Slashdot Mirror
Charges Dropped In Fake Boarding Pass Case
An anonymous reader writes, "Investigators have dropped the criminal case against Christopher Soghoian after satisfying themselves that he acted without criminal intent. The grad student had created a web site capable of printing fake airline boarding passes. Soghoian is quoted: 'If they fix the airport security problems... then this entire process has been worth it. If they don't fix airport security, then... what was the purpose?'" Soghoian's blog has insightful comments about the divide between security researchers and government officials on subjects such as TOR.
100% of the people that have have ever caused harm on an airline have been ragheads.
Bull.
Garland Grant (look it up).
[Only need one counter example to prove your 100% wrong]
The standard of bar codes for bag tags and boarding passes is public (might cost a few bucks) but there is nothing secret about it.
Chuchi
First off the title is really off, he was never charged so thier are no charges to be dropped. What happened is that they got a criminal complaint from a congressman against this guy, they filed paper and started investigating; also the airline company complained about it. With a congressman breathing down thier necks they decided to confiscate his equipment from the site. The decision today is that they would no be going forward with the procecution by filing charges.
There is currently now federal law preventing making boarding passes however Charles Schumer is attempting to get one passed.
While he could probably get away putting it up again he is breaking the copywrite law because of putting the symbols and name of the airline; and the copywrite is probably the original way the FBI was able to confiscate his property. Make up his own airline names and symbols and he would be ok.
For the lazy or confused, read here http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_roo m/usab5201.pdf
Didn't the CIA take an interest in TOR at one point? Kinda hypocritical that the guberment is against it now.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
"Soghoian said fake boarding passes wouldn't be an issue if identification was required and checked to travel. The student said he has been able to get on four flights without showing ID."
I fly across country every other week and have well over 100,000 miles under my belt this year a lone and I have never once gotten through security without my ID. Wrong boarding pass, yes, but it still had my name and matched my ID. And since we have no National ID how does one make sure the the people paid $8 an hour know how to check every state and military ID and look for fakes?
It was made perfectly clear during the meeting that parts of the US government, at least the two represented at the meeting, strongly disapprove of Tor - and in particular, thought that research universities such as IU, MIT, Georgia Tech, Harvard and others have no business supporting such projects.
I wonder how they feel about TOR being a naval research project.
The article: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71115-0.htm l?tw=rss.index
/ 09/1731249
The Slashdot discussion: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
He says he's got his computer back, and will be getting the rest of his stuff back very soon.
But this is slashdot, where reading isn't a prerequisite to posting.
To my dismay, they can't read standard bar codes.
Find a manual for one of them. The previous user most likely had them set to only respond to a very specific symbology, to avoid having the morons they hire accidentally confuse the system by trying to check-in things like Pepsi cans and bags of Cheetos.
You want to reset them to factory defaults, then enable all symbologies (or if you can't find an "enable all", just turn on the ones you need... Code128 works pretty well for general-purpose custom barcodes; if you want to use the existing ones, you'll need EAN and EAN+5 - And of course the various UPCs never hurt). And especially on older scanners with possibly less than pristine lenses, enable check-digit processing or you'll end up with a huge misscan rate.