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.
Appearently, the status quo is that its ok to make a boarding pass generator, but its not ok to create DVD decrypting software.
Don't you get it? Real crimes are copyright infringements. Spending money and resources protecting passengers on jet planes is a complete waste of time....
Real criminals are underprivileged 13 year old girls evilly downloading music they have not purchased. May they hang!
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I bet he doesn't have all his computer equipment back that was confiscated from him during the investigation. Who needs a guilty verdict to punish him? Due process is dead.
I don't have a problem with ID checks, though the USCOA does. When I fly internationally, I am subject to ID checks at almost every port of call. That's just the way things are when you enter and leave countries. However within the U.S. there is no requirement that you submit to an ID check. It is your right to refuse this check. So anyone can claim to be anyone and get past the TSA checkpoint with nothing but a boarding pass. The No-Fly list is made useless by this simple loophole.
So what then? Change the Constitution so that we lose the right to security in our papers? I dunno.
But what I do know is that a not-really determined terrorist can plant a bomb anywhere outside the TSA security perimeter with impunity. In fact, a bomb can be placed anywhere in any city at any time and cause the type of destruction that generates terror.
Is the solution to negotiate with the terrorists? I dunno.
I don't like to give these crackpots any more legitimacy than they deserve, but if we are truly afraid of them wouldn't it help to find out what they want and then find a way to come to a mutual agreement?
If we're not afraid of them, then stop all this nonsense about making our country safer by strip searching grandma. The initial price of freedom is blood, but the recurring cost of freedom is risk. You can't have freedom without risk. You can reduce risk by reducing freedom and that's what the current tack is, but it's a mistake to assume that we have all agreed to this level of reduced freedom because a few fraidycats are unwilling to live in a risk-filled world.
The actions by any organization larger than, uhm, 200 people, are controlled by written procedures and norms, which are software. You'd, probably, learn this much in a management course (not that I tried).
The bigger the organization, the more likely you are to deal with someone who is merely executing the instructions — unable of, and unthinking about changing them. An organization like government, or a huge department like Homeland Security is all about it. A few "software engineers" and "analysts" high above devise the algorithms, some more "coding monkeys" codify it, and then it gets to run "in production".
We are the users. And we get worked-up about the bugs. In this case, the bug is a security one, where a presented certificate is accepted without checking with the issuer.
Somebody thought, that it would be good to limit the crowds next to the gates to people with boarding passes. Checking, that the pass is valid (as airlines do at the actual gates), either did not occur to the coder at all or was deemed too expensive...
The new release will, hopefully, have a fix. If not, than, certainly, the next one. Nothing, you've never heard before.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I understand what you are trying to say, but US law isn't built in some coordinated fashion. Implying that US laws written for the protection of passengers at airports have had any coordination with US laws written to minimize theft of copyrighted works is silly (before I get flamed note that I have not said that I support the way that either set has been written).
If you want to look for coordination, look towards the lobbyists. The RIAA and MPAA lobbyists who have helped pass the oppressive copyright protection laws don't have anything to do with the airline lobbyists or defense lobbyists who have helped write much of the War on Terror related laws.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
A fake boarding pass generator does not endanger the safety of anyone except for the idiot who tries to actually board a plane with one, because he's likely to end up being interrogated by Homeland Security for hours in a back room of the airport.
All these things can do is maybe get someone into the gate area. But seriously, if a terrorist wanted to blow up an airport, do you honestly think he would spend the hundreds of dollars building a bomb, and then balk at the $80 for a plane ticket? Hell, he could even steal a boarding pass from someone else. Seriously, requiring boarding passes to get into the gate area only serves to give people a false sense of security. It would not be an obstacle for anyone who wants to actually do harm.
I agree that posting the generator on the Internet was foolish, but only in the sense that posting anything that even appears to be able to help terrorists in today's climate is a stupid thing to do, not because it could actually endanger anyone's safety.
"If he was truly concerned about the safety of airline security like he claims, why would he sacrifice the safety of others by making a boarding pass generator to make a point?"
He isn't sacrificing the safety of others. This is the point of the exercise: our government is sacrificing the safety of us, and doing it while wasting (or stealing, depending on the individual politico) huge amounts of our tax money.
"Writing a research paper is one thing, but posting a boarding pass generator on the internet is pretty serious stuff."
Serious how, exactly? Serious in the sense that it actually demonstrates his claims, yes. Do you think anyone would pay attention or even hear if he just stated how poorly designed these procedures are? He would be dismissed as a political critic.
Saying that "posting a boarding pass generator on the internet is pretty serious stuff" borders on ludicrous. I can just picture the crowds running for cover, terrified, "Dear God! It's a boarding pass generator! On the INTERNET!"
"I find it very shocking that the FBI dropped the case. I think people have been sent to Guantanamo for much less."
Yes, people have been sent to Guantanamo for much less, but just because a few random peasants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time got locked up for 5 years of their lives, torn from their wives and children, unable to speak even with a lawyer -- let alone protest their innocence -- does not make such pointless attacks on human liberty justifiable. Be surprised that the FBI dropped the case, but only be surprised because of the incongruity of this glimpse of sanity.
Trust is what makes a modern society function. To destroy a modern society, you destroy trust. In many ways, that has been the aim of the terrorists attacking the US. We trust boarding passes. Pointing out that they are not trustworthy is simply beyond the point. Trust is an ephemeral thing, and yet it is an essential thing. Printing out fake boarding passes to show that they are not trustworthy doesn't help to increase security; in fact ..... the terrorists win when you stop trusting people.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
As with most of the security changes imposed on air travel it is all mostly illusion, or as some other Slashdot poster called it "Security Theatre". If you make life difficult for the average travelor they will assume it makes life equally difficult for terrorists. Unfortunately, this just isn't true!
What I don't understand is if Osama and his cohorts are so dead set against us (ie The West) and he has armies of suicide jockeys all raring to go, then why aren't there 'planes falling out of the sky all around us. Why are shopping centres (malls) not blowing up? Trains, buses, garages, boats, ships. They could be instilling real terror on a daily basis but they're not! Hell, even failed attempts to blow up stuff would instil terror as it would confirm that they are still trying! It doesn't make any sense, unless they're simply not as powerful as we are being led to believe, in which case why are the politicians still trying to take away our freedoms?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Right, but at that point, they don't actually check the name against any kind of list.
Just to make it clear:
There is no ??? and Profit.
What about baggage check, you ask? That is a tiny bit more complicated, but not really. You just get John Smith to come to the airport with you and he checks in and checks the bags. Then he goes home and Bob Terror takes it from there. It's even easier in some airports where they have skycaps who I don't think do any ID checking, or automated bag checking with the same problem.
As you can see, the no-fly list is useless because of this flaw. It's a waste of time, money and just hassles people who are NOT terrorists and who have somehow got on the no-fly list, via similar names or simple mistake.
They could make one simple change to make this system better - check ID at boarding. Yeah, it adds a little time and wouldn't stop terrorists with forging connections. I don't think it would actually do much to stop terrorists, either. Especially considering terrorists aren't likely to be on the no-fly list until you figure out they are terrorists and by then it's probably too late. But as it is now, what they are doing is 100% useless. At least that way it would be only 99% useless.
The other thing they could do is just stop the no-fly list and stop checking ID, as both are useless at this point and may never be effective at stopping terrorism. As long as ID is forgable and the method is to check ID, these systems are all just false hope. Unfortunately, it's false hope combined with hassling everyone else that flies.