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Homeland Security Tracks Information of Travelers
feuerfalke writes "Homeland Security recently disclosed a plan regarding an Automated Targeting System, or ATS, that would generate a 'terrorist risk rating' based on information collected about the traveler. This information would include things such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and the meals they ordered in-flight. These ratings have now been assigned to millions of international travelers, including Americans, and the ATS is exempt from many provisions of the Privacy Act — one cannot view their rating or the information used to generate it."
I spent a good part of my childhood just a few miles away from the lucky side of the Iron Curtain. One of the things that our teachers told us was so bad about East Germany was the fact that they "kept files on their citizens! Normal people, like you and me!"
So what do we tell the kids, today?
Out of all the criteria used, meals ordered stood out to me. It seems so out of place, but I imagine that it is a bit of blatant racial profiling. I am guessing that anyone who orders a meal that conforms to an Islamic diet gets a higher rating on this system. I don't think the beef or chicken will make a difference. Perhaps "racial" profiling is not the best term, since this will hunt out people based on Religion, which would be a much greater privacy concern in my mind.
*You took a one-way trip to assist in disaster aid in New Orleans or Thailand in the last two years, not knowing when you would be comfortable with/forced to leave the area.
*You enjoy food from the Middle East (they probably have a Middle-Eastern mid-flight meal SOMEWHERE) after trying some at a small suburban restaraunt near your Pakistani coworker.
*You paid in cash, since you recently went bankrupt and are moving somewhere that has a lower cost of living.
*You refused to show your ID in the airport a few months ago because you packed your wallet in your checked bag by accident (Happened to me, it's tons of fun).
*You checked out a book on Islamic extremism for your Current Issues class, for a Debate on the issue, or other such academia.
It's good to know our previous Congress was too busy pissing themselves post-911 to have a clear enough mind to see how freaking WRONG the Patriot Act was, and then kept being embarassed by the stain enough to extend it's duration.
It just means that if you're an 18-25 year old male from any country that ends with -stan and you ordered your meal to be halal then you're flagged as potential terrorist. It's as simple as that.
"I can envision a lot of people deciding they don't really wish to fly to the US anymore."
Welcome to several years ago: a heck of lot of people have already decided they don't want to visit America anymore.
I used to travel to America regularly before 9/11, but I've only been there twice since and both of those were short stops between planes when flying to and from Canada. Why go to a country that will treat me like crap at immigration, then potentially kidnap me and ship me to Cuba if some computer tells them I might be a terrist?
The scary thing is that half of the people in this country would seriously agree with you 100%.
It's not a national security program:
>Government officials could not say whether ATS has apprehended any terrorists.
It can't work because of the base rate fallacy. At any false alarm rate known to man, the output will be statistically indistiguishable from 100% false alarms.
All these problems are aggravated by the fact that they won't correct errors:
>Nor can they see the records "for the purpose of contesting the content."
It's not to keep airplanes safe, it's a general control tool:
>ATS data about an individual may be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring decisions and in granting licenses, security clearances, contracts or other benefits.
Obviously, this method is a bit more sophisticated than yours as it uses a FEW more variables. I'm not following your logic, which seems to be that if creating a profile based on one factor is stupid then creating one based on many factors is no better.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I just can't think of a anything good that will come of this.
Sorry Yanks, the USA is dead, you have one party with two faces to make you think you have a choice. Welcome to Soviet America.
(goodbye karma)
First there's the games theory problem. Stop everyone from Saudi Arabia from boarding airplanes, and the killers will put locally recruited types like John Walker Lindh onto airplanes.
Second, nobody has a monopoly on killing innocent people. From Salon's Patrick Smith, via Bruce Schneier's blog:
* In 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up over the Atlantic by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Bill O'Reilly
c. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
d. Indian Sikh extremists, in retaliation for the Indian Army's attack on the Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar
* In 1986, who attempted to smuggle three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jetliner bound from London to Tel Aviv?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michael Smerconish
c. Bob Mould
d. A pregnant Irishwoman named Anne Murphy
* In 1962, in the first-ever successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 was blown up with dynamite over Missouri by:
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Ann Coulter
c. Henry Rollins
d. Thomas Doty, a 34-year-old American passenger, as part of an insurance scam
* In 1994, who nearly succeeding in skyjacking a DC-10 and crashing it into the Federal Express Corp. headquarters?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Michelle Malkin
c. Charlie Rose
d. Auburn Calloway, an off-duty FedEx employee and resident of Memphis, Tenn.
* In 1974, who stormed a Delta Air Lines DC-9 at Baltimore-Washington Airport, intending to crash it into the White House, and shot both pilots?
a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
b. Joe Scarborough
c. Spalding Gray
d. Samuel Byck, an unemployed tire salesman from Philadelphia
That's the funniest one-line comeback I've read here in 6 months. Also the saddest but truest.
Well, it's definitely building over time, there's no denying that.
But, even that is getting kind of scary. I seem to recall that some time last year, Gonzales issued a legal opinion that says that they can arrest and detain anyone they see fit, and short of torture (which they defined in terms or organ failure and death) they could do anything they wanted to you.
It sounds very much like just taking a connecting flight through the US could allow you to end up in custody, declared as an illegal combatant, and locked away. I just simply don't trust people who grant themselves that much power and remove all transparency. I realize it's unlikely, it's just eerie to know they believe that they can do anything they want. Especially if other countries did the same, the US would freak out that their citizens can't go around unfettered.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Every time a story comes up on this topic I see a few people saying we ought to start profiling Muslims, and the only reason we aren't doing it is political correctness. There's a huge flaw in that theory: The obvious and easily profiled Muslims are the openly pious ones who are most likely to be peaceful and least likely to carry out any terrorist attack.
The real extremists, the ones who are willing to commit terrorism, are more likely to believe their religion allows them to pretend to be something else in order to defeat their enemies. They may not want to wear Western clothing, shave their beards, dye their skin pale white, take on Anglo-American names, forego their daily prayers, or eat pork rib platters for dinner, but extremists will do all of those things and more if it gives them a chance to strike at their perceived enemies. This is why ethnic profiling would be ineffective at best, and any feelings of safety it might create would be utterly false.
The refusal to openly endorse profiling of Muslims and Middle Eastern people in general is one of the things our government is actually doing right. Most of the people in these categories are not enemies of civilization. It would be a huge strategic mistake to treat all of them as if they were.
You should write or call your senator or representative. I believe that the security insanity is too far gone for anybody in government to take exception to general policies, but you have been singled out for special treatment because of an honest mistake, and now you're stuck with it apparently forever. Appeal to your elected representative for help, he may actually be able to do something for you, and you can think of it as a fairly easy way to make things a very little bit better. I completely understand why you would tolerate this in the airport, but when you're safely at home you should raise a little hell with people who are supposed to be sympathetic to you.
On 9/11, Muslim male extremists successfully hijacked four planes, and successfully crashed three of them into their intended targets. Your five examples of non-Muslim events have only two planes going down, one of them 21 years ago, the other one 44 years ago. And only the one 44 years ago was in the US.
Use some more recent examples, please.
Even then, your one example that's more recent than 20 years ago is an inside job - the FedEx exec who was riding in the cockpit when he attacked the flight crew with a hammer.
And of your five examples, only two actually brought down the jet.
Only two examples, a combined 65 fucking years ago.
With all those logical contortions, you can't even come close to what male Muslim extremists between the ages of 17 and 40 did on 9/11 - four planes down, three targets hit, thousands of dead.
What was the point you were trying to make again?
And while you're at it, please explain who perpetrated the London bombings. The Bali bombings. The Madrid bombings. Who planned on destroying multiple airliners this last summer?
Would they ALL have been done by "Muslim male extremists between 17 and 40"? Got the balls to actually answer that question?
No, all Muslims are not terrorists. But damn near all terrorists are Muslims - so much so that you've got to pull out examples from damn near half a century ago to lamely try and prove otherwise.
"Insightful", my ass. "Inciteful drivel" would be much more accurate.
I cannot believe you people. So, how many of you believe that Bush caused 9/11 by "missing obvious signs" that an attack was imminent? Now, when they go looking for those signs, everyone complains about losing freedom. You cannot have it both ways. Personally, I like freedom, thus I don't blame Bush for 9/11. However, since just about everyone did blame the government, now we have these idiotic systems put in place by the government to try to find that impossible needle in a haystack. Congratulations, everyone who blamed the government for 9/11 is now getting what they deserve. The funniest part is how people will quote security experts like Bruce Schneier, but only look at part of it and miss the whole message. He advocates that if we want to live with privacy, we have to accept that terrorist attacks will happen, and we would spend our resources most efficiently on emergency preparation rather than attack prevention. Since terrorist attacks do far more damage in the media than they do to actual lives, this actually makes sense.
On to the particular issue at hand, the whole point of feeding in all these variables into a statistical model is that a computer can do this better than a human. It's called data-mining, and its been going on in industry for ten years at least. While a human may just end up saying "He looks arab", the computer will base its decision only on what the variables actually suggest based on past data. This is more fair, not less. You can even set it up so that unless a person is flagged, no human ever gets to look at the personal data. You all joke about what the person is eating, but statistical models work best when you toss them all the possible features, and let the system figure it out. Anyone who's ever worked on machine learning would realize that humans cannot always judge what is a relevant feature and what isn't, and that sometimes a computer can learn a model that works well, but at first seems completely off the wall. Google "mushroom dataset" and get some background to this sort of thing with machine learning. There are rules which can calculate with very high probability if a mushroom is poisonous, yet the rules make no sense to the human observer. Welcome to data-mining; If you want to find a needle in a haystack, that's the way to go.
And about that data... the airline already had it, and probably already gave it to their marketing, who may have sold it to "partners". Other companies have been collecting data on people for many years. There is really nothing new about this information being collected. The only "outrage" is that a computer program gets to see it rather than only airline security personel.
Also, of course will not be allowed to see the model. If you have the model, you know how to avoid being flagged. That's like asking the local police for their driving schedule, or expecting highway patrol to reveal to you where all their speed traps are on a given day. That is simply not going to happen, and the reasons are obvious. An automated version such screening does not really represent anything new.
Now, of course, you can still be outraged if you want. Personally I'd rather have the privacy, and ditch such a system. However, don't be a hypocrite and expect the government to stop the next attack. Accept the 1 in 50,000 risk of being directly affected by an attack, and get on with your life... Worry about the real dangers that are likely to affect your life (bad diet, disease, accidents), rather than what Bruce Schneier calls "movie plot threats".
If somebody prayed to Jesus before getting on a plane because they are afraid of flying, should they be removed as a provocative terrorist?
No.
Now: you and five other people do that, and do it very loudly as a group in the terminal. And, of course, you do this in the context of several years of recent history during which your bretheren have a well-documented history of doing the same thing right before an attack in a public space. But never mind that... then, you and your five friends get on a plane, and ask for odd things: like, those of you that are not large, fat people ask for seatbelt extensions, which you then put on the floor by your feet. Then, despite having your request declined, you get up from your seats, and pair up: two walk up to the first class section and site together, two go to the rear of the plane, and two take the middle near the exits.
Gee, do you think that's maybe a little different than some Jesus-type having a little I'm-a-nervous-flier prayer? Pray all you want: but the actions of those six guys (ALL of their actions) have to be taken as a whole. They were deliberately provoking their audience with this stunt, exactly to get the camera time they got, so that they could talk about how people don't treat them nicely. Gee.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.