DHS's 'Secure Flight' Program Proven Insecure

News.com is reporting the somewhat unsurprising news that a government program we were assured was 'perfectly safe', has actually been proven to be a privacy nightmare. The 'Secure Flight' program matched air traveler information with commercial databases in the interests of national security. The charter for the program specifically forbade the TSA from accessing this information; the organization got their hands on it anyway. The Department of Homeland Security has released a report, detailing these findings and analyzing the situation. The News.com piece makes it clear the report was released on Friday in an attempt to obscure it from public notice; it was only linked to from a DHS subsite, and has not shown up on the DHS or TSA main pages. From the article: "The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were 'not intentional,' and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a 'data flow map' to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act. This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act."

Comments

Just like criminal background checks...

[Caspian]

...it hasn't any right at all to be anything but a Boolean, at least at first. DHS has a right to check for the answer to the question 'Is this person a terror suspect?', and perhaps 'Is this person a known friend or confidant of a terror suspect?'. ONLY if the answer to one of those questions is 'yes' have the underpaid security monkeys at the airport got any right whatsoever to see any information on people. All too often, the quest for 'security' is just another grab for power and intimidation.

Re:Just like criminal background checks...

[geoff lane]

'Is this person a terror suspect?'

In the new world order, everybody is a terror suspect until proven otherwise. It won't be long before special rewards will be authorised for children who inform on their non-conformist parents.

Re:Just like criminal background checks...

[swillden]

Is this person a terror suspect?

Is *which* person a terror suspect?

Obviously, it would be nice to know if the person at the airport is actually suspected of being a terrorist, via evidence of links to known terrorists, etc., but to do that, you have to be able to correctly identify the person at the airport, and not just by name, and you also have to know that the reason for the suspicion is real.

All this system does is pick out people who identify themselves using a name that matches one that was placed on the list somehow. Read that last statement carefully, and identify all of the ways in which it's different from "identify suspected terrorists". Then think about what kind of program you'd have to implement in order to really "identify suspected terrorists", and what kind of police state would be required to make it work.

it hasn't any right at all to be anything but a Boolean, at least at first

Given a full profile of the terror suspect, trained TSA agents might be able to ascertain with some reliability whether or not the person trying to travel is actually the suspect, so if implemented it should definitely NOT be a boolean value based only on a matching name. Since the whole thing is so completely unreliable, though, and the only way to make it reliable is to further eliminate our civil liberties, the better solution is just to scrap it.

Somehow, the people in the US need to realize that the blood that must water the tree of liberty isn't just the blood of soldiers who go "over there" and kill the enemy. A free society is vulnerable in ways that a police state is not, but accepting that vulnerability is part and parcel of freedom. If an occasional 9/11 is the price of our civil liberties, we should be prepared to pay it, and consider it the bargain that it is. Cue the famous Benjamin Franklin quote.

Re:Just like criminal background checks...

[mpe]

In the new world order, everybody is a terror suspect until proven otherwise.

Actually there are classes of people who do not have to be proven otherwise. e.g. those who pass and enforce laws about terrorist suspects.

I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how long it will be before we hear politicians praising a new bill to remove these constraints, framing it in terms of a "wall" which prevents the TSA from effectively securing our skies, like they did when they wanted to let foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement exchange data?

See, this is why I'm always skeptical of these things. And for some reason, critics are always written off as paranoid or unrealistic. I wonder if they said the same things when people warned that the new "small" income tax would quickly grow?

Re:I wonder...

[koreth]

And for some reason, critics are always written off as paranoid or unrealistic.

Nah, just left-wing nutjobs. That drumbeat will continue until the next time a Democrat is elected president and the new administration addresses the security rules. At which point the new security rules will instantly become either (a) an unacceptable affront to America's tradition of personal liberty and a symbol of how the left is out to control everyone's lives (if the restrictions are tightened), (b) a sign that the left is weak and doesn't understand the sacrifices required to fight the war on terror (if the restrictions are loosened), or (c) a sign that the left has no new ideas and should be removed from office (if the rules aren't changed at all.)

You read it here first.

Re:I wonder...

[ScrewMaster]

It's not quite that black and white. There is a fundamental difference between good security, and absolute security. What the government is promising us is absolute security if we just give up the Constitution. Would that be a worthwhile trade-off? Not to me, certainly, but some might accept it if it was possible to have absolute security. As you correctly pointed out, it isn't. However, that doesn't mean that ordinary good security isn't worth striving for. It can be done. Other nations have managed to do it without abusing their own citizens with "no fly" lists and "scores" and all the rest of the TSA claptrap. The reasons we have failed in this regard are political not practical.

My problem with the TSA is that it is an organization infected by unaccountability, that has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective at accomplishing its Congressionally-mandated tasks, has lied to Congress (and us!), and is a civil liberties nightmare. It's time for Congress to just give it up as a bad job. My fear is that it has become too bureaucratically-entrenched to be eliminated at this point, much like the DHS itself.

On the other hand, it is always best to make the enemy pay for what he takes, and if we raise the bar enough to make things difficult for would-be terrorists that's a good thing. All terrorists are not the same, so if nothing else, maybe we'll catch the really stupid ones. The professionals will get through no matter what, but there's no good reason to make it easy for them. And the harder they have to work, the odds get better that they'll make a mistake.

Of course, that would mean spending significant amounts of money on the human element, which means airport guards and security people that are properly trained and well-paid. Period. Probably Israel's national airline could give us some pointers in that regard. For some reason, the TSA seems to be much more interested in half-baked technological "solutions" to the problem of providing good security (at considerable profit to the vendors of such solutions) rather than implementing proven techniques for securing an installation. Why has that not been done? They seem to be pretty free with our money on their other pet projects.

Any way you look at this, it's a trade-off between our traditional way of life and personal security: the only question is at what point do we stop trading rights for some vague idea of "security". The government won't tell us what it is doing, won't give us any numbers to help to quantify the real value of these programs, and insists on using emotional appeals to push this crap on us. In general, that's a sign of bad government and it goes well beyond airport security.

This is actually

[CaptainZapp]

The very reason why I refrain from currently travelling to the US after having visited ~20 times in the 90s (and the last time in 2002). It's not so much the fingerprinting / mug shot procedure, which I resent, but the fact that potentially any slimeball marketing sleazoid may be able to get hold of my private data.

Sorry dudes in the US; you really, really need to clean up your privacy laws to actually protect the individual and not to favor major business (and making identity theft darn easy in the bargain).

Lock 'em up!

[Tom]

Sorry, but "not intentional" doesn't cut it when something happens that was explicitly forbidden in the charter of the program.

If I sign a contract that specifically says I can only get X under condition of Y and Z, then breaking those conditions invalidates the contract. Secure Flight should be terminated and TSA be made liable for any and all damages.

Why is it that governments and corporations can fuck up constantly on a scale that makes you dizzy while any natural person doing a fuckup on a similar scale would be locked away for life?

So. It was proven pointless long before that.

[the_REAL_sam]

The Murder rate in the USA is 16,000 PER YEAR.
The US terror rate since (and before) 911 death toll was 3,300 TOTAL.

We maintained our constitution for over 200 years with the number of murders growing the whole time, and we didn't take that as a reason to torch our own constitution.

911 shouldn't have changed a damn thing. Yet it seems as if the Bush team has milked it to build the bedrock for a police state. Given their political donations come from the same private interests that profit from such draconian right wing lunacy, it looks like the Bush team staged it themselves, quite honestly.

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History /Missile-Not-Flight-77.html

Getting security "locked down" is the wrong answer. Getting the nazis out of office is the right answer.

Re:Friday news releases...

[mpe]

It's an old trick to release news on a Friday night, when less people are going to see it. Also, any day in which a major news story (superbowl, oscar night, day after elections, etc.) is scheduled -- those are the days to read the newspaper carefully-- those are days that are typically used to obscure potentially damaging news.

There's also releasing potentially politically embarrasing stories on the same day as a major disaster.

In a 24-hour news cycle it's much harder to hide bad news from the public, but there are still golden times when the government and others are virtually guaranteed no one will be paying attention. Kudos for bringing this story to light.

It isn't so much 24 hour news as "alternative media" some of which specifically looks for stories downplayed or ignored by the "mainstream".

you were making great points

[SethJohnson]

Your comments about the murder rate vs. terror rate and torching the constitution were strong.

You lost me with the conspiracy theory about the neocons planning 9/11. As much as I distrust Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their puppet, the theories about missles hitting the Pentagon just aren't credible to me. At most, I will believe that 9/11 was a happy accident which Cheney leveraged to enrich his friends at Haliburton. He sold it to Bush as an opportunity to finish what his dad had started. Rumsfeld? Well, that guy wanted to prove a war could be fought on the cheap and wanted to take credit for that accomplishment. Turned out it can be fought on the cheap, so long as you're not concerned with winning.

Seth

Re:you were making great points

[mrplastik]

The conspiracy nuts are worse than right-wing christian zealots and left-wing socialist morons put together.

Re:you were making great points

[DaMattster]

Perhaps the conspiracy theories are not so wrong. Politics and the economy seem to dictate that in a tragedy, their will be some that profit and others that loose. Look at Haliburton. Haliburton's profits increased megafold as a result of non-competitive contracts with the DoD. Come on folks, we know if the owners of Haliburton were some poor inner city folk (or just a start up without political connections) they wouldn't have gotten a chance to even bid on the contract. I also have to say that our freedoms have erroded. This is not theory, this law. The Patriot Act puts severe limitations on our freedoms and we are traveling down a steep, slippery slope. As much as I despise the acts of 9/11, I cannot condone Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons and the domestic wire tapping program.

We accused Clinton of being a liar and Bush repeatedly lied about their being no domestic wire tapping program or secret prison Mr. Bush drove us to war on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. While I do not like Cynthia McKinney from Georgia at all, she drove a point by attempting to introduce legislation to impeach Bush. Honestly, he is far more impeachable than Clinton. We hold ourselves up on such high, hypocritical horses that we punished Clinton for a blow job: a harmless, repeat harmless act whereas Mr. Bush has effectively killed 16,000 people because he wanted to finish daddy's work. Mr. Bush needs to answer for his actions but, so long as he has money, he has a get out of jail ticket. It would take the collective bravery of the International Criminal Court to bring charges down. I could only hope that the ICC is brave enough to take this on. Bush has committed war crimes under a guise.

Bush is an extremeist in his own right. He is the antithesis of Ahmadenjinad of Iran. It has been speculated that Bush has some fascination with the Apocalypse and the Born-Again Christians do have a preocupation with this event. Clinton got some undeserved negative attention. He did wonders for the economy. The presidency requires an intelligent, well-thought, and well-spoken indidivdual.

Some have attempted to compare Bush to Lincoln. True, both were in unpopular wars and both rather folksy. There remains an important difference. Lincoln was not ideologically driven and he was doing what was morally correct for ANY time period: ending a wrong justified by pseudoscientific means. Lincoln saw the problems with calling our nation free while slavery still existed. This was a moral and ethical dilemna. Lincoln dealt with this. While Lincoln is folksy, it is clear that his intelligence and thought capacity is higher than that of Bush. As far as I am concerned there is no comparison and history will see the George W. Bush Presidency as one of the worst administrations in the history of our country.

Re:you were making great points

[thona]

Gratulations. Your words give me hope that there are americans that are not idiots. Seriously - you spoke the truth, in exactly the way it needs to be spoken.

I am european, and I have always thought as the US as the country wher edemocracy was strong - today I am not traveling to the US because I refuse to deal with terrorist nations, and unless the us government gets some sort of clue what country they re supposed to govern, the US is just not a place I want to step on even for a day.

Let's all hope that things change once Mr. Bush is out of his office. The uss has dealt with horrendous aberrations in the past (just say McCarthy Era) and recovered.

Re:you were making great points

[Darby]

They predictably won so much power and funding as a result, it's hard not to think they would want it to happen.

Well, you can take it that far without just "thinking" it. We know with 100% certainty that they wanted it to happen, since they stated exactly that back in 2000. Just read "Rebuilding America's Defenses" here.

They stated flat out that "in order to ensure American economic world domination in the 21st century" it would be necessary to invade Iraq. Further they said that they knew full well that the American people wouldn't go along with their lunatic plot so that it would be necessary for there to be an attack on the order of Pearl Harbor which they could then misuse for the purpose of convincing the American people to invade Iraq.

So, we don't have to think that they wanted it, we know it for certain. We know further that it was the single most important event required for them to put their prelaid plans in motion which they bagan doing immediately after 9/11 regardless of the fact that they knew full well that Iraq had no involvement.

Now, none of this proves any involvement with the actual attacks, but it most certainly does make suspicion of them the only rational course as if everything else they did hadn't already made it impossible for any sane person to support them.

Re:stupid americans

[ScouseMouse]

Whereas in the UK, we voted for a bunch of people hwo arent supposed to be Neo-conservative, and ended up with a police state anyway.

If you think this sort of things dont happen in european states, your wrong. Were just better at keeping it quiet.

Heard a great line on any questions today (A BBC Radio 4 comedy quiz show):
The americans had a revolution because they were sick of being told what to do from London.
Boy did THEY manage to turn things around.

I'm waiting for the old Quote...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have nothing to hide, why do you care.

This is exactly why I care. Once the tools are given to a gov't agency, they will be abused, and used to target other groups that weren't the original objective. As one poster on /. said, "Terrorism and 'for the children' are the root password to the constitution".

Note: they can get away with violating the law, because there isn't any penality when a gov't official, or a gov't contractor violates it.

Re:So. It was proven pointless long before that.

[the_REAL_sam]

No, I'm saying 911 was a single event, and if you ask me it looks more like an event planned against hte american people by their own government in an effort to galvanize them against an invisible enemy, in order to gain a more absolute form of dictatorial control. That's what 911 looks like, if you ask me.

Fighting a war against an invisible enemy, and using that as a justification for searching everyone who passes through an airport, train station, you name it, already encroaches on basic civil liberties. The fact that the enemy is unseen makes it all the more insidious when the right wingers are asking for permission to spy domestically. It gives them the same sort of blank check request that joseph mccarthy had back in the commie witch hunts during the 50's. Have you such a short memory for history as to overlook the terrible right wing history of the 50's?

here. this is the recent murder rate. it's been close to 16000 for a long time.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/v iolent_crime/murder.html

3030 killed in 911. that's the only terror attack ever done on that scale on us soil. you think that's a good reason to say "screw civil liberty, privacy and forget about not getting searched. forget about the right to carry a can of coke or a letter opener on an airplane. forget all that it's just not worth it.

you are tire kicking. your whole post is just tire kicking. look at the whole argument and fill in the gaps with your own mind.

Secret trials and detentions, patriot act, roving wiretaps, expanded police powers to read things like email, gone to an airport recently?. there's alot more than I know about but there is plenty.

Sheesh. Wake up, people.

What is going to make your life suck first?

[Marrow]

This seems like a small incremental threat increase given
that the information is already available to anyone who
wants to buy it. Anyone foriegn or domestic regardless
of criminal record can buy data right? That TSA got what
everyone else can access seems a small thing.

What are the greatest threats? Which of these will most likely get you?

National Debt
Trade Inequity
Job Exportation
Oil Dependence / Oil exaustion
Terrorist Attack
Government Intrusion
False Inprisonment
Identity Theft
Neocons
Pinko Liberals
Automated Vote Fraud via Hacked Voting Machines
Contaminated Food or Water
Dumbed down Education
Microsoft World Dominance

I am curious. Which one do you think will actually
make your life "suck" first. Or add one that I
missed.

Re:So. It was proven pointless long before that.

[Scrameustache]

Oh, there was damage done to the building, they wouldn't have wasted that building for no reason. That doesn't mean it wasn't a controlled demolition, though.

The lease holder gave the OK to "pull it".
I didn't know you could do that. Can just any building be "pulled", just like that?

("Silverstein's spokesperson, Dara McQuillan, said in September 2005 that by "pull it" Silverstein was referring to the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building, and confirming that they should evacuate the premises.")

The main challenge in bringing a building down is controlling which way it falls. Ideally, a blasting crew will be able to tumble the building over on one side, into a parking lot or other open area. This sort of blast is the easiest to execute, and it is generally the safest way to go. Tipping a building over is something like felling a tree. To topple the building to the north, the blasters detonate explosives on the north side of the building first, in the same way you would chop into a tree from the north side if you wanted it to fall in that direction. Blasters may also secure steel cables to support columns in the building, so that they are pulled a certain way as they crumble.

Sometimes, though, a building is surrounded by structures that must be preserved. In this case, the blasters proceed with a true implosion, demolishing the building so that it collapses straight down into its own footprint (the total area at the base of the building). This feat requires such skill that only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it.

the coup

[Anonymous Coward]

The key to it is building 7 at the WTC, the "contractors" that were in all three buildings the weeks previous where the security cameras were turned off and people had to not use certain floors for the still to this day unnamed "work" that was done, and the "dancing israelis" with the video cameras and "moving vans" that police dogs hit on as being previously used to transport explosives, who were quietly arrested by local cops and then re taken by feds and quickly deported without much media coverage. If these situations were truly investigated, along with the amazing coincidence of the DOD running planes smacking into buildings as a "terror exercise" on the same exact day, we might maybe could unravel this.

Unfortunately., the shadow government rot and corruption runs up and down and sideways, inside the government, and outside the government in the mainstream media and big business. That is the harsh truth that the people have to recognize.

What happened on 9-11 was a stealth coup near as I can read it, or more accurately, a further consolidation of a long running stealth coup.. I don't know yet what total involvement various PNAC players had in the actual hijacking, or even if there was a hijacking as we know it or remote controlled planes were used, but they are the ones who ordered Norad to stand down and not follow normal procedure with hijacked planes, and I defy any government paid shill (yes we know you get paid to troll message boards, you sould be ashamed of yourselves) or neocon regimist supporter to explain how osama could have arranged that little bit of reality. Go ahead and explain how osma got the procedures in place when hijacking was reported to change. How exactly did he do that? He got on his satellite phone and called up norad and told them to not intercept those planes? Orly? He called all the air traffic control towers and told them to ignore those blips on the screen because they were part of an "exercise"? Orly?

Somehow, I find that rather hard to swallow, but you must swallow that if you want to believe the government's official fairy tale of how the events went down that way on that day.

There are also numerous whistleblower governmental insiders, cops, soldiers and others, who were time after time ordered to STOP looking at linkages with terrorists at a certain point where the next step looked squarely at caucasian people in suits, either black suits with ties or fancier suits with ribbons and medals. Ordered to shut up and go away and stop talking about it, or face serious repercussions. That is a serious clue. This is 2006 and some of those lawsuits are still not resolved, obfuscation and delay, totally from governmental orders, is what is happening there. Again, there is no way osama could have ordered any of that. No possible way in hell could that occur. I don't know how much more smoking gun evidence is needed for anyone to just stop believing the fairy tale at their proclaimed face value. It is *ludicrous*, beyond my ability to comprehend why anyone would believe that nonsense promulgated by known liars.

In other words, one would have to be either a complete fascist supporter or a total retard, one or the other or most likely both, to not recognize that 9-11 was an inside job at least at some seriously powerful levels. There is more than enough for real investigations beyond the 9-11 whitewash report, which is just this generation's version of the warren commission whitewash report.

The implications of some governmental and big business powerful insiders being in on it are simply enormous, because that would require a radical emergency restructuring of government by the people, in the full historical sense.

I do not think at this time there are enough true patriots (people who would put nation over personal safety and paycheck) or honest people (people who can look at what data is available and arrve at a 2+2=4 solution) either inside government or inside either of the two main strea

Re:So. It was proven pointless long before that.

[DarkVader]

How about, we shouldn't worry about terrorism - because if we don't get scared, terrorism has FAILED.

The response should have been an investigation, and a change in hijacker handling policy (previous policy was to just give them what they wanted) and a "cockpit door stays locked at all times" policy. And then we should have started flying again the next week, with EXACTLY the same airport security as before.

Everything that was done by the government was instead calculated to terrorize the population, as a power grab.