Slashdot Mirror
Airlines Have to Ask Permission to Fly 72 Hours Early
twitter wrote to mention that the TSA (Transport Security Administration) has released a new set of proposed rules that is raising quite a stir among groups ranging from the ACLU to the American Society of Travel Agents. Under the new rules airlines would be required to submit a passenger manifest (including full name, sex, date of birth, and redress number) for all flights departing, arriving, or flying over the United States at least 72 hours prior to departure. Boarding passes will only be issued to those passengers that have been cleared. "Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly, the central claim in John Gilmore's case against the US government over the requirement to show photo ID for domestic travel. [...] ACLU's Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). 'If there are that many terrorists in the US, we'd all be dead.' TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. 'Half of grossly bloated is still bloated,' Steinhardt replied."
Right... is everyone that needs to go somewhere *right now* supposed to a member of the 'trusted passenger' program (whatever the current name is) whenever it exists between all major airports? I can't see the 72 hour working, on many levels.
Say goodbye to last minute business travel = say goodbye to important meetings = say goodbye to business dealings = say goodbye to the economy...
Knowing exactly when and where someone is traveling to with 72 hours notice...naw this will never be abused.
I guess last minute flights are out the window then huh? It's not like people don't have emergencies that require them to be across the country by tomorrow. I'm sure the counterargument is that "it does us no good to discover that someone 'suspicious' was on a flight that landed two days ago, he might have been a bomber!", but frankly I don't think the extra security is worth the inconvenience in this case. I know that is a rather cavalier thing to say, but in essence all security measures like this are a tradeoff vs. convenience and I feel this one goes way too far.
I read the internet for the articles.
How many people have missed their flight and caught a later one the same day?
Imagine being stuck 3 days before you can go home.
The TSA seems to be doing all it can to kill the U.S. economy by making travel even more of a nightmare. I know plenty of business travelers that don't know their schedule 72 hours in advance -- they go where ever they are needed when ever they are needed. The more red tape a country throws down at the border, the less business that people will do here.
I'm sure bin Laden is laughing in his cave right now. He's used a classic martial arts move -- using the strength of the opponent against the opponent. Bin Laden wants to the isolate the U.S. from the world and the TSA is doing a great job of that.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
These guys do not deserve to have a budget. If a terrorist tries to take over your plane, you get up and kick his ass. No need for all this fear mongering and travel inconvenience. It's just make work for security contractors that does absolutely nothing. The best guarantee of your safety are your fists, and not someone elses forms.
This is my sig.
They can have my privacy when they pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers. It's simple, folks. Don't fly. I know, I know, we all want to line up at the gates to the abattoir like good little government programmed automatons, but this will do nothing but show them we deserve jackboots kicking in our doors. Do the right thing. Just don't buy their crap. Don't fly. When the airlines start losing money out the ass, then maybe they'll see we're not to be made victims due to idiot fundamentalist extremists, or government abuse of power, or to said government's inability to protect anyone. Hit them where it hurts, folks: in the pocketbook. I'm willing to bet that if over 200 million Americans decided not to fly for a few months, you'd see them scramble to change things.
I hate laws like these. They promote the current trend of being afraid. That's the whole goal of terrorists. It costs so much more to operate an airline now. Millions upon millions of people fly ever year. You have more of a chance of dying in a car crash than dying in a plane. But you never hear that statistic when you see a "Horrible plane crash!" news line.
I refuse to be afraid of this. I refuse to support any measure that would protect me 1% more if it took away my rights. This does that. I refuse to live my life afraid of dying when it takes me 2 hours to get through airline security when it should take 20minutes max.
I don't travel by plane at all anymore because of this. I go to Canada once per year and now I HAVE to get a passport because of paranoid people.
Stop being afraid, start defending your rights or we're going to end up needing permission to travel between states.
So let me get this straight. There are 500,000 to 750,000 suspected terrorists in this country, yet we haven't had a major attack since 9/11/2001?
There are 300M people in the US. Are you seriously telling me that at least 1 in 600 is on a terrorist watch list?
Something tells me that getting onto a terrorist watch list involves something other than being a terrorist. Otherwise, this just doesn't make any sense.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Don't *even* suggest this. If you have gotten to this point in your thinking, move to China because that's where stuff like this is supposed to happen, not here.
It'll be even better if Ms. Clinton (or whomever runs for the Democrats) gets into power and it's Bush and the current TSA cronies who get their travel plans royally messed up by this proposed rule.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The government has a habit of proposing something and then implementing it. They very rarely make proposals without intending to implement it.
The point is that now is the time for feedback. You can't give feedback on something you don't know about.
Say, you don't work for the government do you? Sure don't want those pesky private citizens allowed to influence potential new regulations or laws that affect them, right? I mean the NERVE of some people - thinking that the government works for the citizens...
Or even just unexpected commercial trips; I recently flew to Las Vegas in a rented Cessna that didn't pass pre-flight when I went to take off (bad magnetos). I left the bird with the local FBO mechanic and got a ride to McCarran (I was at Henderson), booking a Southwest flight back to L.A. from my Treo during the drive over, as I had to be back in L.A. later that day for an important meeting.
Shit like this will cripple America...
geek. lawyer.
This is just a deliberately outrageous proposal so that their real goals don't seem so bad. Like when we had a guy yesterday saying that $9250 per song wasn't so bad because it could have been $150,000. This is how parents deal with children. Interesting that it seems to work on the majority of the adult population (including many /.ers).
How dare you throw those facts and common sense into our outrage! We live in a fascist society, and our false assumptions and made up facts about this new policy prove it. Now stop bothering us so we can continue to hide in terror from the made up robotic insects that aren't actually watching us.
When my father-in-law passed away, we had to take a flight the day after we heard the news. My wife is from Indonesia, and it was about a 30-hour plane trip to get there. Adding 72 hours to this would simply be unacceptable as it would likely have caused us to miss the funeral (in Indonesia, it is custom to have an open casket memorial lasting for up to 3-4 days and then bury the body-- this starts almost immediately after the body has been embalmed).
Seems like time to write to Congress.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The fact remains that the very thing we keep hearing those 'trrists' hate, freedom, is essentially dead in this country. For all the talk of how we're supposedly spreading freedom to an occupied country, it's just that, talk, since this administration is hell bent on destroying those very same freedoms in this country.
Between this newest revelation to track when people go on flights, requiring a national ID card, listening to our phone conversations without a warrant to preventing people from paying their bills until the source of their money is ok'd, we no longer live in a truly free society.
Oh sure, I can write this without fear of being arrested, but can I go on a flight without being classified as a threat? What does the file the FBI (and at least one other three-letter agency) have on me (and they do) say?
Bin Laden and his cohorts are probably laughing* in their cave at how they've succeeded in their first goal of undermining our society. How many times a week do we hear about law enforcement going into apoplectic seizures when someone thinks they saw some shifty character hanging around somewhere or an innocent package left behind shuts down some place?
It's a sad state of affairs when the people of this country don't care that their right to be free has been taken away from them. After all, there's those un-reality shows to watch. That the people who only a decade or so ago were crowing about how America is the greatest country on the planet, with all kinds of freedoms not enjoyed by many other countries, are now so willing to go along with this administration's excuses about why the rights enshrined in the Constitution must be taken away to protect them.
The quote about give them an inch and they'll take a mile certainly applies to this administration. Even worse, whoever comes into power next won't have the balls to undo the vast majority of wrongs being perpetrated against society but will instead be more concerned about getting re-elected than serving the people.
The rights of the Constitution had a good run of what, over two hundred years? Not bad all things considered. Now though, we are moving into a new era which will require citizens to involuntarily give up rights which have existed since the founding of the country in an effort to defeat terrorism. It will be a long, never-ending battle but by giving up our rights and acquiescing to the newest form a facist police-like-state, we can be assured that we will be safe and secure in our wiretapped, surveillanced, dwellings.
* I'm assuming that like most leaders, the rules they want to impose on others does not apply to them
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
For all the liberties that have been removed, how exactly have any of the new "security" measures helped prevent any threat coming from outside the country. Anyone intent on doing harm, will find a way through. Terrorism indeed, the U.S. (government that is) is truly terrified. The bad guys are winning.
We should just mark all patriotic Am3rican$ with a simple mark. Something simple like...oh, I dunno', maybe a six, three score, and six.
Without this mark, no one would be allowed to travel. Besides curtailing the nefarious schemes of terrorists it would also help with the large immigration problem. In time, as the populace surrendered to the most excellent goals of this process, it could easily be extended to other activities such as the buying and selling of goods.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
...but the document linked in TFA states clearly that airlines have to provide said data to the TSA 72 hours before departure for all confirmed passengers they have...this doesn't mean that you can't book a ticket under 72 hours, or get on that plane. They realized that 90% or so of passengers are booked over 72 hours to departure, and that way they can clean up the last-minute fliers faster.
That being said, its still bullshit, without a doubt. But its NOT going to stop last-minute fliers from being able to fly.
And again, its not that this isn't complete horseshit, but they're already passing your infromation to the TSA - they're just doing it within 15 minutes of departure now (or 15 minutes after departure for international flights).
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Okay, either A. the TSA really needs three days for clearance because they do hand checking, or B. they do an automated check and don't need that time. Let's examine each case.
If it really takes 72 hours to check someone out thoroughly, then they can't realistically let people be added to flights after that. Otherwise, the terrorists will just book at the last minute and will be checked more quickly and will have a much greater chance of getting missed in the rush.
If it doesn't really take 72 hours to check somebody out, then the TSA is just bullying the airlines into doing extra work, thus raising the cost of travel for everybody with no actual benefit.
I fail to see the upside here.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which is why I'm wondering why in the post-9/11 environment we don't see more "luxury semi-private-charter" type thingies showing up with smaller planes, where they drive you out to the flight line from your home. No time-wasting trip through airport security. No "arrive at least 3hrs before your flight." In fact, if you're 5 minutes late they'd.. just wait for you.
Have you priced it? I have. $500 for a commercial flight, or $3500 for a charter from the Chicago area to North Carolina. Which do you think most people's budgets will let them choose?
Kinda makes the market for that type of service a little small. Anyone who can afford to spend that much on a flight, already does.
Putting moderation advice in your
The upside is it helps break the expectation of freedom and get people used to the idea that every action must be pre-cleared by the government, which reduces the probability of strenuous objection to future intrusive policies.
Admittedly, though, that's only an "upside" from a certain perspective.
And here are some numbers that I find also help to put the whole terrorism thing in perspective:
Deaths in the U.S. in 2001 due to
heart disease - 700,000
cancer - 553,800
stroke - 164,000
accidents - 102,000 (Car accidents - 42,000)
influenza - 36,000
terrorism - 3,000
Where is the war on cancer, or the war on drunk driving? You're more likely to die driving to the airport than on the plane.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
How about a 3 day period because they automatically check, which takes only seconds, but having three days allows them to peform the hand checks needed when the automatic check throws a flag?
I don't read AC A human right
"You can still drive state-to-state with no papers."
Actually, you can't. You have to have a valid driver's license to drive.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
In the PDF, they note that three days provides a good deal of time for them to correct or correlate information from other government agencies. Have *you* ever tried to get anything from even a single government agency in under 30 minutes?
Again, all they are asking is for airlines to send what they can three days before, and then send updates - hardly onerous!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To ./ community and internet community in general: If you've ever complained about your rights being stripped but have not lifted a finger to help - then you are part of the problem.
No, you're not an innocent bystandard, or a spectator, or someone who is "too busy", or "too lazy", or "doesn't care enough", or whatever the excuse. You are all involved and impacted whether you like it or not. Therefore, this is about personal integrity.
I submit to you that you are by now aware of the crises in this country. You are all educated. You are also aware that this is a fixable problem. It may be difficult, but its fixable. To a person of integrity, the choice is clear. Such a person takes action and does her best to be part of the solution. So what have you done to help?
If you refuse to stand up for your own values(which requires action), what good are you?
What I am curious about is this: how many legitimate security threats have been stopped by the regulations in place now? We know they go after nursing mothers, girls with techno-trash style sense, sick people with serious, life threatening conditions, etc. I've also seen them stop people with jars of maple syrup, pickles and other substances, and once even an idiot muling drugs from Canada to Chicago. But, again, how many REAL terrorist style bad guys have we heard about them taking down? By my count, admittedly incomplete though it is, the number is very close to if not actually equal to zero. Then there are those really silly things like the "no-fly" lists. They check your name!! How many real bad guys are going to use their real names? I can just see it, "Name, please? Hmm? Oh, I'm Carlos the Jackal. Sorry, sir, could you step over here? You are on our no-fly list." Seriously, now.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
End of line..
The fallacy in your argument is that deaths from heart disease are not concentrated in a single time and place. No one community has bear the burden of 700,000 deaths in 102 minutes.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc., can be more or less defined as diseases associated with aging and old age.
These deaths consequently rarely comes as a complete surprise - and the shock can be absorbed through mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years.
But, as a society, we have often failed miserably in managing the single incident - the defining moment - that erodes confidence in the government and other social institutions, is marked by massive loss of life, property damage, economic losses that ripple through the entire economy - the WTC and Katrina continue to cast a very long shadow.
Where did you get your hand on such propaganda?!? Come with us, please.
...
Why the hell are you trying to make excuses for the terrorists? You're no true patriot. We can only hope that in a few years, spreading misinformation like this will be outlawed.
When I was a kid, 20 years ago, my world view was that the only country in the world where people would be stopped because of their papers and turned back with no reason, - was the Sovjet Union and its vassal states.
Submit my name 3 days before travel and maybe be refused on short notice? Sovjet. Hearing stories about small issues in immigration escalating and you ending up being sent back? Sovjet.
You're still a good country. Please don't become a bad one...
I lost my sig.
And in that frame of mind, what's to keep any potential terrorists from buying tickets at the counter? Or on the phone from the lobby the same day as the flight? Or on a laptop? Nothing. In fact, they totally bypass this "Screening" technique, making it worthless. So drop the "security theatre" already, and start doing stuff that might actually work! Damn bureaucrats...
Three days? That'll never fly. MAYBE three HOURS, but not three days.
Forget that. Three minutes is 3 minutes too much. If I want to I should be able to to drive to the airport, pick a flight going where I want and buy a ticket with cash then and there without any "Papers please"!
FalconShould there be a Law?
You're absolutely right, that the US government is asking for passenger lists including D.O.B., address, and phone numbers for any flights flying over US air space.
So, if I'm on a flight from Vancouver to Cancun or (gasp!) Havana, (you guys south of us should really try vacationing in Cuba, it's dirt cheap, and you can drink the water, so I'm told...) the US wants to know about it.
Or, in other words, they want to be able to extend their ridiculous no-fly list to include people who don't live in the US, and who don't plan on setting foot on American soil, flying on Airlines that might not even do business to the US.
The fundamentally ridiculous part of this "data mining to catch terrorists" is the idea that, OK, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. So, if we make the haystack bigger, then somehow the needles we're looking for will magically appear.
Never mind that the false positive rate is going to be several orders of magnitude greater than the actual incidence rate of "being a terrorist" or "planning a terrorist attack on the US".
So this only sounds like a good idea to those people who don't care about arresting/detaining/harassing innocent people.
I hate to make a 'slippery slope' argument, but one of the hallmarks of a police state is keeping a file on your citizens, even if they're not suspects in a criminal matter.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
But it'd make a pretty sad life.
It's a pretty interesting world out there. Whether experiencing one of the many wonderous things man has achieved or being within a meter or two of a herd of wild elephants while they bath and play in a watering hole there's an awful lot of great things to experience in the world.
You don't need to do it. But it's a bit of a pointless life if you are contented by mere survival.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You are forgetting that we have to arrive in our own country too. Do you think we are treated that much better? The people that are hired for these jobs are trained to treat everyone like a suspect in a crime and most of them have the mindset of thugs. I don't think you want to turn your immigration procedures into the kind of Police State welcome that we receive whenever returning home. The U.S. is by far the worst country in the world in this respect. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they could see it. We used to be about welcoming people from other lands. Now we are about lining them up against a wall, strip searching them, interrogating them, intimidating them, harassing them so much that they would never even think of returning to this strange land where everyone is a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise. We *are* becoming a police state and are already being recognized as such by many foreigners who can laugh at how "free" we are. I might laugh with them, but it is just sad.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
You have to start somewhere, name's as good as anything and better than most. Would you rather they require a full headshot to make a reservation? Or perhaps a blood and stool sample?
Yea, there's a starting point. In the USA it's called the Constitution of the USA, and nowhere in it does it give the government any power to require people hand over their id, for any reason!
FalconShould there be a Law?
I suspect that most of the Founders would be thoroughly disgusted by what we've done to ourselves. On the other hand, they knew this was coming: Jefferson himself pointed out that governments rarely improve with age.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That is exactly right. We are afraid to say that the price of free society is that some of us will die. We are cowards.
The earlier post of statistics comparing death by accident or health to death by terrorism was something to build on. We should build a society that is much more tolerant of death by "terrorism" (or maybe it is death by "ideology" since the whole point is not to be terrorized).
3,000 people killed in the USA? That is virtually nothing! They should be honored as martyrs to freedom and open society. What good does revenge do for an open society? Are we better off for killing 100,000 in Iraq as retribution? No. We have to learn to absorb these blows while modeling free society. The price of being such a beacon will be that we are also a target. The reward for patience and courage in the face of attack will be, I believe, a real change in the world, a respect that leads other societies to wanting to be more like us. In any event, it is unlikely to that this course would lead to the kind of carnage that revenge has lead to, much less its echos through coming decades.
We have been cowards in the face of attack. And we suffer the fate of cowards: we cower. We remove our shoes. We speak in whispers as we wait in line. We hope we won't be singled out. Our freedom fades away.
It's a simple question: Is freedom of movement a RIGHT? I believe it is. For the record, I have a problem with DRIVER'S LICENSES as I think the rationale that the government has a right to restrict travel on PUBLIC roads is crap. This doesn't mean I have a problem with traffic laws in general. If someone violates traffic rules restricting their travel *IS* appropriate. I just don't think there should be prior restraint. Overly restrictive rules get put in place, get relaxed. I can carry sciccors again. That was damn stupid. That's called a free society where sometimes things will be too restrive, and other times too permissive - and we'll always be in one state or the other. In a FREE society it is the RESTRICTIONS that must be justified, not the freedoms. If you think most of the stupid TSA rules actually improve security, you're deluded. Most of them are there to create "busy work" jobs and provide the ILLUSION of security. For example, restricting people from bringing computer equipment onboard aircraft would provide real security, as it's easy to hide explosives in electronic equipment. But that would piss off the airlines that depend on business travelers with laptops as their bread and butter. Instead they restrict LIQUIDS, not because of the danger (it would be near-impossible to bring most liquid explosives on an aircraft due to their volatility), but because this means the airlines can charge you $5 for a bottle of water. It also means that (hopefully) the passengers will be using the toilet less. Every flush costs them money.
Our tolerance for this nonsense the problem, not the imaginary terrorists. I like how you hide the reality of that behind "certain felonies" like there are none that would matter. I would have no problem with the law if it applied only to those convicted of, say, HIJACKING. That would be pretty short list. But the list includes "lying to federal officials"(which I don't think should even be a crime) and "conspiracy". So MOST of the people are on the list for trivial or petty crimes that have nothing to do with hijacking.