TSA's Sloppy Redacting Reveals All

A travel blog breaks the story of a poor job of redacting by the TSA: they posted a PDF of airport screening policies, with certain sections blacked out — not realizing that simply laying a black rectangle over the text is hardly sufficient. Cryptome has posted a copy with the redaction removed (ZIP).

Comments

Actual Link to the zip

[hcmtnbiker]

http://cryptome.org/tsa-screening.zip The actual link.

Re:Actual Link to the zip

[afidel]

Then use mod_gzip (if the text field's aren't already compressed, which they can be) and mod_cache.

Re:Actual Link to the zip

[Inda]

If zipping a PDF makes it smaller, you've created the PDF wrong.

Use what they give you!

[adamchou]

How stupid are these people?! Adobe even has a feature to redact (not draw black boxes) text from documents

Re:Well, at least the rest don't do this.

[Dr Damage I]

It's worse than that. One trick that the IRA used to use (not sure if it originated with them or not) is to have sequenced bombings: Determine where people fleeing the first bomb will go then set off a second bomb (or bombs) at the logical escape routes. People fleeing danger tend to get densely packed at choke points.

Re:Well, at least the rest don't do this.

[chrb]

the goal of terrorism is to cause terror

The goal of terrorism is to effect political and social change. The terror is just a means to an end.

Re:Well, at least the rest don't do this.

[beowulfcluster]

Indeed, the Lockerbie bombing for example. Apparently a bomb that fit in a tape recorder was enough to blow a hole in the fuselage and that was that.

Re:Well, at least the rest don't do this.

[icebrain]

Are you actually a pilot, or do you just play one on TV?

Barrel rolls are 1G maneuvers. A "normal" roll down the axis of the airplane is an aileron roll. This would probably cause injury to those not sitting down with their seat belts on, and those who are hit by the unseated, but won't cause the plane to crash as long as the pilots don't overstress the airframe during the recovery. A snap roll is something else; it's a more violent maneuver that's more complicated than an aileron roll, and one that would likely break the airplane.

Your "analysis" of Airbus FBW systems is entirely off-base. Fly-by-wire is not some fuzzy-logic computer that tries to think about what you want vs. what it wants to do; rather, such systems have known, hard, rigidly-defined limits. They may have pitch and roll angle limits (as you allude to) in addition to other ones, but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes.