Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Schneier vs. the TSA
An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has posted a huge recap of the controversy over TSA body scanners, including more information about the lawsuit he joined to ban them. There's too much news to summarize, but it covers everything from Penn Jillette's and Dave Barry's grope stories, to Israeli experts who say this isn't needed and hasn't ever stopped a bomb, to the three-year-old girl who was traumatized by being groped and much, much more."
Another reader passed along a related article, which says, "Congressman Ron Paul lashed out at the TSA yesterday and introduced a bill aimed at stopping federal abuse of passengers. Paul’s proposed legislation would pave the way for TSA employees to be sued for feeling up Americans and putting them through unsafe naked body scanners."
how is scanning teenagers not considered manufacturing CP?
we all know the images will be saved, they have to be. After all, what kind of security outfit would not want the capability to go back and look at the images after a future terror attempt happens? Of course they'll want to go back and review surveillance footage and these images, to see if they need to change thresholds or procedures, to see if/what they missed.
So given that it's a given they are saving them for forensics purposes (and perhaps for evidenciary purposes if a terrorist was brough to trial), isn't this the outright manufacture of child porn?
Why is that a country founded on the ideological rejection of tyranny is creeping ever closer to the text book example of abuses of power?
Oh, to the slashbots, Ron Paul is far WORSE than being a Republican: He is a Republican who actually BELIEVES in smaller government, who has consistently acted on those grounds, and campaigns for it. He is a Libertarian in disguise! He must be reviled at every turn, and any time he does good, it must be drowned out! slashbots cannot let the idea of personal responsibility and small government take hold - while they are quite happy to see the government prevented from interfering with their vices, the idea that the government won't give them free stuff and that they might actually be held accountable for their own actions and the consequences thereof - that's just crazy talk.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's been a while since the 9/11 attacks, and maybe later updated information was hidden back in the classified ads of my newspaper - but I thought that the consensus was the 9/11 hijackers did not bring their boxcutters onto the plane with them. So these increasingly intrusive TSA make-work tactics would have had zero effect on the worst terrorist attack in US history.
Not to mention that, post 9/11, passengers and crew realize now that modern-day hijackers are mainly interested in killing everyone on the plane. So in the attempts that have followed, passengers and/or the crew have successfully thwarted those attempts. That's the real solution - an aware public.
These silly "solutions" the TSA keeps rolling out don't seem to be accomplishing anything other than annoying air travelers. If any of these measures had actually demonstrably stopped even one attempted attack, don't you think the TSA would be crowing it from the rooftops?
#DeleteChrome
It all started on 9/11, when instead of reacting to the attacks as a matter for coordinated worldwide policing, we elevated those fuckers to the same status as a nation-state and decided to declare war on anyone and everyone who didn't instantly get in line behind us. We stoked our own fear to an insane degree, and it's already boomeranged back on us in so many ways. This is just one more self-inflicted wound in a long line of idiotic mistakes we've made over the last nine years.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Of course you have just presented yourself as a person who cares more about someone's party affiliation than the actual content of whatever they are saying. Did you even bother to read - never mind, I know the answer. Just keep voting for your party and hope that things will get better. They won't. What the hell is the point of giving someone a vote when they don't even understand or care what they're voting for? /rant
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I would feel safer if we got rid of the TSA and just had one or two fully decked out marines on board each flight. Would be cheaper too...
Every passenger deserves the right to request to have their enhanced patdown conducted in private, by the agents mom.
link
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Oh please! Ron Paul is a rat. He just wants to privatize the system to get people to look away from the government. And his "show" bill to put congress people through the same process is just that, a show, something that would never pass, and he knows it.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
look him up. He has abused and manipulated his relationships with Homeland Security to try and make billions for him and his friends with the naked scanners. Part of the groping is to try and force people to use the scanners so they can sell more of them. Chertoff and Rapiscan Systems need to be indicted.
Your linked article is satire. But I didn't really know if it was satire until I read it through.
The terrorists have won.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
If I don't like how a government conducts its business, I can always vote for a different one... Funny how everything is alike
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
but I don't let my dislike for him cloud my judgement of his individual ideas.
This is a good one; even though his wording in trollish and flamebait worthy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Knowingly putting yourself in a situation where your "normal" liberties must be compromised is your choice. You're welcome to take a bus, train, car or boat to your destination instead.
And the TSA is welcome to go fuck off. They don't get to decide which liberties people must voluntarily compromise in order to fly, or at least that's not how it's supposed to work.
The idea that anything that's not a fundamental human right can be taken away on the whim of any random government bureaucracy is, bizarre, to say the least.
The TSA doesn't "own" flying. They are proposing measures that are invasive and fundamentally ineffective, and we're supposed to have a say in whether or not we want that.
sic transit gloria mundi
Upon what do you base claiming that the Austrian School of Economics is "scientifically" discredited?
Personally, I find using the term "scientific" with regard to any economic theory suspect.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Holy shit, you are possibly the dumbest, blindest idiot I've ever seen
Bullshit.
Train people to conduct good security, and have them stationed at the airports. Make it a well-paying career and people might actually consider it as a career who might otherwise have avoided it. We may have more airports, but we also have more people who can be trained for the job, or are already trained.
Really? Then why didn't he introduce a bill forbidding the molestation of passengers and exposure to harmful and ineffective scans? Or better yet, if he really believes in smaller governement he would introduce a bill eliminating the TSA all together since they are a wasteful ineffective agency that has done nothing to make anyone safer.
Instead he proposes a bill which says, in effect, "if you don't like how you are treated by the TSA you can spend a few hundred thousand dollars trying to sue the Federal Government. This is nothing more than political grandstanding and pretending to be "against big government".
So what if a corporation dumps waste in the river, exposes workers to a toxic environment, over harvests the ocean or destroys entire species, abuses monopoly powers to destroy competition, or any number of negative externalities?
Cutting corners and not getting caught (or getting caught but the penalty being less than the gain) can be very profitable. Sometimes the damage being done is hidden long enough that a corporation flourishes. It's not hard for permanent damage to be be done on either a personal or a very large scale. Suing the corporation doesn't really fix the problem.
Also, corporations have no conscience, no remorse, and basically act like a sociopath.
Corporations don't have the rights of an individual, they have the privilege of acting as in individual in very specific ways.
"Are they made from real Girl Scouts?" ~Wednesday Addams
"Honestly, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal - it's as if we (African-Americans) think we have a God-given right to ride at the front of the bus. Yet in everyday life, we must give up certain liberties; when I'm driving on public roads, I don't have the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure by over-zealous law enforcement. But that's OK, because I voluntarily put myself on a bus, or on a public road."
The government doesn't give us rights. We have the rights inherently. Just because the government says driving on roads that I payed for isn't a right, doesn't mean their position is legally sound. Their unreasonable search and seizure of persons and property at airports is outright illegal under the Constitution. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. The reason it continues is that nobody in power will prosecute them, and courts won't hear criminal cases brought by the general public.
So how long do you think before, TSA would require a body scan before boarding a bus or a train or a ship? You would still be fine with it, if you were informed in advance, right? One can still take the car or walk or swim, right?
They don't know what they want.
They say they're against regulation, but then they say they want some government interference.
Make up your mind already.
The grown-ups have already decided that more government intervention is better than less government intervention.
Uh .. .what? The "grown-ups" (who I assume you do not number yourself among) have decided that more government intervention is better? Are you nuts? The question is not whether or not we need to reduce the size of Federal Government ... but what parts to cut.
Don't presume to speak for your betters.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Have you every been through Ben Gurion?
It's very effective but it's a pain in the ass compared to US Security.
Last time it took me a full 3 hours from entering the airport to arriving at the gate to depart. They x-rayed my bags, then hand-searched them, and asked me grilling and misleading questions before I even got to the ticket counter to check-in! Then it was a long wait to get through immigration. Then I got singled out for another x-ray line that _crawled_ along. There was probably a dozen of us in that line and it took 30 mins to get us all through. I think they make you wait on purpose to see if you get nervous etc.
Effective yes, but I'd hate to have to go through that everytime I want to fly.
You mean like civil rights? Apparently the two Pauls are awfully big opponents of that sort of legislation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It worked out great as another example of government overregulation.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Hey, better the Paulites blow their mod points on an intentionally provocative post than on a sensible, insightful one.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You're welcome to take a bus, train, car or boat to your destination instead.
I've heard this argument over and over again, and it misses a very real factor of modern life: it is assumed by society that you will travel in such a way as to be expedient. I cannot say to my supervisor, "sure, I'll be glad to attend that important conference in Bejing, but it will take me six weeks to get there and another six to get back because I won't fly," and expect to still have a job. Electing to not fly by commercial airline to any destination that is outside of normal driving range, as evaluated not by you, but by everyone else, effectively eliminates most means of employment over unskilled labor. It means attending not your choice of college, but the local ones. It means interviewing only for positions that have, essentially, no required travel whatsoever. And remember that even when travel is not a requirement of employment, it is often a prerequisite to advancement. Modern life assumes travel by air. Your opportunities are severely stunted if you do not fly.
A more realistic view would be that you do not have a choice: flying is part of life.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Sure, if anybody at all in this thread were talking about having no government. Libertarians are not anarchists.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Companies have the conscience, remorse and morals of those people who control them.
Companies are not autonomous entities. To perpetuate such a preposterous idea is to absolve those who run companies of any responsibility for their decisions and actions.
The full body scans are silly because Al Qaeda has ALREADY used suicide bombers with explosives in their BODY CAVITIES. These are not exposed by full-body scanners that stop at the skin surface.
From the linked article "Asieri had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum." That was 2009.
You bet I want services in exchange for my taxes and I want enough of them to build and maintain an entire civilization! I want a military service to defend the nation not one that extends the nation, I want transport services to build bridges to somewhere rather than nowhere, I want sewers and levees maintained not left to fall apart, I want pot holes filled in, I want someone to collect my garbage, I want a heath care system where I don't have to worry about bankruptcy.
It's not how big the government is, it's how effective they are at providing the infrastructure and services that underpin modern life. Truth be told I already have most of the things in the above list because I don't live in a superpower that spends half it's tax revenue on military dick swinging and the other half on narcarsistic corporate welfare.
As for freedom; it's is a state of mind and what I really don't need or want is a government service to provide my state of mind.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Perhaps you missed the whole "Socially Liberal" part, since you keep trying HARD to force libertarians into the tired grooves of either "neocon republican" or "limp wristed spend thrift liberal". Libertarians are not either.
The libertarian would be FOR government regulation for such things as equal rights. What they are against is regulations saying which kinds of house you can own, or what kind of shirt you can wear on the subway (or what kinds of games you can buy for your kids.)
It's simple-- Libertarian comes from "Liberty"-- for the most part, anything that increases the liberty of citizens is considered good; Biggotry is not a liberty that is good for the general citizen, because it de-facto implies obstructionism and lack of liberty to a portion of those citizens. Same with Gay marriage (concerning obstructionism being bad).
If anything, the Libertarian is more likely to suffer the bias AGAINST big business, BECAUSE big business tries to keep people down in general (to prevent competition). Your assertion that Libertarians would support racial biggotry is horribly unfounded, and serves only to highlight your own ignorance of that ideology.
And if the one you voted for doesn't get in, you still have to deal with it. I've never had a corporation poll my neighbors and decide that I had to work with them...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"They are not at all clear representations with easy to identify anatomy. They are strange ghostly pictures that are recognizable as a human form but little else"
This is false. For the one doctored image there are hundreds of real images you can view and the only thing indistinct about them is color.
"First is because it is not sexual in nature."
That literally varies from one examiner to the next. Unless you are going to claim that $10/hr barely trained employees with no significant qualifications maintain a perfect professional disassociation from the innate instincts in every human. Even doctors only pretend this and some of them poorly.
Everyone is against overregulation. They just disagree about what the right amount is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sorry, if you are making north of 200k and "have a harder time providing for our family", you ain't doing it right. Cell phones, every cable channel, the new lex in the 3 car garage. If you adjust for inflation that 20k is nice. I make less than half of what you make, and I am living high on the hog. I honestly don't know what you are doing wrong, but you are doing it.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
You've proved my point exactly: that's the right level of regulation - to them, but it's too much for you. Others might even consider deleting the bit about safe products and levelling the playing field. From their POV you're nothing but a dog-down dawty comyahnast!
Ask people whether they like their bathwater too hot (or too cold). Of course they don't. That doesn't mean everyone agrees on the ideal temperature, or even agrees that there is one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You said the same things I wanted to say, but better. For once, the "Think of the children" mantra is actually reasonable here, and it might actually help to snap people out of their complacency and make them realize how degrading this latest security theatre is. It's one thing to meekly give up all of our privacy and liberty just because the government asks us to, but even BEYOND that, they are now trying to take away our basic dignity. People need to draw the line somewhere and make the TSA realize, enough is enough.
Imagine you have a teenage daughter. Would you rather: (1) have her be irradiated by a medically-unproven scanning device which will show images of her naked body to the sleazy TSA guys behind the counter, any one of whom might capture that image with his cell phone to wank off to later, or: (2) have her be physically molested by a same-sex TSA employee who will touch her breasts and crotch, in public view in front of other passengers, or (3) have her be physically molested by a same-sex TSA employee who will touch her breasts and crotch, in a private room out of sight?
All three of these are grossly invasive and unacceptable options. Of course they're grossly invasive and unacceptable for adults too, but it might be easier to make people realize this if they happen to be a parent and you can explain it to them in terms of what is going to happen to their child. After thinking this through, I think any decent parent would be quite angry at the TSA.
The Libertarian policies seem good on the surface, but many libertarians also are against the government funding education and healthcare. Many libertarians think the governments role should be limited to defense, police, and justice. If everyone was forward thinking, hard working, intelligent, and never had any bad luck, say getting cancer, this would work great. The real world is full of people that do need some help at different points in their lives.
Anarchists never rule
It's a bit more complex than that, and a lot of it has to do with the belief that people will construct institutions using the frameworks available to them.
In the US, we do not have universal healthcare (despite the passage of the "Universal Healthcare" bill, we still do not). There are certain areas, despite that, which do have universal healthcare available. I live in one of the only urban areas in the United States that can be considered nominally conservative, and we have an association of private organizations (charities, doctors, hospitals) that provide healthcare for anyone who is unable to afford it, and do so quite successfully. The largest threat to this association is the government. It is a sustainable model, but once healthcare is nationalized it will no longer be supported. As with other things, people will eventually forget that it is possible, frequently preferable, to control important processes through the local community. If anything happens to the national system, or if there are major disasters in other places which impact it adversely, local communities that could otherwise take care of themselves are adversely affected when they would not otherwise be.
By centralizing things, you create a monoculture which has all the weaknesses of any other monoculture. If there's anything geeks should understand, it is that such monocultures breed nasty weaknesses which can be easily, effectively, and ruthlessly exploited. It's amazing how much the open source movement parallels some of the concepts of libertarianism, and how blind many people are to that fact. It's fine if you want all these government services, but you should be able to pick other platforms for most functions if you so choose. Do you really want complete vendor lock-in for every service you access, or would you like people to be able to innovate and create novel solutions from the ground up?