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One Tip Enough To Put Name On Terrorist Watch List
Frosty P writes "As a result of the US Government's complete failure to investigate credible warnings about 'Underwear Bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from none other than Abdulmutallab's father, senior American counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip can lead to a name being placed on the watch list. Civil liberties groups warn that it is now even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in America's security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel. 'They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they're on,' said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union."
Just waiting to batch upload all the names of TSA agents. What will the Feds do then?
hmm I'm gonna foreward them a list of everyone I went to highschool with. I have a feeling that they were all terrorists.
Freedom faltered
Bill Gates must be added to the list for his involvement in the entire history of Windows!
'They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they're on,' So difficult to travel...no idea why! The flight vendors don't return my phone calls and it's like it takes me 10x the normal time when I'm driving in the airport's general direction...
It's not ego-centrism to be wary of reducing the barrier between having your rights respected and having them violated, without any ability of recourse. That you read this as being ego-centric suggests that you're an ego-centric person who imagines that others are as well.
Something about once you get on a secret list, that's it for your career...
Yes, there is a suspicious fellow hanging around Pennsylvania avenue, claims he is the president...he's met with some 535 co-conspirators in an effort to overthrow the government. Let me give you all their names....
is it that difficult? most people seem to not care about their privacy or spreading details about themselves all over the web or in shopping (when cashiers ask for phone numbers or when they sign up to be contests). given the amount of data mining that exists by retailers already, the feds accumulating that info would probably be trivial.
"To stop the terrorists."
Seriously - this is an excellent thing.
The ridiculousness of the watch list will never be fixed, as long as it's only a small fraction of people who are inconvenienced.
I'm waiting for the day someone gets a hold of every airline's list of frequent fliers with more than 300 miles/month and gets them added to the list. When that happens, the airlines are going to go apeshit, the entire industry collapse and the economy take a massive hit. And then we'll know if it's there as actual security or just a show to make people feel safer.
Girls love bad guys.
There is also vast help from our friend technology.
As just a singular example of a technology, look at this article from four years ago, which is about a commercial facial recognition application which can scan 100,000 faces per second. I haven't been following this tech, but... damn.
Again, that's commercial, 4-year-old technology. Extrapolating that sort of capability outward, it is easy to imagine that a small team of humans can oversee the processing of absolutely tremendous amounts of information about individuals.
(My head is bare, but gee... a little tin foil might feel nice up there. ;)
I've heard rumours that he was involved in funding for Al Quaeda back in the 90's. Not saying that he did of course, but it's interesting that he hasn't denied it so far.
Don't be ego-centric, realize this likely doesn't apply to you, and you will in no way shape or form be effected by this.
Pastor Martin Niemöller would disagree.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think I saw some electronic device in his coat pocket!!!! Let's see how long that would last
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Don't be ego-centric, realize this likely doesn't apply to you, and you will in no way shape or form be effected by this.
So you're saying that we shouldn't care unless something affects us directly? That's ridiculous. It's like saying that only the people inside Guantanamo should have been concerned about what went on there. I'm not a US citizen but if you are then this is your government: it represents you to the world, its actions are a reflection on the population which elected it/let this pass and like it or not it controls a lot of things in your life. You're putting an enormous amount of faith in fallible human beings if you say "this doesn't affect me directly, so I'll let the government officials do what they like". Sooner or later something that does affect you will come around and by your reasoning nobody else should care.
The phrase "Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up" springs to mind.
I really doubt our civil liberties are at stake.
Really? One tip-off (potentially anonymous or vindictive or malevolent) gets you on a watch list, and you're unconcerned. The management of the no-fly list does not inspire much confidence in how this watch list will be maintained.
Just have a name which is sort-of similar to a suspected baddie, and you can be stuck on the no-fly list. The late Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman John Lewis were stuck on it for years: the bureaucracy could not remove even them in a timely way. News reporters have been placed on the list suspiciously soon after publicizing shortcomings at TSA. http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-17/us/watchlist.chertoff_1_air-marshals-chertoff-federal-no-fly-list?_s=PM:US
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Did this happen in the USSR and nazi Germany?
>I have absolutely NOTHING to hide, so I don't mind one bit. Useful idiot.
Yes, I like this very much.
We need the following stuff:
If a single volunteer provides a single hint/warning, then he is quite safe from prosecution. We just need a bug bunch of volunteers.
Personally, I'd rather have my airports be .0001 more secure.
We've lost the "war on terror".
Is doomed.
The USA is now a police state. In the next 10 years history is going to repeat itself and it will ultimately lead to WWIII.
Life is going to get increasingly harsher here, it is already _very_ harsh for many children more than a quarter of which do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis.
The TSA is now the "Brown Shirts" equivalent legally of the NAZI police. They have ultimate authority over the law of the land and can and do on a daily basis exercise that authority in our Airports.
From there it will eventually lead to a knock on your door and a pleasant man entering your residence asking why you are on his "list"....
at 3AM in the morning.
Meanwhile nobody here is doing jack squat about anything.
We already see that the Bank of America and other banks are simply extended branches of the US government along with other large businesses such as Amazon, which should not have any involvement _AT ALL_ as commercial institutions with Wikileaks. (i.e. shutting down accounts).
This cooperation on such a large scale in the US right now between government and large mega businesses compose a fascist state which is being constructed by a few power brokers at the Federal Reserve for complete control of government.
With the TSA, they now have an enforcement arm to build off of that is above the law.
Compare that with the "brown shirts" use by Hitler during the early 1930's to enlist primarily unemployed people who couldn't find a job to do his "dirty work" in eliminating the communist threat or any dissident obstacles to his power.
The horrific implications here though, is to use the TSA to create a list of anyone who points out that the TSA is clearly a criminal run operation and is not constitutional .
Right now names just go on lists...
Eventually that list _will_ lead to your front door in the middle of the night and I hope to god you are either out of the country by then like a lot of the intelligent Jewish people who could see the whole thing coming in the early thirties when Hitler was organizing his power structures...
and left Germany before it was too late.
I fully expect this will continue, with no resistance just like it did in Germany.
God help us all.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I smell another "witch trials", minus all the attention...and the trials.
Well, this just makes it possible to DDOS the entire thing. What, there are over 300 million people in USA, right? So how hard is it to build a script to just iterate over all those people and submit tips on all of them?
Do it in a distributed way and once everybody is on the list only the people who are not on it will look suspicious.
You can't handle the truth.
So now all citizens are enemies of the state? And with a "tip list" that is so easily game-able, why don't we all just submit the names of everyone who works for FOX NEWS?
I'd love to hear about Glenn Beck not being able to fly, or Sarah Palin strip-searched and groped at the airport. Now that might make FOX reverse some of their propaganda. If anything, when it comes to security theater, that's actually one of the very few things Glenn Beck and I agree on.
But since FOX yells louder than any other "news" agency (nobody watches msnbc, CNN is useless), they are a great target for this. I say make FOX an enemy of the state, and let them see how their "post 9-11 world" that they yap about so much has become an insane police-state.
They after all, are the only group to create their own grass-root support, as FOX essentially created the "Tea Party", so, only they can create enough backlash to have any effect in American politics.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Right. 'Cause Obama instituted all of that, not the DHS - which was created by...
It must be great to have such a short memory.
But what will you spend for that extra .0001?
And will you support a campaign to reduce road deaths by a factor of 99% by setting the national speed limit to 3mph? We could 30,000 lives per year!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Then pass legislation making it legal to smoke, possess, grow, and sell pot (subject to taxation), and that will FOR SURE fix things right up !!
I want more Dick !! Cheney way of doing things around here !!
It does effect me if my name pops-up on a watch list, and I have to undergo an hour long interrogation or penis-fondling by the airport SSA.... ooops I mean TSA.
>>>you will in no way shape or form be effected by this
Riiiiight. Here's what a German pastor said after he was released from a Nazi jail cell: "It was the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? ..... Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: 'Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others.' ..... The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written about in the newspapers.
"I ask myself again and again, what would have happened if, in the year 1933 or 1934 - all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 10 million people, because that is what it is costing us now."
Or if you prefer Star Trek:
"With the first speech censured, the first freedom denied, the first link in the chain is Forged that will bind us all irrevocably."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In IT security, there is always a trade-off between usability and security. The key is the efficiency of the security. Really inefficient security will greatly decrease usability without enhancing security much (ala Microsoft's idea of perpetual dialog boxes in Vista). Really efficient security will have relatively much less impact on security (e.g., having the primary user of a computer not be its admin).
There is no reason we shouldn't take the same attitude with airport (etc.) security trading off with liberty. Turning all citizens into suspects is simply bad efficiency (and a serious betrayal of the "innocent until proven guilty" principle that is crucial to American democracy).
If you want 100% computer security, you unplug and wipe the computer (or better, disintegrate it). If we want 100% security from terrorists, we should incarcerate everyone in the world including ourselves (or better, disintegrate the planet).
Sound like a plan. Put all this on a picture, add some Guy Fawkes mask and spam it on 4chan.
I have absolutely NOTHING to hide, so I don't mind one bit.
So what are ally your passwords, real name, address of residence, bank account number(s), Social Security number, and all other personal details? Oh wait you were talking about the TSA, then prove you are not in any way related to a terrorist (including six degrees of separation)
So I assume you've sent your contribution to the ACLU, right?
Right??
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let's make government incompetent --- then it will inevitably shrink down and we'll be free of it. Oh wait, hmm, doesn't work.
Not necessarily a comment on what happened in this story, just a warning to anyone who believes in the above proposition. If you hate big government, then you're definitely not going to like incompetent, underpaid, under-resourced big government. The solution is to make government work better, never the opposite.
Perhaps. (Score:-1, Troll)
by puterg33k (1920022)
Ahhh com'on guys. Even though I completely disagree with his post, that doesn't make him a "troll" or "ass". He's just sharing his opinion. He didn't deserve the negative karma hit nor the insult. Can't we all just..... get along?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Then I'm sure you won't mind posting your credit card numbers and banking details...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Stop trying to blame it on Obama you troll. Once a agency is created it can only gain more powers. Laws are easy to make but not easy to remove. You should have join the so called "bush basher" when it was time to protest instead of supporting your republican puppet. You should be mad that you was worng, but you prefere to continue living in denial; blaming the other party again. It no wonder things never change. It because of peoples like you, that the USA is going down the toilet.
I would think it would take a great amount of effort and persons to keep track of someone.
To keep track of someone at all times, yes. But they don't need to keep track of him at all times to completely fuck up his life.
For me, being included in the "no fly" list would be much worse than having someone following me everywhere. My life is an open book, I have no secrets to hide, but I do need to take a plane from time to time.
What we've done in America is akin to installing Norton Antivirus to fight our terrorist viruses.
Sure, it helps fight it.. but it bogs the damned system down so much that it's now a giant antivirus scanning machine, and that's about it....
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Just goes to show that the US Federal bureaucracy is an un-tameable beast that no administration can manage. Shame on Bush for starting it, shame on Obama for letting it grow.
'as long as it is deemed credible'
"Are you sure?"
"Yep."
"Okay, then. We'll put " . $name . " on the list."
In the Inquisition, one can be arrested and brought to trial on a single accusation. History is now repeating itself.
Right. 'Cause Obama instituted all of that, not the DHS - which was created by...
It must be great to have such a short memory.
That may be, but the head of DHS is an Obama appointee. Changes instituted at DHS since that time fall to Obama. Honestly, the 'Blame Bush' thing is getting tired now that we're two years in. I'm no Bush fan, but this particular thing isn't his fault.
Changing Places, the movie in real life. It's amazing, the things we used to gasp or laugh about in USSR and third world sh-- holes, are expected to be taken for granted by our new Oberfuhrers. Even in the worst countries, with actual Maoist or Marxist wars going, no stooge ever made a grab for my privates.
Today, many of the former "third world" cities are choked with new, expensive Toyotas bigger than a Suburban, while the US has a bunch of econo boxes. The US is going to hell under a fascist-commie government. Time to leave, if you can. We're 80% out.
You mean installing Norton Antivirus AND McAfee Antivirus at the same time......
So I report you to DHS as a terrorist. No evidence to support my claim, just an anonymous tip. For the rest of your life, you're subjected to additional screening and harassment every time you fly. You have no recourse to clear your name. You have no idea how your name got on the watch list. For the rest of your life you learn to show up at the airport an hour earlier than everyone else does and see everyone in the security line looking at you, getting your extra pat-down, wondering, "I wonder that that guy did." And your civil liberties are not at stake?
Actually shortly you won't have an option to avoid the TSA. No going by car won't help because they have bought vans with the full body scanners in them so they can scan cars & people without anyone knowing. You can't take a train, the TSA is already there. You won't be able to take a bus, because the TSA is already expanding to bus stations. The TSA has said they are going to be moving in to ports and such. So soon, you won't be able to even take a boat without running into the TSA. The TSA has starting putting a few people at the boarders as well, they have reported. The TSA just recently announced they want to have a presence at sporting events, and possibly even malls along with monitoring churches. The TSA has also said they will be moving in to the subway systems in cities to make sure they are protected.
So how exactly was it you suggest we avoid the TSA? It is or soon will be impossible to avoid them if you travel anywhere in the US. If they get their wish you won't even be able to avoid them even in your home town. It is probably more an issue of time, rather than if this stuff happens. Soon you can get the experience TSA experience everyday depending on where you go and how you get to work.
The TSA has not stopped one terrorist since they were created. You know who has stopped every terrorist? The passengers on the airplanes. So it it passengers - 2, TSA - 0. Seem to me like the passengers are doing far more to protect the public than the TSA. Maybe we need to do something to make it easier for passengers to deal with terrorists when they find them since they are doing a better job than the TSA. Spend money where it works, not on failed systems and failed government departments. Some have suggested letting every passenger carry a fire arm. While this is a funny suggestion, it might actually work better than the TSA. It does make a sort of perverse sort of sense, after all how many people could a terrorist shoot before everyone else on the plane shoots him dead. I don't think that is the best idea out there though. It is kind of funny to think about though.
There aren't just bad seeds in the TSA. The problem is systemic with the TSA. They have had serious problems listed in their last 3 yearly GAO reports. That is just the 3 I looked at and I didn't go further back. Problems of poor training still, problems of not following the advice of the "red teams" to help improve their security still. They are still failing "red team" test by huge percentages with some airports still having 100% failures still. They aren't following DHS policies like they are suppose to do. They have irregularities in their accounting and can't explain where some money went, and can't explain how much money they spent on other things. There is also the most recent report that questions their spending on new technology and issues of so much technology abandoned sitting in warehouses. The issue is the TSA isn't investigating and properly testing new technologies before they are purchased to see if they even work, let alone help security.
Every few days there is a report of how TSA staff didn't even follow their own rules and harassed a member of the public, or how they assaulted someone. The reports just keep piling up. This indicates a basic fundamental problem with the TSA. Normally you would suggest retraining to correct these type of problems, but we can't even do that since their training programs are a failure and not being done right according to the GAO.
Clearly the TSA is a failure and needs to disbanded. It was a nice idea that we tried but it is a utter and complete failure, and we shouldn't throw good money after bad with the TSA.
Congratulations, youre back at the medioeval witchhunt/inquisition paranoid lifestyle when a single anonymous tip was enough to ruin your enemies and claim their property.
As an American, I hereby invite you not to come here, ever again, until you get a better grasp of U.S. civics, history and politics.
Maybe you should be a little more concerned about the personal liberties in your own home country, son. When it comes to Big Brother, you're way ahead of us.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I did the anonymous coward as it's probably better for this post than others, but needless to say my family is of Pakistani origin, and about two years ago my brother was accused of being a terrorist.
Of course, the guy that pointed the finger at him was about to go to jail himself because he beat his girlfriend over the head with a baseball bat, so he said he knew the whereabouts of a terrorist. My brother was Muslim, he knew that, and that's all it took. The charges were bunk of course, and the guy was stupid enough to email my brother saying "Yea well I'll tell everybody you're a terrorist!", which he showed to the FBI agents that showed up at our house. They were satisfied with that, thanked us for our time, and said that we don't have to worry about it again.
Fast forward to the next year when my brother goes overseas (not the Middle East) to get some research done for his thesis -- he comes back and I went to pick him up from the airport, and was waiting there for FOUR HOURS. The TSA and whomever else inside were questioning him for hours. He's on their watch list because some douchebag that beat up his girlfriend thought he'd get a lesser sentence by ratting out some Muslim guy.
Either way, it's a sad state of affairs nowadays, even a trip over the border he is detained for hours at a time. He has gotten used to it since he can't do anything about it, and showing resistance basically implies you're guilty of something. So he takes it. But the unfortunate thing is that he's far from the only one, and I imagine that lots of people are affected by this, and it's sad. What more, even if you share a name with a would-be terrorist (do you know how many Omars there are out there?) then you get screwed too. Our intelligence services are atrocious, our airport security worse, and our lack of civil liberties eroding quickly. And while right now it's only Muslims that are getting screwed, it's not too far to think it won't be gun owners, or political opponents, or anything else. It's just sick to me, and upsetting since I was born and raised in the US, just like my brother.
The commies are back, but now they follow Islam and use small group tactics!
I propose that people nominate their elected officials for inclusion on the terrorist watch list. Once a few politicians have to deal with this list they will see their way clear to impose more reasonable standards for inclusion...
I can think of 535 members of congress I'd like to add to the list, but what might be even more meaningful would be if their chiefs of staff were put on the list (they might be under the TSA radar and actually get added to the list, whereas a Senator or Congressman's name might be identified and flagged before making the list).
I tend to not support such acts, but in this case I'll make an exception... The issue here is the near-impossibility of ever getting off the list once on it.
Ken
Really? One tip-off (potentially anonymous or vindictive or malevolent) gets you on a watch list, and you're unconcerned. The management of the no-fly list does not inspire much confidence in how this watch list will be maintained.
That is nothing new. One tip-off from a lady and you'll be on the sex offenders list. With no investigation, and no conviction. If a woman says you are a rapist, you ARE a rapist. At least that is what the police here think.
If this sounds insane, look here, it is run by two laywers: falserapesociety.blogspot.com
Is this the very same list that anti-gun folks were SHOCKED to learn we weren't using to deny people the right to own guns?
What is the principle by which you made this decision? Is it a desire to see as few deaths as possible? Then you should be focusing your efforts on heart disease. That accounts for a third of all deaths in the US! (831,000 or 34.3% in 2006, according to the American Heart Association.) It's about as bad as a WTC event every second day (and every Sunday).
Perhaps it's only "unnatural" deaths? Then you should be campaigning to forbid automobiles, since automobile accidents account for some 30,000 deaths in the US annually ( http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.html ). Instead, you suggest using an automobile.
Perhaps it's only deaths with a culpable party? Then let's restrict ourselves to automobile accidents involving drunk driving. That accounts for about 10,000 deaths in the US annually ( http://www-fars.nhtms.dot.gov/Crashes/CrashesAlcohol.aspx ). That's a WTC event every five months.
Perhaps you're upset by intentional murder alone? The going rate in the US is 17,000 per year ( http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0295.pdf ). Terrorism rates for the past ten years have been less than ten annually except in 2001.
If you're restricting yourself any further than this, I doubt the utility of your principle.
You're not necessarily inconsistent here, just inefficient.
It's like Jimmy says; "Like... come on."
Yeah... Obama should spend all of his time micromanaging his appointees such that they don't follow the established policies of their agency. Honestly, the 'Don't Blame Bush" thing is pretty tired now that we've been hearing it for 10 years.
And your children's names and schools, along with their complete class schedules and a list of their biggest fears.
And your mother's maiden name, your date of birth, the name of your kindergarten teacher, a list of every address you have ever lived at, and a list of every pet you have ever owned.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No kidding.
A bunch of Anons using tor/skype to make anonymous tips could cause a *lot* of ruckus.
So could a bunch of al-Qaeda. Why bother making bombs and killing yourselves to disrupt American air travel when all you need is a computer?
Yet another personal rights violation that the media will try to warn the public, but they won't care about.
It saddens me to do this, but I have to agree with parent. This 1-tip-no-fly thing seems a (somehow slow-mo) knee-jerk reaction to last year's underwear bomber. Like all the other measures of the security theater this will accomplish little more than annoy and disrupt innocents' lives. Sad. Orwellian world, we are slowly but steadily getting closer to it.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I'm not even sure I'd go that far. More like "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
>>>You have an option, take a car or a boat.
Although that sounds reasonable the Supreme Law of the land disagrees with you. The 9th reserves to me the right to travel by car and boat AND airplane, while the 10th forbids the Union government from curtailing that right (unless it's across an international border), because the power is reserved to the Member States. It was never given to the central government.
And of course there's the 4th which forbids the Union government from searching people on domestic car drives, boat outings, or plane flights. Or even just walking down the street. Doesn't that suck? That damn LAW makes it impossible for the US Congress to act like tyrants or caesars.
Hmmmm. I guess that's why the Founders created it: "The purpose of a constitution is to render contrary laws passed by the leaders as Nullities. These lesser laws shall not be enforced." - Thom. Jefferson, 1780s.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Er, what? He didn't even say where he is from.
Why should he be all that concerned about US civics and history and politics? What's relevant to him is that he has business reasons to travel to the US, for purposes that benefit both the US and his home country (and the world at large), and the US' draconian security makes it difficult for him to do so. It's not really relevant *why* we have dumbshit rules; it's not an excuse that "we have this stupid rules on air travel because our political system is dysfunctional."
I've been to China on business, and the security measures for air travel there are far more innocuous than the ones in the US. Metal detector, infrared camera (this was during H1N1), simple xray machine, and you're good to go. A Chinese or a Russian wanting to come to the US has to endure far more indignity in order to come to conferences.
It's to the point where a lot of foreign scientists grumble whenever the international conference is in the US, because they have to put up with our bullshit.
What are the consequences of being placed on a 'watch list'? A little extra scrutiny? A lot? Denial of traveling privileges? Isn't this why we want watch lists as opposed to ethnic/religious stereotyping?
Some evidence has been found that would suggest an individual might be a risk. So we watch that person (as opposed to randomly fondling everyone). I don't really have a problem with this. I would like to see some procedure for backtracking the list entries to the sources for the purpose of evaluating source reliability. But seeing as how a valid tip might point to a passenger who may still take many uneventful flights (false negatives) before setting off the big one, this may be of little value (other than for a post mortem study). Sompe people may have to be resigned to being on the list for quite some time.
captcha: prophecy
Have gnu, will travel.
<sarcasm>Why not? Our government created lists like this before and it worked just fine.</sarcasm>
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The federal government already gets the public databases pulled it in to their databases. This is exactly why multiple Fusion centers were set up in almost every state, at least what they are willing to admit publicly from the middle of 2009. Who knows how many they actually have now. They are not part of the federal government, but rather setup by the state and local governments, even though they get federal DHS money to set these up. Since they are not federal agencies, they are not restricted by federal rules for data mining and privacy. They collect information from public sources and private databases (think credit reports, grocery stores, and others that sell their databases), link up with businesses, state and local police and then pass all this up to the federal level such as the FBI and Homeland Security. The FBI and DHS then send down terrorist watch lists, and lists of people that the Fusion centers and law enforcement should monitor in their areas. The stated idea was to allow more data sharing between local law enforcement and federal law enforcement along with the help of businesses. What in fact has happened is that the federal government has gotten around rules about what data they can collect by having it passed to them from another/third party, in this case the state Fusion centers. Technically they didn't mine the data, the states did and they just passed the information along to the federal government. So vast amounts of data is being collected already about the public and what is going on in the US, and most people have no clue at all that this is being done.
The problem with all of this is who the Fusion centers are putting on the terrorist watch list. They have put the ACLU on the watch list in Tennessee, Ron Paul supporters in Missouri, people who vote third party or support them, people who advocate for the Constitution, those who are over friendly, people who buy lots of jeans, owners of certain kinds of historical flags, and other crazy things that have come out. It just insane who the Fusion centers are putting on the terrorist watch list, and the insane criteria being used to put people on the terrorist watch list.
http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/gc_1156877184684.shtm
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2010/dec/22/aclu-bristles-over-terror-list/
http://publicintelligence.net/florida-fusion-center-monitored-bp-protests-ron-paul-events-code-pink/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/23/fusion-centers-expand-criteria-identify-militia-members/
http://epic.org/privacy/fusion/
On a recent family holiday to Florida (from the UK), my son was singled out for specific attention and searches on both sides of the Atlantic. The airport manager later told me that he had been matched on a watch-list. Although he's got a completely western name, which isn't that common, I guess he did have a few reasons he triggered this attention.
1/ His electronic visa application was made about 36hrs before flying
2/ His passport had just been renewed
3/ He was travelling on a one-way ticket
Mind you as he's five years old, I'd kind of hoped that lot would have been ignored. Hard to tell what is worse, dumb computer decisions like this, or the prospect of dumb border guards making decisions for themselves.
Odds of dying from a terrorist on an airplane:
1 in 5000.
That's the same odds of dying in a US tsunami, or getting hit on the head by a meteorite, or winning the Big Lotto prize. Twice. I do not fear any of these events happening, therefore I do not fear death by terrorist. Neither should you.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You nailed it. I worked for the TSA in early 2005 for 5 months until I understood if I ever wanted to work for a agency or NGO again I needed to leave asap.
I do not play in the middle of the road
From TFA, "credible" single tips. A tip from a parent, giving details that can be somewhat checked, is more credible than some stranger on Slashdot.
I'm of two minds regarding the "what makes you think you're special enough to warrant tracking" POV. On the one hand, yeah, totally, a little more of that attitude would go a long way, not necessarily with regards to DHS, but certainly with things like "anti-terror" stuff being done in little podunk towns. It makes a ton of sense for NYC (target, multiple times), probably for Boston (airport two 9/11 planes flew from, plus the whole Mooninite invasion). But otherwise (excepting similar large/famous cities), no.
However, the way that computing and storage is scaling, and the sort of things I see happening now when I browse, all the time (visit the Acme Corp. site, notice Acme advertisements inserted everywhere I go), make me think that the premise is a little wrong. If not today, then soon, it will be not-that-hard to track several million someones. We already know that P(terrorist) is a tiny tiny number, and we also know that P(abuse of information) is a non-zero number, we have history for both of these.
AND -- someone will surely point out that abuse of information is not terrorism. Well, maybe. I think we need to be a little more specific about what we mean by "terrorism". It's not that much about the dead bodies, because in fact terrorists aren't that deadly. They're less dangerous than your bed, put it that way (check the stats for people killed falling out of bed). Cars (as others have noted) are probably 100x more dangerous (steady 30-40k/year), and cars aren't even that dangerous, compared to the danger of simply not getting enough exercise (kills 10x more people than car crashes, estimates I have seen). And we're pretty ho-hum about these orders-of-magnitude riskier things. So whatever it is that we don't like about terrorism, either we totally fail at counting, or else it is not the risk of death. And given a little thought, you can probably come up with ways to automate misery-making with tracking info.
Hey, on the other hand. People would be flying more :)
And because some of us around here are right wingers, we'd like to know the day you first had sex, whether you used a condom, the most recent time you had sex, and any homosexual experiences or thoughts you may have had.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Don't be ego-centric, realize this likely doesn't apply to you, and you will in no way shape or form be effected by this.
Pastor Martin Niemöller would disagree.
And so would just about everyone in the DDR. Dumbasses like GP should really read up on recent history. Of course, it's possible that GP benefits from the rapidly encroaching police state.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
It's not as simple as firing some money off to a subcontractor to hopefully do the right job for you. You actually have to CARE, and become both an interested and active citizen. Otherwise someday the ALCU could be labeled as a "threat to the nation" or some such nonsense, and be shut down; whereas if you have an active, diverse, and interested majority of the populace that isn't willing to put up with any nonsense from their leaders (whatever it might be), then democracy is safe. A complacent population is only one political accident away from a disaster.
You might say that given the experience of history these sorts of things should never happen today. But just look at what's happened in Venezuela: a nice, tidy, step-by-step democratic march closer and closer to dictatorship. Why? Because apparently that's what a significant number of people are willing to accept, either because they genuinely want it (foolishly), or because they don't care and are too busy with their daily lives. I'm sure Venezuela might have the equivalent of the ALCU. While such an organization can be a focus for the good fight, it simply isn't enough. So, while your sentiment may be helpful, it is far from a solution to the problem the previous post was describing.
Blame the nigger its all you stupid, think your educated, white asshole who voted for him because you thought someone might think your racist if you didn't vote for a nigger.
People who have filed grievance reports against the TSA have ended up on the no fly lists as well. So this isn't alimited instances or unfortunately anything new.
...and that's assuming this list never gets used for anything else.
I think you miss the point. As a citizen, I shouldn't have my options limited without due process. The Governor of Pennsylvania was right when he said we've become a nation of wussies. Here's how I see it:
1. Bomb-in-underwear-guy failed.
2. No one except Bomb-in-underwear-guy was hurt.
3. People will always criticize and say "You aren't doing enough to make us safe!" That doesn't mean it's true.
4. Therefor; Stop catering to the pussies and hypocrites
This isn't about protecting lives. This is about controlling spin in a 24-hour news cycle. Americans can take care of themselves. The only people who claim differently are those who gain power by offering "protection". I should never have any rights impinged upon to make it convenient for some politico to avoid criticism.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
"Heil Obama! Heil Bush! Heil Clinton! Sieg heil Amerika! (Can I board now? Thank you.)"
Anonymous Coward (19??-)
Yes it must be great to ignore the news reports about how Obama has gone on to seriously expand the reach of DHS. How Obama has had more warrant-less wiretaps in 2 years that Bush did in 4 years in office. So much for Obama's promise to stop warrant-less wiretaps. Obama could stop any of this anytime he wanted with one phone call to DHS, or a few press conferences. Instead he lets it go on and in fact encourages DHS to go even further. Who started the Fusion centers on his watch? Obama. Who has some some seriously over reaching executive orders with broad powers to monitor? Obama. Who said he would shut down Guantanamo but hasn't done it, and in fact continues the torture that everyone screamed about Bush doing? Obama.
So don't give me that crap the Obama is fine, and it was all the last Bush. He is just as bad if not worse than the last Bush. Our Presidents have been screwing the public and it hasn't mattered one bit which party they come from. Both sides of the isle love to do it.
Except, as has been pointed out repeatedly, concentrating on specific people by definition leaves other areas less inspected.
So all you really need is a guy who has stolen someone else's identity to carry all the damn knives, and you can have 5 'obvious' (In your universe) Jihadists and that guy take a plane.
Hell, if you're really clever, take a tour group of innocent Muslims, from one of these countries. Have thirty obviously suspicious Muslims board the plane, get searched as thoroughly as possible...and then have a black guy from the US who converted to Islam fly under some other guy's name and carry the knives to give to five of those guys. (The other twenty five being innocent Muslims who got a discount on a trip to the US.)
Are you 'pro-profiling' people really so stupid that you can't grasp 'If we search group X more than group Y, terrorists will make sure to be in group Y, or hell, just make sure one member of their group can fake being in group Y and have them carry the stuff.'?
This is, of course, pretending that that 'hijacking a plane' is even vaguely possible, or that the security stuff is even slightly a good idea...but no matter how dumb the security theatre is now, your suggestion makes it worse.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
He is right. I know several people that get hassled every single time they fly, because they happen to have a name that's similar to one that's been listed. One of them has a name which is extremely common in Ireland. There aren't any other details included, no way of determining if it's a coincidence or if they've been listed and no way of getting a slip of paper to show to the TSA that you're not that individual.
For an extra 0.0001% secure that's simply not worth it. It might be worth it for an extra 80% or possibly 50%, but fro 0.0001%, it's definitely not worth it.
America is dead. Our decline is just the corpse rotting.
I think you just wrote my new sig....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Many of you here want this same corrupt, incompetent government in charge of your health care. That's just unreal. Enjoy!
I wonder why they don't just change from the TSA to Stasi.. They are certainly heading in that direction at a feverish clip....
No its because of people like bush and obama that this country is going down the toilet. opps said something against obama must mean I'm a racist
So civil liberties is somehow linked with Hitler now?
You're much more likely to die from the drive to the airport but I don't see them putting the TSA out to pull over bad drivers.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Ex-girlfriend calls in tip, 3 years later you go to buy a gun and can't.
No chance to clear your name?
Maybe you should hide your inability to spell.
Happy New Year!? Happy happy joy joy...
No matter who you give it to your "invitation" and "better grasp of U.S. civics, history and politics" are worth nil: right now you're already a overtly belligerent totalitarian fascist state. Hopefully you will implode violently as your youth goes from using bits to using bullets, it's the only option left that can save your country.
"To save the village we had to destroy the village" s/village/US
Haven't you been conscious the last month? Didn't you notice that the US mask fell? Is it truly possible for you to know so little about the US government and what has happened?
Or are you among those US slaves who are banned from reading specific newspapers?
Close your eyes! Close your Mind. Can you close your heart? If you survive the next decade you will suffer the shame for the rest of your life. Until you kill yourself in disgust.
Enjoy the fireworks?
I believe someone pointed out the odds of dying in a terrorist attack while flying were about the same as getting cancer from the new body scan machines. The government has said that the odds of getting cancer are so small that we shouldn't worry about it, so why worry about dying in a terrorist attack? :)
Fuck you. Just because it doesn't apply to me means that it's OK for thousands of others to be harassed by the government for no legitimate reason? Is that really OK with you? You can seriously go fuck yourself, people like you are a far greater threat than the terrorists.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I live in Canada. I have more personal liberties than an american has now(even with the s.1 clause -- aka the government may restrict freedoms as deemed necessary by the courts of law). I generally like the US too, but the GP is right. You thought Bush was bad, you were wrong. Obama is worse, and anyone with 3 firing neurons could have figured that out when he was running for office.
Om, nomnomnom...
In IT security, there is always a trade-off between usability and security.
No. Good security is all about improving usability. Good security is accomplished by designing the system to encourage secure practices - it is precisely when security implementations interfere with usability that you get bad security because the users now have an incentive to look for ways around the pain that the bad security inflicts on them in their day-to-day tasks.
Odds of dying from a terrorist on an airplane:
1 in 5000.
Wait, 1 out of every 5000 deaths is caused by a terrorist attack on an airplane. Do you have any idea of how many people die each day in the US?
Or maybe you meant that 1 out of every 5000 airplane passers will end up dying in a terrorist attack? Do you have any idea of the number of commercial flights each day in the US?
Or did you just made up some numbers to make your point?
Are you 'pro-profiling' people really so stupid that you can't grasp 'If we search group X more than group Y, terrorists will make sure to be in group Y, or hell, just make sure one member of their group can fake being in group Y and have them carry the stuff.'?
Jihad Jane
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As an American, I hereby invite you not to come here, ever again, until you get a better grasp of U.S. civics, history and politics.
Maybe you should be a little more concerned about the personal liberties in your own home country, son. When it comes to Big Brother, you're way ahead of us.
As a Finn, I hereby declare that I have NO PROBLEMS with Americans, at all. My issue is purely with the totally ridiculous, over the top viciously draconian and humiliating (and ineffective according to the news) security measures at US airports. I don't have to put up with Obama's newfangled blend of fascism, so I won't. He and his beloved TSA can collectively suck on my big poster tube.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What exactly do you want?
One tip off was ignored about the underwear bomber and everyone was questing why he wasn't added to the no fly list.
Now one tip is enough to get you on the no fly list and people still complain.
From TFA, "credible" single tips. A tip from a parent, giving details that can be somewhat checked, is more credible than some stranger on Slashdot.
What about a pissed off ex-girlfriend or ex-wife? Are they credible? Would they vindictively try to screw up your life?
Actually that number is wrong. The odds are much much higher.
The odds of dying in a terrorist attack on a plane in a given year are 1 in 25,000,000.
The odds of a Westerner being killed by a terrorist in a given year are 1 in 3,000,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html
The odds of your dying in a 1 hour flight in a given year are less than 1 in 1,000,000.
http://planecrashinfo.com/
The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html
The odds of dying in a car accident within one year 1 in 18,585.
The odds of simply being in a car accident within one year are 1 in 5,889.
The odds of dying by an assault within one year are 1 in 16,421.
http://www.nsc.org/
I think, if I am not mistaken, I have a better chance to win a state lottery than die in an terrorist attack on an airplane. I am so much more likely to die from an assault than a terrorist, it is an order of magnitude that is just plain silly. So as you can see the odds are pretty slim to die by a terrorist attack of any kind. I think I can risk it, and have far less security at airport with no groping or radiation. If I get a choice, I choose my Constitutional freedoms, over being safe. If a terrorist kills me so be it. At least I died with all my freedoms, rather than beaten down by my own government.
it's called being innocent before proven guilty. by giving passengers guns you make them judge jury and executioner. there would be no accountability before someone actually dies to prove that the person was a so called 'terrorist' rather then 'someone i did not like the look of and who was acting differently then what i think how people should act.' the system you purpose is actually worse then the tsa, at least the tsa doesn't kill you.
Higher odds, lower odds, how ever you say it. It's harder for that to happen. LOL
Report everybody, so everybody is on the watch list. Then the watch list is useless. Well, more obviously useless.
rooooar
Actually if they shoot someone with explosives on them or them catching themselves on fire as has happened the last two times, there won't be an issue. Are you seriously suggesting that all 100+ people on a plane or even the 20+ around the guy would lie to get someone off? What about the stewardesses? That's an awful lot of people lying. Besides install a few cameras with microphones and you don't have any issues at all. Someone gets killed check the cameras to see exactly what happened. All you would have to do is put a few fish-eyes in the ceiling of the isles and you could see and hear everything in a plane.
Your making it more of a problem than it would be and you know it. Besides I didn't say it was the best idea out there. In fact I said the opposite.
Do you remember those police academy movies? Back then, Americans liked the plucky clever sympathetic character that wins in the end. Nowadays however Americans like Jack-ass, mockumentaries, and Snooki. We could therefore make a TSA comedy where TSA lowlifes interact with business flyers and middle class families.
Several possible characters :
Dom -- homeless, stinks, eats the food taken from passengers
T-bone -- steals laptops and cash, he's been studying to get into credit card fraud, but keeps failing the 'exams'
Sketch -- deals cocaine to the passengers, gets into fights with kids
Joe -- supervisor, masturbates to the nudy scanner images, including kids
Laquita -- just obnoxious, steals clothing, likes fucking Sketch while they watch the nudy scanner
Carry -- transvestite, also steals clothing, likes feeling up the passengers who opt out of the nudy scanner
Frank -- just plane crazy, he hides dog poop in passengers luggage for example
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Right sentiment, but as shown above, you clearly have a pretty bad head for odds. I don't recommend ever taking up gambling. Odds of 1 in 5000 would suggest that for every twelve 747s that takes off, one is blown up with the loss of all life aboard.
That was Bruce Schneier on Security:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/tsa_backscatter.html
There's talk about the health risks of the machines, but I can't believe you won't get more radiation on the flight. Here's some data:
A typical dental X-ray exposes the patient to about 2 millirems of radiation. According to one widely cited estimate, exposing each of 10,000 people to one rem (that is, 1,000 millirems) of radiation will likely lead to 8 excess cancer deaths. Using our assumption of linearity, that means that exposure to the 2 millirems of a typical dental X-ray would lead an individual to have an increased risk of dying from cancer of 16 hundred-thousandths of one percent. Given that very small risk, it is easy to see why most rational people would choose to undergo dental X-rays every few years to protect their teeth.
More importantly for our purposes, assuming that the radiation in a backscatter X-ray is about a hundredth the dose of a dental X-ray, we find that a backscatter X-ray increases the odds of dying from cancer by about 16 ten millionths of one percent. That suggests that for every billion passengers screened with backscatter radiation, about 16 will die from cancer as a result.
Given that there will be 600 million airplane passengers per year, that makes the machines deadlier than the terrorists.
(bold added for emphasis by russ1337)
They have a link on that page to send messages to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. This message will also be sent to your senators and members of congress. If all of us sends one than our voices can be heard.
Injustice happens. Complain to the authorities as much as you can and they'll get the idea that we do not enjoy it and will be an annoyance until they do listen. Especially the elected officials.
I should have been smart, not fell into the trap.
What you want is an "and should not have fallen" there instead of "fell". You start out in past perfect (progressive) tense, so you need to maintain past perfect tense or it sounds awkward.
As for the content of your post, see my sig (better yet look the quote up, there is more to it, it was just too long to fit it in).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Right. 'Cause Obama instituted all of that, not the DHS - which was created by...[Bush] It must be great to have such a short memory.
By that logic I suppose we should still be holding George Washington accountable for present day actions taken by the US Army then?
"blind_biker" has said where he's from before.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's funny, the people in the US who hate Obama tend to see Canada as a socialist tyranny. Mostly because you have universal health care, which to them is the sure sign of a communist dictatorship.
How can you figure that out when you are under the thumb of the Canadian Soviet, where the government has taken over health care and television?
I was wondering who would be here at Slashdot on New Year's Eve, and now I'm starting to figure it out.
You are welcome on my lawn.
i think most (but certainly not all, unfortunately) "pro-profiling" people are advocating behavioral profiling, not race/name/origin profiling. normal guy from yemen or germany or singapore or where ever, who cares? shifty-acting guy from SF or dallas or cairo, well, he gets a closer look. even then, that's not necessarily full-body probing either. maybe the guy's just afraid of flying, or his dog got run over and he's having a bad day. the measured response should be appropriate to the situation. not sure why people don't get this...
The people here in the US who believe Obama is a fascist also believe that your universal health care, government-paid education and other reasonable solutions to difficult challenges makes you infinitely worse off in the "fascism" sweepstakes.
If you live in America and believe the Obama Administration is a totalitarian regime, it sort of disqualifies you from being taken seriously. If you live in Finland and believe that security hassles at US airports means that we have become a fascist state, it means the short days and long nights have affected your judgment.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I am not a fan of Glenn Beck, though many times I end up watching his show for the same reason car wrecks are fascinating. But I agree COMPLETELY with Glenn Beck on the TSA, which is hard for me to say. Glenn and I share a hatred of the TSA. Source.
If you live in America and believe the Obama Administration is a totalitarian regime, it sort of disqualifies you from being taken seriously. If you live in Finland and believe that security hassles at US airports means that we have become a fascist state, it means the short days and long nights have affected your judgment.
The wiretaps and the ease of getting onto a no-fly (or a terrorist) list remind me a lot of the bad-old-days of the Kádár regime in Hungary, where all it took to prevent you from ever stepping abroad was an anonymous call from a disgruntled colleague or neighbor. And it took little more for you to lose your job and NEVER get one, again.
Yes, that was a totalitarian regime. And your Obama regime is just as totalitarian + the scanners and the aggressive pat-downs. Enjoy your fascist asshole Obama regime. My judgement is just fine - but yours is definitely affected by some powerful brain-washing, if you think your country is not a totalitarian regime. Oh, and enjoy your money being wasted on security theater, loser!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
and nobody will be deleted as the mere entry into that list is an act of terrorism. Therefore you should be happy you are not put to court for your name popping up...
cb
Right. 'Cause Obama instituted all of that, not the DHS - which was created by...
It must be great to have such a short memory.
Do you know how long would it take Obama to stop this madness? About 4 seconds. Call the guy he appointed, and tell him these TWO words: "Stop it." That's all. Exact same thing for the wiretaps.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
how much worse could they possibly make it...?
Last time I heard that phrase, people were gassed soon after.
Just to get Godwin into play.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You'll know the instant you make a flight after being put on the list that you're on the list, and as a word of warning, slashdot comments are enough to put you on the list.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
...and have them duke it out who may freeze the system.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Consider smoke detectors in buildings. If there's a false alarm every week, and if each false alarm requires the whole building to be evacuated for half an hour, then most people will simply rip out the detectors or put plastic bags over them. This is what it was like at my first-year college dorm; and this is where I see the airline security circus heading.
I liked what you wrote, but the son comment is condescending and inflammatory, so you go an overrated.
I work in IT security. And if I learned one thing VERY fast it is that security MUST NOT impede operation, or people will start looking for ways to circumvent it. Not out of spite, malice or because they try to do something "bad", but simply because they want to get their work done. This, in turn, of course reduces overall security, because if they punch a hole into the wall because you made going through the door so cumbersome that they just couldn't be assed to unlock and use that door every time they want in, that hole in the wall is gapping and open to everyone.
So instead of increasing security by 0.0001, you reduce it to zero.
The same problem applies to the real life penetration protection. When you force your security personnel to practically strip search everyone so it becomes routine, they will only do a routine job on everyone without actually paying attention. The higher you place the "routine" bar, the less attention they will pay to detail. You can actually test this. Give a security guy the order to "look" at everyone passing the entrance and only do a pat down on the ones that he deems suspicious. He will do a very thorough pat down on these people. Then give him the order to pat down everyone and you'll notice that he will only do it routinely, soon developing a predictable pattern that can be observed and used to hide something where he usually does not grab.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thanks!
Well, you have to give it to the passengers that they are much more motivated. What does a TSA guy get when he catches a terrorist? Probably a pat on the back and a lot of paperwork. He'll get his salary whether or not he catches anyone.
The passenger otoh gets to live if he manages to subdue a terrorist.
THAT's motivation!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Human being + power = murderous sadistic monster
Predators + weapons = government
Ignorance + apathy = American electorate
Superstition + gullibility = organized religion
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I suggest getting a list of everybody from the phone company any sending all of the names to the tip off service.
When nobody can get on an aeroplane the air travel industry will put a stop to this bullshit!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
NOTHING to hide, so I don't mind one bit.
Then again, maybe I am just ego-centric. You know what, you're right!
You're certainly a fucking moron. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? That's the fallacy you're going with?
Oooo... you dun goof'd. Slashdot worships at the altar of Obama, you can't say things like that here. Even if they're true.
And remember to not ever step in the way of one of your masters.
Rethinking email
Are you saying 62K Americans been killed by terrorists? Because if that were the case, some of the response might be called-for. However, the 9/11 attacks killed a grand total of 2,996 people, which makes the odds for an American* closer to 1 in 103,000 -- and that's the TOTAL casualty rate. If you only count the 246 ON THE PLANES, the odds are less than 1 in 1.25 MILLION. (That's actually equivalent to winning the $200K Powerball level (all 5 white balls but not the Powerball) prize 25 times, although the jackpot odds are 1 in 1.95 million.) * Actually, about 10% of the victims were foreign nationals, but I'm doing lazy math today.
The scary thing is that the GP will in all likelihood not profit from it. He just *hopes* that he will be among those coming out on top of the new order. The american dream, you see? From dishwasher to the one yielding the whip.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
More like "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
To the fascists maybe.
The Israeli's use a high-tech heuristic approach to catching their terrorist viruses.
The result? The country in the most active terrorist region in the world and they haven't had a "close call" in a decade.
How long does it take an Israeli to get through security? No more than 25 minutes.
See, in Israeli airports they only do basic x-ray and metal detector physical searches. They don't have strange rules for laptops and batteries and liquids and shoes and whatever else. They don't care what you're carrying with you as long as it isn't something obvious like a knife or a huge bomb.
What they do instead of all of TSA's useless rules is ask questions at four different security checkpoints (integrated into the flow of the airport check-in process, so they hardly take any extra time), and based on the responses they weed out suspicious people. Those people get the ringer, but nobody else does.
The physical scanners are also enclosed in a bomb-proof area, so if someone does try to sneak a bomb on, they simply cordon it off and open another security line - no need to shut down the entire airport just because they found a bomb.
That's real security, the nonsense TSA does is just theater.
Case in point:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023820-71.html
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
On the face of it this seems perfectly logical. Terrorists note that swarthy arabic types are getting more attention, terrorists start to recruit Swedish blondes with pneumatic breasts.
So where are all the Swedish suicide blondes?
Yeah sure there are drug cartels, but the Mafia used to control the major cities in the USA a hundred years ago. I know some beautiful spots down there. With satellite connectivity, its possible to work remotely for a lot of tech jobs...
Well, what was the alternative? An anemic old bumbling fool and a dud bombshell.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How about linking to the tips terror tips form?
tips.fbi.gov
The proper form of profiling looks at behavior, not skin color or clothing. Detectives do it all the time, as well as good security guards.
It's what the Israeli's do for their airports, and they are right in the middle of the shit. I think they know a thing or two about this.
Basically, ask a few simple questions (where are you going, how long are you going to be there, etc), and see how they respond. You don't really give a rat's ass what their answers are, you are looking for signs of nervousness and irritation. Those who appear agitated you pull aside for further questioning and possibly a search.
It's exactly the same thing the boarder control does when trying to catch smugglers, except in the Israeli airports they do it four times instead of just once, making it extremely difficult to sneak past.
A person who can fool a lie detector test could probably pull it off, but the people capable of such a feat are few and far between (besides, getting no reaction at all from a person is potentially suspicious as well).
In your example, the five terrorists would have been pulled aside and searched, a cursory background check likely revealing terrorist ties, which would have got them pulled out for a more extensive investigation. Even if they eventually made it through security, the black guy from the US would have been pulled aside as well, the knives and fake ID discovered, and at the very least his ass would be in jail.
Plot foiled.
This kind of security is expensive, because your security professionals need to be real, trained security professionals and not the airport equivalent of a mall cop, but in the long run it saves a lot of money over the asinine security of the TSA because you actually get security.
My favorite new example of how utterly useless TSA's security measures is Adam Savage accidentally sneaking two foam scrapers (foot long razor blades) onto an airplane:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023820-71.html
But even before that, I personally know several people who have accidentally brought box-cutters - the very weapon used on 9/11 - through security. It's one big joke, except the only ones laughing are the real security experts and the terrorists.
BTW, did you know nothing that has been implemented - including the body scanners - will catch a second underwear bomber if one were to try again? They wouldn't catch a laptop bomb or book bomb either, and I'm sure a terrorist could think of a lot more ways to sneak a bomb on a plane that TSA wouldn't have a hope of finding.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Just saying it again... when you give an institution the power to do whatever it wants, as Democrats and then Republicans have, you create a self feeding monster that no one can control. Bravo! "Let's have the government save us" people. You didn't make a hero. You made a tyrant!
This is my sig.
Does anyone have a list of "non-TSA airports" that one can fly out of in the USA? (Not that I think I need to defend my right to ask a question in this first amendment country, but: my desire is to avoid radiation and molestation, and arrive at my destination safely.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
In the Soviet Union, East Germany and China during certain epochs all it took was someone "denouncing" you and you were off to the gulag. People would rat each other out over the smallest (or imagined) slight.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Seriously, do some internet searching. The State Department admitted that they escorted the guy onto the plane. There were witnesses that saw it happen. This was a total setup so they can do things like this and erode our freedoms, bottom line.
http://www.antemedius.com/content/us-brink-fascism
You know, on the one hand, sure, they might. Do you think this is new to the FBI? They could also claim you were a drug smuggler, a child molester, etc, etc.
I'm kinda ok with giving the watch list guys the ok to proceed on a single human tipoff, provided that it is a "good one". The rest of the machinery I think needs examining.
Why not deny all people with arabic names from flighting. We all know that the ragheads are the idiots. Why all of the civilized world has to suffer of a kind of idiots? How much cheaper would it be to all of us if this simple criteria would be implemented?
Well said.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You error is in mistaking the TSA for an actual competent security agency. They are security theater.
In fact, Europeans don't even care about America's TSA crap*, largely because they don't mind walking around naked. So I doubt even they'd even find an audience.** Also, I'm doubtful that they'd understands American's well enough to mock our lowlifes successfully.
There is however one nationality that understands Americans throughly, does exceptional comedy, and isn't beholden to our social mores. That's right, Canada! :)
There is also the very real possibility of small time production by Americans. Anyone feel like pitching a webisode series to Micheal Moore?
* I donno if more business meetings take place in Europe now, but whatever.
** There might be some chance the British could accomplish this given their humorous take on bureaucracy, but I wouldn't count on it, plus they're too polite to mock low class foreigners so much.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Right. It isn't about the passengers. It never was. It's about protecting the airline's investment in aircraft using the taxpayer's resources, and simultaneously trying to keep the public confidence up in flying so that the corporation doesn't lose money that way, either. If it was about the population, as has been pointed out many times, we would fix our roads, legalize pot, put alcohol on a list of absolute most dangerous drugs ever, regulate prostitution, etc. The government has absolutely zero interest in "saving the people."
Remember: The government is controlled by corporations. You can find the interests of those corporations at the bottom of nearly every government action taken. Not yours, and not "the people's." That's why analyzing the TSA in terms of cost-effectiveness and "lives saved" is a worthless process. It's like analyzing the menu at McDonald's for vitamins. That's not why anything is on the menu. You're in the wrong place, looking at the wrong things.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Our economy runs on the idea that you specialize in one task (your job) that you do efficiently, and buy everything else. If taxes are too high a burden, though, it may actually be more efficient to do more for yourself. Since stuff you do for yourself (build your own furniture, for example), isn't taxed, then less for the bureaucrats to dine on.
Free software is an example of "doing for yourself" by leveraging modern technology. In the coming era of robots and 3D printers, more things could be "made at home", and thus less need to work for pay, and thus get taxed.
An individual can't make everything for themselves, so a kind of "community building cooperative" with shared equipment and labor to take care of bigger projects, with some amount of outside work for pay to cover the rest would still cut down the "overhead" of taxes feeding the bureaucrats.
How many TSA agents would be left to oppress us if we didn't supply them with paychecks?
I work at a company that processes airline reservations and therefore needs to enforce these watch lists. We just get emailed a bunch of Microsoft Excel files (yes, .xls files) once in a while (multiple since there are so many rows), which we then need to export to CSV and string-match. Given these incredibly high technology standards, I don't see what could possibly go wrong :)
Based on my long-ago research, I don't think the TSA
will ever be *completely* unavoidable, short of the USA
becoming like the GDR, wherein half the population was
being employed by the State to surveill the other half.
During Ashcroft's reign, they publicised their intent to
more closely track legally-present aliens,
by recording everytime an alien *left* the USA,
so that they could match the arrivals and departures
in order to know who's still "inside" at any given moment.
I'm still puzzled that I never saw any sign of civil .orgs, or media asking the (to me obvious)
libertarians,
question, to wit: how can this be accomplished without
barking "Papieren, bitte" to *everyone* who leaves?
When a traveler walks through a border checkpoint to
Canada or embarks on a Caribbean cruise, how can TSA know
if they've missed a departing alien, unless they
ascertain the status of *all* who are departing?
(Yes, I realize that they could slice-&-dice the USA data
with Canada's entry records, but that's an ad-hoc answer
which misses the point.)
So, I emailed TSA/DHS to ask this, but received no reply.
Then I looked at the Canadian gov sites to determine *their*
regs for entry. As it happens, they don't require (or at least
didn't then) that you enter explicitly by passing through
a USA border post. All they required was that,
if you happened to walk across at some unmonitored location,
that you immediately precede directly to the nearest relevant
Canadian authority.
Then I exchanged some email with Hasbrouck or Gilmore (probably
Hasbrouck) to ask: is it in fact illegal for a USA citizen
to leave in a manner which circumvents tracking by the USA?
If I (silly example) walked across to Mexico unobserved,
obtained visas to proceed to Venezuela and points beyond,
and then one day returned to the USA by commercial jet from
Azerbaijan to JFK, upon arrival could I be arrested
or non-trivially detained *merely* because a
data cross-check revealed that I had been gadding about without
the USA having any prior idea of my departure and movements?
I don't remember receiving (from anyone I asked) any answer
which even remotely approached saying, "Yes, you'll be in
violation of [foo]."
So I started thinking more elaborately about this. I should
mention at this point, that I haven't flown, or used any other
transport requiring I.D., since 9/11 -- not from fear of
accidents or terrorism, but because I simply made up my mind
that I wouldn't travel by any means which allows *this* nation
to directly track my movements in realtime.
After some additional research, I concluded that it *will* be
possible -- not *convenient*, but possible -- for me to travel,
(without yielding that principle), not to absolutely any
country, but to any country where I'm likely to want to go,
even if it requires bribing the captain of a cargo vessel
passing from Brasil to Liberia.
[btw, this is one reason I look at TI.org's annual ranking ;)
of corruption in countries. Corruption can be your friend.
Within the USA, traveling unmonitored is easier.
And getting to the EU through the Bering Strait and Russia
is a particularly knotty problem. Russian regs are much
stricter, and, unlike Canada, one can't merely make a
water approach and proceed to the nearest control point.
For the record, I'm hoping that my return through a USA
border control *does* provoke trouble, in order to
force the issue for public examination & discussion.
btw, I'm puzzled by protektor's saying "vans with the
full body scanners in them so they can scan cars & people
without anyone knowing". I can't picture how it's
possible to effectively scan *one* moving vehicle with the
airport body-scanner technology, even if driving the van in
parallel, let alone *all* traffic, let alone scanning
*through* the vehicle's metall
His numbers are way, way off. I'm pretty sure he made them up.
For one thing, winning the Big Lotto twice is in the several billion range, at least. Depending on the specific lotto it ranges from the millions to hundreds of millions the very first win.
For the backscatter stats, sixteen out of every billion people will get cancer as a direct result of the backscatter X-Ray. At 600 million passengers a year, that's about 11 deaths a year directly caused by the new machines.
Also, there are 130 deaths every three months among people who chose to drive instead of fly because of enhanced TSA security.
Total deaths caused by TSA is now up to 530 per year (we'll stick with 520 for most years though, since the backscatter is new) - in 10 years that's 5210 deaths caused by TSA. That's 73% more than the 3,000 who died in the 9/11 attack, directly or indirectly caused by TSA.
Add to that as far as I can find not a single terrorist attack has been foiled by TSA. To be fair, it can be hard to tell if some of these inane security measures made terrorists decide to cancel their plans, but you'd figure if they actually caught someone they would be making a really, really big deal about it. From what I've seen the only foiled plots are when the terrorists either screw up and fail completely (underwear bomber, printer bombs) or the passengers stepped in and foiled the attack (United flight 93, shoe bomber).
What exactly are we getting out of TSA?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Another nice statistic:
520 people die in automobile accidents because they chose to drive instead of deal with airport security (TSA).
Over the course of ten years that's 5,200 people dead (next September is when this figure will become completely accurate instead of mostly accurate - it's a bit shy of 5,000 right now).
That means TSA is indirectly responsible for 73% more deaths than the 9/11 hijackers.
Chew on that one for a minute.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
520 people per year, I meant to say. It's 130 every three months.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
by giving passengers guns you make them judge jury and executioner.
Passing judgment a little quick there, aren't we? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Or does that not apply to self defense any more?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Clearly only a terrorist would have a grievance against the TSA!
I say burn them all!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Dude! You just got Godwinned!
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You do realize Obama has been in charge of the DHS for two years now, right?
It's Obama's USA right now, you can't keep blaming Bush for his fuckups forever.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Somebody has never heard of hyperbole.
Of course Obama is not actually a dictator, the point is that he has greatly expanded the powers of the Executive under the guise of "security" (Bush did it too, Obama has simply continued the trend, and has done so very aggressively). The road to dictatorship is one of continually expanded Executive powers until eventually the Executive is dictator in all but name. Some point after that they usually stop pretending and disband the remnants of the representative government. See Rome for a historical example.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I once snuck a magazine for my .45 (with 13 rounds) into a municipal courthouse accidentally. I had my gun in a hidden holster, and left the gun in the car to go into the building (or maybe I left it at home; I don't remember any more), but I still had the holster and the spare magazine on me out of habit. They didn't catch it in the security check, even with a metal detector: it went off, and they used the wand, and it buzzed at the belt buckle, and the magazine was right behind that, so they assumed it was just the buckle). I didn't realize I had the magazine on me until I was seated inside the courtroom, but I wasn't about to go tell anyone at that point.
Of course, a bunch of live ammo isn't all that dangerous without a gun to fire them from, but if one guy gets some bullets and a magazine through, another guy can get a small gun through, or maybe several people could get a gun through by breaking it up into its components (handle which is mostly plastic, slide, barrel, spring assembly) and put it together on the inside.
Posting anon for obvious reasons.
Actually shortly you won't have an option to avoid the TSA. No going by car won't help because they have bought vans with the full body scanners in them so they can scan cars & people without anyone knowing.
Citation needed. What are you talking about here? I'm sorry, but you can't look for hidden weapons in peoples' cars with today's technology just by driving by them in a van. X-rays don't penetrate steel unless they're extremely high power, and at that power, you'd kill the people inside the car. (There are X-ray machines used for doing inspection of stuff like 6" thick steel to look for welding defects, but no human would survive exposure.)
Clearly the TSA is a failure and needs to disbanded. It was a nice idea that we tried but it is a utter and complete failure, and we shouldn't throw good money after bad with the TSA.
TSA is another colossal failure of Obama's administration, and another reason to not re-elect him. I'm not looking forward to whoever the Republicans nominate (probably Palin), but I'm hoping the Democrat voters will wise up and nominate someone new. It hasn't happened many times in America's history, but a handful of times, a sitting President did not get the nomination of his party for a second term. Obama deserves to be added to that list.
I plan to report myself; at least then I'll know how I got on the list. No, I'm not kidding, I don't want to fucking fly. This way I'll be kept away from the molestation radiation. At least until they put it in the Chinese Death Vans they've ordered.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I flew from Ben Gurion last month. It went about as usual:
1) It took more than an hour from arrival at the front door, to the gate.
2) There were no "four security checkpoints."
3) Of note, my baggage did not undergo the deep scan that occurs at US airport, because I was actually who I said I was and traveling on non-terrorist business, a fact that any intelligent person could ascertain by talking to me for ten minutes.
Etc. By point two you had established that you have no actual knowledge of what you're talking about, that is, security procedures in Israel.
That said, as El Al's former head of security put it last month (reported right here on /.), Israel succeeds by looking for the terrorist, not the bomb. Every passenger is interviewed (usually once) by someone who is educated, and intelligent enough to detect if you are who you say you are, doing what you say you're doing-- not by ignorant TSA boob high-school dropouts.
These people are actually trained, and their procedures are continually tested and refined. If they fail to detect a team making a "test run" of the system, something is done to analyze and correct the problem and if the person who let them through was the point of failure, they are fired.
In comparison, the TSA are a bunch of incompetent boobs, which, after all, seems to be the Best America Can Offer the World, these days.
Perhaps everyone in the United States needs to stand up and claim to be Spartacus. What would happen if everyone reported themselves and made sure they were on the list?
They count on the fear of being on the list to make the list of some importance. But if nobody fears being on the list, and everyone is on the list, then the list is useless.
Perhaps. (Score:-1, Troll)
by puterg33k (1920022)
Ahhh com'on guys. Even though I completely disagree with his post, that doesn't make him a "troll" or "ass". He's just sharing his opinion. He didn't deserve the negative karma hit nor the insult. Can't we all just..... get along?
This puterg33k posted a couple weeks ago, this tidbit about surrendering our freedoms - topped with the Ben Franklin quote. When someone posts two practically contradictory and controversial statements I tend to think "troll" instead of "multiple personality disorder".
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
1 in 5000? Do you realize how large a number that is?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." Death by a thousand cuts indeed.
Fly private, no security other than what you bring. Do you think the government folk experience TSA searches??? Mrs. Clinton commented on the new TSA procedures but I believe she admitted that she travels privately and hasn't experienced the touchy-feely searches.
I can make an anonymous tip on a politician and suddenly he/she's on the no-fly list?
COOL!
--
BMO
This is the typical problem with any government list, which is why they should not be allowed to make large lists of people. Eventually so many people get on it, and have to get checked that the security proceedures are no longer followed as you have so many people to check and the whole point gets lost. Something similar can be said for these sex offender registrys, anymore you can get on it for any number of crimes (some even unrelated to sex crimes) and when you pull up your own neighborhood, its not just chester the molester with free candy painted on the side of his van down the street but everyone and their uncle and you dont know who to watchout for and who you feel you dont have to pay as close of attention to. again, the list is so large and unwieldy its point has gotten lost, its not the worst of the worst anymore.
Given that there will be 600 million airplane passengers per year, that makes the machines deadlier than the terrorists.
(bold added for emphasis by russ1337)
Only if you make the following two assumptions: that 9/11 never happened (Schneier's numbers come out to about 10 cancer deaths per year, so that's about 300 years worth of it to pass 9/11), and that in the long run the scans will prevent less than 10 deaths per year (100-300 passengers per plane, not counting anyone unfortunately enough to be where it comes down, so preventing one incident equals 10-30 years worth of the cancer cost). I'm under no illusion that the scans are perfect, but even setting aside 9/11 as the past, saving one plane per decade sounds pretty plausible. That's six billion passenger-flights per decade, by Schneier's stats (if there's no increase over time), which is an awful lot of opportunities to down one.
I'd be more concerned about the highly unequal distribution of radiation to the population. Some people fly a lot more than others, of course, and those people will get scanned more. (additionally, risks for one person getting n doses in a short timespan are higher than risks for n people getting one dose each). So those predicted extra cancer deaths aren't randomly distributed; they're almost exclusively going to hit the frequent fliers. Plus, those are only the numbers for cancer deaths; personally, the more important number for an individual wanting to judge whether it's an acceptable personal risk would be the additional cancer cases per year (a larger number, naturally).
The problem is, though, that they are changing the "machinery" because the public overreacted so much too the "underwear bomber". They are now lowering their requirements for how people get on the watch list because they got yelled at so much when they got one tip on the underwear bomber (his father) and still let him on a plane to the US. I have no evidence that they were able to follow up on the tip and determine how "good" it was (just because the tip is from his father does not mean it is "good"; I can imagine instances where a father would put in a fake tip).
I do not blame the government for this, though. I remember thinking when I heard about the "underwear bomber" that he was a sign of our system being successful. He tried to force the plane to crash but all that happened was that a couple people got burned. That is basically what the government said at first, but the backlash from the American public was so big that the Obama administration took it back and said that they would make changes. The changes are here. They are not the fault of the government. They are because the American public is willing to give up their freedom for the illusion of security.
Have you not been paying any attention to actual terrorist attacks on planes recently?
Well, there's Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he is half black, half white, and English. Seems like any sort of profiling based on race or national origin might, I dunno, miss him.
Oh, and there's the shoe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is black and from Nigerian. While his name might cause some profiling, as he's not even a US citizen, there's no way to stop him from flying under fake ID, and half of Nigerians are Christian.
Those are, specifically, the last two people to smuggle weapons on planes. So any focus on Arabs or people from Muslim countries would, you know, have made their job easier.
I didn't just hallucinate those guys, did I?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
9/11! 9/11! 9/11!
repeat ad nauseum until people stop questioning your right to meddle with everyone's affairs.
I just knew someone would mention Israeli -style profiling.
That doesn't have anything to do with the person I was responding to, who apparently has forgotten the last two terrorists (Shoe and underwear bomber) were, in fact, neither Arab or from Muslim countries.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"pro-profiling" people are advocating behavioral profiling
No, they really aren't.
I know you want to assume the best of people, but almost everyone who complains that we don't 'profile', without any sort of modifier, means we should idiotically focus on Arabs (Which is idiotic, as the last two people to attempt to blow up airplanes were black and half-black half-white.) or Muslims (Which is equally idiotic, as we do not magically know what people are.).
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The fearmongers who run the TSA may not be competent at things like maintaining accurate lists or building their databases with tracking information so they can identify the chain of events and accusations that put somebody on the list and track it back to the origins, like any competent database designer would do, but there are some things that are clearly done for political reasons, and putting A Well-Known Liberal Senator on the list was clearly one of them, just as introducing punishment gropings for anybody who doesn't cooperate with the Naked Scanners was clearly political, even though in both cases they pretend to have plausible deniability.
Now, finding terrorist supporters named "Kennedy" is unlikely to have been difficult; as of a couple of years ago I could *still* reliably find pro-IRA fundraising newspapers in Irish bars in San Francisco, and it's probably even easier to find them in Irish neighborhoods in Boston.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yup.
Hell, it looks like she wasn't even on the no fly list.
And thanks to the incredibly stupid way the security area is set up, you can just have her do it multiple times, so that even if she does get caught bringing something in, she's just got one knife and looks like an honest mistake.
It's so trivial it's absurd: If you have need six people to take over a plane (And that is, for some reason, what we're actually defending against.), and you have her and five dangerous looking Arab men with Saudi passwords or whatever. And let's say we've implemented this 'profiling', and those five guys aren't managing to get a single thing on the plane. Let us say they're based out of Atlanta, which I will use because it's the airport I know best.
So the guys are flying in, obviously. As they arrive, the blonde woman books an outgoing flight, and arrives at the airport with a single box cutter. (Hey, honest mistake, right?)
Four of the men leave the airport. One does not. She hands him the box cutter.
She flies to Tampa or something, comes back the next day, with another box cutter. Once she lands, she hands it to the same guy, who's been moving from terminal to terminal. (Thanks to layovers, it's not really that suspicious for people to hang around for a day in the airport. In an airport like Atlanta, you honestly could remain unnoticed by moving from terminal to terminal.)
She repeats this two times. Perhaps the guy staying in the airport would be swapped out for another guy, which can be done by someone else buying a ticket. Might want to buy a ticket out, and a ticket back, and then just not leave, as missing the flight after clearing security might be suspicious. (As an added bonus, this tells them if they're on the no fly list.)
Then they've got six box cutters in, and can do whatever the hell they want.
This is why we have random searches, which, in theory, actually protect us from this better.
In practice, they don't protect us at all, as they are a) very shitty, and b) we just let people through after taking their stuff with no punishment.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
While they do need to have cell phone service to do their jobs, that's just so their customers can reach them when they're out of their offices, buying drinks for Congressional staff members or visiting government offices or meeting with other lobbyists.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and it is when they're at or heading to/from Congress, so you can't harass them on their way home either, except for "treason, felony and breach of the peace" - on the other hand, they might get away with pretending that refusing to stop for a TSA thug is "breach of the peace", and the Constitution doesn't say that their families or staff members are immune from arrest.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Blah blah blah... blah blah... blah blah blah blah.... There are two kinds of people in the world: (1) those who talk and (2) those who do. There's only ONE kind of person in politics, those who talk. The so-called "left" has been emasculated. Unless somebody quits talking and starts doing something we're not going to have any freedoms to defend. What the heck are they teaching political science students these days??? We haven't had any meaningful protests in years. What the heck is going on here?
The big difference between Israeli airport security and the TSA is that, for the most part, Israeli security is trying to prevent bombings and attacks, while the TSA's job is to intimidate the American public and make them feel dependent on big tough government to protect them from scary enemies. That doesn't mean that the Israelis aren't also trying to intimidate Arab citizens or that the TSA isn't also trying to stop bombs, but the primary objectives are different.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I would think it would take a great amount of effort and persons to keep track of someone. I really doubt our civil liberties are at stake. The GREAT majority of people just aren't that important. Don't be ego-centric, realize this likely doesn't apply to you, and you will in no way shape or form be effected by this.
I'm being a tad hyperbolic of course, but have you ever heard this quote?:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
It's not about being ego-centric, quite the opposite. Most of us realise that this is the thin end of the wedge. (Well actually, it's the slightly thicker part of the wedge, just down from the thin end of the wedge, but still thin when compared to the thick end of the wedge.) Every time we think the U.S. can't possibly make it's security theatre any more ridiculous, they come screaming out of the gates with another humdinger that leaves the rest of the world well and truly flabbergasted.
Gradually, incrementally, day-by-day, people waive their rights for a little extra perceived security. One day you'll wake up and realise that you can't travel without a special permit from the State which requires a valid reason, character witnesses and blood, urine and stool samples.
If you mean airports where the TSA doesn't have jurisdiction or presence, it's pretty much limited to general-aviation airports, military air bases, and big stretches of dirt. If you mean a list of airports that don't have Naked Scanners, or that have the Terahertz radars instead of X-Ray scanners, there probably is a list of them, but it's a moving target (and so are you :-), so Your Microwavage May Vary.
I really like flying the small inter-island carriers in Hawaii - they tend to fly out of the commuter terminals at most of the airports, using 10-seater Cessnas that fly low, have a great view, and are small enough that the TSA doesn't mind if they crash, so you don't have to wait in the security lines or get X-rayed. You might have to help the pilot put your bags on the plane, and the one additional privacy invasion is that they need to know your weight, so they can balance the plane, which means fat people sit in the back.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, some radio talking head asked a safety expert how to reduce your risk of getting killed, and she replied "wear your seatbelt and stop smoking." She was of course correct, though since I already wear my seatbelt and don't smoke tobacco, it didn't affect me much. I guess that was before I got hit by lightning, but after the first time I almost got hit by it before. (Hanging out at the tops of mountains affects your risks of that considerably, whether you're getting there by climbing them or taking the ski lift.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you're not afraid, the politicians aren't doing their jobs well enough. And just because Bush/Cheney's party lost the 2006-2008 elections and we got the Democrats back doesn't mean that they've changed the policies any.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, lets see, do they make mistakes by letting terrorists on board?
Nah, the system, not the people, has pretty much taken care of that by making it extremely inconvenient for a passenger to carry squat.
Do they make mistakes by abusing their alleged power? (I know that most TSA agents are about as useful as using Saran Wrap® as a condom.) BINGO!
The TSA just has the power to f*ck up your day.*
That's IT!
Its all theater, a charade to distract you from the guy who just drove up to the end of the runway with a truck mounted SAM (possibly a Chinese HongQi, possibly a Russian S-300, possibly a US Tomahawk, from LOTS of resellers.)
Hell, if your going on a suicide mission, you definitely want to get your score and then go like "Rambo".
You have NO IDEA of the kind of armament can be bought.
*) If you LET them.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Bill,
I think you're mostly right, but this is also probably a good time to drag out Asimov's "never attribute to malice, what can reasonably be explained by incompetence."
In my experience, however, incompetence leads to malice afterthoughs in terms of cover-up; if the US could mount a competent security regime, all the Shock, Fear, Uncertainly, Doubt and Awe wouldn't be necessary.
All you young folks, thinking you've always had the technology to be Anonymous Cowards.... We spent the 90s fighting the Crypto Wars against Louis Freeh and the NSA, and while Clinton didn't start the FBI's quest for increased eavesdropping power, he didn't slow it down any, and the main reason you're allowed to use crypto today is that there was too much money between online banking and e-Commerce that really needed it. Bush and Cheney were really enthusiastic about it, and Bush's father liked the stuff too, and Ronnie Reagan didn't mind it when he was awake either, Gerald Ford was out playing golf, Carter cut back on the CIA a lot (so a lot of them went freelance until he was gone), and Nixon sure was no friend of civil liberties, especially when he could get J. Edgar to give him secrets about his enemies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Read some Dutch newspapers. 12 people from Somalia were arrested last week under suspicion of terrorism.
Guess what. After a fer days of interrogation (no water boarding) there is totally no proof they're indeed terrorists.
Who knows the truth, but they claim they were being extorted and this was the "punishment" (result of an anonymous tip) for not cooperating...
Just to let you know what's coming...
Privacy is terrorism.
It's just those lobbyists and congressmen have already been investigated for years before they became lobbyists or congressmen. They already made the list 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Exactly. Here's an example of the same strategy successfully executed. The Indian security officials and everyone in general were never suspicious because he had an american passport and a christian name. He successfully conducted recce of the various places for the 26/11 Mumbai attack and played a really key role in the same.
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
Can I be on the list as well ?
Really all boys should be on the list.
Well there you go, then. India apparently profiles against people of Pakistan descent, guy says 'Hey, wait a second, how do they know I'm of Pakistan descent if I just change my name?' and proceeds to do so.
It's worth pointed out all the things that let him do that...US passports not having the original name on them and them not having his father's name of them, which some passports have, would be utterly useless anyway if it was his mother from Pakistan and he'd had a different first name. (I.e, profiling based on names is doomed to fail anyway.)
And that's someone with a real US passport...how easy would it be for someone from Yemen to forge a passport from, say, India, along with a Hindu name?
Or, hell, pretend to be Hispanic. 'Race' is a pretty vague and nonsensical science in the first place, no one's going to go up to a Juan Hernedez on a Mexican passport and assert he's really from Pakistan.
Maybe we could implement some sort of skin tone tests, I'm sure that would go over well. Perhaps we could have a whites line and a coloreds line. (White people apparently can't be Muslim...and the Iranians are laughing their ass off.)
Saying you will looked at people harder based on certain things they can fake and lie about is exactly the same as saying you will go easier on people if they willing to spend the time faking certain things.
That is literally what 'we should do profiling' idiots are suggesting: 'We should inspect certain people less, so that those people, if they happen to be terrorists, or if terrorists just pretend to be those people, can easily succeed.'
That is what they just said, and they're proud of it, like dogs that just shit in the middle of the floor. Oh, but they're 'not PC', which obviously makes them right, because the only problems anyone has with their fucking idiotic idea is that it's blatantly racist.
No, you morons, we have a problem with it because, in addition to the other objection that treating all Muslims like terrorists is not really the face we want to present to the Muslim world, it's an idea that cannot possibly work either.
So it's racist and stupid.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"Seem to me like the passengers are doing far more to protect the public than the TSA. Maybe we need to do something to make it easier for passengers to deal with terrorists when they find them since they are doing a better job than the TSA."
I agree... I've suggested that we don't need ANY of this "security" screening bullshit. If I were an airline free to make my own boarding policies, this is what it would be:
If you arrive with your concealed weapon permit and carrying your piece, you get a discount on your ticket. In return, YOU are security for that flight. There are enough CCW holders that nearly all flights would be covered.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Nice country ya got there...
Be a shame if anything happened to it."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"compared to the danger of simply not getting enough exercise (kills 10x more people than car crashes, estimates I have seen)."
Aha! The TSA *is* just doing its part to make us safer. After they make it impossible to fly, take the bus/train, or drive, we'll all be forced to run from place to place. See? The TSA just wants to make sure we all get enough exercise.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think it wold be a lot easier to just have your terrorist apply for a job at the TSA. Then it would be pretty easy for them to get anything they want into the secure area.
Do TSA employees have to have a naked scan and/or get molested every time they go into work?
There are two categories of comparison that go beyond "hyperbole" and enter an entirely different category, they are 1) comparisons to Hitler and 2) comparisons to George W Bush.
We live in a time, at least here in America, where hyperbole has gone so out of control in political discourse that it has lost all perspective and all meaning. Obama is called "tyrant", "terrorist", he's simultaneously called a "Marxist", "Fascist" and compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. One third of the Republican Party say the believe he is the Antichrist. Don't talk to me about hyperbole.
When it comes to expanding the legal framework of the powers of the executive, he's not even close to his predecessor. Consider the acts of Atty Gen'l Gonzalez or John Woo.
Oops, I violated my own rule...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Citation needed. What are you talking about here? I'm sorry, but you can't look for hidden weapons in peoples' cars with today's technology just by driving by them in a van. X-rays don't penetrate steel unless they're extremely high power, and at that power, you'd kill the people inside the car.
did you even look? http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/.
hell, even https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=x-ray+van would do it.
"citation needed" does not mean "I'm too lazy to type 2 words into a search box"
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
TSA is another colossal failure of Obama's administration, and another reason to not re-elect him.
P.S. the TSA was created by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and signed into law by President Bush. I'll save you the one-word search:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Transportation_Security_Administration
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
In case you haven't noticed, the TSA became Obama's responsibility when he took over, and Obama even appointed a new head for the agency, Arizona's Janet Napolitano. Anything the agency does during Obama's tenure is his fault, not Bush's. That includes all the fondling going on right now.
You're pointing out implementation errors, whereas I'm pointing out conceptual errors.
In theory, they could indeed do what you suggest, even though they don't.
Whereas the idea of profiling is just a stupid idea, period.
I notice this a lot. Everyone sees problems in how they do what they do, (Which they are indeed crappy at.) failing to notice that even if they did what they did perfectly, they'd still fail.
I.e., their 'limit on amount of liquids can be bring in' could be bypassed if they were omnipotent and could perfectly see how much liquid you had on you, via the simple procedure I described above. In fact, if I and a group of friends were planning on never flying again, I'd get a dozen of us to go through with an empty bucket and the max amount of liquids, and then blatantly pour all the liquids together immediately after we got through security. Bonus points for including some dry ice so it smokes. In full view of everyone being forced to carry though tiny shampoo bottles.
I do have to give them credit for not implementing profiling, despite calls by stupid people to do so. I suspect it was more out of concerns about looking racist than the actual fact it wouldn't work, though.
But generally, to paraphrase Douglas Adam, the TSA's fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. You don't notice how stupid their actual plans are, because they have blatantly failed to implement those plans correctly.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
to be really bad.
Sure many of /. have heard of the current drug war in Mexico. Since the war is a severe political liability security forces try to do their “best” to catch criminals. The sad part is since we don’t have a professional detective force and the internal security service, CISEN is more worried with political power games and blackmail than state’s security, the police and army relies on anonymous tips for their “investigations”.
Sadly, those tips mean that a prankster could send the army at your home at 3 am and they will beat you and destroy your furniture just because they were told that you are a kidnapper. That happened to my grandmother and is not funny to hear how she had a assault riffle pointed to her head and the family had to be sending her money to fix doors and broken furniture instead of Christmas presents. She was lucky; many people didn’t survive similar ordeals. Instead, the security forces plant evidence to make appear their crimes like a successful operation against gang members. I don’t understand why Americans having a working court and law system will want to throw it away and exchange it for the wild rotten “system” we have now here.
A tip information system is so easily gamed to be useless, specially in the case of airport security.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
If you live in America and believe the Obama Administration is a totalitarian regime, it sort of disqualifies you from being taken seriously. If you live in Finland and believe that security hassles at US airports means that we have become a fascist state, it means the short days and long nights have affected your judgment.
The wiretaps and the ease of getting onto a no-fly (or a terrorist) list remind me a lot of the bad-old-days of the Kádár regime in Hungary, where all it took to prevent you from ever stepping abroad was an anonymous call from a disgruntled colleague or neighbor. And it took little more for you to lose your job and NEVER get one, again.
Yes, that was a totalitarian regime. And your Obama regime is just as totalitarian + the scanners and the aggressive pat-downs. Enjoy your fascist asshole Obama dictatorship. My judgement is just fine - but yours is definitely affected by some powerful brain-washing, if you think your country is now not a totalitarian regime. Oh, and enjoy your money being wasted on security theater, loser!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Dubya's was bad enough, but I got through airport security without TOO much hassle (no pat-downs). What is this, now, this bullshit security theater, scanners, pat-downs, wiretaps, withed govt. documents, Wikileaks witch-hunt, indiscriminate no-fly lists...
Luckily, I have a choice whether I want to subject myself to TSA Gestapo. No scientific conferences in the USA for me, for the moment.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Personally, I don't care.
Make us board the planes, trains, boats and buses naked.
We'd be safe then. (I can only stand so much honesty.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There was a one-off TV special by Matt Lucas and David Walliams a little while back that had piss-take versions (all acted by the pair of them) of most everyone in a British airport - the corner-cutting CEO, the lazyassed check-in desk girls, the whole lot. Included a security check guy who spent the whole time feeling people up.
Actually IIRC he turned out to not really work there - got confronted by the head of security and asked for ID, before being chased out of the building.
Whether we're too polite to mock low class foreigners or not, we mock our own pretty mercilessly...
I wonder what kind of a privileged and soft life one must have to consider airport security to be the same thing as "totalitarianism".
You remember the guy who recorded himself being patted down and told the security agent "Don't touch my junk"? Well, in a totalitarian regime, he'd have disappeared and his family would never learn what happened to him. At very least he'd have been put in a hospital for the criminally insane.
Instead, his video got hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube and he became a minor celebrity in the media. He's probably negotiating right now for a reality TV show or a spot as a commentator on Fox News.
And what kind of totalitarian is Obama if he allows Fox News to stay on the air, anyway? How do you think Pol Pot would have reacted to a 24/7 television network that programmed non-stop criticism of his regime? Dictators generally don't suffer critics, and currently Obama is getting it from both the Left and Right.
Do you know the number one reason that Republicans say Obama is a "tyrant"? Health Care Reform. And the bill he signed is nowhere near the cradle-to-grave universal government run setup you've got in Finland.
There have been many totalitarian regimes in the world since WWII. For you to compare the US circa 2010 to them is insulting to the people who have actually suffered in those places and times.
I have to assume that you have no one in your life who provides you with any feedback on your opinions and behavior. No one real, I mean. Please, young man, form some relationships with people you can trust. You need to get some perspective, and you need to learn how to talk to people. Otherwise, you're going to be in the dark a lot more than the 6 months of your Finnish winters.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I wonder what kind of a privileged and soft life one must have to consider airport security to be the same thing as "totalitarianism".
Hey, let's conveniently forget the topic of this thread - getting on a terror list based on a single tip. Let's also forget the wiretaps that have multiplied under Bokassa, I mean, Obama.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
They changed the criteria for the terror watch list so that if a father of a muslim extremist calls and says his son has been talking about blowing shit up he can be put on the terror watch list with just that one tip. If you read the article and follow the links you'll learn that it's not like I can just call up and suggest they put my neighbor on the list. There only has to be one tip, but there has to be other serious factors.
How do you suggest dealing with a committed group that wants to blow up an airliner? I would suggest a more enlightened foreign policy for the past 60 years, but it's a little late for that, unfortunately.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You dumbass, it means TSA is no more a reason to vote against Obama than it was against Bush.
I am disappointed in Obama's capitulation to the gung-ho national security hardliners, but this crap is hardly his fault. Go find a legitimate reason to vote against him.
Yet another case of people being modded as troll because people disagree.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Yes, Ben 0x10, in fact, I have sent money to charities like EFF that do similar work.
Interresting stats but "citation needed".
"This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (or STFU, for you un-hip people)."
No, you're the dumbass if you're going to vote for Obama when it's apparent that he's no different from Bush.
This crap is absolutely his fault: it's all happening on HIS watch, with his hand-picked appointee (Napolitano) directly running the agency. How the hell is it not his fault in your little mind?
Anyone who votes for Obama after this disastrous Presidency of his should be committed. If the voters have any intelligence at all, they'll nominate someone else in 2012 for the Democratic ticket. There were plenty of other Democratic contenders in 2008 running against him, and any of them would have made a better Pres than him.
This underscores the biggest issue with the no-fly list: there is no due process of law involved in placing a name on the no-fly list (or the watch list), and apparently no way to get off the list.
It's completely unconstitutional - of course, by pointing this out, I'll probably go on the watch list.
It really should be.
I'm just wondering when the ACLU will finally throw up its collective hands in desperation and move to Canada.