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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
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. As far as the difficulty for travel, come on; how much worse could they possibly make it...? It's horrid even for the military.
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...
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....
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.
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...
I'm not going to conferences to the US while your smiling dictator is in office. Sod it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
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)
Did this happen in the USSR and nazi Germany?
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.
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.
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 !!
Sound like a plan. Put all this on a picture, add some Guy Fawkes mask and spam it on 4chan.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
"Heil Obama! Heil Bush! Heil Clinton! Sieg heil Amerika! (Can I board now? Thank you.)"
Anonymous Coward (19??-)
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!
Ex-girlfriend calls in tip, 3 years later you go to buy a gun and can't.
No chance to clear your name?
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.
Report everybody, so everybody is on the watch list. Then the watch list is useless. Well, more obviously useless.
rooooar
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
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 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.
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
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
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.
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...
How about linking to the tips terror tips form?
tips.fbi.gov
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.
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
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?
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
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
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.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." Death by a thousand cuts indeed.
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.
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
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
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.
Can I be on the list as well ?
Really all boys should be on the list.
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!
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...
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.