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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?
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.
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.
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.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Don't get your hopes up.
The X-ray scans and groping procedures are applicable for the "small people" only.
I wish I was kidding, but if you are a government official or rich enough to have your own security people travel with you, you get an officially sanctioned bypass. It's literally in the rules.
At most what would happen if you try to troll the TSA by adding popular people on the lists is to get unwanted attention to your own persona.
The reason you can't play the system against itself is that, after all, the people on top work hard every day on changing the system to play you. They have the capability, head start and experience to make sure you follow the rules and don't yap or object too much, like all small people should.
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.
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.