It's more than a stretch. It's comically naive. The same terrorist groups that attacked U.S. aircraft on 9/11/2001 have put explosives in body cavities before and were nearly successful. The only reason it didn't work is that the person who blew up absorbed most of the explosion. That problem was highly specific to the circumstances (a screening right before walking up to the target of the attack) and is not an issue when talking about flying. Couple the same methodology with a little time in the toilet, and you would have a nearly foolproof workaround for everything the TSA is doing (except in airports that use bomb sniffing dogs).
Billions of dollars of extra equipment, and a terrorist can work around it just by planning ahead and leaving for the airport a couple of hours early---that's why we think these schemes are idiotic. The only people significantly harmed or inconvenienced by the new security practices are the innocent passengers. The extra effort required by the bad guys is negligible. It's basically akin to stopping escaped criminals from Alcatraz by nuking San Francisco every time there's a jailbreak. Sure, a few bad guys might get caught if you're lucky, but most people will just start swimming to Oakland instead, at which point you'll be nuking a lot of innocent people without hurting the criminals in the slightest. It's clearly absurd in any sane universe.
Worse, these schemes are provably no better than other, less invasive screening techniques. One of the better suggestions I've heard is using thermal imaging cameras instead. A significant pack of anything below your clothes will show up as a dark spot. At that point, removal of the foreign object or appropriate hand searching would be needed for people who fail that screening, but because it is a thermal image, there's no detail to be had, eliminating the privacy concerns. Best of all, you can get thermal cameras for mere hundreds or single-digit thousands of dollars compared with $170,000 apiece for the so-called "advanced" imaging scanners, the scanning takes a tiny fraction of the time that the overpriced TSA toys take (you don't even have to stop walking), and it is entirely passive, thus posing no increased health risk.
In short, anyone with basic common sense and an understanding of the technology available should be able to see that this is a giant waste of money at taxpayer expense that provably provides no benefits over cheaper, less invasive techniques. The only real questions left to ask are which prominent senators and/or Presidents took the bribes, and how big the bribes were.
On the other hand, if you ban things, you also remind the people that they are powerless. Humans inherently dislike feeling as though they are not in control of their lives. Thus, in the long run, such bans are usually detrimental to the stability of a regime, particularly if you're regularly banning things that are highly popular. Eventually, the citizens discover that they have enough strength in numbers to seize control, and they do. When this happens, it is usually bloody.
Don't get me wrong---I'm not saying that Saudi Arabia is likely to rise up and overthrow their king over Facebook, of course. Farmville, on the other hand....:-D
(Yes, this is sarcasm. Mostly. You'd be amazed at how militant some people get over Farmville. I really don't get it. It's just a game....)
Exactly the same right and authority that they have to tell me how to read mine, and more to the point, the exact same right and authority that they have to kill people who do not subscribe to their belief system. None, in other words.
I am merely expressing an opinion. They can have different opinions. It's when those opinions become manifest in real-world actions that they become good or evil, and killing those who merely express differences of opinion falls pretty clearly on the evil side of the line in any civilized society. Indeed, this is by definition what differentiates civilization from barbarianism.
In this case, it means the freedom to be oppressive and violate the freedom of others, in accordance with their religion.
You've fallen into the same classic trap as a lot of conservative thinkers. Tyranny and freedom are opposites. Tyranny of the majority is tyranny. Therefore, they are not free in any meaningful sense of the word.
More importantly, such tyranny is unsustainable. In a few hundred years, when the Catholic, Jewish, or Buddhist minority population explodes (and this is a likely scenario---minorities tend to have lower income, and people with lower income often produce more offspring), at some magic point, the Muslims will be in the minority. You can safely assume that at this point, the oppressed will turn on their oppressors and pass laws that oppress them in turn. Eventually, equilibrium will be achieved, but can the human race really be expected to have the patience to wait that long while people commit heinous acts of murder in the name of God?
See, here's the thing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're killing someone for God, you're not reading your scripture correctly. Those rules were not written by God. They were written by man in a time that rightfully should be left in the past. Ask yourself this: if Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, how can they ignore his teachings so willingly? The good Samaritan, for example, preaches religious tolerance; the man Jesus chose to uphold as an example of how to live was of a people that his apostles would despise, in part due to religious differences, and who would have despised the man he helped because of similar differences.
There are many, many more examples of this---so much so that anyone who requires death over differing religious beliefs has blinders on, focusing on a tiny section of their religious text to the exclusion of the majority of it. In short, those who would kill in God's name, by doing so, blaspheme it, and should, by their same standards, be put to death. There's some irony for you.
Actually, I was still a step too late. The telcos are not required by law to unlock the phones and give you a lower monthly rate when your subsidy period ends, so most of them don't. This disguises the real cost of the subsidy and encourages people to upgrade their phones at a rate that isn't particularly useful. (Nobody really *needs* a new phone every two years unless they are exceptionally clumsy.) More to the point, because there is no cost advantage to taking your phone with you (on most U.S. carriers, anyway), almost nobody cares whether the phones are unlocked unless they are traveling to another country.
What we need is not just a law that requires carriers to unlock phones after the subsidy period, but also a law that requires carriers to itemize the subsidy as a separate part of the monthly bill.
Ah. Looks like I'm a little over a month behind. I knew the chips were starting to appear, but I didn't know anybody had actually started releasing products yet. Good to know.
Except that these barriers are all really nothing more than a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody builds a phone that can do all the HSDPA bands, but that's not because it's hard. The only customers who care about the 1700 MHz band are in the U.S. and Canada on carriers that don't sell unlocked phones, and there are no laws requiring unlocking. As a result, those customers don't expect to be able to move from one carrier to another without unlocking. As a result, the handset manufacturers don't need to build phones that allow this. As a result, the chipset vendors largely haven't bothered to design the chips to make this possible.
If you can build a 5-band handset, a 6-band handset is really only incrementally harder. Even a 12-band handset is only incrementally harder when you factor in electronically tunable antennas into the mix.
Because Amtrak's idea of a train station in many parts of the Chicago to New Orleans line is a double-wide that sits a hundred feet off the tracks, because unlike aircraft, trains do not leave the station up in the sky, so one could get around almost any security scheme you could come up with by merely walking down the tracks, and because one could just as easily sabotage a train by planting explosives anywhere along the tracks without ever setting foot on the train. There's a certain degree of infeasibility and absurdity involved in adding that sort of security to trains, and by infeasible and absurd, I mean essentially impossible and utterly laughable.
Not really. All they would have to do is come from a country that would allow them to carry weapons onto the plane too. Once in US soil, they simply kill the passengers, overwhelm the cockpit and do the same.
Two questions:
How does that problem in any way disagree with my suggestion that people should be allowed to carry firearms on aircraft, and that doing so would prevent someone from pulling off a 9/11?
You do realize that people coming in from international flights have to go through a full security screening to enter the non-international section of an airport, right?
Sure, you could blow up a plane over a populated area. You might get lucky and take out two or three homes, one of which would be occupied at the time, and you'd kill an average of three or four people. The people on the plane are at a statistically far greater risk than people on the ground no matter where a plane is when it explodes, mainly because an airframe that no longer has proper lift has a tendency to fall almost straight down, and if the airplane does still have lift, the pilot is going to try to control it as much as possible and drop it somewhere without a lot of people.
Encryption is irrelevant unless you're tunneling. There are specific bits in the TCP header that tell what type of traffic you are providing. This is down a layer in the stack from the actual packet contents. If the BitTorrent software you run deliberately tells the OS to lie about the packet type, the OS should be able to fairly quickly determine from the app's behavior that it is in violation of the RFC, and it should fairly quickly tell the application to get bent. If this does not happen, your OS is operating outside the bounds of RFC compliance, and the ISP is well within its rights to terminate your service without notice. That's what.
It's one thing to try to obfuscate traffic to avoid artificial barriers to traffic. It's quite another to claim that your traffic requires low latency and, ideally, isochronous data flow when it really does not. The former is understandable. The second tends to result in your isoch privileges going away, or worse. And that is as it should be.
The danger with this is really the same as the danger posed by netbooks and other cheap computing devices---if enough people opt into the cheaper technology, the real thing will become progressively more expensive as economies of scale break down, until the people who want the unregulated Internet can no longer afford it, at which point the distinction between opt-in and opt-out becomes moot.
I didn't offer ANYTHING as proof; in fact, I didn't even argue the OP's point.
Your statement implied that evidence is required to show that the TSA is not improving things. I would argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and in the absence of evidence that they are actually improving things, the default assumption should be that they are not.
Wonderful. I've never had someone do a full body X-ray at an airport...
You haven't flown in the past six months, have you? Merry Christmas.
What do you do when there is increased risk? You mitigate it.
So why haven't we done so? Bomb sniffing dogs at every airport? Solid cockpit doors with a proper airlock design (two sets of doors that aren't open at once)? Background checks on passengers? Interviews for non-regular travelers a la Israeli airlines? Instead of mitigating the risk, we've invested billions of dollars in high tech toys that don't work.
The TSA is likely made up of your standard government agency moron just like all the rest of them. But complaining that you can't bring your printer cartridges, and acting like no more wifi on planes is the end of the world is just plain stupid. In review: a guy made a bomb out of a printer cartridge. What would YOU do?
Absolutely nothing. Sometimes the correct response is to not respond, and a prima facie absurd response is always worse than none at all because it just makes you look incompetent. These things were not in carry-on bags, but rather in air cargo (mail or package delivery, I forget which). Odds are good that someone would get a lot of scrutiny if someone had carried a laser printer on board an airplane, making it a very unlikely vector of attack. Not to mention that you'd get close scrutiny if you attempted to take a laser printer down from the overhead compartment during the flight, since there's no feasible way to use one in flight. Also, printer bits were likely chosen because they were large enough to hide enough explosives; anything of similar size could be used just as easily, making the particular object of little consequence. All these factors point towards a single conclusion: that the right answer is to not do anything.
That said, if you really want to do something, then require that printer cartridges be taken out and swabbed appropriately. If the powder is harmful, then it doesn't fly, but if it's just a printer cartridge as one would expect 99.999% of the time, it isn't doing any harm.
This actually change post 9/11 where they now treat all hijackings as a death sentence.
Which means that if "dangerous weapons" were allowed to be carried by law-abiding citizens, it would dramatically decrease the odds of another 9/11, making the current security measures counterproductive. It might not have prevented the first attack, but you can be darn sure it would prevent a second.
Unless someone is sneaking a nuclear fission weapon in to a football game, they aren't going to hurt nearly as many people as, say.. oh, you remember... that airplane thing with the World Trade Center. Whatever.
And unless someone builds a tower that has as many people in it as the World Trade Center, they aren't going to hurt nearly as many people by crashing a plane into it, either.
Which recent bombing or hijacking is the evidence?
Even ignoring the fact that you are just begging for a "correlation is not causation" lecture, when was the last time you heard about a successfully thwarted attempt? You offer lack of evidence to the contrary as proof, which is utterly absurd.
What is it about entering a plane (which, as we've seen, could potentially be used to cause great harm) do you think entitles you to more personal freedom than entering a venue for a concert or a sporting event?
I've never had someone do a full body X-ray when entering a concert or sporting event, nor have I been frisked. What is it about entering a plane (which, due to changes in cockpit door construction, can no longer feasibly be used to do great harm unless the terrorist has a pilot's license) that you think requires so much less personal freedom than any other location with a comparable number of people?
Just wait for somebody to put a bomb in a laptop, a diaper bag, a baby doll, a hollowed out book, a Kleenex box, or another pair of shoes. Just watch. We'll be flying shoeless and pantless before long, blowing our noses on our sleeves, with no entertainment, and with screaming babies who have soiled themselves all around us. Or, rather, the masses will be. I've already decided that unless a lot of things change soon, next year I'm traveling by Amtrak. I've had enough of this bullshit. Sure, it will add an extra two days to my travel time, but it's safer and doesn't require choosing between being either electronically strip searched or manhandled.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the TSA is designed to cripple airlines, make comfortable travel nearly impossible, violate privacy all the while doing nothing to stop a real terrorist plot.
You're joking, right? You mean that wasn't obvious to you way back in 2001 when they banned knives and box cutters, required removing your laptops because you might have hidden a knife in them, and required removing your jackets because the metal detector might not work and you might be carrying a knife in it? Really? It was to me....
If some municipalities, like New York mentioned in the topic, want to skimp out on public services... then they don't hire competent systems designers and you may indeed end up with placebo buttons.
It's not that. In parts of New York (the city), you can safely assume that there will always be someone crossing every intersection every time the light changes (except at night). Thus, hooking up the buttons is not all that beneficial.
And it's not true that it isn't functional. It merely isn't function in normal operation mode. As soon as you put it into firefighter operation mode, the doors are opened and closed with the open and close door buttons, and the doors do not open when the car reaches the specified floor.
Slashdot Mirror
I launched sixteen droids and what do I get? A cubicle bedroom and deeper in debt.
It's more than a stretch. It's comically naive. The same terrorist groups that attacked U.S. aircraft on 9/11/2001 have put explosives in body cavities before and were nearly successful. The only reason it didn't work is that the person who blew up absorbed most of the explosion. That problem was highly specific to the circumstances (a screening right before walking up to the target of the attack) and is not an issue when talking about flying. Couple the same methodology with a little time in the toilet, and you would have a nearly foolproof workaround for everything the TSA is doing (except in airports that use bomb sniffing dogs).
Billions of dollars of extra equipment, and a terrorist can work around it just by planning ahead and leaving for the airport a couple of hours early---that's why we think these schemes are idiotic. The only people significantly harmed or inconvenienced by the new security practices are the innocent passengers. The extra effort required by the bad guys is negligible. It's basically akin to stopping escaped criminals from Alcatraz by nuking San Francisco every time there's a jailbreak. Sure, a few bad guys might get caught if you're lucky, but most people will just start swimming to Oakland instead, at which point you'll be nuking a lot of innocent people without hurting the criminals in the slightest. It's clearly absurd in any sane universe.
Worse, these schemes are provably no better than other, less invasive screening techniques. One of the better suggestions I've heard is using thermal imaging cameras instead. A significant pack of anything below your clothes will show up as a dark spot. At that point, removal of the foreign object or appropriate hand searching would be needed for people who fail that screening, but because it is a thermal image, there's no detail to be had, eliminating the privacy concerns. Best of all, you can get thermal cameras for mere hundreds or single-digit thousands of dollars compared with $170,000 apiece for the so-called "advanced" imaging scanners, the scanning takes a tiny fraction of the time that the overpriced TSA toys take (you don't even have to stop walking), and it is entirely passive, thus posing no increased health risk.
In short, anyone with basic common sense and an understanding of the technology available should be able to see that this is a giant waste of money at taxpayer expense that provably provides no benefits over cheaper, less invasive techniques. The only real questions left to ask are which prominent senators and/or Presidents took the bribes, and how big the bribes were.
On the other hand, if you ban things, you also remind the people that they are powerless. Humans inherently dislike feeling as though they are not in control of their lives. Thus, in the long run, such bans are usually detrimental to the stability of a regime, particularly if you're regularly banning things that are highly popular. Eventually, the citizens discover that they have enough strength in numbers to seize control, and they do. When this happens, it is usually bloody.
Don't get me wrong---I'm not saying that Saudi Arabia is likely to rise up and overthrow their king over Facebook, of course. Farmville, on the other hand.... :-D
(Yes, this is sarcasm. Mostly. You'd be amazed at how militant some people get over Farmville. I really don't get it. It's just a game....)
Exactly the same right and authority that they have to tell me how to read mine, and more to the point, the exact same right and authority that they have to kill people who do not subscribe to their belief system. None, in other words.
I am merely expressing an opinion. They can have different opinions. It's when those opinions become manifest in real-world actions that they become good or evil, and killing those who merely express differences of opinion falls pretty clearly on the evil side of the line in any civilized society. Indeed, this is by definition what differentiates civilization from barbarianism.
You've fallen into the same classic trap as a lot of conservative thinkers. Tyranny and freedom are opposites. Tyranny of the majority is tyranny. Therefore, they are not free in any meaningful sense of the word.
More importantly, such tyranny is unsustainable. In a few hundred years, when the Catholic, Jewish, or Buddhist minority population explodes (and this is a likely scenario---minorities tend to have lower income, and people with lower income often produce more offspring), at some magic point, the Muslims will be in the minority. You can safely assume that at this point, the oppressed will turn on their oppressors and pass laws that oppress them in turn. Eventually, equilibrium will be achieved, but can the human race really be expected to have the patience to wait that long while people commit heinous acts of murder in the name of God?
See, here's the thing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're killing someone for God, you're not reading your scripture correctly. Those rules were not written by God. They were written by man in a time that rightfully should be left in the past. Ask yourself this: if Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, how can they ignore his teachings so willingly? The good Samaritan, for example, preaches religious tolerance; the man Jesus chose to uphold as an example of how to live was of a people that his apostles would despise, in part due to religious differences, and who would have despised the man he helped because of similar differences.
There are many, many more examples of this---so much so that anyone who requires death over differing religious beliefs has blinders on, focusing on a tiny section of their religious text to the exclusion of the majority of it. In short, those who would kill in God's name, by doing so, blaspheme it, and should, by their same standards, be put to death. There's some irony for you.
Actually, I was still a step too late. The telcos are not required by law to unlock the phones and give you a lower monthly rate when your subsidy period ends, so most of them don't. This disguises the real cost of the subsidy and encourages people to upgrade their phones at a rate that isn't particularly useful. (Nobody really *needs* a new phone every two years unless they are exceptionally clumsy.) More to the point, because there is no cost advantage to taking your phone with you (on most U.S. carriers, anyway), almost nobody cares whether the phones are unlocked unless they are traveling to another country.
What we need is not just a law that requires carriers to unlock phones after the subsidy period, but also a law that requires carriers to itemize the subsidy as a separate part of the monthly bill.
Ah. Looks like I'm a little over a month behind. I knew the chips were starting to appear, but I didn't know anybody had actually started releasing products yet. Good to know.
Except that these barriers are all really nothing more than a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody builds a phone that can do all the HSDPA bands, but that's not because it's hard. The only customers who care about the 1700 MHz band are in the U.S. and Canada on carriers that don't sell unlocked phones, and there are no laws requiring unlocking. As a result, those customers don't expect to be able to move from one carrier to another without unlocking. As a result, the handset manufacturers don't need to build phones that allow this. As a result, the chipset vendors largely haven't bothered to design the chips to make this possible.
If you can build a 5-band handset, a 6-band handset is really only incrementally harder. Even a 12-band handset is only incrementally harder when you factor in electronically tunable antennas into the mix.
Or, for that matter, recruiting one?
And this is different from what they could do by getting a pilot's license and becoming a pilot for a third-world airliner how?
Because Amtrak's idea of a train station in many parts of the Chicago to New Orleans line is a double-wide that sits a hundred feet off the tracks, because unlike aircraft, trains do not leave the station up in the sky, so one could get around almost any security scheme you could come up with by merely walking down the tracks, and because one could just as easily sabotage a train by planting explosives anywhere along the tracks without ever setting foot on the train. There's a certain degree of infeasibility and absurdity involved in adding that sort of security to trains, and by infeasible and absurd, I mean essentially impossible and utterly laughable.
Two questions:
Sure, you could blow up a plane over a populated area. You might get lucky and take out two or three homes, one of which would be occupied at the time, and you'd kill an average of three or four people. The people on the plane are at a statistically far greater risk than people on the ground no matter where a plane is when it explodes, mainly because an airframe that no longer has proper lift has a tendency to fall almost straight down, and if the airplane does still have lift, the pilot is going to try to control it as much as possible and drop it somewhere without a lot of people.
Encryption is irrelevant unless you're tunneling. There are specific bits in the TCP header that tell what type of traffic you are providing. This is down a layer in the stack from the actual packet contents. If the BitTorrent software you run deliberately tells the OS to lie about the packet type, the OS should be able to fairly quickly determine from the app's behavior that it is in violation of the RFC, and it should fairly quickly tell the application to get bent. If this does not happen, your OS is operating outside the bounds of RFC compliance, and the ISP is well within its rights to terminate your service without notice. That's what.
It's one thing to try to obfuscate traffic to avoid artificial barriers to traffic. It's quite another to claim that your traffic requires low latency and, ideally, isochronous data flow when it really does not. The former is understandable. The second tends to result in your isoch privileges going away, or worse. And that is as it should be.
The danger with this is really the same as the danger posed by netbooks and other cheap computing devices---if enough people opt into the cheaper technology, the real thing will become progressively more expensive as economies of scale break down, until the people who want the unregulated Internet can no longer afford it, at which point the distinction between opt-in and opt-out becomes moot.
Your statement implied that evidence is required to show that the TSA is not improving things. I would argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and in the absence of evidence that they are actually improving things, the default assumption should be that they are not.
You haven't flown in the past six months, have you? Merry Christmas.
So why haven't we done so? Bomb sniffing dogs at every airport? Solid cockpit doors with a proper airlock design (two sets of doors that aren't open at once)? Background checks on passengers? Interviews for non-regular travelers a la Israeli airlines? Instead of mitigating the risk, we've invested billions of dollars in high tech toys that don't work.
Absolutely nothing. Sometimes the correct response is to not respond, and a prima facie absurd response is always worse than none at all because it just makes you look incompetent. These things were not in carry-on bags, but rather in air cargo (mail or package delivery, I forget which). Odds are good that someone would get a lot of scrutiny if someone had carried a laser printer on board an airplane, making it a very unlikely vector of attack. Not to mention that you'd get close scrutiny if you attempted to take a laser printer down from the overhead compartment during the flight, since there's no feasible way to use one in flight. Also, printer bits were likely chosen because they were large enough to hide enough explosives; anything of similar size could be used just as easily, making the particular object of little consequence. All these factors point towards a single conclusion: that the right answer is to not do anything.
That said, if you really want to do something, then require that printer cartridges be taken out and swabbed appropriately. If the powder is harmful, then it doesn't fly, but if it's just a printer cartridge as one would expect 99.999% of the time, it isn't doing any harm.
Which means that if "dangerous weapons" were allowed to be carried by law-abiding citizens, it would dramatically decrease the odds of another 9/11, making the current security measures counterproductive. It might not have prevented the first attack, but you can be darn sure it would prevent a second.
And unless someone builds a tower that has as many people in it as the World Trade Center, they aren't going to hurt nearly as many people by crashing a plane into it, either.
Black powder is another name for gunpowder. And as I said, since when do terrorists use such a low grade explosive?
Even ignoring the fact that you are just begging for a "correlation is not causation" lecture, when was the last time you heard about a successfully thwarted attempt? You offer lack of evidence to the contrary as proof, which is utterly absurd.
I've never had someone do a full body X-ray when entering a concert or sporting event, nor have I been frisked. What is it about entering a plane (which, due to changes in cockpit door construction, can no longer feasibly be used to do great harm unless the terrorist has a pilot's license) that you think requires so much less personal freedom than any other location with a comparable number of people?
Since when do A. bombers use black powder, or alternatively B. toner cartridges contain greyish-white powder?
Just wait for somebody to put a bomb in a laptop, a diaper bag, a baby doll, a hollowed out book, a Kleenex box, or another pair of shoes. Just watch. We'll be flying shoeless and pantless before long, blowing our noses on our sleeves, with no entertainment, and with screaming babies who have soiled themselves all around us. Or, rather, the masses will be. I've already decided that unless a lot of things change soon, next year I'm traveling by Amtrak. I've had enough of this bullshit. Sure, it will add an extra two days to my travel time, but it's safer and doesn't require choosing between being either electronically strip searched or manhandled.
You're joking, right? You mean that wasn't obvious to you way back in 2001 when they banned knives and box cutters, required removing your laptops because you might have hidden a knife in them, and required removing your jackets because the metal detector might not work and you might be carrying a knife in it? Really? It was to me....
It's not that. In parts of New York (the city), you can safely assume that there will always be someone crossing every intersection every time the light changes (except at night). Thus, hooking up the buttons is not all that beneficial.
And it's not true that it isn't functional. It merely isn't function in normal operation mode. As soon as you put it into firefighter operation mode, the doors are opened and closed with the open and close door buttons, and the doors do not open when the car reaches the specified floor.