Thing is, intelligent behavioural profiling and analysis doesn't carry lucrative shiny-machine contracts and kickbacks for former managerial staff like Michael Chertoff. Trusted Traveler has all the political/PR benefits of "Look at us, we're Doing Something(TM)!" whilst still allowing TSA to scope or grope whomsoever they want.
I can confirm this - they're the ones that look like eggs (yellow light filter inside, visible through the white enclosure). I bought 5 of them - 2 for a pair of accent fixtures attached to a dimmer and 3 more for a pain-in-the-ass fixture in my front entryway that I really don't want to mess with again for the next howeverthefucklong LEDs last. They look and work great. $20 a pop but I consider it truly worth it.
I co-founded Travel Underground as a way to track, report, and fight back against TSA violations of traveller rights. If you're at all interested we'd love to have you there to help build cases against the TSA to present to the media, Congress, anyone who'll help get the word out. Yes, this is a shameless plug for the site but I think it's a worthwhile effort.
"As far as the specific example.. it's unfortunate, but as soon as TSA says they won't examine women who have had mastectomy is the day certain nefarious organizations start recruiting women who have had a mastectomy to take a defacto one way flight somewhere."
Okay...so? So a bomb goes off, so a plane blows up, so people die, so the airline industry suffers as people fear flying for a while and then everything goes back to normal when the fears die down.
The risk of lost life is neither an excuse nor a justification for violations of the inviolable rights upon which the US was founded. Simply put, freedom trumps lifesaving, all the time, every time, without exceptions.
While others have aptly pointed out that the Forbes article advocates (perhaps wrongly) free-market solutions to air security, I've noticed a lot of anti-TSA op-ed pieces in the media of late. Oddly enough it seems that the 95-year-old traveler who was forced to remove her adult diaper, and not the 6-year-old who was molested by TSOs in New Orleans, was the catalyst for massive media criticism. I'd have thought TSA abusing children would have a stronger (albeit only slightly so) impact than TSA abusing adults, even if said adults are senior citizens and/or terminally ill. Either way I'm glad that Forbes, among other news outlets in the US and overseas, is speaking against TSA.
I herd u liek security, so we put a checkpoint in your checkpoint so you can get irradiated while you get your 4th-amendment...rights...viol...ated?...This sucks, I want my free country back.
Just replying in case I change my sig in the future - the site in question is the same one the links pointed to - Travel Underground, at travelunderground.org
Granted this one wasn't actually committed by a TSO but as was mentioned above, airport security checkpoints are prime locations for theft because many seem (or are) deliberately designed to separate you from your belongings.
Tip: You are NOT required to use a TSA-friendly lock to lock your carry-on bag. Keep your valuables inside your bag as it goes through the X-ray and lock it with a secure, TSA-unfriendly lock. If you want to take your laptop out as they insist you have to (many have said they've left the laptop in the bag and the TSA troglodytes haven't said anything about it), lock it to your bag handle with a Kensington locking cable. These steps will help ensure that you're there to watch them if they claim to need to look through your belongings. It also helps prevent them from trying to force you into a private room for a gropedown by picking your bags up and walking off with them.
And yeah, this is a shameless plug, but the site in my sig is a good resource for tracking TSA civil-rights abuses and coordinating political action to fight back against them. There's good advice to be had for putting TSOs in their place at the checkpoint too.
I did. Took me forever to figure out that you had to press the jump button to break the poles Sonic holds onto in the current tunnels, otherwise you'd drown every time. Also took me forever to figure out that you didn't have to actually beat Robotnik in that level, just make it to the top of the pit.
Those designers were goddamn sadists.
Now, did anyone actually beat "Aliens" for C64 all the way through from beginning to end without using the RunStop-Esc command? I only ever beat the air-duct maze once and died at the "rescue Newt" level after it.
Okay, I'll ask the obvious question: How do we fight this? We know that there's little choice between ISPs in many rural (and even some sub/urban) areas, so threatening to switch isn't always practical. It's not a bill being proposed so we can't direct elected officials to vote against it - do we demand our legislators draft a bill to stop it? Is this FCC territory? FTC? Who do we talk to, who do we demand answers from, who do we petition, and how do we get the message across?
Almost. It was slightly different in ROTT - you had 3 "bullet" weapons (pistol, dual pistols, MP40) and one swappable "missile" weapon (bazooka, heat-seek...ing...you know what, there's a LOT. Look 'em up.) The neat bit was that the bullet weapons all had unlimited ammo and the MP40, at least, could hold its own in a firefight. Not exactly the same as the Halo system but not that much different either.
For the record, that's NIH "Not Invented Here," describing Apple's tendency to insistently go their own way even when other workable standards exist. Nothing to do with the National Institutes of Health.
Doesn't work. First, they'd notice that they're being paid for nothing. Doesn't really sit well with most people who prefer to be able to talk about their job. "Security officer" has a better ring than "the idiot that digs a useless hole which gets filled a minute later", don't you think?
Mod up, AC has a point. Pretty much every Sony/PS3/PSN-related article that's been posted, both here and elsewhere, since the start of the Geohot debacle has been rife with the same generic "Geohot is a total douchebag. I don't need to know any details, just look at him!" or "Hackers should all be thrown in jail for life" or "You agreed to the ToS! Nobody can do anything against Sony now!" comments. I know GamesRadar was particularly bad about it but I'm sure there were others too. It's pretty clear that Sony has at least some "reputation preservation agents" working on this matter to try to steer public opinion toward their favour.
What good reason could they have for pulling something like this? I know, I know, I'm not thinking creatively and/or cynically enough. Give the caffeine an hour or so.
This is why I'm quite happy with my N900. No carrier lockability, no Big Brother bullshit, and it's a better phone to boot. As the longtime owner of two Power Macs and a 4G iPod (you know, the kind that can run RockBox, that alternative firmware that you guys hate so much) I feel compelled to tell you, Apple, to get bent.
Better if you or someone in your department can build. I'm putting together Athlon II-based boxes with 2GB of DDR3 1333 for roughly $200 (varies with available CPU/RAM/MoBo sets). Recycle cases, skip the optical drive, go with onboard video. True you don't get the OEM warranty and it makes standardization nigh impossible, but if you integrate device drivers into your XP install source you quickly get to the point where everything works out of the box, since motherboard manufacturers seem to source most of their onboard devices from a small set of suppliers, and having NVidia, ATI, and Realtek drivers slipstreamed addresses most hardware sets.
Their motivation doesn't matter. The principle remains - Sony is trying to keep people from using their hardware how they want. While it's completely within Sony's rights to deny use of their network, the fact is that they flat-out stole a feature that was advertised as a major selling point for the hardware and are trying to blame one hacker for their own misdeeds.
I've made this analogy before but I'll make it again. If someone buys a hammer and files the ends down into sharp spikes, then goes out and starts hitting people in the head with their weaponized tool, you prosecute them for causing bodily harm to other people, not for the act of modifying a hammer. Maybe you can take the modification into account as evidence of premeditation for the actual crime, but you don't treat it as a crime itself. Same thing with the PS3. If people modify their PS3s and then use the modifications to play pirated games, game makers can go after them in civil court for pirating games. However, it should never be permitted to pro^H^Hersecute people for modifying what they own.
We keep the spotlight on things like this so as to avoid desensitization. Just because something is commonplace doesn't make it acceptable or ethically right. On the other hand, something being commonplace does make it very easy to consider the norm, and the last thing we want is for corporate abuses like this to be considered normal.
By raising a clamor about it every time, we reinforce the notion that it's abnormal and unacceptable, and open the door for discussions as to exactly why.
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Thing is, intelligent behavioural profiling and analysis doesn't carry lucrative shiny-machine contracts and kickbacks for former managerial staff like Michael Chertoff. Trusted Traveler has all the political/PR benefits of "Look at us, we're Doing Something(TM)!" whilst still allowing TSA to scope or grope whomsoever they want.
Reference 49 USC S40103(a)(2): "A citizen of the United States has a public right of transit through the navigable airspace."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/49/usc_sec_49_00040103----000-.html
I can confirm this - they're the ones that look like eggs (yellow light filter inside, visible through the white enclosure). I bought 5 of them - 2 for a pair of accent fixtures attached to a dimmer and 3 more for a pain-in-the-ass fixture in my front entryway that I really don't want to mess with again for the next howeverthefucklong LEDs last. They look and work great. $20 a pop but I consider it truly worth it.
This is far from the first or only instance of this kind of abuse happening at the hands of TSA.
http://www.travelunderground.org/index.php?pages/tsa-abuse-master-lists/#BillFisher
I co-founded Travel Underground as a way to track, report, and fight back against TSA violations of traveller rights. If you're at all interested we'd love to have you there to help build cases against the TSA to present to the media, Congress, anyone who'll help get the word out. Yes, this is a shameless plug for the site but I think it's a worthwhile effort.
What was that Schneier was saying about "movie plot threats" again?
We've had security theater since 2002, now it seems like they're trying to base their approach to security on his "Shit you never, ever do" list.
You can buy music, just use this first: http://riaaradar.com/
"As far as the specific example .. it's unfortunate, but as soon as TSA says they won't examine women who have had mastectomy is the day certain nefarious organizations start recruiting women who have had a mastectomy to take a defacto one way flight somewhere."
Okay...so? So a bomb goes off, so a plane blows up, so people die, so the airline industry suffers as people fear flying for a while and then everything goes back to normal when the fears die down.
The risk of lost life is neither an excuse nor a justification for violations of the inviolable rights upon which the US was founded. Simply put, freedom trumps lifesaving, all the time, every time, without exceptions.
While others have aptly pointed out that the Forbes article advocates (perhaps wrongly) free-market solutions to air security, I've noticed a lot of anti-TSA op-ed pieces in the media of late. Oddly enough it seems that the 95-year-old traveler who was forced to remove her adult diaper, and not the 6-year-old who was molested by TSOs in New Orleans, was the catalyst for massive media criticism. I'd have thought TSA abusing children would have a stronger (albeit only slightly so) impact than TSA abusing adults, even if said adults are senior citizens and/or terminally ill. Either way I'm glad that Forbes, among other news outlets in the US and overseas, is speaking against TSA.
I herd u liek security, so we put a checkpoint in your checkpoint so you can get irradiated while you get your 4th-amendment...rights...viol...ated? ...This sucks, I want my free country back.
Just replying in case I change my sig in the future - the site in question is the same one the links pointed to - Travel Underground, at travelunderground.org
http://travelunderground.org/index.php?threads/list-of-tsa-crime-stories-since-december-2010-part-1.127/
http://travelunderground.org/index.php?threads/list-of-tsa-crime-stories-since-december-2010-part-2.128/
Granted this one wasn't actually committed by a TSO but as was mentioned above, airport security checkpoints are prime locations for theft because many seem (or are) deliberately designed to separate you from your belongings.
Tip: You are NOT required to use a TSA-friendly lock to lock your carry-on bag. Keep your valuables inside your bag as it goes through the X-ray and lock it with a secure, TSA-unfriendly lock. If you want to take your laptop out as they insist you have to (many have said they've left the laptop in the bag and the TSA troglodytes haven't said anything about it), lock it to your bag handle with a Kensington locking cable. These steps will help ensure that you're there to watch them if they claim to need to look through your belongings. It also helps prevent them from trying to force you into a private room for a gropedown by picking your bags up and walking off with them.
And yeah, this is a shameless plug, but the site in my sig is a good resource for tracking TSA civil-rights abuses and coordinating political action to fight back against them. There's good advice to be had for putting TSOs in their place at the checkpoint too.
I did. Took me forever to figure out that you had to press the jump button to break the poles Sonic holds onto in the current tunnels, otherwise you'd drown every time. Also took me forever to figure out that you didn't have to actually beat Robotnik in that level, just make it to the top of the pit.
Those designers were goddamn sadists.
Now, did anyone actually beat "Aliens" for C64 all the way through from beginning to end without using the RunStop-Esc command? I only ever beat the air-duct maze once and died at the "rescue Newt" level after it.
Did that as soon as I heard they were fighting this as well. Is there anything else?
Okay, I'll ask the obvious question: How do we fight this? We know that there's little choice between ISPs in many rural (and even some sub/urban) areas, so threatening to switch isn't always practical. It's not a bill being proposed so we can't direct elected officials to vote against it - do we demand our legislators draft a bill to stop it? Is this FCC territory? FTC? Who do we talk to, who do we demand answers from, who do we petition, and how do we get the message across?
Almost. It was slightly different in ROTT - you had 3 "bullet" weapons (pistol, dual pistols, MP40) and one swappable "missile" weapon (bazooka, heat-seek...ing...you know what, there's a LOT. Look 'em up.) The neat bit was that the bullet weapons all had unlimited ammo and the MP40, at least, could hold its own in a firefight. Not exactly the same as the Halo system but not that much different either.
For the record, that's NIH "Not Invented Here," describing Apple's tendency to insistently go their own way even when other workable standards exist. Nothing to do with the National Institutes of Health.
Doesn't work. First, they'd notice that they're being paid for nothing. Doesn't really sit well with most people who prefer to be able to talk about their job. "Security officer" has a better ring than "the idiot that digs a useless hole which gets filled a minute later", don't you think?
The way things are going, not for long.
I agree with you that there are going to be opposing viewpoints, but it's the volume and proportion of Sony-supporting posts that seems suspect to me.
Mod up, AC has a point. Pretty much every Sony/PS3/PSN-related article that's been posted, both here and elsewhere, since the start of the Geohot debacle has been rife with the same generic "Geohot is a total douchebag. I don't need to know any details, just look at him!" or "Hackers should all be thrown in jail for life" or "You agreed to the ToS! Nobody can do anything against Sony now!" comments. I know GamesRadar was particularly bad about it but I'm sure there were others too. It's pretty clear that Sony has at least some "reputation preservation agents" working on this matter to try to steer public opinion toward their favour.
What good reason could they have for pulling something like this? I know, I know, I'm not thinking creatively and/or cynically enough. Give the caffeine an hour or so.
This is why I'm quite happy with my N900. No carrier lockability, no Big Brother bullshit, and it's a better phone to boot. As the longtime owner of two Power Macs and a 4G iPod (you know, the kind that can run RockBox, that alternative firmware that you guys hate so much) I feel compelled to tell you, Apple, to get bent.
Better if you or someone in your department can build. I'm putting together Athlon II-based boxes with 2GB of DDR3 1333 for roughly $200 (varies with available CPU/RAM/MoBo sets). Recycle cases, skip the optical drive, go with onboard video. True you don't get the OEM warranty and it makes standardization nigh impossible, but if you integrate device drivers into your XP install source you quickly get to the point where everything works out of the box, since motherboard manufacturers seem to source most of their onboard devices from a small set of suppliers, and having NVidia, ATI, and Realtek drivers slipstreamed addresses most hardware sets.
And mine too, apparently. Really cowardly way to go about supporting the company, guys.
And they're active here too, modding your comment down.
Their motivation doesn't matter. The principle remains - Sony is trying to keep people from using their hardware how they want. While it's completely within Sony's rights to deny use of their network, the fact is that they flat-out stole a feature that was advertised as a major selling point for the hardware and are trying to blame one hacker for their own misdeeds.
I've made this analogy before but I'll make it again. If someone buys a hammer and files the ends down into sharp spikes, then goes out and starts hitting people in the head with their weaponized tool, you prosecute them for causing bodily harm to other people, not for the act of modifying a hammer. Maybe you can take the modification into account as evidence of premeditation for the actual crime, but you don't treat it as a crime itself. Same thing with the PS3. If people modify their PS3s and then use the modifications to play pirated games, game makers can go after them in civil court for pirating games. However, it should never be permitted to pro^H^Hersecute people for modifying what they own.
We keep the spotlight on things like this so as to avoid desensitization. Just because something is commonplace doesn't make it acceptable or ethically right. On the other hand, something being commonplace does make it very easy to consider the norm, and the last thing we want is for corporate abuses like this to be considered normal.
By raising a clamor about it every time, we reinforce the notion that it's abnormal and unacceptable, and open the door for discussions as to exactly why.