Forget captchas, or at least forget trying to make them more than trivially solvable.
We should be treating blog spam the same way we do email spam - they are essentially the same thing. Bayesian filters and honey pots. Set up blogs that are full of lorem ipsum or something less obvious but meaningless to real humans. Then any posts that end up on those blogs can be considered spam and if similar posts show up on other blogs, just quarantine or even delete them automatically. Similarly we ought to be able to employ bayesian filters that have a broad anti-spam basic training and then are custom-trained to each site.
My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
This truth is the basis of why you are completely wrong.
Your method of accessing the information changed, but the information itself did not change and neither has anyone else's method of accessing the information.
Prior to facebook making this change, all this information was out there and could be accessed in a similar fashion, it just required 3rd party tools. You were ignorant of way other people could collect the information, now you are not. It's the exact equivalent of google coming along and providing google reader, except instead of just mentioning it in a press release, facebook built their version of "google reader" right into their user interface.
Personally, I think it is a bad business decision because people like to be ignorant, they don't like being made to realize that the world is not as safe and secure as they imagined.
Being social has always been the antithesis of privacy.*
No, and for exactly the reasons of scalability that the net brings into play.
Personal, meatspace interactions are not easily automatically recorded and indexed for access by anyone in the world. You certainly give up some level of privacy as part of social interaction, but it is far from being the antithesis of privacy.
It's all pieces of a puzzle that leaves me feeling just a little too exposed.
Here's the question you should be asking yourself:
Since all this information is public on facebook, is it better that facebook provide the "big brother" tools to everyone, or is it better that someone else put together the equivalent "big brother" tools?
Either way you are just as vulnerable, just when facebook provides the tools everyone is made aware that they are vulnerable, when someone else puts the tools together and publishes them on his own website the only the people looking to make trouble will learn just how vulnerable you are.
So which is it? Ignorance or knowledge, you get to choose.
But the one choice people seem to want - to be protected from such tools is not an option. At least not if they want to use facebook.
The point here is that there's a big difference between simply not hiding information and blasting that information through a loudspeaker.
There WAS such a difference. Before the internet existed.
Not any more.
This reminds me of the uproar when dejanews first appeared on the scene. All these people who had made public posts to usenet under a mistaken belief that what they said would never go beyond the little "community" of that group were very unhappy to see all of there messages in a searchable database. Thing was - all of their messsages were already in searchable databases, deja was just the first time these people had access to a database themselves.
They were ignorant before and they highly resented their englightenment. Just like these facebook users. The information has always been there for the taking and even if no "private" aggregation/stalking tool existed before facebook rolled out their changes it is enough that such a tool could have existed.
Facebook's only crime here is speaking the truth.
At least now these people are aware of just how "stalkable" they have always been and can take steps to reduce their vulnerability. It's possible the result will be a mass exodus from Facebook. That's what I would consider the rational response because there is no way in hell *I* would have ever signed up in the first place since I already knew just how much such social-networking systems are the antithesis to personal privacy. For some reason, I don't think the end result here is going to be very rational, though.
For a guy who started cursing me out for being dense, you sure are the pot. It's called long-sleeves and slacks. As for looking not quite right, you don't know a thing about what you are talking about. You just haven't noticed the ones who are passable because they pass. You imply that you are in europe, go look for a tv show called "there's something about miriam" in the UK and the lawsuit it generated. Miriam's level of ability to pass was probably around the 75th percentile for that age range, and she did it in a bikini and made out with the guys.
No, but *parts* of it are. Using properly trained staff to ask pointed questions at check-in, having a properly trained observer as part of the metal detector/security gateway, etc.
No, those parts are NOT. They are EXPENSIVE. Just think about it for a second, enough people to professionally evaluate every single person getting on each plane, plus back-ups for when someone is questioned multiple times. Similarly properly, or rather effectively, trained observers of xray machines are also expensive because they burn out real quick.
In just the US alone there are about 1.8M passengers per day. The TSA currently employes over 50,000 screeners to handle that many passengers with just cursory, 4-5 second examinations of luggage. In order to include even just 30 second interrogations of every single passenger you are going to need at least the same number of people - but you are going to have to pay them more since they will be higher skilled. Right there you've probably more than doubled the entire budget of the TSA. That isn't anyone's definition of feasible.
I proposed no system.... I challenge you to quote any part of any of my posts even suggesting - let alone stating - my examples were to be considered representative of a "proper profiling system".
Maybe my constant quoting has gone over your head. Everytime I say "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists system" that's a slightly paraphrased quote from your first post. OBVIOUSLY if you know people would object to something then you know what they are objecting to. If, on the other hand, you think a proper profiling system would not cause such objections, then why did you bother making that statement in the first place?
Your "position" is that profiling won't work, based on the obviously flawed system apparently currently being used in the US.
Lol. I just said what my position was, but you know better, just like you know how freakish a depigmented woman looks, how unpassable most cross-dressers are, and how amazingly well your poorly defined, theoretical profiling system would work. You sure know a lot without any practical experience don't you? If only the real world were populated by your strawmen, then you could fix everything and make it perfect.
The benefit of it lies not in the probability of catching someone in the process of smuggling a bomb on board, but to force them to spend non-trivial amounts of time planning a mission, allowing regular intelligence and police forces to identify, locate and apprehend them beforehand.
I am begining to think you are just making stuff up as you go along. Make the system complicated so they have to plot really hard and maybe the real police will get lucky and stumble on the plot. Can you cite even one security professional, not a politician, saying something even remotely similar?
The point of security is to prevent security breaches. Preventing breaches isn't about tricking the enemy into wasting time on elaborate plots, it's to actually thwart whatever plots he comes up with.
Damn my failure to use the preview button. Grip should be gripe. Doh!
What? That totally changes the meaning. Originally I was thinking, yeah, I that is a massive grip he's got, I gotta hand it to him. Now, well, who cares?
You misunderstand. We're not talking about the police hunting for a particular suspect.
Ba-lo-ney. The original poster meant "profiling" as used by police in exactly the way I interpreted it. Your use has nothing to do with what police call "profiling." Because "paying closer attention to the 4 young minority males" gets them in trouble for racial profiling if they get caught at it. You claim I say stupid things, but you just hung yourself out to dry without that one.
You've said so many incredibly stupid things that I can't possibly address them all, but the one point I'd like to make to you is that it is not nearly as "easy" to disguise a middle eastern man as a convincing Swedish woman as you appear to believe it is.
Do you really think "she" has to be Swedish? Give me a break. Focus on the salient points - "profiling" is all about picking characteristics that you think correlate with the kind of people you are looking for. The problem is that once you start making rules to use as short cuts, those rules can be figured out and used against you.
Security screeners are not idiots.
Obviously you have not flown in the USA in the last 5 years. These people are close to making minimum wage, they have had cursory training and by no means are experts at anything.
To use a completely random system that may allow obviously sketchy people to pass through with minimal examination, because the computer didn't happen to randomly select them?
You may not get it intuitively, but a completely random system is more effective than one with rules that can be turned against itself. Its also a lot cheaper so you can do more people for the same number of dollars.
Seriously if a user is waiting for a minute or two for things to swap back in, and the user thinks that is too long, then the swap file is too big.
You can't be serious. There is no such thing as "too much swap." If there is, something is seriously broken. All I want is for the system to treat process text and data as more important to keep in RAM than buffercache. I'm not running out of RAM, it is a single 1.2-1.4GB app on a 2GB system.
Oh come on. No form of screening is perfect. It's "trivial" to overcome swipe card systems too, but guess what, people use 'em, and they aren't stupid to do so.
Oh come on. You can't seriously be comparing airport security to a swipe-card system.
Because in real life, people aren't supervillians who can effortlessley jump through endless hoops without ever tripping.
Yeah, what kind of fool thinks a handful of men could chop down the world trade center with little more than the edge of their hands.
While we are at it, I've got a related windows admin question...
How can I pin a process into RAM and make sure that all of its pages stay resident? I don't have source either, it's a proprietary app. The system will push it out of RAM in favor of buffercache, but that is a very sub-optimal for this guy, because he always ends up paging tons of stuff back in while the user sits there for a minute or two wondering if the thing crashed or what...
Talk to the police about profiling. When they have a good profile, it works.
That is the same logical fallacy that the government uses to justify the phone-tapping and tracing.
The difference is that the police have a KNOWN bad guy, a specific individual which they have already identified as having committed a crime and all the ancilliary evidence that goes with it. By "profiling" him they are matching known facts about him with a list of likely characteristics. The terrorists are UNKNOWN, all you have is a list of characteristics and by "profiling" you are trying to associate those characteristics with somebody you have no other knowledge of, who may not even exist.
It's the difference between saying the serial-killer on the lose is probably a white, middle-aged, loner and all white, middle-aged loners are probably serial killers.
If it catches any terrorists at all, it will be a success.
If it saves just one child's life then no matter the cost, it was worth it, right?
The point of profiling is not to spread the misery! Don't be flipping stupid!
It is a highly beneficial side-effect of random profiling.
The point is to effectively target your limited resources! If more ordinary travelers gets targeted than senators, it's because terrorists are more likely to pose as ordinary travelers than as senators.
You make the assumption that ratios matter but magnitudes do not. The number of senators likely to commit terrorism in person is effectively zero. But the number of ordinary travelers who are likely to commit terrorism in person may be 10,000 times greater, but 10,000 * 0 is still zero. You make no measurable improvement to your odds of catching that one in 100,000,000 terrorist if you let the senators opt out - but now you get terrorists thinking about ways to impersonate, or otherwise make use of a senator for long enough to get on the plane (like if the senator gets waived through, what are the chances his staff will get waived too, how hard is to get on staff, or switch carry-on lugage with one of the staff?` - you've created more risk, not less).
You just described - even admitted yourself - that it would not look completely normal, but rather "too perfect". I certainly know that anyone I saw who had completely flawless and pale skin, without even a freckle, would stand out.
A woman with model quality skin is far from being a prime terrorist candidate. Perfect skin is easily concealed with light make-up.
But, clearly - as described in the paper - some passengers are given more attention than others, based on criteria. Ie: they are profiled.
That level of profiling, as fully distinct from the "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" system that you proposed, is not feasible with the kind of limited resources available. El Al has essentially unlimited resources to spend on security. Do not continue to confuse their situation with the world at large.
Likewise, implying we should simply ignore all their experiences is stupid.
Unlikewise, implying that their experience has anything relevant to say about your particular "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" system is stupid.
My theory was *never* based solely on racial and cultural profiling. It certainly considered them as part of the entire process, but never proposed them as the only, or even deciding, factors. Just becuase I didn't write a ten page essay describing every nuance of a properly run airline security system in my first post,
Well, excuse me for going by what you write and not having ESP.
My position has been clearly stated, and regularly illustrated, from the start - you pick characteristics that can be altered by the people you are trying to identify and they will alter those characteristics - thus costing you resources and reducing your security. You just keep jumping from characteristic to characteristic and seem to hope that by combining them into a "system" that somehow they won't be figured out.
The position you appear to be advocating, is that since every single workable security procedure that can be envisaged, can also be subverted, then we shouldn't make any attempts at airline security at all.
All I have "advocated" is that counting on things the enemy can change is bad tactics. If I were to "advocate" a solution to the problem, I would pick things that the enemy can not change, or in changing them he neutralizes the threat himself. For example, better automated screening systems - the harder it is to take a weapon on board, the less likely a person is going to do so - regardless of race, religion, family life or anything else directly under the enemy's control.
full profiling system. I would have thought that was blatantly fucking obvious to anyone with sufficient intelligence to compile a posting to Slashdot,
I was waiting for that. You've shown that you have painted yourself into a corner.
Right. So it doesn't look especially natural at all, is what you're saying. As I suspected it wouldn't.
Lol. I've seen it myself, you haven't. More corner painting.
It is my understanding that suitably well trained behavioral analysts can identify people who are acting "unnaturally", based on both passive observation and active questioning.
You do realize that you have strayed completely from the "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" profiling system that you initially proposed, right?
I believe the Israelis have an excellent system that uses numerous procedures, scenarios and cues to screen passengers (and baggage) and allocate certain travellers more "attention" by security than others.
Allow me to quote from the paper you just read -- El Al's security system works from the assumption that every passenger is a threat
That is no longer about, "directing scarce resources where they are most likely to produce a positive result." El Al gives EVERYONE massive amounts of attention -- As El Al's president, David Hermesh, stated, "If you're a passenger on El Al, most likely you will be observed from the minute that you left your car or you have been dropped off."
Holding up El Al as an example anything even remotely feasible for the majority of the world, especially given the comparitively miniscule risk, is just silly.
Do not use the example of a plainly broken implementation to insist a theory is unworkable. It's just lazy thinking.
Its the only example we've got, plus common sense. Your theory has morphed from racial and cultural profiling to behavioural analysis under dissection, although you still appear to have faith in some sort of massive system that is itself either information starved or big brother incarnate.
I'll agree that some level of behavioural analysis has potential, although I can even think of simple ways to mess with that (e.g. $300 round of botox shots to the face kills visible evidence of anxiety, another $300's worth of shots to the sweat glands stops perspiration, and another $300 will prevent migranes in case the terrorist is subject to them too). If I can come up with that in about 2 minutes, I am sure somebody spending years on the effort can do much better.
You're also (still) ignoring the part where you're only circumventing a few of potentially dozens of criteria.
No, YOU moved past that point when you said your example was only a quickly made up hypothetical one.
And even *that* is assuming your skin-bleaching, etc process produces a result that looks natural.
It is completely indistinguishable from very fair caucasian skin - if anything it is too perfect, the result is near flawless skin that many women would kill for for since all of the pigmentation imperfections are removed. Looks a little weird on a guy, but very nice on a woman, or a female impersonator. Not that it matters since you are the one who said that it was only something you made up without much thought.
But you end up wasting equal amounts of resources on targets that do not represent equal levels of threat. It's like saying if you walk into your house being robbed by two men, one of whom is unarmed and one of whom has a pistol, that you should consider each to be of equal threat to your person, when this is almost always going to be the wrong thing to do.
Again the presumption that the characteristics that matter can be profiled. This line of thinking seems to run through all of your examples and most of your presumptions. It is NOTHING like chosing between the guy with the gun and the guy without a gun or the high-crime area vs the low crime area, etc, etc. On one hand you argue that "profiling" uses all kinds of subtle, hard to guess criteria but everytime you either list a possible criteria or make up an example, its all about blatant obvious stuff.
It is not magic. There is only so much information readily available. If you want to use non-readily available information then you get to go back and answer your own question about invasion of privacy.
The problem is that all of the stuff that "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" object to when profiling is discussed - the kind of stuff you listed in your hypothetical example about young, single, middle-eastern men from saudi - are all characteristics that don't matter. They are easily circumvented, and have such high rates of false positives, that they produce results that are less effective than completely random choices.
If there is something I'm missing here, please list just two such profileable attributes that really are both meaningful and non-obvious.
This whole thing, also, hinges on the two *massive* assumptions that a) you can actually assemble a large enough team of people that don't trigger any flags and b) that profiling criteria are both completely static and completely objective
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Testability is all that matters and when you introduce randomness into the system, that only supports my point that random is more effective than targeting statisticly meaningless characteristics.
Furthermore, a formal and comprehensive proof is not a requirement - there are heuristics that can rapidly narrow the search space - like reading web sites where travelers post their experiences in discussions like this one. You don't have to find out what it takes to get stopped, all you have to do is find out what it takes to not get stopped.
You continue to assume that the "loopholes" in a properly designed and run profiling system will be unchanging, objective, easy to identify and trivial to circumvent. These assumptions are questionable, to say the least.
Based on all the information available to me - including the whole "S" on the ticket method being used in the USA, it is a very reasonable assumption to make. You talk about this stuff like it is magic, and you haven't shown one feasible criteria that isn't also easily inferred and then circumvented. If you can't explain it, why do you believe in it so strongly?
I know a few cross-dressers and I know a person who was originally very brown and has now completely depigmented through the use of benoquin (to hide the cosmetic effects of a medical condition). The guy is even muslim, but I have not been able to convince him to go peroxide blond, he's a little sensative about the whole appearance thing and there is no chance of him ever putting on a dress.
So yeah, I sort of have done this before, at least I have personally witnessed just how easy it is to do.
While it is possible, it also gives someone else two ywars to figure out something is up and involves a number of people, any one of whom may be an informant.
The profiling is all done in public. The plotting is done in private, just like all the other threats we are so worried about. That makes it pretty damn hard to catch the plotters -- and if caught it can all be eaily explained away with non-terrorism related explanations.
Not to mention that there are very few candidates that are going to pass a visual check no matter how tightly they tape up the nads.
Ok, I guess you haven't thought it through very well. The point is to AVOID being checked in the first place. If you are getting inspected, they are gonna find the bomb/boxcutter/whatever anyway, his dick is the least of his worries at that point.
Coming up with an incredibly complex nigh-unworkable plan is not a counterpoint that carries much weight.
Just what is so complex, never mind incredible and nigh-unworkable about this plan? Go back and look it over, the hardest part is waiting for the bleach to take effect, which involves sitting around at home and watching a lot of tv. Everything else is something that regular people are doing hundreds, if not thousands, of times each day for relatively small amounts of money to boot.
The example you "laid out" is in no way, shape, or form "easy". Plus, it only manages to circumvent a few possible criteria that I happened to think of off the top of my head - not all that I could think of, and certainly not all that someone whose job it was, could think of.
It is plenty easy compared to the planning involved in 9/11 and others like oplan bojinka - the hardest part is just sitting around waiting for the bleaching to take effect, and you don't even have to do the entire body, just the visible parts.
Meanwhile you've avoided justifying your position that it isn't so easy to use a profiling system against itself. Just what part of "find out the rules, and then avoid the rules" is so complicated? If you thinking finding out the rules is the hard part, then consider the phrase "test run."
So you wouldn't consider the decision whether or not to walk through a high crime neighbourhood with a history of violent and fatal robberies or not to be a "life and death decision" ?
Just as "life or death" as deciding to eat a PB&J sandwich if you are allergic to peanuts. Your comparison misses one essential point - high-crime neighborhood means high-crime rates and the consquences of a false positive are negligible, neither are characteristics of profiling.
Racial and cultural profiling is all about focusing on characteristics that millions of harmless people also share - the very same people you want helping you, not getting mad at you for being singled out AND you also open up loopholes. With random searches there are no loopholes and you don't give the people you most want on your side reason to distrust you.
No-one said accuracy wasn't important. They said accuracy could be traded off for speed. Being 90% accurate is still better than being 10% accurate.
Based on a swag of 1 muslim male per 200 passengers (total muslim population in the usa being approximately 1-2%, 2x-3x higher in europe) and the number of actual terrorists apprehended in any context the numbers are more like 0.0000001 vs 0.0000000005 - a whole 200x better, but still so small as to be lost in the noise AND now you've got well-defined loopholes that can be used against the system.
Yeah, yeah. It's possible. IIRC however it's consider an afront to God for a man to dress in womans clothing, whether the end would justify the means in terms of shari'ah? I'm not sure.
I don't think you know what sharia is. It isn't in the quran. If you think you can just set up the system so that they have to break some imaginary religious rule in order to do harm, you haven't been paying attention.
So we rule out extreme cases and look for the more probable cases: like the trembling 20-something muslim and his two young friends from Finnsbury clutching Korans, carrying backpacks and muttering under their breath. Yes that's a naive hyperbolic example, but you'd want to check them wouldn't you? Or would you just let them pass and check that Australian Aboriginal grandma's knitting??
How about we check neither of them because, considering how many false negatives we've had since 9/11 -- 1, and that guy was half-white/half-jamaican and would have passed the 'profile' anyway, chances are neither are a problem.
Which would explain why there's so many young Swedish women (or people pretending to be) committing terrorist acts, right ? I mean, 9/11 was what - 5 years ago ? Iraq was invaded when ? Over 3 years ago ? Surely we should be seeing some of the results of these "two year" conversions by now ?
And just how many "young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia" or from anywhere else for that matter have been taking down planes since 9/11? What, none? How many have been correctly arrested because they were profiled? What, none? How many have been arrested because they were incorrectly profiled? More than a few. Seems to me that the evidence is against your position.
Sorry, but circumventing the system is nowhere near as easy as you would like to pretend it is.
Sorry, but proof by assertion is just proof by bullshiting. I laid out just how easy it is to circumvent, you are just waving your hands.
Way, *way* too late for that to be relevant.
Hardly. We still get the occasional news story about some high and mighty politician having to be subjected to the same bullshit the hoi polloi has to suffer.
One example: deciding how to get home late at night.
And by that reasoning, deciding to eat a PB&J sandwich or not is a life or death decision. I'm sorry, but you've really gone past the edge of credible with that.
Exactly. Which is precisely what has to be done when what you're doing involved millions of people and tight schedules.
So, if accuracy is not important, what is the point?
The whole point is that *someone* is at least *trying* to make it marginally more secure. It's like swiss cheese,... add enough layers and hopefully the wholes will not line up
This idiot's point is the profiling is counter-productive. It has enormous costs and negligible benefit.
If you can't understand the concept that security measures are not free - they all have costs and we have limited resources to spend on them - then you are the bigger idiot.
Suggesting that a young single woman flying out of Sweden with a round-the-world ticket is equally as likely to hijack/destroy the plane as a group of young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia, is letting your idealistic bleeding-heart-leftist-stupidity get in the way of common sense.
That is just ignorance speaking.
Given two years it is possible to convert a dark-skinned, black-haired muslim man into a "young single woman flying out of sweden."
Convert dark-skin into white - benoquin is a permanent and highly effective permanent skin bleacher. Convert black irises into blue eyes - blue contact lenses Convert black hair into blonde - peroxide - "blonde in a bottle" Convert man into woman - a thin man can easily pass for a woman with make-up, depillatory, strategic duct taping and a pair of $100 silicone bra fillers (no surgery needed for any of that). Fake-ID - steal one from a christian woman with a strong physical resemblence, hell you don't even have to steal it, just "steal her identity" and make a duplicate ID.
Buying a round-trip ticket versus one-way is trivial. As is flying out of Sweden rather than Saudi Arabia. Anything you can come up with to base your profiling on can be used to work the system. All it takes is to figure out what the profiling rules are. Then all you are left with a big false sense of security.
Plus, by profiling you make it very easy for certain people to "opt out" - like politicians and other members of government and law enforcement while the rest of the poor shlubs have to suffer through it. It's extremely important that these people not become even more sheltered from the realities of normal life (and the effects of the their own policy decisions) than they already are.
Not to mention, *everyone* "profiles", every day, all the time. It's impossible (not to mention stupid) not to.
They do it as a heuristic that saves time as a trade off for reduced accuracy. But most rational people don't make life-or-death decisions based on profiling.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget captchas, or at least forget trying to make them more than trivially solvable.
We should be treating blog spam the same way we do email spam - they are essentially the same thing. Bayesian filters and honey pots. Set up blogs that are full of lorem ipsum or something less obvious but meaningless to real humans. Then any posts that end up on those blogs can be considered spam and if similar posts show up on other blogs, just quarantine or even delete them automatically. Similarly we ought to be able to employ bayesian filters that have a broad anti-spam basic training and then are custom-trained to each site.
My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
This truth is the basis of why you are completely wrong.
Your method of accessing the information changed, but the information itself did not change and neither has anyone else's method of accessing the information.
Prior to facebook making this change, all this information was out there and could be accessed in a similar fashion, it just required 3rd party tools. You were ignorant of way other people could collect the information, now you are not. It's the exact equivalent of google coming along and providing google reader, except instead of just mentioning it in a press release, facebook built their version of "google reader" right into their user interface.
Personally, I think it is a bad business decision because people like to be ignorant, they don't like being made to realize that the world is not as safe and secure as they imagined.
Being social has always been the antithesis of privacy.*
No, and for exactly the reasons of scalability that the net brings into play.
Personal, meatspace interactions are not easily automatically recorded and indexed for access by anyone in the world. You certainly give up some level of privacy as part of social interaction, but it is far from being the antithesis of privacy.
Making people miserable is highly beneficial?!?
Making certain people personally aware of the misery they cause others is highly beneficial.
It's all pieces of a puzzle that leaves me feeling just a little too exposed.
Here's the question you should be asking yourself:
Since all this information is public on facebook, is it better that facebook provide the "big brother" tools to everyone, or is it better that someone else put together the equivalent "big brother" tools?
Either way you are just as vulnerable, just when facebook provides the tools everyone is made aware that they are vulnerable, when someone else puts the tools together and publishes them on his own website the only the people looking to make trouble will learn just how vulnerable you are.
So which is it? Ignorance or knowledge, you get to choose.
But the one choice people seem to want - to be protected from such tools is not an option. At least not if they want to use facebook.
The point here is that there's a big difference between simply not hiding information and blasting that information through a loudspeaker.
There WAS such a difference. Before the internet existed.
Not any more.
This reminds me of the uproar when dejanews first appeared on the scene. All these people who had made public posts to usenet under a mistaken belief that what they said would never go beyond the little "community" of that group were very unhappy to see all of there messages in a searchable database. Thing was - all of their messsages were already in searchable databases, deja was just the first time these people had access to a database themselves.
They were ignorant before and they highly resented their englightenment. Just like these facebook users. The information has always been there for the taking and even if no "private" aggregation/stalking tool existed before facebook rolled out their changes it is enough that such a tool could have existed.
Facebook's only crime here is speaking the truth.
At least now these people are aware of just how "stalkable" they have always been and can take steps to reduce their vulnerability. It's possible the result will be a mass exodus from Facebook. That's what I would consider the rational response because there is no way in hell *I* would have ever signed up in the first place since I already knew just how much such social-networking systems are the antithesis to personal privacy. For some reason, I don't think the end result here is going to be very rational, though.
Even on the arms and legs?
...
For a guy who started cursing me out for being dense, you sure are the pot. It's called long-sleeves and slacks. As for looking not quite right, you don't know a thing about what you are talking about. You just haven't noticed the ones who are passable because they pass. You imply that you are in europe, go look for a tv show called "there's something about miriam" in the UK and the lawsuit it generated. Miriam's level of ability to pass was probably around the 75th percentile for that age range, and she did it in a bikini and made out with the guys.
No, but *parts* of it are. Using properly trained staff to ask pointed questions at check-in, having a properly trained observer as part of the metal detector/security gateway, etc.
No, those parts are NOT. They are EXPENSIVE. Just think about it for a second, enough people to professionally evaluate every single person getting on each plane, plus back-ups for when someone is questioned multiple times. Similarly properly, or rather effectively, trained observers of xray machines are also expensive because they burn out real quick.
In just the US alone there are about 1.8M passengers per day. The TSA currently employes over 50,000 screeners to handle that many passengers with just cursory, 4-5 second examinations of luggage. In order to include even just 30 second interrogations of every single passenger you are going to need at least the same number of people - but you are going to have to pay them more since they will be higher skilled. Right there you've probably more than doubled the entire budget of the TSA. That isn't anyone's definition of feasible.
I proposed no system.
I challenge you to quote any part of any of my posts even suggesting - let alone stating - my examples were to be considered representative of a "proper profiling system".
Maybe my constant quoting has gone over your head. Everytime I say "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists system" that's a slightly paraphrased quote from your first post. OBVIOUSLY if you know people would object to something then you know what they are objecting to. If, on the other hand, you think a proper profiling system would not cause such objections, then why did you bother making that statement in the first place?
Your "position" is that profiling won't work, based on the obviously flawed system apparently currently being used in the US.
Lol. I just said what my position was, but you know better, just like you know how freakish a depigmented woman looks, how unpassable most cross-dressers are, and how amazingly well your poorly defined, theoretical profiling system would work. You sure know a lot without any practical experience don't you? If only the real world were populated by your strawmen, then you could fix everything and make it perfect.
The benefit of it lies not in the probability of catching someone in the process of smuggling a bomb on board, but to force them to spend non-trivial amounts of time planning a mission, allowing regular intelligence and police forces to identify, locate and apprehend them beforehand.
I am begining to think you are just making stuff up as you go along. Make the system complicated so they have to plot really hard and maybe the real police will get lucky and stumble on the plot. Can you cite even one security professional, not a politician, saying something even remotely similar?
The point of security is to prevent security breaches. Preventing breaches isn't about tricking the enemy into wasting time on elaborate plots, it's to actually thwart whatever plots he comes up with.
Damn my failure to use the preview button. Grip should be gripe. Doh!
What? That totally changes the meaning. Originally I was thinking, yeah, I that is a massive grip he's got, I gotta hand it to him. Now, well, who cares?
You misunderstand. We're not talking about the police hunting for a particular suspect.
Ba-lo-ney. The original poster meant "profiling" as used by police in exactly the way I interpreted it. Your use has nothing to do with what police call "profiling." Because "paying closer attention to the 4 young minority males" gets them in trouble for racial profiling if they get caught at it. You claim I say stupid things, but you just hung yourself out to dry without that one.
You've said so many incredibly stupid things that I can't possibly address them all, but the one point I'd like to make to you is that it is not nearly as "easy" to disguise a middle eastern man as a convincing Swedish woman as you appear to believe it is.
Do you really think "she" has to be Swedish? Give me a break. Focus on the salient points - "profiling" is all about picking characteristics that you think correlate with the kind of people you are looking for. The problem is that once you start making rules to use as short cuts, those rules can be figured out and used against you.
Security screeners are not idiots.
Obviously you have not flown in the USA in the last 5 years. These people are close to making minimum wage, they have had cursory training and by no means are experts at anything.
To use a completely random system that may allow obviously sketchy people to pass through with minimal examination, because the computer didn't happen to randomly select them?
You may not get it intuitively, but a completely random system is more effective than one with rules that can be turned against itself. Its also a lot cheaper so you can do more people for the same number of dollars.
Seriously if a user is waiting for a minute or two for things to swap back in, and the user thinks that is too long, then the swap file is too big.
You can't be serious. There is no such thing as "too much swap." If there is, something is seriously broken. All I want is for the system to treat process text and data as more important to keep in RAM than buffercache. I'm not running out of RAM, it is a single 1.2-1.4GB app on a 2GB system.
Oh come on. No form of screening is perfect. It's "trivial" to overcome swipe card systems too, but guess what, people use 'em, and they aren't stupid to do so.
Oh come on. You can't seriously be comparing airport security to a swipe-card system.
Because in real life, people aren't supervillians who can effortlessley jump through endless hoops without ever tripping.
Yeah, what kind of fool thinks a handful of men could chop down the world trade center with little more than the edge of their hands.
While we are at it, I've got a related windows admin question...
How can I pin a process into RAM and make sure that all of its pages stay resident? I don't have source either, it's a proprietary app. The system will push it out of RAM in favor of buffercache, but that is a very sub-optimal for this guy, because he always ends up paging tons of stuff back in while the user sits there for a minute or two wondering if the thing crashed or what...
Talk to the police about profiling. When they have a good profile, it works.
That is the same logical fallacy that the government uses to justify the phone-tapping and tracing.
The difference is that the police have a KNOWN bad guy, a specific individual which they have already identified as having committed a crime and all the ancilliary evidence that goes with it. By "profiling" him they are matching known facts about him with a list of likely characteristics. The terrorists are UNKNOWN, all you have is a list of characteristics and by "profiling" you are trying to associate those characteristics with somebody you have no other knowledge of, who may not even exist.
It's the difference between saying the serial-killer on the lose is probably a white, middle-aged, loner and all white, middle-aged loners are probably serial killers.
If it catches any terrorists at all, it will be a success.
If it saves just one child's life then no matter the cost, it was worth it, right?
The point of profiling is not to spread the misery! Don't be flipping stupid!
It is a highly beneficial side-effect of random profiling.
The point is to effectively target your limited resources! If more ordinary travelers gets targeted than senators, it's because terrorists are more likely to pose as ordinary travelers than as senators.
You make the assumption that ratios matter but magnitudes do not. The number of senators likely to commit terrorism in person is effectively zero. But the number of ordinary travelers who are likely to commit terrorism in person may be 10,000 times greater, but 10,000 * 0 is still zero. You make no measurable improvement to your odds of catching that one in 100,000,000 terrorist if you let the senators opt out - but now you get terrorists thinking about ways to impersonate, or otherwise make use of a senator for long enough to get on the plane (like if the senator gets waived through, what are the chances his staff will get waived too, how hard is to get on staff, or switch carry-on lugage with one of the staff?` - you've created more risk, not less).
You just described - even admitted yourself - that it would not look completely normal, but rather "too perfect". I certainly know that anyone I saw who had completely flawless and pale skin, without even a freckle, would stand out.
A woman with model quality skin is far from being a prime terrorist candidate. Perfect skin is easily concealed with light make-up.
But, clearly - as described in the paper - some passengers are given more attention than others, based on criteria. Ie: they are profiled.
That level of profiling, as fully distinct from the "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" system that you proposed, is not feasible with the kind of limited resources available. El Al has essentially unlimited resources to spend on security. Do not continue to confuse their situation with the world at large.
Likewise, implying we should simply ignore all their experiences is stupid.
Unlikewise, implying that their experience has anything relevant to say about your particular "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" system is stupid.
My theory was *never* based solely on racial and cultural profiling. It certainly considered them as part of the entire process, but never proposed them as the only, or even deciding, factors. Just becuase I didn't write a ten page essay describing every nuance of a properly run airline security system in my first post,
Well, excuse me for going by what you write and not having ESP.
My position has been clearly stated, and regularly illustrated, from the start - you pick characteristics that can be altered by the people you are trying to identify and they will alter those characteristics - thus costing you resources and reducing your security. You just keep jumping from characteristic to characteristic and seem to hope that by combining them into a "system" that somehow they won't be figured out.
The position you appear to be advocating, is that since every single workable security procedure that can be envisaged, can also be subverted, then we shouldn't make any attempts at airline security at all.
All I have "advocated" is that counting on things the enemy can change is bad tactics. If I were to "advocate" a solution to the problem, I would pick things that the enemy can not change, or in changing them he neutralizes the threat himself. For example, better automated screening systems - the harder it is to take a weapon on board, the less likely a person is going to do so - regardless of race, religion, family life or anything else directly under the enemy's control.
full profiling system. I would have thought that was blatantly fucking obvious to anyone with sufficient intelligence to compile a posting to Slashdot,
I was waiting for that. You've shown that you have painted yourself into a corner.
Right. So it doesn't look especially natural at all, is what you're saying. As I suspected it wouldn't.
Lol. I've seen it myself, you haven't. More corner painting.
It is my understanding that suitably well trained behavioral analysts can identify people who are acting "unnaturally", based on both passive observation and active questioning.
You do realize that you have strayed completely from the "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" profiling system that you initially proposed, right?
I believe the Israelis have an excellent system that uses numerous procedures, scenarios and cues to screen passengers (and baggage) and allocate certain travellers more "attention" by security than others.
Allow me to quote from the paper you just read -- El Al's security system works from the assumption that every passenger is a threat
That is no longer about, "directing scarce resources where they are most likely to produce a positive result." El Al gives EVERYONE massive amounts of attention -- As El Al's president, David Hermesh, stated, "If you're a passenger on El Al, most likely you will be observed from the minute that you left your car or you have been dropped off."
Holding up El Al as an example anything even remotely feasible for the majority of the world, especially given the comparitively miniscule risk, is just silly.
Do not use the example of a plainly broken implementation to insist a theory is unworkable. It's just lazy thinking.
Its the only example we've got, plus common sense. Your theory has morphed from racial and cultural profiling to behavioural analysis under dissection, although you still appear to have faith in some sort of massive system that is itself either information starved or big brother incarnate.
I'll agree that some level of behavioural analysis has potential, although I can even think of simple ways to mess with that (e.g. $300 round of botox shots to the face kills visible evidence of anxiety, another $300's worth of shots to the sweat glands stops perspiration, and another $300 will prevent migranes in case the terrorist is subject to them too). If I can come up with that in about 2 minutes, I am sure somebody spending years on the effort can do much better.
Lol. Grammar flame karma.
It happens so often that there must be some sort of universal force at work.
You're also (still) ignoring the part where you're only circumventing a few of potentially dozens of criteria.
No, YOU moved past that point when you said your example was only a quickly made up hypothetical one.
And even *that* is assuming your skin-bleaching, etc process produces a result that looks natural.
It is completely indistinguishable from very fair caucasian skin - if anything it is too perfect, the result is near flawless skin that many women would kill for for since all of the pigmentation imperfections are removed. Looks a little weird on a guy, but very nice on a woman, or a female impersonator. Not that it matters since you are the one who said that it was only something you made up without much thought.
But you end up wasting equal amounts of resources on targets that do not represent equal levels of threat. It's like saying if you walk into your house being robbed by two men, one of whom is unarmed and one of whom has a pistol, that you should consider each to be of equal threat to your person, when this is almost always going to be the wrong thing to do.
Again the presumption that the characteristics that matter can be profiled. This line of thinking seems to run through all of your examples and most of your presumptions. It is NOTHING like chosing between the guy with the gun and the guy without a gun or the high-crime area vs the low crime area, etc, etc. On one hand you argue that "profiling" uses all kinds of subtle, hard to guess criteria but everytime you either list a possible criteria or make up an example, its all about blatant obvious stuff.
It is not magic. There is only so much information readily available. If you want to use non-readily available information then you get to go back and answer your own question about invasion of privacy.
The problem is that all of the stuff that "stupid, idealistic, bleeding-heart-leftists" object to when profiling is discussed - the kind of stuff you listed in your hypothetical example about young, single, middle-eastern men from saudi - are all characteristics that don't matter. They are easily circumvented, and have such high rates of false positives, that they produce results that are less effective than completely random choices.
If there is something I'm missing here, please list just two such profileable attributes that really are both meaningful and non-obvious.
This whole thing, also, hinges on the two *massive* assumptions that a) you can actually assemble a large enough team of people that don't trigger any flags and b) that profiling criteria are both completely static and completely objective
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Testability is all that matters and when you introduce randomness into the system, that only supports my point that random is more effective than targeting statisticly meaningless characteristics.
Furthermore, a formal and comprehensive proof is not a requirement - there are heuristics that can rapidly narrow the search space - like reading web sites where travelers post their experiences in discussions like this one. You don't have to find out what it takes to get stopped, all you have to do is find out what it takes to not get stopped.
You continue to assume that the "loopholes" in a properly designed and run profiling system will be unchanging, objective, easy to identify and trivial to circumvent. These assumptions are questionable, to say the least.
Based on all the information available to me - including the whole "S" on the ticket method being used in the USA, it is a very reasonable assumption to make. You talk about this stuff like it is magic, and you haven't shown one feasible criteria that isn't also easily inferred and then circumvented. If you can't explain it, why do you believe in it so strongly?
You sound like you've done this before.
I know a few cross-dressers and I know a person who was originally very brown and has now completely depigmented through the use of benoquin (to hide the cosmetic effects of a medical condition). The guy is even muslim, but I have not been able to convince him to go peroxide blond, he's a little sensative about the whole appearance thing and there is no chance of him ever putting on a dress.
So yeah, I sort of have done this before, at least I have personally witnessed just how easy it is to do.
While it is possible, it also gives someone else two ywars to figure out something is up and involves a number of people, any one of whom may be an informant.
The profiling is all done in public. The plotting is done in private, just like all the other threats we are so worried about. That makes it pretty damn hard to catch the plotters -- and if caught it can all be eaily explained away with non-terrorism related explanations.
Not to mention that there are very few candidates that are going to pass a visual check no matter how tightly they tape up the nads.
Ok, I guess you haven't thought it through very well. The point is to AVOID being checked in the first place. If you are getting inspected, they are gonna find the bomb/boxcutter/whatever anyway, his dick is the least of his worries at that point.
Coming up with an incredibly complex nigh-unworkable plan is not a counterpoint that carries much weight.
Just what is so complex, never mind incredible and nigh-unworkable about this plan? Go back and look it over, the hardest part is waiting for the bleach to take effect, which involves sitting around at home and watching a lot of tv. Everything else is something that regular people are doing hundreds, if not thousands, of times each day for relatively small amounts of money to boot.
The example you "laid out" is in no way, shape, or form "easy". Plus, it only manages to circumvent a few possible criteria that I happened to think of off the top of my head - not all that I could think of, and certainly not all that someone whose job it was, could think of.
It is plenty easy compared to the planning involved in 9/11 and others like oplan bojinka - the hardest part is just sitting around waiting for the bleaching to take effect, and you don't even have to do the entire body, just the visible parts.
Meanwhile you've avoided justifying your position that it isn't so easy to use a profiling system against itself. Just what part of "find out the rules, and then avoid the rules" is so complicated? If you thinking finding out the rules is the hard part, then consider the phrase "test run."
So you wouldn't consider the decision whether or not to walk through a high crime neighbourhood with a history of violent and fatal robberies or not to be a "life and death decision" ?
Just as "life or death" as deciding to eat a PB&J sandwich if you are allergic to peanuts. Your comparison misses one essential point - high-crime neighborhood means high-crime rates and the consquences of a false positive are negligible, neither are characteristics of profiling.
Racial and cultural profiling is all about focusing on characteristics that millions of harmless people also share - the very same people you want helping you, not getting mad at you for being singled out AND you also open up loopholes. With random searches there are no loopholes and you don't give the people you most want on your side reason to distrust you.
No-one said accuracy wasn't important. They said accuracy could be traded off for speed. Being 90% accurate is still better than being 10% accurate.
Based on a swag of 1 muslim male per 200 passengers (total muslim population in the usa being approximately 1-2%, 2x-3x higher in europe) and the number of actual terrorists apprehended in any context the numbers are more like 0.0000001 vs 0.0000000005 - a whole 200x better, but still so small as to be lost in the noise AND now you've got well-defined loopholes that can be used against the system.
I don't know if crossdressing is haram or hadith or what
Lol, halal. Hadith is like sharia but even less binding.
I was saying was I wondered if fundamentalists would wear womens clothing even if in doing so they could fulfill their muslim calling.
Since they think killing innocents is A-OK, then clearly they are free to pick and chose what parts of their religion they are required to obey.
Yeah, yeah. It's possible. IIRC however it's consider an afront to God for a man to dress in womans clothing, whether the end would justify the means in terms of shari'ah? I'm not sure.
I don't think you know what sharia is. It isn't in the quran. If you think you can just set up the system so that they have to break some imaginary religious rule in order to do harm, you haven't been paying attention.
So we rule out extreme cases and look for the more probable cases: like the trembling 20-something muslim and his two young friends from Finnsbury clutching Korans, carrying backpacks and muttering under their breath. Yes that's a naive hyperbolic example, but you'd want to check them wouldn't you? Or would you just let them pass and check that Australian Aboriginal grandma's knitting??
How about we check neither of them because, considering how many false negatives we've had since 9/11 -- 1, and that guy was half-white/half-jamaican and would have passed the 'profile' anyway, chances are neither are a problem.
Which would explain why there's so many young Swedish women (or people pretending to be) committing terrorist acts, right ? I mean, 9/11 was what - 5 years ago ? Iraq was invaded when ? Over 3 years ago ? Surely we should be seeing some of the results of these "two year" conversions by now ?
And just how many "young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia" or from anywhere else for that matter have been taking down planes since 9/11? What, none? How many have been correctly arrested because they were profiled? What, none? How many have been arrested because they were incorrectly profiled? More than a few. Seems to me that the evidence is against your position.
Sorry, but circumventing the system is nowhere near as easy as you would like to pretend it is.
Sorry, but proof by assertion is just proof by bullshiting. I laid out just how easy it is to circumvent, you are just waving your hands.
Way, *way* too late for that to be relevant.
Hardly. We still get the occasional news story about some high and mighty politician having to be subjected to the same bullshit the hoi polloi has to suffer.
One example: deciding how to get home late at night.
And by that reasoning, deciding to eat a PB&J sandwich or not is a life or death decision. I'm sorry, but you've really gone past the edge of credible with that.
Exactly. Which is precisely what has to be done when what you're doing involved millions of people and tight schedules.
So, if accuracy is not important, what is the point?
The whole point is that *someone* is at least *trying* to make it marginally more secure. It's like swiss cheese,... add enough layers and hopefully the wholes will not line up
This idiot's point is the profiling is counter-productive. It has enormous costs and negligible benefit.
If you can't understand the concept that security measures are not free - they all have costs and we have limited resources to spend on them - then you are the bigger idiot.
Suggesting that a young single woman flying out of Sweden with a round-the-world ticket is equally as likely to hijack/destroy the plane as a group of young single "middle eastern" men with one-way tickets flyng out of Saudi Arabia, is letting your idealistic bleeding-heart-leftist-stupidity get in the way of common sense.
That is just ignorance speaking.
Given two years it is possible to convert a dark-skinned, black-haired muslim man into a "young single woman flying out of sweden."
Convert dark-skin into white - benoquin is a permanent and highly effective permanent skin bleacher.
Convert black irises into blue eyes - blue contact lenses
Convert black hair into blonde - peroxide - "blonde in a bottle"
Convert man into woman - a thin man can easily pass for a woman with make-up, depillatory, strategic duct taping and a pair of $100 silicone bra fillers (no surgery needed for any of that).
Fake-ID - steal one from a christian woman with a strong physical resemblence, hell you don't even have to steal it, just "steal her identity" and make a duplicate ID.
Buying a round-trip ticket versus one-way is trivial.
As is flying out of Sweden rather than Saudi Arabia.
Anything you can come up with to base your profiling on can be used to work the system. All it takes is to figure out what the profiling rules are. Then all you are left with a big false sense of security.
Plus, by profiling you make it very easy for certain people to "opt out" - like politicians and other members of government and law enforcement while the rest of the poor shlubs have to suffer through it. It's extremely important that these people not become even more sheltered from the realities of normal life (and the effects of the their own policy decisions) than they already are.
Not to mention, *everyone* "profiles", every day, all the time. It's impossible (not to mention stupid) not to.
They do it as a heuristic that saves time as a trade off for reduced accuracy. But most rational people don't make life-or-death decisions based on profiling.