DHS Plans Changes in Air Passenger Screening 154
narramissic writes "The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday announced plans to revamp its Secure Flight program, with the agency no longer assigning risk scores to passengers or using predictive behavior technology. In addition, the Transportation Security Administration, part of DHS, will have direct control of checking domestic passenger lists against terrorist watch lists, instead of the airlines, said DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. Just the same Marc Rotenberg, executive director of privacy advocacy group the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), notes, air passengers still can't see the reasons why they're targeted for extensive searches or kept off flights, nor can they correct bad information on the terrorist watch lists. 'The problems with the watch list are still valid and are not going away,' said Rotenberg."
I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're too dangerous to be allowed to fly
So wouldn't any real terrorist just try to get on a plane to see if the government knows about him? If he gets on with no problem, he knows they don't suspect him. If he's turned away, he knows to drop communications with the other terrorists.
This is just stupid. No matter how you phrase it.
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Insightful)
You misunderstand the purpose of the lists. It is not to "protect" anyone from "terrorists". It is to instill a climate of fear and paranoia on a daily basis, in an effort to "justify" the creep of fascism to the sheeple.
Random searches and detentions where the victim had no way to confront the charges were one of the key hallmarks of the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I worry that the next generation (maybe even the current high school kids, now) won't even KNOW what they're missing in terms of basic american freedoms
all govs, everywhere, rejoice when they get more control and keep their citizens in check and in fear. once started, they all jump on the bandwagon. I see it over in europe and even australia. lots of restrictions and oppression from the gov to the citizens. if all the govs are doing it, you can't GO anywhere to find a breath of fresh air anymore.
I remember the 60's and the revolution that was going on, then. now we have a different revolution, but its being held BY the governments and its to keep its people in fear. greatest control stems from fear. (see Religion for more on this subject.)
really - I worry that over the next 20 yrs, people will have forgotton what going on an airplane and NOT having to take shoes off was like. ahhh, the good old days when your own foot odor was your own business
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Human life and memory seem so short -- the generations turn too quickly. Now I understand how vitally important it is to teach history.
Sick? Vote for Ron Paul (Score:4, Informative)
Check out Ron Paul's voting record if you haven't already. He is the most popular canididate on the Net.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That was a rhetorical question.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the mainstream has moved so far away from the ideals that this country was founded on, and so far away from the Constitution, and so far away from liberty, that to speak the words the Founding Fathers of the US once did, sounds a bit nuts these days.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If by mainstream you mean Republican neocons, that would make your statement right, but they are not mainstream.
rd
Re: (Score:2)
Thats a cop-out. The "everybody changed but me" line sounds quite hollow and cliche'.
I am a conservative voter. I don't agree 100% with any candidate, and I have some serious fundamental disagreements with some of them (like Sen. Clinton), but I must s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Check this:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul-arch.html [lewrockwell.com]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Not quite, you have been subject to Terry stops [wikipedia.org] since 1968. Clearly that was all part of Dubya's master plan.
On the past, before Bush Neo-Con dictatorship, they used to get upset but answer on an educated and respectful tone. Now, they will usually say: "step out of the car, sir", and try to humiliate me, as they a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You'd need to make sure that it was a knife suitable for eating food with, since that would be what the vast majority of passengers would want one for.
You could also have NRA Airlines, if you don't have your own gun, the (well armed) flight attendents will issue you with one for the flight.
Re: (Score:2)
Even if you come up with a screening method to detect this you are still playing the "movie plot" game. Once screening methods are known, people are likely to come up with ways to render them ineffective. (Though smuggling is a more likely motivation than terrorism.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The womenfolk in my family feel safer at the airport when a
Then I ask them about Jeam Charles De Menezes [wikipedia.org], and then what they think would happen if a suicide bomber were to run past a queue of passengers. What would happen to the bullets that miss the guy?
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, one of the ways drugs were smuggled was inside a bag, inside a liquid. It makes it harder for the drug dogs to smell it, as the scent is masked by the liquid. This is why you are limited to 100ml, in a clear plastic bag.
The more you know.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose that's plausible, however, given no upper limit for the amount of liquids allowed on checked luggage these precautions seem pointless. Besides, smuggling drugs is a point A to point B deal, no need to have them within immediate reach. If you could clarify though...
Re: (Score:2)
With you separated from your bags, they are free to take as much (or as little) time to search as possible. Luggage delays get blamed on the airline (been there, done that). As for the carry-ons, you have people in line, and a (relatively) fixed amount of time to process them in. By having people remove their liquids beforehand (and put them in a nice clear bag),
Re: (Score:2)
My own personal example - I fly to the US maybe once a year at the moment. I've been flagged variably, but not consistently.
One year I get the "SSSS" on the
Re: (Score:2)
meanwhile, an entry screening system goes down at LAX and 8,000 passengers are stranded for hours upon end. The one reason given so far is an optical fiber line going down. Personally, I don't trust anything this government administration says.
rd
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:4, Interesting)
True story: My grandfather used to take a walk every morning down to his local shooting range. He'd pick up trash, and sometimes brass for loading his own cartridges. On this particular morning, he happened to find a
An old man managed to beat airport security without even trying in the days immediately following 9/11. It has never entered my head that terrorists couldn't do the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Glass knives are obvious, but they are also useless in this situation. Coming up with an idea is easy, coming up with a useful idea is something el
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Doing something that will threaten a person's life *will* get them to react. Every time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Here's the only scenario I can think of where hijacking a plane might work: The hijackers send a note forward with a stewa
Re: (Score:2)
Wait -- you had me going right up to this point. What airport was that, exactly, where they let you get through the security gate without a valid boarding pass in hand?
I've travelled a fair bit by air in the last couple of years (mostly across North America but a couple
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No practical difference. No plane load of passengers will meekly sit while an armed hijacker takes over a plane now. There will be enough "nothing to lose, let's roll" types who'll rush him regardless of him shooting some of the
Re:I'm still not understanding that. (Score:4, Insightful)
As good or better than a gun when you are talking about taking over a plane. Don't forget that the 9/11 hijacking were done with knives. You can incite much more terror and pain with some well placed cuts than with a gun. The only way that a handful of people ever take over a plane filled with over a hundred passengers is through psychological control. If they really internalised that the only way they would live would be to overcome the hijacker, then they would overcome the hijacker by sheer numbers, even if it meant attacking until the ammo ran out. But that will almost never be the case, just given the faintest promise of being let go if they coopperate will subdue most people, even making some passengers stop any attempt to over power the hijackers. As most authority today is ultimately achieved through threats and force, people are well conditioned to submit when confronted with a non-choice like "Open the cockpit door or I will have to cut this young lady. Don't make me have to cut her." From and outside objective view we can say that it doesn't matter if they are all going to die anyhow, and the only one making the hijacker hurt the young lady is the hijacker. But the people actually inside the plane are going to turn to appeasing the violent forces in hopes of survival. If offered something that looks like a choice, people will try to appease violence rather than combat it, it's been demonstrated thousands of times through out human history.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, congress (and through it's actions, TSA and DHS) need to look like theyre being strong and "doing something" about a threat amped up by the 24/7 media's need to have high impact news to generate revenue. People are -already- so paranoid and scared becaus
Re: (Score:2)
Bruce Schneier had an interesting piece on this a while back on this sort of Cover-Your-Ass security [schneier.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The TSA wants to be sure that if there's another airplane terrorist attack, it's not held responsible for letting it slip through. I believe they're forever looking backwards, but the reasoning isn't as much to prevent themselves from being held responsible as it as to comply with direct, specific requests from Congress in combination with the facts that
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Every day, about 3000 people die on the roads somewhere in the world. A September 11 every day. A
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not suggesting that we give in to the dark side.
However, I don't see any point punishing the 19 suicide terrorists that flew the planes into things.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually that may be the best course of action. Terrorists don't have the means to cause much actual damage, they are doing attacks to get attention and to spread terror among the people they target. Ignoring them would defeat their main strength which is the feeling of insecurity and fear they create and leave them as random murderers. They don't possess the means to kill their enemies faster than those regrow (the US population grows fast enough that the 30
Re: (Score:2)
Right now, the economy basically exploits people in poor countries. That can't be changed overnight, we rely
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually a truely random method of selecting people for additional searches is likely to be more effective than any kind of list/profiling. Any terrorist group with a braincell between them can quickly find out which of their operatives is allowed to board with the minimum of searches if there is any non random element involved.
Re: (Score:2)
See the problem? Isolated criteria such as random searches aren't a good way to define any kind of political or economic system. Another problem is that your linkage of the single common criterion is made to two regiemes which were almost 180 degrees completely the opposite of each other in almost every way.
I'm not saying that random searche
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Psychological discomfort (Score:2)
Wait, something's not right. These false dilemmas seem not to work very well.
The problems you're grappling with are an unstated assumption of a right to air travel and the expectation that a person's status is either clearly "good citizen" or "criminal scum". While we would like that to be the case, with a presumption that a person is a "good citizen" un
Re: (Score:2)
a presumption that a person is a "good citizen" unless proven otherwise
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "innocent until proven guilty", which is a cornerstone of many modern legal systems. Or, to quote from the decision of Coffin v. United States:
The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law....
While it may not be convenient for law enforcement and security to follow this, ignoring basic rights chips away at the very democracy that the law enforcement is sworn to protect.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
An interesting question to ask would be if people who have been responsible for "air rage" get added to such lists. If such people don't automatically get listed then it rather indicates that safety of flights isn't the aim.
no longer no longer assigning risk scores (Score:3, Funny)
Does that mean they are doing it again?
De Ja Vu (Score:5, Funny)
This can only mean they changed something in the Matrix
It's really this simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Your American airlines are losing my potential travel dollars because of your stupid government.
I hope the industry tanks.
Don't Tell Us (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't tell us. Write a letter to the airlines. Write a letter to the US board of tourism (or whatever it's called). If enough people do that it might start the pendulum swinging back towards sanity.
Re: (Score:2)
Carnival Booth Attach (Score:5, Informative)
Air travel security is worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
*The security line ID checker occasionally checking people's IDs, then turning around to talk to his co-worker and letting people pass, then randomly checking IDs.
*A second TSA staff member knocking on the glass trying to get the attention of a friend of hers, then making faces like you'd see kids do in high school
*A sporadic "take out all of your electronics" followed by "only laptops" followed by "only electronics bigger than your hand need to be removed from your bag."
Anyone who travels on a regular basis (I fly about 100,000 miles a year) knows that behavior like this is unsurprising, but I'm just getting to the point where I've had enough. If we're going to enforce security, how about actual enforcing effective security protocols rather than making sure that my shaving creams fits in a ziploc bag?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it's unprofessional, and that's a point well taken. But it's one of the few instances I've heard of where TSA employees actually demonstrate that they might be, you know, human. It's a tough job, having to enforce stupid rules and pretending that you have any effe
Re:Air travel security is worthless (Score:4, Informative)
A few days ago I was flying out of Tel Aviv on El Al. Yeah, that's right, the airline that cares more about *real* security and is a far more tempting target than any of these US airlines. And I didn't have to present my plastic bag, or remove my shoes or belt! (of course they do scan the baggage, and question each passenger a bit more thoroughly than they ever do in the US, but it was still a far more pleasant experience than checking back in with Continental in Newark on my way back.)
The TSA is all about making it look like they're doing something, instead of actually doing something. I once heard it said that you simply cannot apply logic to security policy, since then it will never make sense to you. I'm curious what the next hairbrained terrorist scheme will be, and what sort of totally senseless travel restrictions will be added as a result. Any ideas?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Some detectors have a random number generator so they will bleep every nth passenger irrespective of any metal that you have. I once commented passing through Frankfurt that I knew that apart from the zipper in my pants, all metal was out of my pockets and I was still 'beeped' for a hand search. The person who searched me commented that they had a hand search frequency dictated
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The ID checker is not employed by the TSA and ID checking is not considered a responsibility of the TSA. The ID checker is either employed by the airlines or the local airport authority or some combination thereof (you can verify this by the fact that they wear a different uniform from TSA agents. I left from San Antonio airport a few days back an
So? (Score:2, Funny)
Wait, what was I talking about? Who are you? Where are my pants?!
Great (Score:2)
Fun with watchlists (Score:2)
Just this past month, My grandfather passed away, and we (My wife, My 20 month old son, and I) flew to Florida for the funeral. Of course, being that we couldn't really plan this trip ahead, we flew with tickets that we had purchased the day before. We get to the airport, only to be told that we would have to go through extra security because my wife is on the "Watch List"
Here's the kicker, Both my wife and I hold valid Maine State CHRC Cer
Re: (Score:2)
The extra security for being "on the watch list" is, as I understand it—and certainly my w
Again, meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
See, they're smarter than you think! They knew you were going to post this awful opinion of them on Slashdot today, so they put you on that list years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
I've never been told exactly why I can't get on a plane, but it can't be my appearance, I'm 6'4" with blue eyes and blonde hair. I look as Aryan as anyone can.
So what?
Good for you that you're white.
What makes you think only non-white people are on the terrorist watch list?
Did you buy the party line that terrorists = brown people
I feel like you fundamentally misunderstand the point of a terrorist watch list.
The goal is to keep terrorists out.
Not just to keep out Islamic extremists.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Is meh Swedish, Irish or German?
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, time probably wouldn't be a factor if it was cheaper, but the round trip from London to Paris costs ~$100 to $150. For the same price, you can fly pretty much anywhere in the US. There's a reason long haul rail tr
Unfortunate choice (Score:2)
Couple this with (in the media's view) a clear choice: either "do something" or take the risk that there will be another aircraft involved in everyone on board dying intentionally. And maybe a bunch of people on the ground as well. It simply isn't s
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
a) Something must be done!
b) This is something.
c) Therefore, it must be done!
The first problem is that the government's "solution" is not a solution, it is demonstrably completely ineffective.
Second, there is indeed a trade-off between wasting enormous amounts of time and resources and saving lives. Most likely, if all motor vehicles were governed to be unable to exceed 15 MPH, there would be almost no deaths due to motor vehicle accidents. But would it be worth
Just because they say they won't... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend who had his house raided many years ago because of the chemicals he was keeping for making fireworks (not you're crappy little fireworks, but cluster shells and the whole shebang). Due to his age, if he didn't reoffend (which he did, but never got caught or charged) it was to be permanently wiped from his record once he turned 18.
He is now in his 20s (and has a second job in the pyrotechnics industry), yet every time he steps on a plane he gets the full bomb treatment, they even do mouth swabs.
So as I said, just because they say they won't doesn't mean it. And this is in Australia.
Re: (Score:2)
Did Digg just change its interface? (Score:2, Funny)
The Gestapo Lives ... (Score:2)
The only way to do this "gently" at all is to give Homeland Security complete access to airline records (which is illegal no matter how you slice it). A more realistic method and seemingly part of this plan, is to either have armed Homeland Security officers in every airpor
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to the US. Where public transportation is only really used in NYC. Eve
Re: (Score:2)
2) I'm not sure what the stuff you say in the middle has to do with the topic or
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you should read about some coup d'etats in history. Controlling the transport hubs, including airports, as well as mass media such as TV stations, is typically a major objective.
You can't control a people if you can't direct where they go (transport) and what they believe (TV).
Lessons from the anti-virus world (Score:3, Insightful)
Who earns money from post-911 security? (Score:2)
Am I the only one suspecting that all this paranoia about security and terrorism may in fact be driven partly by the security corporations? Surely, this paranoia is being pushed by the governments for practical reasons (there ARE hostile terrorists out there, unfortunately), as well as for political reasons (1984), but there must be an economic factor as well. Some people who have influence over the governments must earn lots of money by selling various security-related products and services, just like de
Financial cost of security (Score:2)
I am afraid that with the billions we spend in ineffective and often unneeded security, we run ourselves out of money while the terrorists laugh behind our back. We essentially blow ourselves up by destroying our economy and our civilisation, effectivelly doing exactly what the terrorists want.