Homeland Security Tracks Information of Travelers 338
feuerfalke writes "Homeland Security recently disclosed a plan regarding an Automated Targeting System, or ATS, that would generate a 'terrorist risk rating' based on information collected about the traveler. This information would include things such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and the meals they ordered in-flight. These ratings have now been assigned to millions of international travelers, including Americans, and the ATS is exempt from many provisions of the Privacy Act — one cannot view their rating or the information used to generate it."
So if you're flagged ... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is like the no-fly list only worse then, isn't it? An algorithm kicks out the belief that you must be a terrorist, and anytime you go anywhere it's gonna beep and you get cold hands and lube once again.
I hope this gets shot down by a court, because way too many scary things are being passed that exempt themselves from any sort of oversight and transparency. I can envision a lot of people deciding they don't really wish to fly to the US anymore. It's impossible to do without having your privacy invaded or running the risk of ending up on some secret CIA flight or something.
they probably do this for domestic travels as well (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying this out of paranoia - I'm saying this from personal experiences. I took a trip about a year ago to attend my brother's wedding. As luck would have it, my birthday had passed while I was at my travel destination, and with all the wedding and family stuff going on, I failed to realize that my drivers license had expired while I was at my travel destination. When I went to go on my return flight, I was flagged for "special" scanning/treatment, and I've been "randomly selected" to be frisked every time I travel after that as well. They can look through my bags all they want, but I must admit I seriously dislike (though I tolerate it to avoid conflict with the TSA) being frisked like that by some stranger every time I travel.
I'm certain some good jokes will follow this, but at least learn from my mistake: make sure your drivers license (even though is technically valid 30 days after expiration) does not expire in the midst of your travels!
Re:Wasn't this talked about at LEAST 2 years ago? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, about four years ago, I was flagged for a super-duper security check at the Denver airport because I was flying on a last-minute one-way flight (bought with a debit card!) as I rushed in to put out a fire at a hosting operation. So there's me, looking more than a little bedraggled, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a laptop bag stuffed with some mysterious-looking replacement parts. The very nice, but very thorough inspectors told me that I should completely expect every flight I take for the following several years to end up going exactly the same way, because the profiling has some real inertia to it. They were correct, as I've gotten the (polite/thorough) treatment every time since, even when traveling on more conventionally purchased tickets. Maybe it's my warm, fuzzy personality.
Not really. It's behavioral profiling - a lot more effective than skin-based profiling. Something that doesn't seem to get the coverage it's supposed to in recent flaps like the imam-fest the other day. (hint: loudly uttering "allah" and dispersing your group of six guys in pairs to the wrong parts of the airplane rather invites a look at your behavior). I may have the imam hair, and perhaps my shoes COULD explode after standing in them for 48 hours straight in front of a rack of servers, but I don't tend to send a lot of those other signals. On the other hand, I've met some very nice TSA people - they keep the best ones on the sidelines for the personal inspections, it seems.
Re:Sounds like.... (Score:3, Interesting)
From the Mod FAQ: The same as being sent to GITMO. No meta mods (courts), just 'other peoples opinion' when the victim^H^H^H^H^H^H *cough* terrorist doesn't follow Slashdot groupthink.
Re:Wasn't this talked about at LEAST 2 years ago? (Score:3, Interesting)
A religious obligation for over a billion people five times a day.
The other noteworthy point is that *after* they were dogsniffed, searched and cleared, US Airways refused to sell them replacement tickets. US Airways pointed them to other airlines, which proves it wasn't a safety issue.
Re:So if you're flagged ... (Score:1, Interesting)
I helped design expert systems and AI apps for a large university during my graduate years.
I gotta tell you, it all depends on the criteria. For instance, while designing an essay grading system, I trained the system against actual humans. The humans generally didn't know the names of the individuals, just the essays. But we had some extra human raters sitting around after they had done their work and we still had 6 months of trials to go where they were going to get paid one way or another.
So we gave them all print outs of the papers with randomized 'stereotypical' names. Didn't tell them what we were doing, which was actually a bit unethical. Trained the computer against these and had the computer know the names as well.
The computer with no overt racial bias in our programming would give Sally Smith a better score that LaWanda Jackson -- same essay. Only marginal, but the bias was there.
Never published the results because human subjects would have beaten the shit out of all those involved, and so would our raters after calling them a bunch of racist inbred rednecks. At the same time, it gave us ideas on how to reduce cultural bias in the scoring from other areas (such as identifying cultural equivalents in writing styles and tweaking the code so that bias was reduced).
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Now think of this as if it were not simply a number a scientist has devised by identifying characteristics of terrorists, but analyzing the work of those in the FBI or military as they go through a standardized method of determining if in fact someone is a terrorist. The standardized portion only goes towards what information they have access to, and how they can handle it. No way to standardize the cognitive portions of whats going on. Each officer has a different means of weighing the same info. Depending on the abilities and strengths of the intelligent agent they are adapting to identify terrorists, it may now be imprinted with racial tendencies.
Re:How can anyone think profiling works? (Score:4, Interesting)
* In 1986, who attempted to smuggle three pounds of explosives onto an El Al jetliner bound from London to Tel Aviv?
d. A pregnant Irishwoman named Anne Murphy
That's probably the worst example I could think of if your trying to defend Arabs from the "Arabs want to blow up airplaes" sterotype. Ann Murphy had no intention of killing anyone. Her Jordanian fiancée, Nizar Hindawi, planted those three pounds of explosives in her bag and convinced her to go on the trip. When he was captured he claimed that this was done at the urging of high ranking officers in the Syrian Airforce. In short: At the behest of Syria a "Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40" was willing to kill his fiancée, his child, and 375 passengers.
Re:How can anyone think profiling works? (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as you're using concepts from game theory, let's introduce the concept of "zero sum." Because it's not just that profiling doesn't work - profiling may actually worsen security.
At any given point in time, a security checkpoint has fixed amount of resources to scrutinize passengers. Under profiling, you are devoting greater manpower to searching the Arabs' bags than you would under no profiling. That means that you are actually devoting less resources to scrutinizing the pregnant Irishwomen's bags than you would under no profiling. So if the bad guys can make an educated guess about who does and doesn't fit the profile, profiling actually helps them.
Profiling + Savvy bad guys = Worse security
Re:Execution (Score:4, Interesting)
This place is freak'n surreal.
Re:Just what was "propaganda"? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The grandparent posters examples might have stretched back a while, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. His examples illustrate that terrorism and ends-justify-the-means violence is nothing new, and that people of more than one faith are capable of doing it.
Furthermore, in a historical context, they illustrate that the current paranoia displayed to the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims because of a the actions of a tiny fraction of people of that faith is an inappropriate overreaction. The actions of a few don't dictate the beliefs and intentions of the many, so don't fall into the trap of making that mistake.
2. You quote a website that clearly has an agenda, and that agenda is colouring Islam as a religion that is based on hate and which is driven by the need to murder others. Even if their stats are 100 percent accurate, do you have similar figures for other religions? Can you honestly claim that, say, Christians, Jews, Bhuddists or people of any other faith are less destructive and can you back it up with any data?
Yes, some misguided Muslims have killed others in the name of their religion, but so have others of other faiths. Yes, some extracts of the Koran can be interpreted violently, but so can some extracts of the Bible, the Torah, etc. If you're going to sweepingly condemn people for the actions of their brethren, or for the words written in their holy texts, then I think you're going to condemn almost everybody on the planet.
Certainly, it makes me glad to be agnostic when I see people colouring things the way that you do here. I don't know if there is a God, so I don't have a side, and I certainly don't have an agenda. As someone who's walked past IRA bombs minutes before they've exploded and whose girlfriend was on a London Underground train while some were being blown up last year I'm in no doubt that you don't have to be of a certain religion, creed, colour or cause to want to kill someone.
There is one thing that I don't doubt though: it's that people who only see one worldview and who demonise those that have differing worldviews are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And in case it passes over your head, that applies to you just as much as it applies to the Al Qaedas and IRAs of this world.
Re:So if you're flagged ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only does it sound like that, it is like that. There was, f'rinstance, the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, who was pulled while transferring planes and sent off to be tortured in Syria.
I'm surprised that all foreign travellers are not making a helluvan effort to avoid touching-down in the USA.
You're sticking your head in the sand (Score:1, Interesting)
2. Yes, it's obvious that http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ [thereligionofpeace.com] has an agenda. No doubt about it. But even if you discount all the singular slayings as criminal acts that don't belong, and toss out everything that's in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're left with literally hundreds of acts like bombings, honor killings, and Islamic-inspired slayings of Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus. No one has numbers like that for any other religion for the simple reason no other major religion today literally has any significant numbers of followers who are exhorted to kill for their religion. The only one that does that is Islam - where entire countries are urged to kill infidels. Go to another fact-filled but agenda-driven site to read about it: http://www.memri.org./ [www.memri.org] IIRC that site is run by ex-Mossad or Shin Bet. But there's nothing there but documented facts - and that's scary.
3. Others have brought up the Inquisition and the Crusades as evidence of Christian moral equivalence to Islam. Please note that those both predate the Enlightenment and the Reformation. Islam abandoned rationality 800 years ago. I believe the relevant word is itjihad. Why is it that even today Islamic leadership almost unanimously calls for the imposition of sharia, even in places like Canada?
4. If you don't think Islam is different from other religions, tell me any other religion extant today that has the equivalents of Salman Rushdie and Theo van Gogh. Go and research jizya. I was going to crack a joke about Scientology here, but the more I think about it, the more accurate that comparison might be - Islam is Scientology with a billion followers, several countries under control, lots of money, and soon nuclear weapons. And with an infallible L. Ron Hubbard as Mohammed, preaching "kill the infidels" instead of "give me money". Don't think so? Something like 15% or so of British Muslims openly admit to supporting the London bombings. Now, put that into the context of the Islamic concept of taqiyya.
Don't believe me? Read what Iranian President Ahmadinejad says. It's right out of the Quran. Listen to Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Those guys are saying they're going to kill infidels, and they're actually going about the process of either actively doing that or openly collecting the weapons that could do so.
This is a scary time - and a Dark Age is looming if we don't stand up for classical Western values against a religion who murders those who demand equal rights for women, a religion that condones the stoning of gays and lesbians, a religion that misogynistically promises 72 virgins to those that die while trying to kill infidels, and a religion that makes the most strident Bible-thumping Creationist look like an absolute scientific Einstein.
Just look what's happening in France. And the Netherlands. [bbc.co.uk]
Explain how all that's "shortsighted". I see a threat to Western values like human rights and the equality of all men and especially women being threatened by an evil, elemental force that has way too much potential to make Hitler look like a passing windstorm.