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Canada Government Privacy Wireless Networking

Canadian Spy Agency Snooped Travelers With Airport Wi-Fi 159

Walking The Walk writes: "It seems the NSA isn't the only agency doing illegal domestic spying. According to a Snowden document obtained by the CBC, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) has apparently been tracking domestic travelers, starting from when they first use free Wi-Fi at an airport, and continuing for days after they left the terminal. From the article: 'The document indicates the passenger tracking operation was a trial run of a powerful new software program CSEC was developing with help from its U.S. counterpart, the National Security Agency. In the document, CSEC called the new technologies "game-changing," and said they could be used for tracking "any target that makes occasional forays into other cities/regions."' The CBC notes early in the article that the spy agency 'is supposed to be collecting primarily foreign intelligence by intercepting overseas phone and internet traffic, and is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada without a judicial warrant.' Predictably, CSEC's chief is quoted saying that they aren't allowed to spy on Canadians, so therefore they don't. As observed by experts consulted for the story, that claim is equivalent to saying that they collect the data but we're to trust that they don't look at it."
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Canadian Spy Agency Snooped Travelers With Airport Wi-Fi

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  • by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:01PM (#46120397) Journal

    And I thought you were so nice and polite.

    I guess you were spying, but politely.

    • "Geography made us neighbours, NSA made you my slave".
      • Legal under the principles of "we have no idea who owns the computers we are tracking, therefore they aren't definitely Canadian" and "airports have planes that transport people to other countries, therefore it's like the people are standing in other countries".

    • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:05PM (#46120441) Homepage Journal

      It's "eh! tu" eh!

      former resident of the Great White North

    • Re:Et tu, Canada? (Score:4, Informative)

      by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:11PM (#46120507)

      And I thought you were so nice and polite.

      Not everyone in Canada is polite [foxnews.com], and the Canadian government has its own security concerns of many types [telegraph.co.uk].

      • by lxs ( 131946 )

        Not polite? Just because they drive a truck and not a hybrid? That's a bit much!

    • by Anonymous Coward

      (from the summary) ...they collect the data but we're to trust that they don't look at it

      That's the wrong way of evaluating the situation. The correct way is to realize that IF they were trustworthy, then they wouldn't be spying on innocent people (you) in the first place.

    • They are being polite. You have to voluntarily join a public and un-trusted network to allow them to snoop. At that point, you are practically leaving your doors and windows wide open for someone to break into your home, so to speak.
      • And if You and I were to setup the same kind of snooping network, we would be jailed. But the laws don't apply the same when you're powerful/rich/government.

    • by davecb ( 6526 )

      According to a former boss, CSE is a really polite bunch of folks. They seem be be polite evil this week, though.

    • Excuse me sir, but I believe that based you accidentally overpaid for your timbits and coffee, can you report back to Tim Horton's.
      Oh, and this long cylindrical object with a fuse that was in your check-on, you can have this back now, thanks.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:02PM (#46120411)

    They spent a lot of time on this story last night and let the privacy comissioner speak her mind about it. I didn't expect such unbiased open coverage of this topic by our state broadcaster.

    • Governments of the day would love us to have a "state broadcaster", and might also prefer to have a pliant privacy commissioner, but neither report directly to the PM. It's admittedly hard for them to honour and defend our constitution (to borrow a U.S. phrase) but they manage somehow.
    • Back when I was in Canada, CBC was routinely reporting on various fuck-ups by the government. They didn't seem to be in any way biased in favor of the latter.

      It's what convinced me that state-funded media can be objective (I hail from a country where it is very much not the case, and assumed it to be universal).

  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:04PM (#46120433) Homepage Journal

    We'll send this junk [whitehouse.gov] back, up to 221K, so far.

  • Three words (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    RANDOM MAC ADDRESSES.

    Chances are they're tracking people by MAC. Set up a cron job on your device to *ahem* adjust your MAC address with some regularity. You need to maintain a connection, so perhaps every hour? Or tie it to GPS coordinates or SSID names and when they change, update the MAC to something random...

    The trick will be to make sure you don't repeat MAC's - probably want to keep an encrypted DB of hashs of the MAC's so you can verify you haven't used it previously before assigning a new one...

    E

    • Re: Three words (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The use of tracking MAC addresses is nothing new. In Sydney, Australia, there are traffic lights fitted with surveillance equipment. This information came out during a television story on ABC tv. What the government is doing is targeting bluetooth/wifi enabled devices, logging them into a database then the owners are tracked around the city. The government claimed that MAC addresses were not personally identifying so it's not a concern. The fact is that MAC addresses are identifiable and can be linked to wh

  • I'm sure the NSA has already thought of this. The only airport that I have been through that has free WiFi is in New Orleans. Everywhere else you pay if you want access. What a country.

    • Why exactly are you entitled to free WiFi in airports?

      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Selling point to compete with American airports. In Canada the airports are financed by ticket surcharges so many people cross the line to fly out of American airports as the whole airport is free.

        • How much gas are you burning to avoid $5 of WiFi fees?

          • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

            How much gas are you burning to avoid $5 of WiFi fees?

            If your flight goes US->Canada->Europe (for example), you can often save hundreds of dollars by driving to America and catching the flight there rather than joining the flight at your local airport when it lands in Canada.

            No, it doesn't make sense to Canadians, either.

          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            As the sibling post says, it is much cheaper to catch a flight from an American airport, not just to Europe either but pretty well anywhere. This is (at least partly) due to Canadian airports having to be self-financing and people expect some perks like free WIFI after paying the extra charges.

  • I would like to know CSEC would get from YVR WiFi. It is so slow that it is useless except for slow surfing on internet web pages.

    • I would like to know CSEC would get from YVR WiFi. It is so slow that it is useless except for slow surfing on internet web pages.

      It's so slow because they're too busy vacuuming the data off of your device, perhaps?

      • and they don't have the budget of the NSA...they only have a single computer with a Core2Duo to do all the computers in the airport

  • It seems the fact you travel internationally is a great reason to keep tabs on you. Add mobile phones and laptops to the list of things you shouldn't carry when traveling internationally if you wish to avoid security hassle, along with explosives, guns, drugs, knives, scissors, nail clippers, tweezers, breast milk, toothpicks, sports equipment, medicines, tent pegs, children, people named Mohammed....

    • But traveling without a mobile phone could itsself be taken as a sign of suspicion. It's abnormal behavior, and might be expected of someone trying to avoid tracking.

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Yeah...those people named mohammed are likely to be waved through if in your group. However your 4 year old daughter is likely to get her first groping by the government...sorry I mean "enhanced pat down."

  • by Xaedalus ( 1192463 ) <Xaedalys@yaho[ ]om ['o.c' in gap]> on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:38PM (#46120759)

    Democratic governments the world over are in a classic catch-22: they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. Prior to 9-11, we had pretty good safeguards in place against domestic spying. Watergate and the revelations of what J. Edgar Hoover did put a bad taste in everyone's mouth in the US about domestic spying. Then a bunch of nihilistic apostate Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, and over 3000 Americans died in the space of a single morning. The entire world watches in shock and horror--and then following America's lead, immediately begins investigating how this could have happened. And as the US discovers very quickly, it happened due to intentional inefficiencies and silo-ization of intelligence.

    If there is one thing we Americans cannot stand more than anything else, it's inefficiency. We want our government/society/economy to WORK, dammit! Make it effective and efficient! The families of 9/11, and the politicians discover to their horror that this all could have easily been prevented, had we made our internal counterintelligence and domestic crime monitoring more efficient. The worst part is that 9/11 really could have been prevented --so easily--, and that's what led to the Patriot Act, the NSA, all of it. And it's not just America that learns this lesson.

    So now the Canadians are following in America's footsteps, because no government, Liberal or Conservative, wants to be blamed for the next attack. And, there always will be a next attack. Maybe not from Islamists, maybe not from brown-skinned people, but there always will be. No one wants to be the one person on the news who's faced with the "Why didn't you stop this!" question. Imagine if you will what would have happened if John Ashcroft and President Bush had stepped up together following 9/11 and said "We understand that this could have been prevented if the FBI, CIA, and NSA had shared their information, but we're not about to dismantle federal policy to facilitate that because we don't want to turn America into a police state". Just imagine for a moment, the response that would have come to that statement from an enraged nation--let alone the entire state of New York.

    What's really, really funny is that on /., we are all pro-privacy, pro-dismantling of the security apparatus. But none of us ever stop to consider if we'd change our tune, if one of our family or loved ones was suddenly, inexplicably killed in a horrible way--and then discover that said death could have been easily prevented if only X and Y agencies had bothered to share their information. And here's why this problem will never be solved--most of us have never been confronted with the desire for justice/vengeance, the anger of being a victim of system failure, and then understanding that there was a reason for the inefficiencies in the first place. Knowing what we know now, can any of us truly say that we'd face 300 million people (or 20 million if you're Canadian) and say "I know we could have easily prevented this tragedy, but we're not going to put in place the fixes that would prevent a future tragedy like this because we believe the outcome would be worse than the disease." And if you are willing to do so, are you willing to face a lifetime of condemnation and excommunication from everything you hold dear?

    Nah, the biggest joke is that this shit HAS to happen, and then we have to go through years of rollbacks and abuses and fighting to undo all the damage, only to have it happen all over again and a new generation has to relearn the lessons. This is life, people. This is human nature. There is no answer, there is only the cycle.

    • But you're completely correct. The world is going back to a bi-polar state, with the democratic westernized economies on one side, and authoritarian non-democratic countries on another (Russia, Iran, China ect...). To the victor goes the spoils. For there to be victory, the USA (and her many allies) must stay on top of the game.
      • with the democratic westernized economies on one side, and authoritarian non-democratic countries

        Say what again? I do not see a huge difference these days between Russia and over-regulated western countries controlled by what is essentially a permanent ruling class of government workers. Russia is just a tiny bit more brazen about what it does... a TINY bit more.

      • So, which side is Saudi Arabia on? Or, say, Pakistan?

    • ^Excellent post.
    • by wasteoid ( 1897370 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @01:01PM (#46121007)
      You don't have to track everyone's movements and monitor all calls to stop terrorist attacks. Having less porous security would be a much easier way to stop attacks without dialing up the police state to Orwellian levels.

      Putting locks on cockpit doors and doing better background checks of airport personnel have far better impacts and don't require obscene surveillance.
      • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
        This exactly. Reinforced cockpit doors, not a new thing since El Al instituted them decades ago would probably alone have stopped 9/11 all by themselves. But it was "too expensive" and airlines didn't want them or the regulations regarding their use.
        • by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @02:44PM (#46122047)

          It's worth nothing that reinforced cockpit doors appear to have caused at least one plane crash where the pilot decided to commit suicide and take the rest of the passengers along for the ride.

          So they're not a cost-free option.

          It's also worth noting that, if the passengers had known what the hijackers had planned, they wouldn't have got anywhere near the cockpit doors before being beaten to death. The real flaw was the expectation that the hijackers would let them off in a day or two so they should just sit back and wait.

          If we'd been beating the crap out of hijackers for decades instead of going along with them, 9/11 would never have happened.

          • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

            It's worth nothing that reinforced cockpit doors appear to have caused at least one plane crash where the pilot decided to commit suicide and take the rest of the passengers along for the ride.

            Only one incident that I know of: LAM Mozambique. Since there are quite a few other recorded pilot suicides, I'd posit the door isn't the cause. The pilot can always just do a full powered dive, door or no door.... no one's going to stop them at that point.

            Note that passengers beating up wannabe hijackers is greatly enhanced by not being able to get into the cockpit...

            • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

              The pilot can always just do a full powered dive, door or no door.... no one's going to stop them at that point.

              I would agree that no-one is likely to stop them in the time available before the plane breaks up or crashes, but with a reinforced door, they have no chance.

          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            It's worth nothing that reinforced cockpit doors appear to have caused at least one plane crash where the pilot decided to commit suicide and take the rest of the passengers along for the ride.

            It's worth noting the absurdity of the scenario. Most crashes already happen on take-offs and landings - your suicidal pilot can fly into a building before anyone has time to do anything about it. Or stall the plane at a low enough altitude so there's no chance to pull out of it. Doors or no doors.

    • Pretty much agree. Intelligence Analyst here, since before 9/11, and I've seen the increased emphasis on data-sharing and data collection in order to prevent future attacks, which we've done multiple times contrary to slashdot groupthink. I don't like the direction our country is going any more than anyone else. I wonder what's happened to the 4th amendment, among other amendments. But the focus on gathering data and sharing it with other agencies is not a power grab by nature (some bad eggs not withstandin
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What's really, really funny is that on /., we are all pro-privacy, pro-dismantling of the security apparatus. But none of us ever stop to consider if we'd change our tune, if one of our family or loved ones was suddenly, inexplicably killed in a horrible way--and then discover that said death could have been easily prevented if only X and Y agencies had bothered to share their information.

      That much is true. But then, your narrative is that you fix sharing problems by collecting more information. That fails to parse. Especially when, post 9/11, you have both this expanded collection program and specific information that was ignored and did exactly zero to prevent the Boston bombing. But no matter, I'm sure there is some use this information vacuuming program is good for. If it happens to have some overlap with preventing terrorism, well, it's nothing that can't be fixed. </sarcasm>

    • What's really, really funny is that on /., we are all pro-privacy, pro-dismantling of the security apparatus. But none of us ever stop to consider if we'd change our tune, if one of our family or loved ones was suddenly, inexplicably killed in a horrible way--and then discover that said death could have been easily prevented if only X and Y agencies had bothered to share their information.

      Hard for me to see any humor here. Sounds like a rather tragic state of affairs.

      A problem with your argument is that it

      • Your points are well taken. I would argue that the NSA initially began with good intentions. I can also say that in the weeks and months following 9/11, there was a lot of attention suddenly given to the inadequacies of our intelligence network, both foreign and domestic. We as a nation decried the lack of Arabic speakers, we demanded more & better domestic surveillance because it boggled everyone's mind how the CIA and FBI failed to connect the dots regarding 19 Saudi nationals enrolling at different f
      • My conscience pinged me on this one -- you are also right about each cycle getting a little better. My biggest desire is that people would step back, consider the cycle, realize that they cannot *solve* the problem, but considerate amelioration and solutions do work in the long term.
        • I want to acknowledge your admission of conscience, as that takes real courage, beyond whether we were to agree or not. Thanks for that.

          Truthfully, despite my participation in protests, rallies, marches, etc., and speaking to friends and family about the certain doom we were headed toward with the vengeful reaction to 9/11, I wouldn't say I received as much flak as I was simply ignored and dismissed. Now not so much, but I also don't speak as loudly since, well, I don't have to.

    • by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @01:31PM (#46121315)

      And as the US discovers very quickly, it happened due to intentional inefficiencies and silo-ization of intelligence.

      No, that is not why it happened but framing it that way is seductively authoritarian and one of the main reasons for the creation of the modern surveillance state. Having spent billions to stop more attacks, what do we have to show for it? The Boston bombers plus a whole host of "white" attacks like mass shootings and the NSA's official record of having stopped precisely zero attacks on USA soil.

      The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system - to say that significant acts of violence are "easily prevented" is to indulge in the fallacy of perfect knowledge after the fact.

      The real inefficiency here is the futile attempt to model the real world through "collect it all" surveillance. It's been a huge bust for its stated purpose and it's had the knock-on effect of jamming up everybody trying to get on with the business of living their lives - businesses and people spending time and money to shield themselves from the surveillance as well as the psychological toll on the entire populace that in the back of their heads they are evaluating if their actions might be misinterpreted by the invisible and unaccountable watchers.

      The only way to win is not to play the game. We need to get away with from the authoritarian framing of the problem of our society being constantly vulnerable and change from a surveillance state to a resilience state - where we accept life has risks, where we will take precautions proportional to the risks and spend the rest of our resources on living productive lives instead of lives of irrational fear.

      • We need to get away with from the authoritarian framing of the problem of our society being constantly vulnerable and change from a surveillance state to a resilience state - where we accept life has risks, where we will take precautions proportional to the risks and spend the rest of our resources on living productive lives instead of lives of irrational fear.

        I see and acknowledge your point. My counterpoint is that your answer will never happen for one simple reason: children. We as a democratic society dominated by the elderly get all sorts of irrational about the safety and protection of children. And you cannot fight irrationality, you cannot fight stupid, and you cannot fight well-intentioned ignorance. You simply cannot--no one can. Hence my statement about there being no answers, there is only the cycle.

        • And you cannot fight irrationality, you cannot fight stupid, and you cannot fight well-intentioned ignorance.

          I disagree. Irrationality is an argument that fundamentally people can't be trusted to govern themselves.

          Sure, at the margins there are people who will never be rational. But what we've been doing is catering to those extremists and we don't have too. When we treat them as the norm of course the entire gestalt becomes one of irrational fear. We'll never be completely rid of that, but we can have a more level-headed society if we focus on our stengths and resilience rather than those rare-as-hen's-teeth

      • The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system - to say that significant acts of violence are "easily prevented" is to indulge in the fallacy of perfect knowledge after the fact.

        Exactly. With perfect hindsight, it's "easy" to come up with a solution which would have caught the 9/11 hijackers when applied to that specific problem.

        But you can't just look at the true positives. You also have to consider false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. The hu

      • And as the US discovers very quickly, it happened due to intentional inefficiencies and silo-ization of intelligence.

        No, that is not why it happened but framing it that way is seductively authoritarian and one of the main reasons for the creation of the modern surveillance state. Having spent billions to stop more attacks, what do we have to show for it? The Boston bombers plus a whole host of "white" attacks like mass shootings and the NSA's official record of having stopped precisely zero attacks on USA soil.

        The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system

        Yes, the real world IS an immensely complex system, and terrorism will always be a part of life. And inevitably, some terrorist acts will be committed BECAUSE of the invasive and overbearing 'security' appartus we've allowed to be built because we foolishly think it's going to make us safer.

        That said, what about taking responsibility for our own contributions to the mess we're in? If we build a society that actively promotes increasing poverty, inequality, disenfranchisement, and personal powerlessness, the

        • FWIW, the overwhelming number of acts of terrorism are nationalist/separatist. Something like 95% of cases. That includes stuff like white power in the US as well as things like the chechen conflict. Surprisingly, over the last 30 years or so the FBI logged more cases of puerto-rican nationalist terrorism than any other single motivation.

    • by asylumx ( 881307 )

      This is life, people. This is human nature. There is no answer, there is only the cycle.

      Acceptance is one thing we do NOT excel at!

    • Your furious rhetoric is invalid.

      If anything, the NSA probably let it fucking happen as justification for even more power.
    • 9/11 would have never been stopped as there was, clearly, many loopholes so gracefully exploited by the so called perpetrators, too much miss information and mixed intelligence reports about the actual events and extremely suspicious lack debris in pentagon crash (plus nearby surveillance footage confiscation of alleged pentagon plane crash for no reason, hey no turbine/jet engine remains but they did find al-qaeda member passports!) and none of the airforce response systems protocols kicked in blah blah ..
    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      So now the Canadians are following in America's footsteps, because no government, Liberal or Conservative, wants to be blamed for the next attack.

      Haha no. We've been doing this up in Canada long before the American letter agencies did. If you need to see why, look up when the RCMP had the "national security" mandate ripped away and a new spy agency created(CSIS). We've had plenty of terrorist attacks up here, in a few cases by the RCMP. The rest by: Extremist Quebeckers, militant sikh's, muslims(prior to 9/11), indians(or natives if you prefer), eco-terrorists(decades of those), etc, etc, etc.

      The difference between what was happening in the past

      • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        Seems to me that the more this national security is delegated to secret agencies, the less average citizens know about it, and the *more* vulnerable we become to the very attacks the secret agencies are supposed to prevent.

    • Then a bunch of nihilistic apostate Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, and over 3000 Americans died in the space of a single morning.

      How many Americans have died from terrorist attacks since? How many died from terrorist attacks before then? (And no, you can't count attacks on troops in Iraq or whatever, where our presence instigated the attacks.)

      What's that? Not that many? And you're many more times to be randomly killed by lightning [gawkerassets.com] that a terrorist? You'd have to fly in an airplane constantly, 24-hours/day for something like 3100 YEARS on average before succumbing to a terrorist attack?

      NEWSFLASH: Thousands of Americans die ev

    • To me the resolution to the apparent paradox is more information not less, in this case more oversight and transparency in government agencies. J. Edgar got away with the total BS he did because he himself was not being monitored. If we openly know and discuss how policing is done in our country, at least we have a chance to talk about if we like it or not.
    • by Sabriel ( 134364 )

      Bullshit. If it was really about efficiency, we'd have secured the cabin doors on our aircraft, investigated and implemented other simple non-invasive methods to prevent similar attacks on air travel infrastructure, shown the terrorists our collective middle finger, and got on with our lives.

      # And if you are willing to do so, are you willing to face a lifetime of condemnation and excommunication from everything you hold dear?

      Hell yes. You make the hard decisions, even if they will ruin your career and your

    • It wasn't the "silo-ization" as you put it, that was the problem. From my memory, there were warnings to the FBI regarding the 9/11 terrorists, but they were ignored.

      That being said, I don't give a damn if various agencies share data among themselves. It's all the same government, so they have the data....go ahead and use the data. (Sure, there are exceptions to that: eg. health data shouldn't be used by the police to place suspicion of drugs on you, so they can raid your house....etc.etc.)
      However, they

  • "the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period."

    Like what? Mac addresses? Mac address + IPs it connected to?

    "The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports."

    How? Did CSEC have a deal with compani

    • Quite possibly, actually. In order to avoid legal issues (mostly being falsely accused of any crimes committed from their hotspot), many businesses don't run their own. They instead pay a specialist to administer it, handle legal defense and deal with the hassle of authenticating users (typically via a captive portal) to prevent abuse. Hundreds of shops and restaurants might run APs in a city, but only a couple of companies actually administer them all. So it's plausible that CSEC could have arrangements wi

  • Airport wifi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:40PM (#46120773) Homepage Journal

    "free" airport wifi is a vacuum operation. Interesting note: we were heading out on a vacation a couple of weeks ago. I plugged my iPad into the USB charger in the plane and got a nice popup (typing this from the screen shot I took):

    Trust This Computer?
    Your settings and data will be
    accessible from this computer when
    connected.

    [Trust] [Don't Trust]

    So charging on planes is another thing to avoid for me.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Use a condom. [int3.cc]

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      To be fair the reason the "charger" on the aircraft appears to be a computer is because it is, in fact, a computer. On some versions you can browse flash drives for media to play, on others the functionality isn't enabled and you can only charge. Even when they are charge only though it's a normal USB port and does a handshake to negotiate how much current to supply, as per the spec.

      Moral of the story is you need to get a charging only USB cable, if such a thing exists for Apple devices. The data lines are

    • I plugged my iPad into the USB charger in the plane ...

      What planes/airlines have built-in USB ports? That aside, it's interesting that it's more than just a dumb USB-shaped port (akin to the wall dongles that merely convert a wall-outlet into a USB port). The fact that you got that message implies there's actually a computer on the other end in addition to just power.

      • by grub ( 11606 )
        This was on an Air Canada flight heading south. I don't recall the type of plane, sorry. Heading back on WestJet had no USB port.
        • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          This was on an Air Canada flight heading south. I don't recall the type of plane, sorry. Heading back on WestJet had no USB port.

          Every Air Canada plane I've flown on in the last few years that had in-flight entertainment also had USB ports for charging. They also have 110V power, though that's only for one seat in two back in cattle class.

      • by rgbscan ( 321794 )

        I recently traveled to the UK and back on Delta on an A330. Their info-tainment system in the seatback had an 8 inch touchscreen panel with both a headphone jack and a usb jack. Plugging it in to USB allowed charging and streaming of any local content you had (provided it was non-drm'd). It was this system, although I couldn't id the manufacturer: http://boardingarea.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/pointmetotheplane/files/2013/08/tumblr_mqccx6yrK41spl3lco1_1280.jpg

      • I can hardly remember the last time I was on a plane that didn't have USB ports beside the in-flight entertainment system touchscreen (well, except for short-haul flights of 45 minutes). I usually fly Air Canada.

  • by ah.clem ( 147626 ) on Friday January 31, 2014 @12:40PM (#46120775)

    I no longer expect outrage, as that seems to be beyond our capacity anymore, but it feels like we treat this kind of news as if it's just trivial bullshit. Has it come to that? Doesn't anyone call their representatives, no matter how deaf they might be? Anyone write letters to their local newspaper about this kind of erosion of personal liberties? Anyone trying to get someone to listen and pay attention, or are we all just willing to head blindly to the kill-floor, tweeting and texting the latest lolcat?

    It seems to me that we are giving our lives away for nothing.

  • "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" in 3.....2.....1......

    • No, don't cue them. Tell them to shut the fuck up. And you shut the fuck up too. The sooner this idea goes away the better everyone is. And you posting it unprovoked, for no reason other than showing off your badge of stupidity, is not helping.
      Mod us both off topic, please.

    • If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look.
  • Last time I use the free wifi at Pearson. Wifi adapter disabled from now on!

  • If you are using an Airport's WiFi without connecting to your trusted VPN, you'll get what you deserve. Airports are a wonderful place to play "Yes, I am that AP" and other fun games while bored hackers wait for their flights.

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