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DHS's 'Secure Flight' Program Proven Insecure
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Dec 24, 2006 07:14 AM
from the i-trust-the-government-as-far-as-i-can-throw-it dept.
from the i-trust-the-government-as-far-as-i-can-throw-it dept.
News.com is reporting the somewhat unsurprising news that a government program we were assured was 'perfectly safe', has actually been proven to be a privacy nightmare. The 'Secure Flight' program matched air traveler information with commercial databases in the interests of national security. The charter for the program specifically forbade the TSA from accessing this information; the organization got their hands on it anyway. The Department of Homeland Security has released a report, detailing these findings and analyzing the situation. The News.com piece makes it clear the report was released on Friday in an attempt to obscure it from public notice; it was only linked to from a DHS subsite, and has not shown up on the DHS or TSA main pages. From the article: "The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were 'not intentional,' and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a 'data flow map' to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act. This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act."
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DHS Passenger Scoring Almost Certainly Illegal 181 comments
Vicissidude writes "At the National Targeting Center, the Automated Targeting System program harvests up to 50 fields of passenger data from international flights, including names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and uses watchlists, criminal databases and other government systems to assign risk scores to every passenger. When passengers deplane, Customs and Border Protection personnel then target the high scorers for extra screening. Data and the scores can be kept for 40 years, shared widely, and be used in hiring decisions. Travelers may neither see nor contest their scores. The ATS program appears to fly in the face of legal requirements Congress has placed in the Homeland Security appropriations bills for the last three years." From the article: "Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he was unaware of the language but that it clearly applies to the Automated Targeting System, not just Secure Flight, the delayed successor to CAPPS II. 'Bingo, that's it -- the program is unlawful,' Rotenberg said. 'I think 514(e) stands apart logically (from the other provisions) and 514 says the restrictions apply to any 'other follow-on or successor passenger prescreening program'. It would be very hard to argue that ATS as applied to travelers is not of the kind contemplated (by the lawmakers).'"
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Misreading (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just like criminal background checks... (Score:5, Insightful)
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In the new world order, everybody is a terror suspect until proven otherwise. It won't be long before special rewards will be authorised for children who inform on their non-conformist parents.
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Actually there are classes of people who do not have to be proven otherwise. e.g. those who pass and enforce laws about terrorist suspects.
Re:Just like criminal background checks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is *which* person a terror suspect?
Obviously, it would be nice to know if the person at the airport is actually suspected of being a terrorist, via evidence of links to known terrorists, etc., but to do that, you have to be able to correctly identify the person at the airport, and not just by name, and you also have to know that the reason for the suspicion is real.
All this system does is pick out people who identify themselves using a name that matches one that was placed on the list somehow. Read that last statement carefully, and identify all of the ways in which it's different from "identify suspected terrorists". Then think about what kind of program you'd have to implement in order to really "identify suspected terrorists", and what kind of police state would be required to make it work.
Given a full profile of the terror suspect, trained TSA agents might be able to ascertain with some reliability whether or not the person trying to travel is actually the suspect, so if implemented it should definitely NOT be a boolean value based only on a matching name. Since the whole thing is so completely unreliable, though, and the only way to make it reliable is to further eliminate our civil liberties, the better solution is just to scrap it.
Somehow, the people in the US need to realize that the blood that must water the tree of liberty isn't just the blood of soldiers who go "over there" and kill the enemy. A free society is vulnerable in ways that a police state is not, but accepting that vulnerability is part and parcel of freedom. If an occasional 9/11 is the price of our civil liberties, we should be prepared to pay it, and consider it the bargain that it is. Cue the famous Benjamin Franklin quote.
Parent
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, this is why I'm always skeptical of these things. And for some reason, critics are always written off as paranoid or unrealistic. I wonder if they said the same things when people warned that the new "small" income tax would quickly grow?
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Nah, just left-wing nutjobs. That drumbeat will continue until the next time a Democrat is elected president and the new administration addresses the security rules. At which point the new security rules will instantly become either (a) an unacceptable affront to America's tradition of personal liberty and a symbol of how the left is out to control everyone's lives (if the restrictions are tightened), (b) a sign that the left is
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Friday news releases... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an old trick to release news on a Friday night, when less people are going to see it. Also, any day in which a major news story (superbowl, oscar night, day after elections, etc.) is scheduled -- those are the days to read the newspaper carefully-- those are days that are typically used to obscure potentially damaging news.
In a 24-hour news cycle it's much harder to hide bad news from the public, but there are still golden times when the government and others are virtually guaranteed no one will be paying attention. Kudos for bringing this story to light.
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Thank god we have reliable 24 hour news, like CNN. Oh wait, I don't see anything about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the story... this isn't NEWS!!!
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There's also releasing potentially politically embarrasing stories on the same day as a major disaster.
In a 24-hour news cycle it's much harder to hide bad news from the public,
This is actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry dudes in the US; you really, really need to clean up your privacy laws to actually protect the individual and not to favor major business (and making identity theft darn easy in the bargain).
Lock 'em up! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I sign a contract that specifically says I can only get X under condition of Y and Z, then breaking those conditions invalidates the contract. Secure Flight should be terminated and TSA be made liable for any and all damages.
Why is it that governments and corporations can fuck up constantly on a scale that makes you dizzy while any natural person doing a fuckup on a similar scale would be locked away for life?
So. It was proven pointless long before that. (Score:5, Insightful)
The US terror rate since (and before) 911 death toll was 3,300 TOTAL.
We maintained our constitution for over 200 years with the number of murders growing the whole time, and we didn't take that as a reason to torch our own constitution.
911 shouldn't have changed a damn thing. Yet it seems as if the Bush team has milked it to build the bedrock for a police state. Given their political donations come from the same private interests that profit from such draconian right wing lunacy, it looks like the Bush team staged it themselves, quite honestly.
http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20Histor
Getting security "locked down" is the wrong answer. Getting the nazis out of office is the right answer.
you were making great points (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comments about the murder rate vs. terror rate and torching the constitution were strong.
You lost me with the conspiracy theory about the neocons planning 9/11. As much as I distrust Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their puppet, the theories about missles hitting the Pentagon just aren't credible to me. At most, I will believe that 9/11 was a happy accident [reference.com] which Cheney leveraged to enrich his friends at Haliburton. He sold it to Bush as an opportunity to finish what his dad had started. Rumsfeld? Well, that guy wanted to prove a war could be fought on the cheap and wanted to take credit for that accomplishment. Turned out it can be fought on the cheap, so long as you're not concerned with winning.
Seth
Parent
Re:you were making great points (Score:5, Insightful)
We accused Clinton of being a liar and Bush repeatedly lied about their being no domestic wire tapping program or secret prison Mr. Bush drove us to war on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. While I do not like Cynthia McKinney from Georgia at all, she drove a point by attempting to introduce legislation to impeach Bush. Honestly, he is far more impeachable than Clinton. We hold ourselves up on such high, hypocritical horses that we punished Clinton for a blow job: a harmless, repeat harmless act whereas Mr. Bush has effectively killed 16,000 people because he wanted to finish daddy's work. Mr. Bush needs to answer for his actions but, so long as he has money, he has a get out of jail ticket. It would take the collective bravery of the International Criminal Court to bring charges down. I could only hope that the ICC is brave enough to take this on. Bush has committed war crimes under a guise.
Bush is an extremeist in his own right. He is the antithesis of Ahmadenjinad of Iran. It has been speculated that Bush has some fascination with the Apocalypse and the Born-Again Christians do have a preocupation with this event. Clinton got some undeserved negative attention. He did wonders for the economy. The presidency requires an intelligent, well-thought, and well-spoken indidivdual.
Some have attempted to compare Bush to Lincoln. True, both were in unpopular wars and both rather folksy. There remains an important difference. Lincoln was not ideologically driven and he was doing what was morally correct for ANY time period: ending a wrong justified by pseudoscientific means. Lincoln saw the problems with calling our nation free while slavery still existed. This was a moral and ethical dilemna. Lincoln dealt with this. While Lincoln is folksy, it is clear that his intelligence and thought capacity is higher than that of Bush. As far as I am concerned there is no comparison and history will see the George W. Bush Presidency as one of the worst administrations in the history of our country.
Parent
Re:you were making great points (Score:5, Insightful)
I am european, and I have always thought as the US as the country wher edemocracy was strong - today I am not traveling to the US because I refuse to deal with terrorist nations, and unless the us government gets some sort of clue what country they re supposed to govern, the US is just not a place I want to step on even for a day.
Let's all hope that things change once Mr. Bush is out of his office. The uss has dealt with horrendous aberrations in the past (just say McCarthy Era) and recovered.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Fighting a war against an invisible enemy, and using that as a justification for searching everyone who passes through an airport, train station, you name it, already encroaches on basic civil liberties.
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The response should have been an investigation, and a change in hijacker handling policy (previous policy was to just give them what they wanted) and a "cockpit door stays locked at all times" policy. And then we should have started flying again the next week, with EXACTLY the same airport security as before.
Everything that was done by the government was instead calculated to terrorize the population, as a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're waaaay behind the times, buddy.
http://www.kolumbus.fi/av.caesar/wtc/wtc7_2.jpg [kolumbus.fi]
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/3990/wtc7roof7p z.jpg [imageshack.us]
It well known by people on the ground that WTC7 was going to collapse.
Here's some accounts from firefighters [bautforum.com] on the scene that day. They describe the severe structural damag
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The lease holder [cbsnews.com] gave the OK to "pull it [youtube.com]".
I didn't know you could do that. Can just any building be "pulled", just like that?
("Silverstein's spokesperson, Dara McQuillan, said in September 2005 that by "pull it" Silverstein was referring to the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building, and confirming that they should evacuate the premises."
Take the train. (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you think this sort of things dont happen in european states, your wrong. Were just better at keeping it quiet.
Heard a great line on any questions today (A BBC Radio 4 comedy quiz show):
The americans had a revolution because they were sick of being told what to do from London.
Boy did THEY manage to turn things around.