TSA Sued Over New Policy to Refuse Opt-Outs
professional-troublemaker.com
professional-troublemaker.com
They're biometrics. They take precise measurements of a person's shape, which is sufficient to detect if someone is traveling under a false name, and they're building a database of those biometrics to have available for use elsewhere. If the scan's result is ambiguous, they swab your hands and stick the swab in a machine, supposedly to detect residue from explosives but with the nice side-effect of producing a stored DNA sample for later use. They've proven pretty useless for controlling the flow of contraband, but they're quite useful for catching fugitives. While the people staffing the checkpoints aren't particularly smart, it's reasonable to assume that the people at the top are pretty clever, and their policies are consistent with this having been the real goal all along.
If they tried collecting fingerprints from travelers, they would get a very strong backlash. This way, they get a weaker backlash and some jokes about how stupid they are for using machines that can't reliably detect guns.
TSA does not store any personally identifiable information from AIT screening.Where did you get this information from?
So, unless they are using face recognition to scan you when you get your boarding pass checked then re-compare it at the rapiscan, there's no PII gathering happening.
(Now, they could always make a policy change and say "now you must tag your boarding pass on the scanner before entering" but we're not there yet.)
Although not directly at the time of scanning video surveillance shouldn't make it too hard to match the records up.
They could pool results saying "these 10 scans are potentially from these 40 people" and cross reference against every airport visit, but are they that competent?
Also, I'm inclined to believe that the TSA is incompetent all the way up.
If they really wanted to use body scans to track people, they'd arrange the checkpoints so the body scanner is the first place you go after they scan your boarding pass and/or ID. And when questioned about why they rearranged the checkpoints that way they'd just say "TSA security evolves to counter ever changing security threats, and we can't speak specifically about what prompted this reconfiguration." End of story since security theater is not to be questioned.
I agree with you, though, that your last point makes this moot. They're too bumbling for me to worry.
If you're tagging face when they get processed and running face recognition at the scanner, (which is either already possible or will be possible within a couple years) you don't even need to do that.
On a related note, I feel like people dont factor in the (exponential) progress of technology in their threat assessment. For example sites that tell people their password strength don't count Moore's law into password difficulty calculations. Nobody uses post quantum crypto. The NSA has played this by storing as much interesting encrypted data and then decrypting it when technology progresses Or vulnerabilities are discovered. Most of our encrypted data is plain text in some X number of years.
Anyway going back to scanners, you could just store data and wait until computer vision gets to the point where you can do it with computers. Anything a person can do a computer will eventually be able to do. If a person could watch a bunch of camera feeds and track each person from the point he presents ID to the point he is scanned a computer will eventually be able to too.
IMO they already can.
Depending upon the airport, people can go from the ID checks to up to a dozen different lines with no ordering of people as they go through the scanners. Then on the swabbing side, there's no checking of ID once again.
If their intent was as nefarious as you claimed, the TSA would have changed the way you move through security in order to properly correlate the collected biometric information with ID.
That said, I'm not too sure how that would work. They only check your boarding pass at the initial security check before the scanners, and the order at which people have their IDs checked is not preserved once you get to the scanners, so you can't track identification that way. On top of that, as someone who's been swabbed multiple times (I'm assuming something to do with my camera equipment), I've never been asked for identification when swabbed. So you might get some DNA to sequence, but you won't really know who it actually is.
After this holiday's eating season is over, my body shape will diverge even more!
I don't like it one bit, but every wacko that told you the government was listening on every phone call and reading every email turns out to be very right, and after Clapper, et al lied about it to Congress with no repercussions, well, maybe don't be so quick to dismiss further theories about the government spying on you.
And previously pregnant women, those with compromised immune systems, and parents of young children could opt out. Not so much now.
I will say that the current Millimetre Wave machines are likely safer than the now defunct Backscatter X-ray machines. At least we're dealing with non-ironising radiation with a lower amount of raw energy.
It's only got about 120 degrees of rotation, so it's tricky trying to tune it to emit a particular color.
I had it turned to ELF for a while, but then the Navy called and said my flashlight was disrupting their submarine communications.
Earlier this year, Terminal 5 at Heathrow wouldn't let me opt out of the scanner. Kinda felt like a personal violation, but the duty guards just said I was uneducated for having any concerns outside of their training.
Whenever I travel to a country that uses body scanners, I carry a printed copy of the airport's FAQ page (if available) and the government FAQ page or law that says that passengers are allowed to opt out. Then I know that I can show this to the people operating the checkpoints or to their supervisors if necessary. So far it was only necessary once (in the Netherlands, where body scanners are used routinely and some checkpoint staff aren't trained well about the opt-out option). But I still have a printout of the UK one and remember very clearly when the policy changed (prior to the change, I took the train through the Chunnel to Brussels instead of flying out of Heathrow).
Maybe I can set up a web page that has links to the policy and law documents so that people can find them more easily. There are already some pages that try to track which airports have body scanners, but I don't think I've seen one that tracks "what to show checkpoint staff to convince them that their country allows opt-outs".
The only real argument in their favor is that it's so easy to use that there is no reason not to use them - but even that isn't true. It's trivial to show that even if they were nearly foolproof that they still wouldn't be worth using. There are so many airline passengers that the prior probability that an individual traveler has malicious intent means that virtually all alerts will be false positives. It is pointless to violate the privacy of everyone when the benefits are so minimal.
Author of the article and lawsuit here. Anything in particular you'd like to challenge?
The thing is, I can put up a guide, but all of this takes a ton of work (and money). It's not possible to make a lawsuit tutorial that you can follow in a couple hours and be done. Once you've researched, written, and filed your lawsuit, then the real stuff begins: the government attacking your suit and you're left to defend it. I think it's fun, and it's definitely rewarding, but it takes a lot to make happen.
Thanks,
--Jon
They clearly don't like it when you opt out. Things I have experienced while opting out:
1. Being separated from my belongings for up to a half hour while dozens of strangers are walking past them and could easily pluck my wallet or computer out of them.
2. Being asked to wait directly next to the luggage X-ray machines. I think most know that we're specifically not thrilled about that.
3. Got an "extra-thorough" pat-down by a guy who claimed it was in the name of security and procedure.
4. Teasing/harassment for not trusting the X-ray machines.
I opted out this morning. I have friends on flight crews who opt out (either by KCM or by the freedom frisk) and I haven't heard anyone in my circles complain about it on Facebook.
Do you constantly worry about "unhinged" drivers while walking on the sidewalk? Are you constantly worried that you would be the victim of an intentional attack like what recently happened in Las Vegas? Do you believe we need to go through the "security theater" motions in order to "mitigate" the, for all practical purposes, negligible risk of something similar happening in the future?
In any case, I am at a similar risk of someone unhinged killing me and hundreds of other people every time I get a local train into the city, which requires no security checks at all. This was, unfortunately, demonstrated in the 7 July attacks in London, and I personally know people who were caught up in those attacks and hurt so I'm the last person who's going to be flippant about that possibility. I still feel just fine about my survival chances getting on a train, though. More people get hurt and killed on our roads most weeks than died in the 7/7 attacks, and those were more than a decade ago and haven't been repeated since.
Individuals undergoing screening using AIT generally will have the option to decline an AIT screeningin favor of physical screening. Given the implementation of ATR and the mitigation of privacy issues associated with the individual image generated by previous versions of AIT not using ATR, and the need to respond to potential security threats, TSA will nonetheless mandate AIT screening for some passengers as warranted by security considerations in order to safeguard transportation security.
When you opt-out, they make you wait a long time standing next to the X-ray machine for someone to give you a pat-down. (It's almost never that the guy doing pat-downs is busy, btw- really weird.)
They're going to claim that having someone wait near the X-ray machines that long represents some kind of security threat. And then they're going to use that fact to justify overriding the opt-out, because the more time you spend next to an X-ray machine, the higher the odds you've tampered with it or have had time to assemble that tactical nuke you've been hiding in your pockets or whatever nonsense they come up with.
PreCheck is a good thing, and a good system, but it hardly incentivizes the government to make it mandatory.
We started moderating HN this way after the Snowden deluge of 2013 in which the front page was dominated by follow-up posts for a long time. Many users complained about this, and they were right, yet the underlying stories were obviously on-topic. We came up with the current policy as a way to balance the concerns.