Security Check Now Starts Long Before You Fly | Hacker News Reader

Security Check Now Starts Long Before You Fly

nytimes.com

58 pointschaostheory67 comments

> For instance, an update about the T.S.A.’s Transportation Security Enforcement Record System, which contains information about travelers accused of “violations or potential violations” of security regulations, warns that the records may be shared with “a debt collection agency for the purpose of debt collection.”

This is absurd. So now the government is snitching on citizens who are traveling domestically.

Wait, WTF does airport security have to do with debt collection?

What does 99.99-% of phone call records have to do with Terrorism/National Security?

Mass data collection doesn't discriminate. These organizations are in the business of collecting everything about you. "Debt collection" is just their primary business.

For ex, most American pharmacies sell what prescriptions people are buying [1] to data mining companies. But they at least "de-identify", due to federal regulations. TSA operates outside quite a few laws/regulations protecting individual rights. We can now add information privacy to that list.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/06/pharmacies-selling-presc...

Is that through credit card data? And how does that not violate HIPPA?

Well, who knows if someone's gonna be so pissed off at tax collectors that he's gonna blow a fucking plane out of the sky. I mean, really pissed off.

Sorry, I couldn't find anything better :(. I've taken the Devil's case pro bono, he's probably gonna fire my ass.

Um, that sort of happened in 2010. A pilot flew his personal plane into an IRS building in Texas. Not related to TSA screening on commercial flights, but still. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack

So if you aren't allowed through the checkpoint, you may not even be able to rent a car to get to your destination?

>The T.S.A. has emphasized its goal of giving 25 percent of all passengers lighter screening by the end of next year, meaning they can keep their shoes and jackets on, wait in separate lines and leave laptop computers in their bags. But travelers who find themselves in the higher-risk category can be subjected to repeated searches.

So if we are good Citizens, we will be rewarded. Only bad Citizens have something to hide and they will be molested for it.

Somehow this does not comfort me at all.

bad citizens and brown people...

Worse yet, I was under the impression that only citizens that have been arrested and fingerprinted had their fingerprints on file. Now with this, they are creating a reason to get a completely law-abiding citizen's fingerprint on file. We've been successful in avoiding a national ID system, but it looks like one is now being implemented via the TSA under the guise of a "convenience program" that you are coerced into participating in by increasingly making your live a living hell if you don't.

It would be valuable to bring something like this to the attention of the NRA, because they are one of the few groups that does a lot of work to prevent a national ID program and centralized databases of biometric markers.

So many cold-war era US criticisms of the Soviet bloc are coming true in this country, except that the surveillance here is more effective than what we saw in The Lives of Others.

"Papers, please" has been replaced with "Wait while we review our database containing your personal information".

This is the road to a police state.

That does not make the "papers please" part disappear btw. Last time I checked, the queues were long anyway.

"Papers please" will disappear as they gradually roll out the bar code tattoos. Starting next year.

What baffles me is how come the subway system has never seen major terrorist attacks despite having very low security and carrying millions of New Yorkers (or citizens of other cities) a day.

I am very thankful for this, but wondering why. If someone wanted to cause a massive amount of damage it would not be difficult to do.

er.. London?

and Tokyo?

Moscow probably had a couple if I can recall...

Perhaps terrorism isn't quite the threat to us that the US state makes it out to be.

It increasingly looks like the "ruling 1%" are preparing for social unrest, respectively for the protection of their power and wealth which will be questioned.

This is the feeling I increasingly get with all this. If this turns out to be the case, I can only imagine that this works for a while until those doing the enforcing realize that they have more in common with the 99% and then turn on the 1%.

And that's where the increasing economic pressure comes in:

Keep the minimum wage inhumanely low, keep talking about the "american dream" and how everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire [0] and watch people keeping their mouths shut.

[0] http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/

There were attacks in London, and a while before that quite a few bombings in the Paris metro. The US don't have a lot of terrorist attacks overall, so I suppose that simply makes it less likely that any particular target might be bombed.

The patriot thing to do is to opt in to all the physically invasive screenings and opt out of all the data collection.

The more time spent on searching you at the airport, the more everyone else is delayed (shared sacrifice) and the more visible these security theatrics are.

Of course, when they scan your passport (drivers license) into their computer at the security desk they are looking you up. That data was gathered before you arrived at the airport.

Question for the Americans: what is still keeping the TSA in business, even in spite of all these draconian practices? Why can't someone fight the TSA in SCOTUS?

Things like this make me really glad to be living in Canada. At least there is some - if not a lot - expectation of privacy and protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

What makes you think Canada isn't working hand-in-hand with the TSA?

As we've seen over the past couple of months, the only difference between the US and rest of Europe is that the US intelligence system is on the front page of the news right now. Everyone else is doing similar stuff, just not in the spotlight.

> Privacy groups contacted by The New York Times expressed concern over the security agency’s widening reach

At this rate of government's lust for control and power, it is time to express outrage already.

I'll enjoy watching when they introduce random body cavity search at the airports. By that time, people will be conditioned enough to comply. After all, it's for our own protection.

I'll enjoy watching...

Rule 34?

Police State v1.0

Please don't make this sort of comment without more useful things to say.

The US government is racist. It's as simple as that. And their fixation with people who look of Arab descent is only going to get worse as citizens shrug their shoulders in resignation and accept that too[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

I am not worried about it. People care about security and don't welcome the hassle. For the privacy advocates when it comes to public transportation like flying: what do you fear may happen as a result of greater background checks?

This article reminded me of this one from 3 years ago: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/why_israeli_airport_securit...

(PS: I predict this comment will be heavily voted down just because people disagree with me, and I want to see whether HN users on aggregate punish opposing views or reward a willingness to reasonably discuss something.)

However, the below doesn't make much sense together:

"The prescreening, some of which is already taking place, is described in documents the T.S.A. released to comply with government regulations about the collection and use of individuals’ data, but the details of the program have not been publicly announced.

It is unclear precisely what information the agency is relying upon to make these risk assessments."

So what is the regulation about disclosing collection of info, if it's still unclear after disclosure what information they are using?

Fuck it, let's just argue the other way and save some time.

What evidence is there that we should ignore the well-known design principles of encapsulation and separation-of-concerns and thus allow the TSA to access data held by other agencies?

Those are programming design principles, not security principles nor natural laws. It does not do to assume that principles in one domain carry over to other domains.

They are system-design principles, and one can consider that the TSA folks are Turing Complete, therefore the laws apply. Q.E.D.

Don't assume that they don't carry.

So, since the body is also likely turing complete via DNA, can I assume that DRY applies and preemptively remove one of your lungs? Give me a break.

Do you really believe that DRY in coding precludes redundancy in implementation?

It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are. Redundant implementations are two implementations which work a different way, which no, are not forbidden by DRY.

> It tends to forbid code duplication, which is what the lungs are.

Lungs are not code duplication any more than running two instances of an application to provide greater peak performance or hot-standby is code duplication. You are confusing duplication of elements of the real system with duplication of specification (programming is executable specification, not the real system.)

I concede this point.

Lungs are more like load balancers, right?

You should've suggested (in the DRY sense) removing extra copies of sequences in DNA--excepting, you know, that I don't think that we know that is safe (those may be there for redundancy as well).

Perhaps you work somewhere where the concept of redundancy is important?

Stop being obtuse; you clearly seem to see the point I was getting at.

I certainly see the argument you were trying to make. I also think the way you tried to make it is totally invalid and casts no light on whether the TSA should or shouldn't use the processes they are planning to adopt.

Why is the TSA magically exempt from sound systems-engineering concepts? You never explained that.

Principle zero is that the system should correctly perform the work required by its owners. If what you're saying is that an additional system should be injected that has access to all the required information, and the TSA should query that system, then I won't argue. That would be a balancing act of coordination costs versus the cost of the technical debt added to the TSA, but I don't feel I have sufficient insight to analyze that balance where I currently am. Likewise if you are arguing any other rearrangement of information owners such that some process can access information and inform the TSA's decisions.

If what you're saying is that the TSA should not perform some work because it's not simple to do that work in accordance with other system design principles, then I fear you have fundamentally misunderstood what those principles are for.

I withdraw my claim that the TSA should not seek to optimize according to design principles. I still believe that you are applying them too broadly, but it isn't a position I care to defend at the moment.

Even if that was a valid application of DRY, no, it wouldn't, because you aren't the system owner, and nothing justifies anyone other than the system owner making changes to the system to achieve fidelity to any principle of system design.

Like many "programming design principles", they are in fact principles for the design of robust systems that are amenable to (1) reasoning about, and (2) adapting to changing circumstances, and are not at all special to the domain of programming.

Encapsulation and separation of concerns does not mean that data is inaccessible to requesters when it is needed. It just means it's accessed through the proper interfaces and the right clearances are given.

If the TSA has MORE information then there will be LESS hassle and MORE accuracy. That, multiplied by the number of people currently affected and delayed by the security checks should also improve the experience by quite a lot.

If the TSA has MORE information then there will be LESS hassle and MORE accuracy.

So, what is their current accuracy? We already know that no TSA --> no hassle.

Yours is at least a testable hypothesis.

That's the way it was before 911; before the Department of Homeland Security. After 911, there was a clusterfuck of confusion about who knew what because Customs didn't want to talk to the TSA who didn't want to talk to the Secret Service who didn't want to talk to.... Or that was what we were told.

In part to alleviate this symptom, the responsibilities for 22 departments were thrown together under the DHS. So, at least the administration running things at the time thought they saw evidence that it was needed.

So, there's no evidence, is what you're telling me, other than the presumed wisdom of those bozos.

That is indeed what I was saying- save for the fact there might be some evidence that requires special privilege to access, or might exist in the observations of some of those who were involved.

...at least the administration running things at the time thought...

IIRC, Bush2 was initially against the formation of the DHS. After a week of everyone in Congress asking why he didn't care about teh Children, and also why was he so against spending in their districts, he caved.

Incidentally, I don't assume that Bush2 was against DHS because of the sound organizational principle that the best way to make a group of poorly performing orgs worse is to pack them all together under an additional management layer. He might well not have cared at all, so he could use the opportunity to extract concessions from other politicians.

> For the privacy advocates when it comes to public transportation like flying: what do you fear may happen as a result of greater background checks?

False positives, increased harassment/inconveniece of innocent people, chilling effects, driving people away from airlines towards other, less efficient means of long distance travel, even as airlines are struggling to stay in business. TSA becoming more powerful, free citizens becoming desensitized to privacy invasions, increased rape-scans, crotch fondling, etc.

Generally, it makes our country a worse place to travel to/from/within. And what are the benefits, again? Because I'm not seeing any, and that is the question you should be asking, not simply "what's the harm?".

I would argue that there are MORE false positives when you don't have enough information. After all, mathematically speaking let's say you sample X things versus X + Y things. Assuming there to be a similar probability distribution for the decision making (same first moments at least), a greater sample size would lead to greater accuracy and therefore less false positives, as well as less false negatives.

You should consider applying Bayes' rule here. For reference, there are 800 million airline passengers in the US every year. Good luck.

Ex. You have a test that detects cancer with 99% certainty, and a prevalence of cancer of 1 in 1 million people. In a sample size of 100 million people:

    People with cancer correctly identified: 99%*100=99 people

    People with cancer not identified: 1%*100=1 person

    People without cancer falsely identified= 1%*99,999,900 = 999,999 people

    People without cancer correctly identified:99%*99,999,900=98,999,901 people

Even with 99% accuracy you have nearly a million people falsely identified, but only identify 99 people with cancer. Now extend this to terrorism, 800 million riders for 12 years, and a prevalence of 2? possible terrorists (shoe, underwear) in the last 12 years. Also keep in mind that since both of these guys made it on the plane, the accuracy of the the terrorist screening process may not be too high.

I downvoted you. Frankly, I would have upvoted you if not for your ridiculous meta comment about HN, including: "I predict this comment will be heavily voted down just because people disagree with me [...]".

I suspect that your comments about what HN is or isn't likely to do in response to your comment is why you're being downvoted, not because of your rational (if wrongheaded) discussion.

I rarely engage in meta debates, and it's possible you're just trolling, but I just wanted you to know.

Politically tinged comments seem to get downvoted quite a bit here, similarly to Slashdot and many other forums. I've experienced this myself. In my opinion, downvoting a comment for any reason other than flagrant trolling, personal attacks, or similar content that degrades the dialogue should be considered inappropriate use of the privilege, because it undermines the feature and renders it pointless. On a Slashdot political topic, I have to read at -1 to catch all the points of view.

To be clear, my downvote was very much in the spirit of two of HN's guidelines:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't downvote your comment, but you're pretty clearly flouting the first guideline. If you want to be a productive part of a community, please respect the guidelines of that community. I have no problem with contrarian political remarks, as long as they're presented rationally and refrain from breaking the community's guidelines.

I appreciate that feedback, but I actually added that "prediction" after the value on the comment reached -2. So I am pretty sure it was because people disagreed with my stance, as I had provided a bunch of thoughtful reasoning besides simply stating my opinion and the comment was inviting reasonable discussion.

So I decided to call out this phenomenon and make this a genuine test of whether I would be downvoted simply because people disagreed with my position, WITHOUT discussing it first. But sadly it was contaminated by people like you downvoting because I had violated a guideline. I guess in retrospect it wasn't that productive to do it.

Two things:

1. If you really wanted to make it a test of downvoting, you should have discussed the phenomenon in another thread (although I would have downvoted you in that thread, since any discussion of being downvoted flouts HN guidelines).

2. You should have given it a chance, even after two downvotes. It's not unusual to receive one or two quick downvotes and then be upvoted back to full visibility if you're comment is unpopular but rational, unemotional, and no ad hominems or other personal attacks. For one, I would have upvoted it. In my experience, it's rare to see good but unpopular arguments downvoted to reduced visibility after the initial 20-30 mins.

People care about security

The TSA doesn't do anything to make us more secure. They might (maybe) make you marginally more secure on the airplane, but if you stop and think about it... a terrorist doesn't need to blow up an airplane to cause terror. All they need is a large number of people compacted into a fairly small space, where their destructive devices can cause large numbers of injuries or deaths.

Like, for example...

...

in line in front of the TSA security checkpoint.

Yep, by adding another chokepoint / bottleneck, the TSA have created a new target. They haven't done anything to solve the problem, they've only moved it.

You're not allowed to take stuff through that checkpoint because it might be an explosive, so they take the stuff off you, and put it in a big bin, next to the line of people.

Yeah, I had an airport cop at Denver International tell me I couldn't park my family's minivan for 2 minutes in a loading zone while my wife came down the escalator from a floor up.

The minivan might be full of explosives, and I might blow the arrivals pick-up zone up while parked.

Why wouldn't I try to blow it up while cruising past in the stop-n-go stream of traffic whose drivers are looking for their person?

If this is the rubbish the TSA tells their trench-level grunts, then what kind of otherworldly nonsense circulates at higher levels in that "organization"?

"For the privacy advocates when it comes to public transportation like flying: what do you fear may happen as a result of greater background checks?"

I fear that some mistake, perhaps just data corruption in some gigantic database somewhere, will affect my government file and permanently ruin my life.

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