Fly With Friendly Eyes

Via Atrios comes a report that the Transportation Security Administration has "collected extensive personal information about airline passengers although Congress told it not to and it said it wouldn't, according to documents obtained Monday by The Associated Press."

If you're getting a vague sense of deja vu, it may be because the data was collected to test the nascent Secure Flight program, whose defunct predecessor, CAPPS II, drew fire when it emerged that TSA planned to test the system with personal data provided by the airline JetBlue without passengers' consent.

Comments

[Mark]

collected extensive personal information about airline passengers

Who cares? Why does someone's irrational concern about privacy trump the rest of the passengers being more confident that their plane will not be used as a human cruise missile by terrorists?

What exactly is it that is so important for the airlines NOT to know about you?

[Stevo Darkly]

Tim, could you please post Mark's IP address? I'm extremely confident this information will not be misused in any way.

[Anvilwyrm]

Fuck the privacy aspect Mark. Does it not bother you that a Government agency broke the law in exactly the way they promised they wouldn't?

Why have laws at all?

[Rick Hall]

So if I sacrifice all of my "irrational" privacy rights, people like Mark will become "more confident?"

I see. It's like group therapy. Glad I could be of use to you.

[Gary]

Makes me curious why Mark didn't fill out a real email address.

Privacy?

[gaius marius]

Why have laws at all?

do we, mr anvilwyrm? it's increasingly hard to say.

[tarran]

Mark,

I think you have the question backwards:

Who cares? Why do government officials irrational propaganda that disarming the citizenry and collecting huge amounts of information will prevent planes from being used as human cruise missiles by terrorists trump my sensible desire to keep them from keeping tabs on me?

Given that every year Federal officials misuse their authority to silence critics or for their personal gain, why the $%!# should I trust any of them farther than I can throw them?

If the feds were serious about preventing hijackings, they would lift the federal restrictions on weapons on aircraft, force airlines to assume the liability, and allow airlines to set policy. No, to Federal officials, keeping the citizenry cowed and scared is worth the risk of future hijackings.

Of course, to me it's very academic. Since my first interaction with the TSA, I have refused to fly on commercial aircraft. I refuse to pay to have my family be treated like criminals. Then again, I do pay my taxes ... 🙁

[Anvilwyrm]

do we, mr anvilwyrm? it's increasingly hard to say.

Laws we got. People obeying the laws, officals respectiong the laws, sane laws, understandable laws... these are clearly in short supply.

[Stevo Darkly]

Does it not bother you that a Government agency broke the law in exactly the way they promised they wouldn't?

That's actually the bigger issue.

[drf]

Mark is one of those, um, intellectuals who probably orders the evening transcript from Coast-to-Coast AM.

Oh wait, flying is a privlege. Therefore the feds can get all info on you.

It goes the other way around. They have the privlege of info. We constrain them. You unhappy? YOU DRIVE. lost the subsidies and let the free market reign.

And Mark: may the bullies that did all that krap to me back when, invade your dreams, haunting you. Damn your federally-sponsored bullying. I hate bullies.

[Serafina]

I love that the airlines, too, are so cheerfully willing to sell their passengers out to the government.

[Number 6]

Mark is a troll, folks. Let's not feed him.

[Cap'n Obvious]

This morning I missed my flight, thanks to the TSA. I arrived at the terminal at 5am. I stood in line to check my bags until 5:15, then I proceeded to the TSA Bag Inspection. I stood there until 5:50 just to have some old deusch ask me if I had guns in my bags. When I answered "no" he said I could go to the security checkpoint. Once there, I waited another 35 minutes, showed my ID three seperate times, removed my shoes (as "suggested"), emptied my pockets, took off my belt, pulled my laptop out of its case, and took a deep breath as I walked through the metal detector. By the time I got my shit back together and made it to my gate (6:30), I realized that my plane had already departed. Standby for the next two planes was out of the question due to all the other "detainees" that the TSA felt the need to harass.

So this post is just to say Thanks to the TSA. Thanks for your hard work, your dedication to my security, your competence. Thanks for your unwaivering commitment to obstruction, retardation and to wasting my fucking time! Thanks for reminding me, yet again, how awful stupid people in large numbers can be. Thanks for the small part you play in eroding what's left of the airlines ability to operate profitably. Thanks for ruining the fun of travel. Thanks for the long lines. Thanks for empowering otherwise useless peices of shit with a star-spangled rent-a-cop mentality. Thanks for making me late for work this morning. Thanks for making me miss my breakfast AND lunch. Thanks for poking through my bags and (god only knows how) opening my toothpaste and forgetting to close it tightly. Thanks for putting those huge x-ray-bag-screening machines right in the middle of the terminal so that the lines of people - made to wait on account of your slowness - have to wrap around in a confused manner that annoys everyone and makes nothing better.

Thanks for the lease on my life. I mean, just because I lived my life peacably before the TSA is no guarantee that I'll continue to live safely without them in the future. Thanks again you no good pieces of shit! Fuck You!

[Mark]

What exactly is it that is so important for the airlines NOT to know about you?

Still unanswered...a lot of paranoia and "privacy in principle" and apparent fear of criminal exposure, but nothing substantive in response to this question.

[isildur]

Privacy is an end in itself. I don't need to have a reason to want privacy. I could come up with examples of things I don't want the government to know, but they would be irrelevant. It doesn't matter why; I don't want to share details that aren't pertinent with government officials.

I notice that you're still not signing your real email address. What's the matter? What's so important for H&R commenters NOT to know about you?

[Rich Ard]

If I may, Mark:

The issue, as I see it, is not that the airlines have this information - part of the purchase price for my ticket is knowing that I have ceded some information to the airline, much as using a credit card comes with the knowledge that I'm passing my SSN on to that company - but that a largely unaccountable government organization is using that information. Further, that government arm was sold to the populace with, among other things, the promise that such information would not be used.

The part that you left off your original question, "without their consent", is the root of this problem - which is why, like tarran, I avoid flying.

[Anonymo the Anonymous]

"Oh wait, flying is a privlege. Therefore the feds can get all info on you."

"I'm going to shave you bald, young man, until you realize that hair is not a right! It's a privilege!"
- Principal Seymour Skinner

[Eddy]

It's funny, when the bank screws up and loses your so-so sequitur number along with all your data, people freak. If the airline gives it away free to a group breaking the law that can't keep track of their hardware much less their data well that's...probably classified. But hey, why worry.

[CodeMonkeySteve]

Mark: "What exactly is it that is so important for the airlines NOT to know about you?"

first, last and middle names, credit card information, home address and phone number, birth date, name suffix, second surname, spouse first name, gender, second address, third address, ZIP code and latitude and longitude of address.

Next question.

[Mark]

first, last and middle names, credit card information, home address and phone number, birth date, name suffix, second surname, spouse first name, gender, second address, third address, ZIP code and latitude and longitude of address.

Scaaaary, indeed. My gender! Heaven forbid! And birth date? Only my hairdresser knows!

Your irrational demand to not have this pedestrian information made available does not even come close to superseding the need for the government to attempt to keep airline travel secure.

As for those who claim the real issue is that they said they would not get the information (Airline lied, my privacy died!): can you sincerely say that if they had admitted up front they were going to use it, that you would have no problem today with the policy? If you cannot, as I suspect, then your argument is irrelevant.

[tarran]

Mark, sweetie, you are completely missing the point.

How exactly will compiling all this information prevent hijackings?

The pathetically weak argument I have heard in its favour is that the government will somehow mine the data for suspicious patterns, no doubt using powerful algorithms that limit the number of false positives, and then arrest the would-be hijackers before they can put their evil plan in action.

This is a serious waste of resources. To pull this off, they need lots of analyists, to develop algorithms that do not exist yet, hire agents to investigate all hits, these agents will, I'm sure, not be so overwhelmed that they can investigate each case sufficiently, and I'm sure that the 99.9999% of false positives will be investigated without inconveniencing the innocent traveler.

It ain't going to happen. First, the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security lacks the analysts needed to process the intelligence that it is now gathering! Secondly, they have a tendency to try to get false confessions out of people, like Abdallah Higazy whose confessions were coerced by threatening to turn his family's names over to Egyptian Intelligence. In fact, I don't know if you've noticed, but many of the terrorist conspiracies that were broken up in the past four years, the ones where we got to see the evidence on anyway, turned out to be a bunch of hot air, the al Queda sleeper cells to be gorups of idiotic young men with no training who demonstrated even less field craft than Nathan Hale did before he was hung. The evidence invariably turned out to be nothing more than FBI fantasies grounded in the most tenous of evidentary foundations.

In other words, they have no use for this information, and they have a track record of misbehavior. Until they prove otherwise, they ain't getting anything from me.

Now, if they really wanted to prevent hijackings, they would allow people to adequately defend themselves. It's no accident that in the three succesful cruise-missiles, the passengers and crew did what the government had ordered them to, they cooperated with the hijackers. On the one aircraft where the passengers did not cooperate, the aircraft never got near its target. The passengers wer enot even properly armed, they were using improvised weapons against knife-wielding adversaries trained in martial arts.

The fact is, al Queada would not have even tried to carry out the hijacking if the policy had been one of non-cooperation. I don't know if you noticed, but they tend not to take on people who can fight back.

The Feds know this, but they love the new security state they are creating. So they send poorly trained Federal Marshals on a few flights, men whose track reord involves forgetting their weapons in aircraft lavatories and whose crowning acheivement was the arrest of a retired U.S. Army Colonel for watching them too closely as they jammed a drunk they had just beaten up into the seat next to him.

Personally, I think it is the height of rationality to not give Federal Officials any excuse to bring me or my family or my friends in for questioning. Rather, mark, it is your blind trust in the promises of Federal officials which is the height of irrationality.

[Dave]

Shhhhhhhhhhhocking!

[Rich Ard]

Mark said, "As for those who claim the real issue is that they said they would not get the information (Airline lied, my privacy died!): can you sincerely say that if they had admitted up front they were going to use it, that you would have no problem today with the policy? If you cannot, as I suspect, then your argument is irrelevant."

But that's not at all the issue at hand - people made a choice to give some or all of that information to the airline based on the verbal contract that stipulated such information would not be used in a certain fashion, and that contract has now been broken.

My argument, at least, is that my private information is and should be as valuable to me as anything else which describes my identity, and someone has dipped their hand into a honeypot I was assured was "hands-off".

And the track record thus far indicates that said information is being used for purposes not even remotely related to terrorism. Am I personally concerned that the Feds will show up in jackboots at my doorstep? Not particularly, but all the same I don't make any special effort to provide them with reasons for doing so.

[js]

"Who cares? Why does someone's irrational concern about privacy trump the rest of the passengers being more confident that their plane will not be used as a human cruise missile by terrorists?"

There are so many falacies and questionable assumptions here that it's hard to know where to begin.
1) the assumption that the majority would prefer safety to privacy is claimed but not substantiated (but even if it is true please see objections 2, 3 and 4)
2) it is assumed that this extreme level of concern with security is rational (I'd agree that it is rational to care about one's safety. *However* I happen to think that U.S. has become utterly paranoid and way overstated the terrorist threat since 9/11).
3) it is assumed that collecting data on passengers is an effective means of protecting security
4) it is assumed that rational desires should trump irrational ones and that this should be enforced (assuming for a moment that the poster is correct about their evalutaion of what is rational). But, in what "utopia" is this the case? This certainly isn't the case in the free marketplace where subjective desire trumps all. Perhaps it will be the case when our Randians overloads go bad ... and become our new dictators.

[Jennifer]

Next week I have to fly for the first time in fifteen years. Not for fun--it's a required part of my job, so if the government prevents me from flying it's effectively preventing me from earning a living. Driving is not an option either, since I have to be in New York City on Tuesday and in Colorado on Wednesday. Rather than answer mark's privacy question, I'd like him to tell me--how will my being treated like a suspicious criminal prevent another terrorist attack? Based upon news reports I've read, I gather that the TSA flunkies will be so busy inspecting the lace on my underwear and looking for plastic explosive in my toothpaste that they won't have time to check and make sure there are no bombs or bioweapons in the cargo hold.

[Jennifer]

Two espressos later, and it hits me: I grew up believiing that the whole point of fredom, or at least the really good thing about living in the US, even if you were poor, is that the government is supposed to leave people alone if they're not hurting anybody. No need to show "papers, please," if you want to travel. No worry that some lecherous government slimedick is going to paw through your underwear bag and display your personal hygiene products to a roomful of strangers. No need to prove your innocence every waking moment. Instead, by flying out on a business trip I have in the eyes of the government added my name to a list of potential terrorists?

Right. Now for added irony, repeat after me: "They hate us for our freedom."

[Rich Ard]

Jennifer, that's why I favor Indiana Jones' solution to the issue - throw the guy out of the blimp.

[Jennifer]

Rich-
Exactly. Even if someone smuggled a boxcutter or a full-fledged gun aboard, there's no way he'll be able to hijack the plane; there will be no shortage of would-be heroes to save the plane and prevent another 9-11. The next terrorist attack (and there WILL be one, sooner or later), will be done in such a way that NOTHING the TSA does would be able to stop it. Meanwhile, I'll keep enjoying my freedom to be felt up in airports and have strangers paw through my personal possessions and find it impossible to make a decent living without having hte government staring down my back the whole time.

[TSA Goon]

"TSA flunkies will be so busy inspecting the lace on my underwear"

This is why we at the TSA recommend that all females 18 to 30 forego underwear while flying.

[Super Prole]

"I grew up believing that the whole point of fredom, or at least the really good thing about living in the US, even if you were poor, is that the government is supposed to leave people alone if they're not hurting anybody. No need to show 'papers, please,' if you want to travel."

Now that's a real, "Don't Tread on Me", American sentiment.

Too bad most of our fellow citizens don't believe in it anymore.

[ChicagoTom]

Mark,

Its actually quite simple. Already the government has used many of these so-called "No Fly" lists to stall and make travel uncomfortable for anti-war protesters or anti-Bush protesters. That right there should be enough to make anyone who believes in a free society recoil in horror. The problem isnt that people object to trying to make the skies safer, its people abuse information. This isnt hypothetical -- its for real! If you would be more comfortable in a police state where the government tracks your every movement, then maybe you should consider immigrating to a police state. We live in a free society. Part of that is being free to travel anonymouslyu when one has done nothing to warrant suspicion.

Mark, do you believe in innocent until proven guilty? Do you believe in Search Warrants? Or should the government just be able to lock you up and search your house on a lark or to send a message?

Look at the patriot act as an example. Of over 200 convictions, only 39 were terrorism related. That to me sounds like abuse of information (the Patriot act was supposed to only be used for terror investigations).

So you tell me....since abuse of private information is already happening, why shouldn't we be upset?

[TSA Goon II]

This is why we at the TSA recommend that all females 18 to 30 forego underwear while flying.

Especially if we need to publicly remove some of your clothes to make sure you're really not a terrorist.

[smacky]

Thanks for your unwaivering commitment to obstruction, retardation and to wasting my fucking time!

Hey, some of us here cherish our commitment to retardation! You're welcome.

[Mad Scientist]

I flew to Indianapolis this week for the farce that was the Formula One USGP. I successfully smuggled my cigarette lighter onto three different airplanes before the x-ray goons caught it on the 4th. I performed this evil subterfuge by putting the lighter into my carry-on bag. Sneaky, huh? The security guy who took it from me said that I was welcome to go across the street to the Hilton where I could mail it to myself, and then come back and stand in line again. Hey, thanks, but no thanks. So, just to be clear, I can't carry it on me, I can't put it into the carry-on, and I can't put it into my checked baggage, because all of those things would result in that incredibly dangerous cigarette lighter actually being on an airplane. However, it's no problem to put it in the mail in which case it will also end up on an airplane...

I've never hijacked a plane before and, to the best of my knowledge, neither has my lighter, but I realize we're both suspicious characters, so I'm glad they took that dangerous weapon out of my hands at least 25% of the time.