Posted on April 23, 2003
You're on their 'No Fly' list
I've been worried about 'false-positives' from the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness initiatives for months -- predicting last November that we could have almost 240,000 mis- identifications of 'terrorists' as that data- mining initiative unfolds.
Turns out even today's stupid technologies are at least as prone to false positives. The WSJ reports (which liquidlist picks up, too) that the TSA's "No Fly List" is creating havoc across the country. Not only are people whose names are close to those on the 'no fly list' routinely stopped (John Adams is cited. Yep, John Adams.), but it also appears that peace activists are specifically profiled; "When is a nun considered too dangerous to get on board a plane? When she's a peace activist." (note to ACLU; the Patriot Act doesn't allow for anti-administration profiling, does it??)
Part of the problem is the age of the component technologies;
One name-matching technique that airlines have used, called Soundex, dates back more than 100 years, to when it was invented to analyze names from the 1890 census. In its simplest form, it takes a name, strips out vowels and assigns codes to somewhat-similar-sounding consonants, such as "c" and "z."
The result can be bizarre. Hencke and Hamza, for example, have the same code, H520. If there's a Hamza on the No Fly List, a traveler named Hencke could be pulled aside for a background check before being allowed to board.
and....
A 40-year-old method designed specifically for airlines does something similar, stripping names down to consonants and pulling up names that have the same consonants in the same order. A third technique sometimes used by airlines hunts for matches based on the first few letters of surnames.
Hence Mr. Musarra's troubles in Juneau. In an algorithm used by Sabre, whose software runs Alaska Airlines' reservations system and many others, "Musarra" appears to pop up as a match for any name starting with "Mus."
The difficulties are logarithmic:
One wanted terrorism suspect, Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, uses five aliases. The six names can be translated a total of more than 500 ways, says Language Analysis Systems.
So, if you're a million-mile Platinum Premier United Airlines flier, who happens to be named David Nelson.... since ...
In most airline systems, the No Fly checks are set up in such a way that the computer treats each passenger as a brand new name, even if he or she has flown recently and was cleared in another flight record.
... you'll be stopped, warned, check-out, and delayed each and every time you fly.
(the impact on airline customer relationships has to have been one of the terrorists' biggest economic blows)
If checking against a simple 'no fly list' is that error-prone, imagine what will happen as the government slices and dices through billions of records in incompatible commercial and other databases to sift out people who should be targetted for surveillance (remember, under the Patriot Act they no longer have to tell you you/your email/your bedroom is being watched), detention, and on we go....
The TSA's solution to the no fly list mess?
Longer term, the agency is working on an advanced passenger pre-screening system known by the acronym of CAPPS II.
It will scour not only watch lists such as No Fly but also criminal records, credit-card transactions and identifiers such as address and date of birth to detect suspicious patterns.
More unscoured data, now matched -- yikes.
Update: the ACLU is suing the TSA, citing 339 (or more) passengers stopped at SF International in the last two years. One of the victims calls it all 'a remarkable bureaucratic mess'. Except it isn't remarkable, it will just get worse...
---------------
On a related note, even right wing bloggers like Instapundit are highlighting the patriotic anti-Patriot act groundswell;
HERE'S A STORY OF A RALLY AGAINST THE PATRIOT ACT IN UTAH, featuring a rather diverse group of people from across the political spectrum.
Meanwhile here's a somewhat less diverse group that's also opposed, and librarians are also unhappy.
And you can find critical newspaper editorials in the Roanoke Times , the Denver Post , the Salt Lake Tribune and the Palm Beach Post, to name just a few.
------------
Secular. Not so Secular.
Here's a picture of the Minnesota crowds celebrating the Wild's overtime victory over the Avs Monday.
Here's a picture of the Karbala Shiite crowds celebrating Islam's victory Monday.
-------------
Bush will spend at least $200 million on his re-election campaign, kicking-off on the 9/11 anniversary this year... I don't know which is poorer taste, the money or the timing....but neither is surprising.
-------------
Early Iraq-II film treatments; these four GI's were nailed trying to steal $1 million of Saddam's cash . Some will succeed...
------------
Everyone is ticked off that the Administration misled the American public in its rush to war (Josh Marshall believes this deception was planned; Scheer in the L.A. Times asks;
Did our president knowingly deceive us in his rush to war?
If he did, and we are truly concerned about our own democracy, we would have to acknowledge that such an egregious abuse of power rises to the status of an impeachable offense.
Well, of course Bush misled us! Lying is a marketing tool in the Harvard MBA (can you say, Jeff Skilling?) kit. What policy area, or campaign promise, haven't they lied about? These guys think they're channeling Sun Tzu, or even more admiringly, the Mossad; whose credo is; "by deception thou shalt do war". In their worldview, the American public is the enemy, too.
-------------
Good column by Jim Spencer in the Denver Post today highlighting the resurgence of "Hate State" legislation across Colorado. The State legislature slammed rights for single-sex parents whenever it could this session, and now the Colorado Springs city government has decided to save $6,700 (which various citizens said they'd pay -- the right can now buy legislation at the state level in Colorado, but the discriminated can't buy rights at any level, apparently), by cutting off benefits to single-sex partners of city employees. Fundamentally (sic), this is just another step in the relentless 20-year effort from the Christian right to, as Jean Hardisty pointed out in Mobilizing Resentment,
institutionalize their brand of Christianity as state practice.
Neoconservatives are in a dither about a prospective Shiite muslim religious state in Iraq ... while enabling and enriching an equally extreme religious take-over of government in America.
|
