Airline Security a Waste of Cash
By Bruce Schneier
Story location: You know, it's just kind of obvious, really
https://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69712,00.html
02:00 AM Dec. 01, 2005 PT
Since 9/11, our nation has been obsessed with air-travel security. Terrorist attacks from the air have been the threat that looms largest in Americans' minds. As a result, we've wasted millions on misguided programs to separate the regular travelers from the suspected terrorists – money that could have been spent to actually make us safer.
Consider CAPPS and its replacement, Secure Flight. These are programs to check travelers against the 30,000 to 40,000 names on the government's No-Fly list, and another 30,000 to 40,000 on its Selectee list.
Security Matters
They're bizarre lists: people – names and aliases – who are too dangerous to be allowed to fly under any circumstance, yet so innocent that they cannot be arrested, even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act. (((Hey wait a minnit... yeah! What's that about?)))
The Selectee list contains an equal number of travelers who must be searched extensively before they're allowed to fly. Who are these people,
anyway?
The truth is, nobody knows. The lists come from the Terrorist Screening Database, a hodgepodge compiled in haste from a variety of sources, with no clear rules about who should be on it or how to get off it. The government is trying to clean
up the lists, but – garbage in, garbage out – it's not having much success.
The program has been a complete failure, resulting in exactly zero terrorists caught. And even worse, thousands (or more) have been denied the ability to fly, even though they've done nothing wrong. These denials fall into two categories: the "Ted Kennedy" problem (people who aren't on the list but share a name with someone who is) and the "Cat Stevens" problem (people on the list who shouldn't be). Even now, four years after 9/11, both
these problems remain.
(((etc etc etc etc, and the longer it takes us to catch on to all this, the more prescient Bruce Schneier gets.)))
