The new "CAPPS II" system is supposed to make everyone safer when they fly by screening out certain individuals and keeping potential "threats" off of commercial flights. Unfortunaltely, two MIT students have already proven that the system can be gamed, so what's the point?
The privacy concerns of "CAPPS II" are monumental. Everything any marketer wants to know about you is going to be in there. Everything anyone with a grudge and access to the system is going to be in there; and we all know how user-friendly the TSA and Fatherland Security Office are for appealing wrongheaded nonsense. Additionally, what's to keep some minimum-wage employee of some agency or company with access to this data from selling it off for a nice little chunk of change?
The CAPPS system is slated for an overhaul and this summer a prototype of the new system, CAPPS II, which draws information from various public and private databases to better flag potential threats to airline security, will be tested by the Transportation Security Administration. The system is controversial and has drawn criticism from privacy advocates because of the amount of personal information it uses from private databases to help profile passengers.
We continue to hand our lives over to "Big Brother" and smile all the while.
posted by Jo Fish on 01.27.04 at 11:29 PM
Comments:
It's true. And it's scary. Americans let cameras watch them doing everything: driving on the freeway, trying on socks, sitting around at work.
I sometimes wonder if all the cameras make people feel like they're stars, like they're important. We're so celebrity obsessed that maybe some people would do anything to feel important, even if it's on a tiny scale such as a dressing room camera.
They've also been conviced to think 'it's safe' to have cameras everywhere. We're not watching you, we're watching the criminals! People would trade away everything to feel safe.
