Is TSA planning new ID rules for operators & passengers of small planes & boats?

When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just
the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations. Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...n2939438.shtml
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Vaughn





--
Will poofread for food.

In article ,
"Vaughn Simon" wrote:

When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just
the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations. Now
this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...n2939438.shtml
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

scary, isn't it?

--
Bob Noel
(goodness, please trim replies!!!)

On Jun 17, 9:27 am, "Vaughn Simon"
wrote:
When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just
the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations. Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...ws/main2939438....
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Vaughn

--
Will poofread for food.

Makes you want to move to a free country, doesn't it? There has to be
someplace in the world that is still truly free, it sure isn't here
anymore!

On Jun 17, 11:27 am, "Vaughn Simon"
wrote:
When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just
the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations. Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...ws/main2939438....
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Vaughn


SARCASM ON

"Out in the middle of Minnesota, a small car is really not a problem.
But when you take a small car and put it in Manhattan or Pennsylvania
Avenue the threat dynamic becomes much different," says security
expert Paul Krutz.

Homeland Security is contemplating new requirements including
mandating IDs for the operators and passengers of small cars,
installing tracking transponders, and subjecting passengers to
terrorist watch list checks.

"It's overkill. It's not going to have the payback," says Ed Bacon who
drives a Geo Metro.

Bacon has been driving in Manhattan for more than 20 years. Getting ID
from all of his passengers may seem like a good idea, but he says it
just won't work.

"You get a lot of last minute requests," he says. "My neighbor might
call and ask for a ride to the grocery store, or a stranded friend
might call from the subway station. How am I going to get that
information to authorities?"

SARCASM OFF

("Andrew Sarangan" wrote)
"You get a lot of last minute requests," he says. "My neighbor might
call and ask for a ride to the grocery store, or a stranded friend
might call from the subway station. How am I going to get that
information to authorities?"

SARCASM OFF


Didn't anybody in HS see:

Speed (1994)
The Gauntlet (1977)
Dirty Hary (1971)

Don't forget the buses.


Paul-Mont
(Sam Lowry) "I only know you got the wrong man."

(Jack Lint) "Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man.
The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good
faith as the right man. Was I wrong?"

Brazil (1985) ....rent it!

"Vaughn Simon" wrote in message
news
When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to
give me serious reservations. Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...n2939438.shtml
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Vaughn





--
Will poofread for food.



Where have you all been? Have any of you ever been walking down the street, just minding your own business, when a cop
stopped you and asked to see your ID? Have you ever said no? Did you pay the price for saying no? This has been going on
for years, and no-one seems to give a damn....

On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:27:16 GMT, "Vaughn Simon"
wrote in
:

When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security", just
the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations. Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...n2939438.shtml
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Homeland Security is contemplating new requirements including
mandating IDs for the operators and passengers of small boats and
planes, installing tracking transponders on boats, and subjecting
passengers on private jets to terrorist watch list checks.

But one report says the first new rules will be issued at summer's
end, and passengers on private jets will have to be checked
against terror watch lists.




It's already happening:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive..._costs_an.html
January 30, 2007
Real-ID: Costs and Benefits
The argument was so obvious it hardly needed repeating. Some
thought we would all be safer -- *from terrorism, from crime, even
from inconvenience -- *if we had a better ID card. A good,
hard-to-forge national ID is a no-brainer (or so the argument goes),
and it’s ridiculous that a modern country like the United States
doesn’t have one.

Still, most Americans have been and continue to be opposed to a
national ID card. Even just after 9/11, polls showed a bare majority
(51%) in favor -- *and that quickly became a minority opinion again.
As such, both political parties came out against the card, which meant
that the only way it could become law was to sneak it through.

Republican Cong. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin did just
that. In February 2005, he attached the Real ID Act to a defense
appropriations bill. No one was willing to risk not supporting the
troops by holding up the bill, and it became law. No hearings. No
floor debate. With nary a whisper, the United States had a national
ID.

By forcing all states to conform to common and more stringent
rules for issuing driver’s licenses, the Real ID Act turns these
licenses into a de facto national ID. It’s a massive, unfunded mandate
imposed on the states, and -- *naturally -- *the states have resisted.
The detailed rules and timetables are still being worked out by the
Department of Homeland Security, and it’s the details that will
determine exactly how expensive and onerous the program actually is.

It is against this backdrop that the National Governors
Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the
American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators together tried to
estimate the cost of this initiative. “The Real ID Act: National
Impact Analysis” is a methodical and detailed report, and everything
after the executive summary is likely to bore anyone but the most
dedicated bean counters. But rigor is important because states want to
use this document to influence both the technical details and
timetable of Real ID. The estimates are conservative, leaving no room
for problems, delays, or unforeseen costs, and yet the total cost is
$11 billion over the first five years of the program.

If anything, it’s surprisingly cheap: Only $37 each for an
estimated 295 million people who would get a new ID under this
program. But it’s still an enormous amount of money. The question to
ask is, of course: Is the security benefit we all get worth the $11
billion price tag? We have a cost estimate; all we need now is a
security estimate.

I’m going to take a crack at it.

When most people think of ID cards, they think of a small plastic
card with their name and photograph. This isn’t wrong, but it’s only a
small piece of any ID program. What starts out as a seemingly simple
security device -- *a card that binds a photograph with a name --
*rapidly becomes a complex security system.

It doesn’t really matter how well a Real ID works when used by the
hundreds of millions of honest people who would carry it. What matters
is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting
that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and
how failures might be exploited.

The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we
make it, it will be forged. We can raise the price of forgery, but we
can’t make it impossible. Real IDs will be forged.

Even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names.
Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid Virginia driver’s licenses in
fake names. And even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued
national ID cards couldn’t be bribed, cards are issued based on other
identity documents -- *all of which are easier to forge.

And we can’t assume that everyone will always have a Real ID.
Currently about 20% of all identity documents are lost per year. An
entirely separate security system would have to be developed for
people who lost their card, a system that itself would be susceptible
to abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people: people who regularly
make mistakes. We’ve all heard stories of bartenders falling for
obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government
buildings. It’s not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a
mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures.
Biometrics such as thumbprints could help, but bring with them their
own set of exploitable failure modes.

All of these problems demonstrate that identification checks based
on Real ID won’t be nearly as secure as we might hope. But the main
problem with any strong identification system is that it requires the
existence of a database. In this case, it would have to be 50 linked
databases of private and sensitive information on every American --
*one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in
stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

The security risks of this database are enormous. It would be a
kludge of existing databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous
data, and unreliable. Computer scientists don’t know how to keep a
database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the
thousands of insiders authorized to access it.

But even if we could solve all these problems, and within the
putative $11 billion budget, we still wouldn’t be getting very much
security. A reliance on ID cards is based on a dangerous security
myth, that if only we knew who everyone was, we could pick the bad
guys out of the crowd.

In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that
denoted intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that said
“evildoer” and everyone else to carry a card that said “honest person
who won't try to hijack or blow up anything.” Then security would be
easy. We could just look at people’s IDs, and, if they were evildoers,
we wouldn’t let them on the airplane or into the building.

This is, of course, ridiculous; so we rely on identity as a
substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough
information about you, we can somehow predict whether you’re likely to
be an evildoer. But that’s almost as ridiculous.

Even worse, as soon as you divide people into two categories --
*more trusted and less trusted people -- *you create a third, and very
dangerous, category: untrustworthy people whom we have no reason to
mistrust. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; the Washington, DC,
snipers; the London subway bombers; and many of the 9/11 terrorists
had no previous links to terrorism. Evildoers can also steal the
identity -- *and profile -- *of an honest person. Profiling can result
in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt
security.

There’s another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these
systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers
are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be
a false alarm. Think of all the problems with the government’s no-fly
list. That list, which is what Real IDs will be checked against, not
only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent
elsewhere, but it also causes grave harm to those innocents who fit
the profile.

Enough of terrorism; what about more mundane concerns like
identity theft? Perversely, a hard-to-forge ID card can actually
increase the risk of identity theft. A single ubiquitous ID card will
be trusted more and used in more applications. Therefore, someone who
does manage to forge one -- *or get one issued in someone else’s name
-- *can commit much more fraud with it. A centralized ID system is a
far greater security risk than a decentralized one with various
organizations issuing ID cards according to their own rules for their
own purposes.

Security is always a trade-off; it must be balanced with the cost.
We all do this intuitively. Few of us walk around wearing bulletproof
vests. It’s not because they’re ineffective, it’s because for most of
us the trade-off isn’t worth it. It’s not worth the cost, the
inconvenience, or the loss of fashion sense. If we were living in a
war-torn country like Iraq, we might make a different trade-off.

Real ID is another lousy security trade-off. It’ll cost the United
States at least $11 billion, and we won’t get much security in return.
The report suggests a variety of measures designed to ease the
financial burden on the states: extend compliance deadlines, allow
manual verification systems, and so on. But what it doesn’t suggest is
the simple change that would do the most good: scrap the Real ID
program altogether. For the price, we’re not getting anywhere near the
security we should.

This essay will appear in the March/April issue of The Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists.

EDITED TO ADD (1/30): There's REAL-ID news this week. Maine became
the first state to reject REAL-ID. This means that a Maine state
driver's license will not be recognized as valid for federal purposes,
although I'm sure the Feds will back down over this. And other states
will follow:

"As Maine goes, so goes the nation," said Charlie Mitchell,
director of the ACLU State Legislative Department. "Already bills have
been filed in Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Georgia and
Washington, which would follow Maine's lead in saying no to Real ID,
with many mores states on the verge of similar action. Across the
nation, local lawmakers are rejecting the federal government's demand
that they curtail their constituents' privacy through this giant
unfunded boondoggle."
More info on REAL-ID here.

EDITED TO ADD (1/31): More information on Montana. My guess is
that Montana will become the second state ro reject REAL-ID, and New
Mexico will be the third.

It also assumes that all terrorists are on the watch list.


"Vaughn Simon" wrote in message
news
When Bush first floated the idea of a "Department of Homeland Security",
just the name sounded Gestapo-ish enough to give me serious reservations.
Now this?

http://www.cbsnews.com:80/stories/20...n2939438.shtml
"New Security Rules For Small Boats, Planes"

Vaughn





--
Will poofread for food.

In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:

Real-ID: Costs and Benefits
The argument was so obvious it hardly needed repeating. Some
thought we would all be safer -- *from terrorism, from crime, even
from inconvenience -- *if we had a better ID card. A good,
hard-to-forge national ID is a no-brainer (or so the argument goes),
and it’s ridiculous that a modern country like the United States
doesn’t have one.

True story...
I was talking to a friend the other day about cell phones.
He then told me about an instance he witnessed in a Circuit City story a
couple days earlier.
A group of five young Mexican males arrived in a vehicle ahead of him.
He walked into the store behind them. They went to the cell phone area
and began looking at the phones. One fellow wanted to buy phone and
phone plan. The clerk asked for a drivers license for identification.
Not one of the four had a drivers licence. The clerk asked for any form
of identification in an effort to make the sale. Again, not one of them
had any identification.

(Disclaimer to the rabid political oriented who inhabit this group: This
is not an anti-immigrant rant, this is just a true story.)

On Jun 17, 2:12 pm, john smith wrote:
In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:

Real-ID: Costs and Benefits
The argument was so obvious it hardly needed repeating. Some
thought we would all be safer -- *from terrorism, from crime, even
from inconvenience -- *if we had a better ID card. A good,
hard-to-forge national ID is a no-brainer (or so the argument goes),
and it's ridiculous that a modern country like the United States
doesn't have one.

True story...
I was talking to a friend the other day about cell phones.
He then told me about an instance he witnessed in a Circuit City story a
couple days earlier.
A group of five young Mexican males arrived in a vehicle ahead of him.
He walked into the store behind them. They went to the cell phone area
and began looking at the phones. One fellow wanted to buy phone and
phone plan. The clerk asked for a drivers license for identification.
Not one of the four had a drivers licence. The clerk asked for any form
of identification in an effort to make the sale. Again, not one of them
had any identification.

(Disclaimer to the rabid political oriented who inhabit this group: This
is not an anti-immigrant rant, this is just a true story.)

Not trying to defend these individuals, but if someone wants to buy a
prepaid phone and a prepaid plan, I don't see why you need to show any
id.