End the War on Freedom

From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Please submit public comments on CAPPS 2 / JetBlue
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 02:12:16 -0700

[Moderator's note: This isn't about crypto, but I have a tradition of forwarding John's appeals on such topics. --Perry]

There's something you can do *right now* that will stop pending abuses of air travelers' private data. And your chance to do it will expire this coming Tuesday (Sept 30).

The government has published a Privacy Act notice about its CAPPS-2 program, which would require all airlines to provide JetBlue-style information (full PNRs) to the government -- all the time, before every flight. It's like another JetBlue database dump that happens again and again, day after day, month after month, airline after airline. Affecting everyone who ever flies.

CAPPS-2 is the real thing, for which the Torch Concepts/JetBlue contract was one of the test runs. The government is taking public comments on the CAPPS-2 proposal, by email or postal mail, between now and September 30th. After that, if you send them your opinion, they'll ignore it (even more than usual).

Address your email like this:

  To: privacy@dhs.gov
  Subject: DHS/TSA-2003-1

Then tell them whatever you want. If the government is honest, then they would stop CAPPS-2 if they got individual notes from 10,000 people saying "KILL CAPPS-2! Don't sacrifice the privacy of 600 million travelers each year in a foolish attempt to catch less than a dozen actual terrorists each year." If they are dishonest and don't care what the public thinks, then they would at least be on notice that 10,000 honest and involved people are watching them.

You can write them pages and pages of details on how terrible CAPPS-2 is, and how corrupt they are to propose it, instead of a short note. But I suggest reading the details of what they propose, if you're going to that much trouble. You can find their proposal (in proprietary PDF format) here:

  http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/CAPPSII_PRIVACY_ACT_NOTICE.pdf

They claim that they're putting up the comments for public viewing on http://www.dhs.gov, but if they have done so, I can't find them there. You can find an earlier round of 282 overwhelmingly negative public comments on CAPPS-2 here, if you click "Simple Search" and enter "1437": http://dms.dot.gov.

As a brief overview, CAPPS-2 would require airlines to collect peoples' full legal name, residence address, home phone number, and date of birth (none of which is currently used by airlines today) before they can even make a flight reservation. They would be required to hand this information, and everything else in the PNR (flight reservation), to the government, LONG BEFORE the flight takes off. Then the government (or its "contractors") would do the same kind of data matching that Torch Concepts did, hooking up your flight reservations to credit databases and many other government and private databases. The difference is that if YOUR data was one of those "anomalous records" (that didn't fit one of the standard patterns of your airline's customers), you would be singled out to be specially searched, and/or kept off the airplane.

Torch Concepts' report blew the whistle on this secret program. The report is at http://cryptome.org/jetblue-spy.pdf. On page 22, Torch found two major groupings of JetBlue customers:

  (1) Young Middle Income Home Owners with Short Length-of-Residence
  (2) Older Upper Income Home Owners with Longer Length-of-Residence

Everybody else they categorized into "anomalous records". If you're an oldster who moved to Florida recently -- or a renter -- or a lower income person of any type -- you're anomalous. You're going to get that special government search whenever you fly on JetBlue, if TSA succeeds in imposing CAPPS 2.

(Oh, perhaps their final system will be more subtle than this clumsy contractor was, but the basic problem is the same: the government will forcibly identify each traveler, evalulate their lifestyle from database records, and then make snap decisions about what civil rights that person will have while traveling. They propose to permanently withhold the right to anonymity; grant or withhold the right to travel; and grant or withhold the right not to be searched without probable cause. I thought rights were something that you had *all the time*, not just if the government likes your lifestyle.)

CAPPS-2 also proposes that this "airport checkpoint" also be used to try to catch various kinds of criminals, rather than solely to make flying supposedly safer. It would also be used to catch foreign visitors whose visa has expired or whose paperwork is snarled. And once the public is used to it, of course I expect it would be expanded to stop people for everything up to and including parking tickets. The judges say that searching the general public without cause, in order to catch criminals, is unconstitutional. But don't depend on a judge to guard your rights. Complain to the government yourself, right now!

Here's the best part. Besides the "blacklists" that today's CAPPS-1 system uses, the CAPPS-2 system will have "whitelists". Anyone with a government security clearance, or a "position of trust and confidence", will never get singled out, screened, or delayed. They will be able to show up at the airport half an hour before their flight, like everyone used to be able to do, and just walk on board. There'll be one rule for "Party members" and another rule for the "proletariat". CAPPS-2 assumes you are guilty until proven innocent -- and assumes you are innocent if you work for the government. That alone is reason enough to stop it.

EFF has also set up an Action Alert web site as another way to submit your comments on CAPPS-2. See:

  http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2785

John Gilmore
http://freetotravel.org/
and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Chris Floyd at The Moscow Times - Global Eye -- Vanishing Act - looks like the people Bush wants to win the 2004 election will do so, thanks to his control of the vote-counting technology. My take: it's time to revert to paper ballots marked with pens, with local people counting the votes and reporting to a hierarchy. It's still possible to rig an election that way, but there's a paper and people trail that is more likely to trip you up than the new evidence-free electronic voting scheme. Prison Planet has a reprint of this essay entitled CIA-owned Voting Machines Ensure Bush Victory in 2004. What Really Happened has been talking about this for a while, but they've just been pointing out how easy these machines are to manipulate. Mr. Floyd's article alleges an existing Bushivek conspiracy. [lew stanleyscoop]

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets" of the private companies who make them.

...

The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government, the military, the judiciary -- and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will disappear -- at the push of a button.

Amos Harel at Haaretz (Israel) - Halutz: Pilots refusing to serve in territories will face law - a group of Israeli pilots are refusing to participate in Israel's terrorist activities. Good for them. [smith2004]

Air Force Commander Dan Halutz has grounded nine pilots who signed a letter refusing to take part in operations in the territories.

Altogether 27 reserve pilots signed the letter, details of which were published last week in Haaretz, but only nine of them still do active duty with the force.

The signatories, who sent the letter to Air Force Commander Dan Halutz, described aerial activity in the territories as "illegal and immoral."

...

Among the signatories is Brigadier General Yiftah Spector (res.), who was a squadron leader during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

...

Captain Yonatan, speaking on behalf of the signatories, said last night: "We are all loyal citizens of the state of Israel. We have taken this step after deep thought and much soul-searching. As officers and pilots, we have been given the heavy responsibility of operating a most powerful war machine. As people who were educated with the moral code of the IDF and the state of Israel, we have decided to ... obey the order that obliges us not to carry out an order that is blatantly illegal."

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