terrorism
A “Clear” Case of Failure
Clear, the “trusted traveler” program that allowed customers to bypass airport security lines, has shut down. The story is an interesting case of bureaucratic disincentives and general failure around the whole mess known as airport security.
A privately-run alternative to the TSA’s Registered Traveller program, Clear started out with what seemed like a good idea — [...]
Data Hiding at the Airport
According to the EFF blog, customs has taken to randomly searching electronic devices for suspicious data. It is somewhat mysterious what they are searching them for — given only a few minutes and a technically unskilled border guard doing the searching, it’s hard to imagine them actually finding anything better hidden than a file on [...]
Surveillance and Ubiquity
HexView has an article about tracking vehicles with RFID tire pressure monitors. The devices are found in tires and transmit tire pressure to the engine control module, which sounds innocuous enough, but to prevent modules from reading neighboring cars’ tires by accident, they also transmit a unique ID. Thus, you can follow a [...]
The Resilient Society, and How Not To Build It
Today I found a link to an article by my least-favorite current presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani. I was expecting a cavalcade of fear-mongering — his usual stock in trade — but discovered to my surprise an article entitled “The Resilient Society.” This gave me pause, as resilience is precisely what I believe must [...]
The War on the Unexpected
Bruce Schneier has a good post today called “The War on the Unexpected,” about the unintended results of asking the general population to report anything suspicious. Even discounting deliberate malfeasance (reporting the neighbor you don’t like as “suspicious”), people find a lot of things suspicious, and the gatekeepers have no motivation to apply intelligent filtering [...]
