Posted on 09/18/2019 9:13:07 AM PDT by BigKahuna
In the U.S. and Europe most especially, recognizing a threat posed by an individual flyer and then managing it so that his civil liberties aren’t infringed until necessary is important to the security process. Assigning flyers a score based on the risk each poses to commercial travel – a score which may increase or decrease based on many factors – is one way to effectively security screen each traveler.
In other words, the depth and comprehensiveness of the aviation security screening you might receive prior to boarding your flight could depend on a ‘risk score’ based on data collected about you. Did you walk up at the last minute to book your flight and then paid for it in cash and don’t have any luggage to check? No doubt, your risk score would be higher than if you’d booked your flight well in advance, paid for it with a credit card in your name and have luggage to check in or carry through security.
Here’s another, more speculative, risk-based scenario: Perhaps you’ve recently been on various social media sites discussing how easy it would be for you to hijack or “take down” an airliner full of travelers. Or maybe you’ve remarked on how you’d like to travel to some part of the world known to harbor terror groups and then join up with one of them, and have even booked a flight there soon? Should your risk score increase, and should you then be subjected to heightened security screening at the airport? And should the depth of screening you receive be greater than that of the frequent-flyer business traveler heading off yet again to some conference in yet another city in Europe or the U.S.?
It’s simply common sense. Fly El Al sometime—they already do this.
I can see both your and his point. However, the first thing I thought when I read the headline was that this could quickly morph into something like China’s “social credit” system.
The short answer is political correctness.
After Sept 11th, our government officials wanted to bend over backwards to prove that we weren’t discriminatory against Muslims. So we decided to thoroughly search everyone, so then CAIR and other Muslim groups couldn’t accuse us of discrimination.
We aren’t allowed to say that some young Muslim man from another country is a higher risk than a little old lady. We have been compelled to say that everyone is an equal risk to hijack a plane or set our shoes or underwear on fire.
Mostly sounds reasonable but I fear abuse from the likes of Google deciding who is the risk.
Did the 9/11 hijackers buy their tickets the morning of the flights or previously?
Behavioral profiling is better.
Daters are already interested in your credit score. Censors would love a social score, and now some pinhead suggests we all, in a kumbaya moment, just merrily accept one more ASSIGNED score!! And yeah, it could be turned around, depending who is doing the turning, government, business, or that redhead you have fallen for!!
Sadly, there’s no such thing as privacy these days, and that’s been the case ever since the internet and the Web came into their own some time ago.
“Did the 9/11 hijackers buy their tickets the morning of the flights or previously?”
They set themselves up smartly enough with previously bought tickets and such. And that was after they’d conducted at least one dry run for each flight. They’d identified the weakness in our systems back then and then exploited them for all they were worth.
But would they have been able to avoid surveillance or increased screening had they been deemed sufficiently “risky” and been assigned a score based on that risk? Most likely, they’d have all been on some sort of watchlist or surveillance file that would have been fed into their risk score. At any rate, I’d rather folks like them be screened than a sea of perfectly harmless and sane people. ;-)
“I can see both your and his point. However, the first thing I thought when I read the headline was that this could quickly morph into something like China’s “social credit” system.”
For sure. Because there’s always the question of just who’s supposed to watch the watchers, huh?
The TSA isn’t running a casino.
Everyone needs to be screened, efficiently, everytime.
Have a service pick up your luggage and have it screened in advance if you don’t want to wait at the airport.
Bar laptops as carry-on.
Set FAA standards for voltage adaptors effective starting 2025.
This cuts both ways, however. Suppose I were forced to endure heightened scrutiny because a Viking American separatist group was blowing up buildings, and suppose I disagreed with their views. I would be going everywhere, proselytizing fellow Viking Americans to bring pressure to bear on Viking Americans to knock off the anti-social behavior that was hurting all of us, joining vigilantes to route out the problem in our own community, asking for government assistance to help us end the violent trend in our own community.
Now, on the other hand, if this was a group seeking to restore constitutionalism to US governance after the impending and promised socialist takeover of all organs of government my response might be different - and that is the point. My views can be assessed from my stance on the violent activities being perpetrated and whether I am a friend or enemy of the state can be deduced from that stance.
That is not exactly true. O was a charter member of the first bbs, in 1993, to gain internet access, by buying a slot. It was still quite private, then, and the WWW came along later, with outfits like Compuserve and America Online, both subscription services, that had specific areas separated as family and adult.
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