Terrorism

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

The U.S. government has decided that the internet poses a terrorist threat and has passed a bill to limit its effectiveness in the terror realm:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1955

Whether this makes it all the way through and what they have planned, I don't know.

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Engineers make excellent terrorists:

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =207001533

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/01/29/1614 ... ml?tid=218

Next they're going to try and tell you that Fundamentalist Evangelical engineers with an affection for firearms and demolition go batsh!t f00king crazy and kill people in public places.



Which reminds me..............

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Students arrested and one about to be deported for researching terrorism for their university project:

http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/05/26/232221.shtml

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Showing why the security at the airport is almost a pure farce:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyreg ... hlist.html

Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: January 13, 2010

The Transportation Security Administration, under scrutiny after last month’s bombing attempt, has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Michael Hicks, 8, a Cub Scout in Clifton, N.J., has the same name as a suspicious person.
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Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”

It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.

At some point, someone named Michael Hicks made the Department of Homeland Security suspicious, and little Mikey is still paying the price. (His father, also named Michael Hicks, was stopped for the first time on the Bahamas trip.)

Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines.

A spokesman for the T.S.A., James Fotenos, said that as a rule, “there are no children on the no-fly or selectee lists,” but would not comment on Mikey’s situation specifically.

For every person on the lists, hundreds of others may get caught up simply because they share the same name; a quick scan through a national phone directory unearthed 1,600 Michael Hickses. Over the past three years, 81,793 frustrated travelers have formally asked that they be struck from the watch list through the Department of Homeland Security; more than 25,000 of their cases are still pending. Others have taken more drastic measures.

Mario Labbé, a frequent-flying Canadian record-company executive, started having problems at airports shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, with lengthy delays at checkpoints and mysterious questions about Japan. By 2005, he stopped flying to the United States from Canada, instead meeting American clients in France. Then a forced rerouting to Miami in 2008 led to six hours of questions.

“What’s the name of your mother? Your father? When were you last in Japan?” Mr. Labbé recalled being asked. “Always the same questions in different order. And sometimes, it’s quite aggressive, not funny at all.”

Fed up, in the summer of 2008, he changed his name to François Mario Labbé. The problem vanished.

Several Web sites, including the T.S.A.’s own blog, are rife with tales of misidentification and strategies for solving them. Some travelers purposely misspell their own names when buying tickets, apparently enough to fool the system. Even the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy once found himself on a list.

“We can’t just throw a bunch of names on these lists and call it security,” said Representative William J. Pascrell Jr., a New Jersey Democrat. “If we can’t get an 8-year-old off the list, the whole list becomes suspect.”

Mr. Fotenos, the T.S.A. spokesman, promised improvements in a few months, as the agency’s Secure Flight Program takes full effect. Under the new system, airlines will collect every passenger’s birth date and gender, along with their names. The T.S.A. will cross-check all that with the watch lists. Previously, the airlines cross-checked the lists themselves, using only the names.

Certainly, Mikey’s date of birth, less than a month before 9/11, should prevent him from being mistaken as a terrorist.

A third grader at a parochial school in Clifton, N.J., Mikey recites the drill like the world-weary traveler he is. Leave early for the airport, always with his passport. Try to get a boarding pass at the counter. This will send up a flag. The ticket agent, peering down at tiny bespectacled Mikey, will apologize or roll her eyes, and call for a supervisor. The supervisor, after a phone call — or, more likely, a series of phone calls — will ultimately finagle him onto the plane. But the Hickses are typically the last to select seats and the last to board, which means they sometimes can’t sit together.

Mrs. Hicks, a photojournalist who herself got Secret Service clearance to travel aboard Air Force II with then-Vice President Al Gore, anticipated additional chaos following the attempted underwear bombing. Before leaving for the Bahamas on Jan. 2, she reached out to Congressman Pascrell’s office, which then enlisted a T.S.A. agent to meet the family at the airport. Even this did not prevent Mikey from an extra pat-down.

On the way home last Friday, Mikey’s boarding pass showed four giant red S’s at the airport in Nassau. “Oh, random screening,” Mrs. Hicks said. Mikey asked his mother not to worry and said he would use his tae kwon do — he has a junior black belt — if needed. Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to take pictures of her son being frisked but was told it was against the rules.

Mikey, who would rather talk about BMX bikes and his athletic trophies than airport security, remains perplexed about the “list” and the hurdles he must clear. “Why do they think a kid is a terrorist?” Mikey asked his mother at one point during the interview.

Mrs. Hicks said the family was amused by the mistake at first. But that amusement quickly turned to annoyance and anger. It should not take seven years to correct the problem, Mrs. Hicks said. She applied for redress in December when she first heard about the Department of Homeland Security’s program.

“I understand the need for security,” she added. “But this is ridiculous. It’s quite clear that he is 8 years old, and while he may have terroristic tendencies at home, he does not have those on a plane.”

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Why counter-terrorism is in shambles:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/15/ ... art_pos=76

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Kid brings a homemade motion detector to school and the vice principal clears it out thinking it was a bomb:

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01 ... art_pos=57

Mind you, it was a school designed for the electronically-gifted.

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Bomb detecting device used in Iraq did absolutely nothing, cost $85 million, and resulted in hundreds of deaths:

http://gizmodo.com/5455692/ade+651-magi ... d-hundreds


Iraqi government still swears by them.

[THE JEW (RaVeN)]

Experts warn about security flaws in airline boarding passes
By James Ball, Published: October 23

Security flaws in airline boarding passes could allow would-be terrorists or smugglers to know in advance whether they will be subject to certain security measures, and perhaps even permit them to modify the designated measures, security researchers have warned.

The vulnerabilities center on the Transportation Security Administration’s pre-screening system, a paid-for program in which the screening process is expedited for travelers at the airport: Laptop computers can remain in hand baggage, as can approved containers of liquid, and belts and shoes can be kept on.

Under the program, passengers can still be subject at random to conventional security screening.

Flight enthusiasts, however, recently discovered that the bar codes printed on all boarding passes — which travelers can obtain up to 24 hours before arriving at the airport — contain information on which security screening a passenger is set to receive.

Details about the vulnerability spread after John Butler, an aviation blogger, drew attention to it in a post late last week. Butler said he had discovered that information stored within the bar codes of boarding passes is unencrypted, and so can be read in advance by technically minded travelers.

Simply by using a smartphone or similar device to check the bar code, travelers could determine whether they would pass through full security screening, or the expedited process.

Butler’s findings are supported by information in a technical specification publicly available on the Web site of the International Air Transport Association, and some details about the vulnerability appear to have circulated in aviation chat forums since at least July.

The TSA declined to comment on the reports and would not say whether the agency had been made aware of the issue. A spokesman stressed that screening at airport checkpoints is only one part of a much wider security process.

“TSA does not comment on specifics of the screening process, which contain measures both seen and unseen,” spokesman Sterling Payne said. “TSA Pre Check is only one part of our intelligence-driven, risk-based approach.”

The findings highlight serious vulnerabilities in the current TSA security systems, according to Chris Soghoian, a security expert who sought to draw attention to airline security vulnerabilities in 2006 by building a Web site that permitted travelers to produce fake boarding passes.

“If you have a team of four people [planning an attack], the day before the operation when you print the boarding passes, whichever guy is going to have the least screening is going to be the one who’ll take potentially problematic items through security,” said Soghoian, now a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If you know who’s getting screened before you walk into the airport, you can make sure the right guy is carrying the right bags.

“The entire security system depends on the randomness,” he said. “If people can do these dry runs, the system is vulnerable. We at the ACLU are not fans of profiling — we think it doesn’t work and has civil liberties issues. The watch-list approach doesn’t ensure security.”

The reported vulnerabilities also raise the possibility that travelers could tamper with boarding passes in an attempt to alter the type of security screening they will receive.

Most passes are issued with verification codes to prevent tampering. But some security experts have said that certain passes are marked as “unverified,” suggesting they could be modified. They were unable to test whether it was possible to do so, however, as it is illegal to tamper with a boarding card under U.S. law.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been critical of TSA security measures on several previous occasions, said the new findings were a cause for concern.

“The pre-check system is extremely valuable for making airport screening more efficient, but it is imperative that security not be compromised,” he said. “This has the potential to be a gaping flaw in the system that would be all too easy to exploit. At the very least, if someone is flagged for a random screening, that information should be encrypted.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... story.html