2003 or 1984?
 

I see that in the name of &quot;national security&quot; Americans traveling in the US by air will soon have their credit reports and other personal financial data checked before boarding Delta flights at three undisclosed airports (and in all U.S. airports by the end of the year). I am curious how this can in ANY way improve security. Foreign nationals traveling by air in the U.S. will be exempt as their credit reports/financial data, etc., will be inaccessible (the privacy laws in many European countries, for example, expressly forbid the sharing of credit/banking information with other countries). So only Americans will be affected. What is the point of this latest scheme? What invasion of privacy will be next in the name of &quot;national security&quot;? I keep checking my calendar--it SAYS this is the year 2003, but it's feeling more and more like 1984. <BR>Also, I'm curious why Delta agreed to this scheme.

BT: look at post: <BR> anyone else see this?<BR>

How will Delta be able to check credit reports? They don't get my social security number when I book an airline ticket - all they get is my name and a cursory look at my driver's license. They do get my credit card number assuming I have paid with a CC - will the credit card company be giving them my SS number?<BR><BR>Where did you hear/read this story?<BR><BR>If an airline asks for my SS number I will refuse.<BR><BR>Andrew<BR>

BTilke,<BR>This was discussed in anoher thread titled &quot;has anyone seen this&quot;<BR>I'm with you 100%, but after reading some of the responses on the other thread, I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. Most of the people there made it known that they would be willing to jump and sing if some authority told to, in return of some false promise that it would make them safe. Actually it's scary that we in this so called free country are becoming like sheep to anything that our government tells us. Before anybody jumps on me, I don't mean that Bush is any worse than Clinton or republicans are any more devilish than democrats. What I'm talking about is the power we give the 'government', which is becoming more scary everyday.<BR>I believe that if our founding fathers were alive today and doing the same things they were doing back then, they would probably be red-lighted and could not fly. On top of this they would probably be arrested and held without charges for months if not years. Why is it so hard for people to understand the basic notion of freedom? On occasion freedom will be costly. I'm willing to take that chance. Soviet Union safeguarded their citiens fairly well, but does anybody want to live in a state like that?

Andrew,<BR>read about this here:<BR>http://www.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/02/28/airport.security.ap/index.html<BR>

BTilke wrote:<BR><BR>&quot;Foreign nationals traveling by air in the U.S. will be exempt&quot;<BR><BR>BT, where did you get this? I've read several descriptions of this - an updated version of a currently in-place screening system, called CAPPS II. From what I understand, State Department databases and terrorist watch databases will be used. None say that no foreigners will be subjected to scrutiny. Can you post a link?

OK this is way out of left field, but I am reminded that quite a number of years ago car manufacturers started adding seat belts, and then HORRORS government agencies started telling us we HAD to use them. Many people were up in arms &quot;It's 1984 they said&quot;, &quot;Big Brother is watching&quot;, &quot;why sould the government tell me what I have to do in my own car&quot;, and &quot;no one can convince me that a seat belt is going to make me any safer in a car crash!&quot; Gee this all sounds so familiar. Same arguments with a whole new safety issue.<BR><BR>Frankly I have nothing to hide, and I could care less what they do to TRY to make flying safer -- with or without some guarantee of its success.<BR><BR>

Where does it end?<BR>when will the American people<BR>resist these invasions of privacy?<BR>My guess is that Delta, and other airlines, had their arms twisted off and used to beat them over the head.<BR>Like, no federal loans, if they do not cooperate.<BR>

Joan, foreign nationals will be exempt from the latest checks (credit reports, bank details) unless they have accounts with U.S. financial institutions of some sort (bills, loans, etc.). There is no story on this, but it's factual. U.S. based credit reporting agencies (TRW for example) simply do not have access to overseas financial information. There is NO credit agency in the U.S., for example, that has any idea what our credit status is in Belgium (where we lived for 3+ years as expats). They are prevented by Belgian law from having that information. Many other countries have similar policies.<BR>Patric, I'm glad you feel you have nothing to hide--today. Do you really feel that Delta needs to know everyone's credit history before they board a plane? Will you accept ANYTHING as long as someone *says* it will improve security? The seatbelt analogy is irrelevant. There's nothing confidential about that. Anyone can tell at a glance whether you're wearing a seatbelt or not. You're absolutely right, that is WAY out in left field.

Well said Patrick! Maybe this is a first step and it might help or not, but at least it is a start. <BR>Better than just firing all the security people AFTER the planes get bombed/hijacked. <BR>I have heard that it is anyone that buys a ticket, not any American.

Patrick - I'm with you, buddy. I have nothing to hide and if it makes everything involved with getting to where I want to go easier, so be it. From what I keep reading, all my personal information is available on every &quot;'net street corner&quot; there is, so when a company like Delta Airlines wants to keep me safe - ok by me...

The whole concept of 'I have nothing to hide' is so ridiculous. If you folks want to give up your civil rights then allow me to suggest we go all the way. In the name of homeland security I propose the following:<BR>Give the cops the right to stop anybody, anywhere on the street for a search and questioning - after all you have nothing to hide.<BR>Give the cops the right to pull over any car for any reason to be searched - after all you have nothing to hide.<BR>Give the cops the right to knock on you door and demand to search your house - after all you have nothing to hide.<BR>I believe these simple changes to our civil liberties would almost guarantee our safety. It would make it pretty hard for any criminal and/or terrorist to hide anything from the authorities. So what if on occasion the local sheriff came to your house at 3 in the morning because he had the right to search. Woke up your family, made them stand around for couple of hours, hey, after all you are helping in the battle.<BR>So what if some cop in some city had a hard on for you and decided to search you everytime you stepped out of your door, after all it makes all of us safer.<BR>Why don't we allow the governemt to listen to our phone conversations, after all you have nothing to hide. Open your mail, after all you have nothing to hide.<BR>Please stop with the ridicolous argument 'I have nothing to hide'. It makes you sound like a simpleton.<BR>

Andrew et al, Wired explains it pretty well...&quot;CAPPS II is a quantum expansion of the current system used to identify potential terrorists attempting to board airplanes. In addition to accessing FBI, National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and State Department databases, CAPPS II is expected to *SPIDER* IRS, Social Security Administration, state motor vehicle and corrections department, credit bureau and bank records....&quot;. For the full article, go to www.wired.com<BR><BR>Another concern is &quot;function creep&quot;. Once a surveillance system is place for one function, it can be used for other functions as well. There are other problems with CAPPS II, such as my (or your) right view and correct errors in files. <BR><BR>How secure will these databases be? Several supposedly secure gov't sites have been hacked repeatedly. There is potential for abuse by insiders as well as outside hackers.<BR><BR>The government isn't known for its careful handling of citizens' private information. Federal agencies have abused their powers of surveyance. <BR><BR>Andrew, they don't have to ask for your SS number--this &quot;spider&quot; function will let them get it through your ID. Joan, this is how foreign nationals will again slip through the net--they won't have SS numbers, IRS numbers, US credit bureau or bank information...so it's Americans whose rights to privacy are invaded, not foreign terrorists.<BR><BR>Patrick, please explain to me EXACTLY how accessing the personal financial data of Americans--but NOT foreigners--makes us more secure?<BR><BR>

I'm not defending this new system at all...but I would guess that future terrorists coming to America *would* get SS numbers in the future (even false ones). Scrutiny on foreign nationals will surely be much higher than on American citizens, so without an SS number your would stand out more.<BR><BR>Perhaps doing all these checks would reveal inconsistencies that would lead authorities to a real terrorist. I am not saying this is any better than breaking down doors without a warrant, just trying to understand the rationale. I don't like futher intrusions into my personal privacy, but I don't buy into the conspiracy theories that portray the government as trying to turn the US into 1984 - sorry.<BR><BR>Andrew<BR>

I think you people against these new security procedures are absolutely correct. Doing things like this in the name of public safety has got to stop. I mean don't you think its ridiculous I can't own an automatic weapon to defend myself and my family, or that I have to register with the government to buy a gun. How about all those traffic safety laws? Isn't is absurd that I can't drive as fast as I want, whenever I want. And we all know that those driver's licenses and social security cards are really just the government's way of tracking us. Don't even get me started on taxes and those invasive tax returns I have to fill out each year. I vote we do away with all this public safety nonsense and return to anarchy. Let us all carry our own guns on planes. That will stop hijackers dead in their tracks. Of course, maybe I'm just hearing the same voices in my head that you folks are hearing.

OK, so maybe the &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot; doesn't seem logical to some of you. But I frankly can get a lot more upset about how easy it is for ANYONE -- including criminals -- to get all my personal credit and other information, than I can about a branch of the US government getting that same information when I purchase an airline ticket. I realize that some of you have no respect at all for our government, and I don't regard them as the most organized group of people in the world either. But frankly I trust them with the information a lot more than any common criminal who has a minimum amount of knowledge of how to get all that same information and more from the internet and various other sources. If you are concerned with your total privacy, then spend you efforts trying to figure out how to stop that!!!

BT, don't you live in Belgium? What are the local authorities/airlines doing to protect their citizens? I don't believe you have an ACLU do you? <BR>When I called to make a rental car reservation the other day, all I had to do was give them my name, they knew my street address and my car insurance. We already live in that kind of world! People already have access to everything about us. <BR>I don't see it so much as 1984 or 2003-it is just naturally the Future. We are progressing. Computers will look up your high school pals, 20 years later. Why can't the airlines look up your criminal history? <BR> I for one, am much more concerned about the possibility that they will miss someone and they will get on a plane. That is all that is important to me if I want to continue to fly. I do not want another plane to be hijacked and I really do not want to go to another funeral for innocent people that were killed because God Forbid, someone looked up his credit rating!

I agree with Patrick and those who say &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot;. And I believe flying is a privilege NOT a right!

Oh, it is 2003. Sorry some of you didn't realize that it was and that really bad people use our laxness to kill us.<BR><BR>I agree with the above...it's not a right. And I say do not exempt foreign nationals...that'd be discriminatory.

This is a very interesting subject but I won't really get into it. One thing that does make me think though, how in the world would they have the manpower and time to check people's financial records to see if there is anything suspicious on them? This is America, people use credit cards for everything, how are they going to check out everyone? Or will it be random like the ridiculous body searches at the airport. I say ridiculous because out of a huge group of people coming home from a trip to Mexico, they decide to body search my 18 year old, bubble gum chewing, boy crazy sister-in-law. I guess she looked really threatening with the sandals, tank top and skirt she was wearing.

this kind of news will only infuriate our domestic anti-federal government terrorists. <BR>I say money talks..and the threat of lawsuits, a boycott of Delta airlines and the threat of some industries losing immigrant labor due to them being afraid to move about the country will limit this movement toward total scrutiny.

I do not want any airline employee to have access to our finantial records. Have you heard about the Southwest pilot that accessed the flight manifests to stalk and make pornographic phone calls to 134 female passengers? I'm all for securtiy but as I recall the hijackers were not Americans- they are now targeting millions of innocents here and quite honestly I am concerned about what an air employee can do with our finantial records. This is big brother.

As scary as this is (and I will certainly boycott Delta as they institute this), what may be even scarier is how easy it is to obtain all of this information without a person's SS#.<BR><BR>Any time a you use a credit card, the merchant can pay a fee to a third party to do something called a &quot;reverse append&quot; and find out everything from your address to your shoe size to the last time you called your mother. It's here right now (and has been for a while, maybe even since 1984).<BR><BR>Oh, and if any of you use shopper's cards or those little key tags with bar codes that merchants give to their frequent shoppers, all of that info is recorded as well.<BR><BR>I personally have nothing to hide, but developments like this (not to mention the good ol' Patriot Act II) make me feel LESS safe, not more. . .

Only the passage of time will tell whether these measures, designed to improve security, will be effective and wise. To bring a little perspective, in a national emergency, one of our previous President's decided it was necessary to completely suspend the protections of the Writ of Habeous Corpus throughout the country, certainly a hugely more intrusive violation of civil liberties than anything proposed today. That same president feared that a particular state legislature would vote against what he viewed as the interests of the country. To prevent that, he surrounded the Maryland State House with troops to prevent them from meeting. Have any of us heard of such a proposal lately? His name? Abraham Lincoln.

How does this have anything to do with security?!?! If I bounced a check for a toaster at Sears in 1995, what does that say about the likeliness of me hijaking an airline? How 'bout we not train Saudi nationals to fly airplanes? Doesn't that more closely address the problem at hand?

I'm not going to get into the debate but thought I maight answeer about how Delta will get your SS#. Did you know in some states your driver's license number is your social security number? Yep. that's right. So if the airline looks at yor photo ID driver's license they have your SS#! <BR><BR>I don't necessarily agree with them being able to do it, but I think you people are getting riled a little too late. If thhis does bother, then you should probably know they are pretty much already doing it!

<BR>I can't believe I'm agreeing with Patrick ... <BR><BR>If you don't have anything to hide this shouldn't bother you. I would rather be safe. If Uncle Sam wants to read my email and listen to my phone calls, go right ahead! US will find me and my friends arguing over sports and other nonsense and it wouldn't bother me in the least.<BR><BR>You have to wonder about those who disagree. They seem to be favoring the possibility of another 9-11 over a very minor intrusion -- unless they're afraid of being caught cheating on their wives or something.

Sunlover makes the proper point: you lost your privacy a long time ago if you have any financial records at all. There's a data &quot;trail&quot; on you that anyone who wants to can get -- employers, retailers, bankers, credit and lending companies, or any enterprising investigator who knows his/her way around &quot;public&quot; records and the credit reporting bureaus. <BR><BR>What I suspect airline security will be looking for is people WITHOUT long credit histories, people with weird credit histories, and people without any credit history at all. Think of what the credit history of the 9/11 hijackers probably looked like -- some might have been &quot;normal&quot; but the majority probably weren't.<BR><BR>If you are worried about the &quot;wrong&quot; people getting your private financial information, too late. They got it long ago.

Magnus, what do you mean that you can't believe you're agreeing with Patrick? He is probably the most reasonable &quot;voice&quot; here!

The people of the United States have given up their rights through the &quot;Patriot Act,&quot; the &quot;Homeland Security Act&quot; and the Pentagon's new system of &quot;Total Information Awareness.&quot; The astonishing thing about this &quot;land of the free&quot; is that most Americans now have no effective rights and do not care. As long as they are free to shop in department stores and have traffic in the streets, they do not care. And to a greater degree every day, those few who do care about our liberties and rights are too terrified of our government to speak out. The so-called &quot;Patriot Act&quot; expanded our government's secret search and wiretapping powers enormously. It empowered racial profiling as a recognized police practice and allowed broad sweeps of people of Middle Eastern or Asian origin. It effectively abolished immigrants' rights, allowing noncitizens to be held in secret locations on secret &quot;evidence,&quot; without right to an attorney, for as long as the government wishes. The government now has the power to enter your home or your computer and secretly record whatever they find without ever having to notify you. They do not even have to obtain a warrant from a publicly accountable judge showing reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed. Notice that these titles, &quot;Patriot&quot; and &quot;Homeland,&quot; sound very much like the language of the Nazis. A common slogan of the Nazi regime was &quot;the highest freedom is a noble slavery of the heart.&quot; People are free, the slogan meant, when they have enslaved their hearts to the &quot;homeland&quot; in absolute obedience to their government.Blind loyalty, patriotism, and emotion must triumph over liberty, reason and sound judgment. <BR>

The most interesting part of this is that this incredible expansion of government powers is being implemented by an administration that supposedly decries &quot;big government&quot;, and is being embraced by the same people who have always claimed that they didn't trust the Federal Government. It's funny how people's tune changes when they get scared.

<BR><BR>if anyone's counting votes, I vote &quot;no.&quot; As in, they (whomever they is) shouldn't have this ability.<BR><BR>If they do this, does that mean that because I pay my bills on time I'm a non-terrorist? Or on the flip side, if I DON'T pay my bills on time I am a terrorist?<BR><BR>This sounds lame. <BR><BR>Look, I want security as much as the next person. but we have this annoying habit of going overboard sometimes.

Check out the BoycottDelta.org site. Also, note that one of the three test airports for this SCAM is San Jose.

Can someone please tell me how any of this information could possibly make airline travel any safer?<BR><BR>This is a huge violation of our right to privacy (which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that something like flying is not a Constitutional right!). But Ashcroft has been spitting on the Constitution for quite some time now. Hey, if we can imprison American citizens, or anyone else for that matter, without charging them with any crime for months on end, then why not check their credit reports if they want to fly?<BR><BR>Or is this like fat people having to pay more to fly? If you have bad credit or have declared bankruptcy, you'll be forbidden to fly, or have to pay a surcharge?

Well, in reading through this thread I have found one common theme in everyone's post, both those who are for these new measures and those who are against -- confusion about how this will be used, what they are looking for and what kind of information will pose a red flag to security. This is what worries me. Many of you say you don't mind if the government inspects your credit report and other financial data before you board a plane. But you don't even know what information they are accessing and what it says about you! You can claim to have nothing to hide, but so often these systems (like TRW) have flawed or outdated information, and they also have the likelihood of putting someone else's financial data into your files. You may have nothing to hide, but what happens when you are denied boarding due to a clerical error? Believe me, it's not always an easy fix.<BR><BR>I am uncomfortable giving any agency carte blanche into my personal information when I don't know what they are looking at and I don't know what they are looking for. I think we Americans should have a great many questions answered first before we are expected to give up all our rights of privacy.

And, by the way, I do realize we've already given up those rights. It is hard for me to understand the great deal of fear that drives all these comfortable Americans to give up their personal freedoms. The great majority of us live in comfortable houses with plenty of food on the table and jobs to go to and good schools for our kids. We know nothing about the kind of fear most people living in the middle East (and most of the world) experience every day. Our comfortable lives are not at any risk at all. Yet we're willing to give up everything for some false sense of security. Do we really think these measures are going to keep us safer?