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U.S. ‘No Fly List’ Leaks After Being Left in an Unsecured Airline Server
- cf100clunk 4y agoHuge discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446673
- joshe 4y agoA million is just so many. I expected abuses, like "tell us about your uncle or we'll put you on the no fly list." So something like 50,000 people or so. It was originally marketed as people directly involved with terrorism. "These are people who might blow up a plane." It's so much vastly bigger, it has to be some dumb trolling for data. Like lets add all the people who went to a mosque where a bad guy once went.
- zmgsabst 4y agoDid you really not expect this? I can’t think of a time where a way to take away rights without judicial overview wasnt massively abused, often to target politically disfavored groups. Look at asset forfeiture and police robbing cash on highways.
- Waterluvian 4y agoWhy is 50,000 about right? Why is 1M too many? I’m not sure I follow your logic beyond it’s how you feel things should be. How did you arrive at those numbers and that conclusion?
- LarryMullins 4y ago50,000 is WAY too many. If we go off the rate of terror attacks in America, the number of terrorists in this country is incredibly low. Consider this: you can buy gun powder at walmart with cash, no ID needed, but how many pipe bombs are going off every day? It's incredibly rare. Obviously there are very few people out there with terroristic inclinations.
- adasdasdas 4y agoWhy are we going off the rate of terror attacks in America
- LarryMullins 4y agoBecause we're talking about America's No Fly list......
- adasdasdas 4y agoOk but American planes fly in and out of the US. Also domestic flights have no limitations on foreigners. Unless you are saying that it's ok to have terrorists onboard, as long as they're not trying to terrorize America.
- LarryMullins 4y agoThe rate of terrorist attacks in America, regardless of perpetrators' country of origin, is the relevant metric when evaluating the value of American anti-terror watchlists. Extend this to international flights to or from America if you like, it makes no difference. Any sort of terrorism is exceptionally rare. If somebody were to say that terrorism doesn't exist at all, they'd be closer to the truth than fiction.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoLeaving aside the question of effectiveness and abuse of the list, the rarity of terrorist attacks doesn't say anything about the number of people who might be inclined or convinced to commit them.
- LarryMullins 4y agoAt the very least it indicates the rate at which people actually go through with it, which is the rate that actually counts. It's stupid small. Worrying about terrorism is extremely foolish.
- czx4f4bd 4y agoIt by no means diminishes the magnitude of the list, but it's worth noting that the list is heavily bloated because any person with multiple aliases or whose name can be spelled in multiple ways (e.g. due to differing romanization systems) will have a separate entry for every known alias and spelling. From the original Daily Dot article: > The list, according to crimew, appeared to have more than 1.5 million entries in total. The data included names as well as birth dates. It also included multiple aliases, placing the number of unique individuals at far less than 1.5 million. > On the list were several notable figures, including the recently freed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, alongside over 16 potential aliases for him. > The aliases comprised different, common misspellings of his last name and other versions of his first name, as well as different birthdays. Many of the birthdays aligned with the recorded date Bout was born. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotected-server-commuteair/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/no-fly-list-us-tsa-unprotecte... So there aren't 1.5 million people on the no fly list, but there's still a hell of a lot of people to ban secretly and arbitrarily from flying with no clear justification given and no clear way to get off the list.
- LarryMullins 4y ago> Viktor Bout That guy doesn't belong on the list. He sold weapons to terrorists, including anti-aircraft missiles, but I don't think that's a reasonable cause to believe he might attack an airplane himself. I wouldn't feel uncomfortable flying on the same plane as him.
- recursive 4y agoI'd never heard of him before. But it sounds pretty reasonable to me. I don't really see the bright line between supplying people attack an airplane and attacking an airplane.
- LarryMullins 4y agoIf the list is to exist at all, it should only be for people we think might blow up or hijack an airplane. If you're putting people on the list for other reasons, even selling weapons to terrorists, then the list is being used punitively and therefore it shouldn't be secret.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoHow can you make such an assertion knowing only the size of the list?
- fbdab103 4y agoThere are ~330 million people in the USA. Do you think every ~1/200 people should be on such a list? By my back of the envelope math, there are ~0 American planes being blown out of the sky on an annual basis. Nor am I even hearing reports of attempts to do such things (the FBI loves to pat themselves on the back after they catch a terrorist they recruited, trained, and supplied just before the act was supposed to occur).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThe list only contains US citizens?
- partiallypro 4y agoThe article says it is most likely around 50,000 (47,000 and 81,000 people to be exact), most of the leaked list are known aliases and alternative names for the same person.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Scoundreller 4y agoHN is going full circle. Instead of being a secondary news source, we’re becoming the primary news that gets reported on. I remember when TV started reporting on what they found on the internet instead of the other way around.
- throwifasd 4y agoJust because HN is where some journalists found a link doesn't make it a news source it just shows that everyone reading HN could replace them.
- Eleison23 4y agoI think this is a compliment from the journalism community. Any journalist on a particular beat is going to lurk on various news aggregators and forums, looking for a scoop. This writer has probably seen dozens, hundreds of stories come across HN's headlines that were reporting on blogs already given exposure and news stories that had already broken. If the journalist determined that in this case, HN had the scoop, and dang's outlet was the first to publish the link to the hacktivist's blog, then HN rightly deserves credit as having the scoop. I have no idea whether it went down that way; I'm just describing a Platonic ideal.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoI look forward to when the list is leaked to the public unredacted. Let’s have fun with this.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoWhat's fun about it? I can't picture any outcome except those people on it facing a constant torrent of abuse.
- slimsag 4y agoIf that happens be prepared for it to become the No Employ list. Employers run background checks via services, and those services will quickly integrate such a list as a flagged item on people.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoLetting employers have a default of freedom of association was a mistake.
- golemotron 4y agoShouldn't the list be abandoned now that the War On Terror is over?
- theg5prank 4y agoThe defining feature of the War on Terror is that it is never over.
- nxm 4y agoWho said it’s over?
- IYasha 4y agoNot really a war, not really any terror, not really over. )
- einpoklum 4y agoHow can the no-fly list be secret in the first place? Or is this part of the outside-the-legal-system, men-in-black, constitution-does-not-apply type arrangement?
- LarryMullins 4y agoPeople so dangerous we can't let them on an airplane, but not so dangerous, or with so little proof of any wrongdoing, that arresting them cannot be justified. So yeah, the whole thing is bullshit. And it will continue because no politician wants to be the guy who fixes this mess then loses his next election because something happened and his "weak on terrorism" stance gets blamed.
- khana 4y ago[dead]