11 ms·

TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story

745 points by ddelphin 15y ago

lightyrs 15y ago
I am outraged.
tylermenezes 15y ago
The term "security theater" has been tossed around a lot, but I think it's pretty clearly coming to that. Asking the mainstream media not to cover something like this is completely indefensible from a security standpoint - what, terrorists only learn about security flaws from TV?. It's pretty patently only about keeping their budget. Also, just going to throw this out there, but it is fairly possible that the email is totally fake.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  It's incredibly suspicious to allude to an e-mail from the TSA, but not actually include a copy of said e-mail.
  - tsaoutourpants 15y ago
    I'll be requesting a copy by FOIA... will post on my blog whenever it comes :)
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      Could you ask the journalist in question to forward you the entire e-mail as well?
      - tsaoutourpants 15y ago
        He doesn't want to ruin his relationship with the source by doing so, but again, it should be a public record releasable under FOIA
        Nate75Sanders 15y ago
        How long does an FOIA request of that sort usually take? If there are multiple steps, could you give us a timeline?
        TimGebhardt 15y ago
        Probably depends on the request. I got a pretty quick turnaround (or at least it exceeded my expectations) on my request to the FBI for whatever they knew about my grandfather: About 3 weeks. Sidenote: if you're interested in doing the same just go to http://www.getgrandpasfbifile.com/ http://www.getgrandpasfbifile.com/
        tsaoutourpants 15y ago
        It's supposed to take a month. But, the TSA ignored my last FOIA request, so I had to sue them for it.
        ShabbyDoo 15y ago
        Wow. That in itself is a great story which should be heard.
        tsaoutourpants 15y ago
        Thank you, story is on the blog, including this post: http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/confirmed-tsa-declares-checkpoint-tapes-ssi/ http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/confirmed-t...
        pavel_lishin 15y ago
        Is this the same source that's threatening him? Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the email server suddenly lost a bunch of emails the day before the FOIA request went through.
        samstave 15y ago
        What kind of relationship does he have with a TSA agent who is mildly threatening him or intimidating him at least?
    - Newgy 15y ago
      Thank you for your brave work on this issue, you are a true patriot. "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." -- Samuel Adams, Founding Father
      - cafard 15y ago
        Was the expression "brush fire" current in the late 1700s? In fact, the whole sentence looks a little questionable.
        dpcx 15y ago
        Not really... http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brush+fire&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brush+fire&... As well as http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams#Misattributed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams#Misattributed
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - doug1001 15y ago
        sure but this only applies to a citizen's inalienable right to make beer (and seasonal ales).
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - martey 15y ago
    It's not "incredibly suspicious", since the author is claiming that one of his media contacts was the recipient of the email. Also, I don't see how seeing a screenshot of the purported message from the TSA would be considered more valid evidence than the current screenshot.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    So you're saying that screen shot [1] of the redacted email was manufactured, or that the source of the redacted email was maybe trolling Jon? I'm one of those folks that when I see a redacted email like that with most of the identity cookie in it I wonder if one could track down the original. I mean mail.fourtentech.com actually has a web server sitting on it and all. Anyway, it could be a viralish stunt, but sadly its pretty credible that the TSA might say this. [1] http://tsaoutofourpants.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/caution_red.png http://tsaoutofourpants.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/caution_...
    - Nate75Sanders 15y ago
      I'm confused. I see something that looks like an email referring to the aforementioned email from Sari Koshetz. I do not however see an email that looks like anything from Sari Koshetz with or without redaction. EDIT: I agree with the user "martey" below, though, that this wouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. It's way too easy to fake this kind of thing. The FOIA request for the email is the way to go. It'll probably find itself conveniently deleted or something, though.
    - scott_s 15y ago
      So you're saying that screen shot [1] of the redacted email was manufactured, or that the source of the redacted email was maybe trolling Jon? Or an infinite number of other things. Don't get bogged down in what the alternative scenario is. What is important is that if something is true, we should be able to find corroborating evidence to support it. If we can't, then we have reason to doubt the initial claim - and we can do so without arguing for a particular alternate scenario.
  - tsaoutourpants 15y ago
    Second source confirms in comments! SmarterTravel March 8, 2012 at 3:34 pm | #11 Reply | Quote | Edit We were also “strongly cautioned” not to cover the story. We did anyway at SmarterTravel: http://tinyurl.com/7te5wj8 http://tinyurl.com/7te5wj8
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      For the cautious, the above tinyurl expands to http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/did-blogger-really-expose-fatal-flaw-in-airport-security.html?id=10723406 http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/did-blogg...
- tibbon 15y ago
  I think they are betting on security through absurdity (I initially meant to spell obscurity but this makes more sense).
  - bdg 15y ago
    They're operating on the age-old wisdom of, "If you don't know where you're going, you're never lost."
    - joshAg 15y ago
      On the plus side, they're making good time.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  Then again, this is arguably censorship theater. I thought the original post was blogspammy in the extreme, and this is more of the same. This does not make me a cheerleader for the TSA.
- Bud 15y ago
  No. It's not "coming to that". We're well past the security theater stage, and into the nightmare stage. Even hinting that any media not cover this or ANY story is so, so far beyond the purview of TSA that it is shocking (or should be shocking—it has become rather hard to be shocked by TSA) that they would even consider pulling this. The Supreme Court should slap them so hard that their acronym gets mixed up. This is an outrage. (edited to add snark) I thought of the perfect new acronym! STA: Security Theater Administration.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Hinting that media cover or not cover any story is so far beyond the purview of the TSA that no competent journalist would consider taking them seriously, making this a comparatively mild nightmare. The Supreme Court can't "slap them" for anything; someone with standing would have to bring a case, and for that case to have merit, some journalistic outlet would have had to have its discretion actually impinged by the TSA.
    - WiseWeasel 15y ago
      There might be a suit brought on behalf of one of these reporters and/or their employer arguing that the implication of consequences from such a powerful entity without a court order constitutes illegal interference with their business, possibly entitling them to some damages, and more importantly, establishing some very important precedent which might prevent the TSA from ever attempting such a stunt in the future. I could certainly see many lawyers salivating at the prospect of winning a suit against such a well-funded target, not to mention the notoriety such a contentious issue would bring them in any event.
      - jcampbell1 15y ago
        You are not familiar with Sovereign Immunity. No lawyer in the world salivates at the thought of suing the federal government.
        praxeologist 15y ago
twiceaday 15y ago
Security by obscurity.
milesf 15y ago
The story he's referring to is this one: http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-body-scanners-made-worthless-by-blog-how-anyone-can-get-anything-past-the-tsas-nude-body-scanners/ http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-...
DamnYuppie 15y ago
I hope the email is fake. Yet I would not be surprised if it wasn't. Most government employees I have met are not really that intelligent. Add that to a bit of power and little to no accountability and you have an instant recipe for disaster.
- high5ths 15y ago
  Why would it be fake?
  - praptak 15y ago
    Somebody's idea of a joke, feeding the opponents fake data to decrease their credibility, someone just wanting attention? People do various things for irrational reasons.
- pseingatl 15y ago
  Sari Koshetz is the name of a TSA representative. Google her.
  - artursapek 15y ago
    So? Edit: Seriously, what does that prove? Someone faking an email can Google for TSA spokeswomen just as easily as someone trying to verify it.
runn1ng 15y ago
To play devil's advocate - he clearly has an agenda and his video is more long and boring political ramblings than something really substantial.
- scelerat 15y ago
  1. Anyone who says they don't have an agenda is lying. Everyone has their reasons for doing anything and everything. 2. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having an agenda.
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    Absolutely. I'm pretty sure that I don't like this guy's politics, his manner irritates me, and every time he says "porn scanners" I get douche chills. But by exposing the truth to the people who pay for it, he's doing god's work and I'm 100% behind him. Not in front of him, but behind him, because he's a brave, tenacious pitbull, and clearly not just fighting for himself. Of course, if some TSA or government representatives show me proof that he was wrong, and in addition prove to me that this is not security theater for the personal profit of government cronies by dismantling some of Bruce Schneier's premises, I'll be 100% behind them too. It's just not likely that'll happen because this guy and Schneier show their work.
  - CWuestefeld 15y ago
    Adding to that: If he makes a bundle of money in the course of defending our freedoms, then my hat is off to him. Bravo! From an economics perspective, the fact that someone has turned a profit (in a free market) is prima facie evidence that he has delivered something of value.
    - reitblatt 15y ago
      Or he's discovered a new kind of sucker, cf. homeopathy.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  3. Having an agenda does not invalidate his results.
rickdale 15y ago
I remember before they were rolling out the scanners seeing a story run by the mainstream media about how congress had invested large amounts of money in the scanners before they realized how useless they were and now they were going to push really push hard for them to become the norm. I guess they succeeded. It sucks how in America a logical argument bumps heads with a touchy subject.
bpd1069 15y ago
Overlay a thin layer of material over the metal plate (the dark/black region in the images) that has a regular repeating pattern (think checkerboard) that shows objects suspended beyond the body's silhouette. Problem solved.
- xymostech 15y ago
  But that would probably ruin the scan from the other direction? There are two pictures, I thought because there is a scan from the front and a scan from the back.
  - ams6110 15y ago
    So it sounds like the easy solution is to do two scans. One face-on, and then they ask you to turn to the side and they do another.
    - CWuestefeld 15y ago
      Attacker then puts the smuggled payload on the inner thigh, where the leg itself blocks it from the sides.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        Or inner arm for that matter. Also, does anybody know what prevents people from simply taping a knife to the bottom of their foot, under their sock?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- teej 15y ago
  The problem isn't that this one particular technique exists. The problem is that the TSA's decision making process led them to spend billions of dollars a year against the advisement of the top security experts in the world. For an organization who's sole purpose is the security of the American people, they're awfully bad at doing things that ensure the security of the American people.
ramses 15y ago
Harassment and directly attacking Free Speech? ... but somehow I suspect that this was an employee independently acting stupid, and not an institutional policy.
- tsaoutourpants 15y ago
  haha surely you kid?
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Did you read the TSA's recent blog post about this? It displays exactly the same sort of attitude.
skanga 15y ago
This is insanity. I try to avoid flying as much as possible. However, the whole controversy also seems to lack common sense. An easy "solution" to this whole problem is to ask people to go into the machine and do a 360 degree rotation before emerging on the other side. I'll call this the "Airport Dance" :-) What? It's not like we aren't made to dance already!
- regularfry 15y ago
  The current arrangement subjects you to one short burst of radiation to take a static image, and it's enough energy to have some doctors worried. Multiply that up by however many frames you want to capture, and I don't think it would be "some doctors" any more. Besides, I've got no idea if the machines in place have microwave units that can withstand a high duty cycle like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they can't.
  - rhplus 15y ago
    Does anyone have some independently verified numbers for the amount of radiation that a FBS exposes a passenger to and how it compares to the amount of radiation exposure the same passenger would get from 3 hours in a plane? The TSA claims that the latter is significantly (like 100x) greater than the former.
    - regularfry 15y ago
      There are numbers out there, but the problem isn't just the amount of energy, it's where it's concentrated. The theory goes that because of its very short wavelength everything that gets absorbed is concentrated in the topmost layers of the skin, so the energy density where it might be damaging is much higher than the absolute amount of energy might suggest. From memory part of the argument was that the studies hadn't yet been done which might show whether this could be a health issue, so claiming the scanners were safe was at best premature.
    - finnw 15y ago
      I'd like to see it on an updated version of this chart: https://www.xkcd.com/radiation/ https://www.xkcd.com/radiation/ (side note: I have the HTTPS version on my clipboard because I hesitated before typing "radiation dosage" into google, and decided to load up Tor to search for it.)
cs702 15y ago
So the TSA is "securing" airports by trying to keep vulnerabilities secret. Their thinking seems to be, "if no one knows where the open door is, no one will get in." Surely that will work out well. Not! Bruce Schneier must be getting a kick out of this.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Indeed. Here's what I posted on Facebook (mildly edited for clarity) about the TSA's response (btw one of my Facebook friends is a TSA screener): Some thoughts about this. The main defense that the TSA offers over the body scanners in this regard is that it is somehow better/harder to circumvent than the metal detectors, and that it's only one part of a larger program using layers of security. We can argue about the specifics but the idea of layers of security is one thing the TSA is doing right. One of my complaints about the body scanners is that they are not implemented in a way that makes full use of this (tandem to a metal detector, as separate layers, ideally in conjunction with behavioral indicators). But that's neither here nor there. I want to talk about testing. As a software engineer, I know there is testing, and there is testing. Extensive pre-deployment testing is important. There can't be any doubt of that. However, it is also by definition incomplete. Stuff will always get missed. Real testing in a security environment involves the sorts of things that this video involves--- many people looking for ways to circumvent a given technology and doing so. A few professional testers will miss stuff because everyone has blind spots. This has to be an ongoing thing, and it has to rely on independent individuals not beholden to the organization ordering the testing. In the computer software field, while the stakes are lower, we deal with a level of constant attack unmatched in any physical security field. A firewall in the rural US is under more constant attack than any US troops on any battlefield and I have logs to prove this, so in my industry we have had to find better ways of dealing with these problems than we see with the Department of Homeland Security today. While my life may not depend on my firewall holding up, my livelihood very well might, as does all of your credit card data depend on firewalls of places like Amazon. The video I linked to yesterday, while I don't agree with all of the political remedies proposed is a solid example of penetration testing, and the sort that makes us more secure. We should no more trust the TSA with securing our airports than we should trust Microsoft with securing our data. Microsoft can't get there without armies of white-hat hackers reporting vulnerabilities before the bad guys find and exploit them. The TSA shouldn't attempt this either. Just this week we saw a massive security hole discovered at Github, which many open source projects use. This hole allowed anyone who had an account (and anyone can sign up!) the ability to commit software changes to any project on the system. The severity of this problem was just unbelievable. In all likelihood this would have gone at least partially unfixed (given past attempts to get the software fixed) had it not been for one daring individual breaking into the system in a reasonably responsible (as far as we know, but if you use github, audit your code!) way. But imagine if a bad guy did this? What critical systems would be vulnerable for years because of malware planted? The fact that it was reported in a public way after a previous fix was attempted and fell flat was a good thing. I have been on the receiving end of accusations of fearmongering for exposing security holes (in software). The fact though is that this is usually the first step to getting the problem fixed. Whatever else is discussed, we need to keep that in mind. The correct response should have been, "We are evaluating this report and, once we are finished doing so, will institute whatever corrective steps appear to be necessary to solve the problem." This is not it.
grandalf 15y ago
The TSA probably views its own mission as largely a propaganda mission. It's just creepy when we realize that it is trying to silence public debate. The biggest oddity to me is that it's been over 10 years and this debate hasn't actually happened in the mainstream media. I think one aspect of most orgs that have entrenched power is that they are always very deferent toward government. NPR is a great example... there is lots of coverage of various wall street schemes, mention of greed as a problem in the private sector, etc., but the underlying message in most of the stories is that government is beyond reproach.
- IanDrake 15y ago
  I don't know if that's entirely true. NPR was really suspicious of the government before 2008. Then something changed.
  - mattdeboard 15y ago
    Have some data to support your cognitive bias?
    - IanDrake 15y ago
      Not sure that data is available, but I was listening to NPR news during that time. I thought they did decent job of highlighting the poor behavior of our government. Then things changed (not government behavior, which is the same if not worse). At the pinnacle of the credit crisis they started hating on the financial services sector. As if they had any idea of what credit derivative were. The "experts" they had on air seemed to have a textbook definition which would then be simplified by saying "It's basically gambling". Uhg. At some point I realized that most of their "experts" (in all their coverage) were either working for the government, the Federal Reserve, or had financial ties to the government (grant recipients, lobbyist, etc...). I stopped listening around 2010 after I found myself yelling at the radio too often. Maybe things have changed.
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    The change happened earlier than 2008. It happened when funding was getting dismantled in Congress and subsequently a conservative ombudsman was appointed along with a guy to run operations that used to run Radio Free Europe. After that, it was National Petroleum Radio. Republicans largely support the things that we're objecting to here, along with Obama.
reinhardt 15y ago
Eagerly waiting for the Streisand effect
jrockway 15y ago
They're not really threatening anything, they're just asking "please don't cover this story". That's their right and it's not censorship unless the journalist faces consequences for covering the story (no future interviews, harassment by the legal system, etc.) It doesn't seem like any consequences are mentioned or implied, so this doesn't bother me. Of course the TSA doesn't want negative press. Would you?
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  No, they're not asking ""please don't cover this story"". They are "strongly cautioning" them not to, which can reasonably be interpreted as a veiled threat.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    A threat to do what?
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      "I know where you live." What is that a threat to do? How about, "Be careful."?
      - jrockway 15y ago
        The government's powers are limited by the Constitution. Someone who threatens to follow you home and kill you, however, is operating in an environment without restrictions, and you might therefore worry that you're actually going to be killed. "Prior restraint" is a well-tested concept and it doesn't do very well in court. And all the government has to harass you are the courts.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        Just because you think that the only way the government is capable of harassing you is with the courts, does not mean that they are not capable of veiled threats. A threats are not limited to personal physical violence. Though I of course strongly disagree with your premise anyway, particularly when the governmental agency in question is the DHS.
danso 15y ago
Just want to point this out: "strongly caution" is what the TSA flak told the reporter (according to the reporter). That doesn't necessarily mean "don't report this or we'll send you to Gitmo". It most likely was expressed in the context of "you're going to look stupid/spread misinformation if you do." I'm not saying the TSA flak won't be vindictive if a reporter covers the story. I'm just saying, there's not an immediate reason to jump to this conclusion. You don't get to be TSA flak by writing thinly-veiled threats that are easily retrieved through public records requests.
- rsingel 15y ago
  Yes, this is exactly right. I've covered TSA and edit a blog that just covered this very story. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/bodyscanner-video/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/bodyscanner-video/ Sometimes a flak can save you embarrassment and other times you disregard them because you know its a story.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Why would a PR flak ever stop a critic from embarrassing and discrediting himself? That would be gold for the TSA. The only exception would be if the critic is so powerful that even a false story would hurt the TSA. I don't think SmarterTravel is that much of a force. At most, this "caution" is concern trolling.
- rhizome 15y ago
  What does the TSA care about people looking stupid? Boing Boing took down their TSA post.
  - travisp 15y ago
    Let's suppose the story was bogus and the reporters would look stupid (neither is true). The TSA might still not want the story to be spread widely, because people will remember the original story, but not the corrections hidden in small print.
  - ilamont 15y ago
mrb 15y ago
The government supporting the TSA, despite its People pushing against it, is a prime example of failure of democracy in the United States. The People elected a government who does not what they want! Some countries hold referendums to vote on controversial topics. It would be a great solution to hold one in the U.S. at the federal level asking a very simple question: "Should the TSA be shut down? Yes/No". Direct democracy at its best. Unfortunately the U.S. constitution does not provide for referendums at the federal level... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum#United_States
- api 15y ago
  People need to understand this: it's all about the lobbyists, period. The TSA is nothing but a cash cow for the defense and security industries. Actual security is an irrelevant side effect.
  - CWuestefeld 15y ago
    it's all about the lobbyists, period. Don't the politicians and bureaucrats -- the ones we're trusting to look out for our interests -- bear some responsibility?
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      You mean people like Michael Chertoff, who pushed for the body scanners when he was the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and then retired to found a consulting company which has been employed by the companies who manufacture those same scanners? That sort of thing?
- tptacek 15y ago
  Be careful what you wish for. The capital-P people are just peachy with those machines. I traveled last week and saw nobody (other than myself) opting out. The people --- in the aggregate --- do not care about this issue. Left to "democracy in the United States", a referendum that requested the elimination of the "opt-out" process in favor of 0.5s of wait time at the security lines would probably pass in a landslide. Thankfully, we're governed not just by a legislature but by a Constitution interpreted by a panel of judges with lifetime tenure.
tptacek 15y ago
They're allowed to say that. The media is allowed (encouraged; morally obliged, perhaps) to ignore them. Whether he's right or wrong (and I'm sure he's right), the bureaucracy would prefer to continue working towards their quarterly MBOs than to address another controversy. This is a non-story.
- Bud 15y ago
  Completely absurd. The TSA is allowed to vaguely intimidate the media? I call bullshit. I know from reading hundreds of your comments that you are a reasonable man, so please explain where you are coming from on this.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    The premise of your outrage is that the TSA has some authority over the media that they are abusing. The TSA has no authority over the media. The media routinely publishes terrifyingly sensitive government secrets over the direct and strident objections of the DoJ and gets hauled into court to defend itself. That the media has a pretty excellent track record in those courts is not so much my point as that the media has so much experience building that track record that only the dumbest reporter would give half a shit whether some TSA functionary "strongly cautioned" them not to run a story. Since this observation isn't so much "insightful" as it is "completely obvious on its face", to me, Occam's Razor suggests that what the TSA was implying was that the guy was wrong, and that his story was going to make the media look dumb. Since I have never once seen anyone from the TSA land on the right side of an argument, from airport security to spelling and grammar, we don't have to argue about which one of us is more vehemently contemptuous of it, or, in this case, its argument.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    The blog post characterizes this communication as intimidation. I don't see anything remotely intimidating about it; to me it looks like the TSA telling the other reporter that the guy has no credibility, and I think this is an entirely valid criticism of anyone who delighted to be featured on Alex Jones' show. I have no especial objection to the original story, but it's little more than a marketing exercise: a hyperbolic headline attached to a banal observation, which shoots at a large target and unsurprisingly, hits it. When you think about it, government procuremet on this scale is almost always slow and suffers from stable-door syndrome. As I've said before, nothing is going to happen with the TSA until after the election, because the minute Obama proposes loosening security at airports he'll be accused of inviting terrorists onto planes. Have you not noticed how none the congresspeople who say they are outraged - outraged! - over the TSA's intrusive security methods have made any attempt to cut the agency's funding?
chao- 15y ago
What really has my interest is not the TSA's request/threat. That part is unsurprising. Instead, my mind ran through a few ideas about what a news story on this topic would entail. From the last time I bothered to watch CNN, I recall they've acquired a penchant for saying "And a viral video of [topic] is hot on the Twitters today!", showing the video, getting someone in-house to do surface analysis, reading off some Facebook posts, and cutting to commercial. Ideally, a reporter does their own investigation on the topic, either by contacting the TSA and arranging to film while testing the scenario depicted here, or by doing a more undercover verification ala the video itself. I don't wish to be specifically judgmental of CNN, and I don't wish to over-analyze my mock-scenario. Instead I'm using the thought experiment of a news report on this topic to express frustrations with journalistic practices I have already seen elsewhere. It seems to me there isn't as much motivation on behalf of larger news organizations to put together a verified report, when you can replay something from YouTube and people will believe it much the same. But maybe there are positive aspects? Crowdsourcing the genesis of news topics allows for a better breadth of topics, clearly. And I recognize there is a need for it in situations such as the Syrian unrest, Tibet, or any place that foreign journalists can't easily access. I get the feeling though, when I go to 'old' media, that I expect old media standards and practices. When I go to 'old' media and get a replay of internet videos followed by an equally-long segment of internet comments, I wonder why I'm not just browsing the internet for myself.
tomkin 15y ago
So, the US collectively pays for the TSA. The TSA takes your money, buys into the accountability of body scanners - somehow miss (then deny) the vulnerability – one a terrorist could successfully overcome - and they're asking, what? That no one know about it? Are you serious? Like the TSA is a newb database admin that accidentally dropped the users table or something? The TSA is literally fucking with your lives and you pay for it and seriously being told to shut up about it in no uncertain terms. Yikes. What gets me is that the person who pointed out this flaw actually demonstrated it. I shutter to think what would have happened to this information had he only provided anecdotal hypothesis.
zotz 15y ago
"Totalitarian democracy is a term made famous by Israeli historian J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy
- haroldp 15y ago
  See Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_democracy
reader5000 15y ago
I think the problem is just that the TSA is run by unprofessional people who clearly have no idea what they're doing.
reidmain 15y ago
Security through obscurity. Doesn't work on the Internet. Doesn't work in real-life.
- Retric 15y ago
  Passwords are Security through obscurity. That does not make them useless, just vulnerable.
  - marshray 15y ago
    A password is a best-effort attempt at implementing the theoretical construct of a 'cryptographic shared secret'. Passwords are from perfect at that of course, but it's not correct to call them 'obscurity' either. The distinction between security and obscurity derives from Kerckhoffs's principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_Principle
  - mikeash 15y ago
    That is not what "security through obscurity" means. The phrase specifically refers to security which relies on secrecy of design or implementation details.
todd3834 15y ago
For someone who clearly values security, I am surprised to see him running Internet Explorer :-/
- sdfjkl 15y ago
  It's MS Exchange's web-frontend (OWA), which doesn't play nice with most browsers (last I checked it degraded into some "basic functionality" mode when using anything but IE, although that was a while ago). FourTen Technologies is his company and seems to be mainly a Microsoft shop based on their staff's skill set (ASP, .NET, COM, MSSQL, AD) and portfolio: http://www.fourtentech.com/about/whoswho/ http://www.fourtentech.com/about/whoswho/ Amusingly their portfolio includes a major project for the NYPD building a automated surveillance network designed for (amongst other functions) "detecting unauthorized individuals in secure areas of the financial district" -- http://www.fourtentech.com/mcs-nypd.html http://www.fourtentech.com/mcs-nypd.html
epaga 15y ago
Though both the email and the blog response from TSA are incredibly unprofessional, the email is NOT intimidation or a "veiled threat", and exaggerating by claiming it is is not going to help a sane discussion about this issue. What do you think the TSA is "threatening" to do? They have no power over the media. All the TSA are saying is "exercise caution with reporting on bloggers that make random statements because you can end up looking stupid". They're wrong in this case, of course, and most likely know they're wrong, but that doesn't make their statement be intimidation (nor should it be read as such). Let's stay reasoned and calm, people.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  Reporters travel a lot. Severe abuses of the opaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List have long been alleged, and I certainly wouldn't put it past them to retaliate that way.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Is there an implied threat of being less cooperative with feeding the journalist info though? It doesn't have to be "we will put you on a no-fly list" so much as "well, that's our right but we don't have to let you in to any press conferences anymore...."
- dedward 15y ago
  Is that what the TSA actually said, or just your interpretation of it?
  - finnw 15y ago
    Wouldn't it be a shame if your shop got broken into, looted and set on fire? Is the above sentence a threat? Of course it is. Not literally (I did not directly say that I would send thugs to loot your shop if you refused to pay me protection money) but a reasonable person would, more likely than not, interpret it as a threat. If I did not mean it that way but was so dumb as not to anticipate that you would read it that way, I would deserve to go to jail for extortion anyway. And the TSA, by virtue of having the power to add people to the No Fly List without public scrutiny and knowing of all the rumours of them having added people for political reasons, they should expect any "request" they make to be interpreted that way, and they should take extra care to ensure that it isn't.
alanh 15y ago
Journalism has been called the fourth pillar of the government. Its job is not to prop up the establishment, but rather to keep it responsible.
georgemcbay 15y ago
FTA: "For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail" The only situation that would make this "obvious" is if the technology is inadequate. Basically by saying that, they're admitting to a large amount of security through obscurity. Imagine a bank's website saying "For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss how our passwords are store in detail". Wait, why not? If the technology is adequate to the task you should be able to explain exactly how it works without compromising anything!
- dedward 15y ago
  Can you cite a bank website where they DO explain how their passwords are stored in detail?
  - eschulte 15y ago
    I don't talk to many banks about their password storage, but they all should. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
ktizo 15y ago
The TSA might as well just move into Barbara Streisand's beachfront property if they are using these kind of tactics.
jlujan 15y ago
Apperently Sari Koshetz doesn't deny anything http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-caution-the-tsa-to-snort-my-taint-and-probably-get-on-the-no-fly-list/ http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-cautio...

745 points by ddelphin 15y ago

I am outraged.

The term "security theater" has been tossed around a lot, but I think it's pretty clearly coming to that. Asking the mainstream media not to cover something like this is completely indefensible from a security standpoint - what, terrorists only learn about security flaws from TV?. It's pretty patently only about keeping their budget. Also, just going to throw this out there, but it is fairly possible that the email is totally fake.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
It's incredibly suspicious to allude to an e-mail from the TSA, but not actually include a copy of said e-mail.
- tsaoutourpants 15y ago
  I'll be requesting a copy by FOIA... will post on my blog whenever it comes :)
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    Could you ask the journalist in question to forward you the entire e-mail as well?
    - tsaoutourpants 15y ago
      He doesn't want to ruin his relationship with the source by doing so, but again, it should be a public record releasable under FOIA
      - Nate75Sanders 15y ago
        How long does an FOIA request of that sort usually take? If there are multiple steps, could you give us a timeline?
        TimGebhardt 15y ago
        Probably depends on the request. I got a pretty quick turnaround (or at least it exceeded my expectations) on my request to the FBI for whatever they knew about my grandfather: About 3 weeks. Sidenote: if you're interested in doing the same just go to http://www.getgrandpasfbifile.com/ http://www.getgrandpasfbifile.com/
      - tsaoutourpants 15y ago
        It's supposed to take a month. But, the TSA ignored my last FOIA request, so I had to sue them for it.
        ShabbyDoo 15y ago
        Wow. That in itself is a great story which should be heard.
        tsaoutourpants 15y ago
        Thank you, story is on the blog, including this post: http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/confirmed-tsa-declares-checkpoint-tapes-ssi/ http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/confirmed-t...
      - pavel_lishin 15y ago
        Is this the same source that's threatening him? Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the email server suddenly lost a bunch of emails the day before the FOIA request went through.
      - samstave 15y ago
        What kind of relationship does he have with a TSA agent who is mildly threatening him or intimidating him at least?
  - Newgy 15y ago
    Thank you for your brave work on this issue, you are a true patriot. "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." -- Samuel Adams, Founding Father
    - cafard 15y ago
      Was the expression "brush fire" current in the late 1700s? In fact, the whole sentence looks a little questionable.
      - dpcx 15y ago
        Not really... http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brush+fire&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brush+fire&... As well as http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams#Misattributed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams#Misattributed
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
    - doug1001 15y ago
      sure but this only applies to a citizen's inalienable right to make beer (and seasonal ales).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- martey 15y ago
  It's not "incredibly suspicious", since the author is claiming that one of his media contacts was the recipient of the email. Also, I don't see how seeing a screenshot of the purported message from the TSA would be considered more valid evidence than the current screenshot.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  So you're saying that screen shot [1] of the redacted email was manufactured, or that the source of the redacted email was maybe trolling Jon? I'm one of those folks that when I see a redacted email like that with most of the identity cookie in it I wonder if one could track down the original. I mean mail.fourtentech.com actually has a web server sitting on it and all. Anyway, it could be a viralish stunt, but sadly its pretty credible that the TSA might say this. [1] http://tsaoutofourpants.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/caution_red.png http://tsaoutofourpants.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/caution_...
  - Nate75Sanders 15y ago
    I'm confused. I see something that looks like an email referring to the aforementioned email from Sari Koshetz. I do not however see an email that looks like anything from Sari Koshetz with or without redaction. EDIT: I agree with the user "martey" below, though, that this wouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. It's way too easy to fake this kind of thing. The FOIA request for the email is the way to go. It'll probably find itself conveniently deleted or something, though.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    So you're saying that screen shot [1] of the redacted email was manufactured, or that the source of the redacted email was maybe trolling Jon? Or an infinite number of other things. Don't get bogged down in what the alternative scenario is. What is important is that if something is true, we should be able to find corroborating evidence to support it. If we can't, then we have reason to doubt the initial claim - and we can do so without arguing for a particular alternate scenario.
- tsaoutourpants 15y ago
  Second source confirms in comments! SmarterTravel March 8, 2012 at 3:34 pm | #11 Reply | Quote | Edit We were also “strongly cautioned” not to cover the story. We did anyway at SmarterTravel: http://tinyurl.com/7te5wj8 http://tinyurl.com/7te5wj8
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    For the cautious, the above tinyurl expands to http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/did-blogger-really-expose-fatal-flaw-in-airport-security.html?id=10723406 http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/did-blogg...
tibbon 15y ago
I think they are betting on security through absurdity (I initially meant to spell obscurity but this makes more sense).
- bdg 15y ago
  They're operating on the age-old wisdom of, "If you don't know where you're going, you're never lost."
  - joshAg 15y ago
    On the plus side, they're making good time.
anigbrowl 15y ago
Then again, this is arguably censorship theater. I thought the original post was blogspammy in the extreme, and this is more of the same. This does not make me a cheerleader for the TSA.
Bud 15y ago
No. It's not "coming to that". We're well past the security theater stage, and into the nightmare stage. Even hinting that any media not cover this or ANY story is so, so far beyond the purview of TSA that it is shocking (or should be shocking—it has become rather hard to be shocked by TSA) that they would even consider pulling this. The Supreme Court should slap them so hard that their acronym gets mixed up. This is an outrage. (edited to add snark) I thought of the perfect new acronym! STA: Security Theater Administration.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Hinting that media cover or not cover any story is so far beyond the purview of the TSA that no competent journalist would consider taking them seriously, making this a comparatively mild nightmare. The Supreme Court can't "slap them" for anything; someone with standing would have to bring a case, and for that case to have merit, some journalistic outlet would have had to have its discretion actually impinged by the TSA.
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    There might be a suit brought on behalf of one of these reporters and/or their employer arguing that the implication of consequences from such a powerful entity without a court order constitutes illegal interference with their business, possibly entitling them to some damages, and more importantly, establishing some very important precedent which might prevent the TSA from ever attempting such a stunt in the future. I could certainly see many lawyers salivating at the prospect of winning a suit against such a well-funded target, not to mention the notoriety such a contentious issue would bring them in any event.
    - jcampbell1 15y ago
      You are not familiar with Sovereign Immunity. No lawyer in the world salivates at the thought of suing the federal government.
      - praxeologist 15y ago

twiceaday 15y ago

Security by obscurity.

milesf 15y ago

The story he's referring to is this one: http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-body-scanners-made-worthless-by-blog-how-anyone-can-get-anything-past-the-tsas-nude-body-scanners/ http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-...

DamnYuppie 15y ago

I hope the email is fake. Yet I would not be surprised if it wasn't. Most government employees I have met are not really that intelligent. Add that to a bit of power and little to no accountability and you have an instant recipe for disaster.

high5ths 15y ago
Why would it be fake?
- praptak 15y ago
  Somebody's idea of a joke, feeding the opponents fake data to decrease their credibility, someone just wanting attention? People do various things for irrational reasons.
pseingatl 15y ago
Sari Koshetz is the name of a TSA representative. Google her.
- artursapek 15y ago
  So? Edit: Seriously, what does that prove? Someone faking an email can Google for TSA spokeswomen just as easily as someone trying to verify it.

runn1ng 15y ago

To play devil's advocate - he clearly has an agenda and his video is more long and boring political ramblings than something really substantial.

scelerat 15y ago
1. Anyone who says they don't have an agenda is lying. Everyone has their reasons for doing anything and everything. 2. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having an agenda.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  Absolutely. I'm pretty sure that I don't like this guy's politics, his manner irritates me, and every time he says "porn scanners" I get douche chills. But by exposing the truth to the people who pay for it, he's doing god's work and I'm 100% behind him. Not in front of him, but behind him, because he's a brave, tenacious pitbull, and clearly not just fighting for himself. Of course, if some TSA or government representatives show me proof that he was wrong, and in addition prove to me that this is not security theater for the personal profit of government cronies by dismantling some of Bruce Schneier's premises, I'll be 100% behind them too. It's just not likely that'll happen because this guy and Schneier show their work.
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  Adding to that: If he makes a bundle of money in the course of defending our freedoms, then my hat is off to him. Bravo! From an economics perspective, the fact that someone has turned a profit (in a free market) is prima facie evidence that he has delivered something of value.
  - reitblatt 15y ago
    Or he's discovered a new kind of sucker, cf. homeopathy.
burgerbrain 15y ago
3. Having an agenda does not invalidate his results.

rickdale 15y ago

I remember before they were rolling out the scanners seeing a story run by the mainstream media about how congress had invested large amounts of money in the scanners before they realized how useless they were and now they were going to push really push hard for them to become the norm. I guess they succeeded. It sucks how in America a logical argument bumps heads with a touchy subject.

bpd1069 15y ago

Overlay a thin layer of material over the metal plate (the dark/black region in the images) that has a regular repeating pattern (think checkerboard) that shows objects suspended beyond the body's silhouette. Problem solved.

xymostech 15y ago
But that would probably ruin the scan from the other direction? There are two pictures, I thought because there is a scan from the front and a scan from the back.
- ams6110 15y ago
  So it sounds like the easy solution is to do two scans. One face-on, and then they ask you to turn to the side and they do another.
  - CWuestefeld 15y ago
    Attacker then puts the smuggled payload on the inner thigh, where the leg itself blocks it from the sides.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      Or inner arm for that matter. Also, does anybody know what prevents people from simply taping a knife to the bottom of their foot, under their sock?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
teej 15y ago
The problem isn't that this one particular technique exists. The problem is that the TSA's decision making process led them to spend billions of dollars a year against the advisement of the top security experts in the world. For an organization who's sole purpose is the security of the American people, they're awfully bad at doing things that ensure the security of the American people.

ramses 15y ago

Harassment and directly attacking Free Speech? ... but somehow I suspect that this was an employee independently acting stupid, and not an institutional policy.

tsaoutourpants 15y ago
haha surely you kid?
burgerbrain 15y ago
Did you read the TSA's recent blog post about this? It displays exactly the same sort of attitude.

skanga 15y ago

This is insanity. I try to avoid flying as much as possible. However, the whole controversy also seems to lack common sense. An easy "solution" to this whole problem is to ask people to go into the machine and do a 360 degree rotation before emerging on the other side. I'll call this the "Airport Dance" :-) What? It's not like we aren't made to dance already!

regularfry 15y ago
The current arrangement subjects you to one short burst of radiation to take a static image, and it's enough energy to have some doctors worried. Multiply that up by however many frames you want to capture, and I don't think it would be "some doctors" any more. Besides, I've got no idea if the machines in place have microwave units that can withstand a high duty cycle like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they can't.
- rhplus 15y ago
  Does anyone have some independently verified numbers for the amount of radiation that a FBS exposes a passenger to and how it compares to the amount of radiation exposure the same passenger would get from 3 hours in a plane? The TSA claims that the latter is significantly (like 100x) greater than the former.
  - regularfry 15y ago
    There are numbers out there, but the problem isn't just the amount of energy, it's where it's concentrated. The theory goes that because of its very short wavelength everything that gets absorbed is concentrated in the topmost layers of the skin, so the energy density where it might be damaging is much higher than the absolute amount of energy might suggest. From memory part of the argument was that the studies hadn't yet been done which might show whether this could be a health issue, so claiming the scanners were safe was at best premature.
  - finnw 15y ago
    I'd like to see it on an updated version of this chart: https://www.xkcd.com/radiation/ https://www.xkcd.com/radiation/ (side note: I have the HTTPS version on my clipboard because I hesitated before typing "radiation dosage" into google, and decided to load up Tor to search for it.)

cs702 15y ago

So the TSA is "securing" airports by trying to keep vulnerabilities secret. Their thinking seems to be, "if no one knows where the open door is, no one will get in." Surely that will work out well. Not! Bruce Schneier must be getting a kick out of this.

einhverfr 15y ago
Indeed. Here's what I posted on Facebook (mildly edited for clarity) about the TSA's response (btw one of my Facebook friends is a TSA screener): Some thoughts about this. The main defense that the TSA offers over the body scanners in this regard is that it is somehow better/harder to circumvent than the metal detectors, and that it's only one part of a larger program using layers of security. We can argue about the specifics but the idea of layers of security is one thing the TSA is doing right. One of my complaints about the body scanners is that they are not implemented in a way that makes full use of this (tandem to a metal detector, as separate layers, ideally in conjunction with behavioral indicators). But that's neither here nor there. I want to talk about testing. As a software engineer, I know there is testing, and there is testing. Extensive pre-deployment testing is important. There can't be any doubt of that. However, it is also by definition incomplete. Stuff will always get missed. Real testing in a security environment involves the sorts of things that this video involves--- many people looking for ways to circumvent a given technology and doing so. A few professional testers will miss stuff because everyone has blind spots. This has to be an ongoing thing, and it has to rely on independent individuals not beholden to the organization ordering the testing. In the computer software field, while the stakes are lower, we deal with a level of constant attack unmatched in any physical security field. A firewall in the rural US is under more constant attack than any US troops on any battlefield and I have logs to prove this, so in my industry we have had to find better ways of dealing with these problems than we see with the Department of Homeland Security today. While my life may not depend on my firewall holding up, my livelihood very well might, as does all of your credit card data depend on firewalls of places like Amazon. The video I linked to yesterday, while I don't agree with all of the political remedies proposed is a solid example of penetration testing, and the sort that makes us more secure. We should no more trust the TSA with securing our airports than we should trust Microsoft with securing our data. Microsoft can't get there without armies of white-hat hackers reporting vulnerabilities before the bad guys find and exploit them. The TSA shouldn't attempt this either. Just this week we saw a massive security hole discovered at Github, which many open source projects use. This hole allowed anyone who had an account (and anyone can sign up!) the ability to commit software changes to any project on the system. The severity of this problem was just unbelievable. In all likelihood this would have gone at least partially unfixed (given past attempts to get the software fixed) had it not been for one daring individual breaking into the system in a reasonably responsible (as far as we know, but if you use github, audit your code!) way. But imagine if a bad guy did this? What critical systems would be vulnerable for years because of malware planted? The fact that it was reported in a public way after a previous fix was attempted and fell flat was a good thing. I have been on the receiving end of accusations of fearmongering for exposing security holes (in software). The fact though is that this is usually the first step to getting the problem fixed. Whatever else is discussed, we need to keep that in mind. The correct response should have been, "We are evaluating this report and, once we are finished doing so, will institute whatever corrective steps appear to be necessary to solve the problem." This is not it.

grandalf 15y ago

The TSA probably views its own mission as largely a propaganda mission. It's just creepy when we realize that it is trying to silence public debate. The biggest oddity to me is that it's been over 10 years and this debate hasn't actually happened in the mainstream media. I think one aspect of most orgs that have entrenched power is that they are always very deferent toward government. NPR is a great example... there is lots of coverage of various wall street schemes, mention of greed as a problem in the private sector, etc., but the underlying message in most of the stories is that government is beyond reproach.

IanDrake 15y ago
I don't know if that's entirely true. NPR was really suspicious of the government before 2008. Then something changed.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Have some data to support your cognitive bias?
  - IanDrake 15y ago
    Not sure that data is available, but I was listening to NPR news during that time. I thought they did decent job of highlighting the poor behavior of our government. Then things changed (not government behavior, which is the same if not worse). At the pinnacle of the credit crisis they started hating on the financial services sector. As if they had any idea of what credit derivative were. The "experts" they had on air seemed to have a textbook definition which would then be simplified by saying "It's basically gambling". Uhg. At some point I realized that most of their "experts" (in all their coverage) were either working for the government, the Federal Reserve, or had financial ties to the government (grant recipients, lobbyist, etc...). I stopped listening around 2010 after I found myself yelling at the radio too often. Maybe things have changed.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  The change happened earlier than 2008. It happened when funding was getting dismantled in Congress and subsequently a conservative ombudsman was appointed along with a guy to run operations that used to run Radio Free Europe. After that, it was National Petroleum Radio. Republicans largely support the things that we're objecting to here, along with Obama.

reinhardt 15y ago

Eagerly waiting for the Streisand effect

jrockway 15y ago

They're not really threatening anything, they're just asking "please don't cover this story". That's their right and it's not censorship unless the journalist faces consequences for covering the story (no future interviews, harassment by the legal system, etc.) It doesn't seem like any consequences are mentioned or implied, so this doesn't bother me. Of course the TSA doesn't want negative press. Would you?

burgerbrain 15y ago
No, they're not asking ""please don't cover this story"". They are "strongly cautioning" them not to, which can reasonably be interpreted as a veiled threat.
- jrockway 15y ago
  A threat to do what?
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    "I know where you live." What is that a threat to do? How about, "Be careful."?
    - jrockway 15y ago
      The government's powers are limited by the Constitution. Someone who threatens to follow you home and kill you, however, is operating in an environment without restrictions, and you might therefore worry that you're actually going to be killed. "Prior restraint" is a well-tested concept and it doesn't do very well in court. And all the government has to harass you are the courts.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        Just because you think that the only way the government is capable of harassing you is with the courts, does not mean that they are not capable of veiled threats. A threats are not limited to personal physical violence. Though I of course strongly disagree with your premise anyway, particularly when the governmental agency in question is the DHS.

danso 15y ago

Just want to point this out: "strongly caution" is what the TSA flak told the reporter (according to the reporter). That doesn't necessarily mean "don't report this or we'll send you to Gitmo". It most likely was expressed in the context of "you're going to look stupid/spread misinformation if you do." I'm not saying the TSA flak won't be vindictive if a reporter covers the story. I'm just saying, there's not an immediate reason to jump to this conclusion. You don't get to be TSA flak by writing thinly-veiled threats that are easily retrieved through public records requests.

rsingel 15y ago
Yes, this is exactly right. I've covered TSA and edit a blog that just covered this very story. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/bodyscanner-video/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/bodyscanner-video/ Sometimes a flak can save you embarrassment and other times you disregard them because you know its a story.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Why would a PR flak ever stop a critic from embarrassing and discrediting himself? That would be gold for the TSA. The only exception would be if the critic is so powerful that even a false story would hurt the TSA. I don't think SmarterTravel is that much of a force. At most, this "caution" is concern trolling.
rhizome 15y ago
What does the TSA care about people looking stupid? Boing Boing took down their TSA post.
- travisp 15y ago
  Let's suppose the story was bogus and the reporters would look stupid (neither is true). The TSA might still not want the story to be spread widely, because people will remember the original story, but not the corrections hidden in small print.
- ilamont 15y ago

mrb 15y ago

The government supporting the TSA, despite its People pushing against it, is a prime example of failure of democracy in the United States. The People elected a government who does not what they want! Some countries hold referendums to vote on controversial topics. It would be a great solution to hold one in the U.S. at the federal level asking a very simple question: "Should the TSA be shut down? Yes/No". Direct democracy at its best. Unfortunately the U.S. constitution does not provide for referendums at the federal level... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum#United_States

api 15y ago
People need to understand this: it's all about the lobbyists, period. The TSA is nothing but a cash cow for the defense and security industries. Actual security is an irrelevant side effect.
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  it's all about the lobbyists, period. Don't the politicians and bureaucrats -- the ones we're trusting to look out for our interests -- bear some responsibility?
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    You mean people like Michael Chertoff, who pushed for the body scanners when he was the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and then retired to found a consulting company which has been employed by the companies who manufacture those same scanners? That sort of thing?
tptacek 15y ago
Be careful what you wish for. The capital-P people are just peachy with those machines. I traveled last week and saw nobody (other than myself) opting out. The people --- in the aggregate --- do not care about this issue. Left to "democracy in the United States", a referendum that requested the elimination of the "opt-out" process in favor of 0.5s of wait time at the security lines would probably pass in a landslide. Thankfully, we're governed not just by a legislature but by a Constitution interpreted by a panel of judges with lifetime tenure.

tptacek 15y ago

They're allowed to say that. The media is allowed (encouraged; morally obliged, perhaps) to ignore them. Whether he's right or wrong (and I'm sure he's right), the bureaucracy would prefer to continue working towards their quarterly MBOs than to address another controversy. This is a non-story.

Bud 15y ago
Completely absurd. The TSA is allowed to vaguely intimidate the media? I call bullshit. I know from reading hundreds of your comments that you are a reasonable man, so please explain where you are coming from on this.
- tptacek 15y ago
  The premise of your outrage is that the TSA has some authority over the media that they are abusing. The TSA has no authority over the media. The media routinely publishes terrifyingly sensitive government secrets over the direct and strident objections of the DoJ and gets hauled into court to defend itself. That the media has a pretty excellent track record in those courts is not so much my point as that the media has so much experience building that track record that only the dumbest reporter would give half a shit whether some TSA functionary "strongly cautioned" them not to run a story. Since this observation isn't so much "insightful" as it is "completely obvious on its face", to me, Occam's Razor suggests that what the TSA was implying was that the guy was wrong, and that his story was going to make the media look dumb. Since I have never once seen anyone from the TSA land on the right side of an argument, from airport security to spelling and grammar, we don't have to argue about which one of us is more vehemently contemptuous of it, or, in this case, its argument.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  The blog post characterizes this communication as intimidation. I don't see anything remotely intimidating about it; to me it looks like the TSA telling the other reporter that the guy has no credibility, and I think this is an entirely valid criticism of anyone who delighted to be featured on Alex Jones' show. I have no especial objection to the original story, but it's little more than a marketing exercise: a hyperbolic headline attached to a banal observation, which shoots at a large target and unsurprisingly, hits it. When you think about it, government procuremet on this scale is almost always slow and suffers from stable-door syndrome. As I've said before, nothing is going to happen with the TSA until after the election, because the minute Obama proposes loosening security at airports he'll be accused of inviting terrorists onto planes. Have you not noticed how none the congresspeople who say they are outraged - outraged! - over the TSA's intrusive security methods have made any attempt to cut the agency's funding?

chao- 15y ago

What really has my interest is not the TSA's request/threat. That part is unsurprising. Instead, my mind ran through a few ideas about what a news story on this topic would entail. From the last time I bothered to watch CNN, I recall they've acquired a penchant for saying "And a viral video of [topic] is hot on the Twitters today!", showing the video, getting someone in-house to do surface analysis, reading off some Facebook posts, and cutting to commercial. Ideally, a reporter does their own investigation on the topic, either by contacting the TSA and arranging to film while testing the scenario depicted here, or by doing a more undercover verification ala the video itself. I don't wish to be specifically judgmental of CNN, and I don't wish to over-analyze my mock-scenario. Instead I'm using the thought experiment of a news report on this topic to express frustrations with journalistic practices I have already seen elsewhere. It seems to me there isn't as much motivation on behalf of larger news organizations to put together a verified report, when you can replay something from YouTube and people will believe it much the same. But maybe there are positive aspects? Crowdsourcing the genesis of news topics allows for a better breadth of topics, clearly. And I recognize there is a need for it in situations such as the Syrian unrest, Tibet, or any place that foreign journalists can't easily access. I get the feeling though, when I go to 'old' media, that I expect old media standards and practices. When I go to 'old' media and get a replay of internet videos followed by an equally-long segment of internet comments, I wonder why I'm not just browsing the internet for myself.

tomkin 15y ago

So, the US collectively pays for the TSA. The TSA takes your money, buys into the accountability of body scanners - somehow miss (then deny) the vulnerability – one a terrorist could successfully overcome - and they're asking, what? That no one know about it? Are you serious? Like the TSA is a newb database admin that accidentally dropped the users table or something? The TSA is literally fucking with your lives and you pay for it and seriously being told to shut up about it in no uncertain terms. Yikes. What gets me is that the person who pointed out this flaw actually demonstrated it. I shutter to think what would have happened to this information had he only provided anecdotal hypothesis.

zotz 15y ago

"Totalitarian democracy is a term made famous by Israeli historian J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy

haroldp 15y ago
See Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_democracy

reader5000 15y ago

I think the problem is just that the TSA is run by unprofessional people who clearly have no idea what they're doing.

reidmain 15y ago

Security through obscurity. Doesn't work on the Internet. Doesn't work in real-life.

Retric 15y ago
Passwords are Security through obscurity. That does not make them useless, just vulnerable.
- marshray 15y ago
  A password is a best-effort attempt at implementing the theoretical construct of a 'cryptographic shared secret'. Passwords are from perfect at that of course, but it's not correct to call them 'obscurity' either. The distinction between security and obscurity derives from Kerckhoffs's principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_Principle
- mikeash 15y ago
  That is not what "security through obscurity" means. The phrase specifically refers to security which relies on secrecy of design or implementation details.

todd3834 15y ago

For someone who clearly values security, I am surprised to see him running Internet Explorer :-/

sdfjkl 15y ago
It's MS Exchange's web-frontend (OWA), which doesn't play nice with most browsers (last I checked it degraded into some "basic functionality" mode when using anything but IE, although that was a while ago). FourTen Technologies is his company and seems to be mainly a Microsoft shop based on their staff's skill set (ASP, .NET, COM, MSSQL, AD) and portfolio: http://www.fourtentech.com/about/whoswho/ http://www.fourtentech.com/about/whoswho/ Amusingly their portfolio includes a major project for the NYPD building a automated surveillance network designed for (amongst other functions) "detecting unauthorized individuals in secure areas of the financial district" -- http://www.fourtentech.com/mcs-nypd.html http://www.fourtentech.com/mcs-nypd.html

epaga 15y ago

Though both the email and the blog response from TSA are incredibly unprofessional, the email is NOT intimidation or a "veiled threat", and exaggerating by claiming it is is not going to help a sane discussion about this issue. What do you think the TSA is "threatening" to do? They have no power over the media. All the TSA are saying is "exercise caution with reporting on bloggers that make random statements because you can end up looking stupid". They're wrong in this case, of course, and most likely know they're wrong, but that doesn't make their statement be intimidation (nor should it be read as such). Let's stay reasoned and calm, people.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
Reporters travel a lot. Severe abuses of the opaque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List have long been alleged, and I certainly wouldn't put it past them to retaliate that way.
einhverfr 15y ago
Is there an implied threat of being less cooperative with feeding the journalist info though? It doesn't have to be "we will put you on a no-fly list" so much as "well, that's our right but we don't have to let you in to any press conferences anymore...."
dedward 15y ago
Is that what the TSA actually said, or just your interpretation of it?
- finnw 15y ago
  Wouldn't it be a shame if your shop got broken into, looted and set on fire? Is the above sentence a threat? Of course it is. Not literally (I did not directly say that I would send thugs to loot your shop if you refused to pay me protection money) but a reasonable person would, more likely than not, interpret it as a threat. If I did not mean it that way but was so dumb as not to anticipate that you would read it that way, I would deserve to go to jail for extortion anyway. And the TSA, by virtue of having the power to add people to the No Fly List without public scrutiny and knowing of all the rumours of them having added people for political reasons, they should expect any "request" they make to be interpreted that way, and they should take extra care to ensure that it isn't.

alanh 15y ago

Journalism has been called the fourth pillar of the government. Its job is not to prop up the establishment, but rather to keep it responsible.

georgemcbay 15y ago

FTA: "For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail" The only situation that would make this "obvious" is if the technology is inadequate. Basically by saying that, they're admitting to a large amount of security through obscurity. Imagine a bank's website saying "For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss how our passwords are store in detail". Wait, why not? If the technology is adequate to the task you should be able to explain exactly how it works without compromising anything!

dedward 15y ago
Can you cite a bank website where they DO explain how their passwords are stored in detail?
- eschulte 15y ago
  I don't talk to many banks about their password storage, but they all should. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

ktizo 15y ago

The TSA might as well just move into Barbara Streisand's beachfront property if they are using these kind of tactics.

jlujan 15y ago

Apperently Sari Koshetz doesn't deny anything http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-caution-the-tsa-to-snort-my-taint-and-probably-get-on-the-no-fly-list/ http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-cautio...