TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story

http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/breaking-tsa-threatens-mainstream-media-not-to-cover-story/

by ddelphin • 14 years ago

745 149 14 years ago

tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com

lightyrs• 14 years 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_lishin3• 14 years ago

It's incredibly suspicious to allude to an e-mail from the TSA, but not actually include a copy of said e-mail.

tsaoutourpants6• 14 years ago

I'll be requesting a copy by FOIA... will post on my blog whenever it comes :)

martey• 14 years 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• 14 years 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_...

tsaoutourpants6• 14 years 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

tibbon• 14 years ago

I think they are betting on security through absurdity (I initially meant to spell obscurity but this makes more sense).

bdg• 14 years ago

They're operating on the age-old wisdom of, "If you don't know where you're going, you're never lost."

anigbrowl2• 14 years 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.

Bud2• 14 years 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.

tptacek6• 14 years 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.

IanDrake3• 14 years ago

Change "Administration" to "Department" and I think you've got a winner.

dlikhten• 14 years ago

Would this be considered blackmail, if the media starts getting harassed by the TSA over covering such stories?

Iv• 14 years ago

> No. It's not "coming to that". We're well past the security theater stage, and into the nightmare stage.

If you want to stick to the theatrical vocabulary while being pedantic, you could talk about security phantasmagoria

twiceaday• 14 years ago

Security by obscurity.

milesf• 14 years ago

The story he's referring to is this one:

http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-...

DamnYuppie• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Why would it be fake?

praptak• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Sari Koshetz is the name of a TSA representative. Google her.

artursapek• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

pessimizer2• 14 years 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.

CWuestefeld4• 14 years 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.

burgerbrain7• 14 years ago

3. Having an agenda does not invalidate his results.

rickdale• 14 years 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.

bpd10692• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

ams61102• 14 years 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.

teej• 14 years 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.

ams61102• 14 years ago

A big problem with that procurement was the very close ties between former TSA director, Michael Chertoff, and the company that makes the full body scanners.

shareme• 14 years ago

no they are spending billions to advertise traveling securely as what they are attempting to secure is so statistically approaching zero to be laughable..

in the 1970s when it was found that people could highjack planes by delivery a threatening note or bomb and using a parachute to jump out with money what do you think the airlines did?\

They took the statistically significant thing and changed how planes were designed to prevent people being able to jump out of airliners through the back escape doors.

It did not cost billions of dollars and no extra xray scanning machines were used either..

First act of de-toothing TSA is putting those qualified on security of airlines..the airlines themselves back in charge of security!'

rorrr• 14 years ago

> For an organization who's sole purpose is the security of the American people

Their sole purpose is to make money. They obviously don't give a damn about security.

einhverfr5• 14 years ago

How many places do you think assume security is a problem that can be solved by buying fancy products?

This is an all-too-common mistake. I am sure we have all seen it in the IT industry. I am surprised we don't just recognize it and call it out as such when we see the federal government doing the same.

aroberge• 14 years ago

Why do you think it is black in the first place? Think physics and X-rays, not computer screen...

akavi• 14 years ago

Have the backgroundpattern made of alternating pieces of absorbent and transparent material, then. (I assume the machines work by measuring obstruction of rays. If they work by reflection of rays, then replace "absorbent and transparent" with "absorbent and reflective".)

samstave2• 14 years ago

Isn't it solved by just forcing the scanee to turn to the side, scan front rear and sides?

Great - now the time to get through security just went up!

I mean, the TSA idiots STILL require us to remove our shoes because of some joker with a lighter attempting to burn his foot.

jawngee• 14 years ago

Twice the dose of radiation.

ramses• 14 years ago

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

tsaoutourpants6• 14 years ago

haha surely you kid?

burgerbrain7• 14 years ago

Did you read the TSA's recent blog post about this? It displays exactly the same sort of attitude.

skanga• 14 years 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!

regularfry2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

CWuestefeld4• 14 years ago

Nope. If the payload is attached to the inner thigh, the smuggler's leg will shield it from the side scan.

cs702• 14 years 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.

einhverfr5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

IanDrake3• 14 years ago

I don't know if that's entirely true. NPR was really suspicious of the government before 2008. Then something changed.

mattdeboard• 14 years ago

Have some data to support your cognitive bias?

pessimizer2• 14 years 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.

gaius• 14 years ago

Remind me what year Obama was elected?

reinhardt• 14 years ago

Eagerly waiting for the Streisand effect

jrockway3• 14 years 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?

burgerbrain7• 14 years 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.

jrockway3• 14 years ago

A threat to do what?

hyperbovine• 14 years ago

The government should not be in the business of telling the press what to cover. Individuals and businesses, sure. Government, no. I understand there are occasional exceptions due to national security, but those requests come from the highest levels of government and are rare. This is some asshole at the TSA calling up reporters to spread FUD. Completely indefensible.

danso2• 14 years ago

Well I work in the press and the government can say what they want. It's wrong for the press to obey the government's every wish and it is wrong for the press to immediately ignore the government's every opinion. If a NASA PR person tells me that the agency has determined the Earth to be round that doesn't mean that I need to launch an investigation into the possible flatness of the earth.

There's a difference between "telling/informing" and mandating. The latter is bad; the former is...well, part of a government's job is to disseminate information.

cleaver• 14 years ago

I think it is actually pretty common for authorities not to cover a story if it is in the public interest. For example, a kidnapping case in progress and so on.

The question then, is it in the public interest not to cover this story. I'd say it would probably not matter so much from a security standpoint, but more so for the amount of mayhem that could ensue at airport security if this was public knowledge.

danso2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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/

Sometimes a flak can save you embarrassment and other times you disregard them because you know its a story.

Drbble4• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

What does the TSA care about people looking stupid? Boing Boing took down their TSA post.

travisp• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

This one is still up:

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/howto-get-metal-through-a-t...

I can't imagine any BoingBoing writers sitting still if the TSA forced something like this to be removed from the site.

weixiyen• 14 years ago

> "you're going to look stupid/spread misinformation if you do."

"And then we will send you to Gitmo for spreading misinformation."

einhverfr5• 14 years ago

I think it's probably in the middle.

You have to remember that journalists rely on sources, and some of those sources come from government agencies. A strong caution contains an implied threat of non-cooperation, i.e. if you cover that story, we will be feeding other journalists more info than we feed you.

We've already been seeing this a lot with the current administration, regarding trying to ban Fox News from the press pool (ok, I am no fan of Fox News, and I was a fan of Obama in 2008, but COME ON). In context, this is a meaningful threat.

However, I wonder if the issue has to do more with the "get rid of the TSA" rhetoric in the post than it does with the security hole.

Drbble4• 14 years ago

You need general, sure but the TSA management is not Apple, or even a politicians who uses media manipulation to win hearts and minds. It is just inept damage control trying to cover up corruption and incompetence.

mrb2• 14 years 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

api• 14 years 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.

CWuestefeld4• 14 years 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?

tptacek6• 14 years 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.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

I don't think your observations back up your conclusions with regard to public support for the machines.

The choice people have is between these scanners and a highly intrusive "pat down" which typically includes some TSA agent's hands on your junk. That's not much of a choice.

timsally• 14 years ago

Indeed. It's actually quite amazing how impressive our federal judiciary is (two notable examples in Chicago: Posner [1] and Easterbrook). Unfortunately, the judiciary has faced a fairly serious crisis in funding over the last two decades [2]. The Chief Justice spoke about this in his year end report in 2010 [3]. It's one of the largest unsung problem in the U.S. today and it makes me worry about the calibre of judges we will end up with a few decades down the road. The math is depressingly straightforward: judges get paid a lot less, law school costs a lot more, and an entire branch of government is at risk for decay.

[1] http://www.projectposner.org/

[2] http://www.uscourts.gov/JudgesAndJudgeships/JudicialCompensa...

[3] http://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2010year-end...

protomyth• 14 years ago

Some states have had good luck with referendums (ND), but I am not sure a federal version would be all that good. I'm one of those that thinks the 17th Amendment made it harder for the federal government to be accountable to the will of the people in the states. It seems like Senators are not as responsive. I don't think repealing it would help these days since people expect to directly vote for office holders (electoral college aside).

It would be interesting, since travel distances are not really the issue, if each state was represented in the Senate not by 2 Senators but by that state's Governor. Seems like you would get a much better response.

tptacek6• 14 years 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.

Bud2• 14 years 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.

tptacek6• 14 years 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.

anigbrowl2• 14 years 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?

burgerbrain7• 14 years ago

Just because they are legally in the right does not mean that we cannot express our displeasure with their actions.

chao-• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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

haroldp• 14 years ago

reader5000• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Security through obscurity.

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

Retric• 14 years ago

Passwords are Security through obscurity. That does not make them useless, just vulnerable.

marshray• 14 years 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

mikeash• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

sdfjkl• 14 years 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/

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

epaga• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Reporters travel a lot. Severe abuses of the opaque 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.

einhverfr5• 14 years 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...."

dedward2• 14 years ago

Is that what the TSA actually said, or just your interpretation of it?

finnw2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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!

dedward2• 14 years ago

Can you cite a bank website where they DO explain how their passwords are stored in detail?

eschulte• 14 years ago

I don't talk to many banks about their password storage, but they all should.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

ktizo2• 14 years ago

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

jlujan• 14 years ago

Apperently Sari Koshetz doesn't deny anything

http://www.popehat.com/2012/03/08/in-which-i-strongly-cautio...

TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story

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