Statistics!

Over on the site there's a new page which charts the "color" of each submission for each month since the site launched. Cool stuff!

New filters

A few weeks ago, we noticed some issues with the submissions to the site. For instance, people were writing their entries in ALL CAPS! Or they were forgetting dates, or to submit a status "color" or something else. Or they were using the site to propagate political views. So I put a bunch of new filters in. (Note: if you're not a nerd, you can probably stop reading here.) And I asked people to report if the filters were causing any problems. I tried them, and they worked. But, as we all know, making any changes can create any number of other issues arise.

So I got an email from someone who was unable to submit. They sent me a screenshot:

and were receiving an error message to please TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK key. I pretty quickly figured out what the problem was, and fixed it. So, before I tell you what it was, take a quick think . I'll put the answer in the comments.

725 guns!

A friend forwards the following from Blogger Bob via the Economist:

Speaking of good catches, did you know that our officers have found 725 firearms in carry-on luggage since January of 2011? And it’s still only September!

So that's about 1000 firearms per year. (!) There are that many absentminded American gun-owners who totally forget that, oh, whoops, you can't bring a gun on a plane? It mentions a 1-2% failure rate which seems, actually, sort of okay—in other words, a would-be terrorist would be caught 49 times out of 50 trying to sneak stuff on board, which seems like a pretty good deterrent.

Of course, the body scanners do precious little to find the guns. No one here (that I know of) is arguing against WTMDs at airports. You know, because they actually do something.

This one takes the cake (or, don't get the runs airborne on Sept. 11)

So, there was the anniversary of September 11. And on that anniversary, we pretty much forgot about all the freedom we have here in the good ol' US and A. Amongst the stories of particular crazy was the widely-reported DEN-DTW Frontier flight which was delayed on the ground in Detroit because, uh, some brown-ish people were all seated in the same row. Seriously.

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

In other words, go and read the whole post.

This is beyond compare for so many reasons. First of all, the terrorists back in the day attacked planes from United and American and flew them in to New York and Washington. There's less bang for your buck hijacking a Frontier plane and flying it in to, what, an abandoned building in downtown Detroit? Aside from that sort of snark, three people who don't look like Norman Rockwell's picture of America sitting in the same row does not a crisis make. Even if two of the guys get up, in succession, to go to the bathroom.

I could see if they were chanting in some foreign language. I mean, sure, it would probably still be an overreaction, and it would be unwarranted, but this does not seem to have been the case. Or if they were trying to light their shoes on fire. In that case, yeah, kick their butts.

But, it wasn't. Apparently someone got spooked, told a flight attendant, and everyone flipped out. The FBI interviewed everyone on the plane. I hope they figure out what numbskull got so spooked of someone who didn't look just like them. I hope the TSA, and airline crews, and even fellow passengers, can use this as a learning experience to not get creeped out when the person next to them doesn't look like a real 'Merkin. And I hope this kind of miscarriage never happens again.

Of course, I think a lot of what we can learn from this instance, and from September 11 itself, is that we need to be more open with our friends and neighbors and, well anyone in out community. This is the United States. This is somewhere where a Saudi Arabian and a Jew get married and no one looks at them funny (well, unless they happen to be seated next to two Indian-looking fellows). This is the melting pot. We need to celebrate diversity, not fear it. Imagine if someone had reached out to talk to these folks. Say, "hi." Ask them about their flight, and their trip. Find out that they are, hey, normal Americans just like everyone else. Diffuse the situation (which, of course, wasn't a situation until it was made a situation). And get everyone off of the plane and in to the terminal and on with their lives.

And once the plane was on the ground, well, all hell seems to have broken loose. Maybe protocol was followed, in which case protocol needs to be changed. In god's (allah's?) holy name, why are you strip searching these people? Why are you handcuffing them? What kind of harm could they do to anyone other than themselves with something they smuggled through security (oh, wait) once the plane is on the ground? Innocent until proven guilty apparently does not apply when you are on an airplane and don't look just like everyone else on the craft. This is another point where a little common sense (talk to the people, run a quick background check, find out that—hey, look!—they're not terrorists) is much better than humiliating them, handcuffing them and leading them in shackles for an interrogation. Lordy, what are they going to tell you about living in suburban Ohio, after all?

If I were a passenger on this plane—and if I had been inconvenienced for hours for no real reason other than a few people getting a little too excited about the Evil Doers—I'd want a full explanation from the airline. Not the FBI's cop out "Due to the anniversary of Sept. 11, all precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously. The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not." (Apparently some folks on a LA to NY flight also had the shits, and that flight was also escorted in, but they must have been white, so they they avoided the interrogation.) No, I'd want to know why the flight crew, once on the ground, called for the police, taxied away from the gate, and put in motion a long-term interrogation.

This sounds like a JANFU* between Frontier, the local DHS (gosh) and the flight crew. Cooler heads should have prevailed.

* JANFU, in the vein of SNAFU and FUBAR, is a joint Army-Navy foul up, when multiple parties are to blame for a sticky situation. To put it nicely.

Do we have an ethical obligation to correct incompetence

One of my favorite columns (albeit less so with the departure of Randy Cohen) is the Times Magazine's The Ethicist. The most recent column dealt with, guess what, the TSA. Basically, a guy keeps getting the SSSS on his boarding pass which tells the screeners to give him the extra-special grope. (Let's not get in to the argument of how silly it is to be telling people, by means of SSSS on their boarding pass, that they are going to be screened.) In any case, some guy is finding that the SSSS on his pass is not always noticed. Should he point out this incompetence?

The ethicist was pretty non-commital. I say: it's silly to be printing this on your boarding pass. How about printing them at home, photoshopping out the SSSS if necessary, and not having to deal with it anymore. Yeah, that sounds good.

"Has anyone unknown to you …"

We recently posted about the TSA asking passengers questions in an attempt at using behavior detection. The verdict? Good in theory. In practice: likely not.

Well, it turns out the first airport to implement this is BOS. And guess who is flying out of BOS in the next few weeks? This guy. Maybe. Although, perhaps I should run a little experiment and print out a boarding pass using the Photoshop and go have a little fun. All it might cost me is a couple of subway fares.

In any case, according to the article, the questions are along the lines of "how long have you been here?" and "where are you going?" It seems like what you get asked when you cross the Canadian border (we could talk about the intrusion of privacy, although you can just as easily lie). And the questions seem slightly less inane than what the baggage handlers were mandated to ask until the middle of the last decade: "Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry anything for them."

The answer to that question was, of course: "If someone had asked me to carry something, then they would be known to me, moron."

The TSA's behavior detection program

The Times today details the TSA's expansion of behavior detection at airports—basically, informal conversations with travelers to try to see if they are, well, if they can be trusted. On paper, it looks like a good idea. The Israelis do it, and the Israelis have a really good track record when it comes to security. And it's far less invasive (they're not making you strip down, and then having a conversation, after all) and cheaper than $150,000 machines.

Unfortunately, it will probably be implemented like when I recently flew through San Francisco and had this conversation with the TSA agent checking my ID and putting the "TSA squiggle"* on my boarding pass:

TSA agent (holding my ID): What is your name?
Me: Uh, [my name].
TSA agent: Thank you [draws TSA squiggle]
Me: Wait, is that some sort of new security? Does that work?
TSA agent: Yes, it does.
Me: Seriously? People are dumb enough to give the wrong name? You catch terrorists like that?
TSA agent: You'd be surprised.
Me: Yeah, I'd be surprised, if anyone ever fell for it.

I didn't want to insult this fellow's intelligence, but there were two reasons why this was an utter failure of a policy. The first is that anyone who had put a bomb in their underpants or a coke bottle would probably take the time to memorize the name on their fake ID. (Or, in the words of Bruce Schneier: "you're a dumb terrorist and the government will catch you".) Second, the TSA agents, even the creme de la creme out front putting on the terrorist-proof, ever-so-sophisticated squiggles on our nation's boarding passes, are not likely to be highly trained in psychology and able to determine the tics of a nervous potential terrorist.

Hiring some highly-trained psychologists to question travelers might make some sense, but it would still be searching for a needle in a haystack. Some common sense measures like making sure that you couldn't just print out a copy of a boarding pass with a new name on it and use it to board a plane would make a lot of sense. Not having this in place—and, really, some cheap scanners and a database are all we need (I've even seen it used, once in a while)—completely negates the whole reason we have check IDs in the first place. (Hey, remember when the airlines printed our tickets for us? That was much more secure! But it cost them money. Poor guys.)

Case in point: a few months ago I was in a terrible rush to get to the airport; and didn't have time to change out of sweaty running clothes. So when I arrived, I was disheveled, sweaty and looked like a crazy person (more than usual). Did I stick out amongst the rest of the (generally sheveled) travelers? Yes, but not to the TSA. I walked right to the plane.

So if I know the TSA (and I believe I do), I'm sure we'll all be subjected to another round of silly questions every time we fly. At least they won't be strip searching us all.

* The TSA squiggle

This is the most meaningless of all the meaningless security measures. Back in the day (and I mean way back), for about a year after September 11, they checked your boarding pass and ID twice: once at check-in, and once at the gate. The squiggle was, ostensibly, a measure taken to make sure you didn't switch out IDs (and boarding passes) before boarding. This had several flaws: it took a lot of time, it took a lot of personnel, the squiggles were pretty easy to forge (I just imagine the TSA standing in a briefing room every morning saying "okay, today, we're using a blue highlighter, and were underlining the date and making two vertical lines across the destination, okay?") and was rendered obsolete by the "print your own" boarding passes from home—although that happened long after this extra check disappeared. And it has been pointed out that the airlines love this whole name-matching step, because it means that you can't (easily) fly under someone else's name. That's called "revenue protection." I'm glad the government is doing the job of the airlines.

But we still have the squiggle. I've never had my squiggle checked at the gate. Sometimes I print off extra copies of my boarding pass just to see what happens if I go through with a blank one (answer: nothing). It is a completely meaningless layer of security, security theater at it's best. It does nothing to make anyone safer, and even if it did, it could be so easily circumvented that it would be a complete waste of time. And now that we have boarding passes on mobile phones, well, no one is highlighting the screen. (Flyertalk, of course, has a thread with some snarkiness about this.)

Maybe next time when I fly I'll bring along two boarding passes, get the squiggle, and proceed to immediately rip the squiggled pass in to pieces and proceed to the gate. We'll see if that causes any problems. I'm sure it won't.