

Crowdsourcing a real-time solution to air terrorism - mmaunder
http://markmaunder.com/2009/crowdsourcing-a-solution-to-air-terrorism/

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mattmaroon
"Give passengers a way to quickly and discreetly report suspicious activity to
officials, both before boarding and during the flight. A button that simply
reports suspicious activity within a 3 passenger radius may be all that’s
needed."

Yeah, then every time anyone with a thick beard boards a 747 they'll get 200
reports. That will solve the problem.

Also passengers who don't speak English is not cause for suspicion on a flight
from Nigeria.

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jcl
Never mind that the passenger in question attended University College London:
He speaks English.

And if acting nervous on a plane is reason enough to move a person to the back
of the plane to conduct a full-body search... well, let's just say the
airlines had better have a significant rubber-glove budget.

~~~
jrockway
No, they just reuse the rubber gloves. The security people at LHR doing the
body pat-downs are a great example. I watched one sneeze all over his gloves,
and then immediately pat someone down. Mmmm, body fluids...

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wglb
So thereby it becomes clear who the gloves are protecting. Not the passengers.

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jrockway
It's funny because they are supposedly looking for (sharp?) syringes, but are
only protecting themselves with a 1mm thick piece of latex.

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Alex3917
Why not post all the x-ray images on mechanical turk and give $1000 to anyone
who can catch a weapon the TSA misses. That way we'll have an army of people
trying to improve the TSA's awful success rate. I suspect the only reason we
don't already do this is that it would expose the fact that the TSA catches
only a tiny fraction of banned weapons.

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philwelch
No, you'll have an army of people falsely pointing out random shapes as
weapons, hoping they'll win the lottery.

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pmorici
3 wrong guesses and you are banned for 3 months.

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ojbyrne
Which would cause people to ignore things that _might_ be weapons.

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grumpycanuck
_Yawn_

Another ineffectual "solution" to a problem that cannot be solved. The idea of
some nosy, self-important passenger on a flight deciding who is and is not a
terrorist is ludicrous.

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ryanelkins
I think one reason that crowd sourcing works as well as it does on the web is
because there is an actual crowd. What this article is referring to is more
like "small group sourcing".

The benefit of the crowd is that there are generally enough people to counter
act false alarms, prejudices, etc (not always, but generally). The proposed
system would have only a few people one which to draw information rather than
the hundreds, thousands or millions that these kinds of operations usually are
deployed towards. Basing information on just a handful of people exposes many
flaws that are generally evened out over actual crowds of people.

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jrockway
Is air terrorism a problem? More people have died from the pilot flying the
plane into the ground than have died in terrorist attacks. And that "more
people" is "not very many".

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patio11
This seems to be a way to launder the racial profiling that we're unwilling to
say we'll do through making the decision to profile diffuse among an
arbitrarily large crowd of people who are not subject to feedback loops for
doing it.

Phrased like that, I'm not sure if I oppose it or not.

Sidenote: This is a really good line: _[T]he TSA continues to treat passengers
as self-loading cargo that may harbor a terrorist._

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mixmax
This article was impossible to read on 1024x768 screen because the wrapping
DIV was set to a width of 1000px.

Particularly irritating because it's a really interesting post.

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dmnd
Keep this Readability bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.

<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

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mixmax
I just changed the CSS with firebug, but thanks for the link

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dnsworks
You say Solution as if there's really a problem? What's the statistic, one
incident for every 16m miles? The real problem is the culture of fear these
kinds of ideas perpetuate, ie letting the "terrorists" win in their main goal,
which is to increase fear.

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simon_
Agree.

I'd put both words -- "the terrorists" -- in quotes. There definitely are
individual terrorists in the world, but the notion of a unified red team of
"the terrorists" has motivated a lot of bad decisions.

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patio11
I've always thought that elements of the terrorist infrastructure -- plots,
operatives, muscle, money, connections -- are sort of cloud-provided and
available to pretty much anybody capable of implementing the API. Al Quaeda is
sort of the 37 Signals of terror: they aren't the central nexus, they're a
media-savvy early adopter whose core competence is marketing and have a happy
little Italian restaurant-scale kill-the-Jews-and-Crusaders business, and they
inspire people all over the globe to quit the day jobs, try a little lean
jihad, iterate rapidly, and blog about the whole process.

Sadly the I in API does not stand for Interface and we are totally unwilling
to discuss what it does stand for so War on Terror it is.

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tptacek
Does it stand for "Basque"? No, wait, that doesn't start with "I". Oh!
"I.R.A." No, wait, that's itself an acronym. It's not FARC... no, hrm, not
"Shining Path", either. And clearly not Aum Shinrikyo. Wait, waitwaitwait...
you couldn't mean "Islamism", could you? But what about all the terrorist
organizations that _aren't_ Islamist?

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patio11
See, that is exactly why the War on Terror naming doesn't make sense (+). All
of the above are terrorists (and contemptible), none of the above are even a
remote threat to American air travel, and approximately none of our War on
Terror related activities target them except incidentally.

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lucifer
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Emblema_S...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Emblema_Stasi.svg)

