
TSA “Quiet Skies” surveillance program targets innocent U.S. citizens - pmoriarty
https://boingboing.net/2018/07/30/tsa-quiet-skies-surveillan.html
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kochb
This is a dupe of the much more thorough Boston Globe article from two days
ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635761)

I'm not a huge fan of all the borderline off-topic political articles, but if
we're going to do it, it'd be nice to choose the original source that was
referenced four times. As it stands, we're not even adding anything new to the
conversation.

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dylan604
I have not understood the purpose of anything about this that I have read. I
have heard (NPR) that any data they collect does not roll up into other three
letter agencies records. They also mentioned that it in no way could prevent
someone from boarding a flight. All it could pretty much do would be to pull
you out for "random" additional screening. It really seems like an example of
a solution searching for a problem.

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nerdponx
You might not be wrong. This could have been the brainchild of a contractor
who is now profiting from the program.

They might also need "negative" training data to train some kind of machine
learning models. Maybe they only have data on criminals, and want data more on
non-criminals to help train their models.

Maybe they _are_ looking for something specific, but what they're looking for
is classified.

Basically: who the hell knows?

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diafygi
I've been telling most of my tech friends, especially the ones in
tracking/adtech jobs, to start paying what I call the "Orwell Tax".

You pick a number of anti-surveillance nonprofits (EFF, ACLU, RestoreTheForth,
etc.), and sign up for a recurring donation of $19.84/month or $1,984/year
(whichever your budget allows).

If you're working in a surveillance/tracking job and don't want to quit, the
least you can do about the spread of the surveillance state is to pay the
Orwell Tax.

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duxup
Some previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635761)

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golem14
My guess would be that this is going to establish a 'baseline' for passengers
to be fed into learning models as labeled data set. Unclear how much that
would help since there really isn't a baseline of true positives (that I'm
aware of).

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oneplane
Not trying to be rude here, but this is basically what the U.S. does to
_anyone_ else in the world by default... and they don't like it either (using
anyone instead of everyone on purpose here)

