
TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program - Anechoic
http://apps.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/graphics/2018/07/tsa-quiet-skies/?p1=HP_SpecialTSA
======
travelman3000
I'm a remote worker and have travelled a lot for fun in the past two years.
While checking into a flight from AMS headed to USA, I was told as a
prerequisite to getting my boarding pass I needed to talk to an agent from the
US Department of the State. He asked me many detailed questions about my
travels and said I was considered a person of interest. He stressed that they
may in the future not allow me to enter the USA (I'm a citizen of USA).

It seems likely he was just trying to scare me, but it was still was quite
jarring. I'm a fairly normal US citizen (I don't associate with political
people, no criminal record, never been to a country not known for tourism). I
believe I was flagged just from traveling between Turkey and Russia.

Since then when I fly I cant use online check-in, my boarding pass is marked
SSSS and I am taken into the backroom for questioning at border control.

Maybe these extra precautions keep the USA safe, but it certainly seemed
excessively paranoid.

~~~
raarts
> they may in the future not allow me to enter the USA (I'm a citizen of USA).

I always thought that if you're a US citizen you cannot be denied entry into
the United States, though you might be delayed.

~~~
travelman3000
That is my understanding as well, and the main reason why I thought he was
just trying to scare me.

However, they can place me on the no flylist, but I believe that this is run
by a different branch of the government.

------
bogomipz
This sounds like the latest "mission creep" by the TSA in order to justify
their budget and possibly ask for a budget increase. This would not be the
first instance of "mission creep" by them.

See:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-
bey...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyond-
airport-security.html)

and

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-
is-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-coming-to-
a-highway-near-you/#29ee469ddbee)

They are basically an entrenched part of the security-industrial complex at
this point. It seems to be a vicious circle of "expand the mission to justify
a bigger budget and ask for a bigger budget in order to meet the self-directed
increase in scope." There seems to be very little practical oversight of this
agency.

~~~
avs733
What I particularly loathe about TSA's constant mission creep is that at no
point have they proven even minimally competent at any of the existing
missions.

Nothing they do provides any meaningful security. They fail 90% of tests run
by their own agency. They are useless and ever expanding.

By a medical definition, they are cancerous.

------
olefoo
This is the natural evolution of the privatized prison. To treat an ever
growing segment of the population in a carceral manner in ways large and
small. Degrees of citizenship is now a thing in America. You can be graded on
your credit, your connections, your history; the color of your skin or the
shape of your face.

~~~
phry
degrees of citizenship has always been a thing, but you're correct that it's
an evolution of the carceral state, and by extension capitalism

~~~
skookumchuck
> by extension capitalism

In communist states, you get degrees of citizenship. For example, are you a
party member or not?

~~~
andrei_says_
At the time when this really mattered, everyone was a party member as not
being one meant not being to find a job and be practically outcast.

What mattered much more, was: are you _related_ to a high-ranking party member
or not?

~~~
js8
I guess it depends on the country, but in former Czechoslovakia, it wasn't
true. There was about 1 million party members to about 10 million adults.
Whether you needed to be a member depended on the nature of the job.

But you're correct that family relations played a big role, the nepotism was
rampant.

------
amf12
Some of these behaviors are so benign that any regular person might exhibit
these. Slept during the flight, changed clothes, boarded last (I hate standing
in those queues), observed the boarding area from afar. Hell I do many of
these things. I am sure their "ML" model must have spit these indicators but
it's a waste of resources.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Also, they capture all ranges of behavior. Glazed over look? Suspicious.
Intently paying attention to everything? Suspicious. Friendly? Suspicious.
Cold to agents? Suspicious.

This is worse than criteria to pull you over when driving.

~~~
polynomial
Extreme overfitting, where any data point outside the norm is correlated.

It makes a kind of perverse sense once you realize the stated point is/was to
target extremists.

------
duxup
>The teams document whether passengers fidget, use a computer, have a “jump”
in their Adam’s apple or a “cold penetrating stare,” among other behaviors,
according to the records.

I believe this isn't the first time the TSA has tried to do some sort of
behavioral profiling and such. Previously it proved to be BS and did not show
any ability to identify threats.

Considering TSA agents are leaking this to the press makes me think someone(s)
at TSA think you can just spot a terrorist and the agents think it is ballony
....

~~~
adrr
How many airline terrorists have we had in the last 10 years? 2? How many
travellers per year? 500m+. TSA is just really bad a math if they think they
have any chance of actually profiling a real terrorist. They should just take
the money and buy Powerball tickets, least then they have a better chance at a
return of investment.

~~~
duxup
It does raise questions about the costs and actions for sure.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It allows more spending by taxpayers for the military industrial complex, more
invasion of privacy, increased government power, and makes the populace
mentally prepared to be repressed. It’s a jobs program for people who don’t
want to do manual labor, and aren’t smart enough to do anything else.

Perfect for power hungry organizations. Only solution to combat this is full
transparency, or to join the game and make it to the “elite” and help suppress
everyone else. It’s a pretty good setup, you use the bottom 20% to help keep
the 20% to 80% in line, and then pluck out a few of the smarter 20% to 80% and
drop those in leadership positions in military or police and pay them a nice
pension and keep suctioining up a bigger and bigger share of resources.

~~~
guitarbill
> and makes the populace mentally prepared to be repressed

First it was electronics. Then water/liquids. Then shoes. Lately, they've been
asking people to get snacks/food items out. For what reason? We aren't given
one. Just do as you're told, or else.

------
eximius
Imagine the economic result if we got rid of the TSA (we did fine without it
before 9/11 and they don't do shit now) and created jobs in rebuilding
infrastructure using that budget.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Healthcare, housing, education, feeding the poor. You know, those things the
US says are "socialist commie bullshit", but spending ~$8 BILLION a year on a
bunch of untrained people given power over others is perfectly acceptable.

------
kylec
This sounds like they’ve hired a bunch of air marshals but don’t have much for
them to do. Having them make observations on random people might be a way to
make sure they’re still doing their job?

~~~
walrus01
It might be like the air marshal version of a security guard route patrol
system, where the guard has to swipe a fob or access card at predefined
locations in a campus or building periodically. Intended to enforce actually
patrolling an area. Not saying it's a good thing, just that's the closest
analogy I can think of.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_tour_patrol_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_tour_patrol_system)

[https://www.guard1.com/Products/Equipment/Checkpoints.aspx](https://www.guard1.com/Products/Equipment/Checkpoints.aspx)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
<knee slap!> That's a good one!

The closest analogy I could come up with was the Stasi.

Okay, I'll concede, it's not really analogy, it's more like a 1:1 mapping: _"
One of its main tasks was spying on the population, mainly through a vast
network of citizens turned informants"_[1]

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi)

~~~
a3n
And this being a capitalist society, we pay our citizens (marshals and TSA) to
spy on each other.

------
a3n
>A bulletin in May notes that travelers entering the United States may be
added to the Quiet Skies watch list if [they] ... “are possibly affiliated
with Watch Listed suspects.”

What a beautiful qualification. Put one person on Quiet Skies, for any reason,
legit or not. Now every known contact or associate of that one person becomes
of interest to the Quiet Skies program. Every neighbor, even if they don't
know the neighbor. Every work colleague, even if the colleague doesn't know
that they work with the person. Every vendor. Every vendee. The air marshal
assigned to watch them.

TSA seems to have taken a page from NSA. They aren't even "hop-limited;" they
can continually go as far out on a person's network as they want, merely by
including a hop in Quiet Skies.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/28/ns...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/28/nsa-
files-decoded-hops)

------
goscots
US Federal Tax dollars at work, infringing on our rights with no tangible
benefits for the American people.

~~~
bobwaycott
This is far more an issue of the Executive and Congress at work, than it is
tax dollars at work. Let’s lay the blame where it belongs—only then do we have
the slightest hope of citizens recognizing how they can play a part in
stopping this. Tax dollars aren’t allocating themselves.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Complaints about "tax dollars" or about 'tax payers' seem like stalking horses
for the whole Reagan-esque 'drown government in the bathtub' thing. It's weird
to me that the most jingoistic Americans are also the ones who are most
hostile to the concrete manifestations of America.

Back to the topic at hand: I agree wholeheartedly with you and I hope that you
and everyone else here votes in their primary and general elections. Headcount
is a good, nonpartisan resource for finding out more about this:
[https://www.headcount.org](https://www.headcount.org)

~~~
u801e
> I agree wholeheartedly with you and I hope that you and everyone else here
> votes in their primary and general elections.

I doubt that either major party plans to reform the TSA or the Department of
Homeland Security.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
If you believe that, then you should seek to change the policy priorities of
either major party. Fatalism in a two party system is neither useful nor
indicative of a keener understanding of early 21st century American politics.

------
baxtr
_Agency documents show there are about 40 to 50 Quiet Skies passengers on
domestic flights each day. On average, air marshals follow and surveil about
35 of them._

Wow... reminds me of good old East Germany

~~~
kolinko
There are 2 million people on domestic flights daily, if I checked correctly.
If 30 get followed, it is a few orders of magnitude lower than in East
Germany.

~~~
baxtr
My comment was meant to be sarcastic. Maybe I should have made that more
explicit

I think 30 per plane would be really bad. 30 per 2 million is probably just a
normal rate

------
roywiggins
This seems mostly harmless (insofar as tailing random innocent people could
be) but also a collosal waste of time that could be spent doing nearly
anything else.

Mind you, it's hard to see it as security theater (they won't admit it's
happening!). It sounds like they have a power envy thing going on vis a vis
the FBI, but even the actual marshals doing it seem to think it's dumb. If it
were the FBI just tasking FBI Surveillance Vans onto random people without a
predicate, there'd potentially be hell to pay as they generally have
regulations on what is a valid reason for opening an investigation.

~~~
forapurpose
> It sounds like they have a power envy thing going on vis a vis the FBI

What makes you say that? I didn't see it in the article, but maybe I missed
something.

> mostly harmless (insofar as tailing random innocent people could be)

Hmmm ... I hate to start from scratch this very common discussion (i.e., the
harm in surveillance). Is there anything new to add?

~~~
roywiggins
I mean, it's obviously bad for the same reasons dragnet surveillance is always
bad. But this particular instance so ham-handed (tailing an executive that
went to Turkey one time?) and so manpower intensive it's kind of hard to take
seriously.

> What makes you say that? I didn't see it in the article, but maybe I missed
> something.

The article mentions that they first got into the business of tracking people
through airports and in the sky after the FBI asked them to help on existing
investigations, so I wonder if they are just trying to show that they can do
investigations on their own like big boys.

------
pasbesoin
The most likely explanation I can think of, is that this is work to establish
baselines against which to run mass automated surveillance.

So, it's not just this. Consider where it's going -- what would induce this
level of effort and expenditure?

P.S. It will also be "interesting" when parallel construction enters the
picture -- if it hasn't, already.

------
singularity2001
Next headline: NSA is tracking regular Americans like terrorists in secret
surveillance program.

------
itronitron
>> the program could pass legal muster if the selection criteria are
sufficiently broad

and...

>> surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing

Those seem to play off each other in a weird way. The program is legal because
the selection criteria are so broad that no one under surveillance is
suspected of any evildoery? It would be really interesting to find out what
kind of records on these surveillance activities are kept.

Having been the subject of covert surveillance at multiple points in my past
(and future probably) there is a certain amount of shrugging it off that is
necessary. The real concern for TSA, or Neighborhood Watch, is whether they
are sharing records with any other agencies. Congress would potentially have a
Pinata party if that came to light.

------
dreamcompiler
TSA employees are generally not well-paid and not well-educated. They come
from the bottom third of the economic advantage spectrum. As a result, most of
them have probably never visited a foreign country; many have likely never
even been on an airplane.

So their opinion of "foreigners" is skewed by their anti-terrorist training to
think that people from outside the USA are mostly bad and wish us harm.

TSA employees should be required to visit a foreign country at least once a
year--paid for by their employer--so they have direct experience with the vast
majority of non-US citizens who are simply normal people living their normal
lives.

------
globetrotter33m
While we are on this topic, what I find to be a complete sham is TSA-PRE (a US
preflight registration program). The pre-screening is valid for 5 years, in
exchange you don't remove your shoes or have to remove electronics and
liquids. Basically, what you did BEFORE the TSA program was put in place.

I presume they are OK with taking the chance that a TSA-PRE enrolled
individual is not turning into a shoe-bomber in year 3 after preenrollment?
Why not just abolish all the checks and selectively pull people to remove
liquids, shoes and electronics. You'd lose the $99 revenue/passsenger that
TSAPRE generates.

------
bww
This program sounds like a huge, irresponsible waste of public resources.
However I don’t exactly see how merely being observed in public amounts to the
dystopian surveillance state this article seems to imply. Is going unnoticed
in public reasonably considered to be a right? I would suggest the problem
here is the extent of resources that are wasted by the government watching the
innocuous behavior of arbitrary people in an airport.

~~~
a3n
> This program sounds like a huge, irresponsible waste of public resources.
> However I don’t exactly see how merely being observed in public amounts to
> the dystopian surveillance state this article seems to imply.

It's the same argument against "I have nothing to hide."

Consider two people, both objectively innocent. One is surveilled, one is not.

The surveilled person, merely by coming to the attention of the government, is
at risk of mistakes, misjudgment, quota satisfaction, resume building, budget
justification, extortion by criminal government employees bad personal life
and resulting sour disposition of the watcher, etc. Just because they became
noticed.

The unsurveilled person is safe.

In firearms training, you learn not to point a gun at something unless you
intend to destroy it. You should also not point a government at someone unless
they have at least shown some reason beyond existence that it's worth
potentially destroying their well being.

------
polynomial
"Subject was abnormally aware of surroundings"

Isn't that the whole point of being vigilant?

------
anon19871394
OT, but I just get

"You're using a browser set to private or incognito mode.

To continue reading articles in this mode, please log in to your Globe
account."

Should that even be possible?

------
Calib3r
Seeing my 12 year old daughter groped by a TSA agent because she "moved her
hand too early" in the x ray machine really put things into perspective for
me.

TSA is the department of domestic fear mongering. That's it.

------
a3n
"But some air marshals ... say the program has them tasked with shadowing
travelers who appear to pose no real threat .. a fellow federal law
enforcement officer, in a third."

Who watches the watchers? Why, the watchers!

------
polynomial
"Subject slept during the flight" ??

You got me, guilty as charged.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Hitler and Bin Laden both slept sometimes.

------
gwbas1c
Could a program like this just be practice?

------
dingo_bat
I dunno about TSA, but I'm am Indian male and I keep a beard and visited
Sydney and Melbourne recently. I was singled out for "random" checks at every
single airport. Even though the metal detector thing didn't go off at all.
They were very nice and polite but I was a bit annoyed. After 9-11, it seems
most western countries have become cautious to the extent of paranoia and
cause inconvenience to normal people.

~~~
eganist
(Tagging dang -- am I crazy here for the following observation? Please
advise.)

What is it with all the random European-Caucasian men coming in and commenting
on how they're randomly selected all the time?

When someone feels like they're being selected-against for bias and when
popular and well-researched evidence of such exists, you're minimizing and
trivializing their suffering by making the same observation of yourself when
you're the majority party. It's a form of passive and latent bigotry you might
not even realize you're expressing. I'm commenting publicly and _separately
from HNthrow22_ because plenty of you seem hideously blind to this.

Your case may be true; I'm not disputing that, but the consensus research
position is that "people of color are more often mistreated" and this anecdote
by the OP fits that position. Your anecdote fits the less frequent occurrences
("more often against minorities v. less often against the majority"), and so
by mentioning it, you diminish and belittle the minority person who's being
mistreated by suggesting your experience is of equal likelihood; it's not, and
you're not being considerate of that fact.

As for me, I ambiguously appear to be of Middle Eastern or Cuban descent--
Persian, for the record--and noticed that I'm consistently selected-against
for screening about 50% of the time whenever I have either a beard or an
extremely well-maintained fade. Of the many, many times I've been down to
scruff or a clean-shaven face, it has happened only once, with that singular
exception being this past Tuesday night in Tom Bradley International in LAX.

In closing: there's nothing preventing you from voicing your less-likely
experience, but by doing so, you're diminishing the more-likely experience
faced by minority parties because there's inherently no differentiating
context in individual anecdotes.

~~~
HNthrow22
You are 100% correct, I made a similar post and had it flagged/deleted, albeit
with a bit more anger in mine. Give up man, this is a safe space for the white
SV bros to hang out, they delete articles about minorities/black people in
tech are regularly, check out [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) to
see what they remove. Don't mistake Hn for a discussion platform like I did,
this is a curated SV accelerator funded PR platform to promote YC companies
before anything else, the anger/frustration comes from this place
parading/dressing up as a discussion forum, it is NOT.

~~~
dang
I'm sorry you feel that way and would be glad for an opportunity to persuade
you otherwise, but there's no mystery in why users flagged
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637105):
it broke the site guidelines. Comments here need to be better than telling
others to "fuck right off", even when they're wrong, even when the feeling is
understandable. eganist's comment makes the same point more thoughtfully, and
didn't get flagged.

~~~
jsoc815
Not making any statements about the post in question, but I do think it would
be more helpful if posters where given reasons for why posts are being flagged
and/or downvoted.

The legal profession exists because rules/laws are subject to all sorts of
interpretation. And just as is the case in the outside world, it seems that,
if at all, _the rules_ are cited quite frequently for no other reason than
someone decided that they didn't/don't agree with something that someone said.

Hell, I've been downvoted a number of times for relaying _facts_ that answer
questions people here are asking or for pointing out a duplicate post. As you
can imagine, such experiences detract from the experience, but perhaps that is
the point?

------
thisacctforreal
[https://my.mixtape.moe/ohbnhi.jpeg](https://my.mixtape.moe/ohbnhi.jpeg)

The website detects and blocks private browsing on iOS, but you can bypass it
using Reader View.

~~~
Macha
"Look how terrible it is that the TSA may track you!

If you make it harder for us to track you, go away"

The double standards are amusing.

