A Stitch in Haste

Generally speaking, my libertarian radicalism ends where public infrastructure begins — which is why, for example, the “just one drink” anti-DUI crowd doesn’t like me very much (i.e., because I dare to suggest that hyper-anarcho-libertarianism cannot apply when you hurl a multi-ton slab of metal down public roads at potentially lethal speeds).

Same for air travel. If you don’t like the rules then take a bus (but not Amtrak!). I only get uppity when the rules are dumb.

Well…I’m uppity:

The Transportation Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will order domestic airlines to turn over personal information about passengers to test a system that will compare their names to those on terrorist watch lists.

The system, called Secure Flight, replaces a previous plan that would have checked passenger names against commercial databases and assigned a risk level to each. That plan, which cost $103 million, was abandoned because of privacy concerns and technological issues.
…
The amount of data in passenger name records varies by airline, but it typically includes name, flight origin, flight destination, flight time, duration of flight and form of payment. It can also include credit card numbers, address, telephone number and meal requests, which can indicate a person’s ethnicity.

Now the new system is vastly superior to the CAPPS II monstrosity that it replaced. And most of the data seem to be rationally related to searching for potential terrorists.

But meal requests?

So now of course anyone who wishes to do ill on a commercial jet will simply not request a special meal. Brilliant.

And of course that category of special meals (Kosher, Hindu, Muslim) doesn’t indicate “ethnicity,” it indicates religion. So we’re either going to ding all non-Arab Muslims who ask for Halal meat, or scare them into not ordering a Muslim meal in the first place, out of fear for being flagged. Brilliant.

Clearly we need to move away from random searches at the airport and incorporate some form of profiling (not to mention keeping the weapons off the planes in the first place). But let’s try to keep some common sense connection between the data we gather and the reason we’re gathering it.

Meanwhile, I strongly suggest brown-bagging it when you fly.

Similar Posts:

• “Secure Flight” Revisited
• CAPPS II Successor Unveiled
• The Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling Flight Status Notification
• Any Landing You Can Deregulate Away From…
• CAPPS Capsized

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