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August 19, 2005 | Screening TSA Traffic
It was a rather busy summer news week for the Transportation Security Administration.
- Leslie Miller of the AP found that toddlers were being snagged by the no-fly list
- Wired News's Kim Zetter and Reuters's Andy Sullivan both report (WN Reuters) that a group of Alaskans are suing the TSA to figure out how their data were used during Secure Flight testing and the Alaskan's PR guy, Bill Scannell, has a site with all the relevant pictures and lawsuit documents.
- Edward Hasbrouck of Practical Nomad fame comes out of semi-retirement with a round-up of recent Secure Flight news and an argument that the real scandal about using airline records (both foreign and domestic) is being ignored.
- I reported on Monday in Wired News that the Department of Homeland Security is pushing language in Congress that would significantly reduce Congressional oversight of Secure Flight, despite the program's recent privacy troubles.
- And finally, the Transportation Security Administration's chief spokesman Mark Hatfield was re-assigned/promoted/demoted to second-in-command of security at Newark Liberty International Airport, according to Ron Marisco of the Newark Star-Ledger. Loyal readers (whoever you are) might remember Hatfield for his flat-out lying about the TSA's role in its most recent privacy flare-up.
Hatfield will be succeeded by Yolanda Clark, one of his former deputies.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:10 PM | TrackBack
August 18, 2005 | Friday Bike Poetry.jpg "Debbie Schwinn Bike")
Those of you with a yearning in the heart for a cruiser of old and a burning in your brain to turn your two-wheel lust into poetry, here's your chance to pick up Debbie with a little cash money and a sweet sonnet.
From the Sacramento Craigslist ad:
Single Blue Bike seeks somone to ride her into the sunset. I'm Debbie Schwinn , in my late 40's, and newly divorced. From a g-d-bastard.Dang it. I wasn't going to mention that SOB.
But you think you know someone after 25 years of marriage. One minute you're cruising along just fine, enjoying the scenery together, and then the next minute he tells you he's met someone else.
Not just ANYONE else, mind you.
Someone younger with more gears. And Calliper brakes.
Bastard.
Ok, so I'm no spring chicken, but I prefer the term Vintage. I may have been around the blocks a few times--but honey, I'm ready to roll. Check out these curves and tell me I'm not one fine looking chick.
[...]
Update!Wow! I knew I was good lookin', but thanks to all who responded for that confidence booster! There are just too many to choose from at random, and besides that's no fun, so I thought I'd make it a little more interesting. Announcing the:
"Win Debbie's Heart Poetry Contest"
If you are still interested in winning my wheels, please write your best poem on my two favorite topics: Time Travel and Marshmallows. The writer that impresses me the most shall have first dibs, and if he/she decides to pass, then on to the next best.
[...]
On your mark. Get set. Go!
Love,
Debbie Schwinn
Posted by Ryan Singel at 02:37 PM | TrackBack
August 18, 2005 | IED IDing UpdateAs noted here a couple of days ago, the Transportation Security Administration caught a 24-year-old Oklahoma man trying to sneak an improvised bomb onto a plane.
Charles A. Dreyling Jr.says he forgot about the bomb, which was made using gunpowder and a used CO2 canister, and that it was just a thing he and his buddies liked to explode for fun.
Dreyling is now out on $10,000 bail, according to this USA Today story, and is free to return to classes at Oklahoma University.
What does a student who ,at best, forgot about a IED in his backpack before boarding a plane major in?
Yeah, you saw this coming.
Aviation Management.
Something tells me that in the age of background checks, Dreyling ought to change his major.
If he changes his tune about his intentions, he could even maybe transfer to UC Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness Program and study with Angela Davis.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 08:47 AM | TrackBack
August 12, 2005 | Data Mining the Able Danger AllegationsThere's much time table ado about Congressman Curt Weldon's assertion that a Pentagon data mining program identified Mohamed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of a terrorist cell in 1999 but declined to share the information with the FBI over a perceived legality.
Many, including myself, are skeptical of the claim, though I think there's a very interesting story in here. I just don't think it has come out yet.
Eric Umansky points to a Dan Eggen Washington Post story, which includes this information:
Commission officials confirmed a report in yesterday's New York Times that two staff members interviewed a uniformed military officer, who alleged in July 2004 that a secret program called "Able Danger" had identified Atta as a potential terrorist threat in 1999 or early 2000.Panel investigators viewed the claim as unlikely, in part because Atta was not recruited as an al Qaeda operative until a trip to Afghanistan in 2000 and did not enter the United States until June of that year, officials said.
Umansky also raises the question of whether the list of names was actually quite large, perhaps in the range of thousands, which might explain why Atta's name wasn't noticed on the list until fairly recently.
Over at Intel Dump, Jon Holdaway, a veteran with experience in military intel operations, has a rundown on the laws controlling data mining and an insider's take on the Pentagon's capabilities. But he also thinks something about this story doesn't pass the smell test.
Able Danger appears to be the codename to the forerunner of the Information Dominance Center, or at least IDC-type tools were being applied to the Able Danger mission, but analysis presumes collection, or investigation. If Able Danger was conducting an investigation in to Atta et. al., it would have no jurisdiction to conduct collection or investigative activities in Brooklyn - that would fall under FBI.To say that the "wall" prevented DOD from talking to FBI doesn't make sense. The "wall" existed between FBI-Criminal Division and FBI-Intelligence Division and was managed by the DOJ Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR). DOD was free, in fact required, to discuss counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations taking place in the United States (or even taking place outside the United States if they involved US persons or potential prosecutions) with FBI-Intelligence officials.
Regardless, as I noted before, data mining raises some serious questions that need to be thought through publicly.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 08:46 AM | TrackBack
August 11, 2005 | Screeners ID IEDIn what seems to be a post-9/11 first, Transportation Security Administration screeners stopped a man from boarding a plane with a homemade bomb.
A Norman, Okla., man with an explosive device hidden in his carry-on baggage was caught by Transportation Security Administration screeners as he tried to enter Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City on Wednesday morning.
Bryon Okada's story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is here (reg. required, try bugmenot).
The FBI arrested Charles Dreyling Jr., 24, but do not think he is associated with a terrorist group, according to Okado.
Kudos to the screeners for catching the IED.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 11:17 AM | TrackBack
August 10, 2005 | Me and Manjoo And All the Web We UseSeems Salon's Farhad Manjoo and I are thinking the same thing about the future of the web (not that others aren't way smarter about seeing the signs than I am, I'm just smart enough to know to call people smarter than I am).
Go read his piece if you want to learn about some Rubies and 37 Signals and why your browser is happy they exist.
My Wired News piece on the remodeling of the Internet is here.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 10, 2005 | Fear Not, Report NotHomeland Security chief Michael Chertoff says Americans should not worry having to give their date of birth when buying an airline ticket as part of a new proposed airline screening system, according to a Thomas Frank USA Today story.
Chertoff said there is too much worry over a plan by the Transportation Security Administration to collect passengers' full names and birth dates before they board."The average American gives information up to get a CVS (drugstore discount) card that is far more in-depth than TSA's going to be looking at," Chertoff told reporters and editors at USA TODAY's headquarters in McLean, Va. "But I actually make that case that giving up a little bit more information protects privacy."
"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"
Chertoff vowed to implement Secure Flight, a plan by the federal government to screen out potential terrorists by scrutinizing the backgrounds of passengers. Under the plan, passengers will be encouraged - but not required - to give their full names and birth dates when reserving a seat. The TSA hoped to begin testing Secure Flight this month but that timetable is in doubt.
I'm dumbstruck by Thomas Frank's absurdly lousy reporting.
He gets a chance to interview the head of Homeland Security and then writes up this press release?
First, the government hasn't yet even announced that airlines would have to start collecting dates of birth, but Frank allows Chertoff to pretend that its the main issue about Secure Flight.
Yes, the requirement been talked about for a while and is widely acknowledged by those familiar with the program to be a necessity if watchlist checking is going to be done in D.C. and not by airlines (How else would a government agent tell the difference between the senior senator Ted Kennedy from a watchlist entry Ted Kennedy, age 25?)
But the travel industry, not Americans concerned about privacy, are the strongest opponents of the birthdate requirement, since they will, at their own expense, have to revamp the second largest computer network in the world to accommodate this request.
If Frank hasn't been paying attention as he is paid to, the main issues with Secure Flight are:
- How good are the watchlists?
- How do people accidentally snagged by the lists get off the list?
- How much will Secure Flight cost?
- Will it be effective without being overly intrusive?
- Should commercial databases be used and if so, for what purpose? To verify identity? To do background checks?
Frank didn't include anything in his story about these questions, and instead let Chertoff set the agenda.
Furthermore, Frank let Chertoff chide the American public about privacy concerns about Secure Flight, without even mentioning that the program just got caught violating the Privacy Act in its latest round of testing.
That was done by an agency that has already been involved in 14 separate secret transfers of sensitive travel records, totaling more than 2 million reservations.
The TSA has also been busted by Homeland Security's own Inspector General for making false statements to Congress under oath and misleading the media and the American people about what it was doing with their personal data(.pdf).
Meanwhile, there is a behind-the-scenes fight in Congress over prohibiting Secure Flight from relying on commercial data brokers such as Choicepoint.
But Frank doesn't even ask Chertoff what he thinks about Secure Flight employees intentionally making an end run around the Privacy Act, let alone get Chertoff on record about his thoughts on previous TSA privacy scandals or the fight in Congress?
What a joke.
Chertoff might have had something interesting to say, but one would be hard pressed to find it anywhere near Frank's pathetic effort.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:23 AM | TrackBack
August 09, 2005 | RFID Passports, Yet AgainToday's Wired News story has an update on the government's plans to speed border crossings and make passport fraud more difficult by adding RFID chips to the travel documents.
United Airlines pilots and crew are the flying guinea pigs in a test of controversial new passports equipped with remotely readable chips.Approximately 300 United employees stationed on international flights received the new passports in mid-June as part of a three-month, three-country test of IDs equipped with RFID chips. The chips can be read at a distance at border crossings by special readers installed for the trial.
The test is intended to see how easily Australia, New Zealand and the United States can read other's e-passports and how durable the chips are under constant use.
The new chips are part of post-9/11 security efforts intended to curb passport fraud and speed up border crossings, according to Frank Moss, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary for passport services.
"The new passport undercuts the market in lost and stolen travel documents, because if you steal one of these you are not going to do much with it," Moss said.
The 64-KB chips store a copy of the information from a passport's data page, including name, date of birth and a digitized version of the passport photo. To prevent counterfeiting or alterations, the chips are digitally signed.
The United States is requiring all 27 countries whose citizens do not need visas to visit to begin issuing e-passports by October 2006. The original deadline was October 2004, but wrangling over standards and privacy protections has delayed upgrades by many of those countries.
Stateside critics would like to derail the current U.S. effort -- they believe the unencrypted chips could endanger Americans. Because the chips can be read from several feet away, they could serve as a beacon to thieves and terrorists targeting Americans traveling abroad, critics say.
Link.
USA Today came out with its version of the story today, too.
And security expert Bruce Schneier approves since he says he has insider information that the State Department isn't just thinking about adding encryption, they are actually planning to do it.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:25 PM | TrackBack
August 09, 2005 | The Pentagon's Computers Knew, Congressman SaysA Congressman and an unnamed former defense official say that a secret Pentagon intelligence group used data-mining software in 2000 that fingered Mohammed Atta and three other September 11 hijackers as terrorists and considered turning over their information to the FBI, according to New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl's front page bombshell.
The information never made it into the 9/11 commission report and a Pentagon spokesman claims not to know about the program (which does not mean it didn't exist).
I'm skeptical of this report for a number of reasons, including that Weldon's new book about the dangers of Iran relies mostly on information funneled to him by Manucher Ghorbanifar, perhaps best known as a shadowy arms dealer from the Iran-Contra affair and whom the CIA has dismissed as a fabricator.
Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said.
[...]
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.
[...]
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
Maybe that was the institutional culture at the time and certainly the 9/11 Commission report demonstrated that agencies were reluctant to share information or do so efficiently.
But not passing on the information because of visa issues?
I don't buy it.
I think there may be a really interesting story here, but I think Weldon is getting taken, quite willfully, on a ride.
Update: Phillip Carter of Intel Dump shares my skepticism, but adds that regardless of the story's veracity, the story should spark some further debate.
First, it shows that the U.S. has been actively engaged with data-mining for some time, at least since 2000. Second, notwithstanding the spectacular death of Total Information Awareness some time ago, it appears likely that the U.S. continues to engage in data mining work - both R&D and operational work. Third, I think this story demonstrates the promise of data mining techniques, which fuse the disciplines of artificial intelligence, relational databases, and non-obvious relationship analysis (NORA)..Of course, pitfalls remain for the use of these systems. The U.S. must implement robust control measures to ensure systems like Able Danger don't evolve into an extra-Constitutional menace. Some of those control measures might include the use of ex ante and ex post judicial review for these programs; the appointment of a bipartisan commission to monitor these systems; and a procedural mechanism which would allow citizens to learn of the data held by the government about them (similar to what exists now under FOIA, but better).
Ultimately, however, I think the potential promise outweighs the risk. The government's primitive passenger screening system in place on 9/11 identified 9 of the 19 hijackers, according to the 9/11 Commission report. Other data mining systems have helped big time in the efforts to combat terrorism financing. We need these systems, and we need to find ways to mitigate the legal, policy and political risks so that we can put them into action
Link.
A couple of things:
1. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that intelligence agencies have been using data mining prior to and after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Data mining techniques are a way of making some sense of a piles of data. I used them to make sense of search logs prior to 9/11 and of course, intelligence agencies were using them to make sense of open source, intelligence and signals data.
2. Carter is right that data mining will be a big issue again soon. There's been several signs of this over the last few months, but I don't feel like giving too much away until I get a good story or two out.
3. Carter skips over what will be the salient points in the coming debate.
Should data mining tools respect the difference between U.S. persons and foreigners?
Should that respect apply only to predictive data mining -- the kind that tries to figure out who is a terrorist before they strike or also to data mining to track down criminals after they've committed a crime?
What kind of data should government data mining programs have access to? Commercial data it buys? Commercial data that it subpoenas? Commercial data it asks for? Your phone records? Your medical history? The list of web sites you visit or people you email? The contents of your email?
If encryption shields personal information in databases (your name becomes X3$FSG, for instance) and the government can only see the uncoded results of data mining after proving to a judge that the data mining results might be important to an investigation, does that change what kind of data mining should be allowed?
These will be the real questions that need to be debated.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 09:06 AM | TrackBack
August 08, 2005 | Jennings Signs Off
I was deeply saddened to hear of Peter Jennings's death today.
Jennings was my favorite of the big three evening news deans, as I noted here before.
He was above all else a reporter, a humanist believer in fairness and the power of reporting.
In a Terry Gross interview, he admitted to his frustration with the evening new format. Like any good journalist, he hated the limits of his medium.
That's why I find it so hard to write the news copy. I realize that with the Evening News we are trying to give people black and white, but I want to give them gray.
While cable news anchors focused on the most recent missing white woman, Jennings spent part of his final year of his life working with the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow to put together a documentary building on O'Harrow's stellar reporting in No Place Left to Hide.
We are all poorer for his death.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 11:14 PM | TrackBack
August 05, 2005 | U And I And Every Program We UseCall it the Ipodization of the Internet.
Whether you notice it or not, websites are growing handles. They are starting to feel useful, less like something you have to figure out how to use, than something you intuitively know how to use.
Much of this has to do with a web programming technique called AJAX.
Microsoft is getting in on the web action (check their beta search portal Start.com), but say the coolest user interfaces are going to found not on the Interweb, but on desktops running Microsoft Vista.
Either way, as today's Wired News story shows, the remodeling of the internet is clearly underway.
Unfortunately, not everything gets to fit in.
For example:
Rael Dornfest's worries that web designers and programmers would take the new power of AJAX to create showy messes reminiscent of the worst Flash websites, and
Jesse James Garrett's musings on the yet-to-be resolved problem of relying on online applications in a world where laptops move in and out of connectivity, and
Microsoft's Forest Key's belief that Vista will help solve the UI-lost-in-translation-between-conception-and-code problem, since designers get to scratch out their dream designs in a way that produces XML code that web programmers can incorporate wholesale.
And some quotes ended up on the editing floor, too.
Here's two little sections I was sad to lose:
"With an AJAX application, users actually can manipulate data without clicking through to a new page.This is going to go a long way towards eliminating the user interface insults and injuries we have suffered since we moved to the web," Dornfest said. "When we first went to the web, a lot of us expected it to be more interactive and it turned out not to be so. Now people these days expect it to be flat so they might be a little surprised [by AJAX applications], but the rest of us see AJAX and say 'Ahh, this is what it is supposed to be like.'"
"A lot of customers won't notice the changes but they will notice they no longer feel stupid," Dornfest said.
and
"With AJAX, you are starting to get to where people come to pages with non-drag-and-droppable lists, start tying to drag-and-drop and are surprised that it doesn't work. So, in that sense, everyone is going to have to modernize very quickly."Dornfest sees the future of user faces not in Microsoft's Vista, but in the shine of an old Apple product.
"AJAX hearkens back to the old Macintosh philosophy that everything should be guessable," Dornfest said. "If you think something should work a certain way, it should most of the time."
I also didn't mention Macromedia's Flash. It's not likely to disappear from the web anytime soon, and I imagine the best programmers will be integrating Flash into sites when appropriate (handling video, for one).
But that's the way the editor's pen scratches (and mostly/sometimes for the better).
And with or without my cutesy line and miles of Dornfest quotes, you still know by the end of the story that the UI's, they are a'changing.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:27 PM | TrackBack
August 04, 2005 | Quick ScreeningsJust a couple of pointers to things worth your time:
- Daniel Solove and Dan Markel of the young-blood lawyer hangout, PrawfsBlawg, have a little smart back and forth about irrational fears, rational spending and a touch of the avian flu. Start with Solove's questioning of homeland security spending and then check out Dan Markel's response.
Solove's one graf:
Certainly, we should devote resources to fighting terrorism. But programs such as Secure Flight and data mining, which have yet to deliver any benefits, which are costing millions to study and develop, and which pose significant concerns for privacy and civil liberties, strike me as incredibly wasteful. The same is true with the NYC subway searches. It's a waste of money and resources that could be used in addressing the more serious (and often preventable) risks of death in our society . . . like the bird flu.
Markel's one graf:
[T]he threat we face is one that would rip apart the stability that is both a precondition for liberal democracy, and its blessing. Cancer, suicide, and heart disease, for all the heartache and sadness -- and death -- they cause, are not the same threat. In our zeal to be rationalists, we shouldn't forget that.
(Hat tip to Shostack for getting here first) - The New York Times's Stephanie Strom has a good piece exploring the implications of non-profits employing permanent background checks to make sure their volunteers haven't been convicted of sex or drug crimes. (Hat tip to AF)
- And the story that could have be written within hours after New York City announced random searches for subway travelers: The New York Civil Liberties group is going to sue.
- Reuters has the update on the privacy and civil liberties board that was recommended by the 9/11 commission and created by law 6 months ago.
A civil-liberties board ordered by the U.S. Congress last year has never met to discuss its job of protecting rights in the fight against terrorism, and critics say it is a toothless, underfunded shell with inadequate support from President Bush.
Lawmakers including some Republicans, civil-rights advocates, a member of the Sept. 11 Commission and a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have expressed concerns.
Lanny Davis, the only prominent liberal among the five people Bush nominated after a six-month delay, said he had not received a call from anyone related to the board since it was formally announced in June. Davis said he could not comment on specifics because the members had not yet met.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:10 PM | TrackBack
August 03, 2005 | JetBlue Lawsuit DismissedI haven't kept up with the lawsuits filed against JetBlue et. al. for violations of their privacy policies even though I broke the initial secret data transfer story, but I did notice today that a New York City judge dismissed a class action lawsuit against the airline.
(I should note part of my laziness in following that news stems from a lack of conviction that automatic damages and huge lawsuits are always an appropriate remedy to privacy policy violations or security lapses.)
Some details of that can be found here in a vaguely accurate story by Martin H. Bosworth in ConsumerAffairs.com. (I think Bruce Schneier should have told more people he changed his name to Bill)
The saga of JetBlue secretly turning over its records to the government for an anti-terrorism data-mining study is mired in plot twists (such as the participation of the commercial data giant Acxiom) and acronyms, but everyone involved admits that JetBlue massively violated its stated privacy policy when it handed over its entire passenger database to a minor, Alabama-based defense contractor called Torch Technologies (née Torch Concepts) that was looking to cash in on post-9/11 anti-terrorism money.
So if class-action lawsuits can't go forward against a company that violated privacy promises made to 1.5 million people unless the plaintiffs can prove they were harmed, how should we enforce privacy policies?
The Federal Trade Commission?
Just today the FTC announced it had settled a case with Advertising.com, which the government caught secretly installed spyware on the computers of people who thought they were installing an anti-spyware application.
The company, which tried to scare users into installing its SpyBlast software through ads blaring that a customer's computer was broadcasting an IP address (the online equivalent of saying you are naked under your clothes), was not fined.
Instead, the FTC got Advertising.com, a company acquired by AOL for nearly a half a billion dollars, to agree to show future customers an end-user license agreement -- you know the other long legalese thing no one ever reads on their computer.
That's the same FTC that never made a move on JetBlue, perhaps because the company apologized and announced it had hired a big name accounting firm to audit its privacy practices.
The same FTC that didn't find out that JetBlue had also violated its privacy policies two other times by turning over passenger records to the government and its contractors.
That had to come out from sworn Senate testimony by Transportation Security Administration honcho David Stone.
The same FTC that never did anything after that revelation.
To this day, JetBlue has never admitted these other transfers occurred or that it lied in the aftermath of the original disclosure when company officials, including CEO David Neeleman, swore to me and dozens of other reporters, that the Torch transfer was a one-time mistake.
Now, I like flying in JetBlue's wide seats, eating their fine selection of snacks and watching Animal Cops re-runs at 32,000 ft.
But that doesn't mean they should get a pass on promises they make to their customers or false statements they make to the media.
Yet save for a short bit of intense media attention, the company has escaped closer scrutiny or any penalty.
So, I'm still wondering, who should be in charge of enforcing privacy policies?
Or should we just all admit that they are simply a corporate charade?
Let's be honest.
In reality, strongly-worded privacy polices don't mean anything since no one will enforce their terms.
And companies not interested in even tempting the FTC fates have their policies written by a team of overpaid mercenary lawyers so that anything that company does with your private info is legal, even though the fool who bothers to click through to read the policy mistakenly thinks the company has made a binding promise to them to treat their data well.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 04:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 03, 2005 | Hot Chat Gives Lazarus a RiseSan Francisco Chronicle business page columnist David Lazarus often does great work taking on large corporations' shoddy privacy practices and predatory financial business moves, combining some reporter's legwork with a dose of indignation.
But today, Lazarus decides to get condescendingly moralistic on Microsoft and Ebay for holding minority stakes in a company that sells over-the-phone computer tech help, psychic readings and sex chats.
The two West Coast tech titans, along with the influential Washington financial firm, are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.
Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay, not to mention Carlyle, which in recent years has counted among its associates the likes of ex-President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker.
One Ingenio service, NiteFlirt, essentially serves as an online mall at which customers can choose from among hundreds of purveyors of pay-per-minute phone sex.
Another service, Keen, is a dial-a-psychic site that links the spiritually needy with assorted pay-per-minute clairvoyants, pet psychics, astrologers and people claiming a pipeline to "voices from beyond."
Ingenio supplies the online forum through which independent practitioners of these exotic skills seek customers, as well as the technology to facilitate calls.
The company also gets a 20 percent cut of all calls made through NiteFlirt and Keen, which typically cost between 99 cents and $4.99 a minute (although some calls can run considerably more).
Microsoft declined to comment on its relationship with Ingenio.
EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the San Jose company's roughly $2 million stake in Ingenio resulted from an earlier promotional agreement that's since expired.
He said eBay wasn't aware of Ingenio's phone-sex business. In light of this, Durzy said, "we are evaluating this investment."
Yes, that's right. Lazarus just "exposed" that Microsoft and Ebay each have a two-percent minority investment in a company you have hardly heard of that they probably forgot they owned.
Now, oddly, I happen to know something about this operation. Back in 2001, Keen handled all of these services in one storefront where people could search for someone to talk to about what firewall to install, what game codes unlocked the tomb of death in Doom 7 or how Catholic schoolgirl skirts made them feel the right kind of funny.
Back in the days when I worked for a small search company working to make corporate search better, Keen was our only client.
I spent much time building dictionaries so Keen users could find the right person to talk to about their problem or carnal itch. It's not easy to present useful results for queries such as "word hangs" "spirit world" and "ages of empires."
Sadly, it was very clear from the search logs that while Keen really wanted to make its money from technical computer help and advice on how to cook Peking duck, people really just want to know the future and talk dirty.
Now that's not too hard to figure out from how what people were willing to pay for over the phone before the invention of a browser, but you can't blame Keen for trying to create a new market (and to some extent it has).
Now it seems Keen has broken out the sex, psychics and other phone services into several different, more focussed sites.
But Lazarus is shocked, shocked, shocked to find that sex and horoscopes are on the Interweb.
Next time, he's looking to figure out who gets paid from such tawdry pursuits perhaps he can check his own pay stub since his newspaper's online presence has, you guessed it, a horoscope page, a feature devoted to sex-based weird news, and a now dormant series devoted to the sex industry, and a page that provides the luckless and ignorant with the day's lottery numbers.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:44 AM | TrackBack
August 03, 2005 | Class-based ScreeningAirline screening is increasingly being divided into the fly-right-through treatment line for high-end travellers and the make-your-way-through-a-rat-maze option for the discount class, according to a recent Sara Kehaulani Goo article.
Across the country, "elite" lines are making a comeback at U.S. airports. The lines, which deliver high-paying travelers right to the checkpoint without waiting, were common before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the federal government eliminated them when it took over security. In allowing the lines to return, the Transportation Security Administration has irked travelers who say the airlines' class system should not extend to airport security, paid for by all taxpayers.The lines are operated by the airlines - not the government, which is responsible only for the actual screening process.
"The physical rope and stanchions and the real estate they occupy (are) the responsibility of the airlines or, in some cases, the airports," TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said. "The TSA area begins just past the ticket checkers. From that point forward, we treat them all the same."
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The privilege for those who get it, is incredibly valuable. Wait times in the standard security lines at Reagan National Airport near Washington can be as long as 50 minutes, according to the TSA's website.
Inside the exclusive American Airlines Admirals Club at Los Angeles International Airport, Mike Shires relaxed on a leather chair, enjoying a few moments of peace before his flight back home to Chicago. He flies 200,000 miles a year on business, and he enjoys the perks that come with it.
"I'd have to put 30 minutes back into my schedule" without the special security line, he said. "There's a perk that comes with all the miles we travel."
Airport and airline officials said they persuaded the TSA that creating special lines speeds all travelers through.
By separating seasoned passengers familiar with security rules from vacationers who don't know they have to remove their shoes, officials say, everyone moves through security more quickly.
In short, American Airlines persuaded the American government that some Americans are more American than other Americans and if you don't get that there's only one word for you.