Entries Tagged "DHS"

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A Pilot on Airline Security

Good comments from Salon’s pilot-in-residence on airline security:

In the days ahead, you can expect sharp debate on whether the killing was justified, and whether the nation’s several thousand air marshals—their exact number is a tightly guarded secret—undergo sufficient training. How are they taught to deal with mentally ill individuals who might be unpredictable and unstable, but not necessarily dangerous? Are the rules of engagement overly aggressive?

Those are fair questions, but not the most important ones.

Wednesday’s incident fulfills what many of us predicted ever since the Federal Air Marshals Service was widely expanded following the 2001 terror attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington: The first person killed by a sky marshal, whether through accident or misunderstanding, would not be a terrorist. In a lot of ways, Alpizar is the latest casualty of Sept. 11. He is not the victim of a trigger-happy federal marshal but of our own, now fully metastasized security mania.

And:

Terrorists, meanwhile, won’t waste their time on schemes with such an extreme likelihood of failure.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for us. In America, reasoned debate and clear thinking aren’t the useful currencies they once were, and backlash to the TSA’s announcement has come from a host of unexpected sources—members of Congress, flight attendants unions and families of Sept. 11 victims.

“The Bush administration proposal is just asking the next Mohammed Atta to move from box cutters to scissors,” said Rep. Markey.

Actually, that Atta and his henchmen used box cutters to commandeer four aircraft means very little. Just as effectively, they could have employed snapped-off pieces of plastic, shattered bottles or, for that matter, their own bare fists and some clever wile. Sept. 11 had nothing to do with exploiting airport security and everything to do with exploiting our mindset at the time. What weapons the terrorists had or didn’t have is essentially irrelevant. Hijackings, to that point in history, were perpetrated mainly through bluff, and while occasionally deadly, they seldom resulted in more than a temporary inconvenience—diversions to Cuba or cities in the Middle East. The moment American flight 11 collided with the north tower of the World Trade Center, everything changed; good luck to the next skyjacker stupid enough to attempt the same stunt with anything less than a flamethrower in his hand.

And finally:

This is almost acceptable, if only there weren’t so many hours of squandered time and manpower in the balance. Nobody wants weapons on a jetliner. But, more critical, neither do we want to bog down the system. The longer we fuss at the metal detectors over low-threat objects, the greater we expose ourselves to the very serious dangers of bombs and explosives. TSA is not in need of more screeners; it’s in need of reallocation of personnel and resources.

It was, we shouldn’t forget, 17 years ago this month that Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland by a stash of Semtex hidden inside a Toshiba radio in a piece of checked luggage. Then as now, and perhaps for years to come, explosives were the most serious high-level threat facing commercial aviation. European authorities were quick to implement a sweeping revision of luggage-screening protocols designed to thwart another Lockerbie. It took almost 15 years, and the catastrophe of Sept. 11, before America began to do the same—and a comprehensive system still isn’t fully in place.

Flying was and remains exceptionally safe, but whether that’s because or in spite of the system is tough to tell. The “war on terror” has left us fighting many enemies—some real, many imagined. We’ll figure things out at some point, maybe. Until then, dead in Miami, Rigoberto Alpizar is yet more collateral damage.

Posted on December 12, 2005 at 1:21 PM • View Comments

U.S. Immigration Database Security

In September, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security published a report on the security of the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) databases. It’s called: “Security Weaknesses Increase Risks to Critical United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Database,” and a redacted version (.pdf) is on the DHS website.

This is from the Executive Summary:

Although USCIS has not established adequate or effective database security controls for the Central Index System, it has implemented many essential security controls such as procedures for controlling temporary or emergency system access, a configuration management plan, and procedures for implementing routine and emergency changes. Further, we did not identify any significant configuration weaknesses during our technical tests of the Central Index System. However, additional work remains to implement the access controls, configuration management procedures, and continuity of operations safeguards necessary to protect sensitive Central Index System data effectively. Specifically, USCIS has not: 1) implemented effective user administration procedures; 2) reviewed and retained [REDACTED] effectively, 3) ensured that system changes are properly controlled; 4) developed and tested an adequate Information technology (IT) contingency plan; 5) implemented [REDACTED]; or 6) monitored system security functions sufficiently. These database security exposures increase the risk that unauthorized individuals could gain access to critical USCIS database resources and compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive Central Index System data. [REDACTED]

Posted on December 8, 2005 at 7:38 AM • View Comments

30,000 People Mistakenly Put on Terrorist Watch List

This is incredible:

Nearly 30,000 airline passengers discovered in the past year that they were mistakenly placed on federal “terrorist” watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.

When are we finally going to admit that the DHS is incompetent at this?

EDITED TO ADD (12/7): At least they weren’t kidnapped and imprisoned for five months, and “shackled, beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs by interrogators.”

Posted on December 7, 2005 at 10:26 AM • View Comments

CME in Practice

CME is “Common Malware Enumeration,” and it’s an initiave by US-CERT to give all worms, viruses, and such uniform names. The problem is that different security vendors use different names for the same thing, and it can be extremely confusing for customers. A uniform naming system is a great idea. (I blogged about this in September.)

Here’s someone talking about how it’s not working very well in practice. Basically, while you can go from a vendor’s site to the CME information, you can’t go from the CME information to a vendor’s site. This essentially makes it worthless: just another name and number without references.

Posted on December 6, 2005 at 3:21 PM • View Comments

Airplane Security

My seventh Wired.com column is on line. Nothing you haven’t heard before, except for this part:

I know quite a lot about this. I was a member of the government’s Secure Flight Working Group on Privacy and Security. We looked at the TSA’s program for matching airplane passengers with the terrorist watch list, and found a complete mess: poorly defined goals, incoherent design criteria, no clear system architecture, inadequate testing. (Our report was on the TSA website, but has recently been removed—”refreshed” is the word the organization used—and replaced with an “executive summary” (.doc) that contains none of the report’s findings. The TSA did retain two (.doc) rebuttals (.doc), which read like products of the same outline and dismiss our findings by saying that we didn’t have access to the requisite information.) Our conclusions match those in two (.pdf) reports (.pdf) by the Government Accountability Office and one (.pdf) by the DHS inspector general.

That’s right; the TSA is disappearing our report.

I also wrote an op ed for the Sydney Morning Herald on “weapons”—like the metal knives distributed with in-flight meals—aboard aircraft, based on this blog post. Again, nothing you haven’t heard before. (And I stole some bits from your comments to the blog posting.)

There is new news, though. The TSA is relaxing the rules for bringing pointy things on aircraft:.

The summary document says the elimination of the ban on metal scissors with a blade of four inches or less and tools of seven inches or less – including screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers – is intended to give airport screeners more time to do new types of random searches.

Passengers are now typically subject to a more intensive, so-called secondary search only if their names match a listing of suspected terrorists or because of anomalies like a last-minute ticket purchase or a one-way trip with no baggage.

The new strategy, which has been tested in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Orange County, Calif., will mean that a certain number of passengers, even if they are not identified by these computerized checks, will be pulled aside and subject to an added search lasting about two minutes. Officials said passengers would be selected randomly, without regard to ethnicity or nationality.

What happens next will vary. One day at a certain airport, carry-on bags might be physically searched. On the same day at a different airport, those subject to the random search might have their shoes screened for explosives or be checked with a hand-held metal detector. “By design, a traveler will not experience the same search every time he or she flies,” the summary said. “The searches will add an element of unpredictability to the screening process that will be easy for passengers to navigate but difficult for terrorists to manipulate.”

The new policy will also change the way pat-down searches are done to check for explosive devices. Screeners will now search the upper and lower torso, the entire arm and legs from the mid-thigh down to the ankle and the back and abdomen, significantly expanding the area checked.

Currently, only the upper torso is checked. Under the revised policy, screeners will still have the option of skipping pat-downs in certain areas “if it is clear there is no threat,” like when a person is wearing tight clothing making it obvious that there is nothing hidden. But the default position will be to do the more comprehensive search, in part because of fear that a passenger could be carrying plastic explosives that might not set off a handheld metal detector.

I don’t know if they will still make people take laptops out of their cases, make people take off their shoes, or confiscate pocket knives. (Different articles have said different things about the last one.)

This is a good change, and it’s long overdue. Airplane terrorism hasn’t been the movie-plot threat that everyone worries about for a while.

The most amazing reaction to this is from Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants:

When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood.

How’s that for hyperbole?

In Beyond Fear and elsewhere, I’ve written about the notion of “agenda” and how it informs security trade-offs. From the perspective of the flight attendants, subjecting passengers to onerous screening requirements is a perfectly reasonable trade-off. They’re safer—albeit only slightly—because of it, and it doesn’t cost them anything. The cost is an externality to them: the passengers pay it. Passengers have a broader agenda: safety, but also cost, convenience, time, etc. So it makes perfect sense that the flight attendants object to a security change that the passengers are in favor of.

EDITED TO ADD (12/2): The SFWG report hasn’t been removed from the TSA website, just unlinked.

EDITED TO ADD (12/20): The report seems to be gone from the TSA website now, but it’s available here.

Posted on December 1, 2005 at 10:14 AM • View Comments

Chemical Trace Screening

New advances in technology:

“Mass spectrometry is one of the most sensitive methods for finding drugs, chemicals, pollutants and disease, but the problem is that you have to extract a sample and treat that sample before you can analyze it,” said Evan Williams, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley.

That process can take anywhere from two to 15 minutes for each sample. Multiply that by the number of people in line at airport security at JFK the day before Thanksgiving, and you’ve got a logistical nightmare on your hands.

The research from Purdue, led by analytical chemistry professor Graham Cooks, developed a technique called desorption electrospray ionization, or DESI, that eliminates a part of the mass spectrometry process, and thus speeds up the detection of substances to less than 10 seconds, said Williams.

To use it, law enforcement officials and security screeners will spray methanol or a water and salt mixture on the surface of an object, or a person’s clothing or skin, and test immediately for microscopic traces of chemical compounds.

As this kind of technology gets better, the problems of false alarms becomes greater. We already know that a large percentage of U.S. currency bears traces of cocaine, but can a low-budget terrorist close down an airport by spraying trace chemicals randomly at passengers’ luggage when they’re not looking?

Posted on October 14, 2005 at 1:56 PM • View Comments

Secure Flight News

The TSA is not going to use commercial databases in its initial roll-out of Secure Flight, its airline screening program that matches passengers with names on the Watch List and No-Fly List. I don’t believe for a minute that they’re shelving plans to use commercial data permanently, but at least they’re delaying the process.

In other news, the report (also available here, here, and here) of the Secure Flight Privacy/IT Working Group is public. I was a member of that group, but honestly, I didn’t do any writing for the report. I had given up on the process, sick of not being able to get any answers out of TSA, and believed that the report would end up in somebody’s desk drawer, never to be seen again. I was stunned when I learned that the ASAC made the report public.

There’s a lot of stuff in the report, but I’d like to quote the section that outlines the basic questions that the TSA was unable to answer:

The SFWG found that TSA has failed to answer certain key questions about Secure Flight: First and foremost, TSA has not articulated what the specific goals of Secure Flight are. Based on the limited test results presented to us, we cannot assess whether even the general goal of evaluating passengers for the risk they represent to aviation security is a realistic or feasible one or how TSA proposes to achieve it. We do not know how much or what kind of personal information the system will collect or how data from various sources will flow through the system.

Until TSA answers these questions, it is impossible to evaluate the potential privacy or security impact of the program, including:

  • Minimizing false positives and dealing with them when they occur.
  • Misuse of information in the system.
  • Inappropriate or illegal access by persons with and without permissions.
  • Preventing use of the system and information processed through it for purposes other than airline passenger screening.

The following broadly defined questions represent the critical issues we believe TSA must address before we or any other advisory body can effectively evaluate the privacy and security impact of Secure Flight on the public.

  1. What is the goal or goals of Secure Flight? The TSA is under a Congressional mandate to match domestic airline passenger lists against the consolidated terrorist watch list. TSA has failed to specify with consistency whether watch list matching is the only goal of Secure Flight at this stage. The Secure Flight Capabilities and Testing Overview, dated February 9, 2005 (a non-public document given to the SFWG), states in the Appendix that the program is not looking for unknown terrorists and has no intention of doing so. On June 29, 2005, Justin Oberman (Assistant Administrator, Secure Flight/Registered Traveler) testified to a Congressional committee that “Another goal proposed for Secure Flight is its use to establish “Mechanisms for…violent criminal data vetting.” Finally, TSA has never been forthcoming about whether it has an additional, implicit goal the tracking of terrorism suspects (whose presence on the terrorist watch list does not necessarily signify intention to commit violence on a flight).

    While the problem of failing to establish clear goals for Secure Flight at a given point in time may arise from not recognizing the difference between program definition and program evolution, it is clearly an issue the TSA must address if Secure Flight is to proceed.

  2. What is the architecture of the Secure Flight system? The Working Group received limited information about the technical architecture of Secure Flight and none about how software and hardware choices were made. We know very little about how data will be collected, transferred, analyzed, stored or deleted. Although we are charged with evaluating the privacy and security of the system, we saw no statements of privacy policies and procedures other than Privacy Act notices published in the Federal Register for Secure Flight testing. No data management plan either for the test phase or the program as implemented was provided or discussed.
  3. Will Secure Flight be linked to other TSA applications? Linkage with other screening programs (such as Registered Traveler, Transportation Worker Identification and Credentialing (TWIC), and Customs and Border Patrol systems like U.S.-VISIT) that may operate on the same platform as Secure Flight is another aspect of the architecture and security question. Unanswered questions remain about how Secure Flight will interact with other vetting programs operating on the same platform; how it will ensure that its policies on data collection, use and retention will be implemented and enforced on a platform that also operates programs with significantly different policies in these areas; and how it will interact with the vetting of passengers on international flights?
  4. How will commercial data sources be used? One of the most controversial elements of Secure Flight has been the possible uses of commercial data. TSA has never clearly defined two threshold issues: what it means by “commercial data” and how it might use commercial data sources in the implementation of Secure Flight. TSA has never clearly distinguished among various possible uses of commercial data, which all have different implications.

    Possible uses of commercial data sometimes described by TSA include: (1) identity verification or authentication; (2) reducing false positives by augmenting passenger records indicating a possible match with data that could help distinguish an innocent passenger from someone on a watch list; (3) reducing false negatives by augmenting all passenger records with data that could suggest a match that would otherwise have been missed; (4) identifying sleepers, which itself includes: (a) identifying false identities; and (b) identifying behaviors indicative of terrorist activity. A fifth possibility has not been discussed by TSA: using commercial data to augment watch list entries to improve their fidelity. Assuming that identity verification is part of Secure Flight, what are the consequences if an identity cannot be verified with a certain level of assurance?

    It is important to note that TSA never presented the SFWG with the results of its commercial data tests. Until these test results are available and have been independently analyzed, commercial data should not be utilized in the Secure Flight program.

  5. Which matching algorithms work best? TSA never presented the SFWG with test results showing the effectiveness of algorithms used to match passenger names to a watch list. One goal of bringing watch list matching inside the government was to ensure that the best available matching technology was used uniformly. The SFWG saw no evidence that TSA compared different products and competing solutions. As a threshold matter, TSA did not describe to the SFWG its criteria for determining how the optimal matching solution would be determined. There are obvious and probably not-so-obvious tradeoffs between false positives and false negatives, but TSA did not explain how it reconciled these concerns.
  6. What is the oversight structure and policy for Secure Flight? TSA has not produced a comprehensive policy document for Secure Flight that defines oversight or governance responsibilities.

The members of the working group, and the signatories to the report, are Martin Abrams, Linda Ackerman, James Dempsey, Edward Felten, Daniel Gallington, Lauren Gelman, Steven Lilenthal, Anna Slomovic, and myself.

My previous posts about Secure Flight, and my involvement in the working group, are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

And in case you think things have gotten better, there’s a new story about how the no-fly list cost a pilot his job:

Cape Air pilot Robert Gray said he feels like he’s living a nightmare. Two months after he sued the federal government for refusing to let him take flight training courses so he could fly larger planes, he said yesterday, his situation has only worsened.

When Gray showed up for work a couple of weeks ago, he said Cape Air told him the government had placed him on its no-fly list, making it impossible for him to do his job. Gray, a Belfast native and British citizen, said the government still won’t tell him why it thinks he’s a threat.

“I haven’t been involved in any kind of terrorism, and I never committed any crime,” said Gray, 35, of West Yarmouth. He said he has never been arrested and can’t imagine what kind of secret information the government is relying on to destroy his life.

Remember what the no-fly list is. It’s a list of people who are so dangerous that they can’t be allowed to board an airplane under any circumstances, yet so innocent that they can’t be arrested—even under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

EDITED TO ADD: The U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General released a report last month on Secure Flight, basically concluding that the costs were out of control, and that the TSA didn’t know how much the program would cost in the future.

Here’s an article about some of the horrible problems people who have mistakenly found themselves on the no-fly list have had to endure. And another on what you can do if you find yourself on a list.

EDITED TO ADD: EPIC has received a bunch of documents about continued problems with false positives.

Posted on September 26, 2005 at 7:14 AM • View Comments

Hurricane Security and Airline Security Collide

Here’s a story (quote is from the second page) where airline security is actually doing harm:

Long lines and chaos snarled evacuees when they tried to catch flights out from two of Houston’s airports. After about 100 federal security screeners failed to report to work Thursday, scores of passengers missed flights and waited for hours at sparsely monitored X-ray machines and luggage conveyors. Transportation Security Administration officials were at a loss for an explanation and scrambled to send in a team of replacement workers from Cleveland.

This isn’t an easy call, but sometimes the smartest thing to do in an emergency is to suspend security rules. Unfortunately, sometimes the bad guys count on that.

If I were in charge, I would have let people onto the airplanes. The trade-off makes sense to me.

Posted on September 23, 2005 at 9:10 PM • View Comments

Movie-Plot Threats

Wired.com just published an essay by me: “Terrorists Don’t Do Movie Plots.”

Sometimes it seems like the people in charge of homeland security spend too much time watching action movies. They defend against specific movie plots instead of against the broad threats of terrorism.

We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared.

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Humans have good imaginations. Box cutters and shoe bombs conjure vivid mental images. “We must protect the Super Bowl” packs more emotional punch than the vague “we should defend ourselves against terrorism.”

The 9/11 terrorists used small pointy things to take over airplanes, so we ban small pointy things from airplanes. Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes, so now we all have to take off our shoes. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security said that it might relax airplane security rules. It’s not that there’s a lessened risk of shoes, or that small pointy things are suddenly less dangerous. It’s that those movie plots no longer capture the imagination like they did in the months after 9/11, and everyone is beginning to see how silly (or pointless) they always were.

I’m now doing a bi-weekly column for them. I will post a link to the essays when they appear on the Wired.com site, and will reprint them in the next Crypto-Gram.

Posted on September 8, 2005 at 6:57 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.