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Use this handy boarding-pass generator to: 1) get through airport security without a ticket, 2) bypass the “extra screening” if you have “SSSS” printed on your ticket, or 3)—and this is harder—snag yourself a Business Class seat with a Coach ticket.
EDITED TO ADD (10/28): Lots of news on this item: the page is down, and he was visited by the FBI.
I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone talking about class issues as they relate to security before:
On July 23, 2003, New York City Council candidate Othniel Boaz Askew was able to shoot and kill council member and rival James Davis with a gun in school headquarters at City Hall, even though entrance to the building required a trip through a magnetometer. How? Askew used his politicians’ privilege—a courtesy wave around from security guards at the magnetometer.
An isolated incident? Hardly. In 2002, undercover investigators from Congress’ auditing arm, the General Accounting Office, used fake law enforcement credentials to get the free pass around the magnetometers at various federal office buildings around the country.
What we see here is class warfare on the security battleground. The reaction to Sept. 11 has led to harassment, busywork, and inconvenience for us all well, almost all. A select few who know the right people, hold the right office or own the right equipment don’t suffer the ordeals. They are waved around security checkpoints or given broad exceptions to security lockdowns.
If you want to know why America’s security is so heavy on busywork and inconvenience and light on practicality, consider this: The people who make the rules don’t have to live with them. Public officials, some law enforcement officers and those who can afford expensive hobbies are often able to pull rank.
In an effort to deal with the problem of imposters in fake uniforms, Iraqi policemen now have a new uniform:
Police Colonel Abdul-Munim Jassim explained why the new uniform would be difficult for criminals to fake.
“The Americans take a photo of the policeman together with the number of the uniform. If found elsewhere, it will immediately be recognised as stolen,” he said.
Bolani promised tough measures against anyone caught counterfeiting or trading in the uniforms and praised his officers, telling them their work had begun to turn back the tide of violence around Iraq.
I’m sure these things help, but I don’t see what kind of difference it will make to a normal citizen faced with someone in a police uniform breaking down his door at night. Or when gunmen dressed in police uniforms execute the brother of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.
A futile attempt to improve the security of Japan’s hanko identification system.
In Beyond Fear, I wrote about profiling (reprinted here). I talked a lot about how smart behavioral-based profiling is much more effective than dumb characteristic-based profiling, and how well-trained people are much better than computers.
The story I used was about how U.S. customs agent Diana Dean caught Ahmed Ressam in 1999. Here’s another story:
An England football shirt gave away a Senegalese man attempting to enter Cyprus on a forged French passport, police on the Mediterranean island said on Monday.
Suspicions were aroused when the man appeared at a checkpoint supervising crossings from the Turkish Cypriot north to the Greek Cypriot south of the divided island, wearing the England shirt and presenting a French passport.
“Being a football fan, the officer found it highly unlikely that a Frenchman would want to wear an England football jersey,” a police source said.
“That was his first suspicion prior to the proper check on the passport, which turned out to be a fake,” said the source.
That’s just not the kind of thing you’re going to get a computer to pick up on, at least not until artificial intelligence actually produces a working brain.
This is a good idea.
The built anti-phishing capability warns users when they come across Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to his or her home page. Meanwhile, microsummaries are regularly updated summaries of Web pages, small enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, but large enough to provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated as new information becomes available.
From Wired News:
Among the falsified evidence produced by the conspirators before the fraud unraveled were confidential bank records originating with the Clearstream bank in Luxembourg, which were expertly modified to make it appear that some French politicians had secretly established offshore bank accounts to receive bribes. The falsified records were then sent to investigators, with enough authentic account information left in to make them appear credible.
In case you thought a hard-to-forge national ID card would solve the fake ID problem, here’s what the criminals have to say:
Luis Hernandez just laughs as he sells fake driver’s licenses and Social Security cards to illegal immigrants near a park known for shady deals. The joke—to him and others in his line of work—is the government’s promise to put people like him out of business with a tamperproof national ID card.
“One way or another, we’ll always find a way,” said Hernandez, 35, a sidewalk operator who is part of a complex counterfeiting network around MacArthur Park, where authentic-looking IDs are available for as little as $150.
Winning my award for dumb movie-plot threat of the week, here’s someone who thinks that counterfeit electronics are a terrorist tool:
Counterfeit Electronics as Weapons of Mass Disruption?
Some customers may consider knockoff clothing and watches to be good values, but counterfeit electronics can be devastating. What would happen, then, if some criminal element bent on wreaking havoc and inducing public panic were to intentionally introduce such a bogus product into the electronics supply chain—malfunctioning printed-circuit boards in a critical air-traffic-control system, say, or faulty parts into automobile braking systems? Even the suggestion that such an act had occurred might set off a wave of recalls and might ground suspect systems.
Gadzooks.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Here’s another article:
“Many attacks of this kind would have two components. One would alter the process control system to produce a defective product. The other would alter the quality control system so that the defect wouldn’t easily be detected,” Borg says. “Imagine, say, a life-saving drug being produced and distributed with the wrong level of active ingredients. This could gradually result in large numbers of deaths or disabilities. Yet it might take months before someone figured out what was going on.” The result, he says, would be panic, people afraid to visit hospitals and health services facing huge lawsuits.
Deadly scenarios could occur in industry, too. Online outlaws might change key specifications at a car factory, Borg says, causing a car to “burst into flames after it had been driven for a certain number of weeks”. Apart from people being injured or killed, the car maker would collapse. “People would stop buying cars.” A few such attacks, run simultaneously, would send economies crashing. Populations would be in turmoil. At the click of a mouse, the terrorists would have won.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.