Ok, in light of the article posted about yesterday's SouthWest Airlines flight diverted to Phoenix after leaving L.A., it seems it may have just been a false alarm generated by a phoned-in bomb threat...
Now... I know a lot of us may have done some prank calling when we were younger... seeing if Prince Albert ever made it out of his can, or if someone had a working refrigerator, etc. But, this is something a bit more serious, right? I mean, we're talking about at BEST a delay of a nuimber of hours of an entire flight of passengers, someone said 140+, I think. So, all of those passengers then had to be put back on other flights to make it to their final destinations...
Figure a bunch of new tickets, passengers shuffled, many man-hours for airline ticket agents and gate personel to reroute itineraries, etc. Not to mention the police/fire/EMS/SWAT/bomb squad response. Addtional fuel costs to airlines, man hours and extra food costs lost in vouchers and such. Airport security personel and emergency response teams being tied up, a whole airport terminal being shut down... plus passengers down the pipeline who were supposed to board that plane in Austin to fly on somewhere else... it's a whole chain of events, that I would suspect cost at LEAST many tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even into the 6-figure range? Who knows, ultimately, what the financial impact alone of an event like this could be. Even the cost of the military scrambling two F-16s to "observe" the airlplane in its approach to Sky Harbor. Not cheap.
Now...
We all know the NSA is logging all our calls. Metadata, a new term many people had probably never heard in their lives is now becoming a household word. They're getting all of Verizon's info, and you can safely assume the same warrants have been served on most, if not all, other major cellular carriers. And no one is even talking about the possibility of the same information being provided by the landline providers in the US, but that would be JUST as easy, if not moreso, right?
So let's assume for a moment, not exactly unreasonably, if you ask me, that the NSA has essentially a record of every phone call made in the United States at any given time... outgoing and receiving numbers, registration information, duration of call, and in the case of cellular calls, likely a good fix on location from where the call was placed, if not specific data on that, assuming the cellular customer had GPS enabled on their phone at the time - or can you really ever turn it off??? Who really knows... triangulation of a pinpointed spot is fairly easy given the plethora of cellular towers in most populated areas, perhaps even retrospectively.
So... here's the question...
Let's say the NSA ALREADY KNOWS when, where and from whom this call was placed. Not a hard thing to figure out and seems a pretty reasonable assumption given what we know about technology today, right? So, maybe it was some highschool prank, and Little Johnny is going to get a visit from some men in black suits and aviator shades who are going to plop down a list of phone numbers, dates, times and locations and make him explain every text he sent to Mary Jane asking for naked pics, or telling his buddies to find someone who would buy them beer for the weekend. Pretty scary for Little Johnny.
But, on the other hand, if this were actually a nefarious plot (I love that word lately, nefarious, lol) by an anti-US budding terrorist, the NSA now has dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of leads to chase down regarding everyone this person ever contacted, leading to who knows how many additional investigations, terror cells uncovered, plots foiled or perhaps even just simple deterrent of additional plans because these people now know they are being watched, are linked to one of their idiot members of the organization who went off half-cocked and screwed up their plans.
So... is this really all a bad thing?
Yes, we are giving up some freedom, by allowing a government agency to monitor all our communications ala Big Brother/1984, but it IS a tradeoff, right? How many lives could such surveillence save? Perhaps hundreds on the next flight they try to bomb or crash? Dozens in shopping malls who might have been killed in a mass shooting spree or bombing? Little children, your kids or grandkids who were just grabbing an ice cream cone with their friends, or catching a movie, maybe the latest Batman/Pirates of the Caribbean/Ironman release?
How many lives might it save? How much money might it save in not having these kinds of incidents with the plane in Phoenix?
Where is the line? What is acceptable? What is unacceptable? When will you scream that the NSA knew about these issues, but no one stepped up and took responsibility to chase them down, because it was too invasive of the "freedom" and "privacy" of the general public to collect all this data for retrospective analysis in the event of an actual incident such as the one yesterday, or even just a credible threat, such as someone turning up on a list buying explosive materials with a somewhat questionable background of mental health issues or international travel into areas heavily populated with anti-American sentiment?
It's a serious question... the technology is there. The ability to chase down the leads, or utilize data retrospectively in incontrovertably valuable in any criminal investigation. The point as issue is whether or not this should be allowed to happen, right? We don't TRUST the government to utilize that data in ONLY the most responsible and necessary ways. This isn't them taking our guns away (yet), or demanding registration, implanting microchips to track movements of ordinary people, etc. Yet. But it is all baby steps, isn't it? How many baby steps is ok, and how far do we let it go? And how much benefit must be proven before we accept the loss of privacy in return for the restoration of economic stability or freedom of travel unencumbered by too many onerous restrictions, etc.
What say you?
Now... I know a lot of us may have done some prank calling when we were younger... seeing if Prince Albert ever made it out of his can, or if someone had a working refrigerator, etc. But, this is something a bit more serious, right? I mean, we're talking about at BEST a delay of a nuimber of hours of an entire flight of passengers, someone said 140+, I think. So, all of those passengers then had to be put back on other flights to make it to their final destinations...
Figure a bunch of new tickets, passengers shuffled, many man-hours for airline ticket agents and gate personel to reroute itineraries, etc. Not to mention the police/fire/EMS/SWAT/bomb squad response. Addtional fuel costs to airlines, man hours and extra food costs lost in vouchers and such. Airport security personel and emergency response teams being tied up, a whole airport terminal being shut down... plus passengers down the pipeline who were supposed to board that plane in Austin to fly on somewhere else... it's a whole chain of events, that I would suspect cost at LEAST many tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even into the 6-figure range? Who knows, ultimately, what the financial impact alone of an event like this could be. Even the cost of the military scrambling two F-16s to "observe" the airlplane in its approach to Sky Harbor. Not cheap.
Now...
We all know the NSA is logging all our calls. Metadata, a new term many people had probably never heard in their lives is now becoming a household word. They're getting all of Verizon's info, and you can safely assume the same warrants have been served on most, if not all, other major cellular carriers. And no one is even talking about the possibility of the same information being provided by the landline providers in the US, but that would be JUST as easy, if not moreso, right?
So let's assume for a moment, not exactly unreasonably, if you ask me, that the NSA has essentially a record of every phone call made in the United States at any given time... outgoing and receiving numbers, registration information, duration of call, and in the case of cellular calls, likely a good fix on location from where the call was placed, if not specific data on that, assuming the cellular customer had GPS enabled on their phone at the time - or can you really ever turn it off??? Who really knows... triangulation of a pinpointed spot is fairly easy given the plethora of cellular towers in most populated areas, perhaps even retrospectively.
So... here's the question...
Let's say the NSA ALREADY KNOWS when, where and from whom this call was placed. Not a hard thing to figure out and seems a pretty reasonable assumption given what we know about technology today, right? So, maybe it was some highschool prank, and Little Johnny is going to get a visit from some men in black suits and aviator shades who are going to plop down a list of phone numbers, dates, times and locations and make him explain every text he sent to Mary Jane asking for naked pics, or telling his buddies to find someone who would buy them beer for the weekend. Pretty scary for Little Johnny.
But, on the other hand, if this were actually a nefarious plot (I love that word lately, nefarious, lol) by an anti-US budding terrorist, the NSA now has dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of leads to chase down regarding everyone this person ever contacted, leading to who knows how many additional investigations, terror cells uncovered, plots foiled or perhaps even just simple deterrent of additional plans because these people now know they are being watched, are linked to one of their idiot members of the organization who went off half-cocked and screwed up their plans.
So... is this really all a bad thing?
Yes, we are giving up some freedom, by allowing a government agency to monitor all our communications ala Big Brother/1984, but it IS a tradeoff, right? How many lives could such surveillence save? Perhaps hundreds on the next flight they try to bomb or crash? Dozens in shopping malls who might have been killed in a mass shooting spree or bombing? Little children, your kids or grandkids who were just grabbing an ice cream cone with their friends, or catching a movie, maybe the latest Batman/Pirates of the Caribbean/Ironman release?
How many lives might it save? How much money might it save in not having these kinds of incidents with the plane in Phoenix?
Where is the line? What is acceptable? What is unacceptable? When will you scream that the NSA knew about these issues, but no one stepped up and took responsibility to chase them down, because it was too invasive of the "freedom" and "privacy" of the general public to collect all this data for retrospective analysis in the event of an actual incident such as the one yesterday, or even just a credible threat, such as someone turning up on a list buying explosive materials with a somewhat questionable background of mental health issues or international travel into areas heavily populated with anti-American sentiment?
It's a serious question... the technology is there. The ability to chase down the leads, or utilize data retrospectively in incontrovertably valuable in any criminal investigation. The point as issue is whether or not this should be allowed to happen, right? We don't TRUST the government to utilize that data in ONLY the most responsible and necessary ways. This isn't them taking our guns away (yet), or demanding registration, implanting microchips to track movements of ordinary people, etc. Yet. But it is all baby steps, isn't it? How many baby steps is ok, and how far do we let it go? And how much benefit must be proven before we accept the loss of privacy in return for the restoration of economic stability or freedom of travel unencumbered by too many onerous restrictions, etc.
What say you?
