The Bottomless Dollar Pit of “Homeland Security”
An article in Technology Review that critiques the technology being used by the U.S. government for airline passenger screening is so bad that not only does it confuse Osama Bin Laden with Johnny Rotten, it also puts the names “George Bush” and “Jesus Christ” on watch lists. Why? The basis of the technology is “Soundex”, an identification system that was brought into being in the punchcard era.
“Soundex dates back to a time when Hollerith punch cards were the newest thing in computing technology. Developed to index and retrieve soundalike surnames with different spellings (like Rogers and Rodgers) scattered throughout an alphabetical list, Soundex was first used so that U.S. government clerks could retroactively analyze the 1890 U.S. census results. Soundex works by taking the first letter of a name, dropping all vowels, assigning a number to each of the next three consonants (with similar-sounding consonants like s and c getting the same numbers), then dropping any remaining consonants. Thereby, the algorithm reduces all names to a letter followed by three numbers.Consequently, Soundex assigns to the name Laden the code L350, as it does Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham. This is, in other words, an algorithm so deficient for identification purposes that it confuses al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the Sex Pistols’ Johnny (Lydon) Rotten.
So, what’s the Department of Homeland Security’s solution to cleaning up the 75,000 name list of “suspected terrorists”, most of whom are false positives? Throw another $220 Million at it, without changing the underlying technology, and THEN create a “Traveller Redress Inquiry Program“, which has not resulted in any names being removed. ” . . . nobody at the DHS and TSA will be taking responsibility for removing any names from the watch lists, and individuals on the lists will continue to undergo extra screening of their persons and carry-ons.”
This in addition to the Orwellian measures of IDs made to Federal Standards, which have already been shown to be “leaky” to anyone with the right scanning equipment, and a field day for identity thieves, and that’s before we get into the privacy concerns of governmental tracking of individuals for any reason. I remind you all that most of the terrorists who boarded planes on 9/11 were carrying proper, legal identification.
Technorati Tags: Department of Homeland Security, Pork, Terrorist Watch List, Traveller Redress Inquiry Program
