AIR SAFETY INFO IN NASA TERROR DATABASE

NASA researchers are using flight-​​safety records — includ­ing reports of sick pas­sen­gers, bad weather and sleepy pilots — to build an anti-​​terror data­base.
Under the generic name Data Mining and Aviation Security, com­puter sci­en­tists at NASA’s Ames Research Center are devel­op­ing a pro­gram for pre­dict­ing ter­ror­ist threats by inte­grat­ing “the Internet and clas­si­fied intel­li­gence data” with infor­ma­tion from two flight-​​safety data­bases.
The pro­gram is the sec­ond recent exam­ple of a NASA effort to mine infor­ma­tion store­houses for ene­mies of the state. Over the week­end, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) revealed that Northwest Airlines forked over mil­lions of pas­sen­ger records to the space agency for a terrorist-​​screening project, an effort enhanced with data from the 1990 U.S. cen­sus.
Although the new program’s bud­get is under­sized — less than $1 mil­lion, accord­ing to Ames spokesman David Morse — civil lib­er­tar­i­ans are trou­bled by the effort. Such projects are a waste of resources, they say, espe­cially at a time when the space agency is gear­ing up for a return to the Moon.
“This is 21st-​​century phrenol­ogy,” said pri­vacy advo­cate Bill Scannell, refer­ring to the dis­cred­ited art of read­ing people’s per­son­al­i­ties from the bumps on their heads. “You might as well stick a cou­ple of employ­ees in a sub-​​basement and have them read tea leaves.“
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: Using flight safety reports for home­land defense is a “pretty wild exper­i­ment,” said Barry Steinhardt, direc­tor of the ACLU’s tech­nol­ogy and lib­erty pro­gram. “They’re lit­er­ally attempt­ing to mon­i­tor us through our entrails, rather than focus­ing on the phys­i­cal secu­rity mea­sures that we know work.“
For exam­ple, Steinhardt notes, air­port tar­macs still aren’t secure. Just last month, a dead body was dis­cov­ered at New York’s Kennedy Airport, wedged into the wheel of a British Airways 747. How the per­son got on to the tar­mac and how the corpse man­aged to go unde­tected through 15 take offs and land­ings in eight days remains a mys­tery.
AND MORE: Sandra Hart, with the Human Factors Research and Technology Division of NASA Ames, wants to fight ter­ror­ists — bad. She makes the fol­low­ing plea on the American Psychological Association’s web­site to let her and her col­leagues get involved with stop­ping evil-​​doers:

We can develop system-​​wide base­line and trend infor­ma­tion to iden­tify gaps and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in the secu­rity sys­tem. Data min­ing and visu­al­iza­tion tools can be adapted to con­vey secu­rity infor­ma­tion clearly and unam­bigu­ously. Data acqui­si­tion and analy­sis tools can iden­tify pat­terns in routes of flight as well as pas­sen­ger pro­files. We can help estab­lish poli­cies, design tech­nolo­gies, and develop pro­ce­dures to ensure that the peo­ple in the sys­tem are even more effec­tive. We can pre­dict the poten­tial impact of new ideas on the reli­a­bil­ity and effec­tive­ness of the sys­tem and then eval­u­ate them as they are devel­oped and fielded. Basic knowl­edge of human vision, cog­ni­tion, atten­tion, and so on can improve the design of secu­rity tech­nolo­gies. Expertise in orga­ni­za­tional and team behav­ior might be applied to the for­ma­tion of more effec­tive secu­rity teams and mit­i­gate the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ad hoc responses by pilots and con­trollers in response to per­ceived threats. Human Factors exper­tise in task analy­sis, mod­el­ing, and sim­u­la­tion can offer insights into the skills required to per­form cru­cial tasks, iden­tify func­tions that are can­di­dates for automa­tion, and develop train­ing. We can work with the front line — - secu­rity per­son­nel, ticket agents, pilots, flight atten­dants and their employ­ers — - to iden­tify secu­rity gaps and fig­ure out how to ensure that humans are part of the solu­tion in the future, not the prob­lem. (empha­sis mine)

Just in case you thought only a cou­ple of NASA mad sci­en­tists wanted to find Osamas in our infor­ma­tion…
AND MORE: EPIC will file a suit against NASA tomor­row in U.S. District Court in San Jose, to force the space agency to spill the beans about all of its anti-​​terror efforts.

January 21st, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.