The Civilized Explorer aggregation

Current rules require airline passengers to give birth dates and sex when booking flights. The TSA intends to compare people to the terror watch lists, and the additional information will help prevent false positives on matches.

This is in lieu of scrapping the lists altogether, since they serve no purpose, or scrubbing the lists of false names.

TSA must be staffed by utter boobs.

A British comedian claims he was held at the Miami Airport because they thought he was an illegal alien from Cuba - based on his accent.

He was detained and bullied for two hours.

dvice.com claims to survey all the airline WiFi services, and it’s set up a page for you to see what’s what. Not that WiFi will make you choose one airline over another - right?

The British government has an ID database which it has assured people will not be the subject of improper access.

The Guardian reports that nine employees have been fired for illegally accessing the system to look up their friends, their own records, and a girlfriend’s. That’s nine people fired out of 34 who improperly accessed records; the other 25 were reprimanded or resigned. No one was prosecuted in spite of government insistence that security would be absolute and that penalties would be so severe that no one would dare read the files.

It was a small airplane that carried 47 passengers. The flight was diverted because of weather, but the TSA agents had all gone home at the second airpport, so no one was allowed off the plane, for “passenger safety and the legal requirements of airlines,” according to an airline spokesperson.

Passengers spent the night in an airplane with a row of seats on one side, two rows on the other side, full toilets, and no food.

This was a small commuter flight nominally flown by Continental but instead chartered out to ExpressJet Airlines, which provided aircraft and crew. However, a lawyer on board discusses other ideas on agency on the second page of the article.

Someone set up an RFID scanner and camera at DefCon, a convention for high tech conference where such hijinks are common. Most RFID cards don’t identify the holder by name, but by taking a photo of the holder, it’s possible to identify that person later.

If the RFID is an employee’s access card, it can be cloned, the identity of the employee verified, and then educated guesses can be made (by those who are educated) about adjacent RFID serial numbers (remember the definition of serial?). Other cards can then be generated, giving greater access to buildings and their contents (especially interesting is that access to some computers is controlled by RFID cards).

Sitting outside an office building and scanning people as the enter and leave could be profitable. And if everyone then is required to wear Faraday-shielded ID holders, what’s the point of having RFID?

If you have an RFID passport, I strongly advise carrying it in a shielded holder. RFID scanners fit in backpacks (the surreptitious scanners at DefCon were scanning from their backpacks), and it is trivially easy to scan your passport as you walk in line to the security checkpoint.

Bruce Schneier daydreams about being asked to fix airport security: Make the rules known; restrict TSA to searching for bombs and terrorist and lay off pot smokers and deadbeat dads; give us back our Constitutional protections.

Travel convenience will have to take a back seat to flight schedules, and the fares may go higher because the airlines are continuing to cut capacity.

In other news, American is raising its fees for checked bags. For tickets purchased after August 14, 2009, fees go up five bucks: $20 for the first bag, $20 for the second.

In addition to the $15 for your first checked bag and $25 for the second one on domestic flights, Delta will now charge you a convenience fee of $5 to pay the checked bag fee at the airport. If you pay the fee online, the extra $5 does not apply.

Delta is not the first to charge a convenience fee for paying the fees in person: US Airways and United also charge extra, and Continental has announced a convenience fee to be in place next month.

If you’re on a number of hops with in-flight WiFi, you’ve had to buy access on each hop. Now Gogo is offering 24-hour and 30-day plans. Many restrictions apply, so follow the link to read them.