Vastly Important Notes

Japan Signs

Longtime readers of this blog will know how much I love Japan. I just got back from another trip and made an Evernote public notebook of my favorite signs. Check them out in the widget below (scroll around and click once to magnify a note, again to open it) or at http://preview.evernote.com/pub/chef/JapanSigns .

Hello? Nevada Taxicab Authority?

I'm experiencing some problems attempting to deceive a passenger...

Worst description of Apple TV ever

I snapped this picture from my TV screen on a recent JetBlue flight. Truly, The New York Times is a master of all new media.

Changing the quote thusly might make it more true, although no more informative:

"David Pogue reviews Apple TV, which cannot connect your computer to your TV and which includes several wires."

Security Theatre in Manzanillo

I recently came back from a great trip to Manzanillo, Mexico.  I always know that a vacation is over when I feel the first brush of the long arm of US airport security.  In this case, it was at the ticket counter for the sole US-bound flight.  All passengers had their bags thoroughly hand-searched before getting their tickets.  Our carry-on bags were then handed back to us and we passed the time milling around in the small front lobby, going into and out of random parked cars and grazing at the souvenir shops.  I asked the guy searching my bag about the logic of doing this outside of a controlled environment and with no attempt to prevent someone from adding contraband to their bags after the search, and was cheerfully told, "rules for American".  Of course there was another, proper, security checkpoint that everyone had to go through to get to the gates.  It's nice to know that folks traveling to the US get the added benefit of a bonus "warm up" search, even if it obviously doesn't count.

Geech says that this isn't Security Theater anymore, it's maybe Security Circus.  I'm afraid of clowns.

 

A Realistic Plan For Saving Air Travel

There's recently been a lot of hand-wringing that the air travel experience is on an irreversible spiral to unbearable levels of craptitude. Fear not! By thinking outside the box I have come up with a way to change the paradigm and simultaneously exploit win-win synergies between security and economic stakeholders. Here's how the brave new world of air travel is going to work:

1. RFID chips will be in everything - all your clothes, toiletries, electronics, underwear, etc.

2. When you show up at the airport, you'll walk through a scanner which will instantly compile a full catalog of everything you're wearing and carrying using the above mentioned RFID chips. This information will be stored in XML!

3. You'll take off your clothes and put on a stylish paper gown. All of your clothes and other possessions will be placed into a box and incinerated.

4. You'll board the plane in your gown. Since everyone on board will be similarly attired, you'll enjoy a relaxed, spa-like atmosphere. Business class seats will offer a complimentary electro-pneumatic massage ($12 in coach).

5. As you fly, the information about your possessions will be electronically sent (via XML!) to a new joint venture between Air Mall and Amazon.com. Assuming all your brand licenses are up to date, an exact duplicate of all your clothes and possessions will be just-in-timed to your final destination.

6. Once you arrive and clear security a second time, you'll be given new copies of all your stuff. An efficient waiting area will be provided for people whose new clothes haven't arrived yet.

Think about it: total security and a big boost to our RFID, XML, PPRM (Physical Possessions Rights Management) and logistics industries! Low cost off-shore manufacturing gets a hand as well and who cares about quality when that Hugo Boss suit only has to survive until your next flight?

As an alternative to incineration, I suppose that your items could be cataloged, sanitized and given out to people traveling in the opposite direction, but that sounds like defeatist tree-huggery to me. The other alternative, low cost air-taxi service using a new generation of affordable light planes that are convenient, efficient and too small to be interesting terrorist targets, is just rampant crazytalk.

XML!

Vienna

I had a hankering to start up the blog again. Who knows how long it'll last but here goes.

I'm in Vienna for a couple of days. They're really into some guy (? - hard to tell for sure from the portraits) named Mozart here. You literally can't walk a block without running into something Mozart related. It's like with Starbucks in the US, except they have just as many Starbucks (Starboxen?) here as we do at home, so there's really not much room for anything else. The "anything else" is quite beautiful though. Walking around old European capitals always reminds me that the most historically-significant building in my neighborhood is the art deco Sears-Roebuck store from the 1930s. Apparently it's the 250th anniversary of Mozart founding the city or something, so they're really going all out. Mozart must be some sort of mythical city-creating hero in Vienna, like Paul Bunyan in Brainerd or Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

I'm here to moderate a panel at the Global Security Forum. It's been a worthwhile experience. One of my panelists, Aldo Agostini from Venice, made a fascinating point about the different meanings of "privacy" between the U.S. and Europe. According to Mr. Agostini, the American concept of privacy is rooted in the goal of "freedom", while the European definition centers around "dignity". I'm not entirely sure what "dignity" is, but the Europeans seem quite attached to it. It might somehow be related to the Japanese word, "shame", but that's a concept as strange to Americans as anthropomorphic panda bears riding in giant-panda-shaped fighting robots. Except less cool, like Brainerd.

Anyway, I'll take freedom over dignity any day. I'd take happiness over dignity. I've even been known to take a nice big steak over dignity.

Speaking of which, I've yet to eat any of the famous Viennese meat products so when the conference was over I headed back to the Radisson with the plan of changing clothes and then hitting a restaurant. Once in my room I flipped open the hotel-provided Vienna guide book and read the very first sentence in the "sightseeing" section:

"Even though we are facing an economic slump, terror threats and cost reduction measures: Vienna is still one of the most popular places for outings and holidays."

Way to go for the hard sell! Now I see why our idea of marketing isn't centered around "dignity", either.

Under the guidebook was a brochure for the fancy hotel restaurant. The pictures looked appetizing until I saw this one in the corner:

Ok, seriously, I'm thinking of calling the cops.

Back to the guidebook, randomly flipped open to page 41:

"Would you like to discover Vienna in a special way? Would you like to discover Vienna in a very-special way?"

No. I'm going to bed hungry.

[Update: Two people have already accused me of "name dropping" Brainerd. Yes, I've been there. Any place that has Jello in the all-you-can-eat salad bar is OK in my book.]

I buy a jelly doughnut

Here’s a blurry camera phone picture of me in front of “Snack Point Charlie”  - which is about fifteen feet away from Check Point Charlie -  in Berlin.  The city is now so seamlessly integrated, that it took me a minute to puzzle out east from west.  May this be the fate of all divided countries.

New York Times gets it at least two-thirds wrong

Yesterday, the New York Times online featured a brief video clip called Business Travel Minute: More Checkpoint Follies.  Video links on nytimes.com are kind of screwy and the whole thing will probably disappear in a few days, but as of this writing, you could still watch the video at the link above.)  The piece is in the currently popular "airport security is absurd" genre and features three examples of alleged TSA bone-headedness.  Smug tittering aside, at least two of the ridiculed examples are perfectly understandable.

The first case is a toss-up:

An on-duty FBI agent was cleared to board a plane with a loaded gun, but her nail file was confiscated.

Ok, the end-result here is absurd, but I do not find serious fault with the process.  How much leeway should gate inspectors be given to interpret the rule, "do not allow sharp metal things on board"?  Perhaps the law can be changed to give authorized airplane gun-carriers the additional authorization to carry knives (or be immune from the screening process in general), but unless that happens TSA inspectors should not be blamed for enforcing the rules.

Examples two and three are completely appropriate airport security behavior (at least as briefly stated by the NYT, there may have been other circumstances).

A woman holding an infant was ordered to remove her shirt.  When she refused, she was led away for a private inspection - and yes - the infant also got the full pat down.

Ho ho ho.  Wait, patting down an infant makes sense because, um, you can hide things on an infant.

An investment executive who's a retired navy man got so fed up with being treated like a suspect that he showed up at the airport in a tank top with all his military medals pinned on it.  Yes he had to remove the medals.

What were they supposed to say? "Go right ahead and set off the metal detector sir.  We trust that you don't have anything else in your pockets."  Come to think of it, a case could be made that any upset man who shows up at an airport wearing a tank top pinned through with dozens of medals (for proud service to the USA and/or eBay) should probably not be allowed to board at all.

There's no shortage of legitimate ridicule of US airport security (see my own attempts here, here and here), but this snickering from the New York Times is just dumb.

(Thanks to Dave Engberg for the link.)

Random Tokyo snaps

You can click on any of these to get a larger image, but you probably wouldn't want to.

	This sign was on an escalator going from fourth floor to the fifth floor of a five story pachinko parlor. I like this sign's determination and professionalism; it strives in multiple ways to make itself understood. Being over 18, I bravely went upstairs. What's on the fifth floor? Pachinko.
Seen at a great Tokyo toy store. Who doesn't heart New Yoku DX? I mean, really.
	I've heard that the Internet was full of this sort of thing. The adjacent men's room was apparently camera-free (but had great hand dryers).
Before seeing this sign, I did not have a personal motto.
	The name of the TV set in the office I was using was the Toshiba Wide Bazooka Kiss. This is superior to the name of any TV sold in the US, even if this particular Wide Bazooka Kiss was actually quite small (and not widescreen).
Unfortunately this bar was closed when I passed by in the middle of the afternoon. Being in Tokyo, it's hard to know if the theme is Snoop or Snoopy.

Betrayed by Styx

Like most American businessmen my age, my primary experience with the Japanese language comes from Mr. Roboto.  Therefore, I naturally thought that "domo arigato" meant "thank you very much", as it was clearly written:

Domo Arigato
Mr. Roboto
Domo Arigato
Mr. Roboto
...
Thank you very much
Mr. Roboto
for doing the jobs
that nobody wants to

It wasn't until my third week in Japan that I learned that "domo arigato" means only "thank you", and to say "thank you very much" requires a "domo arigato gozaimasu".  Gozaimasu?  That wasn't in the song at all.  Some crap about Killroy, but no gozaimasu whatsoever.

All that time that I thought I was being very polite to my hosts and/or colleagues, I was merely being casually polite.  If this flagrant negligence on the part of Styx lyricists causes me to lose any business in Japan, I will sue the record label with persistent and ruthless determination.

Unless that record label turns out to be owned by Sony Music.  In that case,  Gomen nasai.  I humbly apologize for my poor humor.

Jamaican security theatre

Strangely enough, the neon sign for the main bar at the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica prominently features a large model airplane that's in the process of crashing through a tin roof and into the ocean.  I circled the mock crash site, large umbrella-drink in hand, and tried to puzzle out this obvious misunderstanding.  There wasn't one.  The bar's theme was clearly, "plane crash."  Most likely, you're supposed to think that the plane crashed into a happy beach bar, and the passengers are now enjoying rum drinks in the sun instead of flying back to their workaday lives.  Wacky.

Security at this airport was equally confidence-building.  It started out with a hand search of all checked luggage that, while quite time-consuming, was lackadaisical enough (pat, pat) that it would have been unlikely to turn up (lift, poke) any contraband less conspicuous (pat, zip) than a live goat.  This was followed by a queue at an obviously malfunctioning metal-detector which beeped non-stop regardless of whether or not anyone was actually in it.  If you placed a functioning metal-detector astride a large vein of iron-ore you would expect it to behave like this one did.  People who set off the metal detector (that is, every single person), were subjected to a perfunctory wanding.

Immediately on the other side of the metal detector was a duty free cigar stand which sold Cuban cigars (perfectly understandable, but illegal to bring back stateside), novelty bongs (I suppose because purely functional bongs are harder to explain to U.S. Customs agents), and giant scissors-style cigar cutters of exactly the same level of lethality that the security screening you just went through was supposed to prevent you from taking onboard the plane.  I don't remember the name of this stand but, given the immediately U.S.-bound nature of most of the shoppers, "Ye Olde Bad Idea Duty-Free Shoppe" would be appropriate.

Not everything was lax.  In the twenty feet from the crash-bar to the plane, my boarding pass was hand-inspected three separate times.  This probably has more to do with full-employment for Jamaican airport workers (whose air traffic controllers just went on strike) than with making really, really sure that my seat number was in order.

On the other hand, the security experience at many U.S. airports isn't significantly more sensible and you can't see the perfect beach from your airplane window as you're taxing away.  The airport at Montego Bay isn't bad; it just needs a little bit more security and a little bit less pretending.  And the bar decor can use some work.

[Update: The crashed-plane mystery has become less wacky and more creepy.  When posting the snapshot, I noticed the bullet holes and the registration number "N928J" near the tail.  Google says that "N928J" is a Grumman HU-16C Albatross named "Air Margaritaville" and owned by Jimmy Buffet.  Jimmy Buffet also owns a bunch of large "Margaritaville" club/bars in the area.  I'm not sure if this airport bar is affiliated with him.  So there are two choices: (1) The bar is Jimmy Buffet's competitor and the bullet-ridden, crashed airplane model is a murderous (though good-natured) threat, or (2) The bar is owned by Jimmy Buffet and the plane is some kind of suicidal fantasy.  Either way, it makes me want to drink and fly away.]

[Update 2: I feel maybe I'm missing some crucial Jimmy Buffet song lyric, but am not willing to investigate any further.  Got to draw the line somewhere.]

Red Sox Nation - Far East

Due to a last-minute change of schedule, I had to send Seth Hitchings, one of our best (read: customer presentable) engineers to Taiwan during World Series week.  Apparently, our local team was somehow involved.  Seth managed to catch most of the games live from his hotel room and a tea shop.  He kept a web journal, complete with pictures, of the events.   

I was flying home from Denver during the last game.  The pilot had the game on one of the in-seat audio channels.  The Sox won just as we were taxiing to our gate at Logan and I thought that mobs of fans would run out onto the tarmac and tip my plane  over.

People seemed to be in a pretty good mood around the office today.  I assume it must be because they missed me during my two weeks of travel. 

Seth, sorry you missed the home crowds; take pride in your role as Red Sox ambassador to the people of Taiwan.  Thanks for going.

Oh, nice tie.

Things to Do in Denver When You're Fed

I'm in Denver, Colorado for the Digital ID World 2004 Conference.  I came in directly from Japan (great trip, despite the typhoon and four earthquakes), so I'm going to spend some time balancing out the excellent tofu and tempura of Kyoto with good old-fashioned American steak. 

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/26), I'll be speaking on a panel discussion about "PKI Deployments. Balancing Return, Cost & Complexity" from 2:30 - 3:30.  If you're at the show, feel free to stop by and heckle me. 

Please no, "Who's your daddy?"  I was asked that by the US passport control officer at LAX where my standard response tactfully invoking the questioner's mother seemed situationally inappropriate.

No dripping!

There are machines outside of hotels and office buildings in Japan into which you stick your wet umbrella and get it instantly wrapped in plastic.  This prevents wet floors and makes it look like everyone just bought a new umbrella. 

I'm reporting this fact to my loyal readers on a broadband wireless connection, while traveling at 270 kilometers per hour on the bullet train to Kyoto.

In my mind, this raises three fundamental questions about my own home country:

1. Why don't we have magic umbrella-wrapping machines? 

2. Why don't we have broadband wireless connections that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

3. Why don't we have trains that work at 270 kilometers per hour?

Write your congressman.  It's time for some pork barrel spending.

Mmmm pork barrel.

A groan of puns

One of the ways I amuse myself on business trips is trying to come up with clever (given my somewhat limited and juvenile intellect) collective nouns.  A collective noun is a peculiar feature of the English language used to describe a group of other nouns – usually people or animals.  Common examples are, "a flock of sheep", "a school of fish" and "a pride of lions".  Quasi-humorous collective nouns include, "a suit of lawyers" and "a club of golfers".  I’ve tried explaining this concept to non-English speakers, but have not generally succeeded.

Last year, while watching horse races at the Hong Kong Jockey Club (no longer the, ahem, Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, as I was politely but firmly corrected by my hosts), I saw a number of jockeys standing around at an award ceremony and spontaneously invented, "a shortage of jockeys".  Today, passing group after group of uniformed Japanese school girls in my cab (or, more accurately, being passed by group after group while stuck in Tokyo traffic), I triumphantly decided that from now on, the collective noun shall be, "a giggle of schoolgirls".

My pride in these two linguistic inventions was cruelly dashed ten minutes ago when I discovered not only that both had already been coined, but that they appear together on a single Google-indexed web page.

I hate Google.  They ruin my best ideas.

[Update: "a bloviation of bloggers" is original!  My place in English language history is secured.]

Back in Japan

I’m back in Japan this week.

The good news about Tokyo cab rides: there’s flawless, high-speed wireless Internet access even at 60 mph.

The bad news: You don’t get to go 60 mph very often and every trip takes an hour.

Net net: Lots of time for blogging.

e-Passport problems

There’s a good write-up in the EETimes about recently discovered flaws with the Department of Homeland Security’s proposed electronic passports.  The new passports have an embedded contactless (ISO 14443) “smart-card” chip that stores personal information and (sometimes) a biometric template. The problems come in two flavors: reliability and privacy.

The reliability issues are what you’d expect from a fairly new technology with mandated cross-vendor interoperability: some readers were not able to properly read some passports placed on them.  I have no reason to believe that this is a serious problem.  Like other standards before it, ISO 14443 will take a few generations to work out the kinks.  We at CoreStreet work with many cards and readers and I expect that the number we have to smash (run over, shoot, microwave) out of frustration will decline over the coming months.  Remember how hard it was to get Ethernet cards to work correctly in the late eighties?  No?  Sometimes I think I missed out on some fun in that decade.

The privacy issues are more serious.  Basically, since the current standards don’t call for any encryption between the passports and the readers, it’s possible to build a clandestine reader and read passports from a distance:

Using a reader equipped with an antenna, NIST testers were able to lift "an exact copy of digitally signed private data" from a contactless e-passport chip 30 feet away, said Neville Pattinson, director of business development technology and government affairs for smart-card provider Axalto Americas.

Two government officials are quoted with reassurances:

An ICAO spokesman said the organization specifies a contactless "proximity" chip that can be read only within a distance of a few inches. He said he didn't know which chips had been used in the tests but called it "extremely unlikely" that proximity chips could read information from more than 4 inches away.

Unfortunately, the distance limitation on the read has more to do with the antenna on the reader than with the chip on the passport.  Four inches is the maximum range for a regular antenna and a fast read time, but significantly greater distance can be achieved with larger antennas and multiple attempts.  Radio wave stuff is a black art to me, so I can’t say for certain whether or not it’s possible to restrict the read range on the actual chip, but i doubt it.

Another misleading quote follows:

A Homeland Security spokeswoman confirmed the tests had "demonstrated that if the readers are not designed with appropriate shielding, the data transmitted from the chip to the reader could be detected several feet away."

Once again, the problem has nothing to do with the legitimate readers.  You can shield the readers in the finest dwarven mithril, but that won’t stop a rogue reader from getting at your passport data.

The only long term solution is to add encryption to the cards.  This can’t be done in any meaningful way with most current ISO 14443 chips because those cards are not capable of storing a secure private key.  The finer points of public key cryptography are beyond the scope of this blog entry, but suffice it to say that the only way you can have meaningful encryption for tens of millions of individual passports is to have individual private keys.  There are cards that can do real public/private key stuff on a proximity interface, but this “dual interface” technology (so called because the cards can be typically be used in contact or contactless mode), is probably a year or two away from widespread use.  Maybe these kinds of findings can spur the industry forward.

In the meantime, the article suggests that it would be extremely impractical for bad guys to build giant covert readers, and that metal-lined passport wallets can minimize opportunities for unauthorized reading.  Both statements are true, so there’s no cause for near-term concern.  The chips are good enough for now, and “dual interface” cards will clean up the remaining problems over the next few years.

One quote near the end really caught my attention:

Kefauver also speculated that at some point, the contactless chip and passport could be eliminated altogether. Instead, a person's biometric data would be measured at the point of contact and compared with information stored in a central database. That would shift the security concerns from the chip to the network.

Now that seems like a really dangerous idea.  The privacy, reliability, performance, cost and security implications of a central database approach are all potentially catastrophic at the scale we’re talking about.  Proving this is left as an exercise to the reader.

(But if you have the answers and want a job, drop me a note.)

Giant leap for geek-kind

Today, SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize by becoming the first commercial craft to reach “space” twice in one week.  The psychological transformative power of this event didn’t really sink in until I just wrote “space” in the last sentence and realized that that word doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anymore.  I haven’t been this excited about a technological achievement since…well, since the NASA Mars Rovers from earlier this year.  Or maybe Cassini.  Ok, so I’m highly space-excitable.  There’s that strange word again.

No, this is way more exciting; my dreams of being a NASA astronaut ended years ago when I forced myself to admit that they’re never going to need a “SQL Specialist” on the space station.  But being a boorish and out-of-place tourist?  That’s practically my life’s work.

Anyhoo, I’ve just signed up to be first in line when Virgin Galactic starts flying.  Maybe if I save up all of my frequent-flyer miles between now and then I can score a free trip.  If you think I’m kidding, you haven’t seen my frequent flyer activity.

Kind of sad

Here are two pictures of quickly-disappearing vintage European phone booths that I took with one of the devices that are making them disappear. 

Cell phones are better in virtually every respect, but it seems like we’ll lose something of the universal city fabric when phone booths are finally relegated to technology museums.  It is fitting that the last generation of cell phones to overlap widely with phone booths have cameras on them to help document the evolutionary passing of their predecessors.  When you take a snapshot of a phone booth with a camera phone, you get a neat trophy, but you also feel like you’ve helped speed the demise.  At some point, the only function of phone booths might be to be photographed by camera phone toting tourists.

Click on the thumbnails for a full-size view.

Leicester Square, London.  Taken with a Motorola V300. 
Was it built at a time when it was considered unthinkably rude to subject passersby to your conversations, or simply when transmission quality was so bad you had to isolate yourself from the outside noise?

Gamla Stan, Stockholm.  Taken with a Motorola V300.
Notice the raised standing platform for inclement weather.

Anyone else have these kinds of snapshots?  There might be a geek-sentimental photo book waiting to be made here.  I’ll try to snap more on my next trips.

New X-Ray

I was flying out of London’s Heathrow airport a few days ago and was pulled aside by a security officer for a “random” screening through a new x-ray machine.  The officer explained that this was a “perfectly safe” procedure that would take four “low-intensity, high-resolution” x-ray images of my body.  If I didn’t want to go through the machine, I could choose an old-fashioned manual search instead.  That sounded ominous, so I agreed to the hands-off option.

The officer took me to a semi-private section near the security line and asked me to empty my pockets.  Then I had to stand with my back to a wall, click, turn sideways with my legs apart and my arms away from my body, click, turn to face the wall, click, and turn to the other side with legs apart and arms away from my body, click.  The whole thing took about 30 seconds. 

I was interested in what the images looked like, so I asked the officer if I could see the computer display.  He initially said no, but I used the secret code-phrase to identify myself as a fellow security professional (“aw come on, lemme see”), so he took me into a little room a few feet away and showed me the monitor.  Luckily for the world, there is no surviving picture of myself standing with legs apart and arms away from my body, so here is a Photoshop recreation using the closest stand-in I could find and my best memory of the event:

“Yikes”, I said, “that’s unattractive.”  The officer explained that, of course, the x-ray makes the image very squashed in the vertical axis.  “Of course”, I concurred.  You couldn’t exactly see bones, but all clothes were effectively removed.  It looked like I was wearing a splotchy full-body stocking (I wasn’t at the time), but the splotches were probably internal bits.  All in all, it looked like this scanner would do a good job finding anything suspicious.  I can understand why they have the monitor in a separate room; many people might be a bit offended at seeing themselves like this.  I also feel bad for the guy who has to sit in a closet and look at quasi-naked, splotchy fat people all day.  It’s bad enough in London, but I don’t envy the operators when this thing gets installed in, say, Houston.

My verdict:  This thing is great.  It’s fast, convenient and (most likely) effective.  I’ve written before about how the metal-detector ceremony is mostly useless and I’m glad that new technology is finally doing something about it.  This type of x-ray combined with one of those air-puff explosive detectors would be an ideal passenger-entry unit.

Oh, the real secret to the code-phrase is the inflection.  Don’t try it yourself unless you really are a security professional, or you'll get it wrong and wind up in airport jail.

Doing something about the weather

I’ve been bouncing around northern Europe for the past few days and have noticed at least one way in which this part of the world is less advanced than the USA.  They may have better cell phones, better service, better food and better transportation; but one glaring deficiency diminishes my enjoyment:  Europe is insufficiently air conditioned. 

Even fairly high-end hotels, shops and cars are typically left at the mercy of the outside temperature.  I’m so used to ubiquitous artificial refrigeration in the US, that walking into a hot building feels, well, unnatural.  Of course there are plenty of Europeans who would argue that US consumption of energy to keep our entire half-continent at 68 degrees (F) all year round is exactly the sort of thing that causes global warming and is therefore responsible for the recent record high temperatures of European summers, which is why they need air conditioners for the first time in history.  I’ve heard this twice now, but it’s a long train of thought and, as an American, I can only get as far as the dining car.  If we’re going to keep ruining their environment, I’m going to have to remember to stay home in August.

Reverse air rage

Put on your best Yakov Smirnoff accent and repeat after me:

“In Russia, drunken flight attendants beat up on YOU!”

The other shoe

[This is the third, and longest (yikes) part of my “Too Frequent Traveler” series.  See parts one and two.]

Many flight attendants are so practiced at constantly repeating the same things at the same times that their body language subtly changes when they’re about to say something new.  I saw this happen a few days ago while struggling to simultaneously tie my shoe and buckle my seatbelt after a clumsy sprint from airport security to the gate.  At the conclusion of a stiffly rendered pre-flight safety video, the lead flight attendant paused oddly before announcing:

“What our new safety video didn’t mention is that if you have to put on your life jacket in the event of a water landing, please inflate only one side inside the cabin and wait until you’re outside to inflate the other side.  That’s not going to happen today since we’re going to have a great, landlocked, flight from Chicago to San Jose.”

This must be a fairly new policy since I distinctly remember snickering at past safety brochures and videos that clearly depicted eerily calm people dutifully blowing into their air vests while the voice-over admonished real-life passengers NOT to inflate their vests inside the plane.  Here’s my completely uneducated guess about how this happened:  Once there were two panels of industry experts.  One panel argued that obese people with inflated vests might get stuck in the emergency doors. The other panel argued that poor swimmers might panic upon hitting the water and lack the presence of mind to inflate their vests.  They commissioned a study to determine the ratio of obese people to poor swimmers on domestic and international flights. After much debate, a compromise was reached: tell passengers to inflate only half the vest. A number of routes were selected to participate in a pilot study of the newly revised announcements. Naturally, to minimize risk, they were all completely over-land routes. The follow-up study to determine the optimal half to inflate first is still in progress.

Perhaps I’m being unfairly pessimistic about this new “half-full” policy, but common sense is not the strong suit of the American air travel security system.  Neither is openness to questions.  This is a shame because arbitrary, opaque and confusing procedures are exactly what’s wrong with flying today.  Opaque security slows down the process, strains already overworked personnel and leads to passenger resentment and disenfranchisement.  This last side effect blunts the industry’s best anti-terror weapon:  The vast majority of travelers would be more than willing to help with security if they only understood the reasons behind the policies.  There is a big difference between actual help and the type of passive-aggressive “cooperation” that we’re habitually being thanked for when subjected to inconveniences and delays.  Passengers can’t help the system if they’re kept in a perpetual state of surreal resentment and confusion.  Who even knows what’s normal in airports these days?  That guy running around with no pants?  Maybe he just had to remove his belt for the metal detector and is about to miss his plane. 

Let’s get rid of the arbitrary stuff, the confusing stuff, the misleading stuff and the silly stuff.  Instead of fear and bemusement, let’s earn the useful respect of the public.  What do I mean by arbitrary and misleading? Everyone’s got their favorite illustrations:

I was once granted an extra-thorough search for simply asking why my flimsy cardboard poster tube couldn’t be brought as a carry-on (it was “club-like”), and I’m nearly paralyzed with fear at the sight of those “No Joking!” signs present at many screening checkpoints. What if I only look funny? When I asked a high-ranking member of the TSA why my friend was subjected to extra searching on each of his last dozen flights, I was assured that it was purely “random.”  There’s “flips a coin” random and then there’s “moves in mysterious ways” random.  The government is not an institution that ought to be permitted the latter definition.

Another problem with arbitrary policies is that security personnel don’t understand them either. Poor understanding often leads to poor execution, which often leads to funny results. Unfortunately, funny isn’t the goal.

For example, when my wife and I were returning from Alaska, we brought four suitcases to the check-in counter. The ticket agent punched in some numbers and told us that while my bags were cleared for check-in, my wife’s had been selected for a random hand-inspection. The agent wanted to know which bags were my wife’s. I tried, “Um, they’re all mine”, but she dutifully informed me that we were allowed only two bags per person and so would I please select which two were mine – and would therefore go straight on the plane, and which two were my spouse’s – which we would have to take back and carry to another line for hand-searching. Had I hypothetically stashed a box of Cuban cigars in one of the bags, that would have been a hypothetically good time to remember which one. At least I didn’t make a joke!

This is making us safe?

Ralph “Where’s” Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” I used to love that quote in junior high school because (1) it justified the state of my room and (2) I knew what a hobgoblin was. Thing is, I didn’t do a lot of business travel in junior high. Now I think a bit of consistency is just what good and lawful security should have.

Take the selection of cutlery that gets served with in-flight meals.  On domestic flights, I always get plastic butter knives, but in international business class I often get metal ones – even when departing from a U.S. airport.  The dull two-inch blades are completely non-threatening and someone attempting to wield one in a melee would find themselves at a severe tactical disadvantage against any sufficiently blunt object.  But why allow the knives on some flights and not on others?  Why make such a transparent mockery of security procedures?  Much of the time, the plastic knife comes with a sharp metal fork. Did someone decide that it was less dangerous to get forked than buttered?  I smell a committee compromise. 

On a recent flight from Japan I was actually given five knives – three for dinner and two for breakfast. By TSA logic, that would have been enough to fight off a whole ninja clan, should one have stowed onboard.  Also, do they allow women’s stiletto heels on-board? Hang on while I look… they do!

Which brings me full circle to my favorite example of pseudoscientific and counterproductive airport security: the shoe removal ceremony. This started immediately after the “shoebomber” incident and many people think it’s done so the shoes can be checked for explosives. This is patently not true – the shoes are simply run through the x-ray machine so they don’t set off the main metal detector. The fact that shoes don’t set off metal detectors in any other country just proves that the sensitivity on US metal detectors is jacked up to 11. A couple of times, I’ve seen a TSA employee will walk up and down the security line and scan shoes with a wand so as to warn people in advance if their shoes had metal in them. I’m fairly certain that the wand was set to detect homeopathic amounts of metal, because it went off on literally every single shoe he scanned – including the “airport friendly: contains no metal” shoes I had just purchased for the trip. Of course everybody knows that sneakers don’t have metal, so he didn’t bother scanning those. 

Taking off shoes and belts is not just frustrating. It actively hurts security by creating a mass of disorderly, irritable and partially disrobed passengers clogging up the line. That kind of confusion is exactly what a patient terrorist needs to better his chances of exploiting the system. Some expert panel really ought to study this carefully.  Of course should it come to that, I’ve got the perfect compromise: hold your pants up with one hand and hop through on only one shoe.

[The TSA and airline security folks have a very tough job.  Despite my criticism in the last two parts, there's a lot that they're doing right. The next and final part will be about the stuff that works today, the stuff that'll work soon, and how to get there from here.]

A better tomorrow

Remember how disappointed you were when the year 2001 came and went and we still didn’t have jetpacks or instant-turkey-dinner pills?  You’d be less disappointed if you lived in Japan.

The taxicabs in Tokyo have passenger doors that automatically open and close, and big GPS systems that display real time traffic levels on the map.  For all these years, I’ve been opening cab doors with my own hands.  Like a sucker. 

Carwashes are fully automated and only about the length of a single car.  You park under it, and the carwash moves back and forth over your car bristling with nozzles and brushes and wipers and other, less identifiable, cleaning apparatus.  At subway and garage exits, there are machines that suck up your paper tickets or cash at impressive speeds and regardless of the input angle; then they bow at you.  The forced-air hand driers in public bathrooms actually manage to dry your hands with a speed and efficiency that show severe disrespect to the ornamental driers found in American bathrooms.

Don’t even get me started on the unforgivable lack of heated water jets on our toilets. 

A Japanese visitor to the US must feel like I feel while walking through the Neanderthal man dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. 

[This blog entry was filed during a Tokyo cab ride where the ubiquity of wireless broadband doesn’t quite make up for the oppressive distance and traffic.]

Earning electric karma

The life of my average gadget is not a particularly dignified one.  Many of my electronic purchases lie neglected at the bottom of random home and office drawers, dinged through careless handling, with missing accessories and batteries slowly leaking in their springs.

This was the fate of a Garmin hand-held GPS unit that I bought three or four years ago.  When I first took it out of the UPS box and popped in a fresh set of batteries, it blinked awake and displayed a world map with the cursor centered on Japan. “How cute”, I remember thinking, “it thinks it’s still home.”  A few seconds later, as the Garmin started to receive satellite signals, it realized that it was somewhere else.  It took a minute or two for the precise truth to sink in:  It was far from its carefree birth and testing lab; it was on the other side of the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It might have been quietly sad.

Over the next few years, the Garmin has been driven across the United States, left forgotten under stacks of paper, wearily fingered by airport security guards, dropped into puddles in Stockholm and down stairs in Hong Kong.  Throughout it all, the GPS carried out its duties with stoic honor and never mentioned home again.

Yesterday, I finally turned it on outside my hotel in Tokyo.  The Garmin took some time to catch up with the months and miles since it was last awake, but it soon displayed the exact same map that had never appeared since the first few seconds of its professional life.  There was no happy animation or other outward indication, but I’d like to think that somewhere inside, a fuzzy-logic chip grew warm for a while.

I get unexpected visitors

A couple of years ago my Chief Financial Officer and  I found ourselves quite unintentionally stranded at 9773 feet on top of the Schilthorn mountain in Switzerland after the last cable car had descended for the evening.  The resulting five hour walk (him) and crawl (me) back to civilization contained many a humbling experience.  A lifetime flat-city dweller, I simply had no appreciation of the otherworldliness of high places until I found myself stuck on a mostly vertical plane, holding on to a stunted tree, being suspiciously eyed by a bearded goat.

I was reminded of this tonight when I checked the traffic graph for my blog.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com linked to the second part of the post on my recent travels and observations about airline security, and in one sentence managed to drive over 1,100 visitors to this site in just a few hours.  That’s a lot of influence.  If the U.S. government is still unsure about the best organization to receive our June 30th transfer of authority in Iraq, perhaps we should consider Mr. Reynolds for the job.  He’d certainly be efficient at reading through the daily ministry reports.

Many of the readers who came here from Instapundit left insightful comments.  I thought I’d answer some of them here:

Nick points out that the hijacking risk is still real for cargo planes and that armed pilots would help for both types of flights.  I tentatively, but not wholeheartedly, agree.  Opposition to arming pilots seems to come in three flavors (1) placing a gun in the cockpit makes it more likely that that gun can be used by a terrorist, (2) pilots do not have adequate training/background checks to be trusted with a gun, and (3) pilots should focus on safely flying the airplane – especially in an emergency – not on fighting terrorists.

The first objection is fair – and hard to get around.  Training and procedures will help, but ultimately it’s a tradeoff.  I don’t honestly know if we’re better of with a controlled gun or no gun onboard.  I’m leaning toward controlled gun.  The solution to the second objection is easy: more training, better checks. 

The third objection seems to stem from an action-movie view of a lone pilot in hand to hand combat with an assailant, with pauses in punching for just long enough to right the controls.  This may actually be close to the truth on both flight 93 and EgyptAir 900, but neither of those flights had a secure cockpit door.  I think the “shoot vs. fly” procedures for armed pilots would be pretty straightforward:  If there’s no terrorist smashing through the cockpit door, fly the plane.  If there is a terrorist smashing through the cockpit door, shoot the terrorist, then fly the plane.  Also, the vast majority of flights will have at least one co-pilot and autopilot.

Roosevelt, TomK and Dave wrote about the threat of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, otherwise known as MANPADS.  I’ve written about MANPADS here and here.  The gist: we should invest in technology to limit the risk from existing, unsophisticated, designs and mandate smart “kill-switches” for new, much more lethal designs produced by the U.S. and cooperative allies.

Researcher pointed out that “the metal detector with gain cranked way up would pick up the metal wires and metal detonator components necessary for a hidden bomb?”  True, but I wouldn’t put any of that stuff through the metal detector.  Even the shoe-bomber got around that, and he’s not the swiftest Taliban on the monkey bars, if you know what I mean.  Also, as Stef comments, metal detector tolerances are pretty much random.

Finally, Toren says, “The overwhelming and useless airport security is here to stay, because of the very simple reason that government jobs never go away.”

I’ve finally met someone more cynical than myself.  It’s an honor to make your acquaintance, sir.

Me know grammar one day

I was giving a talk on security assessment at the New York State Cyber Security Conference today and used my regular “don’t talk like an expert” slide that I first wrote about on February 25th in “Security in four simple words”.  The point of the slide is that security vendors do a disservice to the community when they use obfuscated and exclusionist industry lingo to describe commonsense concepts.  I propose four simple words that should be used instead: Identity, Privileges, Credentials and Validation.  I explain how the first three words are nouns and represent static concepts, while the fourth is a verb and represents an action that you have to do at every transaction.  I’ve used this slide for several public and private presentations now and it usually solicits a good discussion.

Today, an audience member came up to me (mercifully after the talk was over and the other post-presentations questioners had departed) and said, “Validation is a noun.”

Dammit!  Why wasn’t I informed?!

If you’d like to book me for your event (I’m great at dentist conventions but too foul-mouthed for Bar Mitzvahs), drop me an email.

Too-Frequent Flyer Part 2 – Counting Threats

[See part one of this series on air travel and security.]

Let me propose a heuristic: it may be a good time to reevaluate the effectiveness of a national security institution when it becomes the subject of a Playmobil play set. 
”Airport Security Check-in” has reached that point. 

Don’t get me wrong, getting playmobiled isn’t an automatic demerit; there are plenty of realistic, practical things in play land.  Still, it's worth some hard thinking just to make certain that on the scale of practical reality,  our airline security processes are closer to  “Rescue Equipment Trailer” than to “Bunny with Wheelbarrow”. 

I think we might be somewhere in the middle.
   
Please pardon the sudden shift from absurdist humor to serious and unpleasant realities in this post.  I think it mirrors the experience of modern air travel.

Before discussing the effectiveness or practicality of new security measures, it’s useful to understand what threats they’re designed to prevent.  There are basically four broad categories of attacks which can be directed against the air travel system:

1. Hijacking – to use the airplane as a weapon or for hostages or safe passage
2. Bombing – to blow up the plane with a stowed device or suicide attack
3. Infiltration – to transport dangerous individuals into or out of the country
4. Smuggling – to transport or disseminate hazardous materials such as chemical or biological agents using the air travel infrastructure

Each of these threats has important national security repercussions.  However, the vast majority of the new publicly visible security measures implemented at U.S. airports are focused on preventing only the first one.  This is an understandable political and psychological reaction, since preventing a 9/11 style hijacking is at the top of everyone’s immediate demands.  Unfortunately, anti-hijacking measures are some of the most costly and burdensome to implement.  They may also be the least necessary – maybe even counterproductive.

Only two changes were necessary to virtually guarantee that a hijacking intended to crash a passenger plane into a building could never happen again.  One of them - unbreachable cockpit doors – was relatively cheap and implemented within months of the attacks.  The other one was excruciatingly expensive, but the price was paid in full before the day ended and implementation was immediate and ubiquitous: everyone became painfully aware of the possible cost of losing control of an airplane.

Someone attempting an exact replay of the 9/11 attacks today would likely be beaten to within an inch of death - and I wouldn’t take that inch for granted - by passengers with nothing to lose.  Even if the terrorists managed get to the cockpit, physical locks and airline policy would make it impossible to take control of the plane.  They could kill everyone on board and blow up the airplane, but that makes this kind of attack identical in effect to the “bombing” type.  The “hijacking” category, at least for commercial passenger flights, has been largely negated.  “Never again” is not just a solemn vow here.  It is a statement of fact.

Why, then, do I still have to surrender my nail clippers, take off my belt and wait three quarters of an hour to go through a metal detector honed to such a level of sensitivity that the steak taco I had for lunch sets it wailing?  What harm could I inflict with a one inch piece of flimsy metal on a hundred instant air marshals, a bank-vault quality door and pilots specifically trained to never give up control of the airplane?  Why is our still-recovering economy being subjected to this level of delay and inefficiency?  More importantly, why are our dramatically finite security dollars being spent here as opposed to on other, largely unsolved, problems - like the other three types of threats outlined above?  Are these measures effective security, or are they primarily meant to comfort us?  There's nothing wrong with comfort, as long as it's not the fuzzy, anthropomorphic-rabbit type.

Also, can I have my nail clippers back? 

Next Up: The Other Shoe

[Update: The Playmobil site is not very link friendly.  If you get errors following the links in IE, just ignore them and the pages should open fine.  Also, I just remembered where I saw the Playmobil link originally – thanks Boing Boing.

Update 2: I replaced the Playmobil links to direct links to the right product images.  That seems to be the only way their website wants me do it.  Who doesn't love JavaScript?

Update 3: Yikes, this post got a link from Instapundit, lots of great comments here, and my answers in a new post.]

Too-Frequent Flyer Part 1 – Intro

As I lowered my tray table to accommodate the proffered bag of mini pretzels on the last leg of my latest month-long travel circuit, an unexpected advance in airplane technology caught me by surprise.  The entire inside of the tray table was covered by a vivid, full-bleed photo advertisement of a ski-shod lower torso sitting on a chair lift.  The optical illusion was almost perfect: exactly where my real legs disappeared into the circulation stopping confines of a coach class seat, my new virtual legs dangled unencumbered over trees and fresh snow.  Turning up the surrealism another notch, a flying duck holding a credit card in its beak was apparently on a collision course with my ski lift. 

Of course, once you see an ad on a tray table you wonder why all tray tables haven’t had ads on them since the beginning of time.  It seems like the perfect place for ads:  a large, flat surface and a (literally) upwardly mobile captive audience already resigned to several hours of obtrusion, inconvenience and following orders.

Having flown about 60,000 miles of domestic and international business (like anyone would subject themselves to this for pleasure) travel in the past 30 days,  I’ve had plenty of time to (1) go partially insane, and (2) reflect on the diverse and strange rituals collectively known as airline security.  Security has permeated every aspect of modern air travel.  Virtually all activities, from how you get your ticket, to how you board the airplane, eat your “meal” and go to the bathroom have changed in the past two and half years.  Air security professionals have admirably stood up to an enormous job.  Many of the new changes are both necessary and effective; others are asinine and almost assuredly counterproductive.

Over the next several entries, I’ll try to post my thoughts and impressions on the experience of modern commercial flying, with an emphasis on how countries and airlines are trying to keep us safe.  Or at least keep us content.  As they say, this is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

A few hours before landing at home, the ski-lift experience achieved its full potential.  My biological legs, efficiently numbed by the reclining seat in front of me, had ceased all attempts at communication with my brain.  With mild turbulence shaking the seat and no competing senses to put the lie to the visual illusion, I was fully convinced that I was really sitting a hundred feet above an expert slope, wind blowing on my ski suit, about to be impaled upon a duck.  For the first time aboard an airplane, I felt a tinge of fear.

Next up: Counting Threats

So you run and you run

to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking / racing around to come up behind you again. 

Pink Floyd must have been singing about the inefficiencies of foot racing, because when you take off westward in the afternoon from Heathrow on a 777, you can give the sun a pretty solid run.  Sure, it gets an unfair head start because you’re only #17 for take off, and by the time you get up over the permanent cloud cover the sun is already forming large orange bands on the horizon, but you give chase for a good five hours.  The horizon gets slowly squeezed in the middle of your window until concentrated reds and purples pop out and run up and down the frame.  On top they separate and congeal into tiny white stars, on the bottom they blob into barely discernable landscapes.  You know that you're flying over nothing but ocean, so those must be clouds.  It can run, but it can't fool you. 

The sun finally shakes you somewhere behind the coast of Newfoundland, but on balance it probably worked harder than you in the race.  Have another drink.  On the ground, a sunset is finished in five minutes.  At 38,000 feet you can stretch it to feature length.  Unlike Saturday Night Live movies, the material emerges quite intact from extra scrutiny demanded by the expanded format. 

Of course, if you were on a Concorde, you could actually beat the sun by a whole hour and half.  It wouldn’t catch up with you until you were already on the ground, filling out your missing luggage report.  Who’s “shorter of breath” now?

[Note to investors: my in-seat power plug wasn’t working, hence the uncharacteristic lazing about.]

Decline of Western Civilization

If you have any doubts about the superiority of Japanese culture, just look at what they call Phillips and normal screwdrivers: “Plus” and “Minus”.  I feel like I’ve led a completely unoptimized life not knowing about this sooner!  How much do we have to spend on “No Child Left Behind” to get the U.S. to such a  pinnacle of technical clarity? 

Make it so.

Can't put your finger on it

The recent example of winsome personal diplomacy performed for Brazilian airport security workers by an American Airlines pilot has given me an idea about how to overcome a persistent obstacle to biometric adoption.  Many of the arguments often made against fingerprint biometric authentication are misinformed and readily corrected, but one objection has been almost intractable.  Until just now.

The accuracy problem associated with false-positive and false-negative results is a real challenge for forensic and surveillance applications, because these kinds of uses require each individual scan to be compared against thousands or millions of stored records.  Picking a small group of individuals out of a large pool of people by briefly examining parts of their bodies is hard.  Smart people are working on it.  I’m glad it’s not me. 

However, for authentication (proving that you are who you say you are) you only have to match your fingerprint against one template (allegedly your own) stored on a reliable card or other credential.  False-positives are greatly diminished and false-negative errors only cause a minor inconvenience (just scan that finger again).  Privacy and cost concerns are similarly addressed – you can prove that you are who you say you are while preserving appropriate anonymity.  A good match-on-card or match-on-reader system combined with a reasonably secure and affordable storage medium and real-time validation is a pretty fast, accurate, private and affordable way to do strong authentication.  So what’s the big problem for wide-scale public deployments?

Shame.

Deep-seated psychological connotations found in many cultures equate getting your fingerprints taken with being accused of a crime.  Most people don’t like being treated like criminals.  Particularly high-minded ones may even be insulted by the perceived insinuation.  Put Queen Elizabeth and Joe Lieberman in an airport line and see how long it’ll take them to clear security (and don’t count on face recognition to tell them apart).  Changing this mindset will take a lot of patience and training - for the security professionals administrating the scans, not the finger-owners.  Here’s a shortcut:

Instead of scanning the index finger or thumb, go for the intermediate digit.  I propose that all new biometric scanners at public facilities be configured to accept the longest and most expressive of the fingers.  Reasonable and dignified security experts (such as myself) will present our fingers without comment, but people with an innate distrust of technology or law enforcement will be so giddy from having the chance to flip the bird at authority that they’ll line up for a second run through the scanner.

Of course that still leaves Senator Lieberman, but we’ve narrowed down the search space.

The Quicker Picker Upper

There's new legislation on Capitol Hill, which seems to call for bounty hunters to help round up foreign visitors to the U.S. who overstay their visas.  The House Resolution (H. R. 3452) is called the Visitor Information and Security Accountability (VISA) Act of 2003 and was introduced on November 6th, 2003 by Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Congressman Lincoln Davis (D-Tennessee). 

My general skepticism about legislation with earnestly clever names aside, the VISA act has some common sense points.  Secure Identification Documents (sec. 102) and Increased Penalties for Alien Smuggling (sec. 107) seem reasonable and overdue.  Where the bill loses me, is the section 201, MAINTENANCE OF STATUS/DEPARTURE BONDS AND DELIVERY BONDS.  From a summary of the act:

Finally, the VISA Act seeks to take action against individuals who violate the terms of entry by:

• Introducing the private sector as a force multiplier in improving visa compliance by authorizing and requiring federally regulated Maintenance of Status/Departure bonds for those seeking U.S. visas, except for individuals from countries participating in visa waiver agreements with the U.S.

Basically, visitors from countries requiring entry visas in to the U.S. will be required to post a bond with a registered, private bond agent.  If the visitor overstays their visa, the bond agent would be responsible for the now-illegal alien's apprehension and deportation.

I'm not sure I understand what all this means in practice.  Presumably, it would add a significant, non-refundable, "cover charge" for every visa-holding visitor entering the U.S., and would encourage private bounty hunters to roam immigrant communities searching for visa overstays in the same way they currently do with court bail jumpers.  I do not believe that the economic, political and security implications of this have been thought through very carefully. 

Need to educate myself a bit more...