Suitcase surprise: Rebuke written on inspection notice
By Susan Gilmore for the Seattle Times.

Seth Goldberg says that when he opened his suitcase in San Diego after a flight from Seattle this month, the two “No Iraq War” signs he’d picked up at the Pike Place Market were still nestled among his clothes.
But there was a third sign, he said, that shocked him. Tucked in his luggage was a card from the Transportation Security Administration notifying him that his bags had been opened and inspected at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Handwritten on the side of the card was a note, “Don’t appreciate your anti-American attitude!”
“I found it chilling and a little Orwellian to have received this message,” said Goldberg, 41, a New Jersey resident who was in Seattle visiting longtime friend Davis Oldham, a University of Washington instructor.
Goldberg says that when he took his suitcase off the airplane in San Diego, the zipper pulls were sealed with nylon straps, which indicated TSA had inspected the luggage. It would be hard, he said, for anyone else to have gotten inside his bags.
TSA officials say they are looking into the incident. “We do not condone our employees making any kind of political comments or personal comments to any travelers,” TSA spokeswoman Heather Rosenker told Reuters. “That is not acceptable.”

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Today I saw this article on BoingBoing and my friend Cam and I were discussing it while riding in a Taxicab to downtown Austin. (I’m still here for SXSW 2003.)
I mentioned that cab companies around the country already keep information on every pick-up and drop off that takes place, and that the information is already available to the cops without a subpoena or anything. The cops often need a witness or something when a crime has been committed, and can then ask whatever cabby might have been in the area at that time (like in Law and Order). (I gleaned these facts some time ago from my cabbies back home in San Francisco.)
Our Austin cab driver told us that they’ve had black boxes in Austin for years. That the cops know exactly where every driver is at all times within 10 feet (theoretically), and that they can tell everytime the meter is started or paused, idling, etc., and when the engine turns off and on, etc.
The only way to drive anonymously is to turn everything off inside the car: the meter, blackbloxes, gps, etc. None of the other devices will work without the black box on. (Note: the car itself will operate without the monitoring equipment on.)
Of course, if you turn everything else off, then that in itself looks suspicious (we all mused).
It would appear that the devices currently installed within all of the cabs in Austin, TX already go far above and beyond those described in this WSJ article.
Here’s the WSJ article on the subject written by William M. Bulkeley:
Taxis Soon May Acquire Their Own ‘Black Boxes’

The devices, somewhat like the “black boxes” in commercial airliners, will sense a crash and automatically report data on speed, location, brake pressure and number of passengers to a crash-records depository run by International Business Machines Corp., Armonk, N.Y.
Ralph Bisceglia, director of American Transit, said it expects to get “important feedback on auto-safety features,” and to combat fraud. For example, if a cab driver claims he “was under the speed limit and the passenger claims he was speeding, the box will tell you,” he said.
The program illustrates the growing interest of insurers and fleet owners in using “telematics” in vehicles to remotely monitor what drivers do, where they go and how the vehicle is performing.

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State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
By Jennifer Lee for the NY Times.

Law enforcement officials across the country will soon have access to a database of 50 million overseas applications for United States visas, including the photographs of 20 million applicants.
The database, which will become one of the largest offering images to local law enforcement, is maintained by the State Department and typically provides personal information like the applicant’s home address, date of birth and passport number, and the names of relatives…
For all the ambitious technological proposals being debated in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, the new unified system was cobbled from existing networks and has required little new spending. “These are the networks that people are already using,” said Roseanne Hynes, a member of the Defense Department’s domestic security task force. “It doesn’t change jobs or add overhead.”
A primary feature of the system is the State Department’s enormous visa database, whose seven terabytes give it a capacity equivalent to that of five million floppy disks. Until now, that database has been shared only with immigration officials.
“There is a potential source of information that isn’t available elsewhere,” said M. Miles Matthew, a senior Justice Department official who works with an interagency drug intelligence group. “It’s not just useful for terrorism. It’s drug trafficking, money laundering, a variety of frauds, not to mention domestic crimes.”

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