Your face or fingerprint could soon replace your plane ticket

Who’s logging your face?

_Alvaro Bedoya is the founding executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology and co-author of “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America _.”_ _ You probably remember the day you got your driver’s license. You went to the department of motor vehicles, took a driving test, stood for a photograph and then got your license. What if you — and most other teens in the United States — were then asked to submit your fingerprints for criminal investigations by the FBI or state police? It sounds absurd, even Orwellian. Yet, one by one, over the past 15 years, 29 states have done something similar with our faces: They have allowed police or the FBI to use face-recognition technology to scan and search drivers’ faces for investigations — much like they would the fingerprints of criminals. In this way, most American adults can find themselves in a criminal face- recognition network. In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published a treatise in which he argued that the patterns on our fingers were “an incomparably surer criterion of identity than any other bodily feature.” Today, fingerprinting is ubiquitous. But the limits of the technique are clear: Fingerprinting is a targeted, one-off process whereby a single person is identified, typically through an in-person or on- site interaction. Advanced face recognition, on the other hand, lets police identify people from far away and without interacting with them. It also lets them remotely identify groups of people. Picture police using telescope-like cameras to surreptitiously photograph and identify organized-crime figures at a meeting. Imagine a street surveillance camera that scans the face of every person walking by. Now, picture a world in which body-worn police cameras are equipped with real-time face-scanning software. This is real technology — on sale, in use or coming soon. These tools will catch dangerous criminals, but, left unchecked, they also create profound questions about the future of our society. Will you attend a protest if you know the government can secretly scan your face and identify you — as police in Baltimore did during the Freddie Gray protests? Do you have the right to walk down your street without having your face scanned? If you don’t, will you lead your life in the same way? Will you go to a psychiatrist? A marriage counselor? An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting? In the future, will you call the police if, seconds after seeing you, an officer’s body camera will scan your face and search it against various government databases? What if you have a criminal record? What if you have overstayed your visa? In scope, law-enforcement face-recognition systems recall the National Security Agency’s call-records program, which logged all of our calls in the form of metadata. Face-recognition technology already scans some 125 million adult faces. This has never happened before — not with DNA or fingerprints, which are kept in smaller national networks made up mostly of known or suspected criminals. Yet law-enforcement face-recognition systems have received a fraction of the NSA’s oversight. No federal law governs face recognition. No court decision limits it. On Wednesday morning, a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will mark only the second congressional hearing on the subject. Over 4½ years, the FBI searched drivers’ faces more than 36,000 times — without warrants, audits or regular accuracy tests. Maryland and Ohio enrolled all of their drivers’ faces into criminal face-recognition networks without telling them. In Florida, the oldest and perhaps most frequently used system lets police search someone’s face even if that person is not suspected of a crime. In fact, officers are encouraged to use face recognition “whenever practical.” This rules-free environment is made worse by the fact that face-recognition technology makes mistakes — far more than fingerprints. A 2012 study co- written by an FBI expert found that face recognition makes more mistakes when searching for the faces of African Americans, women and young people. Depending on how a system is configured, these errors could result in innocent people being investigated. You may brush off modern privacy invasions. Perhaps you have nothing to hide. But do you resemble someone who does? **Read more on this topic:** Alan Charles Raul: After NSA revelations, a privacy czar is needed Radley Balko: Police cameras are a tool. It’s how we use this tool that matters.

The biometrics revolution is already here — and you may not be ready for it.

The future is here, and it's biometric identification: You will soon be able to unlock the most recent iPad model with your fingerprint; banks are reportedly capturing voice imprints to catch telephone fraud; and the FBI's facial recognition database is at "full operational capacity" (although it still pales in comparison to Facebook's database). But while these technologies are already influencing consumers' lives, it's not clear that everyone understands the long-term implications of widespread biometric use, experts say. Biometric identifiers are any personal feature that is unique to an individual, including fingerprints, iris scans, DNA, facial features, voice and many other markers. In some cases, these identifiers are already making it into consumer technology. Some brands of laptops have had fingerprint scanners for years -- and the new iPad Air 2 will come equipped with the same Touch ID fingerprint reader already offered on the iPhone.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Apple system stores information from its scans locally -- meaning it's not uploaded to some master database. But the ubiquity of iOS devices may make consumers more comfortable than ever with using biometrics as a means of self-identification. And biometrics are being used by companies and governments in ways that many people may not even be aware of yet. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that two major financial institutions are using voice imprints from customer support calls as part of their fraud protection efforts. Facebook maintains what many experts call the largest facial recognition database in existence to tag individuals in photos, while some of its researchers have been developing an even more advanced system. And the FBI announced last month that its Next Generation Identification, or NGI, system had reached "full operational capacity." The system is supposed to incorporate iris scan, fingerprint and facial recognition databases. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NGI will have 52 million photos in its facial recognition database by 2015 -- most, but not all, of criminals.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But as biometrics become more and more common, experts worry that consumers aren't fully aware of the potential pitfalls of using a personal feature for verification purposes. "Our keys for authentication things used to be things that we had," says Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology. "Then they were things we knew, like passwords. And now they're things that we are." Biometric markers area also immutable, unlike other forms of digital verification techniques. "You can change your password, but you can't change your face or your fingerprints without going through an awful lot of trouble," Bedoya explains. To make matters worse, Bedoya says, most biometrics are also inherently public. "The only people who know my passwords are people who I tell them to and in some cases the services I am accessing," he says. "But I leave my fingerprints on everything I touch, and my face shows up on every camera I pass and my Facebook profile." "Biometrics are not secrets," agrees American Civil Liberties Union analyst Jay Stanley. "Ideally, they're unique to each individual, but that's not the same thing as being a secret." In a recent C-SPAN interview Jeremy Grant, director of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, acknowledges that even as biometrics are gaining popularity, they may not be the best solution for all tasks because of these concerns. "The devil is in the details of how you deploy it," he says.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There are two general ways biometrics are used, Bedoya says: for verification or identification. But the equipment to do either is the same. "A company one day can use your face print or your voice print to ID fraud, but the next day use it to identify a person unknown to them," he explains. Says Stanley: "One-to-one verification is less intrusive than one-to-many. But once you compile a biometrics database, it's hard to put limits on how that's used." Bedoya contends that current laws have not kept pace with technological developments in this area. "Facebook can create the world's largest privately held facial recognition database, legally, because our law has yet to catch up with biometrics," he says. "The law doesn't recognize a right to privacy over anything you reveal to the public, and in this case that includes just showing your face." Just walking around outside and participating in society could leave some biometric markers open to collection, Bedoya says, raising significant privacy concerns as the technology to track these markers from afar advances. It's this last part that worries Stanley the most. "In some ways, the biggest privacy concern is that biometrics become used as unique identifiers for pervasive surveillance, so the things that are of the most concern are the ones that can be captured from a distance," he says. Bedoya and Stanley both doubt that consumers are aware of just how far some of this technology has advanced -- or what it might mean down the road.  "People think of biometrics as this thing out of 'Minority Report,'" says Bedoya. "But the fact is that if you have a driver's license, a passport and a Facebook account, you are likely enrolled in at least three different facial recognition databases."

Everyone calm down about the iPhone’s fingerprint scanner

There were a lot of jokes to be had about the NSA and the fingerprint scanner announced for Apple's newest iPhone -- including the one above courtesy of Internet meme machine reddit. But you can put away your tinfoil hat, because the technology used in most identity-based digital fingerprint scanners means the data they store is very different than the kind desired by law enforcement agencies. "Databases of fingerprints keep full images of all 10 fingerprints so that future techniques for feature detection can be used," according to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. But for mobile devices, "the enrollment or registration will take a few scans to detect features and determine the center of the print, then it will turn the detected features into a reference data structure (a biometric template) that lists features and positions on the print.," Hall explains. It would be that template, rather than a full featured scan that the device stores -- and likely of only one or two fingers, like say both thumbs so you have a back up. Because it's only storing a few data points on select fingers, this data is very unlikely to be useful to law enforcement for things like matching a partial print from crime scene to an individual. So unless Apple did something radically different than earlier types of fingerprint scanners, the type data it will collect and store isn't something that would likely be used to build some sort of huge fingerprint database. And just in case that doesn't put you at ease, Apple claims fingerprint data stored as part of the Touch ID will stay on the phone rather than be uploaded to some central database. It's unclear if Apple will still have access to fingerprints despite that state of affairs, but assuming it doesn't, it would be hard for the NSA to subpoena Apple for that biometric data.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Besides, law enforcement is doing a pretty good job creating their own biometric databases. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) claims to have prints for more than 70 million subjects in its criminal master file and more than 34 million "civil prints." And the records in that database also include "corresponding criminal histories; mug shots; scars and tattoo photos; physical characteristics like height, weight, and hair and eye color; and aliases" that are available 24 hours day, 365 days a year to their local, state, and federal law enforcement partners. The FBI is also working on a Next Generation Identification (NGI) program that will go beyond fingerprints to include things like iris scans and face and vocal recognition.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Of course, none of this completely erases concerns about the larger implications of using fingerprint scanners instead of passwords on electronic devices like an iPhone. As my colleague Brian Fung noted, there are potential legal consequences for the switch from passwords to fingerprints for unlocking devices. For instance, some courts have ruled that forcing a defendant to provide the password for an encrypted hard drive is a violation of the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. It seems unlikely that the same level of protection would apply to fingerprint scans because the police can obtain them merely through access to a suspect's thumb.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

You could be in this FBI facial-recognition system and not even know it

Whenever you upload a photo of yourself or your friends to Facebook, the social network uses a facial-recognition algorithm to identify who's in the picture — and then suggests that you tag them. This might strike some as a little creepy, but at least it's relatively transparent. The same may not be true of a massive facial-recognition setup used by the FBI, which not only combs through pictures of criminals but also allows law enforcement to search the faces of millions of other law-abiding citizens without their knowledge. And now a top federal watchdog says the program risks putting countless Americans under needless suspicion because of the system's lack of safeguards.  Since 2011, law enforcement officials have run tens of thousands of searches on the state driver's license databases alone, in an effort to hunt down suspects. But the FBI hasn't done enough testing to ensure that the system works appropriately, the GAO said. In its 10-page reply to the GAO, the FBI said it "fully recognizes that the automated nature of face recognition technology and the sheer number of photos now available for searching raise important privacy and civil liberties considerations." It added: "For that reason, the FBI has made privacy and civil liberties integral to every decision … regarding its use of face recognition technology." Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment further.  The accuracy and testing issues extend to the non-FBI databases that law enforcement officers rely on, such as those from state governments. "The FBI has entered into agreements to search and access external databases," the report reads, "including millions of U.S. citizens’ drivers’ license and passport photos — but until FBI officials can assure themselves that the data they receive from external partners are reasonably accurate and reliable, it is unclear whether such agreements are beneficial to the FBI and do not unnecessarily include photos of innocent people as investigative leads." Civil liberties advocates say they are alarmed by the news. "When people go to the DMV to take their driver’s license photos, they don’t expect that their faces will be scanned and searched tens of thousands of times by the FBI," said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology. "They don’t expect that their faces will become part of a permanent, digital line-up. What the FBI is doing may be legal, but it isn’t right."

The new iPhone might have a fingerprint scanner. That’s a gamechanger for privacy.

If we're to believe the rumors, Apple's new iPhone may include a fingerprint scanner. In conjunction with — or perhaps in lieu of — a traditional passcode lock, users might soon be able to use their thumbs to gain access to their phones.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University But what's supposed to become an added layer of security might present new vulnerabilities in terms of privacy. How much depends on the way Apple designs its system and the state of the current laws, but there are a few ways biometric data could shift the privacy landscape. The first way has to do with how everyone's fingerprints are stored. There's a slim chance Apple could store your prints in a massive database in the cloud, but that'd be expensive and not a little dangerous. More likely is that your own fingerprints would be stored locally on your device, not in a repository of some kind, according to security researcher Bruce Schneier. "If the system is centralized," writes Schneier, "there will be a large database of biometric information that’s vulnerable to hacking."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University That raises some other questions. Even if the iPhone stores your fingerprints locally, will Apple still have access to the prints on your device? If so, then the company would likely begin to see law enforcement requests for the prints, much as some Internet companies reportedly have received government requests for user passwords in the past.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Fingerprints are a lot like passwords in that they're a piece of data used to secure other data. But passwords are a form of knowledge, whereas it's nearly impossible to "know" someone's fingerprint just by looking at someone's thumb. (You could probably do it using some software, but it'd take at least some work.) And that could have legal implications. For example, in some cases, courts have held that forcing a defendant to provide the password for an encrypted hard drive violates the defendant's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. That protection is unlikely to apply to fingerprint data, which the police can obtain merely by scanning a suspect's thumb. Another important question about fingerprint scanners is whether other applications will be able to make use of them. Just as apps like Instagram can currently take advantage of hardware such as the camera and the built-in GPS of a phone, Apple could decide to give developers access to the scanner. Doing that could bring benefits. It might, for example, kickstart a new app industry that leverages the unique identifying information of a fingerprint. But there are also dangers associated with giving apps access to the fingerprint scanner (and more importantly, the stored fingerprints). Your password can be changed. Your fingerprint can't. So once your fingerprint is leaked to third parties, it may become practically impossible to control who gains access. And every application a user downloads creates some additional risk. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief, was visiting a Virginia Apple store recently when he was approached by a sales rep boasting about how many apps were in the App Store. According to Der Spiegel, Hayden then turned to his wife and remarked, "This kid doesn't know who I am, does he? Four-hundred- thousand apps means 400,000 possibilities for attacks."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Yes, you can board a plane without an ID

Even the best doughnuts in America might not have been worth it. I had left Dottie’s Diner in Connecticut with a heavenly powdered doughnut that pretty much lived up to its billing. But more than three hours later and 150 miles away, I discovered I’d also left my wallet. And I had a flight back to D.C. early the next morning that would require me to present my ID. What to do? As I learned from firsthand experience earlier this month, you can board a plane without identification and get through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening, though not without some hassle. Here are some tips on getting through it:  Get to the airport early. That’s trickier, of course, when you’ve lost your wallet. I had to take an Uber to get to Boston’s Logan International Airport because I couldn’t board public transit or pay for a cab without a subway fare card, credit card, ATM card or cash — all of which were in my wallet back at Dottie’s. When I arrived at the TSA checkpoint, I told the agent there that I didn’t have my driver’s license. He pulled me aside right away and asked what other forms of identification I was carrying. I showed him what I had in my backpack: an ID for work that had my photograph but not my name; some documents with my name but not my photograph; an image of my driver’s license that I had stored on my cellphone. He said none of those were acceptable. Only a physical item with both a photo and a name would do. Then he called a phone number, reaching a database that somehow had lots and lots of information about me. To prove that I was indeed the person who matched that data, the TSA agent asked me to list several of my previous addresses. He asked me to state when I lived at each one. He asked for my brother’s name and birthday. He asked for the last four digits of my parents’ phone number. That worked: The agent said I had verified my identity. I was too relieved to wonder much about how the TSA knew so much about me, and by then I was on to the next step. I had to go through the metal detector and then the most thorough pat-down and bag search I’ve ever been through. I submitted to an examination of every little fold of my clothing without complaint; it was only when an agent insisted on opening up the beautifully wrapped wedding gift I had purchased for a friend that I objected. The TSA agent opened it anyway.  The flight there was fine, though a little thirsty — I couldn’t bring a water bottle through security and couldn’t find a working airport water fountain before boarding. After we took off, I discovered that Spirit Airlines doesn’t give out free cups of water during a flight, and I couldn’t buy a drink without money. When I landed at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, I wasn’t home free yet. I still needed to catch a MARC train from BWI, and I still didn’t have any money with me. I was thinking about just getting on the train and pleading my case with a conductor, but then a man asked me if I knew how to work the ticket machines. “Well, yes, I can help,” I told him brightly. “And would you mind buying a ticket for me too? I can Venmo you the money.” He agreed, and I sent him the $7 by Venmo, since, thankfully, I did have my smartphone. I presume this went better for me than it might have for other people stuck in the same situation. I’m white and fluent in English. I happened to be a small woman asking a tall man, so I wasn’t physically intimidating to him. If the situation were reversed, I wondered if I would have helped him out.  The train got me to Washington’s Union Station. From there, instead of attempting to board a bus or Metro, I simply walked to The Post’s newsroom. I was really thirsty by this point. On my 30-minute walk to The Washington Post, I eventually found a store that accepts LevelUp, a payment app I already had on my phone, so I could get water without cash or a credit card. After it was all over, I called the TSA with some questions. I wanted to know about just who it was on the other end of the line when that agent made the phone call. TSA spokesman Michael McCarthy told me that the agent had called Secure Flight, a TSA office near Annapolis where agents process the name, date of birth and gender of every person who buys a plane ticket. Part of the office’s duties is to tell airlines whether any passengers are on any terrorist watch lists. The employees at Secure Flight can also log into a commercial database — the same one that credit card companies use — to find a thorough profile of almost any adult’s previous addresses and other information. It also turns out that I’m far from the only absent-minded traveler. “This happens every day,” McCarthy told me.  This could happen to you. So here’s what you should do, right this minute, before you lose your wallet: • Take out your driver’s license. Take out your phone. Now take a picture. Have you done it? Really, do it right now. I happened to take a picture of my driver’s license just a few days before losing my wallet, and without that photo on my phone, the whole ordeal would have been even more difficult. The airport wasn’t the only time I was asked for my ID — it turns out everything from picking up an order at Target to visiting a college dorm requires it. • Keep a cash stash and a secret credit card. When I finally made it back from the airport that day, I had some cash and a credit card that I had stored at home. I recommend keeping some money in a place that’s not your wallet, and perhaps even traveling with your money in two different places. • Make use of your smartphone. Download apps such as Uber or Lyft, LevelUp, Apple Pay and your bank’s app — anything that might let you act like you have money when you just have a phone. Be prepared. And also, when you’re enjoying those great Connecticut doughnuts — remember to keep a hold of your wallet.

After the disappearance of Flight 370, the Malaysian government faces 6 big questions

The Malaysian authorities have been slammed by many people for the confusing, and at times contradictory, statements, in the case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It's a situation that has left relatives and friends of those missing not only upset and bewildered, but increasingly angry. As the search drags on, the anger is beginning to spread. People are asking questions not only of Malaysia's actions in the search for Flight 370, but also what the apparent problems with that search say about the Malaysian government. Here's some of the big problems being raised: It quickly emerged after the flight went missing that at least two passengers on board were flying on fake passports. These two men are not believed to have been behind the plane's disappearance, but their trip to Kuala Lumpar does raise some big questions: Why did they travel all the way from Iran to Malaysia in an apparent bid to get to Europe?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The answer, apparently, is because they could not only buy a stolen passport there, but they could use it to get on board a flight to Europe. Malaysia is one of many countries that apparently ignores Interpol's database of stolen passports.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Simple facts released by the authorities have turned out to be wrong, sometimes bizarrely so. For example, on Monday Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said five passengers had checked in but never boarded the plane, and thus their luggage was removed. The implication was that there could not have been any bombs in the luggage. It wasn't true, however. Four passengers had booked tickets, but never turned up at the airport. Their luggage was never on board to be removed.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Stranger still, Azharuddin said that the two passengers on-board the flight on stolen passports did not look Asian, but instead looked like Mario Balotelli, an Italian soccer player of Ghanaian descent. Balotelli looks very little like the two Iranian men who were later revealed. Other facts appear to have simply been left out. It apparently took four days for Malaysian authorities to release reports that military radar had picked up signals that could have been the plane, significantly off course. This information appeared to show that the plane was heading west, instead of east toward its destination in China, and it may be why the search for the plane has spread to the Indian Ocean. As the Times has noted, it was only under a "barrage of intense questioning" from reporters that officials admitted this possibility.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Additionally, U.S. officials have also told the Post today that the aircraft's engine seems to have been running for four hours after it disappeared. This information was apparently shared by Malaysian officials, but not made public.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University According to Transparency International, Malaysia comes 53rd out of 177 countries in terms of corruption. In another survey that Ernst & Young conducted among executives last year, 39 percent of respondents felt that bribery or corrupt practices were widespread in the country, according to Malaysian Insider. Even if corruption didn't play a direct role in whatever happened to Flight 370, this factor will likely be scrutinized in light of Malaysia's confusing response to its disappearance, and the high-profile revelations about fake passports.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Joshua Kurlantzick, a Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains in Businessweek that Malaysia's troubled relationship with other Muslim-majority nations, its liberal visa policy, and its co-operation with the U.S. and Britain has led it to adopt a secretive approach to terrorism. While there is no reason to assume a terror attack right now, Kurlantzick writes, "do not expect the Malaysian government to be the one providing any answers to the public if it turns out terrorism was involved."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Malaysia has been dominated by the United Malays National Organization since independence 1957. It's closed political system runs largely on patronage, the government is rarely criticized by a largely state-controlled press, and opposition leaders run the risk of being jailed: Notably, just before Flight 370 disappeared, Anwar Ibrahim, a prominent and charismatic opposition leader, was found guilty under a rarely used sodomy law, a move that former presidential candidate Al Gore called "extremely disturbing" on his blog.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Some Malaysians are beginning to wonder if such a system has created a systematic lack of accountability. “Malaysians have come to accept that their leaders don’t answer questions,” Ambiga Sreenevasan, a lawyer in the country, told the New York Times. “When you are not seriously challenged in any meaningful way, of course you get complacent and comfortable.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Apple’s next iPhone may have fingerprint recognition

You may already consider your iPhone an extension of your body. And according to developers playing around with the early builds of Apple’s next mobile operating system, you may be putting even more of a personal imprint on your phone in the future. As 9 to5 Mac reported, developers have said that a folder within the latest build of Apple’s forthcoming iOS 7 includes references to a fingerprint scanner on the iPhone, which could be located in the home button. The scanner, the report said, would be able to read the thumbprint of an iPhone user when he or she holds the smartphone with one hand. Apple could not immediately be reached for comment. The thought that your iPhone may — and we should put an emphasis on that word, may — be able to read your thumbprint is an exciting one, but also a feature that should be used and implemented with care. Apple will have to make a pretty strong security case that the biometric data we may put into a device can not only protect data we put in the phone, but also be well-protected itself. The Federal Trade Commission has already taken steps to see what it can do to ensure the safety of fingerprint and facial recognition data — further adoption of this kind of technology will likely also merit close scrutiny from consumer protection agencies. Speculation about Apple possibly including biometric scanning in its devices has been floating around since the company bought the mobile security firm AuthenTec last July. There are plenty of reasons that Apple may be interested in offering users a more secure way to use their devices — notably the potential of mobile payments. Mobile payments are one of those ideas that seems to cycle around every year as being just on the tip of going mainstream. But it’s actually a very difficult concept to get moving in the general marketplace. Retailers don’t want to risk investing in mobile payments unless they see consumer demand, and consumers don’t want to try out these payments unless they’re supported by their favorite retailers. Mobile payment systems such as Google Wallet have made some impact thanks to the fact that more smartphone makers are putting payment chips in their phones, but it’s far from a mainstream activity at the moment. With its Passbook app, Apple has shown that it can handle the management aspect of the digital wallet by letting users save gift cards, loyalty cards, coupons and tickets onto their phones. But it has yet to dip its toe into showing how secure it can make transactions that directly impact the bank account. If Apple does include some sort of mobile payments option in its next phone, it will add a ton of mobile-payment ready customers to its ranks, which in turn could spur greater adoption of mobile payments overall. As for what else Apple might have up its sleeve in the hardware space, there’s renewed speculation that the company will be releasing a cheaper iPhone, thanks to a report that tech blogs including Boy Genius Report picked up from a Chinese Web site claiming to have leaked pictures of cases for a plastic- bodied phone called the iPhone 5C — though the report also noted there are some points about the leaked photo that may suggest it has been faked. A Monday labor report from China Labor Watch, outlining alleged labor violations in the factories of Apple supplier Pegatron, also had the secondary effect of seeming to confirm that Apple is working on a plastic-backed version of the iPhone by detailing the plight of workers making the device. Related stories: Apple supplier’s labor practices in China back under scrutiny after report Apple discloses its suppliers Apple beats low expectations, but profits slump _Sign up today to receive#thecircuit, a daily roundup of the latest tech policy news from Washington and how it is shaping business, entertainment and science._

In China, your face can really open doors now

Your face can get you more than just toilet paper in China.   The monitoring system will alert if strangers follow students when they enter the building, a university official told the Beijing News, according to the Telegraph. For a machine that literally opens a door based on your looks, it can be very forgiving. “Even after I had my hair cut, the machine still recognized me,” a student told People’s Daily Online. “There is a 3-D face model database, so even if you wear makeup or gain weight, the machine recognizes you anyway.” But the system can also create logjams at the door, with some residents complaining on social media that after classes a crowd forms to get in the dormitory since students can only enter one face at a time. The school is the first among Beijing region universities to adopt this technology, which could roll out to another nine undergraduate female dormitories, according to local reports. Facial recognition is seeping into all walks of life in China.    The mobile payment app Alipay already allows its more than 120 million people to transfer money with a scan of the face. Some local governments have used it to identify suspected criminals from surveillance videos.  “If we encounter guests who have diarrhea or any other situation in which they urgently require toilet paper, then our staff on the ground will directly provide the toilet paper,” a park spokesman told the Beijing Wanbao newspaper.  The Economist raises the question of whether it’s a move to cut workers or if such systems could lead to “abuse from marketers, hackers or unscrupulous government entities.”

TSA’s new Pre-Check programs raises major privacy concerns

When the Transportation Security Administration’s Pre-Check formally launches sometime this fall, its trusted-traveler program will already have the enthusiastic endorsement of frequent travelers — and an equally enthusiastic denouncement from privacy advocates. Pre-Check offers an appealing shortcut past the often long airport security lines. After you pay an enrollment fee and submit to a background check and interview, the TSA promises to treat you like a VIP. You’ll be sent to a preferred line, where you can leave your shoes, light outerwear and belt on, leave your laptop in its case and keep your bag of liquids and gels in your carry-on. “I can’t say enough about how much I love it,” says Ralph Velasco, a photographer based in Corona del Mar, Calif. “It’s saved me many, many hours. I’d highly recommend it.” How do Velasco and others know about the benefits of Pre-Check? Because the agency assigned to protect U.S. transportation systems has slowly rolled out the program in 40 airports since 2011. Travelers could opt in to Pre-Check through their frequent-flier program or through another government trusted-traveler initiative, such as Global Entry, a similar program that allows travelers to cut the customs line when they return to the United States from overseas. Velasco, for example, belongs to Global Entry, which is operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But you might think twice before plunking down the $85 that a five-year Pre-Check membership is expected to cost. Privacy advocates and some consumers are uneasy about government trusted-traveler programs like this one. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be approved, and if you aren’t, you may never know why. And Pre-Check status is no guarantee that you can avoid a standard TSA screening, which includes a full-body scan or a so-called “enhanced” pat-down. “If you sign up, you’ll want to keep your nose clean for the rest of your life,” says Gregory Nojeim, a director at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “Because that’s how long the FBI will keep your fingerprints.” True, as part of the application process, TSA collects a cache of personal information about you, including your prints. They’re held in a database for 75 years, and the database is queried by the FBI and state and local law enforcement as needed to solve crimes at which fingerprints are lifted from crime scenes, according to Nojeim. The prints may also be used for background checks. “What started as a criminal database to link arrestees to other crimes is being turned into an all-purpose database of fingerprint identifiers,” Nojeim says. It isn’t what Pre-Check is now — we don’t really know that yet — but what it could someday become that worries privacy-watchers. In the future, it isn’t too difficult to imagine a faster line for pre-screened train passengers waiting to board. TSA’s roaming Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams already selectively screen Amtrak passengers and attendees at special events such as NFL games and political conventions. It also wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see the program requiring passengers to be pre-approved before they can fly. “I would not apply for one of these trusted-traveler programs, which in the past have involved giving the government more information or authorizing it to get more information about me,” says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates on privacy issues. The concept of a line for elite travelers who can afford to pay a fee also strikes many observers as unfair, if not un-American. Critics say that, in the interests of safety, all travelers should be given the same careful screening whenever they fly. Another problem with trusted-traveler programs: You might not be approved, and even if you are, you could lose your preferred status at any time. Consider what happened to Melanie Hansen when she recently applied for the Global Entry program. A few weeks after her interview, she received a form letter rejecting her. Turns out that when she and her husband were leaving Hong Kong 24 years ago, they failed to declare two valuable watches that they’d purchased in China. “I admitted not properly declaring items on my application for Global Entry, and the approximate date of that incident,” says Hansen, a writer who lives in Columbia, S.C. “When the Global Entry representative brought it up, I could only say that I was young and stupid.” Actually, Hansen is fortunate. Many Americans who apply for a trusted-traveler program never find out why they were turned down and are left to speculate. Appeals to the government are often answered with vague responses. The Customs and Border Protection Web site notes that having a criminal record or a past violation of CBP laws, regulations or policies “may render you ineligible” for participation in all trusted-traveler programs, but if you appeal, the exact reasons for denial or suspension are not always given. Program membership can also be terminated at any time, leaving travelers wondering what they did to get themselves expelled but never knowing the answer. But a TSA spokesman said Pre-Check is run by TSA and will have its own appeals process in place, which will allow passengers to ask for a second look if they’re rejected. Assuming that you’re green-lighted for Pre-Check and you don’t do anything that gets you kicked out of the program, you still might be sent to the slow lane. Even passengers with a Pre-Check designation on their boarding passes aren’t guaranteed expedited screening, according to the TSA, which vows to continue incorporating what it calls “random, unpredictable screening measures” into airport security. The early enthusiasm for Pre-Check may be a product of the relief air travelers feel when they’re exempted from the TSA’s normal screening methods, which some have criticized for being invasive and unconstitutional. But as the program expands and more stories begin to emerge of passengers being rejected or removed from this pricey trusted-traveler program, the tide of public opinion could turn. By then it might be too late. The government seems determined to know more about you before you fly, whether you’re willing to pay for the privilege or not. In a little-noticed proposal, the Department of Homeland Security says that it plans to upgrade to its Secure Flight system, which pre-screens all passengers. The results would be indicated on your boarding pass, with some observers speculating that the TSA would use a “green” designation for trusted travelers, “yellow” for non-members of Pre-Check and “red” for probable security risks. TSA says that the new Secure Flight would be used to send non-members who are tagged as low-risk passengers through the Pre-Check lines, even if they aren’t members. Travelers have until Oct. 10 to leave comments on the government’s Regulations.gov Web site. It may be your last, best chance to let the government know what you think of its plan to pre-approve you for travel. E-mail Christopher Elliott at chris@elliott.org. **More fromTravel:** TSA taking some of the hassle out of airport security lines Dulles to be enrollment site for expanded pre-check program Privacy? There’s no such thing on the road. Travel Guide

Justice Department: Agencies need warrants to use cellphone trackers

The Justice Department announced a policy Thursday that will require its law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant to deploy cellphone-tracking devices in criminal investigations and inform judges when they plan to use them. The new policy, announced by Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, should increase transparency around the use of the controversial technology by the FBI and other Justice Department agencies. It imposes the highest legal standard for the device’s use and a uniform standard across the department. The policy change is an acknowledgment by the Justice Department that the use of the devices — sometimes called StingRays, the name of one popular model — raises serious privacy concerns. But the policy does not apply to state and local agencies, which continue to use the tracking technology, often without expressly informing a judge and obtaining a warrant based on probable cause. And some lawmakers have raised concerns about whether exceptions to the warrant requirement are too broad. The new policy, Yates said in a briefing with reporters, was designed “to promote transparency and consistency and accountability, all while being mindful of the public’s privacy interest.” The devices are boxes about the size of a small suitcase that can help investigators locate suspects by identifying signals coming from their cellphones. But the machines, which simulate cell towers, also sweep up data from innocent bystanders in the suspect’s vicinity. The data captured by the devices are serial numbers from cellphones, not GPS coordinates. The technology used by federal authorities does not capture e-mails, texts, contact lists, images or any other data from the phone, officials said. Such devices have also been deployed on planes flown by the U.S. Marshals Service in pursuit of criminal suspects. Other federal agencies that have purchased the equipment include the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Justice Department policy does not apply to other departments or overseas investigations by the FBI and other agencies. “The Department of Justice’s new policies are finally starting to catch up with the rapid advancement of this tracking technology,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. But he said that he has “serious questions” about the exceptions to the warrant requirement and that he will press the department to justify them. The new policy waives the warrant requirement for exigent circumstances. These include the need to protect human life “or avert serious injury,” prevent the imminent destruction of evidence, the hot pursuit of a fleeing felon, or the prevention of escape by a convicted fugitive from justice. The technology, which is powerful enough to penetrate the walls of homes, was developed for use by intelligence agencies and has since been adopted by law enforcement. At least 53 state and local law enforcement agencies in 21 states and the District of Columbia have bought such devices. Under the new policy, data gathered by authorities must be deleted as soon as the suspect’s phone is located, or if they fail to locate it, all data gathered must be deleted at least once a day. In cases in which officials know where a suspect is but do not know his or her phone number, they may set up a simulator nearby to try to identify through patterns over time the suspect’s phone. In those cases, the data gathered must be disposed of either when they’ve located the phone or at least once every 30 days. Authorities must also keep data that could help prove a suspect’s innocence. “This is a really positive development that makes important strides towards protecting the privacy rights of Americans,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It leaves some questions unanswered, but it is a strong improvement over the patchwork of less protective policies we saw before.” The department’s policy resulted from a review of existing practice in the wake of a number of high-profile news stories focusing on the concerns of privacy advocates and judges, who often were unaware the devices were being used. The policy now also requires that in applying to a court for a warrant, prosecutors and law enforcement officers must disclose the planned use of the tracking technology and how it will be used. In some cases, after consulting with federal authorities, state and local prosecutors have settled criminal cases rather than proceed with prosecutions that could reveal to defendants details about the use of the devices. The policy’s warrant requirement tracks with the FBI’s, which as of April required a search warrant before agents could use a cellphone tracker. Prior to the change, officials said, some Justice Department agencies sought a court order based merely on an assertion that the data sought was relevant to a criminal investigation. Often, the order was used to obtain cell-tower data from a phone company — a preliminary step before using a StingRay, and the judge often was not told that the cell-site simulator was going to be used. The policy also requires annual reporting by each division or district office to its agency headquarters reflecting the number of times a cell-tower simulator is used; the number of uses at the request of other agencies, including state or local law enforcement; and the number of uses in emergencies.

The iPhone may soon be able to map your face for 3-D selfies

Apple declined to comment on the rumors.    But experts say that Apple's reported plan to use a depth-sensing camera for the feature addresses those issues. “You can get much more accurate readings,” said Chester Wisniewski of the security firm Sophos. “There are things that can mess with visual sensors. This sees through makeup, to tissue.” Plus, he said, this type of camera isn't easily fooled; even a 3-D-printed model of a face shouldn't trick it.  But there's one concern about facial recognition technology that may not be resolved by a depth-sensing camera: privacy. The technology would likely give these companies a pretty comprehensive map of your face, which may give some people the creeps and raise fears about how the identification data could be used. Of course, we won't know how Apple will handle this data until an official announcement. And we won't know until then whether the feature can be disabled by the user.   While some privacy experts lauded Apple for taking those steps, however, they also called on the company to give customers more information about how the data is collected, used and shared.

Apple’s iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner reportedly hacked by German group

A team of hackers in Germany are claiming that they have successfully cracked Apple’s new fingerprint scanner, which the company calls TouchID, and were able to unlock an iPhone 5s using an artificial copy of a fingerprint. As the BBC reported, the hackers say they bypassed the security system by “photographing a fingerprint left on a glass surface” and creating a fake finger to press on the sensor. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On its company Web site, the firm says that fingerprint security is strong because the chances that another fingerprint may contain a section similar enough to unlock a user’s phone is 1 in 50,0000. But the group claiming to have cracked Apple’s security feature, the Chaos Computer Club, said that all it had to do to trick the sensor was to make a “higher resolution” phony finger, which could be done by pulling a print off glass. “As we have said now for more than [sic] years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything, one of the group’s members said in a blog post. “You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints.” The group also posted a video showing someone programming an iPhone 5s to recognize one finger, and then using a cover over a different finger that does not appear to be programmed into the phone to unlock the device. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) had already asked the company for more information on how the device stores information on users’ fingerprints, using some of that same arguments for caution. “If someone hacks your password, you can change it, as many times as you want. You can’t change your fingerprints,” Franken wrote in a letter to Apple. “You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.” The fingerprint scanner is not the only security feature on the iPhone, but it can be used to replace the standard four-digit pin in many cases. Users who opt to use the fingerprint scanner will still have to use a pin when they restart their phones if they haven’t unlocked their phones for more than 48 hours or when they want to open or change settings on the “passcode and fingerprint setting” menu. In another security issue, outside researchers have identified a bug on Apple’s new operating system, iOS 7. They said people can bypass the lockscreen and to send messages, make calls and see some contact information on users’ phones by using the Siri voice assistant from the lock screen. Cenzic, a security firm based in California, said Friday that it had uncovered the flaw and that it found that the Siri issued also affected some functions in iOS 6. “This vulnerability indicates that there is a thin line between security and convenience,” wrote Cenzic’s vice president of engineering, Tyler Rorabaugh. “Functionality like calling phone numbers, sending messages and sending emails, even if the phone is locked, can be debated as security over convenience, but there is no setting that can control this if Siri is enabled. A user might need to disable SIRI completely to stop this.” In a statement, an Apple spokeswoman confirmed that the company was aware of the Siri bug and investigating the issue. “Apple takes user security very seriously. We are aware of this issue, and will deliver a fix in a future software update,” she said in a statement. Related stories: Apple’s iPhone 5s and 5c: Review Roundup Al Franken is worried the new iPhone fingerprint scanner might be a privacy menace _Follow The Post’s new tech blog,The Switch, where technology and policy connect._

Can airlines force you to check a bag?

Space is at a premium on your airplane, and airlines with crammed overhead bins are often asking — and forcing — passengers to check bags at the gate. A reader in our recent online chat asked why this is: “I had purposely packed carry ons because I didn’t want the bags lost or delayed. Well, you can guess what happened [. . .] It was extremely frustrating to say the least. How can they force you to check when you bring a carry on?” They can, Travel columnist Christopher Elliott said. And they frequently do. “The only way around it is to pack light or to keep all your valuables on your person,” Elliott said. “Also, it helps to be in an earlier boarding group.” You can be sure you are in an earlier boarding group, but it will cost you. Airlines offer an option to pay for preferred or early boarding, which will give you the best access to overhead bins before they fill up. Another option? If you’re carrying an essential medical device, let the airline know. You can also be sure to carry a shopping bag, purse or messenger bag that is small enough to fit under the seat in front of you. Airlines won’t ask you to check a bag that small, and you can keep essentials (wallets, passports, laptops and medications) in it. **Read morefrom Travel:** Making the case for luggage tracking The FAA funding bill may mean big changes for fliers — or none The five best places to travel while the dollar is strong

U.S. official: ‘Too soon to tell what happened’ to missing Malaysia flight

Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said Sunday that it's too early to say what caused a flight en route from Malaysia to China to go missing. "It is too soon to tell what happened, why it happened," Blinken said on CNN's "State of the Union." Reports that two passengers on the Malaysia Airlines flight, which went missing Saturday, apparently traveled together with stolen passports "raise questions and concerns," said Blinken. But he added that it's too early to draw conclusions.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Blinken said the U.S. has dispatched the FBI and other experts to help with the investigation. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" that the investigation is "certainly in its early stages. He added, "It's not common but its not unheard of either that stolen passports can be repurposed and used."

State photo-ID databases become troves for police

The faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases that state officials assembled to prevent driver’s-license fraud but that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations. The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial-recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens. The most widely used systems were honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as soldiers sought to identify insurgents. The increasingly widespread deployment of the technology in the United States has helped police find murderers, bank robbers and drug dealers, many of whom leave behind images on surveillance videos or social-media sites that can be compared against official photo databases. But law enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities. Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face. “Where is government going to go with that years from now?” said Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann, a conservative Republican who has fought the creation of such systems there. “Here your driver’s license essentially becomes a national ID card.” Facial-recognition technology is part of a new generation of biometric tools that once were the stuff of science fiction but are increasingly used by authorities around the nation and the world. Though not yet as reliable as fingerprints, these technologies can help determine identity through individual variations in irises, skin textures, vein patterns, palm prints and a person’s gait while walking. The Supreme Court’s approval this month of DNA collection during arrests coincides with rising use of that technology as well, with suspects in some cases submitting to tests that put their genetic details in official databases, even if they are never convicted of a crime. Facial-recognition systems are more pervasive and can be deployed remotely, without subjects knowing that their faces have been captured. Today’s driver’s-   license databases, which also include millions of images of people who get non-driver ID cards to open bank accounts or board airplanes, typically were made available for police searches with little public notice. Thirty-seven states now use facial-recognition technology in their driver’s-license registries, a Washington Post review found. At least 26 of those allow state, local or federal law enforcement agencies to search — or request searches — of photo databases in an attempt to learn the identities of people considered relevant to investigations. “This is a tool to benefit law enforcement, not to violate your privacy rights,” said Scott McCallum, head of the facial-recognition unit in Pinellas County, Fla., which has built one of the nation’s most advanced systems. The technology produces investigative leads, not definitive identifications. But research efforts are focused on pushing the software to the point where it can reliably produce the names of people in the time it takes them to walk by a video camera. This already works in controlled, well-lit settings when the database of potential matches is relatively small. Most experts expect those limitations to be surmounted over the next few years. That prospect has sparked fears that the databases authorities are building could someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas. Whatever the security benefits — especially at a time when terrorism remains a serious threat — the mass accumulation of location data on individuals could chill free speech or the right to assemble, civil libertarians say. “As a society, do we want to have total surveillance? Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are . . . without any immediate probable cause?” asked Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied government facial databases. “A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.” Facial-recognition systems analyze a person’s features — such as the shape of eyes, the curl of earlobes, the width of noses — to produce a digital “template” that can be quickly compared with other faces in a database. The images must be reasonably clear, though newer software allows technicians to sharpen blurry images, bolster faint lighting or make a three-dimensional model of a face that can be rotated to ease comparisons against pictures taken from odd angles. For the state officials issuing driver’s licenses, the technology has been effective at detecting fraud. As millions of images are compared, the software typically reveals the identities of hundreds or thousands of people who may have more than one driver’s license. When searches are made for criminal investigations, typically a photo called a “probe” is compared against existing images in a database. The analytical software returns a selection of potential matches, though their accuracy can vary dramatically. A probe image of a middle-aged white man, for example, could produce a possible match with a 20-something African American woman with similarly shaped eyes and lips. Many systems include filters that allow searchers to specify race, sex and a range of possible ages for a suspect. “It’s a fine line where you need to protect the rights of the citizens, but you also are protecting the right of citizens when you ferret out crime,” said Anthony J. Silva, administrator of Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles and a former town police chief. Establishing identity, Silva said, is essential to effective police work: “I can’t tell you how many times I was handed fraudulent documents. And when you are on the street at 3 a.m., who do you call?” Pennsylvania’s Justice Network, which has allowed police anywhere in the state to compare a facial image with mug-shot databases, has become a key investigative tool, officials said, and last month it added access to 34 million driver’s-license photos. (Some residents have several images, taken over years.) A detective in Carlisle, Pa., attempting to learn the real name of a suspect known on the street as “Buddha the Shoota” compared a Facebook page picturing the man with the mug-shot database and got a promising lead. “Facebook is a great source for us,” said Detective Daniel Freedman, who can do facial searches from his department-issued smartphone. “He was surprised when we walked in and said, ‘How you doin’, Buddha?’  ” He said the suspect responded, “How you know that?” — to which Freedman replied simply, “We’re the police.” There typically is little concern when facial-recognition systems relying on criminal databases help identify suspects in narrowly targeted investigations. But searches against images of citizens from driver’s licenses or passports, as opposed to mug shots of prisoners, raise more complex legal questions. Police typically need only to assert a law enforcement purpose for facial searches, whether they be of suspects or potential witnesses to crimes. Civil libertarians worry that this can lead to broadly defined identity sweeps. Already many common but technically illegal activities — blocking a sidewalk, cycling at night without a light or walking a dog without a leash — can trigger police stops and requests for identification, they say. “The potential for abuse of this technology is such that we have to make sure we put in place the right safeguards to prevent misuse,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “We also need to make sure the government is as transparent as possible in order to give the American people confidence it’s using this technology appropriately.” A few states, including Washington, Oregon and Minnesota, have legal barriers to police accessing facial-recognition technology in driver’s-license registries. New Hampshire’s legislature passed a law prohibiting motor vehicle officials from collecting any biometric data. But the broader trend is toward more sophisticated databases with more expansive access. The current version of the Senate’s immigration bill would dramatically expand an electronic photo-verification system, probably relying on access to driver’s-license registries. Montana has a facial-recognition system to help prevent fraud in its driver’s-license registry, but officials are still debating whether to allow police any kind of access. “I can see it’s an amazingly powerful tool. It has a lot of possibilities,” said Brenda Nordlund, the administrator of the Motor Vehicle Division there. “I don’t know if that’s what citizens expect when they come in and get their driver’s-license pictures taken.” There are substantial variations in how states allow police searches of their driver’s-license databases. Some allow only licensing-agency officials to conduct the actual searches. Others let police do searches themselves, but only from a headquarters office. And still others have made the technology available to almost any officer willing to get trained. The District of Columbia has facial-recognition technology for its driver’s-license registry but does not permit law enforcement searches, spokeswoman Vanessa Newton said. Virginia motor vehicle officials have run a pilot program experimenting with facial-recognition technology but have not made a decision on whether police will have access to such a system if it is eventually installed, spokeswoman Sunni Brown said. Maryland does not use such technology in its driver’s-license registry. Police long have had access to some driver’s-license information — including photographs — when they are investigating criminal suspects whose names they know. But facial-recognition technology has allowed police working from a photo of an unknown person to search for a name. Las Vegas police, for example, called on authorities two states away in Nebraska for help solving a homicide. Based on a tip, investigators had a page from a social-media site featuring the image of an unknown suspect; the tipster said the woman in the photo had lived in Nebraska. The facial-recognition software produced a hit on a driver’s license there, cracking open the case. “That picture hung on our wall for a long time,” said Betty Johnson, vehicle services administrator in Nebraska. “We are pretty darn proud of that one.” A single private contractor, MorphoTrust USA, which is based in a suburban Boston office park but is owned by French industrial conglomerate Safran, dominates the field of government facial-   recognition technology systems. Its software operates in systems for the State Department, the FBI and the Defense Department. Most facial-recognition systems installed in driver’s-license registries use the company’s technology, it says. The largest facial database belongs to the State Department and includes about 230 million searchable images, split almost equally between foreigners who apply for visas and U.S. citizens who hold passports. Access for police investigations, though, is more limited than with state driver’s-license databases. The FBI’s own facial-recognition database has about 15 million criminal mug shots. Bureau officials are pushing to expand that by tens of millions more by encouraging states to upload their criminal justice photos into the national system. The FBI does not collect driver’s-license images, but the bureau has developed access to state systems that do. That effort began with“Project Facemask,” which compared images of federal suspects and fugitives against photos in North Carolina’s driver’s-license registry, helping identify a double-homicide suspect who had changed his name and moved to that state from California. The FBI now has agreements giving access to driver’s-license databases in 10 states for investigative purposes. Many motor vehicle officials say they also run searches for federal agents who request them, typically through “fusion centers” that ease the sharing of information among state, local and federal authorities. Depending on the importance of the case, federal agents can potentially tap facial databases held by driver’s-license registries, state criminal justice systems, the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department, which has several million searchable faces, mostly Afghans and Iraqi men. Together these amount to an estimated 400 million facial images in government hands, though the rules on access to each database vary. (Often an individual is pictured in more than one database, or even more than once in a single one.) Federal investigators searched several facial databases in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in April, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But the images were not clear enough to produce hits, even though both of the alleged bombers had driver’s licenses in Massachusetts, a state that uses facial-recognition technology. Yet as facial databases grow and video cameras become more prevalent and powerful, such searches will become more effective, experts say. “More and more, what you’re going to see is criminals and other people whose images were taken over the years are digitized, [and] put into these databases, and incidents like Boston will be easier to solve,” said James Albers, senior vice president for government operations for MorphoTrust USA. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office says its facial-recognition unit conducts 5,000 searches a month and has assisted in nearly 1,000 arrests since 2004. A bulletin board in the office is lined with success stories: A teenage boy who was sending lewd messages to young girls through multiple Facebook accounts was identified, as was a suicide victim and an alleged bank robber — whose scowling image was captured by the branch’s surveillance camera. In another case, a man reported a stolen computer but then noticed that an online photo album he long had maintained was automatically uploading new snapshots of a couple he did not recognize. When the sheriff’s office ran a search, the pictures matched faces in both the mug-shot and driver’s-license databases. The couple soon fingered an acquaintance who was arrested for stealing the computer and then selling it to them. The sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes St. Petersburg and its suburbs, built its facial-recognition system over more than a decade, relying for most of that time on mug shots collected at prisons and police booking centers across the state. The system now has partnerships with the sheriff’s offices in more than half of Florida’s counties and many other government agencies. This year the unit added the ability to search more than 20 million driver’s-license records, bringing the number of facial images in the database to 30 million, officials say. The Pinellas County system also has access to 250,000 mug shots — though not driver’s-license images — from the Northern Virginia Regional Identification System, a joint project of Washington area jurisdictions, including some Maryland counties. Pinellas Deputy Jeremy Dressback, a community policing officer, uses access from the laptop in his patrol car to keep track of the people he encounters on a dingy country stretch notorious for prostitution, drugs and seedy motels. On a recent patrol, when a scruffy-looking man he did not recognize walked up to one of the motels, Dressback stopped him on suspicion of trespassing and asked for identification. The man did not have a driver’s license but gave his name — James A. Shepherd, age 33, from Kentucky — and said he was staying at the motel with his girlfriend. Dressback pulled out a digital camera, asked permission to take a picture and then snapped a shot. When the image did not match anyone in the facial-recognition system, Dressback downloaded the picture to his laptop computer and attached it to a field report on Shepherd as a “suspicious person.” Shepherd, who said he was a roofer returning from work, grumbled at the intrusion, even though he had agreed to have his picture taken. “I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database,” Shepherd said before adding, “But I have been arrested quite a few times.” When his girlfriend walked by moments later — they were indeed staying at the motel — Shepherd directed her toward their room. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ll be in his database in 10 seconds.” _Sign up today to receive#thecircuit, a daily roundup of the latest tech policy news from Washington and how it is shaping business, entertainment and science._

Crud on your cellphone screen reveals more about your life than you might think

Are you a coffee drinker? Do you slather on sunscreen? How about mosquito repellent? You don’t have to tell a team of University of California at San Diego biochemists — they just need to borrow your phone. To them, the answer to such questions lies within a thin layer of grime on your cellphone’s screen and case.    They could tell if someone used an antifungal medication, skin inflammation or hair loss treatments, antidepressants and eye drops. Trace amounts of caffeine indicated a tea or coffee drinker. The scientists found a molecule associated with citrus fruits on the hand and phone of one subject. That person, naturally enough, was a “large consumer of oranges and uses a lot of citrus-based cleaning products,” the biochemists wrote in the paper. Plant sugar and sunscreen indicated a person spent time outside. Capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers, revealed a spicy food fan. Some signatures, like the anti-mosquito pesticide DEET, remained detectable for up to five months after application.   The goal of this recent research was not to create a way to identify a particular person by phone. The signatures were not so specific that they could replace a fingerprint. Rather, the scientists envisioned that the technique could be used to gather details about someone’s routine — a boon, the authors said, for fighting crime. (And to the National Institute of Justice, which funded the study.) “The molecular analysis would help a criminal investigator in narrowing down the owners of the object (e.g., a suspect of a crime scene or understanding the habits of a terrorist),” they wrote in the paper, “by identifying specific lifestyle characteristics from objects they touch.”

Three-hour lead time and luck are keys to avoiding TSA slowdowns this summer

You know that part of your vacation where you hold your breath and hope for the best? It used to happen just before the plane landed, in that precarious moment between heaven and earth. But lately, it’s been taking place on terra firma, when you arrive at the airport and you’re confronted by a Transportation Security Administration screening. For good reason. A few months ago, the TSA announced that screening with a full-body scanner would no longer be optional for some passengers, meaning there’s a better chance than ever you’ll be forced through one of the machines. What the agency euphemistically calls a “random and unpredictable” security screening adds an aspect of fear and uncertainty to an already fear-inducing and uncertain process. And then there are the long lines, which have been blamed on cutbacks related to the TSA’s PreCheck program. The agency assigned to protect America’s transportation systems incorrectly predicted that more passengers would sign up for its trusted traveler program, so it cut staffing by 10 percent. The result? Record lines. The TSA says it’s taking steps to reduce the wait times. The coping mechanisms have evolved in the past few months, so if you’re a frequent air traveler, you probably already know a lot of the following strategies, at least subconsciously. But with the summer travel season about to get underway, you may find yourself face to face with a TSA agent, unsure what to do. Travelers can avoid that fate with a little planning and a few insider strategies. First, give yourself time. Lots of time. Josh Nathan, a professor at the Art Institute of Colorado, allows himself three hours to get through the TSA screening in Denver. That’s no typographical error. It’s advice he would pass along to anyone who’s thinking of flying this summer. “Plan for three hours, and be delighted if you make it to your airplane,” he says, adding, “If that departs on time, you feel like you won an unpublicized lottery.” Why so long? Nathan reports that the Denver TSA, once one of the most efficient of the agency’s operations, has randomly closed checkpoints. A few weeks ago, the airport made headlines when TSA wait times exceeded one hour. To calm angry passengers, airport staff reportedly handed out bottled water, parceled out candies and brought in therapy dogs to soothe frayed nerves. There are shortcuts, but they’ll cost you. Sonita Lontoh, a San Francisco technology executive and frequent flier, recommends paying $100 for a five-year membership in the Global Entry program, which also gives you TSA PreCheck eligibility. And the PreCheck lines, which allow you to get screened without removing the computer from your bag, taking off your shoes or passing through a full-body scanner, are significantly shorter. “It’s much faster,” she says. For example, on a recent flight from Orlando, the difference between using the TSA PreCheck lane and the regular lane was more than an hour. How does she know? A colleague without PreCheck went through the regular line, and she didn’t see her until shortly before their flight began boarding. There are other ways to cut the line. In Orlando, for example, you can also use Clear, a private biometric screening system. It costs about $15 a month to belong to Clear, which can be used at a number of airports in cities including San Francisco, Dallas and Baltimore (but not Washington). Neither Clear nor Global Entry are practical solutions for infrequent travelers, though. What you wear this summer matters, says Katelyn O’Shaughnessy, a travel agent from Venice, Calif., who has advised countless clients on how to handle the TSA. With the agency beefing up security in the wake of various terrorist threats, you don’t want to wear anything that could slow down the process. “Don’t wear shirts or pants with extraneous pockets, buttons, zippers, or anything with sequined bling on it,” she says. “These items tend to appear suspicious on the scanner, which is programmed to flag anything out of the ordinary.” Unfortunately, it’s possible to follow all of this advice and still fall afoul of the TSA’s random and unpredictable security. Kimberly Marcus, an educational consultant from Alfred, N.Y., thought she had done everything right when she showed up for her recent flight at the Tri-Cities Regional Airport in Blountville, Tenn. But an alarm sounded when she stepped through the scanner, and an agent ordered her to submit to an “enhanced” pat-down. “An agent felt up my leg until she met resistance,” she says. “Several times. The agent also felt across the front of me with her fingertips. This routine is not at all routine or acceptable to me, and I found what would be sexual assault in other contexts to be very disturbing and upsetting.” And that’s the problem with the TSA this summer. The expert advice works, but not every time. Which is to say, you can show up three hours early and still miss your plane. Trusted traveler programs don’t always send you to the front of the line, and you could still get a once-over by an agent and a possible delay. You can wear all the right clothes and still set off alarms. Of course, nothing can prepare you for a prison-style pat-down at the hands of a TSA agent. And nothing can guarantee you’ll avoid it, either. But if you take a few precautions, you can come close. Don’t forget to breathe. Elliott is a consumer advocate, journalist and co-founder of the advocacy group Travelers United. Email him at chris@elliott.org. **** **More fromTravel:** What the TSA’s new body-scanner rules mean for you Don’t mind the wet nose: TSA enlists more dogs to screen passengers Travelers are less certain about the airport screening experience than they’ve been in years Read past Navigator columns here

Odd, yet true, stories on how fliers ‘forgot’ their guns in their carry-ons

Gun owners must know that they shoulder an extremely heavy burden to make sure their firearms are used and handled in a responsible way. And yet, about once a month, some idiot goes through a security checkpoint at one of the Washington region’s three airports with a firearm inside a carry-on bag. Besides creating a potential safety threat, these gun-toting travelers often further jam up already long lines of passengers waiting for security screening. The drill goes more or less like this: a TSA scanner alerts airport police that X-rays have detected a firearm in a traveler’s carry-on bag. Police seize the bag. The police ask who owns the bag. The bag’s owner identifies himself. The police inform the bag’s owner there’s a gun inside. Shock ensues, usually. In almost every case we looked at, the gun owner says, “I forgot.” Among the people who have been charged with unlawful possession of a firearm on airport property are the principal of a clinical research-monitoring company, a New Jersey attorney, and a Maryland dentist with a prior criminal conviction. The Maryland dentist blamed his girlfriend for leaving the gun in his bag. A Virginia woman blamed her big purse. It seems incredible that anyone could forget about carrying a lethal weapon that a) could go off inside the airport or, worse, aboard an airplane, with potentially catastrophic results  b) could fall into the hands of a bad guy aboard a plane (and who’s to know if the bearer is a bad guy?)  and c) could land the person, theoretically, in jail?  Most of the firearms were loaded, by the way. That’s right: most had live rounds in them, sometimes even with a bullet chambered and ready to fire.  So we talked to some experts on memory about this, and all of them were more or less skeptical that anyone can really “forget” something like a firearm. We’ll get to them in a later post. But in the meantime, as an occasional feature, we thought it might be interesting to hear from the people who were stopped trying to pass a security checkpoint at one of the three airports in the Washington region. So we set out trying to reach everyone whose firearm was intercepted by the TSA in 2015 and, usually, charged by law enforcement officials assigned to the airport in question. Whether the courts are treating this seriously enough is also a question for a later post.  Here are some of their stories, as told from police and court documents and interviews: Say this about Dennis Stephen Oddo: he has chutzpah, to judge from a police report of his encounter with the authorities at National Airport last year over improperly carrying a firearm onto airport property. On Jan. 12, 2015, police were alerted that Oddo had checked a bag with U.S. Airways with an undeclared firearm inside. The key word here is “undeclared,” because stowing a firearm in checked luggage is the only to lawful way to transport a firearm on a commercial flight. But you have to keep it unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container. You also have to declare each one with the airline. But in this instance, the scanner found a Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic handgun in the bag. It was loose inside an inner pocket. It was unloaded, and there was no ammunition packed with it. And Oddo failed to declare it, authorities said. Oddo, 65, a former Maryland resident who now lives in Jupiter, Fla., must be a smart guy. He was a dentist after all, who was licensed to practice from 1978 until June 2005, according to a record with the Maryland Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. How could he have been so careless? Oddo was already at the gate waiting to board his flight for Palm Beach, Fla. when police had him paged. The officer asked Oddo if he had packed his own bags. He said he had, with help from his girlfriend. The officer asked if had anything that needed to be declared. “Not that I know of,” Oddo told the officer. Oddo was then asked if he owned any firearms. He said he didn’t, but his girlfriend did. Then he described one that was similar to the firearm found in his luggage, the report says. When an officer asked him if he had packed the firearm in his bag, Oddo said he had not. He told the officer that his girlfriend must have done it without his knowledge. On to the girlfriend: with Oddo’s help, police called her up. Did she own the firearm? Yes, indeed. She told police that she had left it at Oddo’s place last year. And she told police she hadn’t put the gun in his bag. The officer told Oddo’s girlfriend that police were confiscating the weapon, and she would have to make arrangements to get it back. Then things became even more interesting. Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) police discovered that Oddo had been involved in a similar incident at the airport on Aug. 3, 2013. That’s when police obtained a warrant for his arrest. In 1980, Oddo was convicted of 70 drug-related offenses following a trial in Montgomery County. Witnesses testified that Oddo passed around Demerol, Oxycodone, morphine and other narcotics to friends and associates and presided over  sex orgies in his office and home. He was a heavy drug user himself who snapped Polaroids of the good times and sometimes bragged that his family had ties to organized crime in New York, according to Montgomery County Circuit Court papers. Oddo, who was then a licensed pilot and firearms dealer, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. The late Judge Joseph M. Mathias suspended all but 10 years; Oddo applied for reconsideration and eventually served about 16 months behind bars. Records show that besides being a licensed dealer, he owned 19 firearms and surrendered them for storage following his conviction. Which brings us back to the airport. How does this guy have a firearm in the first place? And why would he try to bring it through security. We wanted to find out, but efforts to reach Oddo through public telephone numbers, email and the postal service were unsuccessful. –++– On Oct. 1, Jerlysha T. Williams was arrested at BWI airport after an X-ray scan showed that she was carrying a loaded .38 caliber Ruger handgun in her carryon bag, according to a complaint filed by the Maryland Transportation Authority Police. Williams, who was taken into custody, was charged with criminal possession of a handgun and violating state regulations by interfering with security procedures. Williams, 30, of Jacksonville, Fla., told the officer that someone had been killed in her neighborhood so she kept the firearm in her bag for protection, the complaint says. Efforts to reach Williams by mail, email and a publicly listed telephone number weren’t successful. –++– On May 2, 2015, same deal: this time, the person with the gun was Margaret Hunt Freeburg, 63, of Woodbridge, Va. Scanners detected a gun in her carry-on at National Airport. It was a North American Arms .22 magnum revolver. It’s a tiny weapon, the sort of thing you imagine someone hiding under a poker table or in a garter. It wasn’t loaded. There were, however, 23 hollow-point bullets in the same small black zipper pouch with it, a police report says. The responding police officer asked her: did she pack her own bag? Yes, Freeburg replied. Was there anything in the bag the officer should know about, such as “any bombs, guns or grenades?” No, Freeburg said. And then the officer did the big reveal. “Oh, no,” Freeburg was reported to have said, when she saw the police remove the zippered pouch from her bag. She said she hadn’t seen the pouch when she was packing her luggage for her flight on JetBlue Airlines that morning to Fort Lauderdale. The report states that she carries the firearm “when she visits her mother,” which on first glance made me wonder about her mom. In an interview, Freeburg offered the Women’s Bottomless Purse defense for her lapse. “Women carry big bags and they carry all sorts of things in those big bags. And you never take anything out. You never use it. And you just don’t know it’s there. They’re at the bottom,” Freeburg said. That might be why, she said, that this happens to women more than men, or so she had heard. But this sounded odd, since women in general are less likely to own or carry firearms. Freeburg rejected that idea: “That’s the only equalizer out there for women.” It is, she said, something only for a “drastic emergency.” I asked her then, what use would the firearm be if she were in a tight spot and she needed to use it and it was at the bottom of purse. “Trust me, women know to dig,” Freeburg said with a chuckle. But Freeburg, who implored us not to use her name, said she was mortified by her mistake. “Man, I’m telling you: It’s brutal. It is brutal. Because you haven’t intentionally done anything, but you’re punished. And you are punished,” Freeburg said. “Your reputation is damaged. There is no way it’s not, because you sound like a nut: ‘What crazy person would go to the airport like that? What crazy person would do that?’ And it’s not anything like that. It’s just an accident.” Still. We’re not talking about a TSA-banned bottle of liquid at the bottom of a purse. We’re talking about a firearm, which is an expensive item (hers goes for upwards of $200), a highly regulated item and, of course, a lethal item. That’s why Freeburg, who has not owned firearms a long time, attended a course to help certify people to receive concealed carry permits. She said she didn’t get the permit because she doesn’t want to carry. Freeburg said she only ever takes the weapon with her when she visits her parents in a remote part of Virginia. And it was just easy to miss, especially inside a black pouch at the bottom of a large dark bag. “This awesome weapon I had — I think it’s about a 3 ½-inch thing — it’s such a tiny thing,” she said. “It’s black in the bottom. I don’t see very well. I was in a hurry packing, and just did not remember it was in there. And that was kind of what happened to me. I was late throwing everything in a bag. That tiny black case in a big black bag, and then everything on top of it – I was just shocked. I was absolutely stunned. But I don’t think people really are careless with them. I think they just have things in their bags and just don’t realize it.” Airport authorities issued a citation and confiscated the weapon. Police issued a citation for having a firearm in the airport. The experience completely ruined her Fort Lauderdale vacation, she said. “It was the most traumatizing experience I have ever had.”

Why the next iPhone may ditch its fingerprint reader, and other rumors

As the expected fall debut of Apple’s new phones nears, rumors have taken hold about the new models this week, based on new reports from analysts and leaks from Apple’s supply chain. As with all speculative reports, it’s best to take this information with a grain (or shaker) of salt. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Here’s a breakdown of what people are saying and what we make of it all.  There has long been an expectation that the next high-end version of the iPhone would have a new type of screen called an OLED (organic light-emitting diode). OLED screens boast more vivid colors, deeper blacks and improved battery life. But they are also more difficult to produce, particularly at the levels that Apple requires for the iPhone.    Apple is expected to ditch the home button for the high-end iPhone in favor of an edge-to-edge screen. But that change would eliminate the location of the fingerprint reader. That’s led some to wonder whether Apple will move the reader, embed it in the screen or even get rid of it altogether. Noted Apple analyst Ming Chi Kuo of KGI Securities wrote in a recent note that Apple won’t put the fingerprint reader in the display — something many hoped the company would do to be more consistent with its current design. But the report didn’t indicate where the fingerprint reader may go.  Still, it would be surprising to see Apple drop the fingerprint reader, particularly given how hard it has pushed Touch ID in recent years and how integral it has become to the phone for logging in and purchasing.  With the possibility (and, again, it’s just a possibility) that Apple could ditch the fingerprint reader, that raises the question of what would replace it.  Facial recognition makes a lot of sense as a verification tool — particularly if Apple gets rid of Touch ID. It would offer another option for biometric authentication, which many find more convenient than passwords and passcodes.

Passport officers aren’t too good at spotting fake photos

If you've been lucky enough to enjoy a vacation this summer, you've most likely handed your photo ID over to a TSA agent (or your own country's equivalent). But according to a study published Monday in _PLOS ONE_, endless practice hasn't turned them into human passport-scanning machines. In fact, the people responsible for checking photo identification all day might not be any better at recognizing a mismatched face than you are.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday In the study, 49 passport officers from the Sydney Passport Office were tested on their face-matching abilities. Many were highly experienced, with an average of over eight years among them, and all but three had undergone a special training course on face recognition (which told them, for example, to break the face down into individual features and compare each one). When the officers compared photos to live people, they let fraudulent photos through 14 percent of the time. When asked to decide if multiple photos truly showed one person at different ages (an important skill, since many photo IDs are good for as long as a decade), the officers showed a similar error rate and didn't perform any better than student volunteers given the same task. The researchers also gave the officers the Glasgow Face Matching Test, a standard test of face matching ability. Here, the researchers were able to compare the final scores to those expected in the general population -- and on average, the officers just weren't any better at matching faces.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday A few officers did quite well, and some even had perfect accuracy. But when the results were broken down, the researchers didn't find any correlation between work experience and matching accuracy. In other words, it seems to be more of an inherent knack than a learned skill. Facial recognition is easier for some than others, and there's a broad range of ability. Many people don't even realize they have some degree of "face blindness" until they read a description of the neurological quirk, and others (myself included!) have notable difficulties with facial memory. But the idea that the agent checking passports might be unable to tell people apart is a bit worrisome. In response to this particular study, the Australian Passport Office now uses facial matching tests during its staff recruitment process.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Our economy is a hellscape for consumers. The United flier is the latest victim.

This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons. It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination. Air travel is different from other sectors in degree but not in kind. In a few generations, it has gone from a Tomorrowland-style marvel, accompanied by luxury service, to a series of petty frustrations and humiliations. Like rail travel, which was also once steeped in a certain glamour, it has suffered the effects of a lack of competition and declining investment in public infrastructure. Airlines needlessly demean customers, who are gouged for fees to goose the margins of tottering industry monoliths like United. The process begins when you first shop for your ticket. It is not enough to book passage on a plane. Instead, you are besieged with offers — to book bags, to upgrade, to get more leg room, to gain access to a preflight lounge, to board earlier, to acquire insurance — each of which costs an additional fee. The inducements continue all the way through check-in at the airport and practically until you land at your destination. Any flier who has tried to nap after takeoff knows the exasperation of trying to block out a credit-card ad delivered by airplane public-address system.

Here’s why you could be thrilled to hear your flight is delayed

Some industries – the travel industry immediately comes to mind – are so plagued by dreadful experiences that it almost seems like we’ll never break out of the vicious cycle of paying more and more money for a worse and worse experience. But what if it were possible to turn any negative business experience into a positive game-like experience for your customers? Instead of bringing down your Yelp scores and complaining about you on Twitter or TripAdvisor, they might just walk away satisfied and content every time something unfortunate happens. In fact, there’s a new travel insurance product from Berkshire Hathaway called AirCare that lets customers do exactly that. AirCare is essentially a $25 travel option that pays out if bad things happen — your flight is delayed, your bags are lost, or you miss a connecting flight. It’s genius. If you spend more than two hours on the tarmac, you collect $1,000. If you miss a connecting flight, you collect $500. And this money is wired directly into your bank account, with no confusing claims to file. So, as a traveler, you’re secretly hoping that your flight will be late or that your bags will be lost.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday And this is where it gets interesting — you could almost imagine every industry essentially challenging their customers to bet against them. You’d bet your Uber driver that he or she couldn’t drive you from your apartment to your office in less than 20 minutes. You’d bet FedEx that it couldn’t deliver a package by a certain date. Any business transaction, in fact, could take advantage of this hidden optionality in everyday life.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday You can see how ridiculously fun this would be — at least, a lot more fun than scratching off Lotto tickets at the end of every week. You’d want “bad” things to happen, and your life might actually be happier as a result. You’d be turning lemons into lemonade on a daily basis. This notion of being happier when things go wrong has a unique gamification aspect to it. Travel, for example, would become a game, making something that used to be unbearable almost fun. Airport delays would become a potential way to pad your bank account.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday What’s making all this possible is the unbelievable growth of data all around us. Thanks to Big Data, it’s now the case that managers — and people such as Warren Buffett — know more about inner workings of their business than ever before. It used to be that only insurance companies and Las Vegas casinos (and some Wall Street brokerages) had the house edge when it came to business outcomes. In the case of insurance companies, they had actuarial tables, and could predict exactly how long you’d live in case of issuing a life insurance policy. In the case of Vegas, the casinos know the exact odds of winning, and always shade the odds in the favor of the house.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Now, it’s travel companies that have the house edge in betting against customers. Think the odds of picking up $1,000 for a two-hour tarmac delay are in your favor? Think again. You have better odds of winning in roulette than of ever picking up a payout from AirCare. While the two-hour tarmac delay seems to be a staple of the travel business, it’s actually a lot more rare than you might suppose. Of the over 500,000 flights in the United States in March, only 160 had tarmac delays of more than two hours. Your odds of winning? Approximately 1 in 3,000. So, no, it’s not actually advisable to bet against Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday But it’s easy to see that, if customers actually start taking advantage of these types of products, it could create a superior experience for consumers. If the odds of a two-hour tarmac delay used to be 1 in 3,000, then you can be sure that those odds would be pushed down even further once AirCare starts making payouts. The same thing with just about any other business transaction — businesses hate to lose money, and will do everything within their power to ensure that bad things won’t happen if they’re constantly on the hook. They will be forced to improve or change, to avoid losing money.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday In fact, you can see similar types of AirCare-like arrangements all around you, only we just haven’t thought of them in terms of “hoping that things go wrong.” Take the “30 minutes or it’s free” pizza delivery promise, for example. (You want pizza to be late) Or, the “if you see a lower price anywhere else, we’ll beat it” promotion. (You want to experience a form of buyer’s remorse) Even the garden-variety product warranty is really a form of a bet – you’re betting that you’re purchasing a quality product that won’t wear out in 12 months. Companies that are willing to make your warranty more valuable by extending it out two, three, four or five years are also signaling to customers that they have a superior product.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday So that’s why the future of business is hoping that things go wrong. We might see similar types of AirCare deals popping up in more industries. Just as some investors buy deep out-of-the-money put options in the hope that a company’s fortunes will plummet, consumers would essentially be buying deep-out-of-the- money options as well, hoping that a particular business event will turn out for the worse. Businesses may not become better, but they might just become more efficient.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Facebook can recognize you even if your face isn’t visible

Thanks to advances in computer vision, we now have machines that can pick you out of a lineup. But what if your face is hidden from view? An experimental algorithm out of Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab can recognize people in photographs even when it can’t make out their faces. Instead, it looks for other characteristics, such as hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose. Modern face-recognition algorithms have already found their way into social networks, shops and even churches. Yann LeCun, head of artificial intelligence at Facebook, wanted to see whether they could be adapted for situations where someone’s face isn’t clear, something humans can do quite well. “There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” LeCun says. “For example, you can recognize Mark Zuckerberg very easily, because he always wears a gray T-shirt.” The research team pulled almost 40,000 public photos from Flickr — in some, the person’s full face was clearly visible; in others, the face was turned away from the camera — and ran them through a sophisticated neural network. **** The final algorithm was able to recognize individuals with 83 percent accuracy. It was presented this month at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston. An algorithm like this could one day help power photo apps likeFacebook’s Moments, released last week. Moments scours through a phone’s photos, sorting them into separate events such as a friend’s wedding or a trip to the beach and tagging whoever it recognizes as a Facebook friend. LeCun also imagines that such a tool would be useful for the privacy-conscious, alerting them whenever a photo of themselves, however obscured, pops up on the Internet. It’s also true that the ability to identify people even if they are not looking at the camera raises privacy implications. Two weeks ago, government-sponsored talks failed to come up with a voluntary code of conduct for facial recognition use by private companies. “If, even when you hide your face, you can be successfully linked to your identity, that will certainly concern people,” says Ralph Gross at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who says the algorithm is impressive. “Now is a time when it’s important to discuss these questions.”

The Navigator: Is that you on your plane ticket?

What’s the best way to correct the name on an airline ticket? If you’re Akshay Malhotra, the answer is: Buy a new one, of course! In March, Malhotra booked a flight from Newark to New Delhi on United Airlines for his wife, using her maiden name, which matched her passport. But in the meantime, she became a U.S. citizen, took his last name and changed her passport. “United is telling me the only way to fix this is to buy a new ticket with the correct last name,” he says. United doesn’t prominently disclose its name-change policy online, but the industry standard is that minor slips such as typographical errors can be corrected, while major alterations require a change fee or a new ticket. Airlines say it’s because of post-9/11 security concerns, but critics claim that intentionally vague policies have added millions of dollars in change fees and ticket-replacement charges to the airline industry’s coffers. An interesting thing happened this year when a new Transportation Department rule went into effect, allowing passengers to cancel an airline reservation within 24 hours of making it. The rule permitted most ticketing errors to be fixed, effectively threatening an important source of revenue for the airline industry. (Among the major airlines, only Southwest Airlines does not charge ticket change fees.) As a result, some airlines took an even harder line on name changes. Consider what happened to Belinda Johnson — that’s Belinda with a B — when she booked a round-trip airline ticket on United from Cleveland to Paris through Travelocity. “The ticket agent had a heavy Indian accent, and I did not realize that he had misspelled my name as Delinda instead of Belinda until I called them to find out why I hadn’t received confirmation letters,” she says. By then, the 24-hour rule no longer applied. Travelocity deferred to United, which said that it allows “no name changes.” That seemed a little harsh, so I contacted Travelocity and United to see whether I could get the mistake corrected. Charles Hobart, a United representative, said that the airline’s policy on changes is that it has no policy on changes. “Tickets are non-transferable, and the name on the ticket needs to match the customer’s government-issued identification,” he said. “Customers should contact reservations if they have questions regarding an error on their ticket. Of course, we also encourage customers to make certain that the names match before purchasing their tickets.” Okay, so how about Delinda . . . uh, I mean Belinda? “A single letter change shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. United corrected her ticket. If you think that this policy — or lack of one — makes it seem as if airlines are trying to cash in on our mistakes, you’re not alone. The rules at other airlines, from Delta (“Name changes are not permitted,” says its site) to US Airways (“If there is a discrepancy [between your ID and ticket], go to the airport ticket counter with your passport to update your reservation,” it advises) are similarly vague, restrictive or both. Only one domestic airline, discount carrier Allegiant, allows name changes for a $50 fee, but with significant restrictions. After 9/11, many airlines enthusiastically enforced an exact-name-match requirement on tickets, citing security concerns. To some industry observers, that seemed disingenuous. If the airlines were worried about having the correct names on their passenger manifests to compare against a passenger watch list, wouldn’t they want to make it as easy as possible to get the correct name on a ticket rather than obstruct the process with change fees? When Secure Flight, the government-run program that compares passenger names against a watch list, took over in 2010, it was decidedly more flexible, using birthdays and other personal information to make sure that you were who you said you were. So it would have various ways of verifying that “Delinda” was actually “Belinda.” Maybe that’s the solution here, too. If the federal government can determine the identity of a passenger, why can’t an airline? And if Secure Flight clears passengers with name discrepancies on their tickets through the airport checkpoint, then why not let those passengers board? To do anything less would be to unjustly enrich yourself via the innocent errors some passengers make. Fortunately, ticket agents understand that mistakes happen. So when Malhotra, the passenger whose wife had changed her name, visited the United ticket counter in Newark and presented her paperwork, the airline employee corrected her ticket, too. Unfortunately, I doubt that most passengers are that persistent.

Interpol set up a huge database to track stolen passports in 2002. Almost no one uses it.

News that two Iranian men were able to board Malaysia  Airlines flight MH370 last weekend using stolen passports sparked a frenzy of speculation about whether they may have played a role in bringing the plane down. Officials have since cast doubt on that possibility, saying the men had no known links to terrorist groups. But the ease with which they managed to board the flight has drawn attention to lax security procedures that enable people in many countries to routinely board international flights using other people’s documents. It’s a security gap that Interpol, the international law enforcement organization, sought to close in 2002 in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, by building a database of stolen travel documents. Interpol leaders hoped that governments and airlines around the world would be able to feed into, and consult, the database systemically in a matter of years. Only a handful today do. “We have a real-world case where the world is speculating whether the stolen passport holders were terrorists, while Interpol is asking why only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights,” Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said in a statement issued earlier this week.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Interpol says that last year, travelers boarded flights more than a billion times without having their passport numbers run through the database. That raises a key question: Are U.S. flights today safe against this kind of fraud? For the most part, yes, argued Jayson P. Ahern, a former chief of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that screens passengers arriving on international flights.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University After the September 11 attacks, Washington invested heavily in automated passenger screening systems that check flight manifests against databases of suspected terrorists and stolen travel documents before planes are cleared to take off. Checks are conducted 72 hours before the scheduled departure time and then again 30 minutes before takeoff. “The U.S. has a very robust system for looking at these kinds of things,” said Ahern, who now works as a homeland security adviser at the Chertoff Group. In addition to the database checks, international travelers have their fingerprints scanned by a machine upon arrival at U.S. airports — an additional safeguard to ensure that the prints of the person seeking admission match the ones collected when the traveler’s visa was issued. So why haven't other countries adopted similarly stringent security protocols? Mainly cost, said Ahern, and differing assessments of the threat passengers traveling with fake documents pose. “As much as the U.S. would want to raise everyone’s standards, it’s not always welcome by partnering nations,” he said.

Afghan ID cards were meant to stop voter fraud but instead stoked ethnic division

KABUL — It is one of the few things everyone in Afghanistan can agree on — the need for a new, electronically readable, biometrically secure ID card that will help build a sense of national identity and prevent the kind of massive voter fraud that has marred the past two presidential elections. The new card was promised by President Ashraf Ghani soon after he took office nearly two years ago and approved by parliament last year. It was designed by experts and financed by international donors. More than 9 million cards have been produced so far, and the cost of providing them to more than 20 million adults is expected to be well over $100 million. Yet to date, not a single card has been issued to the public. Instead, the e-Tazkiras as they are called here, have become the latest casualty in an ongoing war of ethnic sensitivities that caused previous brouhahas, over the images on the Afghan currency and the language of the national anthem. The e-Tazkiras were supposed to be an important early step in electoral reforms that would lead to local and parliamentary elections by this fall. But those have been repeatedly delayed, weakening the legitimacy of the struggling national unity government. Ghani and his top electoral rival, Abdullah Abdullah, were pressured by U.S. officials into a power-sharing deal after the chaotic 2014 election. The rollout of the ID cards was halted because of vocal opposition from various ethnic leaders, who objected to having ethnic background mentioned as part of each citizen’s official identity. Some minority groups feared it would make them vulnerable to harassment, while some from the dominant Pashtun ethnic group worried it would reveal that their percentage of the population is less than they have always insisted. “We have millions of ghost voters with fake cards that have been printed in Pakistan. This is a problem we urgently need to solve to hold future elections, but for some groups, the larger issue is one of social insecurity,” said Javid Faisal, an aide to Abdullah, the country’s chief executive. Abdullah recently proposed a compromise in which citizens would be issued two ID cards — one for voting with no ethnic information, and a second for other uses with a full list of personal information. But even that apparently has not satisfied some minority critics, who also objected to printing every card-holder’s nationality as “Afghan” on the new biometric cards, complaining that “Afghan” historically has been used interchangeably with Pashtun. Several officials have suggested the cumbersome “Afghanistani” as a substitute; the simpler “Afghani” is already in use as the name of the national currency. Beneath the veneer of an emerging modern democracy, in which the United Nations and Western donors have invested enormous resources since the overthrow of Taliban religious rule in 2001, Afghanistan is still a fractured tribal society whose inhabitants identify themselves first as ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras or Uzbeks, as well as a small Turkmen group. Ancient ethnic lines hardened during the civil war of the early 1990s, when anti-Soviet militias from different groups turned against each other and nearly destroyed Kabul in the process. Since then, national leaders have bought off ethnic bosses by parceling out ministries, governorships and other lucrative posts, although that system is now under pressure from President Ghani’s drive to depoliticize the government and build a professional meritocracy. Today, there are no guns being drawn in the name of Pashtun or Tajik supremacy, but their old lions still roar when they don’t get enough respect. Even the president, a Pashtun, has gotten grief from his fellow tribesmen on the e-card issue, although it is the former Tajik militia commanders from the north who have roared the loudest about prejudicial wording, calling for protests and walkouts. “The e-card was such a simple thing, and now it has become a huge political issue,” complained Shinkai Karokhel, a member of parliament from Kabul. “Everyone who lives in Afghanistan should be considered an Afghan,” she said. “These politicians just want to satisfy their groups; they won’t take advantage of an historic opportunity and tell people to shut up and do the right thing.” On the streets of the capital this week, an assortment of shopkeepers, professionals and tradesmen agreed uniformly that the new foolproof ID card would be a very good thing for the country, especially to prevent Afghanistan’s neighbors from interfering in elections and to restore trust and accountability to an electoral system that lost both after the fraud-plagued 2014 presidential contest. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, they were divided on the question of whether to put ethnicity on the new ID cards. Some thought the issue was a tempest in a teapot being stirred up by ethnic leaders to prove their clout; others thought it would help establish the true balance of ethnic power in a country where no national census has ever been conducted and every ethnic boss claims to be king of the largest constituency. “These self-proclaimed leaders act so foolishly, proclaiming that the Pashtuns or the Hazaras are the majority,” said Sherzai Seerat, 25, who manages a small market in West Kabul. “The electronic tazkiras will be a vital tool for solving crimes, finding jobs, getting passports. A year ago, people from the government were knocking on doors and telling us about them,” he added with a bewildered shrug, “but then nothing happened.” Ahmad Zaki, 32, an unemployed plumber, said the dispute over the new tazkiras is one in a long list of things that has made him “100 per cent disappointed” in the current government. “I think they should put down people’s ethnicity, because it is important to know who is who,” he said. “But we have much bigger problems: security, prices and jobs. I go to my plumbing shop every day, but there is no work at all now. The new president promised to change so many things, but there has been no action.”

Why fingerprints scans may not be the future of digital verification

Fingerprint scanners are becoming increasingly mainstream -- they even come built-in many Apple devices. But researchers are finding ways to spoof biometric ID methods, and they come with their own set of privacy and security drawbacks. Biometrics researcher Jan Krisller demonstrated how he spoofed a politician’s fingerprint using just a high definition photo at a conference held by the Chaos Computer Club in Germany this weekend. Krisller, who also goes by "Starbug," and the group previously showed off a way to spoof Apple's Touch ID system by creating a fake finger modeled off a fingerprint left on a glass surface.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico One key problem with biometrics is that they are permanent. The much maligned password is less secure than using a unique biological marker to identify yourself, but it can be changed if it is leaked or compromised in some way. Your fingerprints, on the other hand, are yours forever. And the immutable nature of the fingerprints becomes even more concerning when you consider how public they can be. You leave prints out in the world just going through your day -- and Krisller shows data needed to fake the prints can also be captured remotely without direct contact. "Biometrics are not secrets," American Civil Liberties Union analyst Jay Stanley explained to The Washington Post earlier this year.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As fingerprint scanners become more and more common, they are also raising legal questions. At least one court has ruled that police could compel a suspect to give up his fingerprint, but not his passcode, in order to unlock and search his cellphone.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

China detains a man for five days — for using his phone on a flight

In one case, for example, a passenger was detained for five days. This person's alleged crime? Listening to music on their phone during takeoff and landing.   “You can use any mobile phone to dial an emergency hotline even if it has no SIM card or is in airplane mode, which means it can search or send signals under these conditions,” Zhang Chen said.    Given that both domestic air travel and mobile phone use have skyrocketed in China over the past few years, any changes to the rules are likely to be popular.

Are fingerprints the new passwords? Security experts sure hope not.

Ever since Apple introduced TouchID for iPhones, more and more smartphones feature fingerprint scanners. And that has some security researchers worried. "If you leak a password, you can just change it; if you leak a fingerprint, it's lost for your whole life," FireEye researcher Yulong Zhang said at a presentation at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas last week. Zhang was part of a team that revealed that several Android smartphones from makers including Samsung and HTC featured vulnerabilities that could allow bad guys to steal users' fingerprints. HTC's One Max device, for instance, saved fingerprint images without encryption. they said. And the images could be read by any other app on the phone, potentially leaving them exposed if the user had installed another program with a security vulnerability, according to the researchers. _[The OPM breach exposed more than a million fingerprints.]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Both the HTC One Max and Samsung Galaxy S5 also left users' fingerprints vulnerable, the researchers said, by not isolating the fingerprint sensor tech from the rest of the phone's operations. The phone makers have provided patches for these issues, according to a report from the researchers.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico While fingerprint scanners have become a popular way to avoid using a password or PIN, especially on mobile devices, the FireEye research highlights some of the potential pitfalls of the tech: As a biometric marker, fingerprints are impossible to change. They're also public. You leave fingerprints on, well, almost everything you touch. And researchers have even been able to spoof fingerprints based on public photos \-- all of which makes fingerprints a pretty hard sell as the future of authentication to some experts. If someone else can make a copy of your prints, they stop being an effective security mechanism.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico _[The biometrics revolution is already here — and you may not be ready for it]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And there's a very real risk they might be compromised. Just ask the Office of Personnel Management: More than a million fingerprints were breached as part of cyberattacks against the agency disclosed earlier this year, in what experts consider a significant intelligence failure.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico If the research has you on edge about the security of your own fingerprints with your smartphone, consider this: Similar general security concerns have been raised about the fingerprint scanners used in other consumers devices, like laptops, or by set-ups at motor vehicle departments and airports, researchers say.

Yes, there actually is a huge difference between government and corporate surveillance

By contrast, it's nearly impossible to simply pick up your belongings and quit the United States. For most people, that would carry some significant costs — quitting your job, for instance, or disrupting your children's education, or leaving friends and family. Those costs can be high enough to outweigh the benefits of recovering some hard-to-measure modicum of privacy. Besides, leaving the country would ironically expose you to even greater risk of surveillance, since you'd no longer be covered by the legal protections granted to people (even foreign terror suspects) that arrive to U.S. shores. There are still some ways to shield yourself from the NSA. To the best of our knowledge, the government has yet to crack the encryption protocols behind Tor, the online traffic anonymizing service. But Tor's users are also inherently the object of greater suspicion precisely because they're making efforts to cover their tracks. In the business world, no single company owns a monopoly over your privacy. The same can't really be said about the government.

MasterCard to use the power of selfies to protect your online shopping

MasterCard wants to use your face to help fend off fraudsters. Using a new system called MasterCard Identity Check -- or, colloquially, "selfie pay" -- the credit card company will use biometric methods like face recognition and fingerprint scans to better **** secure online shopping.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Right now, Mastercard offers a feature that financial institutions can enable that lets customers set up a password for online payments to help prevent fraud. The new system will use the same principle, but instead of relying on a password that could be forgotten or stolen, it uses your face or fingerprint. Consumers will go through all the normal steps of filling out credit card information when making an online purchase, but this feature adds another step: The website will send a notification through an app on customers' smartphones that asks them to verify their identity. This can be done either through a fingerprint scan or by using the phone's camera to take a brief, selfie-like, video. When taking the "selfie," the user will have to blink to prove that it's a live person and not just an old photo being used to spoof the system. MasterCard started testing the feature with nearly 1,000 consumers in the United States and the Netherlands last year. It plans to make it more broadly available through partnered banks this summer in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and potentially other markets. Various smart wallet systems, including Apple Pay, already use fingerprint scans to let customers prove their identities when making purchases. Last year, USAA -- a financial services company that offers banking to members of the armed forces and their families -- rolled out a feature that lets customers use a similar blinking selfie test or voice recognition to log into their mobile banking app. And HSBC will soon roll out tech that offers fingerprints and voice recognition to help identify patrons of a U.K. subsidiary.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The rise of biometrics comes as managing multiple passwords has become overwhelming for users and driven them to poor digital hygiene practices, such as reusing passwords.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But using things like fingerprints and facial recognition tech to verify identities comes with its own set of risks. For one, they generally aren't secrets: Your face is probably plastered all over social media profiles and captured by many different surveillance cameras every day while you leave fingerprints on almost everything you touch. Biometrics are also permanent: If a password gets compromised, you can change it -- but it's much harder, if not practically impossible, for most people to change their face or fingerprints.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico That means that when entities like MasterCard start using biometric techniques for verification purposes, it's extra important that the information stay secure -- which the company says it will ensure through data protection measures such as encryption. The fingerprint data will be processed and stored locally on the device, according to MasterCard. For facial recognition, users will snap an initial photo of their face that will be converted into a string of 0s and 1s. The original image will be destroyed, but the digitized protected version will be stored and matched to the blinking selfies to verify a user's identity. "We are currently prototyping facial recognition to be converted and stored as encrypted code on the device as part of the MasterCard Identity Check rollout," said Jane Khodos, a vice president for communications at MasterCard.

Cell phones on planes shouldn’t be the government’s call

Various government officials are crafting new policies on in-flight cell-phone use, the combined effect of which would be to allow Web surfing and text messaging from airplanes, but not voice phone calls. In other words, two steps forward, one step back.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University There’s no scientific reason to limit any sort of cell-phone use on board, so the Federal Communications Commission can’t pretend that it has the grounds to limit it. The Transportation Department, though, might pick up the policy from there, banning voice calls under its “Aviation Consumer Protection Authority.” And if DOT doesn’t act, Congress might. Lawmakers have already proposed new restrictions on in-flight calling. Instead, they should all butt out. People fret that, absent government restrictions, the tweens in the next row over will freely dial up their BFFs all flight long. That’s unlikely, and not just because no one under 25 calls anyone anymore. Airlines will have total control over the cellular connection, if they choose to have one at all, so they could enforce all sorts of rules to adjust for customers’ tastes. Judging by public polls and the intensely negative reaction to the potential of in-flight cell-phone calling, many airlines probably won’t even consider allowing voice conversations. If some do, they will most likely move with high sensitivity to those worried about the noise. They might experiment with separate cabins or limit the number of calling-enabled planes. Even then, callers’ roaming charges will be high, discouraging long conversations. These are decisions airlines and their customers should be making, which is the best way to satisfy the most people — including, I hope, those of us who want to be able to make brief calls, perhaps to let our relatives know that the flight we’re on is late, without annoying people around us.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University People’s discomfort with the government removing its restrictions on in-flight phone use is beyond exaggerated, and it’s hardly a rational basis on which to base any federal policy. Instead of enforcing politeness, a job best left to airlines, flight attendants and individual passengers, it should simply loosen up. And so should the critics.

Tricking the TSA

IF, QUEUED UP at the airport — shoes half off, belt slung over your shoulder, laptop balanced precariously on one hand — you’ve ever looked at the speedy “pre-check” security line and wondered how easy it would be to fake your way into a less invasive screening, you would have been onto something. The Post’s James Ball reports that frequent fliers and technology geeks have discovered that the Transportation Security Administration’s boarding pass procedures are bizarrely insecure, allowing those with some basic software and know-how to read sensitive security information contained in boarding pass bar codes and even to alter those bar codes. The result could be bad guys getting around tough screening or the government’s no-fly list. The bar codes contain information about how much scrutiny the TSA will give each ticket holder. But they aren’t encrypted. Any passenger with a smartphone can figure out whether he or she is destined for the pre-check line, which was designed for very frequent fliers and others thought to pose few security risks, or the line for tougher screening. In theory, this could tip off a terrorist who has managed to qualify himself for pre-check to the sort of security he will have to deal with. More troubling, though, is that it is also possible for said terrorist to fiddle with the bar code. He could place himself in the pre-check line. Or, if he is on a no-fly list, he could change the name printed on a copy of his boarding pass. That could fool the TSA agents checking tickets at security checkpoints, because they don’t compare the names in the bar codes to the database of fliers that the airlines keep. Longtime boarding pass security critic Chris Soghoian points out there are easy policy changes that can fix both problems. Requiring each bar code to bear a digital signature would make any tampering evident. The TSA already has the technology to handle this — it is just a matter of making sure the airlines cooperate. The TSA could also shake up how it decides which passengers will undergo random checks. The justification for extensive airline security is not that it will ever be foolproof but that the apparatus of no-fly lists, backscatter scanners, bar code machines and TSA agents is worth the expense of money, time and invaded privacy to make it more difficult for terrorists to attack the country’s airlines. That logic relies on the notion that the TSA can anticipate flaws and, if it doesn’t, quickly fix them when others point them out. ****

The government’s airplane crash detective

James Cash has spent nearly three decades in federal service successfully deciphering information from electronic recording devices to help determine the causes of major aviation and other transportation accidents, leading to reforms and greater safety for the traveling public. As the chief technical adviser for the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) Office of Research and Engineering, Cash is the government’s top expert on cockpit voice recorders—the black box devices that record the voices of pilots and co-pilots during flights, and are used to help determine the system failures and human errors that cause airplane crashes. “Jim has helped grow the science of cockpit recording devices. He’s been here through the history of recording devices and has led the next generation of recorders,” said NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman. Over the years, Cash has played a pivotal role in the development and use of sophisticated audio, video and data recording equipment. His job has evolved from extracting information from tape recordings to the use of sophisticated electronic technology. One of Cash’s innovations involved designing specifications for cutting-edge voice analysis and transcription software that performs readouts and analysis of cockpit voice recorders and other audio devices. The software was the first of its kind to employ voice recognition and speaker identification to automate the process of creating a transcript of recorded events. Cash’s work also led to the development of software giving the NTSB the ability to extract and analyze recorder data from multiple accidents, which has helped the agency spot trends on safety issues. After a 1997 crash of a jetliner from Indonesia to Singapore that killed 104 people, Cash needed to find a way to piece together damaged recording tape from a black box device. “We were looking for a way to reconstruct audio on the tape from little bitty pieces,” Cash said. “We were able to develop a means of reading individual pieces, digitizing each piece of audio track and reassembling it. It was like gluing together a shredded document.” Cash’s electrical engineering degree and experience as an Air Force pilot make him uniquely suited for his job, giving him familiarity with the cockpit and the demands flight crews endure in high-stress situations. His specialized knowledge and resourcefulness assisted in investigations into two space shuttle accidents and a nuclear submarine collision. He helped the Drug Enforcement Administration analyze GPS data from a vehicle in which agents had been killed in Mexico, and often supplies the FBI and other law enforcement agencies with important information from seized electronic devices. One of the major accident investigations for Cash involved the case of the 1996 TWA Boeing 747 that exploded over the water 12 minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. During a four year investigation, NTSB bought a Boeing 747 that was going to be demolished and blew it up to try to simulate the event and discover the cause. The investigation included tests with small explosives and recording how sound behaves in the fuselage of the plane. Cash worked with a quarter of a second of noise at the very end of the cockpit voice recording from the original flight and compared that with the sounds from the explosion of the test plane. His analysis helped provide direction to investigators, who later concluded the accident was due to a maintenance error that allowed high-voltage electricity into the fuel tank that sits below the floor in the fuselage. A convergence of the right temperature, pressure and other conditions caused the explosion. James Ritter, deputy director for research and engineering at NTSB, said Cash’s knowledge of the technology allows him to continually find ways to recover and improve the quality of data retrieved from different types of recorders and incidents. “He works on handheld GPS, cell phones, iPads—anything that records data and sound,” Ritter said. “He is now advocating for cockpit video recording devices. There are more and more video recorders in transportation vehicles.” Frank Doran, a consultant to L-3 Communications, a firm that manufactures crash protected recording devices, said Cash is widely recognized worldwide as an expert in aviation accident investigations. “The extent to which we take for granted aviation safety is due to Jim and his colleagues at NTSB,” said Doran. Cash said the ultimate goal of his work is to contribute important information that will save lives and prevent future accidents. “You’ve got to figure out what happened this time before you have any chance of preventing it from happening again,” he said. _This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go tohttp://washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference. _ ****

A passenger carrying a baby asked about a delay — and was punched by an airport worker

It had all the makings of a modern-day airport nightmare: a 13-hour delay, more than 100 cranky and exhausted passengers, and babies running out of formula and diapers.  A photo of the latest case of air-travel misery shows the exact moment the frustrations of easyJet Flight 2122 boiled over: the outstretched arm of a uniformed airport worker connecting with a man’s cheek, inches away from a baby. The man who was struck was one of the passengers scheduled to depart from Nice, France, late Sunday morning. The plane was to land at Luton Airport, just outside of London, two hours later. Instead, a mechanical problem with the plane caused a half-day delay. Worse, said another passenger, Arabella Arkwright, easyJet personnel either didn’t have answers or didn’t communicate them to the passengers languishing in the waiting area. Employees distributed food vouchers, but they barely covered the cost of a muffin at a nearby Starbucks, Arkwright told The Washington Post. As the hours ticked by, the stranded passengers could hear calls for other easyJet flights that were going to Luton Airport. It reached a boiling point at the 13-hour mark, sometime before midnight. Passengers were finally told that they finally board, then there was a delay at the aircraft’s door, Arkwright said. They were stuck on a jet bridge for a half-hour before trudging back into the terminal. A man holding a baby and a cellphone approached an employee for Samsic, a contractor that assists customers at the airport, for more information. Voices were raised. Passengers stared. “It was just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Arkwright told The Post on Monday. “The easyJet employee lifted his hand first and pushed the mobile phone out of the man’s hand. You could see it go flying. The man pushed him back, like he was protecting the baby.”  On social media, people debated who, exactly, was the aggressor.  Arkwright, who witnessed the altercation along with her husband, said the worker turned a verbal confrontation into a physical one when he slapped the phone out of the complaining man’s hand. The man with the baby appeared to shove the worker. Then came the punch. “It was a verbal thing, and then the … employee knocked the phone. It went flying; you could hear it,” Arkwright said. Arkwright said that she and other passengers were outraged, but not entirely surprised that the situation had devolved to violence. Afterward, the airline went into damage-control mode. The puncher, easyJet said in a statement, was not one of their employees. He worked for “special assistance provider” Samsic. The airline said it was trying to get to the bottom of the situation. Samsic did not return a message seeking comment. It’s unclear what happened to the worker. Both he and the man he punched were escorted away by airport security guards. The man with the baby returned with a fresh welt on his face and received applause from the other passengers, who were now seated and ready to take off, according to Arkwright. But Arkwright said she was still incensed at easyJet. Even though the employee wasn’t on the airline’s payroll, he was interacting with easyJet’s customers. And, she said, company managers were nowhere to be seen as the customer service problems mounted all day. “We’d been trying to get information out of them all day long,” she said. “I’ve seen their statements. They said they kept people informed. We had to keep going up with questions. On their app they had one thing. On the board they had another thing. On the website they had another.”   Earlier this year, David Dao’s removal from a United Airlines plane sparked a public-relations nightmare for the company. In that incident, a United official told passengers that they needed four people to give up their seats to accommodate off-duty crew members. When no one volunteered, the airline randomly selected four people. Three left without incident. Dao wouldn’t budge. In the ensuing struggle with officers, Dao fell and hit his mouth on a seat’s armrest. His lawyer said he broke his nose and lost two teeth. Dao went limp, and a video captured him bleeding from the mouth as officers dragged him off the plane.  Arkwright, at home a day after her ordeal in Nice, said she was thinking about the recent spate of airline mishaps when she wrote a letter to easyJet chief executive Carolyn McCall. Arkwright said her biggest gripe wasn’t with the airline’s front-line employees, but with managers who’d allowed the situation to devolve by not communicating. “In short, the whole saga was a disgrace; the problem is a management one and, yes, that is YOUR responsibility,” she wrote. “How much more inept can you be before your shareholders as well as your customers get seriously angry? “Information was contradictory all day as the departure time got put back and back — so as not to get people angry at the outset and/ or because there was no f‑‑‑ing Plan B.”

A man on a plane said he had a bomb. Passengers ‘pounced.’

The drama started shortly after Malaysia Airlines Flight 128 took off from Melbourne. A passenger stood up, grabbed a flight attendant by the arm and told the 337 passengers aboard the Kuala Lumpur-bound plane that he had a bomb, witnesses said.  As the man walked toward the cockpit, demanding to see the pilot, the flight attendant he clutched screamed for help, witnesses said. But passengers were already mobilizing.  “All of a sudden, someone has him in a chokehold and got his arm behind his back, and the other guy eventually choked him and he passed out.” Passengers then took the man to the front of the aircraft and tied him up with belts as the pilot turned the plane around.  Authorities have identified the man as Manodh Marks, a 25-year-old Sri Lankan living in Australia on a student visa, the AP reported. He was studying to be a chef. As officials investigated the incident, they began to suspect that mental illness — and not terrorism — was behind the dramatic scene on the Wednesday flight to Kuala Lumpur. Ultimately, authorities determined there was no bomb. The object passengers saw in Marks’s hand was a Bluetooth speaker or possibly an amplifier. Some passengers said the man appeared to be intoxicated.  Marks was charged with making false threats and endangering the safety of an aircraft. If convicted, he could spend a decade in prison on each charge. In court Thursday, the man’s lawyer, Tess Dunsford, told the magistrate that Marks had a “psychiatric illness,” according to the AP. He did not ask for bail or enter a plea; his next court date is scheduled for Aug. 24.  In a statement, the airline said Flight 128 “was forced to turn back to Melbourne Airport due to a disruptive passenger. The airline’s cabin crew with the help of one passenger managed to restrain the passenger who was immediately handcuffed and subdued.” The statement added: “Malaysia Airlines wishes to extend its appreciation to everyone involved during the emergency situation.” Wednesday’s altercation was the latest in a steady stream of airline drama this year.    For Malaysia Airlines, the most notable incidents have been deadly.  Just four months before that, Malaysia Flight 370 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Crews combed the vast ocean for nearly three years, but the most expensive aviation search in history yielded nothing: The plane and the 239 people it was carrying have not been found.

Samsung is setting up booths at airports to exchange Note 7s

The Transportation Department's ban on the Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 could be leaving some users in a lurch if they try to bring the phone on any flight going to or from any part of the United States. To help those folks, Samsung is setting up pop-up exchange booths at airports to offer customers another Samsung phone in exchange for their faulty Notes.   When asked, the company did not say whether the Samsung phones received from the airport kiosks could then be swapped for another phone once you arrive at your destination. So if you weren't sure whether you wanted a Samsung phone in exchange for your Note, this may not be the best option for you. Even Samsung advises that it is best to exchange your phone before you get to an airport, if possible. That way, you won't have to add this hassle to the other hassles of modern-day air travel. Airports are not exactly the calmest places, so they probably are not the best locations for making a smartphone-purchasing decision — particularly when your alternative is having no smartphone at all.   The ban is absolute: You cannot board with the Note 7, even if it's turned off. You definitely cannot check it. You cannot ship it by air. The only real option, if you want to board your flight, is to get rid of the phone. And you thought having to throw away a mostly full bottle of water in a security line amnesty box was a waste.

2016 holiday gift guide: Travel

Make travel more efficient, more comfortable or just more fun for the jet-setters in your life. SLIM SONIC TOOTHBRUSH A welcome alternative to lugging your electric toothbrush and charger on vacation.  NECKTIE TRAVEL ROLL Rolling rather than folding your clothes is the packing trend of the moment — why should your tie be an exception?  POINT IT: TRAVELLER’S LANGUAGE KIT This slim volume could mean the end of inefficient charades for non-speakers of the local language.  HANDPRESSO A little something for those of you who spend the first few hours of every day on the road trying to find a decent cup of coffee.  TOILETRY SHEETS An ingenious way to sidestep those pesky TSA regulations about liquids.  ATLAS CORK BOARD SET Part scrapbook, part art installation, this is a great way to document where you have been — or map out the future.  MASK BUNNY LUGGAGE TAG Here’s a kids’ luggage tag that’s likely to stand out on the baggage carousel.  THE GETAWAY PASSPORT HOLDER Break away from that classic navy passport cover and let the world know how you really feel.  MATADOR DAYLITE16 BACKPACK Boost your carrying capacity on the fly: This full-size backpack fits into a tiny storage bag when not in use.  COLLAR PERFECT COMPACT TOUCH-UP AND PORTABLE IRON Just enough iron to smooth out travel’s inevitable crinkles and creases.  2017 BON VOYAGE WALL CALENDAR Rifle Paper Co. brings its characteristic ebullience to this calendar inspired by travel destinations.  COOLING EYE PADS For a whimsical jet lag cure, just pop these babies into the minibar.  ROTHY’S FLATS Looking for a comfy, machine-washable travel shoe that is made from recycled water bottles? We thought so.  Prices listed above may vary.

Making football safer, the robotic and Australian ways

In their April 24 op-ed, “One way to make football safer,” Gary Belsky and Neil Fine stated that the best solution to reduce concussions is to return the helmet “to its rightful role as protection against unintentional collision rather than armor.” Without this change, they posit, it might be time to “reconsider papier-mâché.” Contrast that position with the April 23 Sports article “Ivy League dummy could help save football.” This innovative and entrepreneurial project could have easily appeared in the business pages for augmenting the possibilities of proper tackling technique without human-to-human contact during football practice. Will making papier-mâché football helmets or robotic football dummies be the answer to reducing concussions? I can’t help but notice that Mr. Belsky and Mr. Fine’s description of “a diminishing set of solutions” sounds like scarcity, while the robotic football dummies create an abundance of intriguing possibilities for the future of football. Which solution would you try first? ****Wendy Moomaw** , Fulton** **I played football** at a small college in the early 1950s. In the three seasons I played, we did not have face masks. Only once did I play against a team that wore helmets with some type of face protection. Each of those helmets had a single bar positioned to protect the player’s teeth. My brother-in-law was a high school football coach during the transition to face masks. He told me that the effect on his players’ attitude was remarkable. They played with a reckless abandon. Gary Belsky and Neil Fine suggested that the first step toward a safer form of football would be an “easily removable” face mask. That’s a good first step. The next step could be banning face masks entirely. Step three: Ban the weaponized helmet and replace it with an Australian-football-type cap. Rugby and Australian football players are big and fast, and they wear little protective gear. Football with minimal protective gear works in Australia. Why not try it here? ****James Brennan** , Stephenson, Va.**

Forensic techniques are subject to human bias, lack standards, panel found

In Hollywood, the moment the good guys trace a hair, a bullet fragment or a fingerprint, it’s game over. The bad guy is locked up. But the glamorized portrait is not so simple in real life.  Even fingerprint identification is partly a subjective exercise that lacks research into the role of unconscious bias or even its error rate, the panel’s 328-page report said. “The forensic science system, encompassing both research and practice, has serious problems that can only be addressed by a national commitment to overhaul the current structure,” the panel concluded in 2009.    Police and law enforcement agencies have rebuffed recommendations to remove crime labs from their control. Since 2002, failures have been reported at about 30 federal, state and local crime labs serving the FBI, the Army and eight of the nation’s 20 largest cities.  A 2009 study of post-conviction DNA exonerations — now up to 289 nationwide — found invalid testimony in more than half the cases.  More DNA testing alone is not the answer, experts say. Biological evidence historically is collected in fewer than 20 percent of criminal cases. Other questioned forensic techniques are used far more often, with mistakes harming defendants and crime victims whose true assailants remain at large. The National Academy of Sciences report cited the lack of effective standards for examiners, laboratories and court testimony. It also criticized Justice Department agencies for a dearth of research into problems and for being “too wedded” to the status quo to be trusted to lead reforms.  Arson investigation is an example of how research has dramatically improved practices. Since 1990, the number of U.S. structure fires attributed to arson has dropped by half. One reason is that scientific test burnings have disproved the notion that some burn marks could be caused only by liquid accelerants. Meanwhile, scientific doubts have festered for decades with fingerprint examination. While fingerprint analysis is one of the most valuable and frequently applied investigative tools, its accuracy has not been scientifically defined. FBI examiners claimed until recently that they can match fingerprints to the exclusion of any other person in the world with 100 percent certainty using a method with an error rate essentially of zero. The academy report found that assertion was “not scientifically plausible” and had chilled research into error rates.  Neumann declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the episode blamed a polarized climate in the adversarial legal system, saying, “Few agencies in the forensic-science community want to be the first ones associated with an error rate.” The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive federal research funding decisions.  Since then, the Justice Department has begun research to try to quantify how complete a fingerprint must be to properly declare a match; how different conditions may affect the reliability of examinations; whether computers can do such work; and how to present forensic testimony about probabilities to judges and juries. The FBI has also required “blind verification” of results by agents unfamiliar with initial examinations. The bureau said that skilled analysts are extraordinarily accurate, at least when they know they are being tested. An FBI study with Noblis Corp. last year found that when 169 examiners compared thousands of fingerprints and decided there was enough information to declare a match or not, they were correct 99.8 percent of the time.  Crime lab directors and prosecutors welcome calls for more money for research and to improve examiners and facilities. But with budgets tight at all levels, Washington has few other tools to prompt 350 state and local labs across the country to improve. Because techniques have not been scientifically proved does not mean they do not work, defenders say, and mistakes can be handled traditionally through case-by-case appeals.

Why you should take your glasses off before your next passport photo

Before you snap that passport photo, remove your glasses. Under new rules starting Nov. 1, the State Department will not accept passport photos if you are wearing glasses in them, even if you normally wear glasses. Last year, more than 200,000 passport customers submitted poor quality photos that the agency could not accept. “The No. 1 problem was glasses,’’ the State Department said in a news release. “We had to put their passports on hold because we couldn’t clearly identify them from their photo.’’ The agency expects fewer passport application delays with the new rule. Some other passport photo regulations to keep in mind: • You must submit a photo taken within six months. • Photos must be high resolution. They cannot be blurry or grainy. • Photos must show your true skin color. They cannot be over- or under-exposed or have shadows on your face. • Selfies are a bad idea. Photos taken too close or too far away will be rejected. •Photos must meet image size requirements of 2 by 2 inches. Be aware that many countries, including popular European destinations, require that passports have at least six months of validity left when you enter the country. This is not a new requirement, but it has been more strictly enforced over the past several years, according to the State Department. Getting your passport photo right the first time is especially important now because the agency is experiencing a surge in renewal applications. Because of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, they are expecting the surge to continue in 2017. The initiative implemented in 2007 requires anyone, including U.S. citizens, traveling by air to the United States from a foreign country to have a valid passport. Nearly 10 years later, those passports are beginning to expire, resulting in an increased demand for renewals, according to the agency. On average, processing of U.S. passports takes four to six weeks. But during heavy periods, the wait may extend to 10 weeks. Expedited service takes two to three weeks but costs an extra $60. Adult passports are valid for 10 years; children’s passports are valid for five years. Passports can be renewed by mail if certain criteria are met. First-time applicants, or those younger than 16, must appear in person at a passport-acceptance facility, including designated U.S. post offices, clerks of court and public libraries. If you are part of the renewal surge, get started early and remember, save the selfies for your vacation. For more information on photo requirements, visit _travel.state.gov _. **More fromTravel:** Around the world in 20 days: How to visit seven countries in one 21,623-mile adventure This isn’t Darwin’s Galapagos: The wildlife-rich islands are more tourist- friendly than you think Still finding kicks on Route 66

‘Breathprints’ offer clues about what makes you who you are

What makes your body different from everyone else’s? Maybe you’re thinking fingerprints or the DNA that you leave on everything you touch. Now, add your breath to that list. Researchers have found that individuals have unique “breathprints” that change throughout the day and that reflect chemical reactions in the body. In a study reported last week in the journal PLoS One, volunteers blew air into a mass spectrometer, an instrument that can measure the masses and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules. The device split the exhalation into its chemical components. Unlike older methods, which required samples to be prepared and then injected into the machine, the device used in this study can directly accept breath and show the results in seconds. The researchers found that individuals’ breathprints changed slightly from sample to sample, but they always kept a core signature that was unique enough to identify that person. That means that a breathprint reflects what’s going on in a person’s body and isn’t just a random sampling of room air, researchers concluded. In the future, the authors say, such analysis might reveal the drugs you’ve been taking or biomarkers of diseases such as cancer. Smaller versions of the machine may someday make their way into doctors’ offices and could be used to detect doping at races without sending samples to a lab.

The OPM breach exposed more than a million fingerprints. Here’s why that terrible news.

The scariest part of the massive hack at the Office of Personnel Management may not be the breach of Social Security numbers or employment information. Instead, it could be something closer to home — in fact, just on the tip of your fingers: The breach exposed more than 1 million fingerprints to hackers. And unlike an address or even a Social Security number, those fingerprints can't be changed. "Fingerprints can be very convenient because a password is something you know, but a fingerprint is something you are," said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. Fingerprints are a key element of biometric data — used for everything from background checks and border crossings to unlocking smartphones. Some secure workplaces even use to them to verify employees identities. They're often thought  of as a more secure way to prove identities than passwords. But unlike a password, your fingerprint isn't a secret: You leave them on everything you touch. That means fingerprints are most effective, and potentially more dangerous, when paired with the other data compromised in the OPM breach, said Bedoya. The government has remained quiet about who it thinks was behind the breach, but many suspect it is part of an attempt by China to build a massive database on Americans. And if that's the case, a foreign government has access to a permanent way to identify a lot of people who applied for security clearances — although likely not the most covert of spies at the CIA, because that agency keeps its records in a separate system.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico It remains unclear exactly how the hackers might use the prints or what exact format they were stored in. That is a key question for Bedoya, who says that if the prints were complete and high quality, there could be "some acutely negative long-term consequences for individuals affected and their future use of fingerprints to verify their identities." An FBI spokesperson said the agency was unable to comment on the specific format of the fingerprint data due to the ongoing investigation into the breach. Asked about the fingerprint breach, OPM spokesperson Samuel Schumach said affected individuals will be contacted once the agency finalizes its notification process. “Right now, OPM continues to work with the Department of Defense on an appropriate process and selection of a vendor for notification,” he said.

Randomizing airline passenger screening

The Oct. 24 news article “Experts warn of security defect with airline boarding passes” warned that the random component of the airline security system may be compromised because the allocation of a passenger to a full or a limited check is based on information readable in the boarding-pass bar code. However, effectively random security checks do not require embedding information in boarding passes. A pair of dice at the checkpoint would do nicely, though passengers might find it unsettling to learn what “random” really means. This random component could always be combined with risk-based criteria (some of which would have to be encoded in the boarding pass and should indeed be encrypted). A truly sophisticated system might throw in bogus unencrypted information on the boarding pass to give terrorist hackers a false sense of security. ****Peter Bruce,** Arlington** The writer is the president of the Institute for Statistics Education.

What is the logic behind Trump’s new ‘electronics ban’? People are stumped.

But there are two caveats: U.S.-bound passengers will still be able to travel with the restricted electronics, but they will have to keep the devices in their checked baggage. And U.S.-based airlines, if they were to fly to the affected airports, would not be subject to the restrictions. These loopholes have led many analysts and journalists to question the logic underpinning the new rules: If a laptop can be converted into a bomb, what difference does it make if you check it or carry it onboard? Does that imply that the screening process for checked baggage is more stringent than for carry-ons? Haven't most in-air bombing incidents been caused by explosives in the cargo holds of planes?  With answers to these questions conspicuously absent, other theories have arisen about the impetus for the new rules. One centers on the administration's professed protectionist instincts regarding U.S. businesses.  “A lot of that competition is subsidized by governments, big league,” Trump said at that meeting. “I’ve heard that complaint from different people in this room. Probably about one hour after I got elected, I was inundated with calls from your industry and many other industries, because it’s a very unfair situation.” For business travelers flying long-haul via major transit hubs serviced by these airlines, the inability to carry, say, a work laptop onboard would be a crippling disadvantage. Inevitably, these travelers, as well as some leisure travelers, would choose to fly on unaffected (and largely U.S.- or Europe-based) airlines instead. Several journalists and activists expressed shock at the rules, noting that they would have to part ways with personal and possibly sensitive data stored on their devices.

Six tips to avoid getting kicked off a plane (leggings not included)

“Legging-gate” has died down, but in its place, a pressing question has arisen: How easy is it to get kicked off a flight? The answer: It depends. Every airline has a “contract of carriage,” which outlines, in fairly broad terms, the actions that could cause a passenger to be denied boarding or removed from a flight. Delta has a 51-page contract, Southwest Airlines has a 42-page contract and United has 30 rules in its contract. When passengers purchase tickets, they agree to all of these terms. The enforcement of many of those rules, however, is largely at the discretion of the flight crew. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said that flight crews must be vigilant about looking for warning signs of disruptive behavior that could escalate after takeoff. “Once you’re up in the air, you don’t have a lot of options. You can’t call for help. You can’t have someone taken away. It starts to become an issue that threatens the safety and security of the rest of the people on board,” she said. You can wear your leggings on the flight (as long you’re not using an employee pass on United) but there are a number of other personal choices that could get you kicked off. Here are six tips to avoid getting booted from a plane. This, Nelson said, is the first reason that someone might be turned away at the gate or get thrown off a plane. Alcohol may contribute to air rage (in fact, it was involved in a recent incident of threats against other passengers), and that’s something that the flight crew wants to avoid at all costs. “If your flight is delayed, you might want to sip those drinks at the bar a little more slowly, because you need to understand that you could get to a point where if you’re not really in control of what’s going on, you might not get on the plane,” Nelson said. No one wants a sick seatmate. If a person is visibly ill, he or she may be asked not to fly, Nelson said, whether it’s out of fear of contagion (especially if there’s a known epidemic) or safety concerns. “If someone comes to the gate and they’re clutching their chest, sweating, showing signs of a major medical event — heart attack, stroke, anything — [the flight crew is] going to very likely be very concerned about that,” Nelson said. In some cases, she said, the crew may call paramedics to conduct an assessment. The goal is to avoid an in-flight medical incident, which could put the passenger in danger and affect everyone on board if the plane has to divert. Fighting or acting aggressive (in the gate area or onboard) is a quick ticket off the plane. That’s what happened earlier this month, when a man uttered threats over the cost of a $12 blanket. No, you won’t get kicked off a plane for having your headphones in and missing the “fasten your seat belt” instructions. But Nelson said that if you’re sitting in an exit row and become obstinate toward the crew when they ask if you’re willing to assist in an emergency, that could be an issue. It sounds, well, fishy, but references to a “malodorous” condition are a part of multiple contracts of carriage. And for good reason, Nelson said: “Odors in a confined space can actually cause other people to be ill, and that would be the concern. I think this would be incredibly rare, but that is absolutely a reason that someone could be denied boarding.” Clothing and, yes, wearing shoes are also listed in the contracts of carriage. United makes mention of being “properly clothed” and Southwest calls out clothing that is “lewd, obscene, or patently offensive.” In reality, however, Nelson couldn’t think of any instances of barefoot passengers being removed from a plane, and she said that the only time she has seen clothing that raised an eyebrow was an instance involving beachwear. “They’re not turned away, they’re coming on the plane, but we’re looking at them thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, you are going to freeze and we don’t have blankets on the plane,’ ” she said. Still, when you read about passengers running into trouble because of baggy pants (it has happened) or other wardrobe malfunctions, that rule in the contract could be the airline’s out. One more piece of advice. When it comes to in-flight behavior, Nelson asks passengers to consider before boarding their next flight that they are part of a community. “They didn’t just buy a seat that is flying through the clouds by themselves,” she said. “Be aware that other people matter.” Silver is a freelance writer and author of “Frommer’s EasyGuide to Chicago.” **More fromTravel:** 14 ways to survive 14 hours in coach Can’t sleep on airplanes? These products and techniques can help. How to avoid the worst seat on the plane this summer They aren’t just for backpackers. ‘Poshtels’ boast chic decor and the chance to be social. Still finding kicks on Route 66

9/11 and the long-lost joys of flight

When I was 16, I got on a plane departing from Boston’s Logan International Airport, bound for England. I was on my way to visit my pen pal, which in retrospect is not the most anachronistic part of this story. That began when a heavy snowstorm diverted the flight from Manchester to Norwich, on the other side of the country. I took the trip at a time when cellphones were not yet universal, much less cellphones with international plans or swappable-SIM cards, and I was traveling abroad alone for the first time. Anxious about how I’d let my friend and his family know that I might not arrive for hours, I paged a flight attendant, who went to inquire about our schedule. On her return, she asked me to leave my seat and follow her — to the cockpit, where she buckled me in and left me to chat with the pilot and co-pilot, all the way through our eventual takeoff and landing in Manchester. Nine months later, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, turned that experience into an immediate relic. Nine days after the attacks, I flew again out of Logan, from which American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, had been hijacked. The troops providing security insisted that my pediatrician fax the prescription for my EpiPens to the airport to prove the injectors weren’t intended to be used as weapons. I tell these stories not out of any lingering sense of trauma, but from a place of wistfulness. The 9/11 attacks, which happened 15 years ago this Sunday, had wide-ranging impacts on American policy and culture, many of which we’re still entangled in. And while the attacks were unprecedented in their violence and the holes they left in American cities, these four hijackings were the fatal endpoint of a slow-growing decay in the trust and glamour that defined American air travel in an earlier era. Despite the scale and lethality of the 9/11 attacks, they represented the return of skyjackings in a new, more deadly form, rather than an entirely new form of violent crime.  Airlines initially responded by making it policy that pilots and airline crews should cooperate with hijackers in hopes of avoiding violence, even to the extent of training pilots to land in Cuba, a popular destination for skyjackers, or to explain in Spanish that they couldn’t make it all the way there. But, as Koerner writes, “By the end of 1972, the skyjackers had become so reckless, so dismissive of human life, that the airlines and the federal government had no choice but to turn every airport into a miniature police state.” Congressional legislation and executive action by President Nixon brought metal detectors to U.S. airports. And for a time, deterrence worked — so well, in fact, that skyjackings came to been as a relic of the past. Koerner writes: I recently found myself revisiting “The Skies Belong to Us” not to blame airlines, airports or even federal regulators for the 9/11 attacks. The hijackers, after all, used knives, box cutters and pepper spray, which weren’t yet banned on airlines. Koerner’s book is a powerful testament to the idea that, at least when it comes to air travel, 9/11 exacerbated a decline already in progress in the belief that flying was safe and that our fellow passengers were trustworthy. In retrospect, those nine years free of skyjackings feel like the exception, rather than a permanent rule. The hassles and suspicions of flying today are a small part of what 9/11 has cost us. But the wonders of a view from the cockpit, or the joy of meeting someone you love right at the gate, are still losses worth mourning.

Obama’s phony war

Tell me: What’s a suicide bomber doing with a passport? He’s not going anywhere. And, though I’m not a religious scholar, I doubt that a passport is required in paradise for a martyr to access his 72 black-eyed virgins. A Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the terrorists. Why was it there? Undoubtedly, to back up the ISIS boast that it is infiltrating operatives amid the refugees flooding Europe. The passport may have been fake, but the terrorist’s fingerprints were not. They match those of a man who just a month earlier had come through Greece on his way to kill Frenchmen in Paris. If the other goal of the Paris massacre was to frighten France out of the air campaign in Syria — the way Spain withdrew from the Iraq war after the terrorist attack on its trains in 2004 — they picked the wrong country. France is a serious post-colonial power, as demonstrated in Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic and Mali, which France saved from an Islamist takeover in 2013. Indeed, socialist President François Hollande has responded furiously to his country’s 9/11 with an intensified air campaign, hundreds of raids on suspected domestic terrorists, a state of emergency and proposed changes in the constitution to make France less hospitable to jihad. Meanwhile, Barack Obama, titular head of the free world, has responded to Paris with weariness and annoyance. His news conference in Turkey was marked by a stunning tone of passivity, detachment and lassitude, compounded by impatience and irritability at the very suggestion that his Syria strategy might be failing. The only time he showed any passion was in denouncing Republicans for hardheartedness toward Muslim refugees. One hundred and twenty-nine innocents lie dead, but it takes the GOP to kindle Obama’s ire. The rest was mere petulance, dismissing criticisms of his Syria policy as popping off. Inconveniently for Obama, one of those popper-offers is Dianne Feinstein, the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. She directly contradicted Obama’s blithe assertion, offered the day before the Paris attack, that the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIL) was contained and not gaining strength. “I have never been more concerned,” said Feinstein. “ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding.” Obama defended his policy by listing its multifaceted elements. Such as, “I hosted at the United Nations an entire discussion of counterterrorism strategies and curbing the flow of foreign fighters.” An “entire” discussion, mind you. Not a partial one. They tremble in Raqqa. And “We have mobilized 65 countries to go after ISIL.” Yes, and what would we do without Luxembourg? Obama complained of being criticized for not being bellicose enough. But the complaint is not about an absence of bellicosity but about an absence of passion, of urgency and of commitment to the fight. The air campaign over Syria averages seven strikes a day. Seven. In Operation Desert Storm, we flew 1,100 sorties a day. Even in the Kosovo campaign, we averaged 138. Obama is doing just enough in Syria to give the appearance of motion, yet not nearly enough to have any chance of success. Obama’s priorities lie elsewhere. For example, climate change, which he considers the greatest “threat to our future.” And, of course, closing Guantanamo. Obama actually released five detainees on the day after the Paris massacre. He is passionate about Guantanamo. It’s a great terrorist recruiting tool, he repeatedly explains. Obama still seems to believe that — even as ISIS has produced an astonishing wave of terrorist recruitment with a campaign of brutality, butchery and enslavement filmed in living color. Who can still believe that young Muslims are leaving Europe to join the Islamic State because of Guantanamo? Obama’s other passion is protecting Islam from any possible association with “violent extremism.” The Islamic State is nothing but “killers with fantasies of glory.” Obama can never bring himself to acknowledge why these people kill and willingly die: to advance a radical Islamist millenarianism that is purposeful, indeed eschatological — and appealing enough to have created the largest, most dangerous terrorist movement on Earth. Hollande is trying to gather a real coalition to destroy the Islamic State, even as Obama touts his phony 65. For 11 post-World War II presidencies, coalition leading has been the role of the United States. Where is America today? Awaiting a president. The next president. _Read more fromCharles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook._ **Read more:** Charles Krauthammer: Putin marches, Obama watches Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s Syria debacle David Ignatius: The fight against the Islamic State should unite Muslims and the West Harleen Gambhir: The Islamic State’s trap for Europe George F. Will: After Paris, we should look to Chris Christie

TSA’s new rules on knives are safe and reasonable

KNIVES ON planes: Can the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) be serious? That has been thereaction of some members of Congress to the TSA’s announcement that it will loosen restrictions on what passengers can carry aboard airliners. Next month, federal airport screeners will no longer force you to surrender hockey sticks, golf clubs, toy baseball bats or pocketknives — as long as the blades don’t lock in place and aren’t too long. In fact, it makes sense for TSA agents to be looking for bombs that could bring down a plane, not scouring luggage for penknives. The agency is not and cannot be in the business of protecting every passenger and crewmember from every conceivable threat. If it tried, it would have to ban a lot more than knives, and its effort would cost far more money, gobble up more of passengers’ already overbooked airport time or both. Instead, government resources and travelers’ time should be spent with a sense of priority. Airplanes pose unique dangers that justify the frustration that comes with airport screening. Terrorists have committed mass murder by using planes as weapons: forcing them to crash and blowing them up in midair. In the post-Sept. 11 era of reinforced cockpit doors, savvy passengers, a more robust air marshal program and flight attendants trained in self-defense, allowing penknives onto planes would not result in such tragedies. The change would, however, lead to less hassle for the tourist who forgot to take her knife off her key ring and less wasted time for the screener who must do the hassling. Opponents charge that the opposite could be true; instead of just confiscating knives, TSA agents might have to measure blade lengths. Yet if X-ray screeners were allowed simply to let items that are obviously pocketknives pass through, that would surely result in fewer time-consuming secondary bag inspections. The TSA, meanwhile, says that the screening process has gotten more efficient since it started allowing small scissors and knitting needles aboard in 2005 and lighters onto planes in 2007. Some also wonder why passengers should be allowed to carry knives on planes when they still have to take off their shoes for X-ray screening. But terrorists can and have fit improvised explosive devices into shoes. They could combine certain liquids in an airline cabin and cause a disaster. TSA is right to loosen up on pocketknives before such items as shoes and liquids. Instead of pouncing on the TSA for its rules change, lawmakers should enable — indeed, press — the agency to continue adding building a flexible and focused security system capable of blocking big and unexpected threats. **Read more on this issue:** Alexandra Petri: The screening system remains absurd Jonathan Capehart: Get rid of the shoe-removal requirement

Companies are betting on a new way to protect your identity: the selfie.

The selfie is about to get serious. Already ubiquitous at parties and for capturing Instagram-worthy landscapes, the act of raising a phone to your face and finding the perfect photo angle could take on a whole new role in people’s finances. Some banks, tax agencies and tech companies are making the selfie an integral step for people checking their bank accounts, shopping online and filing tax returns. Forced to find creative ways to guard against the rising threat of identity theft, a growing number of companies are moving from a system that tests people on what they know, such as a password. Now they want to ask consumers to provide evidence of something that can’t easily be changed or copied: their face. “In our opinion, the password is dying,” said Tom Shaw, vice president of enterprise security at financial services firm USAA. The company lets customers use a selfie instead of a password to log in to their mobile banking apps. Customers only need to choose the facial recognition option when they open the app, hold the phone up to their face and blink. It’s much easier for some consumers to take a quick picture than it is to ask them to remember yet another username and password, Shaw says. A photo also can serve as a way for consumers to offer proof that it was indeed them — and not an imposter —  who made that purchase or submitted that form. For instance, MasterCard plans to roll out a service nicknamed “Selfie Pay” this summer through its member banks. Through the program, consumers would shop online as usual and after checking out, they would confirm the purchase by taking a selfie with a MasterCard mobile app. And Georgia will roll out a pilot program for the next tax season at the end of the year that gives taxpayers the option of creating a secure account where they verify their identities by taking a photo. If there is a match, taxpayers will be asked take a photo on their smartphones before their tax returns can be processed, ensuring the return was not submitted by a fraudster. The growing use of facial recognition, however, raises a series of security and privacy concerns. One obvious vulnerability is that it is not that difficult to find out what someone looks like. “Everyone has your face,” says Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “So it is a mode of authentication that is inherently public.” To overcome that risk, the companies are requiring selfies that are a little different than the ones you might see on Facebook. After finding the right angle, consumers are asked to move around to confirm that the camera is capturing a live person and not a photo. In the MasterCard and USAA programs, users are told when to blink. Georgia’s tax program will prompt people to position their faces a certain way and scan for motion. The photos are typically not the only safety measure, serving instead as the second or third method of authentication. USAA, for example, says that it checks not only the photo, but also for the device being used to access the account. That means a criminal should not be able to log in from another phone that isn’t already registered with their systems, Shaw said. For the tax program, Georgia will compare the selfies consumers submit to the photos it has in its database of state driver’s licenses. Privacy advocates fear that if companies misuse the photos, it could lead to situations where people are instantly identified when they walk into stores or while they are walking down the street. Some of that is already happening.  “It is a basic human freedom to be able to walk outside and be anonymous and be private,” said Bedoya. “If you can no longer be a face in the crowd, that’s a problem.” But some of the companies and agencies introducing facial-recognition programs say they are only using the images to verify customers’ identities. They also say they are protecting consumers by not storing the images. MasterCard, for instance, said it converts the initial photo users take when they set up their accounts into a series of 1s and 0s that cannot be used to recreate a person’s face. USAA says the biometric information is encrypted and wiped if a customer hasn’t logged in for a while. And MorphoTrust USA, the company providing the technology for the facial recognition pilot in Georgia and a potential one in North Carolina, said that after a person’s identity is confirmed, the photos taken will not be stored on the state’s servers.  Whether most consumers will go along with the new selfie programs has yet to be seen. The parties introducing facial recognition and other biometric options cite convenience and security when pitching the technology.   The selfie offers a simple way to help them combat that kind of fraud, the companies say. In some cases, taking a photo can also offer an alternative to a more complicated process. For instance, Georgia says for some taxpayers who need to provide more information before their tax refunds are paid, taking a selfie could be easier and faster than calling or mailing in a form. “We’re getting to a place where we can really start using our identities as a key, or as a way to protect ourselves,” said Mark DiFraia, senior director of market development at MorphoTrust USA.  MasterCard users who do not want to take a photo can use the app to scan a fingerprint. Those alternatives may come in handy for people facing a potential security threat from someone very close to them: their identical twin. For that subset of the population who knows someone with a face that looks just like their own, it may be safer to pass on the selfie option and go with fingerprint verification instead, says Catherine Murchie, senior vice president of enterprise security solutions at MasterCard. Otherwise, that twin could end up going on a nice shopping spree.

Experts decode germs’ DNA to fight food poisoning

Chances are you’ve heard of mapping genes to diagnose rare diseases, predict your risk for cancer and tell your ancestry. But to uncover food poisonings? The nation’s disease detectives are beginning a program to try to outsmart outbreaks by routinely decoding the DNA of potentially deadly bacteria and viruses. The initial target are listeria bacteria, which are the third-leading cause of death by food poisoning and are especially dangerous to pregnant women. Already, the government credits the technology with helping to solve a listeria outbreak that killed one person in California and sickened seven in Maryland. “This really is a new way to find and fight infections,” said Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “One way to think of it is, is it identifying a suspect by a lineup or by a fingerprint?” Whole genome sequencing, or mapping all of an organism’s DNA, has become a staple of medical research. But in public health, it has been used more selectively, to investigate particularly vexing outbreaks or emerging pathogens, such as a worrisome new strain of bird flu. For day-to-day outbreak detection, officials rely instead on decades-old tests that use pieces of DNA and are not as precise. Now, with genome sequencing becoming faster and cheaper, the CDC is armed with $30 million from Congress to broaden the use of the technique with a program called advanced molecular detection. The hope is to more rapidly solve outbreaks — food-borne and other types — and maybe prevent infections, too, by better understanding how they spread. “Frankly, in public health, we have some catching up to do,” said the CDC’s Christopher Braden, an infectious-diseases doctor and epidemiologist who is helping to lead the work. As a first step, federal and state officials are rapidly decoding the DNA of all the listeria infections diagnosed in the United States this year, along with samples found in tainted foods or factories. This is the first time the technology has been used for routine disease surveillance, looking for people with matching strains who may have become sick from the same source. If this pilot project works, the CDC says, it sets the stage eventually to overhaul how public health laboratories around the country keep watch on food safety and to use the technology more routinely against other outbreaks. “Genome sequencing really is the ultimate DNA fingerprint,” said George Washington University microbiologist Lance Price, who uses the technique to study the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and says the CDC’s move is long overdue. ** — Associated Press  ** ****

Stressed out flying with the kids? Help might be on the way.

Few thoughts strike fear and dread into parents like the prospect of having to make a plane trip with a baby, toddler or young child. If the stress of shepherding sippy cups and electronic toys through the security checkpoint doesn’t leave the grown-ups on edge, it’s the possibility of having to beg a stranger to switch plane seats so they can sit next to their children. Now, Congress may be stepping in to try to ease some stress. The Senate added an amendment Monday night to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that would allow parents to accompany their children at all times through security checkpoints and would require airlines to allow parents to sit with their children on flights, at no additional cost. The amendment, proposed by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), also would require airlines to accommodate pregnant women, such as by allowing them to pre-board. As more airlines have begun charging additional fees for “premium” or “preferred” coach seats, fewer seats remain for passengers who want to reserve seats next to each other without paying extra. Many of the remaining options are middle seats, rows apart. Some families with multiple children say the additional cost of reserving premium seats together, on top of ticket fares, can be unaffordable. That can leave parents scrambling for seats adjacent to their toddlers or young children — babies often sit on adults’ laps, but some parents buy a seat for their infant carriers — once they get to the airport. There they’re at the mercy of fellow passengers, who voluntarily switch seats with them or are persuaded to do so by gate agents or flight attendants. While most passengers eventually switch to accommodate parents — who wants to get stuck babysitting someone else’s sticky, seat-kicking toddler for hours on end? — parents say the seat scramble adds to the stress of flying. Meanwhile, the passengers who agree to switch don’t get the seat that they might have paid extra for or reserved months in advance. Some parents say they pay extra for premium seating with their children just to avoid the uncertainty. Airlines for America, a trade group for some U.S. airlines, including United and American, says no law is needed because passengers already can sit together without paying additional charges. “Airlines have always worked to accommodate customers who are traveling together, including those traveling with children, and will continue to do so — without unnecessary federal mandates,” said spokesman Vaughn Jennings. “We believe that customer service decisions are best left to the dedicated and experienced airline employees who interact with and receive feedback from their customers every day — not the government.” The Senate is debating the full bill but added the amendment by unanimous consent, a Bennet spokesman said. He said the challenge will be keeping it in the bill through the conference negotiations.

A fingerprint requirement could drive Uber and Lyft out of Maryland

_Nick Zaiac is a policy analyst at the Maryland Public Policy Institute._ Some regulations seem innocuous but can destroy innovative industries and throw thousands of people out of work. The Maryland Public Service Commission was considering whether transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft must submit their employees for fingerprint-based background checks when they apply to drive. Last last month, the commission rejected that proposal. Had the commission enacted the fingerprinting requirement, both companies might have left Maryland immediately. The incomes of 30,000 Marylanders were in the commission’s hands, and it made the right decision. Fingerprint-based background checks bring serious problems. First is the system itself. The fingerprint search was designed for law enforcement and relies on law enforcement databases. The databases are not well maintained, and errors in the system are common. Studies have shown fingerprint-based searches retrieve complete information only about half the time. These errors in the system cost people jobs. Appealing a search error would require a lawyer, which defeats the purpose of applying to drive for a transportation network company. Worse, people fingerprinted for a wrongful or expunged arrest could be wrongly refused the ability to work for Uber or Lyft. Disadvantaged people don’t deserve to be kicked while they’re down, and the system proposed by the Public Service Commission would have done just that. This factor alone should have made the Public Service Commission consider alternative methods to screen drivers. The transportation network companies have fought for their alternative background check method, which uses people’s names. This method is more accurate because it doesn’t rely on databases maintained by overworked law enforcement offices. The companies have a lot on the line with background checks. They want them to be accurate and efficient. When background checks miss a driver’s disqualifying details, it is the companies that pay the cost in bad publicity, which leads to declining ridership. Regulations on new, flexible industries are a problem, and fingerprint-based background checks are one of the most problematic. Similar mandates were forced on Uber and Lyft by Austin last year. The ride-hailing companies left the city. Maryland already regulates transportation network companies and taxes their rides. Moreover, companies are subject to public utility regulations of the Public Service Commission. Every new form, screening, waiting period or license required means fewer people will want to drive and fewer people will have access to a popular service. With that comes less taxpayer revenue, less mobility and less growth. Being a driver for a transportation network company is one of the lowest-cost forms of entrepreneurship available. It takes little time and little money for those who already own personal cars and can fit driving schedules around family responsibilities and other jobs. This combination of low start-up costs and flexible schedules makes driving for transportation network companies the first taste of being one’s own boss for thousands of Marylanders. People value that freedom. The Public Service Commission shouldn’t take that away from them. Episodes such as this should prompt us all to step back and think about the goals of our government institutions. When government mandates a method that’s worse than the industry standard, costs jobs and threatens individual justice, it’s a sign that something is wrong with the state’s priorities. That it came so close to happening makes “Free State” start to sound like an empty slogan. **Read more about this issue:** The Post’s View: Arguments against fingerprinting make little sense Catherine Rampell: Uber continues to flout laws and brawl with cities Evan Feinberg: D.C. and Virginia should stop fighting Uber, Lyft and Sidecar Catherine Rampell: Who will win the ridesharing war? Probably not consumers.

The government tested facial recognition tech on thousands of travelers at a Washington area airport

Facial recognition technology isn't science fiction -- and the federal government has already used it on thousands of Americans entering the United States through Dulles International Airport. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection used a facial recognition system on around 5,000 people with U.S. ePassports at Dulles, in recent months, agency spokesperson Jennifer Evanitsky said in an e-mail statement. The Dulles test, which ended in May according to Evanitsky, was part of a larger set of pilot programs designed to test the feasibility of using biometric tech at border checkpoints previously reported on by Motherboard when it began in March.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico At the moment, the system is not being tested at any other airports, Evanitsky said. "Plans for future testing of the technology are still being discussed." The news comes amidst a public debate over whether there should be more rules about the use of facial recognition technology. It currently faces no specific federal restrictions, although the government and private companies are already using deploying the technology. The FBI's Next Generation Identification database, which includes facial recognition capabilities, reached "full operational capacity" last year and tech giants like Facebook use it for things like identifying people in photos.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Some privacy advocates worry that pilot projects like the one at Dulles could be harbingers of more widespread deployment of facial recognition in public spaces down the line. "What starts out as a narrow program can often turn into something that's broad and has great civil liberties implication," said Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. The Dulles test was used on travelers ages 18 and up who were in lines equipped with the technology, along with some who were randomly selected. It compared a digital copy of passport photos stored on a chip embedded into passports issued in recent years to a picture taken as the person went through customs with facial recognition software to help figure out if the person trying to enter the country actually matches up with their documents. "The idea is to catch imposters," said Mark Cohn, the chief technology officer at Unisys Federal Systems, which provided some of the technology used in the test.  But a CBP officer, not the computer system, had the final say on if the person was able to enter the country during the test, Evanitsky said. The narrow version of facial recognition tested out at Dulles doesn't raise as many privacy concerns as some others uses of the technology, said Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, because it is using the technology to verify the identity of a person rather than identify them from a larger database. "But there are still privacy interests because whoever is collecting it could turn around and use it for some other purposes," he said. The government took precautions to prevent those risks, according to a privacy impact statement released earlier this year. For instance, the government will only hold onto photos until the end of a 19-month pilot period, it said, unless the photos became part of a criminal investigation.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And the photos from the test won't be tied directly to an individual's identity, instead they will be stored in a database that tags them by the time and date the image was taken, according to the privacy impact statement. "The technology is a stand-alone system that does not communicate with any other CBP or DHS systems," Evanitsky told the Post. "CBP remains dedicated to protecting the privacy of all travelers." There was information posted at the airport informing travelers about the trial, she said, and officers informed travelers about the test before using it on them. Travelers could not opt out of the testing if they were in a line using the equipment, according to Evanitsky. Cohn said the United States is actually a bit behind the curve when it comes to using facial recognition technology at its borders. He believes it has the potential to speed up the customs process, perhaps even bolstering tourism, and points to other countries that already use similar set ups to automate parts of the immigration process. "Years ago we integrated a system that used facial recognition and other biometric identifiers to detect counterfeit documents for the Chilean border police," he said, working to set up systems at the Santiago airport. Travelers approaching some forms of these systems, which can look like picture kiosks, may not even understand they are using biometric data to verify a person's identity, Cohn said. "It's the sort of thing you might not even realize is happening — as long as you're not flagged as a non-match, you go through the process and have no reason to be aware of the automated check is going on." _This post has been updated with further details about the test from CBP._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

A man wouldn’t leave an overbooked United flight. So he was dragged off, battered and limp.

United Airlines says a man wouldn’t give up his spot on an overbooked flight Sunday. So, according to witnesses and videos of the incident, he was pulled screaming from his seat by security, knocked against an arm rest and dragged down the aisle and back to the terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. United refused to answer questions about the incident, which horrified other passengers on the Louisville-bound flight. An airline spokesman only apologized for the overbooked flight, and said police were called after a passenger “refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily.” What happened was captured on cellphone video by at least two passengers. Tyler Bridges recalled trouble starting almost as soon as he and his wife boarded. An airline supervisor walked onto the plane and brusquely announced: “We have United employees that need to fly to Louisville tonight. … This flight’s not leaving until four people get off.” “That rubbed some people the wrong way,” Bridges said. Passengers were offered vouchers to rebook, he said, but no one volunteered. So the airline chose for them. A young couple was told to leave first, Bridges recalled. “They begrudgingly got up and left,” he said. Then an older man, who refused. “He says, ‘Nope. I’m not getting off the flight. I’m a doctor and have to see patients tomorrow morning,’” Bridges said. The man became angry as the manager persisted, Bridges said, eventually yelling. “He said, more or less, ‘I’m being selected because I’m Chinese.’” A police officer boarded. Then a second and a third. Bridges then began recording, as did another passenger — as the officers leaned over the man, a lone holdout in his window seat. “Can’t they rent a car for the pilots?” another passenger asks in the videos. Then the man, out of frame, screams. One of the officers quickly reaches across two empty seats, snatches the man and pulls him into the aisle. “My God!” someone yells — not for the first time. He goes limp after hitting the floor. “It looked like it knocked him out,” Bridges said. “His nose was bloody.” His glasses nearly knocked off his face, the man clutches his cellphone as one of the officers pulls him by both arms down the aisle and off the plane. “This is horrible,” someone says. “What are you doing? No! This is wrong.” And with that, Bridges said, four United employees boarded and took the empty seats. They were not popular among the passengers, he recalled. “People were saying you should be ashamed to work for this company,” Bridges said. And it wasn’t over. In another video, the man runs back onto the plane, his clothes still mussed from his forcible ejection, frantically repeating: “I have to go home. I have to go home.” “He was kind of dazed and confused,” Bridges said. He recalled a group of high school students leaving the plane in disgust at that point, their adult escort explaining to other passengers: “They don’t need to see this anymore.” The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher. In the end, Bridges and his wife got to Louisville about three hours late. “It was a pretty tense flight,” he said. United Chief Oscar Munoz tweeted that everyone at the airline was upset about it.  Munoz, by the way, was recently honored as “Communicator of the Year” by PRWeek. Late Monday afternoon, the Chicago Department of Aviation said one of the officers involved in the incident had been placed on leave. “The incident on United flight 3411 was not in accordance with our standard operating procedure and the actions of the aviation security officer are obviously not condoned by the Department,” the agency said in a statement. “That officer has been placed on leave effective today pending a thorough review of the situation.”

Stun gun is latest ‘Oops, I forgot’ at BWI

If you didn’t know better, you might think it was a clicker to change channels. Fortunately, the Transportation Security Administration folks at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport know better. They seized this stun gun from a passenger at a security checkpoint on Friday, the second stun gun confiscated at BWI in three days, the TSA said. No details on the passenger, but in most cases, if policed are convinced that the would-be flyer simply forgot the weapon was with them, they let the passenger head for the boarding gate, without the stun gun

Cellphones on planes deserve a chance

THE FEDERAL Communications Commission may permit airlines to experiment with allowing passengers to use cellphones in flight, officials said last week. The agency should do so, and airlines should get on with experimenting. Permission is not requirement; a change in federal rules would not necessarily mean the ruination of air travel for all time. We sympathize with anyone whose immediate reaction is to recoil at the prospect of having to listen for hours to a loudmouth with unlimited mobile minutes. Air travel is uncomfortable enough. But the FCC’s move wouldn’t guarantee such an outcome. Rather, it would leave matters to airlines and their passengers, which is as it should be. The proposal before the FCC would simply admit that there are no dangers or technical complications to transferring voice and data to and from mobile phones in the air, as long as the right technology is on board. Until now, the FCC worried that airborne mobile phone use would interfere with ground-based cell networks. Now that carriers in Europe and Asia have shown it can be done safely, the government’s telecommunications regulator has no sound reason to keep its restrictions. Its rules are outdated, and they should go. Once gone, airlines and travelers would decide what to do. Carriers would have all sorts of possibilities to suit a range of passenger preferences. They could allow a limited number of simultaneous phone conversations. They could let passengers retrieve data or send text messages but not talk. They could create quiet cabins or designate entire flights as no-phone zones, if that’s what customers want. Airline staff would have all the leverage in enforcing the rules, because they would control the equipment that would connect passengers to cellphone networks. Beyond the rules, costs would also constrain cellphone users; they would be charged roaming rates for their conversations. There’s a distinct possibility that some carriers would not allow any mobile phone use. It is already legal for air passengers to make calls over onboard WiFi connections, but airlines don’t permit it. Some travelers are waging a campaign against anything that might lead to more noise in cramped airplanes. Major airlines did not rush to celebrate the FCC’s announcement. The immediate impact of the FCC ridding the country of its unnecessary rule, then, may well be small. Yet we hope that carriers explore their options to bring air travel into the 21st century, with all its pluses and minuses. While some passengers mourn the disappearance of their last disconnected refuge, others will embrace the convenience of connection. Either way, there’s no reason for the government to play referee. **Read more:** Jonathan Capehart: Cellphones on planes = hell on Earth Alexandra Petri: FAA to allow phones on airplanes?

Could skull echos and brainprints replace the password?

What if you didn't have to keep remembering passwords — and instead they were literally inside your head? That's the gist behind new cutting-edge research that explores doing things such as watching how your brain responds to celebrity pictures or listening to sounds echoing around your skull to prove your identity.    These studies represent initial research that is a long way away from helping you sign into your online banking account. But they also highlight the push to figure out new alternatives to the traditional password, two-factor authentication and fingerprint scan to prove who you are.    Looking inside people's heads for the future of biometric identification at least may help avoid part of that last problem: Given the state of technology now, you'd probably notice if someone was trying to measure your brain waves or listen to your skull for echos.

Fingerprint scanner for iPhone 5s raises privacy, security concerns

One of the highlights of the iPhone 5s, the fingerprint scanner, is facing two concerns that may take a little shine off Apple’s cool new feature. Lawmakers and some privacy advocates raised concerns this week over how Apple plans to handle this highly sensitive data. And many consumers who ran out to pick up the new iPhone when it went on sale Friday may find themselves at odds with their information technology departments when they report to work Monday. Few companies and government agencies allow their employees to use fingerprint IDs to unlock iPhones being used for work. It may take months or longer before these businesses adopt the new technology. The iPhone 5s is the first Apple device with a built-in fingerprint scanner on the home button. Instead of entering a four-digit code, a user needs only to place a finger on the button to unlock the phone. Apple says it will only store the data on the device in an encrypted format rather than sending the information to its own servers. Apple will also block third-party apps from accessing what the company calls “iTouch ID.” This week, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook noting how fundamentally different biometric identifiers are from previous ID methods: “Passwords are secret and dynamic; fingerprints are public and permanent. If you don’t tell anyone your password, no one will know what it is. If someone hacks your password, you can change it — as many times as you want,” Franken wrote. “Let me put it this way: if hackers get a hold of your thumbprint, they could use it to identify and impersonate you for the rest of your life.” Franken wants to know more about the technical possibilities of Touch ID and how Apple plans to use it — as well as what diagnostic information, if any, the iPhone 5s transmits about the Touch ID system to Apple and third parties. And he wants assurances that Apple will never share the fingerprint data or the tools needed to get them with commercial third parties. Another important question is whether Apple considers fingerprint data to be the contents of communication or a subscriber identity under the Stored Communications Act. This is particularly important because content data require a warrant to be released to law enforcement, but a subscriber ID or number needs only a subpoena. Similarly, Franken asks if Apple considers fingerprint data to be subscriber information that the company could be compelled to share by the order of a national security letter. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Besides privacy concerns, many companies will probably want to run their own tests on the system before adding it to a list of security measures required for employee devices. Chris Hertz, the chief executive of the IT firm New Signature, said that he expects it will take businesses three to six months to begin adding fingerprint data to their existing protocols. “People within the security community want to get their hands on the iPhone and hammer against it to see how secure it really is,” he said. That is certainly the case for Dave Frymier, chief information officer for Unisys, who said that while his firm has discussed letting employees use their fingerprints as a form of identification, Unisys will have to thoroughly test the sensor first. But overall, including fingerprint technology may be better for company security, Frymier said. Even when firms require passwords or four-digit pins on their devices, he said, employees still often choose codes that are easy to crack. “Even though we try to discourage our employees from using things like ‘1111,’ they are often pretty easy to guess,” he said. Tim Hoechst, chief technology officer at the software and security firm Agilex, said the broad appeal of the iPhone and its new fingerprint technology could actually help persuade workers to secure their devices. Many consumers do not even bother to put up a pass code on their phones. “It’s a lot more secure than nothing.” Hoechst said. Still, if enough consumers adopt the technology and clamor for their IT departments to support it, the adoption of the scanner among companies and government agencies could happen faster. “It’s like anything in mobile, speed in adoption in enterprise is driven by speed of adoption by users,” added Ojas Rege, vice president of strategy at MobileIron — a firm that helps businesses manage their employees’ mobile devices. “If your CEO says this is how I want to do it, these things happen a lot faster.” _Follow The Post’s new tech blog,The Switch, where technology and policy connect._

One swab from the surface of your smartphone can tell scientists all about your lifestyle

The method draws on an understanding that the outermost layer of human skin carries chemical components drastically affected by the body’s inner chemistry and external, environmental factors. Researchers were able to capture the skin molecules present on these personal items and match them to a vast array of environmental and biological factors, quickly processing and crosschecking databases using a supercomputer. Some of the molecules found on phone surfaces had lingered for extended periods of time. Researchers found traces of DEET on one participant’s phone even though that person had applied the mosquito repellent nearly five months before the study. Pieter Dorrestein and Amina Bouslimani, co-authors of the study, decided to use phones to collect samples because of their widespread use. “We thought about what objects that we most frequently interact with that has the highest chance of demonstrating our proof of principle, that so much could be determined from a sample of these molecules,” Dorrestein said. “The phone is very obvious. Most of us spend so much time on our phones, so there are lots of molecules from your hands being transferred to the object itself at all times.” Dorrestein and Bouslimani think that the applications of this type of broad chemical analysis are vast. They cited possible medical applications that monitor the effect of medication on a patient. The effects of using cosmetics and skin-care products can also be monitored. They also mentioned potential law enforcement uses, where officials could analyze samples from phones, car keys, handbags or other personal items left at a crime scene to determine the profile of a suspect.

Racial profiling, by a computer? Police facial-ID tech raises civil rights concerns.

The growing use of facial-recognition systems has led to a high-tech form of racial profiling, with African Americans more likely than others to have their images captured, analyzed and reviewed during computerized searches for crime suspects, according to a new report based on records from dozens of police departments. The report, released Tuesday by the Center for Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University’s law school, found that half of all American adults have their images stored in at least one facial-recognition database that police can search, typically with few restrictions. The steady expansion of these systems has led to a disproportionate racial impact because African Americans are more likely to be arrested and have mug shots taken, one of the main ways that images end up in police databases. The report also found that criminal databases are rarely “scrubbed” to remove the images of innocent people, nor are facial-recognition systems routinely tested for accuracy, even though some struggle to distinguish among darker-skinned faces. The combination of these factors means that African Americans are more likely to be singled out as possible suspects in crimes — including ones they did not commit, the report says. “This is a serious problem, and no one is working to fix it,” said Alvaro M. Bedoya, executive director of the Georgetown Law center that produced the report on facial-recognition technology. “Police departments are talking about it as if it’s race-blind, and it’s just not true.” The 150-page report, called “The Perpetual Line-Up,” found a rapidly growing patchwork of facial-recognition systems at the federal, state and local level with little regulation and few legal standards. Some databases include mug shots, others driver’s-license photos. Some states, such as Maryland and Pennsylvania, use both as they analyze crime-scene images in search of potential suspects. At least 117 million Americans have images of their faces in one or more police databases, meaning their resemblance to images taken from crime scenes can become the basis for follow-up by investigators. The FBI ran a pilot program this year in which it could search the State Department’s passport and visa databases for leads in criminal cases. Overall, the Government Accountability Office reported in May, the FBI has had access to 412 million facial images for searches; the faces of some Americans appear several times in these databases. Several law enforcement agencies also have expressed interest in real-time facial-recognition technology, potentially giving police the ability to instantly identify people walking by a camera posted on a city street — or attending a political protest that authorities are recording, the report says. A coalition of civil rights and civil liberties groups, provided with advance copies of the Georgetown report, plans to deliver a sharply worded letter to the Justice Department’s civil rights division on Tuesday calling for investigation into the use — and possible abuse — of facial-recognition technology. The groups note the technology’s deployment during protests after the police-involved death of a black man in Baltimore and warn that unregulated use could make African Americans reluctant to attend events where facial images might be captured, chilling their rights to free speech and assembly. The report said protesters arrested for minor crimes such as trespassing can end up in facial-recognition databases for their rest of their lives, exposing them to an enhanced level of police scrutiny even if charges were later dropped. “Face recognition technology is rapidly being interconnected with everyday police activities, impacting virtually every jurisdiction in America. Yet, the safeguards to ensure this technology is being used fairly and responsibly appear to be virtually nonexistent,” wrote the American Civil Liberties Union and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group with more than 200 member organizations. More than 40 civil rights and other groups signed the letter. The FBI said facial-recognition technology is a valuable tool for fighting crime. The technology provides leads that investigators can pursue but does not by itself single out people for arrest. The bureau also said that concerns about racial disparities are misplaced. “Facial recognition algorithms are developed in the computer vision field, based solely on pattern matching techniques,” the FBI said in a statement. “ ‘Facial recognition’ algorithms do not actually compare ‘faces’ and they do not consider skin color, sex, age, or any other biographic.” Yet the uneven impact of surveillance tools is a source of growing concern for civil liberties and civil rights groups. Experts say that a wide range of technologies — body cameras, cellphone tracking, facial recognition and others — is creating what amounts to feedback loops that reinforce and amplify traditional forms of police bias. Virginia State Police, for example, can search a mug-shot database with 1.2 million images that skews toward African Americans because they are twice as likely to be arrested than the overall population in that state, the report said. Maricopa County, Ariz., uploaded the entire driver’s-license and mug-shot database from the government of Honduras, a major source of immigration to Arizona. In Pinellas County, Fla., a pioneer among police forces using facial-recognition systems, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri called allegations of disparate racial or ethnic impact “a bunch of nonsense.” Florida’s database of 11 million law enforcement photos, Gualtieri said, helps Pinellas County deputies identify robbers captured in bank videos, uncooperative people in routine police stops and even victims of fatal accidents or killings. All of the images are public record; the facial-recognition technology only helps investigators compare existing images more efficiently, he said. When asked about racial disparities in arrest rates, Gualtieri replied, “That’s a whole different discussion.” His county’s system, he said, “is not capturing any [people] other than those who are charged with crimes.” Yet he acknowledged that the database had not been audited for accuracy or racial disparities. People represented in some databases can seek court action to have their images removed, but the process typically is arduous. Research from experts increasingly has found disproportionate racial impact in advanced surveillance technologies. The problem is not the technologies themselves but the underlying bias in how and where they are deployed, said Sakira Cook, counsel at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. That is especially true when arrests — as opposed to successful prosecutions — are key factors in determining whose images appear in databases. A higher arrest rate, Cook said, “doesn’t necessarily mean that African Americans are committing crimes at higher rates. It just means that they are being policed, surveilled and arrested at higher rates. It compounds the issue of racial profiling.” The stakes may be highest for freedom of political expression. One activist, Chris Wilson, was arrested for trespassing after blocking entrance to the Florida State Fair to protest the death of a black teenager shortly after he was released from police custody on a dangerous roadway. The charges against Wilson were dropped in exchange for community service and a fine, but the booking photos made their way into the Pinellas County face database — and potentially into the FBI’s national database as well. That is worrying, said Wilson, who is African American and in North Dakota protesting a pipeline construction project. “It worries me so much that I cover my face when I go out and protest,” Wilson said. “It really is scary to think that they’re tracking you.”

Hey, Siri, am I drunk?

Are you sober enough to drive? The familiar way to test levels of blood alcohol (without actually drawing blood) is with breathalyzers. They are used by police trying to identify drunk drivers and in ignition-locking devices designed to prevent intoxicated people from starting a car. But breath analysis can be distorted by such factors as ambient humidity and the use of mouthwash. Research has shown that sweat might provide a more reliably accurate medium. In an article published in ACS Sensors, a journal of the American Chemical Society, scientists from the University of California at San Diego report that they have developed a flexible, wearable and even “attractive” skin patch that detects blood alcohol in the wearer’s sweat, then sends the results to a smartphone. The researchers made the patch from temporary-tattoo paper embedded with flexible electronics. It works by delivering a small amount of pilocarpine (a drug that stimulates the secretion of sweat) to the wearer’s skin using electrical current, a process called iontophoresis. The patch electrochemically assesses the sweat’s alcohol content. And the data is transmitted to your mobile device via a Bluetooth connection. The whole process takes less than eight minutes. Calling it “the first example of a completely wearable tattoo-based alcohol biosensor system,” the researchers say the device could easily be mass-produced and sold to law enforcement agencies, businesses and individuals. Besides linking to ignition-lock devices in cars, they note, “such single-use printed tattoos could be used by bartenders or friends to identify patrons that become intoxicated.” They note that future systems would have to be modified to ensure privacy and data security. ****

Everything that’s wrong with FaceApp, the latest creepy photo app for your face

FaceApp is an app for ruining your face. It morphs you into an old (or in my case, an even older) person. It can change your appearance to make you look more masculine or feminine, maybe. Take a photo with a neutral expression, and it will force you to smile. It is an app built only to please those who have really wanted a new way to play roulette with their own face.  The app has been around for a few months, yet became suddenly popular in the United States over the course of the past few weeks. God knows why. Maybe it’s something to do with the unpredictability of FaceApp’s transformations. Take mine, for instance: The “old” filter is actually pretty convincing on me, while the smile looks extremely wrong and bad. Bad transformations can be funny! Anyway, people are having a lot of fun online with FaceApp this week. But just as FaceApp exists to “transform” your face into something worse, I would like to “transform” your temptation to use this app into a lack thereof. So here are a list of things that are wrong about FaceApp:  One of the transformation options for FaceApp used to be to make you look hotter. One of the things it actually did: The app lightened skin. On Tuesday, FaceApp apologized and said they had temporarily renamed the filter to “spark.” As of Wednesday, the option no longer appears on Android’s version of the app.   “We can at least thank them for illustrating the lurking problem of underlying algorithmic bias in such a visually impactful way,” TechCrunch wrote.   This one is self explanatory.  Some have figured out that transforming an already altered FaceApp photo more than once can really create some disturbing images. For instance: Here’s the filter applied to this photograph, three times: And this is its final form, filtered eight times. I feel like there should be some sort of content warning here, but I’m not quite sure what. So, just be generally warned:   Whenever you’re thinking about installing a viral app like FaceApp, privacy should be a concern. These apps are fun, but by installing them you’re usually agreeing to give a third party some degree of information about you in exchange for that fun. And there’s something about apps like FaceApp, that take, analyze and mess with photos of your face, that is good at cooking up a healthy paranoia. To put FaceApp on my Android phone (for journalism), I had to give it access to in-app purchases, my photo and media files, my device storage and my camera. That’s pretty straightforward for an app that needs to take a photograph of you to work and wants to save that photo to your phone so that you can horrify your loved ones. Under “Other,” there were some additional permissions I granted to FaceApp:

How to make the Patriot Act more patriotic

_Jeffrey Rosen is president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and a law professor at George Washington University._ The problem with the government’s handling of surveillance since Sept. 11, 2001, comes down to the choice of the naked machine over the blob machine. In 2002, the Transportation Safety Administration had to pick between two airport screening technologies: one that showed graphic images of a passenger’s naked body and one that represented the body as a nondescript blob, with arrows pointing to the areas that required secondary screening. Because both technologies promised the same amount of security, while one also protected privacy, you would think the choice between them would be a no-brainer. In fact, both the Bush and the Obama administrations supported the wide deployment of the naked machine over the blob machine. It took a political protest — represented by the Patrick Henry of the anti- body-scanner movement, the gentleman who in 2010 exclaimed to a TSA agent, “Don’t touch my junk” — to persuade the Obama administration and Congress to reconsider. This year, the TSA removed the invasive technology from major airports and replaced it with more privacy-protective machines. Yet we remain unnecessarily exposed. Repeatedly, our government has chosen technologies, policies and laws that reveal innocent information without making us demonstrably safer. The massive telephone and Internet surveillance programs disclosed last month are the most recent examples. But the tendency goes back at least as far as the USA Patriot Act, passed in the anxious weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, with only one dissenting vote in the Senate. Defenders of the Patriot Act say it has prevented terrorism. But a better Patriot Act might have avoided national scandals over not only airport scanners and phone metadata but also wiretapping and library records. A better law could have dispensed with the “trust us” mentality and mitigated the erosion of trust in government. It could have put us in a better position to detect terrorism and other serious crimes without threatening privacy. Here’s what some of the most controversial passages of the Patriot Act should have said from the start — and how they could be amended. Before the Patriot Act, the government could conduct warrantless surveillance only to seize a limited set of records, such as business records, and only when the target was a suspected spy, terrorist or “agent of a foreign power.” Section 215 broadened the exception to warrant requirements dramatically, allowing the government to seize from anyone “any tangible things” — that is, any data, including e-mails, financial records and travel itineraries — arguably relevant to a terrorism investigation, regardless of whether the target is a suspected terrorist. Now, even Patriot Act sponsor Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) argues that Section 215 should be revised. As Sensenbrenner suggests, it should be amended to require a warrant, or “specific and articulable facts” giving reason to believe that someone is an “agent of a foreign power,” before the seizure of phone records or any other private data. That would avoid the hoovering of information and focus surveillance on suspicious targets. The director of national intelligence has suggested that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already imposed a version of this requirement on the government. But fundamental constitutional protections should be enacted by Congress, not imposed in secret by unaccountable judges. While Section 215 deals with data held by citizens and noncitizens alike, Section 218 covers foreign intelligence searches targeting noncitizens. Before the Patriot Act, such searches — authorized by that secret court — were allowed only in the small category of cases whose “primary purpose” was to gather intelligence about terrorism suspects. Section 218 lowered the bar, allowing those secret searches whenever a “significant purpose” is intelligence-gathering and whenever the evidence might be relevant to a terrorism investigation. This more relaxed standard was expanded by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively authorized President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program by allowing the NSA warrantless access to the data of Americans communicating with overseas “targets” as long as the conversations allegedly dealt with “foreign intelligence information.” In the PRISM surveillance program, the government insists that its algorithms can filter out the data of U.S. citizens not related to “foreign intelligence information” with 51 percent accuracy — but this assurance is not enough to protect Fourth Amendment values. To satisfy the Constitution, Congress should amend Section 218 by restoring the requirement that the “primary purpose” of foreign intelligence surveillance searches is to gather information related to particular terrorism suspects. The law should require foreign intelligence surveillance judges to review the content of individual surveillance applications, rather than simply the targeting and minimization procedures. It should prevent the government from amassing and sharing huge databases of private information collected through programmatic surveillance, regardless of whether the targets are at home or abroad. And Congress should limit foreign intelligence surveillance to communications related to terrorism, not “foreign affairs,” broadly defined. The most controversial treatment of non-U.S. citizens after Sept. 11 — indefinite detention at Guantanamo — initially occurred without congressional authorization. After the Supreme Court repudiated the Bush administration’s claim that it could detain alleged enemy combatants on its own say-so, Congress authorized the detention and trial of enemy combatants in military tribunals. Still, the Patriot Act itself explicitly expanded the government’s power over noncitizens in several ways. Section 411 allows the government to deport noncitizens who associate with terrorists, even unknowingly. And Section 412 allows the attorney general to detain foreigners if he has “reasonable grounds to believe” that they threaten national security. This essentially imposes guilt by association, even if you aren’t aware that you’re associating with terrorists. And it threatens the liberty of both citizens and foreigners in an age when any international call or e-mail might involve someone connected to terrorism through six degrees of separation. Congress should tighten the standards for deportation, detention and surveillance so that neither citizens nor noncitizens can be targeted in any way for unknowing association of any kind. Twelve years after the Patriot Act was passed, we’ve learned that cutting constitutional corners is both unnecessary and counterproductive. By ensuring that the courts and Congress review all requests for mass surveillance, foreign and domestic, these amendments could cure the defects of the Patriot Act while preserving its benefits. In other words, Congress can, like the blob machine, protect privacy and security at the same time.

Senate panel approves immigration changes requiring fingerprint system at 30 U.S. airports

Every immigrant leaving the United States through one of the 30 biggest airports would have to be fingerprinted by federal authorities under an immigration reform measure that won early committee approval in the Senate on Monday. The plan approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee is a concession to Republicans and some Democrats who support establishing a nationwide biometric tracking system at all U.S. air, sea and land ports of entry, a key recommendation made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track potential terrorists entering or leaving the country. The committee rejected a similar GOP proposal last week that would have forced the Department of Homeland Security to establish a biometric immigration tracking system at every U.S. air, sea and land port of entry. The committee’s Democrats and the four members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who wrote the immigration bill and sit on the panel said such a plan would be too expensive. But bipartisan negotiators sought a compromise after Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — a key GOP member of the “Gang of Eight” — said he supports the concept of a nationwide biometric system and would fight for the proposal once the immigration bill reaches the full Senate. Under the new agreement sponsored by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), DHS would need to establish a fingerprint tracking system at the nation’s 10 largest international airports within two years of the bill’s approval. The program would expand to the next 20 largest international airports within six years. Rubio deemed the proposal “a good start,” but said he would keep pushing for a nationwide system. “If we have an exit system that utilizes biometric information, it will help make sure that future visitors to the United States leave when they are supposed to,” he said in a statement. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), a key Democratic negotiator, said in a statement that establishing the system at 30 airports “will not be easy” but will be “doable in the next five years.” The Judiciary Committee met in a marathon session Monday seeking to complete debate on the immigration bill by week’s end. The panel by Tuesday should be on to the most controversial aspects of the bill regarding how to handle the legal status of the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, according to committee aides. The panel also agreed Monday to changes that would essentially bar immigrants who were granted asylum from returning to their home country, a proposal drafted in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Senators unanimously approved an amendment by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that would terminate the asylum or refugee status of anyone who returns to his or her home country. Graham introduced the amendment after investigators discovered that Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev had traveled last year to Russia and Dagestan after his family sought and was granted asylum from Dagestan in 2002. In the months prior to his trip, the FBI had opened and closed an investigation of Tsarnaev based on tips from Russian authorities. A U.S. counterterrorism task force later received a warning about Tsarnaev’s overseas trip and the warning was delivered to a single U.S. Customs and Border Protection official based in Boston. The warning went unnoticed until after the April 15 bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 others near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The committee last week approved another GOP amendment inspired by the Boston attack that would prevent lapses in information-sharing about foreign students when their immigration status changes while they are in the United States. _Discuss this topic and other political issues in thepolitics discussion forums._

A national ID card could reshape the irrational way Americans vote

CIVIL RIGHTS activists might not be able to stop Republicans from seeking electoral advantage by passing unnecessary voter ID laws. Sixteen states already require photo identification at the polls. But this week, Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and a one-time associate of Martin Luther King Jr., has been promoting a new response: Offer to put people’s photos on their Social Security cards. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was among those to push back, warning that the idea would lead to a national ID card system. To which we say, all the better if it were so. A free, easily obtainable national ID card would offer the benefits of official identification — help with boarding planes, entering government buildings and cashing checks, among many other things — to people who do not have driver’s licenses or passports. A uniform system could also help reshape the irrational way Americans vote: Simply present your card and cast a ballot. No need for registration, no confusion about what ID you need at polling places, shorter lines on Election Day. Simple rules could manage the relatively small privacy concerns: barring authorities from demanding to see an ID before letting you drive from state to state, say, or prohibiting police from hassling people simply because they left their card at home. Mr. Young’s proposal, backed by the voting activist group WhyTuesday?, does not go nearly that far. It would merely allow people the option of adding photos to their Social Security cards, making them more effective as government-issued identification. Pretty much every citizen, after all, has a Social Security card, and the Social Security Administration has offices around the country with staff dedicated to properly identifying Americans seeking government benefits. People who do not drive or travel abroad would have another way to get a useful government ID. The idea’s backers also say that President Obama could establish the policy by executive order, at a cost of about a dime per card, short-circuiting the ideological fuming of some in Congress. People who want to get a photo Social Security card would still have to show, somehow, that they are who their card says they are, which would require some kind of documentation. The Social Security Administration has a flexible set of criteria for identifying people, accepting church records, for example, when hospital birth records do not exist. But documentation requirements would still be a hurdle for some of the poorest and most vulnerable voters. So, too, might be the distance from Social Security Administration facilities. The ideal would be a comprehensive, well-funded program approved by Congress and designed to make obtaining and keeping federal ID cards as easy as possible. Given the past effectiveness of lawmakers such as Mr. Paul at blocking that sort of initiative, the ideal seems unlikely anytime soon. In the meantime, given GOP determination to crack down on the virtually nonexistent problem of voter impersonation, there is a good case to use infrastructure that already exists to maximize the number of options people have to obtain proper IDs. **Read more:** Marcus Anthony Hunter: Voter suppression is a threat to all The Post’s View: Government has to make voting easier The Post’s View: Arizona voter ID law should be overturned

Al Franken is worried the new iPhone fingerprint scanner might be a privacy menace

The iPhone 5s, released Friday, has a built-in fingerprint scanner, which will function as an alternative to conventional passwords. Some privacy advocates are concerned about how Apple plans to handle this highly sensitive data. Apple says it will only store the data collected via Touch ID on the device in an encrypted format rather than in a centralized server. Apple will also block third-party apps from accessing Touch ID. But Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) wants details about Apple's plan for the data collected by the system. Thursday he sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking some tough questions about the fingerprint system, and noting how fundamentally different biometric identifiers are from previous ID methods:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Franken wants to know more about the technical possibilities of Touch ID and how Apple plans to use it. For instance, if it's possible to convert or extract locally stored fingerprint data in a format that could be used by third parties, and whether that can be accomplished without physical access to the phone. And what diagnostic information, if any, the iPhone 5s transmits about the Touch ID system to Apple and third parties. And he wants assurances that Apple will never share the fingerprint data or the tools needed to get them with commercial third parties. Another important question is whether Apple considers fingerprint data to be the contents of communication or a subscriber identity under the Stored Communications Act. This is particularly important because content data requires a warrant to be released to law enforcement, but a subscriber ID or number only needs a subpoena. Similarly, Franken asks if Apple considers fingerprint data to be a "tangible thing" as defined in the Patriot Act, or subscriber information that they could be compelled to share by a National Security Letter. While some of the answers to the system process questions seem to be implied by what we know about Touch ID so far, responding to Franken's letter will put Apple on the record on many of the most pressing questions about the technology. He wants a response within a month of receiving the letter. But until Apple responds, early adopters will have to use their shiny new iPhones without answers to these questions. We asked Apple for comment about Franken's letter and will update if they respond. Franken has a history of aggressively pursuing inquiries into the privacy practices of technology companies. Just earlier this month he questioned Facebook about how changes to its privacy policies would expand their facial recognition database, and in the spring he asked retail analytics company Euclid about its tracking of shoppers without their knowledge.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Carrying a ‘throwaway’ wallet and other tips in avoiding travel scams

Sid Kirchheimer’s guard is perpetually up — and it reaches its zenith when he travels. As the author of the book “Scam-Proof Your Life” and the “Scam Alert” columnist for AARP, Kirchheimer strives to stay a step ahead of would-be thieves. Tourists, he said, are particularly vulnerable to crooks. “If there is a criminal element out there, they’re going to prey on you over a local because when you’re traveling you’re out of sorts,” he said. “You don’t know what to do.” When he is on the road, Kirchheimer takes strides to prepare for the worst. Consider his wallet bluff. Kirchheimer has heard many stories of tourists walking around at night and getting mugged. So he takes the advice he learned from a former pickpocket, and carries what he called a “throwaway wallet”: an old wallet that he has filled with plastic hotel room keys, which resemble credit cards, and a few bucks. “So when you get held up, you give them that wallet,” he said, adding that, thankfully, he has never had to use the decoy. Jovial and down-to-earth, Kirchheimer seems more a realist than a paranoiac. As someone who lives in a tourist-heavy area (Florida) and who has interviewed the scammers and the scammed for more than a decade, he is seasoned in deceptive practices, and has plenty of advice for travelers. He, along with two other scam experts, shared some common cons and tips to avoid them when on the road. **The airport scam.** If someone at the airport asks you to watch their luggage or purse for a few minutes, think twice, said Uzma Javed, a citizen services specialist in the State Department’s Office of American Citizen Services, which assists U.S. citizens living and traveling overseas. After the owner leaves the bag behind, a police officer may appear and say the bag has been stolen. In the ruse, the police officer proceeds to open the bag, “And then the bag has drugs in it or some type of illegal item,” Javed said. “Then the police officer will extort them for money and say, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to go to jail, give me this much money.’ ” She said it is a deceit that her office frequently hears of taking place in Russia. **The hand-off scam.** If a stranger tries to hand you something unexpectedly, do not take it. Javed said that she has been approached multiple times by people overseas who present her with an item and, when it is in her possession, demand money in exchange for it. She said it happened in Paris: someone walked up to her, grabbed her wrist, put a friendship bracelet on it and then demanded money. In Venice, she said the same thing happens with flowers: people walk up to tourists, hand them a flower and then demand cash. “They’re not really big scams, but they’re some of the types of things that folks do encounter,” Javed said. **The taxi scam.** The taxi driver “long haul” is nothing new: a driver takes passengers on the scenic route, which costs more than driving from point A to point B, or the driver manipulates the meter and charges far too much. Peter John, author of “Around the World in 80 Scams: An Essential Travel Guide,” which was inspired by his encounters with travelers who had been fleeced, offers this common-sense advice: “With taxi drivers, look like you know where you’re going, even when you don’t.” That tip applies to general tourist behavior outside of cabs, as well, John said. “Don’t look lost when you walk around. Don’t too obviously consult a map for ages,” he said. “It’s not so much trying to avoid looking like a mark, it’s trying to avoid looking like a foreigner.” **The jewelry scam.** Beware any souvenirs you buy, particularly jewelry or other items that come with a sales pitch trying to convince you of their value, John said. He said that in India and Thailand, jewelers will often approach tourists and offer to sell them gems. “They say here are some gems, if you take them home you’ll sell them for 10 times what we’re going to sell them to you for,” he said. “And they turn out to be glass.” **The money-changing scam.** Another common con: manipulating an exchange rate and short-changing a visitor, in hopes they will not notice. “Know the exchange rate and work out in advance how much you should get,” John said. **The takeout menu scam.** Do not trust any takeout menus put outside or under your hotel door. Kirchheimer said that in Florida, where he is based, con artists will deliver menus advertising pizza or Chinese food. When a visitor calls the number listed to place an order, they will be asked for their credit card number. “They say they’ll deliver within 30 minutes. You never get your food and they’ve got your credit card,” Kirchheimer said. **The vacation-rental scam.** Planning to stay in a house you found online? Make sure that house actually exists, Kirchheimer said. A few years ago, he said he saw a rental ad for an address near his neighborhood. He did an online search and found the address was actually for a vacant lot. “If you’re renting, Google the property address, see if it exists and see what else comes up,” he said. “If it comes up as a RE/MAX website and the house is for sale, well, it’s not for rent.” He said scammers will lift descriptions and photos directly from real estate sites and then list them on Craigslist or elsewhere, taking travelers’ money and offering them no place to stay. **The parking lot scam.** If a person seems like he or she is being overly helpful, look out, Kirchheimer warned, especially if you are in a parking lot in Florida, where rental cars are frequent targets. The grift goes like this: A person parks and goes into a store. While they are inside, a con artist punctures their tire or dismantles a spark plug. The driver returns to find the damage. That is when the same con artist approaches and, like a good Samaritan, says, “I can fix that for you.” When the work is done, Kirchheimer said, the hustler will demand cash for the work. **Pickpocketing.** Be skeptical of distractions around you. A person’s goal could be to divert your attention, by, say, bumping into you and dropping something or asking you to sign a petition. While you are focused on that person, his or her partner stealthily steals your wallet. Kirchheimer said you can protect against pickpocketing by protecting your valuables. Men should carry their wallet in the breast pocket, if possible. “If not,” he said, “wear tight pants.” Women, he said, should divide up their belongings, keeping a credit card in the wallet while placing others in their make-up bag or another spot. Despite having been duped himself while traveling the world, John, author of “Around the World in 80 Scams,” is quick to point out that the possibility of getting hustled should not be a deterrent to travel. “If you worry too much about this stuff, then you’ll never go anywhere or enjoy anything, and you’ll miss out on a lot of unique experiences,” he said. He added, dryly, “Don’t be too paranoid, enjoy your trip and remember you can be robbed at home as well.” To learn about the latest travel alerts and warnings, visit the State Department’s website travel.state.gov. Victims of crime overseas should contact the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate. **More fromTravel:** The best time to buy airline tickets and more 2016 travel predictions What the TSA’s new body-scanner rules mean for you Pet travel accessories for keeping Fido safe on the road

What the TSA’s new body-scanner rules mean for you

The Transportation Security Administration’s new rules for screening passengers with its controversial full-body scanners — which were quietly changed just before the busy holiday travel season — represent a significant policy reversal that could affect your next flight. Getting checked by the TSA’s advanced-imaging technology used to be entirely optional, allowing those who refused a scan to be subjected to a pat-down. In fact, many observers thought the agency installed the 740 body scanners in 160 airports with an understanding that no one would be forced to use them, ever. But on a Friday in late December, the TSA revised its rules, saying an “opt out” is no longer an option for certain passengers. (The full document can be found on the Department of Homeland Security’s website.) The decision drew mixed reaction from experts and raised concerns from passengers. The biggest: Will I get pushed through one of these scanners before I board my next flight? “Most people will be able to opt out,” says Bruce Anderson, a TSA spokesman. “Some passengers will be required to undergo advanced-imaging screening if their boarding pass indicates that they have been selected for enhanced screening, in accordance with TSA regulations, prior to their arrival at the security checkpoint. This will occur in a very limited number of circumstances.” To some, the change appeared to be timed to ensure a muted public response. It escaped the traveling public’s notice until almost a week later, which happened to be Christmas Eve. Anderson says the TSA wasn’t waiting for a slow news day. “The revision to this policy was designed to provide TSA with the flexibility necessary to address immediate security concerns,” he says. Either way, barring a major outcry, the new opt-out rules are likely to stick. But it’s still too early to tell how the TSA plans to implement its new protocol or how the vague guidelines could affect your spring break or summer flights. That, say TSA observers, is cause for concern. Passenger advocates object to the full-body scanners on many levels. The pricey machines, they say, were deployed without giving the public a chance to comment, a process required by federal law. They also say the devices violate the Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. Also, the scanners have not been adequately tested and may present health risks, some claim. Critics say the technology is easily foiled and ultimately ineffective at identifying threats, citing an audit in which the TSA failed to catch weapons 67 of 70 times. To date, the scanners have not thwarted a single attempted terrorist attack, these agency-watchers correctly point out. What’s more, the agency has broken a promise it made to passengers and legislators when it began installing the scanners in 2009. “The TSA is going back on its word,” says Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University and prominent TSA-watcher. “The scanners were sold to Congress and the public on the promise that they were optional, but for at least some people, that is no longer the case.” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed the original lawsuit to suspend deployment of the devices, says the new policy represents an important reversal. In previous court filings, the agency offered written assurance that the scanners were optional. Based on the agency’s statements, a federal appeals court affirmed the legality of using the full-body scanners as long as fliers were given a choice. “The TSA lacks the legal authority to compel travelers to go through the body scanners,” Rotenberg says. Despite the concerns, the new scanning rules may improve security, says Stephen Lloyd, a former safety director for the Federal Aviation Administration who now runs an aerospace consulting firm in the Washington region. “This recent change was implemented, I’m sure, based on security threat assessments and the need to use scanners when security conditions dictate, to protect the public,” he says. Anthony Roman, a counterterrorism expert in Lynbrook, N.Y., concurs. “I believe it is one of the best initiatives taken by TSA in recent memory,” Roman says. “Surprise is the key element of this initiative. It creates a randomness and unpredictability regarding who will be scanned and who will not be scanned.” That randomness, for fliers screened in the future, can prevent a terrorist attack, he adds. Some fliers are skeptical and upset about the change. Karen Pliskin, an anthropologist from Oakland, Calif., opts out of the scanners and plans to continue doing so. She objects to the advanced-imaging technology for several reasons, chief among them her fear that they may emit harmful radiation. “I had a small skin cancer removed, and I don’t do anything that could potentially exacerbate a recurrence,” she says. “No matter that the TSA says that their scanners are foolproof, only a fool would say that something is foolproof.” Anderson says they are safe: “The radio-frequency emissions from these systems are well below the safety limits established by national health and safety standards for the general public.” Stephen Costanzo, who runs an education company in St. Petersburg, Fla., says he’s not bothered by the new rules. He interprets the new guidelines to mean that only passengers with screening anomalies will have to use the scanner. “In other words, when a person, for whatever reason, has already failed multiple checks, a full-body scan can be required in order to identify with more accuracy whether that traveler poses a potential security threat,” he says. “Clearly, there is still room for abuse,” he adds. “But there always has been, and these new guidelines do not change that.” For now, the TSA’s new rules mean you might not be able to say “no” to its full-body scanners on your next flight. If you do, you won’t be allowed into the boarding area. (Time is running out for the TSA; its scanners are expected to start reaching the end of their useful life in two years, and it’s unlikely they’ll be replaced.) Down the road, it’s unclear whether the TSA’s rules will change yet again, perhaps mandating that an opt out is no longer an option at all. But we know when such a policy change is likely to be announced. Look for it on a Friday just before the next major travel holiday. Elliott is a consumer advocate, journalist and co-founder of the advocacy group Travelers United.   E-mail him at chris@elliott.org. **Read more fromTravel:** Read past Navigator columns here

Could the ease of Uber come to parking garages?

Anyone who has ever tried Uber knows the joy of how simple it is. Your wallet stays in your pocket and everything is done on your phone. There’s a remarkable lack of friction. Barney Pell wonders why parking in a garage or lot can’t be just as easy? Instead we struggle to lean out of our cars to press the ticket button, sometimes lose our tickets, and have to feed money or credit cards into payment machines. On Friday, Pell’s company LocoMobi acquired Nautical Technologies to help create a better solution for parking, which is a $30 billion industry and remarkably low tech. In Pell’s world, parking could work like this. You’ve downloaded an app (LoCoMobi’s is QuickPay) and entered your credit card and license plate. When you drive up to a garage, a nearby camera scans your license plate and recognizes you. That information is also sent to the garage, so it knows exactly how many people are parked in the garage. On your way out of the garage, another camera scans your license plate. Your credit card is automatically charged and a digital receipt is sent your way. Your wallet never leaves your pocket or purse. The system would be better for customers, and more profitable for garages. “There are a lot of problems in parking,” said Pell, the co-founder and chairman of LocoMobi Inc. “There are always places people could be cheating the systems.” People can park in a garage for several days, claim they lost their ticket and only pay a one-day rate. Or gate operators can siphon off profits, or let their friends in for free. With an automated system garages could also save money by hiring fewer employees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Pell likened parking to the hotel and airline industries, which also sell perishable inventories but do a far better job of using technology. Parking garages know little about their customers, or what’s happening in their garages on a real-time basis. With hotel rooms and airline tickets, prices are constantly adjusting to fit the market. Parking lots could do the same. With technology getting cheaper, it’s reasonable to rig up a set of cameras, and have analytics software running on the cloud. Parking lots could also join hotels and airlines in offering dynamic pricing. Why should the worst spot in a garage have to cost the same as the best spot? Or on slow days prices could drop to entice customers, while rates could rise on the busiest days. Pell foresees a future where parking lots get involved in local advertising. So often people who are parking are about to go shopping. They’re a great audience for nearby merchants who may want to entice customers with special deals. But first Pell’s team will have to convince parking garages en masse that they could run their businesses a lot better.

Delaware wants to be the first state with digital driver’s licenses

You can pay for groceries by scanning your phone. You can board a plane after scanning your phone. You can check your bank account balance and order dinner and show proof of insurance and buy pants and watch a movie and do essentially anything with your phone, because your phone is always there. Your phone is always in your hand, and even when it isn’t in your hand it is in your bag or your pocket, ready and waiting, secure in the knowledge that you won’t be able to wait long before compulsively checking it again and again. So if the phone has replaced the credit card for many, and if the phone has replaced and consolidated so many other things, it stands to reason someone would ask: We’re always carrying around driver’s licenses, so is there a way our smartphone could replace that, too? This idea is being considered in a few places across the country, states that could function as test subjects to see if such an idea can catch on with the broader populace. The Delaware legislature passed a bill last week asking the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles to “study and consider issuing” digital driver’s licenses that could replace the traditional plastic ones.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This bill notes that since people in the state are already using their phones for things such as working and banking, so giving them the option for a digital driver’s license could be a way of “increasing convenience” for drivers in the state. And it would just be an option, giving drivers the choice of loading it on their phone or sticking with the plastic card wedged into a wallet. The First State isn’t the first to suggest such an idea — Iowa said last month it planned to have a pilot program testing smartphone driver’s licenses — but Delaware wants to beat them out of the gate, if possible.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “We’d like to go first,” said Jennifer Cohan, head of the state’s motor vehicle division, told DelawareOnline. “If it works for Delaware, then it will be a new option for Delaware citizens to show proof of driver’s license and identification.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The bill passed last week notes that Iowa is exploring this concept, but reasons that with the state’s smaller population (Iowa has three times as many residents), Delaware “may be in a better position to adopt new digital driver’s license technology.” Arizona also hopes to get into the race. A state senator there proposed a bill that could similarly lead to electronic driver’s licenses.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In many ways, these proposals seem inevitable, a natural extension of the process that began with phones replacing address books and cameras, continued as they became travel agents and taxi dispatchers and now evolve into a handheld, rechargeable excuse not to carry around cash or a credit card. This is, of course, not a universal truth, and the smartphone-as-essential-gadget trend is undercut by the realities of actual adoption and usage; as of last year, about six in 10 American adults had a smartphone, compared to the 90 percent who had some sort of cellphone, according to the Pew Research Center.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Unsurprisingly, these devices are more common among people who are wealthier, younger and have more formal education. Yet the popularity among 18- to 29-year-olds — more than four in five of whom have smartphones — seems important, not just because this may be the only kind of phone some of them know, but because this is an audience that is being taught how easy it is to replace cash with a thumbprint.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Still, there are possible headaches that could accompany the idea of replacing something as personal, and as frequently needed, as a driver’s license. A patchwork system could emerge, with some states accepting the digital license and others requiring a plastic one, which could be a headache for a driver who travels to an area where police require an actual license if they pull you over. Phones get lost, dropped between couch cushions or left atop a bar counter. Phones also require juice, so a driver pulled over with a dead phone may also be a driver pulled over without any proof of a license. And, of course, smartphones are not just phones. They are repositories of our personal and private information, messages sent between loved ones and banking information, all kinds of things you would not necessarily want to show a police officer or bouncer at a bar or whomever else may require proof of identification. Personal information offers an entirely different set of possible concerns that could emerge if the digital licenses enter the physical world (so to speak). The issue of privacy and our phones has been considered before by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the ruling ultimately speaking to concerns about government prying that reach back to the country’s earliest days. Justices ruled unanimously last year that police have to get a warrant before they can search the phone of someone who has been arrested, drawing an explicit link between the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and warrant-less searches of phones.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Roberts noted that these phones, with their ever-increasing capacity, offer a possible intrusion of personal information that was previously impossible to carry out with a single search. “The term ‘cell phone’ is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone,” he wrote. “They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.” Drivers may have the option to add “license” to that list at some point in the relatively near future. It remains to be seen how they will feel about handing their computer-camera-video-player-diary hybrid to a police officer who has just pulled them over.

CLEAR launches expedited ID screening at Dulles and National

So how does CLEAR work? David Cohen, chief administrative officer for the New York-based company said travelers should think of airport screening as a two-part process that consists of an ID and document check and then physical screening. CLEAR’s aim is to offer travelers a speedier path to physical screening, he said. Instead of waiting in line to have your documents checked by a Transportation Security Administration officer, he said, travelers enrolled in CLEAR will move through special lines where their travel documents and identity will be checked using CLEAR’s biometric platform, a machine that scans their iris image or fingerprint. From there, they will be directed to physical screening. People enrolled in TSA’s Pre-Check program will be directed to that line; other travelers will move into the regular screening line. CLEAR’s services differ from two other expedited screening programs offered by TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It differs from Global Entry in that it provides expedited screening for departures; CBP’s Global Entry program is designed to move arriving passengers more quickly through customs. And while it will allow you to bypass the line for having your ID checked by a TSA agent, you’ll still need to enroll in TSA PreCheck if you want be able to use those lines and avoid having to remove your laptop, jacket and shoes. National and Dulles join 13 other airports, including Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall, that offer CLEAR as an option. BWI spokesman Jonathan Dean said the airport began offering the service in spring 2015 and it has been popular among frequent travelers. Cohen said enrollment in the program can be done at participating airports. Travelers must provide a government issued ID and take a brief quiz to verify their identity. In addition to being fingerprinted, travelers will have an iris scan and have their photo taken. Cohen said the process takes less than five minutes.  There is a $179 a year membership fee to enroll in CLEAR. Family members over the age of 18 can be added to a membership for $50 a year. Children under 18 can use the service free with a member. Travelers who are members of Delta’s SkyMiles program receive special pricing through a partnership between the two companies. The launch of CLEAR means additional dollars for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which manages National and Reagan. The authority’s board of directors, which  approved the five-year agreement in March, will receive a minimum of $2.15 million over the course of the agreement. In addition, the authority stands to receive 10 percent of the enrollment fees received from travelers who reside in the airports’ catchment area, should the revenue exceed the financial guarantees outlined in the contract. According to MWAA officials, there are currently more than 475,000 people enrolled in the CLEAR program. Roughly, 26,000 are in the Washington region. CLEAR also is offered at airports in San Francisco,  San Jose,  Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston Bush, Houston Hobby, San Antonio, Austin, Orlando, Miami, Las Vegas and Westchester County in New York. Dulles and National are part of a major expansion the company has launched this year. The service begins this week in Seattle as well. CLEAR’s services differ from two other expedited screening programs offered by TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It differs from Global Entry in that it provides expedited screening for departures; CBP’s Global Entry program, is designed to move arriving passengers more quickly through border control and customs. And it comes at a time when D.C.-area airport officials have been experimenting with more strategies for moving passengers more quickly through security and through customs. While passengers at Dulles and National did not experience the extensive waits that some travelers in U.S. airports did this spring and summer, airport officials nevertheless say, they want ensure that does not change.

TSA’s medical marijuana mix-up doesn’t discourage this guy

But the TSA’s apparent new acceptance of THC — which appeared on its website — went up in smoke almost as fast as news of the supposed change zipped through social media. In 24 hours or so, the TSA’s website went from green to red: The agency said passengers are still not allowed to have marijuana in their luggage and blamed the website’s mix-up on a computer glitch.  Here at Tripping, we wondered: How do people fly (on an airplane) with marijuana that had been legally purchased in some states?      Now, unfortunately, when you put that on a federal website, and you have someone like Jeff Sessions as the attorney general … that’s why it was removed pretty quickly. I’m not surprised it got taken down.   I do. Yeah. Certainly, in our company it’s an interesting topic of conversation. We’re big believers in the plants. We think that everyone has the right to enjoy cannabis and use it however they see fit — as long as it doesn’t interfere with their workday.  A: Officially, all the advising we do is how to market your business … That said, as a team of 27 cannabis enthusiasts who lived in four different states and who all travel very regularly, we know a fair bit about transporting cannabis across the country. And what I’ll say is this: TSA says very clearly on their website that security officers do not search for marijuana or other drugs. That’s not their job, right? They’re looking for safety. They’re not DEA, they’re TSA … That said, obviously cannabis is still federally illegal, so you have to be careful. And you certainly don’t want to flaunt it or rub it in their face …

The Senate voted on 4 popular gun control proposals Monday. Here’s why none of them passed.

One filibuster, two gun control proposals, four party-line votes, zero compromises, lots of finger pointing. That's what we can expect Monday evening as the U.S. Senate votes on four different gun control amendments -- two offered by Republicans, two by Democrats -- a week after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.  We have no reason to expect different results Monday. Still, all is not lost: Both sides can and probably will use the results of Monday's votes to rally their bases for November and try and apply pressure to the other side over the next few weeks and months. Here's a step-by-step guide on what Monday's gun control votes mean and how to follow along.  All four amendments will need 60 votes to be included in the package, which will also need to gain final approval. But given the partisan makeup of the Senate (54 Republican, 46 Democrat), and how the gun debate tends to fall neatly along partisan lines, we don't expect any of the proposals to advance.                     Believe it or not, there are some opportunities -- however small -- for Congress to move forward on gun control legislation in the wake of Orlando. For example, here's one new idea that almost all of the four proposals above, have added: If a person who has been on one of the FBI's terrorist watch lists at any point in the past five years tries to buy a gun, the federal government must immediately notify law enforcement about it. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, had been on and off the FBI's watch list before he bought his weapons.  She wants to prevent people on two of the FBI's terrorist watch lists (it's unclear exactly many lists there are for perhaps obvious reasons) from buying guns: the no-fly list and the selectee list. Both lists deal with a person's rights at the airport. If you're on the no-fly list, you can't board an airplane. If you're on the selectee list, you get extra security screening when you try to board a plane. Mateen was on the selectee list for a time. And under Collins's proposal, if you are on these lists and are denied your right to buy a gun, you can challenge it, and if you win, the government has to pay your legal costs. Again, her proposals are not exactly what Democrats want (they don't like the idea of working with just these two terrorist watch lists) or what Republicans want (they don't like the idea of banning a person from buying a gun first, then offering legal recourse later). But that's the essence of a compromise, and right now it looks like the only one the Senate's got. Tellingly, Collins's proposal isn't up for a vote Monday, suggesting it might not yet have backing from Republican leaders. Definitely these knowledgeable congressional reporters and teams:

At last! The FAA has seen the light on in-flight electronics

At long last, airline passengers fed up with having to switch off their electronic devices during takeoff and landing will be able to use them freely at all times on a flight,  not just at cruising altitudes. The FAA has announced that airlines will soon be receiving guidance on how to implement the new rules, which still require devices to be in airplane mode at all times. "I will be the biggest proponent of following flight attendant instructions," said FAA administrator Michael Huerta in a Washington news conference. "But I did feel like any regulation that has been around for a long time — a lot has changed in 50 years. Let's take another look." The change won't take place overnight; each company will ease the restrictions according to their own timelines. Still, it's a welcome relief for passengers after a years-long battle to overturn the prohibition. Surprisingly, once an independent panel (whose members included Amazon) signed off on the idea, it didn't take long for the FAA to follow suit. A decision was expected "within months," according to my colleague Lydia DePillis, but the government's announcement today came just five weeks after the panel finished its safety study.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In a statement, the FAA said customers will "eventually be able to read e-books, play games and watch videos on their devices during all phases of flight, with very limited exceptions."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Requiring that passengers use airplane mode might make life more difficult for flight attendants, who might not be able to check as quickly whether a customer has the feature turned on. But there's little point in keeping your cell radios enabled anyway, said Huerta. "They're going to ping for a signal, and they won't get one," he said. "You're going to arrive at your destination with a dead phone, and I don't think anyone wants that."

The next ransomware attack will be worse than WannaCry

Ransomware isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular and profitable. The concept is simple: Your computer gets infected with a virus that encrypts your files until you pay a ransom. It’s extortion taken to its networked extreme. The criminals provide step-by-step instructions on how to pay, sometimes even offering a help line for victims unsure how to buy bitcoin. The price is designed to be cheap enough for people to pay instead of giving up: a few hundred dollars in many cases. Those who design these systems know their market, and it’s a profitable one.   The lessons for users are obvious: Keep your system patches up to date and regularly backup your data. This isn’t just good advice to defend against ransomware, but good advice in general. But it’s becoming obsolete.  It’s only a matter of time before people get messages on their car screens saying that the engine has been disabled and it will cost $200 in bitcoin to turn it back on. Or a similar message on their phones about their Internet-enabled door lock: Pay $100 if you want to get into your house tonight. Or pay far more if they want their embedded heart defibrillator to keep working.   Even worse, the usual solutions won’t work with these embedded systems. You have no way to back up your refrigerator’s software, and it’s unclear whether that solution would even work if an attack targets the functionality of the device rather than its stored data. These devices will be around for a long time. Unlike our phones and computers, which we replace every few years, cars are expected to last at least a decade. We want our appliances to run for 20 years or more, our thermostats even longer. What happens when the company that made our smart washing machine — or just the computer part — goes out of business, or otherwise decides that they can no longer support older models? WannaCry affected Windows versions as far back as XP, a version that Microsoft no longer supports. The company broke with policy and released a patch for those older systems, but it has both the engineering talent and the money to do so. That won’t happen with low-cost IoT devices.  Solutions aren’t easy and they’re not pretty. The market is not going to fix this unaided. Security is a hard-to-evaluate feature against a possible future threat, and consumers have long rewarded companies that provide easy-to-compare features and a quick time-to-market at its expense. We need to assign liabilities to companies that write insecure software that harms people, and possibly even issue and enforce regulations that require companies to maintain software systems throughout their life cycle. We may need minimum security standards for critical IoT devices. And it would help if the NSA got more involved in securing our information infrastructure and less in keeping it vulnerable so the government can eavesdrop. I know this all sounds politically impossible right now, but we simply cannot live in a future where everything — from the things we own to our nation’s infrastructure — can be held for ransom by criminals again and again.

The secret life of baggage: Where does your luggage go at the airport?

Memo to the lady with the hot pink luggage tag: The six cans of Libby’s pumpkin pie filling that you carefully knotted in that plastic supermarket bag for your flight to Australia are not going to explode. And to the Boise, Idaho-bound photographer with the double-locked “Golf Guard” case packed with tripods, you couldn’t have squeezed a bomb or much of anything else in there if you tried. By now you both know that your bags seemed suspicious enough to be tested for explosives by inspectors for the Transportation Security Administration before you flew Delta Airlines out of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport recently. The TSA leaves a calling card inside every bag it opens. Which isn’t many, and that’s a good thing, given that about 14 million checked bags will pass through TSA hands nationwide during the extended Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when an estimated 24.6 million people plan to fly. Many will feel a palpable tremor of trepidation as they crowd around the baggage carousel, praying that their bag appears and fearing a visit to the dreaded missing-baggage-claim office. Fewer bags go missing — and even fewer get touched by the TSA — than was the case before bar-coded tags. And the slick new systems to keep terrorist explosives off airplanes have reduced the need for agents to open them for further scrutiny. “The TSA isn’t even touching the vast majority of these bags,” the TSA’s spokeswoman, Lisa Farbstein, says. The question of how the TSA goes about its business behind the scenes at airports arose last month with an e-mail from an angry doctor. He had flown home to Mumbai via Los Angeles and Hong Kong. When his bag tumbled onto the carousel in India, his TSA-approved lock had been torn off and the bag was held together with packing tape. Though he had flown about 10,000 miles — and there was no TSA card indicating that his bag had been opened by American screeners — he pointed the finger at the TSA, charging agency personnel with “arrogance borne of the certainty that no one will question them.” Federal data shows that every month an average of 352 people question the TSA about real or perceived sins against their luggage. What happens in Hong Kong or Mumbai may be a different story, but once you wave bye-bye to your bag at the ticket counter at BWI, and in most large U.S. airports, here’s where it goes: After trundling along the conveyor belt for a bit, it descends into the labyrinthine system of the TSA. And into the clutches of the Dickensian pack of thieves imagined by Dr. Mumbai? Not likely. Sensors placed on the belt every few feet track the progress of a bag, setting off an alarm if a bag goes missing in the second or two that elapses between one sensor and the next. The machinery has identified some bags that are too big (this might be your golf clubs) for what comes next. Those it sends down another belt to a TSA inspector with a bomb-detecting wand. Still bigger boxes (like the one with your bike in it) go down a different belt and are wrestled onto a steel table, where they are opened. Most likely, however, your bag rumbles along toward a boxy beige device that looks a bit like the scanners you put your carry-on bag through, only about twice as big. As the bag approaches, something that looks like a rubber rumble strip gets it properly aligned, and a metal curb gives a shove if that fails. In it goes. The bag passes through something in the machine — called an Examiner 3DX — that resembles the rotating collar in a medical MRI system. The machine does two things: decides whether there might be a bomb inside, and sends a three-dimensional image of any suspect bag to a nearby control room. Exactly what makes the machine worry that a bag may have a bomb? “It’s sniffing it, so to speak,” Farbstein says. A bag that has been cleared — a green light flashes the good news — heads on down the conveyor belt and back into the airline’s luggage system in the hope of getting on the same plane that you do. But when a bag emerges after drawing a red light or a white one — white is the machine basically saying “I dunno” — the bottom drops out of the belt and the bag moves to a lower conveyor. Then the race is on. Can the TSA inspector in the control room study the images of the bag flashing on the computer screen and in less than a minute make a definitive decision that it poses no risk? If the answer is yes, the inspector pushes a button and your bag pops up to the conveyor taking all the green-lighted bags to the airline and your airplane. If the inspector sees something distressing or isn’t quite sure, your bag heads down the belt to the TSA inspection team. A team member takes a look at the computer monitor to see what caught the control room inspector’s attention and then opens the bag. It’s locked? No problem, Dr. Mumbai, the inspector has a key ring full of master keys for TSA approved locks. The photographer headed for Boise had two locks on the golf case containing his tripods, and both yielded readily to the inspector’s keys. Whether it’s something in a case of tripods or six cans of pumpkin pie filling, the offending item is ferreted out. The inspector unknots the bag with the pie filling and pulls out the cans. Everything is tested with a swab that detects explosives. Repacked, locks and straps snapped into place, the bag goes back onto the conveyor that carries it to the airline system, where bags are loaded onto carts that will be towed to the airplane. A bag that gets green-lighted will zip from counter, through the TSA system and to the airline luggage cart in about five minutes. Bags that are opened take longer. How much longer depends on whether you are a careful packer or one whose bags spill stuff when opened. Locks slow things down too, and non-approved locks get sheared off with bolt cutters. But few bags suffer the indignity of inspection. While the TSA doesn’t want to reveal exactly how many set off the alarm, one security official said it’s about 4 percent nationwide. Each of the “sniffing” Examiner 3DXs can take the scent of 500 bags an hour. In the $38 million TSA baggage-handling area that serves Delta at BWI, three of the machines can handle 1,500 bags an hour. Southwest Airlines, BWI’s biggest airline, has six 3DXs. You’re thinking, this sounds like things click along like a Swiss watch, so why didn’t my bag show up on the carousel when I flew home for Thanksgiving last year? For starters, bad luck. The number of bags that get lost — or “mishandled,” as the federal Transportation Department prefers to call it — has been cut by more than half in the past seven years. Volume also could be a factor during peak travel times. Last year, BWI scanned 97,243 checked bags the week before Thanksgiving, 118,787 Thanksgiving week and 108,249 the week after Thanksgiving. There also are a few irksome things that can go wrong in one of the TSA’s “in-line” baggage systems, like Delta’s at BWI and those at 118 other big airports. A bag refuses to align properly for the scanner. A bag is placed on the belt with its wheels down so it squirms around, causing confusion for the bags behind it. A bag’s strap or name tag gets snared in a belt. _Crunch_ , and there’s suddenly a jam all the way up the line. “We can go a whole day without one,” said Kristin Katz, the TSA’s liaison with the airlines at BWI. “Then we can have numerous jams in an hour.” Even with workers standing by to clear jams, several within an hour can muck up the system and make bags late for their flights. And on some flights, baggage raises more red flags than others. “At JFK in New York, with Air India, virtually every bag alarms,” Farbstein says. “They bring home — bless their hearts — things for friends, families, everybody.” Memo to Dr. Mumbai: The TSA has keys for that lock you think they ripped off. There’s a stack of TSA calling cards next to every station where they open bags. (Just check with the pumpkin pie lady or the Boise photographer.) Your bag passed through airports in Hong Kong and Bombay bearing a big “Priority baggage” sticker that some might see as an indication it contained something important. But you point a finger squarely at the “shocking and shameful” conduct of the TSA? Hmmmm.

What to do when your airline or hotel reservations go missing (besides panic)

No one knows exactly why part of Andrew Smith’s business-class airline reservation from Salt Lake City to San Juan, Puerto Rico, vanished. But when Smith clicked on American Airlines’ Web site to check on his in-flight meal, he discovered he was going nowhere. Despite the sophisticated technology used in today’s reservation systems — or maybe, because of it — data goes missing from time to time. Fortunately, there are ways to recover your reservation and salvage your trip. Smith was temporarily working in Utah and commuting to Washington, D.C., and the business-class tickets were for a getaway with his wife. Oddly, one leg of his flight, from Dallas to San Juan, had been canceled. American offered to re-book Smith on his original Dallas-to-San Juan flight in economy class, but he wanted his original class of service. The airline also offered an alternative flight in business class, but it would have arrived in San Juan too late in the evening for his preference, and Smith turned that down as well. “A representative told me that she would have to kick it up the chain,” he says. A few days later, American restored his itinerary. What happened? American says the glitch is unrelated to its recent merger with US Airways and that it would investigate the partially lost reservation. Perhaps it’s just as well; when things go wrong, travelers almost never find out why, but, in fairness, they almost never ask as long as the problem is solved. Smith’s reservation wasn’t an easy fix. His airline continued to insist that he accept an economy-class ticket or a new, less convenient schedule. Smith says he was patient and persistent, which may be the first rules of finding a missing reservation. Smith also remained polite, even when it appeared his Puerto Rico vacation would be less than perfect. It’s a strategy that paid off. What are the chances your next reservation will get lost? If you’re flying, Smith’s problem is one in a million, says Elizabeth Blount, president of Uniglobe Travel Designers, a travel management company. She’s never had an airline lose a reservation, she says. “Car rentals and hotels have lost reservations a handful of times for me.” The problem is declining as travel companies upgrade their systems. But it’s far from extinct, and it probably never will be. The reason: human error. Mike Danish says he recently lost a car rental reservation made online through CarRentals.com. The cause is unclear. “When I got to the Dollar counter in the airport in Seattle, I was told there was no reservation,” he says. According to Dollar’s records, Danish had made two reservations for a different date. The error came at a cost: Instead of paying $26 a day for the rental, Dollar billed him a walk-up rate of $48. Danish, an electronics repair consultant based in Aberdeen, Md., isn’t sure whether he pushed a wrong button or whether CarRentals.com booked the wrong day. But if it was his mistake, he wonders why the system didn’t catch an impossible pick-up or drop-off date. One of the most common lost-reservation cases used to involve hotels, particularly rooms booked at the last minute. The reason was largely technical. As recently as a decade ago, many hotels used fax machines to handle reservations — and fax machines can run out of paper. “The technology and products for last-minute bookings have come a long way,” says Leslie Cafferty, a spokeswoman for the Priceline Group, which owns Priceline and Booking.com. A few simple precautions can ensure that your trip isn’t ruined by lost reservations. Smith’s strategy is among the best. “It’s never a bad idea to contact a company 24 hours prior to the trip,” says Ben Hamilton, the president of ImagineAir, an on-demand plane service. “If there is a problem, you will have time to correct it.” Even if you don’t remember to call ahead, you can still save an AWOL reservation by packing a hard copy of your confirmation. Nothing jogs a general manager’s memory like a printout. If you’re inconvenienced by a lost reservation, you can ask for reasonable accommodations, Hamilton says. “There may be a policy in place to award a credit, upgrade or free room altogether,” he says. For example, at ImagineAir, if an important detail in a reservation is flubbed by humans or technology, your flight is free. “Everyone understands that mistakes are made,” he adds, “but it’s how they are handled that often makes the difference between earning new customer loyalty stemming from a lost reservation, or ensuring that the customer never comes back.” And that may be your most effective tool for finding a lost reservation. Politely remind your airline, car rental company, cruise line or hotel that it has a reputation to uphold. That should be all it takes to help it locate your ticket, car or cabin. Elliott is a consumer advocate, journalist and co-founder of the advocacy group Travelers United. E-mail him at chris@elliott.org. **** **More fromTravel:** Sizing up the sincerity of corporate apologies For travel companies and their customers, the distrust is mutual Don’t get pumped up about great gas prices until you read the small print **Read more fromTravel:** Read past Navigator columns here

Apptitude: Will SeatGuru’s wisdom result in a more comfortable flight?

Which seats are the best seats on the plane? Since airlines began charging for everything from a checked bag to a bag of peanuts, the answer is, “Whichever ones I don’t have to pay extra for.” Which puts SeatGuru in a bind — not unlike the passenger in the middle seat on a transatlantic flight. SeatGuru has provided commercial cabin seat maps on its Web site since 2001, advising travelers which seats in the cabin to select (exit rows) or not select (non-reclining seats in front of exit rows) when booking a flight. SeatGuru’s mobile apps were released in 2012, about the time airlines realized there was money to be made on these prime seats. Want that aisle seat on the exit row that SeatGuru spotted for you? It’ll cost you. And there’s the rub: No matter how savvy SeatGuru’s cabin maps may be, the only map that matters to me, as a regular flier, is the color-coded cost one on an airline’s booking page. An extra $25 to sit in the exit row? No, thanks; I’ll stay in the seat I’ve been randomly assigned. You may want to follow SeatGuru’s wisdom and spend the extra money for a premium seat when booking a long-haul flight, but that makes SeatGuru much more useful as a desktop site than a mobile app. By the time you open your SeatGuru app as you check in at the airport — while balancing your carryon bag, passport, confirmation number and anything else you’re traveling with — the best seats on the plane are likely already occupied. It’s not worth the trouble. The SeatGuru app offers several other functions, including the ability to check flight statuses. There’s no way to save a flight, however, so you have to enter the airline, flight number and departure date every time you want an update. On one trip, SeatGuru indicated my flight would depart 38 minutes late, which was news to the airline’s gate agents. The flight took off about 15 minutes late, but pushed back from the gate as scheduled. The threat of scurrying aboard a not-actually-delayed flight gave me pause about trusting this part of the app. SeatGuru’s seat maps would be a nice bonus as an additional feature in a more versatile travel app. It’s no at-the-airport replacement for apps such as FlightTrack or TripIt, which manage such details as confirmation numbers and travel distances, as well as last-minute gate changes and in-flight maps. As with all travel, it’s always best to pack light, and SeatGuru’s app feels like unnecessary baggage. More Apptitude. For stories, features such as Date Lab, Gene Weingarten and more, visit WP Magazine. Follow the Magazine on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. E-mail us at wpmagazine@washpost.com. **NAME:** SeatGuru **COST:** Free **OPERATING SYSTEM:** iOS, Android **CREATOR:** TripAdvisor LLC **USER RATINGS:** Apple  (34 ratings), Google  (1,232 ratings) ★ **REVIEW’S BOTTOM LINE:** _“By the time you open your SeatGuru app as you check in at the airport ... the best seats on the plane are likely already occupied. It’s not worth the trouble.”_ **NEXT WEEK:** Runtastic

Toes, animals, nipples and hackers — all can unlock iPhone’s TouchID

The new high end 5s model of Apple's iPhone launched with a fingerprint scanner called TouchID last Friday. But fingers aren't the only thing that works with the fingerprint scanner. The Internet has had a lot of fun trying novel deployments of the system over the weekend. Here are a few of the notable examples of things that were able to unlock TouchID: **Toes**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This isn't too surprising. Of course a system designed to recognize the ridges of fingerprints can identify the ridges of your lower appendages, too. Although, removing your shoes each time you need to unlock your phone seems like a bit of a hassle. **Various animal paws**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This is the Internet, so of course someone tried to use cats -- and it looks like it works. Not to be left out, man's best friend (the dog) also seems to be able to set up a paw-based TouchID. Presumably, this would work for nearly any animal with paws, although good luck keeping a raccoon still long enough to get it working.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Nipples**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Don't worry, the video is safe for work -- unless you work in an office where manboob is deemed unsightly. Anyhow, a fairly legit-seeming video from Japan shows a man using his nipple to successfully unlock TouchID. So, if that's what you're in to....    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Hackers**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Last, but certainly not least, German hackers said they were able to trick TouchID over the weekend, as my colleague Hayley Tsukayama reported Monday morning. Using a photo of the needed thumbprint, a laser printer and some latex milk, the Chaos Computer Club was able to fool the fingerprint scanner, the hackers said. If the hack works, it would not be a full break of the system, since it would still require access to a photo of the thumb print, but it certainly shows that TouchID may be far from foolproof.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

There is an important distinction between the ability to use a credit card or cash a check or travel on an airplane and the ability to vote. The Constitution (Amendments 15, 19, 24, and 26) refers to voting as a “right,” not a privilege. There are alternatives to using a credit card or traveling on an airplane; the only alternative to voting is not voting. Although I agree with letter writer Frank Rott that it is not hard for most people to get a government-issued photo ID, his statement missed the point: The focus of our governments (federal, state and local) should be to protect their citizens’ rights. Governments should be facilitating the exercise of citizens’ rights, not creating barriers. ****Robert Finkelstein,** Reston**

Privacy? There’s no such thing on the road.

Recent revelations of the National Security Agency’s sweeping domestic surveillance programs may have angered many Americans, but for most travelers, it was nothing new. Surrendering your right to privacy is the price you pay to travel anywhere in a post-9/11 world. You fork over your personal information to the airlines, hotels and the Transportation Security Administration with no expectation, much less a guarantee, that it will be kept confidential. “There is no privacy,” says Tab Stone, a pediatrician from Los Angeles who’s a frequent traveler. “Reservation information is shared with the TSA if you’re on a flight. If you use a credit card to pay, it’s in a database. For years, many other countries have required hotels to hold or copy passports and give the information to the local authorities.” Privacy advocates largely agree that to travel is to leave your personal data scattered across the information highway for almost anyone to see. Justin Brookman, the director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, says that current laws don’t adequately protect your personal information when you’re on the road. “When you give information over to a company, it can do whatever it wants with it,” he says. “The information could just be used to advertise to you, or it could be used to change the prices you see the next time you search for or buy tickets.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Privacy advocates point to several possible plugs for the information leak. First, they suggest that companies could voluntarily choose to protect your data as a matter of policy. Consider what happened to Dori Egan, who told me that she gave her cellphone number to a hotel reservation service two years ago and has regretted the decision ever since. “This was my personal cellphone, and I’m very careful about giving the number to anyone,” says Egan, who owns a small business in San Francisco. Almost immediately after divulging her number, she began receiving text messages to the phone from businesses related to the hotel site, and try as hard as she did, she couldn’t stop them. “I’m still getting text messages to this day,” she complains. Had the reservation service voluntarily agreed to keep Egan’s information private, it wouldn’t have incurred her wrath. Travel companies often give themselves permission to share this kind of information with third parties by pre-checking a box on a Web form that customers are asked to complete. That automatically adds their guests to a marketing list that the company shares with corporate “partners” who often pay for the information. Paul Stephens, the director of policy and advocacy for the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, says that many travel companies handle customers’ personal data in a reckless way, and with no legal consequences. This becomes particularly problematic when the information is deeply personal, such as your pillow preference or your taste in movies, which your hotel collects during a stay. Although the Federal Trade Commission requires that companies abide by their published privacy policies, some don’t have adequate privacy rules to begin with, says Stephens. Another fix: Pass new laws protecting consumer privacy. Edward Hasbrouck, a privacy rights advocate who specializes in travel, says that Congress should consider a comprehensive privacy bill that would protect your personal data when you’re on the road, modeled on Canadian and European Union privacy laws. In the United States, a company can use any information it can obtain about you in any way not explicitly forbidden by law or by the terms of your contract. In Canada and the E.U., it’s the reverse: Businesses can use or share your data only for the specific purpose for which you provided it, or if you give them permission. These protections should also apply to the government, Hasbrouck says. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has direct access to the Global Distribution Systems used to make airline, hotel and cruise reservations. That information is mined by government intelligence agencies, he adds. “Measures to address the surveillance scandal need to include government surveillance and logging of the movements of our bodies just as much as, if not more than, government surveillance and logging of the movements of our messages,” Hasbrouck notes. But perhaps the most effective way to keep your information private is to simply refuse to give your personal information to anyone unless you’re required to. “There are times I’m forced to give my date of birth, like when I fly,” says Howard LaVine, a technology consultant from Clifton Park, N.Y. “But there are many others when I’m asked for information that the business doesn’t need. When someone asks for my driver’s license number, Social Security number or similar personally identifiable information, I question why they need it and usually don’t provide it.” Taking a few common-sense precautions can significantly reduce the possibility that your personal data will fall into the wrong hands, says Christopher Wolf, co-chairman of the Future of Privacy Forum and a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Hogan Lovells. For example, taking care not to reveal your password when using a laptop computer, a tablet or a smartphone in public can protect your privacy in a meaningful and immediate way. “Something as simple as a privacy screen on a device makes sense,” he says. In the end, there are no easy solutions. New privacy laws seem unlikely to be enacted in the near future, and the travel industry is largely unmotivated to regulate itself, some advocates say. But probably not as unmotivated as travelers, most of whom simply fork over their personal information at every step without a second thought. Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, admits that the current options are terrible. Paying cash avoids leaving a trail, although it can also raise suspicions. Making sure that you don’t reveal any personal details about your travel plans via social media might prevent your home from being burglarized, but it’s no guarantee. Tien makes sure to carry a computer with only the data he needs, lest a customs agent at the border try to scan it and harvest the information. The NSA scandal “raises the stakes” on the privacy discussion, he says. Maybe it will also raise our awareness of the information we’re about to give up when we travel this summer. **More fromTravel:** The Navigator: When you check in, your private information may be checked out Travel Guide Ski Guide Caribbean Guide

Supreme Court should begin laying out privacy protections for smartphones

JUST HOW much does the Constitution protect your digital data? The Supreme Court is only just coming to grips with that question. On Tuesday, it will consider whether police can search the contents of a mobile phone without a warrant if the phone is on or around a person during an arrest. California has asked the justices to refrain from a sweeping ruling, particularly one that upsets the old assumption that authorities may search through the effects of suspects at the time of their arrest. Even if the justices are tempted, the state argues, it is hard for judges to assess the implications of new and rapidly changing technologies. The court would be recklessly modest if it followed California’s advice. Enough of the implications are discernable, even obvious, that the justices can and should provide updated guidelines to police, lawyers and defendants. They should start by discarding California’s lame argument that exploring the contents of a smartphone — a vast storehouse of digital information — is similar to, say, rifling through a suspect’s purse. The court has ruled that police don’t violate the Fourth Amendment when they sift through the wallet or pocketbook of an arrestee without a warrant. But exploring one’s smartphone is more like entering his or her home. A smartphone may contain an arrestee’s reading history, financial history, medical history and comprehensive records of recent correspondence. The development of “cloud computing,” meanwhile, means that police officers could conceivably access even more information with a few swipes on a touchscreen. Americans should take steps to protect their digital privacy. But keeping sensitive information on these devices is increasingly a requirement of normal life. Citizens still have a right to expect private documents to remain private and protected by the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches. As so often is the case, stating that principle doesn’t ease the challenge of line-drawing. In many cases, it would not be overly onerous for authorities to obtain a warrant to search through phone contents. They could still trump Fourth Amendment protections when facing severe, exigent circumstances, such as the threat of immediate harm, and they could take reasonable measures to ensure that phone data are not erased or altered while a warrant is pending. The court, though, may want to allow room for police to cite situations where they are entitled to more leeway. But the justices should not swallow California’s argument whole. New, disruptive technology sometimes demands novel applications of the Constitution’s protections. Orin Kerr, a law professor who blogs on The Post’s Volokh Conspiracy, compares the explosion and accessibility of digital information in the 21st century with the establishment of automobile use as a virtual necessity of life in the 20th: The justices had to specify novel rules for the new personal domain of the passenger car then; they must sort out how the Fourth Amendment applies to digital information now. ****

Just picture this: Travel companies are eager to charge customers for damages

You don’t have to be an expert on photographic evidence to take snapshots of your rental car before you drive off the lot, but it helps. Just ask Steve Wolf, who happens to be an expert on photographic evidence. When he recently rented a car in Denver, he instinctively started videotaping his rental from every angle, pausing at each scratch and dent. “The pictures saved my bacon,” he says. Shortly after he returned the vehicle, the company accused him of damaging it and promised to send him an invoice. Instead, Wolf e-mailed the agency the video of an already-damaged car. The agency backed off. It might not surprise you to learn that car rental companies are more vigilant than ever about collecting damages from their customers. But here’s a little fact that you might not know: Other companies, notably hotels, are getting in on the act, too, billing customers for everything from broken fixtures to torn furniture, whether they’re responsible or not. Although stopping these claims is almost impossible — after all, they’ve turned into a huge moneymaker for some travel businesses — you don’t have to become a victim. The solution: Get in touch with your inner shutterbug when you’re on the road. Take pictures of everything that could turn into a damage claim, particularly your rental car and your hotel room. And store the photos in the cloud for at least a year, because that’s how long damage claims can sometimes take. How to take the pictures? According to a dozen top photographers whom I interviewed, the camera on your phone will do just fine. But technique matters. Miss a detail, get the lighting wrong or capture a blurry image, and you could pay a price. When it comes to car rental photos, for example, timing is important. Take a photo or video both when you pick up the car and when you return it, say the pros. If a car rental company finds damage to a car, it will assume that the last renter is responsible. If you find any preexisting damage, you’re better off asking for a different car. Also, “I would advise against using flash, since there’s a risk that a compact camera flash will wash out bright areas and make it impossible to see any scratches or dents already there,” says Victoria Johansson, a wedding photographer from Orange County, Calif. Tom Clarke, a food and architecture photographer in Philadelphia, suggests a lower vantage point for taking snapshots of a rental — somewhere around door level. If you notice a scratch, stop to take a closer photo. “Be aware of glare from the sun,” he adds. “If it’s distracting or not visible, adjust the height or stand in a way that blocks the sun.” Not having enough light can be a problem, too. Too many complaints from car rental customers hit with unfair damage claims start in a dimly lit garage. If there isn’t enough light, drive the car to a place where you can photograph it clearly. Often, car rental agents will conduct a walkaround inspection with you, and they’ll offer a form where you can note previous damage. Filling it out can be helpful as a backup, but it’s no substitute for photographic evidence. If you’re taking pictures of a hotel room, says Michael Molinski, a wedding photographer based in Hudson, N.Y., turn on every light and open every drape. Then stand in a corner and shoot toward the next corner, making sure that you capture every detail. “Move to all four corners and shoot overlapping images,” he says. “The idea is to cover all the walls with overlapping photos.” Focus on problem areas, advises Steve Thornton, an Atlanta fashion photographer. “Don’t forget to photograph the carpet, the bathroom, the closet, the doors, the inside of the mini bar, the fridge and the lamp fixtures,” he says. If you see any preexisting damage, contact the front desk immediately and ask for a different room. Don’t get too much extra in the shot, advises Michael Pliskin, who specializes in aviation and hotel photography and is based in Redondo Beach, Calif. Make any damages prominent so that the torn furniture or dented vehicle is clear to anyone. “Before taking the photo, compose it in the viewfinder so that you’re not showing too much,” he says. “Get closer to the details you want to photograph. If you encounter a broken lamp or chair when you first enter the room, photograph that lamp or chair as close as you can. You don’t need the walls, ceiling or bed in the shot if you’re only photographing a lamp or chair.” If all this sounds silly to you, don’t worry. You’ll feel a little awkward taking snapshots of your car or hotel room, but not as awkward as the employee who’s trying to wrongfully collect damages from you. Joe Fitzpatrick, a wildlife photographer in Fort Myers, Fla., remembers a car rental agent in St. Maarten who accused him of denting a car. “It had numerous small scrapes on the lower front and rear body panels,” he says. “When I returned the car, the person inspecting the car claimed that many of the scratches were new. He told me they would need to repaint the panels and started talking about what it was going to cost me.” Fitzpatrick let him continue for a while. “Then I pulled out my camera, brought up the pictures and showed them to him,” he says. “The expression on his face was priceless.” The agent immediately dropped the claim and handed Fitzpatrick a receipt. Having a good insurance policy can help, but it’s not always enough to stop a damage claim. Hotels, for example, are notorious for simply charging a customer’s credit card for damage, often without even giving a reason. Normal wear and tear should be built into the cost of doing business. It shouldn’t be a profit center. Until that changes, remember: When it comes to your next vacation, a picture can be worth a thousand dollars. E-mail Christopher Elliott at chris@elliott.org. **More fromTravel:** Responsible or not, travelers often feel the pressure to pay up for damages immediately Travelers have little recourse against rental car companies’ ‘loss of use’ policies The Navigator: Some rental car companies’ damaging practices Travel Guide

A big passport change is coming that could affect frequent travelers

Frequent overseas travelers might want to check their passports. The State Department said Thursday it is about to end the practice of adding new pages to existing passport books. Starting Jan. 1, adults running out of space for new visas in their 28-page passports will have to pay $110 for a new passport of either 28 or 52 pages. Until the end of this year, they can still pay $82 to have an extra 24 pages stitched in. The prices are slightly lower for minors. The State Department said the decision to stop adding pages was made for security reasons. “When a passport gets larger and larger, it’s more difficult to keep the same security standards,” said William Cocks, a spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Anyone applying for a new passport will get the old one back. Though the passport will be canceled, any unused visas in the old book will still be valid, Cocks said. The State Department began routinely issuing 52-page passports last fall to anyone applying for a new passport at embassies and consulates around the world. More than 124 million U.S. passports are in circulation, up dramatically from 14 million in 1991, the first year the Department of State began tracking the number. That’s the same number the State Department issued in 2014 alone. About 38 percent of American citizens have passports. Passports are valid for 10 years, though in practice they can be less useful in the final year because many countries require a passport valid for six months before they issue a visa. Even before the new rule takes effect, the State Department has been bracing for a surge in passport applications in upcoming years. Security measures that went into effect after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, required passports for Americans traveling to and from Canada, Mexico and Bermuda, three countries where Americans could travel passport-free before. Those passports issued initially after the law took effect will start to expire soon.

Susan Collins is trying to make a gun control deal. Here’s what’s in it.

Four gun control proposals failed in Senate votes Monday — not a good sign for those who want to tighten our nation's gun laws after Orlando. But there may be one last chance for some sort of deal to emerge. It comes from one of the Senate's most moderate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, who will officially unveil her proposal Tuesday afternoon. We're unclear how much support it will have, but at the very least, it looks like both sides in a very divided Senate are willing to hear her out. Here's what we know about the Collins compromise — and why she's proposing it. Right now, anyone on the FBI's various terrorist watch lists can legally buy a gun. Senate Republicans and Democrats both agree that suspected terrorists shouldn't be able to do that, but they're split on whether to let the attorney general ban people from buying guns before or after the courts have a chance to weigh in.  Both lists deal with a person's rights at the airport. If you're on the no-fly list, you can't board an airplane. If you're on the selectee list, you get extra security screening when you try to board a plane. (Orlando killer Omar Mateen was on the selectee list for a time.) And if you fit the criteria for being on those lists — but for some reason the FBI never put you on it — the attorney general could also ban you from buying a gun. Under Collins's proposal, the attorney general doesn't have to go to court first to prove you're a suspected terrorist (as Republicans want). But if you are on these lists and are denied your right to buy a gun, you can challenge it afterward. And if you win, the government has to pay your legal costs. Why these lists? Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said it's because they're the most serious of the FBI's watch lists. "There are no Bubbas on this list," he told reporters Monday. "If you're on this list, it's not because you went to a tea party rally or you've got a political ax for the president or you're a liberal. You're on this list because you're doing things that unnerve the FBI to the point that you can't fly on an airplane." One more thing: Collins's proposal also would require the FBI to notify law enforcement if someone who had been on the terrorist watch lists in the past five years buys a gun. That doesn't mean they couldn't buy a gun, but at least law enforcement would know when someone who was once considered suspect did. Collins's proposal isn't exactly what Democrats want (they don't like the idea of working with just two terrorist watch lists) or what Republicans want (they don't like the idea of barring a person from buying a gun first, then offering legal recourse later).  Unclear. As with any real attempt at compromise, neither side seems thrilled with the outcome. But neither side is a hard no either.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was withholding judgment until the bill was actually released.  It seems like the only ones talking about Collins's proposal are moderate lawmakers in both parties:  Unless Ryan's position changes, it's very hard to see how this proposal — even if it passes the Senate — becomes law. That passing any new gun control laws is still really, really difficult. And that any potential compromise will have to be narrow enough to squeak through without upsetting the powers that be on either side of the debate.

Uber and Lyft’s arguments against fingerprinting make little sense

MANY OF the nation’s biggest cities have tried to require ride-booking services such as Uber and Lyft to establish fingerprint background checks for their drivers, in the interest of public safety, only to discover that the companies, which hate the idea, have them over a barrel. The pressure on local leaders can be intense: Don’t they want their town to remain in (or join) the 21st century? And what about the thousands of people who make ends meet as part-time drivers in the gig economy — don’t they deserve the extra income? In the face of threats by Uber and Lyft to leave or stay out of a city, a county or even an entire state, many public officials have buckled, much as Maryland’s Public Service Commission did last month in dropping its effort to force fingerprint background checks. (It did beef up rules for biographic background checks.) The fact is that fingerprinting is widely required for bus, taxi and limousine drivers; it is generally regarded by law enforcement as the gold standard of background checks. Given reports nationally that some gig drivers have assaulted passengers, fingerprinting makes sense as an added measure to protect the public. Uber and Lyft complain that fingerprinting is unfair, onerous, racially tilted and unreliable. Those arguments are largely specious. For one thing, both firms submit to the requirement in New York City, and Uber also does so in Houston. In other words, if the city (and profit potential) is big enough, the firms suck it up and bear the burden. And if the city isn’t big enough, the firms have shown themselves willing to walk, as they did when voters in Austin passed a ballot measure requiring fingerprint background checks this past spring. The firms say they worry fingerprinting is a hassle that may discourage the flow of new drivers — about a half-million have already signed up across the country. In fact, the burden is minimal: In Houston, prospective Uber drivers pay about $40 to be fingerprinted, a process that takes about 10 minutes. As for the argument that fingerprinting disadvantages black prospective drivers because they are disproportionately and sometimes erroneously represented in criminal databases — well, yes. Yet few dispute that fingerprinting provides the public with added protection when it comes to hiring bus drivers, teachers, security guards, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, nurses, government employees and many other prospective employees in sensitive occupations that involve interacting with the public. The firms’ real reason for opposing fingerprinting may be that it (slightly) strengthens the argument that their drivers are employees and not, as Uber and Lyft insist, private contractors. As employees, they would be eligible to press for a range of benefits that would upend the firms’ labor costs and business models. Uber and Lyft say their own biographic background checks, performed by private contractors, are just as efficient in weeding out applicants with criminal backgrounds. Not many law enforcement agencies buy that. Fingerprinting isn’t a foolproof tool for background checks, but neither are the biographic databases used by the ride-booking services now. The best way to protect the public is to insist on both. **Read more on this topic:** Catherine Rampell: Uber continues to flout laws and brawl with cities Mark R. Warner: Asking tough questions about the gig economy Catherine Rampell: Who will win the ridesharing war? Probably not consumers. Catherine Rampell: The dark side of ‘sharing economy’ jobs Evan Feinberg: D.C. and Virginia should stop fighting Uber, Lyft and Sidecar

After the United incident, passengers should know their rights. If bumped, ask for cash.

Most likely, you are one of the millions who have watched the video: A United Airlines passenger is sitting in his seat on a flight from Chicago O’Hare to Louisville when along come three Chicago airport police. One of the officers drags the man down the aisle as if he were a slab of beef. An uproar ensues over his forced removal and continues days after the Sunday event. United’s stock drops by 4 percent. On Twitter, travelers threaten to boycott the carrier. A lawsuit is a near-certainty. “This is a black eye on the industry,” said George Hobica, president of Airfarewatchdog.com. To a point, United was within its rights to bounce the man from the flight, thereby freeing up his seat for another passenger (in this case an employee). Read Rule 25 in the airline’s contract of carriage. According to the document, if an airline overbooks, it must ask for volunteers to relinquish their seats. The agents usually sweeten the deal with a voucher, plus, depending on the wait until the next flight, a hotel room, transportation and meal voucher. However, if no one raises their hand, the airline must deny a passenger boarding. In this scenario, the passenger is entitled to a maximum of $1,350. “United could’ve made this go away by offering more money,” Hobica said. Airlines can remove a passenger from the plane if the traveler exhibits aggressive or harmful behavior. But the contract does not mention roughing up a passenger because he declines to give up his seat. “It’s denied boarding,” Hobica said of the rule. “It’s not ejecting you from your seat.” Several authorities are investigating the debacle, including the Transportation Department and the Chicago Department of Aviation. Travelers can also learn from this unfortunate occurrence. First, airlines bump people. All carriers, with the exception of JetBlue, oversell flights. From October to December 2016, the DOT documented nearly 9,000 denied boardings, including 891 by United. “Maybe it’s time to rewrite the contract of carriage,” Hobica said. He also urges the industry to resuscitate Rule 240, which requires airlines to provide a displaced traveler with a seat on a different carrier. When an airline needs a seat for another passenger or an employee, it prioritizes its customers. At the top of the don’t-bump list are passengers with disabilities and unaccompanied minors under the age of 18 as well as members of the military. Also in the protective bubble, according to Hobica: passengers who fly first- or business-class, pay a higher fare and demonstrate their loyalty to the airline as a member of a frequent-flier program. He adds that pleading your case — that you have to attend a funeral or relieve your dogsitter — is useless. Passengers should prepare for the reality of an overbooked plane. Take a morning flight, so you have more options if you are left behind at the gate. (The Louisville flight was the last one of the day.) If you agree to relinquish your seat, accept only cash, not vouchers, which expire after a year. (If the airline rebooks you within an hour of your original flight, compensation is not required, though Hobica received $300 for losing his seat to an air marshal on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.) If the airline randomly ousts you, don’t argue. Ask for your cash and try to enjoy an extra night of vacation. **More fromTravel:** Air rage incidents are on the rise. First-class sections aren’t helping. You’re going where? Scottsdale. I’m treating myself to these three standouts at the International Travel Goods Show in Las Vegas

How cloud storage complicates the Supreme Court debate over cellphone privacy

Should police be able to search the contents of your smartphone without a warrant? That's the question that faced the U.S. Supreme Court this week — and the answer could have ripple effects for the Internet industry as a whole. Here's how. If you're just tuning in, the case has to do with a California man named David Riley, who was pulled over for driving with expired license plates. Police searched through Riley's smartphone without obtaining a search warrant and discovered photos that they say linked Riley to a drive-by shooting. Within minutes, a relatively minor traffic stop had suddenly become very, very serious. Riley's lawyers argue that cellphones should be protected from that kind of warrantless search. And, broadly, the Supreme Court justices seemed sympathetic during oral arguments Tuesday, acknowledging, for example, that entire photo albums stored on a smartphone are very different from, say, a few pictures in a wallet. "Most people now do carry their lives on cellphones," said Justice Elena Kagan, "and that will only grow every single year as, you know, young people take over the world." Among Kagan's concerns was the quantitative difference between the amount of data that can be gleaned from a person's phone compared with the other possessions people carry around with them. Yet there's also a qualitative difference at play: The contents of a wallet is very unlikely to reveal, for instance, a person's entire financial history, whereas a smartphone easily can. You can see where this is headed. Much of the information we think of as being "on" a phone may instead be stored on a server, retrievable from the cloud. To use the financial history example, there are services such as Mint that pull down all of a user's recent transactions every time the user fires up the app. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted during the arguments, police officers could find that data incredibly useful for identifying potential drug deals or illegal weapons buys. But it's not technically information that's stored in the phone. Other basic content, such as a person's contacts or notes, are synced to the cloud even if they're also stored locally. Sometimes you don't even have a choice in the matter: Last year, Apple upset customers when the company began forcing some iPhone users to sync their address books through iCloud.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday This creates a legal gray area, according to Hanni Fakhoury, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  "So, when you search, are you searching the cloud, or are you not?" Fakhoury asked. "I don't know the answer to that question… If the court wants to future-proof their decision, they should come up with a rule that says you can't search the phone, period." If police are looking at data retrieved from the cloud, are they effectively performing a search of another company's property — and does that mean they need to issue a formal data request to that company? After all, that's precisely what happens when the authorities want user information from Google or Facebook. It gets more complicated. Every subpoena and warrant filed to those companies gets logged and reported in their periodic transparency reports. But if a law enforcement officer can perform a warrantless search of a suspect's cell phone anytime the person is detained, the companies would have no record that the information was accessed. The federal government has come out against searches of cloud-based data. In its brief for a similar case the Supreme Court is also hearing this term, the Justice Department acknowledged that smartphones could be abused to view content stored remotely. Officials even used the word "cloud." "Using a cell phone to retrieve files beyond those stored on the phone could not be justified as a search incident to arrest," the government wrote.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Whether that view extends to the states is unclear. In theory, everyone from the highway patrol to the sheriff's department could be free to thumb through your Evernote files. It would also be difficult to distinguish between what's stored locally and what's stored remotely in each instance. An officer would have to know how each app or operating system works, and perhaps what a user's settings were at the time. As more of our lives get shifted to the cloud, we'll need to reconsider the legal standards for how police can access that content. There's a movement afoot to review the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law that governs this practice. Riley's case demonstrates that the push on ECPA ought to take into account what can happen during traffic stops. That could be a good thing for law enforcement, too: The nation's finest have enough work to do without also being forced to become on-the-spot engineers.

TSA agents find a 3-D printed revolver in a carry-on bag, confiscate it

Now we can add 3-D printed guns to the list.  TSA agents discovered the weapon in a passenger’s luggage during screening at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport. The gun was a replica, but was loaded with five live .22-caliber bullets, the agency said.   The passenger, whose name hasn’t been released, voluntarily left the gun and ammunition at the airport and boarded his flight, the AP reported. He wasn’t arrested or issued a citation, but could still face a civil fine of as much as $7,500, Dankers said. Guns and other weapons manufactured with 3-D printers pose a major security risk in air travel. For one, they’re typically made of plastic and resin, allowing them to easily slip through airport metal detectors. They can also be broken down into their component parts, enabling carriers to store them in different places and reassemble them later.    “Two reporters passed completely unchallenged through strict airport-style security to carry the gun on to a London to Paris service in the weekend rush-hour, alongside hundreds of unsuspecting travelers,” the Daily Mail reported, saying the journalists had exposed a “massive international security risk.”

Foreign travelers stay plugged in

Imagine this scenario: You’ve discovered a pot of gold at the end of your driveway and can now afford your dream trip. You plan to visit Canada, Scandinavia, China, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and New Zealand. Question: Which will you need to pack more of — shoes or adapters? Answer: Shoes. You can’t scale the Great Wall in your tango heels, but you can use one plug in all those destinations. The world’s outlets have basically remained unchanged since homo sapiens first flipped the switch over a century ago. Socket meets plug; they hook up and create a spark. Travelers, meanwhile, have evolved. We no longer traipse around the globe weighted down by multiple adapters and converters. We have flown the nest of cords and plastic bits. The first accessory to go: the converter. Previously, travelers needed a converter to synchronize their single-voltage Made in America item (hair dryer, curling iron, etc.) with the foreign country’s high-wattage outlet. Without it, prepare for a potential meltdown. Today, most smart-gadgets and beauty products are dual-voltage and can handle a range of current strengths. “Almost all gadgets now run on 110-220 volts and can adapt to different kinds of voltage,” said Sascha Segan, PCMag.com’s lead mobile analyst, by e-mail from Seoul. “You can easily buy travel haircare devices that work on both voltages.” How do you know whether you need a converter? Check the manufacturer’s label. If the tag has a single voltage number (110 or 120 volts), you do; if you see a combined low/high number (120/240 volts or 100/240 volts) or digits of 200 or higher, you don’t. Unlike the converter, the adapter is essential, regardless of the device. The plastic nub bridges the design divide between the U.S. plug and the foreign socket. With it, you can use your three-pronged hair straightener in a two-holed outlet. Without it, you are stuck with curly hair in Paris or Bangkok. Adapters are sold in myriad forms. You can purchase singlets for a specific country (Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom) or a multi-destination model. The superhero of adapters is the four-in-one, a quartet of plugs that accommodates outlets in North America, continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the South Pacific/Australia. It covers about 150 countries, including some former colonial nations, such as Hong Kong, Zambia and Kenya, where the U.K. outlet still reigns. “India has a mix of European and South African plugs, and China has a mix of European, U.S. and Australian,” said Segan. “But most Chinese sockets take American plugs, and most Indian sockets take European plugs.” The mega-adapter is a staple for such peripatetic travelers as Lee Abbamonte, who claims to be the youngest American (35 years old) to have visited every country in the world. Abbamonte always packs a universal adapter, but he warns of outliers. South Africa, for one, features a socket shape not found elsewhere on the map. (For a list, check Magellan’s online Guide to World Electrical Connections.) For the greatest outlet possibilities, consider purchasing a wider world set. Magellan’s sells a drawstring pouch filled with 13 adapters. Apple’s World Travel Adapter Kit includes a USB power adapter, a USB cable connector and six plugs suited for North America, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Korea, Australia and Hong Kong. Adventurers who travel with a small arsenal of gadgets or rely heavily on their devices pack supplemental power-source boosters. Abbamonte’s security blanket is the Mophie, a rechargeable battery case that extends a device’s unplugged life by many hours. Segan relies on a USB backup battery and Powerstick’s PowerTrip, a charger that can draw energy from a wall socket, a USB port and the sun (via solar panels). To charge several gadgets simultaneously, he throws into his luggage a Wonpro universal power strip that comes with detachable cords tipped with different adapters. “Hotel rooms often don’t have enough outlets for the gadgets I carry, or the outlets aren’t in convenient places,” he said. “The ability to suddenly summon six outlets at once, and to mix U.S. and foreign gadgets on the same strip, is invaluable.” Of course, even the most alpha traveler can find herself in a jam, with a dormant gadget and no juicer to revive it. If this happens, simply inquire at the hotel front desk. Many international properties keep a small pile of adapters and chargers that past American guests forgot to take home. **More fromTravel:** Travel Guide Ski Guide Caribbean Guide

White House moves on new visa waiver regulations, asks Congress for more reforms

The White House got the jump on Congress by announcing changes Monday to the visa waiver program as the GOP House leadership promised a vote on its own reforms before the end of the year. But it is not yet clear how the new White House regulations – or proposals for cooperation with Congress – will be received in the House, where leaders say that a bill to address problems with the waiver program is coming. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that he expects the House to vote on changes to the  program before the end of the year. A task force of committee chairmen – including the heads of the House Foreign Affairs, Armed Services, Appropriations, Judiciary, Homeland Security and Intelligence Committees – is expected to present a proposal Tuesday, McCarthy said. The visa waiver program —  which was enacted in 1986 and brings almost 20 million people to the U.S. every year — is receiving renewed scrutiny following the Paris terror attacks. Covering 38 countries, 30 of which are in Europe, citizens of waiver countries can enter the U.S. with minimal screening. That makes it much harder to identify and weed out European nationals seeking to enter the U.S. after traveling to ISIS training camps in other nations and then returning to Europe. On Monday, the White House pledged **** to “immediately” **** implement reforms to record which traveler **s** had recently been to “countries constituting a terrorist safe haven;” review the quality of terrorism information sharing between the U.S. and waiver countries; and help countries improve their collection of biometric data, especially when it comes to screening asylum-seekers and refugees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The White House also promised to step up penalties for countries and airlines that fall short of the program’s security standards. The White House also listed areas in which it expects to work with Congress to further improve the waiver program, including efforts to identify people who may have been to terrorist training camps; fast-track the requirement that all waiver participants have passports with embedded security chips; and collect the biometric data of passengers before they board flights to the U.S. Several of those points are expected to be addressed in a bill from Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to strengthen the waiver program. Feinstein said prior to the Thanksgiving recess that her bill would require the passports of those from waiver countries to contain security chips and preclude individuals who traveled to Iraq or Syria in the last five years from participating in the waiver program. The measure is expected to be introduced soon.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The House majority leader also previewed the proposals under consideration, including a requirement that waiver countries use passports with embedded biometric technology and participate in an international database of lost and stolen passports – another area for improvement that the White House listed among its suggestions for future cooperation with Congress. Those proposals are similar to the ones made by lawmakers months before the Paris attacks – some of which were adopted by the Department of Homeland Security over the summer. In August, DHS introduced new screening and information-sharing requirements for waiver countries; this time last year, DHS also added new data fields to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, the screening program for  waiver travelers. Off the Hill, the U.S. Travel Association, which warned against efforts to “scapegoat” the waiver program in the wake of the Paris attacks, said that it could support the White House changes. “The American travel community continues to be amendable to enhancements to the Visa Waiver Program,” Association president and CEO Roger Dow said in a statement Monday. “Travel cannot thrive without security, and even the most successful programs should be continually evaluated and updated to reflect the ever-evolving security landscape.” _Mike DeBonis and Catherine Ho contributed to this report._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

How can airlines prevent crashes like this in the future?

Flying is safer than ever before, yet in this era of locked cockpit doors and pilot screening, authorities said Thursday that a single aviator was able to deliberately crash a commercial airliner in the French Alps. The disaster has raised questions about how pilots are evaluated and how airlines can be sure that such a horrifying, if rare, event won’t reoccur. Aviation security experts say what unfolded on Germanwings Flight 9525 could not have happened on a U.S. airliner because of strict security procedures adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Cockpit doors were strengthened, and airlines now lock them at all times, with most doors requiring security codes known only to a handful of people onboard. Moreover, U.S. pilots cannot be left alone in the cockpit — the fatal error that investigators say doomed the Germanwings flight. “It’s just a common-sense issue,” said aviation security expert Glenn Winn. “If you have a two-person cockpit, you don’t leave [one of] them alone up there.” In Europe, however, there is no requirement that two crew members be in the cockpit at all times. After the crash, European carriers were moving swiftly to adopt such rules; on Thursday, Norwegian Airlines became the first to announce that its flights would adhere to those guidelines. Although high-profile disasters such as the crash of Flight 9525 and the disappearance last year of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 draw frenzied media coverage, flying has, in reality, never been safer. The era of planes going down because of engine failure, wind shear or midair collision has given way to state-of-the-art technology and vastly improved radar networks. The last plane crash in the United States to kill more than 50 passengers occurred in 2001. The grim story told by investigators probing this latest crash — a pilot desperately trying to reenter the cockpit after the co-pilot locked him out — seems to fit a pattern for recent air disasters: The causes have been unusual, possibly unprecedented, making them difficult to predict and tough to prevent. Because it is still early in the investigation, many things remain unknown about the crash and the co-pilot. If it is determined that he intentionally brought down the plane, as French officials said Thursday, the crash will be a rarity. Investigations into airline crashes almost never find deliberate pilot action responsible. Flying carries inherent risk, and some of the danger emanates from the cockpit. Safety advocates and transportation officials usually worry about pilot fatigue and distractions. But pilots almost never intentionally crash their planes, experts say. “To do that in an airliner is just pretty darned rare,” said Robert Benzon, who spent 27 years as a National Transportation Safety Board lead crash investigator. “You could tweak a database on suicide, and you’d get a lot of little planes. But airliners, not much would pop up at all.” If this crash is confirmed as deliberate, Benzon said it would be the third suicide by airliner in recent memory, not counting the four planes hijacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. Investigators looking into the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared last year have pointed to pilot action as a likely explanation, but that remains an unconfirmed theory. The most recent commercial crash blamed on a deliberate action by a pilot occurred near Nantucket, Mass., in 1999. EgyptAir Flight 990, which was leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York en route to Cairo, crashed into the ocean, killing all 217 people on board. The NTSB’s investigation said the first officer had guided the plane down; it did not speculate on a motive. EgyptAir contended the plane was not intentionally crashed, however, arguing that the first officer may have been trying to maneuver the plane “out of a perceived dangerous situation.” Two years earlier, a SilkAir flight from Jakarta to Singapore crashed. The Indonesian transportation agency said that although the crash may have been intentional, it was unable to determine that conclusively. Late late year, investigators found that a 2013 crash in a Namibian national park bore similarities to what French officials say happened on the Germanwings flight. But that crash involved a smaller number of passengers than the crowded commercial flights. Airlines have safeguards in place both onboard their planes and throughout the hiring process, but experts say there is little they can do to stop a suicidal pilot if he or she is left alone at the controls. What stands out as an unusual factor in the Flight 9525 crash is the inability of the pilot and other crew members to get back inside the cockpit. New rules issued by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2002 require that cockpit doors be enhanced so they cannot be opened by physical force and could block shrapnel fire from small arms or explosives. These doors also must be equipped with an internal locking device and locked at all times. But “most airlines have procedures to unlock that door,” Benzon said. “I’m a little surprised that, if the scenario we’re talking about is true, that the captain couldn’t get back up forward.” Benzon said the methods for reentry are “confidential, because if you tell everybody, there goes the plan.” Speaking in general terms, he said some crew members typically have a key or a code that would grant them access. Winn, the aviation security expert, said the Germanwings crash will probably put a greater focus on psychological screening of pilots and crew members, who already go through multiple background checks as part of their jobs. Pilots and crew members are screened by the airlines that employ them as well as the airports where they operate. The checks include fingerprinting and criminal history. U.S. airlines put pilots through “rigorous evaluations” before hiring them, Melanie Hinton, managing director of the industry group Airlines for America, said in a statement. “While working at an airline, all pilots have to regularly undergo thorough medical examinations to maintain their license,” she said. “In addition, all U.S. airlines can and do conduct fitness-for-duty testing on pilots if warranted.” According to the FAA, airline pilots are required to undergo a medical exam with an approved physician every six or 12 months depending on their age. The screening typically includes questions about a pilot’s psychological condition. Physicians can order additional psychological testing if they think it is necessary. Pilots who fail to disclose or falsify information about physical or psychological conditions and medications face fines of as much as $250,000. As part of the screening, pilots must report any visits to a health professional during the previous three years. While the focus of the Germanwings investigation has shifted to the co-pilot, there are probably multiple factors that contributed to this crash, according to Thomas Anthony, director of the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California. For example, he said, investigators might consider workplace culture. Germanwings is one of a new breed of low-cost carriers that have proliferated in the industry as travelers look for more economical ways to fly. “It’s a mistake to look at a single factor when we’re looking at an aircraft mishap,” he said.

Applying for a Passport

**When do I need to carry a passport?** Basically for all foreign travel, with a few caveats. Since 2009, the United States has required Americans to carry a passport when traveling to Bermuda, Mexico, Canada and 17 Caribbean nations. U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam are exempt, as are cruises that begin and end in U.S. ports. Children younger than 16 traveling to the above destinations by land or sea can still use their U.S. birth certificate (original or copy) or another proof of citizenship to reenter the States. Also, U.S. passport cards valid for sea and land crossings (note: not air) are acceptable for travelers of all ages. The card costs $55 for first-time adult passport applicants, $40 for those younger than 16 and $30 for valid passport holders. For application info, go to travel.state.gov. Acceptable alternative documents include Trusted Traveler Cards (i.e., Fast Cards), U.S. Military ID with travel orders and Native American photo ID cards. **How much advance time do I need to apply for a passport?** It can never be too soon. If your passport is nearing its expiration date, renew as soon as possible, because some countries require passports to be valid for six months after a traveler’s entry or return date. Passports issued to travelers 15 and younger are valid for five years; for those 16 and older, 10 years. Processing time in early May was four to six weeks for regular service and within three weeks for expedited. **Can I apply by mail?** Not if you’re a first-timer. Mail-ins are for individuals whose old passports were issued within the past 15 years and haven’t been damaged or stolen. The passport also must have been issued after your 16th birthday. To renew a passport, place a DS-82 application form (available on the State Department Web site, at post offices and at travel agencies), your most recent passport, one 2-by-2-inch photo and a check for $110 made out to the U.S. Department of State in an envelope. If your name has changed, also include a certified copy of the legal document specifying the change (e.g., marriage license, court decree, etc.). For routine service, mail your renewal application package to National Passport Processing Center, P.O. Box 90155, Philadelphia, Pa., 19190-0155. **Who must apply in person, and what is the process?** You must apply in person if: ●You’re a first-time applicant. ●Your passport was lost, stolen or damaged. (If lost or stolen, you must also complete form DS-64.) ●Your old passport expired and was issued more than 15 years ago or before you turned 16. ●Your name has changed since your last passport was issued and you have no documentation reflecting the change. ●You’re younger than 16 years old. A parent or legal guardian (with his or her own ID) must be present if you do not have acceptable identification. Parental consent is required for children under age 16. Both parents must appear and present acceptable identification and proof of relationship (e.g., their names on the child’s certified birth certificate). And yes, even newborns and toddlers need a passport and must be present when their parents apply on their behalf. Application materials include form DS-11 (but don’t sign it until you appear before the passport official); proof of U.S. citizenship, such as an original or certified birth certificate; personal ID, such as a valid driver’s license or military ID; one 2-by-2-inch passport photo taken in the past six months; and $135 (16 and older) or $105 (younger than 16). Note: The full names of the applicants’ parents must be listed on the certified birth certificate. **Where do I apply in person?** There are more than 8,700 passport acceptance facilities nationwide, including many federal and state courts, post offices, public libraries and county and city offices. See the State Department Web site www.travel.state.gov (under Where to Apply ) for local outposts. **What if my passport is running out of pages?** If you’re down to two to four visa pages, you need to fatten up your book. Send your passport, DS-4085 form and $82 to: National Passport Processing Center, P.O. Box 90106, Philadelphia, Pa., 19190-0106. **I’m in a hurry — my trip is in a few weeks!** For expedited renewal service by mail, send in the required materials plus an additional $60 and overnight delivery costs. Write “Expedite” on the envelope and put the departure date on your application. To ensure timely delivery, splurge on two-way overnight delivery. If you’re leaving in two weeks or sooner, make an appointment with a Regional Passport Agency. In Washington, the center, at 600 19th St. N.W., is open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Schedule an appointment at 877-487-2778. If you can’t make it to an agency in time, private companies charge a flat rate based on the speed of service, plus government fees. Search online for firms and prices. **Where can I find official passport information?** On the State Department Web site, www.travel.state.gov. For a status report on your application, contact the National Passport Information Center at 877-487-2778 or check online at travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports/information/application- status.html within five to seven days of your application. **More fromTravel:** Travel Guide Ski Guide Caribbean Guide

The Switchboard: Five tech policy posts you need to read today

**Crypto prof asked to remove NSA-related blog post.** A professor at Johns Hopkins University was forced to remove a blog post after he used it to criticize the NSA, Ars Technica reports. University administrators said the offending post linked to classified material and used the NSA's logo. Johns Hopkins later reversed its decision, but not before the incident raised questions about the school's link to the NSA through its Applied Physics Laboratory.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **The cowboy of the NSA.** Foreign Policy's Shane Harris profiles Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, revealing a bit of the personal backstory behind his relationship with Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director. "At times, Hayden had found himself swimming in the murkiest depths of the law, overseeing programs that other senior officials in government thought violated the Constitution. Now Hayden of all people was worried that Alexander didn't understand the legal sensitivities of that new mission."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **Will PayPal rescue Bitcoin?** Unlike the top Bitcoin exchanges for which regulations haven't been hammered out yet, PayPal is already a "fully compliant money transmitter" in the government's eyes and may assume much of the burden of integrating Bitcoin into the consumer economy, Wired's Robert McMillan reports. "In April, eBay CEO John Donahoe said that the company was looking at ways to integrate Bitcoins into PayPal. 'It’s a new disruptive technology, so, yeah, we’re looking at Bitcoin closely,' he told The Wall Street Journal."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **The new iPhone could have your biometric data. Don't panic.** It might be creepy, but as Fast Company's Neal Ungerleider writes, there's little chance that Apple's rumored fingerprint scanner can be easily hacked. A bigger problem might be how government gets involved. "Apple could take users' thumbprints and put them all in a central repository, which might make that dystopian concern slightly less fuzzy. Or each iPhone could retain only a local copy, which brings up far fewer privacy issues. But questions do remain if Apple would actually share fingerprint information with law enforcement, even if only on an extraordinary basis. More important for foreign users is the significant question of whether a central repository of thumbprints could lead to the NSA gaining access to them."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **John Sculley just gave his most detailed account ever of how Steve Jobs got fired from Apple.** In a report in Forbes, Sculley reveals that his dispute with Jobs originated over what to do with the second-generation Macintosh, which critics derided as overly ambitious. "Steve came to me and he said, ‘I want to drop the price of the Macintosh and I want to move the advertising, shift a large portion of it away from the Apple 2 over to the Mac.' I said, ‘Steve, it’s not going to make any difference. The reason the Mac is not selling has nothing to do with the price or with the advertising. If you do that, we risk throwing the company into a loss.’ And he just totally disagreed with me.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

The government’s high-tech plan for identifying you based on your tattoos

Tattoos aren't just for rebels: 1 in 5 American adults have some ink, according to recent polls. And now the government is trying to beef up technology that can automatically identify people by their tattoos.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The National Institute for Standards and Technology, a part of the Commerce Department that has taken the lead on evaluating biometrics, organized a "challenge" in which groups faced off to see who could deliver software and algorithms that identified tattoos most accurately. The event, sponsored by the FBI's Biometric Center of Excellence, brought together researchers from academia and the private sector to test image recognition technology against five different scenarios. Groups of researchers, including some from Purdue University and the MITRE Corporation, worked with data sets ranging from hundreds to thousands of images. The results from six organizations were reviewed at a NIST workshop on Monday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Some of the systems had "hit rates well above 90 percent" in some of the tests, like basic tattoo detection and identification over time as well as matching up a small piece of a tattoo to an image showing the the whole thing, said Mei Ngan, the NIST computer scientist who organized the event. But other tests, like using sketches or computer graphics to match up with a real tattoo and trying to identify shared characteristics across different tattoo designs were more challenging. Tattoos could help identify victims of disasters, like tsunamis or earthquakes. But tracking down criminals, who often sport tattoos at a higher rate than the general population, Ngan said, is the main reason the government is so interested in the technology. "You can't use it as a primary biometric like a finger print or face because it's not necessarily uniquely identifying," Ngan said. "But it can really help in cold cases where you don't have those things." Images of tattoos are already part of the FBI's massive Next Generation Identification database, which focuses on biometric identifiers, including fingerprint and facial recognition. But it currently relies on written descriptions of tattoos to help identify suspects, said Ngan. But text descriptions are "inadequate," she said. Many people may choose similar motifs -- from crosses to brand logos -- for their tattoos. And even vastly different tattoos may be described with similar language. "Think of a Hello Kitty tattoo versus a wildcat tattoo -- they both might be put in a text-based database as 'cat,'" Ngan said. Tattoo identification **** may raise fewer privacy concerns than some other types of physical identifiers, according to Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology. "Tattoos are traditionally something you put on your body to distinguish yourself from other people -- it's a little different from someone recognizing your face because a digital description has been logged, or analyzing your gait," he said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Still, Bedoya questions if the law has caught up with how image recognition technology will likely be used with tattoos: "People are being identified remotely without their knowledge -- and right now the Fourth Amendment doesn't really say anything about that."