The Amazing Race 8 (Family Edition), Episode 5 (RFID passports)

New Orleans, LA (USA) - Panama City (Panama)

Just when the families on The Amazing Race 8 finally left the USA in tonight's episode, the USA Department of State today took the latest in its recent series of regulatory actions to make it more difficult for other families like them to take that first step across the borders of the USA, and less likely that they ever will.

Under a final rule published today (70 Federal Register 61553-61555) and effective immediately, secretly and remotely readable RFID chips will be embedded in all USA passports:

[T]he first issuance to the American traveling public [is] slated for early 2006. By October 2006, all U.S. passports, with the exception of a small number of emergency passports issued by U.S. embassies or consulates, will be electronic passports.

The Passport Office's attempt to sell its critics on the "e-passport" scheme was an unsuccessful fiasco , and public comments on the proposal were overwhelmingly negative:

We received a total of 2,335 comments on the introduction of the electronic passport.... Specifically, concerns focused as follows: 2019 comments listed security and/or privacy; 171 listed general objections to use of the data chip and/or the use of RFID; 85 listed general objections to use of the electronic passport; 52 listed general technology concerns; and 8 listed religious concerns. Overall, approximately 1% of the comments were positive, 98.5% were negative, and .5% were neither negative nor positive.

As had been rumored (leaked?) over the summer, the State Department has made some changed to its original plan. Most of the data on the RFID chip in the passport (except, crucially, a fixed globally unique serial number) will be encrypted to reduce the risk of identity theft or passport cloning, and "anti-skimming material" (presumably a layer of metal foil or mesh) will be laminated into the passport cover to reduce the risk of surreptitious reading (except, crucially, whenever the passport is opened for even the briefest and most cursory visual inspection).

Those changes might be sufficient to assuage those people whose primary concerns were about the ways RFID passports would facilitate identity theft, fraud, terrorism, passport forgery, smuggling, and other crimes.

But as I've previously reported, those changes fail to address the use of RFID passports for commercial and government surveillance: transaction and position logging, data aggregation, and data mining.

Each RFID chip has to broadcast a unique identification number, in the clear (unencrypted), in response to a query from any reader. (Readers are cheap and widely available, and will get cheaper.) This number is used to initiate communications with the reader, and to manage "collisions" if multiple chips are within range of, and replying to, the same (or another) reader.

The single change to the RFID passport plan that would make the most difference -- dramatically reducing the usability of RFID passports for commercial or government surveillance , while having no effect at all on their use for security purposes -- would be to have the chips to generate and use a different random collision avoidance and session initiation ID in response to each reader query, instead of a serial number fixed for the life of the chip and the passport.

(Under another part of the RFID passport regulations finalized last month, you'll have to get your passport replaced if the RFID chip fails -- at your expense, if you have deliberately disabled the chip.)

As I understand it, there is no technical obstacle to using a dynamic, random (or at past pseudo-random) session ID. The only reason to use a static serial number, as the USA has deliberately chosen to do, is to facilitate the use of RFID passports as part of the travel panopticon of surveillance.

If the regulations published today are put into effect without further change (as they likely will be unless they are successfully challenged in court), the serial number of the RFID chip in your passport will become the international analogue of your Social Security account number: the globally unique personal identification number through which every transaction or event with which it is linked can be positively correlated and compiled into a personal travel history maintained by government(s), or added to the multi-purpose dossier and profile maintained by data aggregators like Choicepoint and Acxiom (and available to anyone willing to pay for it, or to the USA government under the USA Patriot Act provisions for secret demands for commercial records).

The government's plans were set back a year by massive public protest, but this time I think the proposed schedule for beginning to issue at least some RFID passports is real. Barring a successful lawsuit, after the start of 2006, you won't be able to tell when you apply for a new passport whether it will be one of the first ones with an RFID chip.

All you can do to protect yourself is to get a new passport now that will remain valid for the next 10 years. (There's no plan to invalidate existing non-RFID passports until they expire.) You can apply for a new or replacement passport at any time, for any reason, even if your current passport still has several years of validity.

Given that the use as a session initiation and collision avoidance key of a serial number fixed for the life of the chip does not even arguably serve any security purpose, the only reason for the government's choice is to facilitate surveillance. And border guards will be able (regardless of which type of session ID is used) to capture and decrypt the entirety of the personal data on the passport and the chip, including a digital photo. So the only possible reason not to use a different ID number for each "reading" of the chip is to facilitate use of the fixed ID number by entities other than governments, at places other than borders. In other words, this part of the scheme is being forced on us by the USA government solely to make it possible for data aggregators and data miners to track our movements and activities, for their profit. And we'll be required to bear the cost through increased passport fees.

Why would the State Department go out of its way to give businesses a tool for tracking and compiling dossiers about us? Presumably, the government hoped that doing this would get the "buy-in" of the travel industry (and perhaps) others) for the RFID passport plan. It will probably work: the travel industry is eager for "location-based" marketing data and customer profiling as well as business process automation, and this will enable commercial users of RFID passport data to blame the government, instead of having to justify their data demands to their customers.

Already, casinos use RFID frequent gambler "loyalty" cards not just to log the time, place, and amount of each bet, but to analyze the patterns of movement of gamblers on the casino floor and throughout their casino/hotel/restaurant/entertainment/resort complexes, recording in individual logs and profiles such things as when and how often gamblers leave the betting (spending) areas, and where they go: to their hotel room (perhaps to sleep, i.e. rest up to be ready for more gambling), to a restaurant to eat (refuel for more gambling), etc. Theme parks -- where all visitors can be required to carry admission tickets or badges with RFID chips -- are beginning to do the same. Unique fixed ID numbers in RFID chips in passports will make this possible for all businesses on a global scale.

The problem with Social Security account numbers has little to do with how they are used by the Social Security Administration, and everything to do with how they are used for data aggregation by other, mainly commercial entities. The same is largely true of RFID passports, although the potential for direct abuse by governments remains higher for RFID passports than for Social Security account numbers.

The State Department has failed to conduct the Privacy Impact Assessment which, as EFF and others have noted , is required before the proposed rules can take effect. And its limited analysis and response to the comments on the proposal is based on the fundamentally false claims that:

It will not permit "tracking" of individuals. It will only permit governmental authorities to know that an individual has arrived at a port of entry.

Both of these last two sentences are lies, and the State Department knows it. The root of the problem is the continued refusal of the State Department to admit -- even when I directly confronted the head of the Passport Office, Frank Moss, with this question at CFP -- that passports are ever inspected by anyone other than government authorities, or anywhere other than at government border-crossing checkpoints ("ports of entry").

In fact, most passport checks are made by commercial entities, for commercial purposes, at commercial facilities, and are required as a condition of commercial transactions. Passports have to be opened for inspection by airlines, airport security (sometimes they work for and are regulated by the government, sometimes not), banks, currency-exchange offices, hotels, duty-free stores, and other businesses.

Unless you want to travel without ever changing money, staying in a hotel, or using mass transportation (passports -- or national ID credentials of the country, which foreign travellers don't have -- are routinely required for travel by bus, train, and ferry, increasingly in the USA as they have been for years in many other countries), it's impossible to travel around the world without leaving a trail of times, places, and purposes for which your passport has been displayed.

With an RFID passport that responds to any query from any reader with an unencrypted static ID number, you'll have to assume that whenever you open your passport, even momentarily, your position, the date and time, the nature of the facility or reason for the passport check, and the details of any associated transaction will be entered in your permanent file.

Of course that could be done manually with a non-RFID passport, but it would be slow and costly for the business, and you'd probably know it was happening. With an RFID passport, what seems to be a cursory glance at a passport by a bored and inattentive person at a doorway could in really also include the invisible capture of the chip ID number and logging of the event in a central file (to which, in the USA, you yourself have no right of access) of information about you available for sale to all comers, and available to the government for the asking.

"Social network analysis" of that file, in conjunction with others, will enable commercial or government data miners to identify those with whom you associate and the nature of your relationships:

Hmmm. These two people showed their passports to enter this duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport 30 seconds apart in 2007, and to get on the same sailing of a ferry from Hong Kong to Guangzhou three years later. That's probably not a coincidence. If one of them is a suspect, the other one probably should be too. If one of them showed their passport at a money-changers in Maputo in May to convert Mozambican Metacias to South African Rand, there's a good chance the other one of them was nearby. Let's investigate them further.

Similar concerns have also been raised in Australia, where the first Australian passport with an RFID chip was issued today to the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer.

It's especially problematic that this is happening at the same time that the USA is beginning to require passports, both for USA citizens and visitors, for everyone crossing the borders of the USA including travellers to and from Canada, Mexico, and some Caribbean and Central American countries where passports haven't previously been required.

Along with the abolition of all provisions for transit of the USA without a visa (citizens of all Latin American countries need to pay US$100 and go through an elaborate visa application process just to change planes in the USA en route to or from Europe or Asia), the new rules will further discourage visitation to the USA from Mexico, Canada, and other countries, as well as travel to those countries by USA citizens who don't yet have passports. The USA is seeking comments through next Monday, 31 October 2005 on how much this will cost, but the total value of the lost spending by border crossers will be at least in the billions of U.S. dollars a year, possibly tens of billions.

Welcome to America. Your papers, please.

[Addendum, 29 October 2005: Also this month Norway began issuing unencrypted RFID passports .]

[Further addendum, 3 November 2005: In his column in Wired and an entry in his blog today, Bruce Schneier (who had previously said that "Assuming that the RFID passport works as advertised (a big "if," I grant you), then I am no longer opposed to the idea", now joins me in identifying the static chip ID number as a "fatal flaw" in the privacy and surveillance risk of the RFID passport scheme.]

The Amazing Race 8 (Family Edition), Episode 4

Huntsville, AL (USA) - Anniston, AL (USA) - Talladeega, AL (USA) - Hattiesburg, MS (USA) - Richland, MS (USA) - Madisonville, LA (USA) - New Orleans, LA (USA)

Whether you're a foreign visitor or a family of Americans, a road trip across the USA is a great way to learn about American history and culture.

The cult of the car, and the culture of daily and lifetime mobility that has us changing addresses more often than people almost anywhere else in the world except true nomads -- even, in some cases, physically moving our "mobile homes" -- are key aspects of the American way of life and worldview.

So it's appropriate for the producers of "The Amazing Race" to send the families of racers to explore the imagery of NASCAR racing at the Talladeega, Alabama, Superspeedway and National Motor Sports Hall of Fame, and then to spend the night at the "Southern Colonel" trailer park and mobile home dealership in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

I'm troubled, though, that the only thing the producers of the TV show tell the racers (or viewers of the show) about Anniston, Alabama is that it is the site of ... the world's largest office chair .

The producers of the race may not have realized it, but Anniston is the site of an important event in modern American history -- too important to pass through without acknowledging. It's especially relevant to a travel show, since it is specifically related to transportation. And had it not happened, "The Amazing Race: Family Edition" wouldn't have been able to send a racially integrated group of white and African-American families by bus through the South.

Because the Constitution of the USA gives the Federal government more power over interstate commerce and transportation than over local and "intrastate" activities, some of the first Federal court challenges to state "Jim Crow" laws requiring racial segregation were related to interstate transportation facilities.

But Federal court rulings weren't self-implementing or self-enforcing. In 1947, a small integrated group of radical pacifists -- mainly draft resisters recently released after being imprisoned for refusing to register for the World War 2 draft, and emboldened by their success in desegregating the Federal prison system through nonviolent direct action within its walls -- carried out a Journey of Reconciliation through the upper part of the South to establish the right of whites and Blacks to sit together on interstate busses.

(For more on that story, see the biographies of Bayard Rustin by Jervis Anderson ("Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen") and John D'Emilio ("Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin"). On the continuity provided by radical pacifists between World War 2 and the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's, see James Tracy's "Direct Action" and Maurice Isserman's, "If I Had a Hammer".)

In 1961, the idea of such a "Freedom Ride" was resurrected in the wake of another Supreme Court ruling against segregation of interstate busses and bus stations. This time, the Freedom Riders included students, Black and white, from the South and the North, as well as older pacifists, and the route was a more ambitious and dangerous one through the heart of the Deep South.

On Mothers Day (a day originally established as an antiwar holiday and to honor mothers of soldiers and civilians killed in war), Sunday, 14 May 1961, two small groups of Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston on separate Greyhound and Trailways busses.

What happened then is described in Chapter 11 ("Baptism on Wheels") in Taylor Branch's "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years":

The Greyhound bus arrived first, and was set upon at the station by...

...a large crowd of men armed with clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives.... The mob shouted for the Freedom Riders to come out. Some tried to force open the door. This brought the two Alabama state investigators out from under cover -- they ran to the front of the bus and braced themselves against the pull lever, holding the door shut. Enraged, the mob began pounding on the bus with pipes and slashing the tires.

The driver got the bus out of the station and back on the highway before the lynch mob could get to the passengers, but not before the tires on one side were slashed.

The mob was in hot pursuit. About fifty cars, containing as many as two hundred men, soon were stretched out behind them as the Freedom Riders headed for Birmingham.

The bus made it only about six miles out of Anniston, listing more and more towards the side on which the tires were going flat, before it had to pull over, and the driver fled in terror.

This time the mob used bricks and a heavy axe to smash the bus windows one by one.... The attackers ripped open the luggage compartment and battered the exterior again with pipes, while a group of them tried to force open the door. Finally, someone threw a firebomb through the gaping hole in the back window. As flames ran along the floor, some of the seats caught fire and the bus began to fill with thick, acrid smoke. When the choking passengers realized that the fire could not be contained, they gave way to panic. In the front, state investigator E.L. Cowling saw that the mob was no longer trying to force entry, but now was barricading the door to seal them in the fire. Desperate and weak from the smoke, Cowling brandished his revolver and the attackers fell back. When he managed to get the door open, Albert Bigelow and others herded the passengers to the exit. The mob, frenzied by the sight of them but made panicky by Cowling's gun, danced around the perimeter of the smoke billowing through the door, taking swings at those escaping. Henry Thomas, the SNCC student from Howard, staggered into the clear and was felled by a blow to the head. The others tumbled out behind him, and the attacks continued until arriving Alabama state troopers fired warning shots into the air....

The Trailways bus pulled into Anniston an hour behind a Greyhound.... A small group of tough-looking men... jumped on the bus just ahead of the driver.

The white toughs attacked the unresisting Freedom Riders, beat them to the floor and stamped on them viciously, and then piled them bleeding and semi-conscious across the back seats (where, in their opinion, both "niggers" and "nigger-lovers" belonged).

The Trailways bus then continued from Anniston to Birmingham, where the police withdrew from the bus station while the Freedom Riders, and others, were even more brutally assaulted:

About a dozen Klansman surrounded the two men and pummeled them with kicks, pipes,and [other] objects.... FBI informant Rowe contributed lustily to the beatings. The Freedom Riders entering behind the lead pair tried to retreat from the mayhem, only to find their path blocked by Klansmen. When reporter Simeon Booker looked into the terminal a few seconds later, he saw a bloodied Walter Bergman on his hands and knees crawling desperately among the legs of the men beating him, groping for a door.... The violence at the terminal was contagious, furtive, and often blind.... Seven bystanders [were] hurt badly enough to be hospitalized.... as were several reporters.

Back at Anniston Hospital,

Freedom Riders from the burned Greyhound bus were besieged. A large contingent of the white mob had pursued them there, and hospital personnel, intimidated by the mob, ordered the Freedom Riders to leave, saying their presence endangered other patients.

The pacifists were rescued from Anniston Hospital and brought to a measure of temporary safety in hospitals in Birmingham by "eight cars of Negro churchmen, brimming with shotguns and rifles".

As for those from the Trailways bus, who had been set upon both in Anniston and in Birmingham:

The ambulance bearing Jim Peck had been turned away from Carraway Methodist Hospital, and he now lay under the surgery lights in the Hillman Hospital emergency room. It took 53 stitches to catch his six head wounds, most prominently a four-inch horseshoe-shaped gash on his forehead. Photographers standing behind the doctors took pictures of the gore for the local newspapers, and a clutch of reporters tossed questions to the woozy and nauseated patient. Peck answered questions coherently, though weekly, sometimes pausing in the effort to distinguish the attack in Anniston from the one in Birmingham. To a final series of questions about his plans, and whether the ferocious attack had been worth it, he replied simply, "The going is getting rougher, but I'll be on that bus tomorrow headed for Montgomery." Reporters looked incredulously at Peck and then at one another.

Photos of the burning bus and the dazed and battered riders put the Freedom Ride in the national consciousness, and what happened to the Freedom Riders that day put Anniston on the map of history.

No doubt some local people are ashamed to have their city remembered for such events. I've seen similar discomfort elsewhere in the world at the idea of visitors wanting to see the sites of happenings of which some locals aren't proud. But that doesn't mean these things should be forgotten, or places like this left unmarked. The point of visiting them is not to blame (or praise) the perpetrators of violence and hatred, but to honor those who have struggled against those evils, and to learn how any why they happened so as to keep those evils from being repeated (and to ensure that, if those evils are repeated, so are the struggles against them).

My mother is a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), whose beliefs center on their faith that there is that of good ("God") in everyone. My father (and his forefathers for ten generations) were raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, whose Old Testament theology centers on the Temptation and the Fall, the capacity for evil in each of us, and the need for constant vigilance against the devil(s) within and without. I don't subscribe to either of those, or any other, religion. But I suppose I'm somewhere in between in believing that being human implies the personal capacity for both good and evil actions, and that being moral implies trying to make conscious choices between them.

I visit the scenes of those struggles and choices to honor the victims and the survivors, and to understand the perpetrators of violence and their motives. I would hope that local people would want to do the same thing, although I too might come to resent it if the first thing visitors wanted to see in my home town was something that brought up only unpleasant memories and feelings.

That's not uncommon: "Ground Zero" is now one of the most-visited places in New York City, and the one thing that almost all visitors to Oklahoma City see is the memorial on the site of the Federal Courthouse destroyed by a bomb on Patriots Day, 19 April 1995 (the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War of Independence) by ultra-patriotic white Christian nationalist American terrorists. (Sadly, that memorial and museum deliberately, explicitly, and completely exclude any attempt to understand the terrorists, or their roots in American values.) "The Amazing Race" has visited the Gorée Island slave pens in Senegal, and Robben Island prison in South Africa.

I'd be interested to hear how readers deal with visits to reminders of bad things, unpleasant events, or aspects of the past that locals don't want to remember.

Earlier this year in South Africa I visited the site of the Bhisho Massacre, where Black troops of the Ciskei puppet-state army fired on a march demanding the reintegration of the "homelands" into South Africa, killing 29 people.

Black pedestrians nearby were hesitant to direct us to the location, and questioned us about the motives for our visit before doing so. But the Bhisho Massacre site is marked by a memorial monument, and there's a page about it, including directions for visitors , on the municipal government's Web site. As there should be: it was an important historical event, and it's a source of pride for those who identify with participants in the march.

Elsewhere in South Africa, we saw the plaque marking the spot where Mohandas Gandhi, first-class ticket in hand , boarded the first-class (and thus whites-only) compartment of a train in Durban, and the statue of Gandhi that stands where he was thrown off the train in Pietermaritzburg, only a quarter of the way to his destination, when he refused to move to a second class compartment designated for "Asians". (The statue in Pietermaritzburg shows Gandhi in a dhoti. But on the train that day, he was almost certainly wearing one of the bespoke suits he'd brought back from his recently-completed legal studies in London.)

Times have changed in Anniston , and one recent book argues that race relations in Anniston have moved Beyond The Burning Bus . During a reunion of the Freedom Riders in 2001, which included a reenactment of the ride on a bus provided by the Greyhound bus company as a sponsor of the reunion, the riders were given the key to the city of Anniston.

The National Park Service and a coalition of state government history offices have mapped out a register of historic places of the civil rights movement , but Anniston isn't on it. So far as I can tell, there's nothing to mark the spot where the Freedom Riders' bus was sacked. Today, younger people who grew up in Alabama may never have heard of what happened there on Mother's Day, 1961.

But many, perhaps most, white Southerners honor those who fought on either side in the Civil War, and preserve the battlefields of that war as sacred ground. Earlier this season in Virginia, the participants of "The Amazing Race" were sent into the midst of a Civil War battle re-enactment to carry "wounded" soldiers on stretchers through the "blank cartridge" gunfire. Why should either the producers of "The Amazing Race" or the people of the South deal differently with the historical sites and events of the Civil War of the 1860's and the civil rights struggle of the 1960's?

It's hard not to interpret the continued shame at this piece of history, on the part of many white Southerners, as a sign that at some level they may still identify more with the segregationists than with the Freedom Riders.

For those who identify with the riders, what happened in Anniston is cause for pride, not shame. It's hard to imagine anyone, even the most fervent racist, reading the accounts of what the riders did without being in awe of their courage, their ability to remain nonviolent in the face of such provocation, their commitment to carry on with the Freedom Rides (as a succession of others did after the original riders moved on), and perhaps above all their continued faith in the possibility of change in the hearts and minds of those who were trying to kill them.

I'm glad that these days civil disobedience rarely entails the likelihood of death or great bodily harm. But it's important to remember, and to honor, the extent to which people like the Freedom Riders, other civil rights workers like my mentor and former housemate Eric Weinberger (also profiled in Tom Cohen's out-of-print "Three Who Dared"), and ordinary Southerners -- especially poor folks with few resources with which to start over if they were kicked off the land they sharecropped, or driven out of town, on account of their activism -- really were risking their lives and livelihoods, every day, in the struggle for a better America and a better world. That's not something I want to see forgotten, in Anniston or anywhere.

Travel talk Friday in Modesto

For those of you who are (or have friends in) the Central Valley or the Motherlode, I'll be speaking about independent international travel this Friday, 21 October 2005, at 7 p.m. to the Yokuts Group of the Sierra Club in Modesto. The meeting will be held in the Community Room of the Modesto Police Department, 600-10th St., Modesto, CA. Non-members are welcome.

Upcoming S.F. Bay Area draft resistance events

• On The Frontlines: Options for Youth in Times of War "A conference for youth and their allies", Saturday-Sunday, 22-23 October 2005, University of California at Berkeley. Open to all: free for youth, $10-25 donation requested for adults. High school students, parents, and teachers especially invited. Workshop for students, other young people, and their parents on Preparing for Draft Resistance with Edward Hasbrouck and Maxina Ventura , Saturday, 1:30-3 p.m.

• New leaflet, Parents and the Draft (also in PDF format for printing and in Wordperfect format for editing)

• Premiere of "Walking Rainbow: Fred Moore Remembered", a 30-minute documentary about the life and legacy of radical pacifist Fred Moore, Sunday, 23 October 2005, 8 p.m. at the Film Arts Foundation screening room at the Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth Street, between Mission and Howard Streets, San Francisco. RSVP to Markley Morris . "A community organizer, inventor, and ground-breaking peace activist, Fred Moore did more than preach peace: he devoted his life to transforming his ideals into action. Fred Moore's lifelong commitment to social justice inspired all around him; from Quakers to anarchists, from computer scientists to conscientious objectors. His groundbreaking 1959 sit-in and fast at UC Berkeley helped spark a new era of political protest. His early efforts with the Homebrew Computer Club brought his idealism to the creation of the personal computer. And his record of civil disobedience, arrests and incarceration set an example for a generation of peace activists. Seven years in the making, this documentary about Moore and his legacy features interviews and reminiscences, amplified by period footage and extensive archival material. The screening is free but the filmmaker is trying to raise distribution funds. For a tax deductible contribution, make out the check to Eschaton Foundation with "Walking Rainbow" on the memo line. (Eschaton is the parent of the Resource Center for Nonviolence.) DVDs and VHS copies will be available for $15 (plus $3 shipping if mailed).

• Remember The Draft? Honoring Resistance from Viet Nam to Iraq fundraising dinner for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Thursday, 27 October 2005, 7, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., St. Mary's Cathedral, 1111 Gough Street at Geary Blvd., San Francisco. "Honor those who risked their lives and reputations as conscientious objectors, draft counselors and resisters during the Vietnam War. Welcome those who are resisting today. Individual tickets begin at $50 and low-income tickets are available. Underwriting for youth attenders sought. For reservations, call Ann Goett, 415-565-0201 ext. 25."

The Amazing Race 8 (Family Edition), Episode 3

Middleburg, VA (USA)- Dulles Airport, VA (USA) - Charleston, SC (USA) - Huntsville, AL (USA)

The decisive factor in The Amazing Race: Family Edition this week is the fact that only one team at a time can ride the pilot-training centrifuge , and that it takes some time to spin up to speed and slow to a stop again. That gives the last team on the centrifuge no chance to catch up before they are eliminated at the finish line. It's hard to run, anyway, when you've just been struggling against 3.2 times the force of gravity, an amount of force that can cause people to lose consciousness and will cause most people to be at least a bit unsteady on their feet when they first emerge from the centrifuge.

Before getting spun around in a capsule at the end of a glorified (yes, very glorified) amusement park ride, the teams had to make their way through two actual travel tasks:

First, they had to fly from Washington Dulles International Airport, IAD (actually in Virginia -- none of the three airports with scheduled passenger service in the greater Washington metropolitan area are in the District of Columbia) to Charleston, South Carolina.

The only reason for the television producers to require the racers to fly from Dulles would be to showcase Independence Air, which has its hub at Dulles and which was prominently named (in a paid product placement, presumably) as having the flight to Charleston that arrived first.

The irony is the widespread expectation that Independence Air will file for bankruptcy -- and possibly for liquidation, unlike other airlines that have thought they had a chance of reorganizing under protection of bankruptcy, and continuing to operate -- before changes to the bankruptcy law take effect next week. Independence Air had a business plan as hopeless as the worst of dot-com's: "Let's charge lower fares than our competitors, while using the most fuel-inefficient planes with the highest possible operating costs per available seat mile (small "regional" jets)." But if they go bankrupt the week after buying their way into "reality" TV, I'll think it an appropriately realistic fate.

From Charleston, the producers chartered two buses to take the racers to Huntsville. That was probably because there is (so far as I can tell) no direct scheduled bus service from Charleston to Huntsville. But in isolating the racers on chartered buses, the producers missed a chance to put them in touch with a cast of real characters, not just for the 12 hour ride but while changing buses in the Atlanta bus station (and you complain about changing planes in Atlanta?) in the middle of the night.

As my friend Wendy Grossman wrote in her column this week, and as I noted in my blog:

I have some guidelines that might be of assistance to TSA personnel stationed at bus depots, train stations, and airports to play spot-the-terrorist. First of all: it is very, very easy to spot the suspicious people in a Greyhound bus station, especially at, say, two in the morning. They are the people who are clean, well-dressed, affluent, and not creepy. Eliminate the foreigners, and you have your suspicious people. Affluent Americans do not travel by bus unless they are expatriates back on a visit.

At the end of their bus ride, and after their centrifuge ride, the family teams of four cross-country racers come to rest in the field of rockets and missiles on display at the U.S. Space Center museum and site of the "Space Camp" in Huntsville, Alabama -- not to be confused with NASA's nearby Marshall Space Flight Center founded by Werner von Braun, who developed rockets both for the Nazis (including the V2 used against London) and for the USA (including the Saturn 5 that launched all the people who've gone to the moon), and is perhaps best known for the line attributed to him in a song by satirist Tom Lehrer:

"Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department," says Werner von Braun.

The racers' countdown will last for 12 hours as they try to wash the mud and shrimp-cleaning detritus from their tasks off their clothes, eat, and sleep at the Huntsville "pit stop". Our countdown will last for a week as we wait for the next episode.

"Spot the Terrorist"

USA-EU dual citizen and fellow CFP-er Wendy Grossman has more on the new demands for passenger information by the USA government and airlines, as well as the latest USA plans for a Ministry of Silly Walks , in her net.wars column here and here :

Spot the Terrorist

... Some of this, as travel data guru Ed Hasbrouck says in his blog entry on the subject, is silly. You've long been asked for a US address on customs forms, but there's nothing to stop you from lying or changing plans. Much more of it is simply invasive, the more so because you can't give the information directly to the government; instead it goes to several commercial organizations along the way: the airlines, the "Computerized Reservations Systems" who handle the airlines' data, travel agencies. Forcing EU citizens to supply personal data to companies that are not bound by EU data protection law or its equivalent ought to be a violation of EU principles....

Meantime, the TSA has also been asking the industry to suggest technologies for detecting suspicious behavior....

While the technology industry gears up to meet the challenge, I have some guidelines that might be of assistance to TSA personnel stationed at bus depots, train stations, and airports to play spot-the-terrorist:

...[At] airports, you should be suspicious of anyone who does not complain about the long lines, the questions, the wait, the rules, or the personnel. You show me someone who is docile, cooperative, and pleasant throughout, and I will guarantee that person is either drugged or has an ulterior motive. It's not normal to be bureaucratted for three hours and not get cranky.

See Wendy's full column and the Detecting Suspicious Behavior Request For Information (RFI) for more fact and fancy. The RFI is a disturbing indication of the TSA's continuing interest in more widespread use of discriminatory Israeli-style behavioral profiling of travellers, despite the ongoing lawsuit against its first major publicly-disclosed USA use at Logan Airport in Boston.

The Amazing Race 8 (Family Edition), Episode 2

Lancaster, PA (USA) - York, PA (USA) - Washington, DC (USA) - Middleburg, VA (USA)

"Washington, City of Spies"

The Family Edition of The Amazing Race has barely begun, and already it's broken with the impression it was starting to create of squeaky-clean American patriotism, portraying Washington, DC, as a city of spies.

The racers join in their cloak-and-dagger games, taking a briefcase from an unseen stranger lurking in a limousine opposite the Capitol, and exchanging it for yet another mystery briefcase with whichever "operative" at the Tidal Basin gives the right response ("The sea is green") to the challenge phrase ("The sky is blue"). The best line of the night came from one of the extras playing non-agents: "The sky is blue?" "Yes, it is, isn't it" (spoken with a big smile). So much for security, or for call and response.

Thus far this season the racers haven't gotten on an airplane. That's a first, of course, for the previously "around-the-world" reality travel television show. But I wonder what would happen if they did try to travel by air with the closed briefcases handed them by the mystery men and women. "Has anyone unknown to you given you anything to carry on this flight?" Effective today, you won't be able to get on an international flight to or from the USA without telling both the airline and the USA Department of Homeland Security a long list of personal details including your date of birth, address in the USA, airline itinerary, and a "unique passenger identifier, or reservation number or Passenger Name Record (PNR) locator number". I'm feeling safer from the spies already. (Not.)

Map reading was the key in this leg of the race, and urban orienteering clearly should be part of any aspiring "Amazing Race" team's preparations. As one of the Linz brothers says, "Having this map's huge -- we can take all these back roads" when the Interstate highway is blocked with stop-and-go traffic. Which is true, but then the Rogers family goes awry by relying on a map that shows two highways crossing near York, which they do, where there turns out to be (or so the Rogers say) a partial interchange that doesn't include an entrance from U.S. 30 in their direction (there was some ambiguityy as to whether they were actually headed east or west) to I-83 South towards Baltimore and Washington.

The bottom line is that maps are valuable sources of information, but still only secondary sources.

As I say in The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World

Finding maps locally is hit or miss, with little rhyme or reason to how useful or easy to find they will be. I recommend bringing with you whatever maps you think are essential, particularly large-scale maps of countries and regions and any specialized maps you'll need for trekking or the like. I bring the best maps I can find, and I've never regretted it.

I've even been suspected of being a spy myself, or at least of possessing state secrets, because the map I had brought to China, although actually published in China, was so much more detailed than anything anyone i met had ever seen. (The Chinese post office wouldn't let me mail it home.) But what I say in the same book about guidebooks is equally true about maps:

If a guidebook says, "A bus leaves A for B every Tuesday and Thursday", that's a fair indication that it will be possible for you to get from A to B by bus, probably at least once a week. But you certainly shouldn't turn up in A on Monday, counting on there being a bus the next day. Nor should you blame the guidebook writer if there isn't. One of the most useless things to say to anyone is, "But it says here in this guidebook that..." The outsider who argues with reality, on the basis of a book, will be interpreted only as stupid, closed-minded, unwilling to learn, and/or contemptuous of local people.

Read the map, but don't forget to watch the road or you too, like the Rogers, could be eliminated.

USA requires passenger details from international airlines

Effective today airlines, cruise ships, and other vessels operating on international routes to or from the USA are required to provide the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS), electronically, in a standard format, with detailed information on all passengers and crew members, including information well beyond anything contained in their passports or travel documents:

[E]ach electronic arrival or departure manifest must contain certain information for all passengers or crew members of air and vessel carriers. Air carriers must provide the following information: (a) Complete name; (b) date of birth; ( c ) citizenship (country of document issuance); (d) gender; (e) passport number and country of issuance, if a passport is required; (f) country of residence; (g) United States visa number, date, and place of issuance (arrivals only); (h) alien registration number; (i) United States address while in the United States; (j) International Air Transport Association (IATA) arrival port code; (k) IATA departure port code; (l) flight number, date of flight arrival, date of flight departure; (m) airline carrier code; (n) document type (e.g., passport; visa; alien registration); (o) date of document expiration; and (p) a unique passenger identifier, or reservation number or Passenger Name Record (PNR) locator number.

Some of these items are merely absurd and useless, such as the requirement of an address in the USA. I'm reminded of the number of times when, obliged to enter a local address on a visa application or immigration form, I've copied the name and address of a suitably respectable (but not implausibly expensive) hotel from a guidebook.

Others are more intrusive and subject to potential abuse by both of the recipients: the airline and the CBP.

The CBP final rule and analysis of comments and the DHS Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), published in the Federal Register 5 April 2005 (70 F.R. 17819-17861) and effective 180 days thereafter (i.e. today), discuss and dismiss the implications of requiring travellers to submit personal information to the CBP .

[A] large majority of the 328 commenters to the INS NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] expressed concern with respect to the right to privacy of travelers and the protection of data by the agency.

Although a passenger's refusal to supply the information required by the regulatory text will result in denying that person access to international travel on commercial vessels and aircraft, the new provisions will not violate a constitutional right to travel.... [N]o government interest is more compelling than the security of the nation. Haig v. Agee, 453 U.S. 280, 307 (1981). The government may place reasonable restrictions on the right to travel in order to protect this compelling interest.

But that's not what the rule requires: the rule gives travellers no option to provide the required information directly to the CBP. Instead, the rule requires airlines to provide passengers' personal information to the CBP, effectively requiring travellers -- if the airlines are to be able to comply, without which airlines' passengers won't be allowed to travel -- to turn over their information to the airlines as well as the government.

Both the final rule and the PIA entirely ignore the implications of requiring passengers to provide detailed personal information to, at a minimum, airlines (and, in most cases, other companies such as Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS's) and travel agencies), under government order, without imposing any restrictions whatsoever on the ability or authority of the recipient airlines and other companies to use, rent, or sell the information that passengers will be forced to give them, without any requirement for notice or consent. This government-compelled transfer of rights in personal data to unregulated private entities is the real violation of privacy rights in the new rule.

This is also what makes the new rules incompatible with the data protection rules of European Union and other countries with similar laws. While the transfer of information to the USA government, if required by law, probably fits within the exception in the EU law for data transfers to government agencies mandated by law, the transfer of personal information by EU travel agencies, tour operators, and CRS's to airlines in the USA that aren't subject to any "adequate" data protection regime almost certainly violates EU law, national laws in EU member countries, and the (never yet enforced) privacy clause in the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's.

Some were surprised when I first suggested, in my September 2003 comments to the DHS on its CAPPS-II airline passenger screening and surveillance scheme, that requiring airlines to provide this sort of additional personal data on each passenger would cost the airline industry a billion U.S. dollars in IT infrastructure changes.

But the DHS now admits that its current proposals would cost exactly that, a billion U.S. dollars, just for international flights to and from the USA, which carry far fewer passengers than domestic flights in the USA. According to the CBP final rule:

We estimate that the cost of this final rule will be approximately $1 billion over a 10-year period.... In the first year this rule is in effect, we estimate the cost will be $166 million (undiscounted) as companies reprogram existing systems and purchase necessary equipment.

The CBP figure actually appears to be a significant under-estimate. It considers IT infrastructure and programming costs to airlines (presumably including the changes required by CRS's, which presumably would be passed on to their airline customers), and data-entry labor costs, but omits from its otherwise detailed itemization any estimate of the costs to more than a hundred thousand travel agents (online and offline) around the word who book travel to or from the USA, as well as other travel services providers and intermediaries, to reprogram their business process automation scripts, quality control systems, Web user interfaces and Web site back-end databases and systems, API's for CRS access and airline data interchange, and third-party software that interacts with any of these.

The CBP and DHS try to have it both ways: they argue that few changes will be required because most of the data requested is already available from machine-readable passports and travel documents, while also arguing that much more information is needed than is presently available from passports and other travel documents.

The latest notice from CBP implicitly concedes that much of the necessary IT and business process changes have yet to be made, and that compliance is still impossible even for airlines making a good-faith effort.

The DHS began talking about demanding additional Advance Passenger Information (API) -- though not, it would appear, talking to the airlines, and not with any understanding of what it would require -- in late 2001 or early 2002 as part of CAPPS-II. It took two years, until early 2004, before standards to support the inter-airline and inter-CRS transfer of API data were added to the AIRIMP interline messaging protocol. And it took another 18 months, until this month, for the CRS's to add the ability to enter and store this data in PNR's.

For those who are interested, I've posted section 3.14 of the AIRIMP (28th edition, effective 1 June 2004) containing the API interchange formats, and the command-line formats being rolled out this month by the big four CRS's (Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan, and Galileo/Apollo) for entering API data in their PNR's. (You can order the complete AIRIMP book from IATA.)

The command-line formats aren't pretty (nor are the earlier IATA / World Customs Organization suggested guidelines for the transmission of API data from airlines to governments), and so far as I can tell, none of the CRS's and no major third-party software vendor has yet implemented them in any of the graphical interfaces now used by most travel agents and airline reservations staff. My guess is that it will take another year, even with government coercion and substantial spending, for them to be implemented throughout the reservations data entry and processing "food chain".

Because airline reservations can be made up to 11 months (a year with some systems) prior to the date of travel, and becuase airlines and travel agents may have no way to contact ticketed passengers between the time they make their reservations and the time they present themselves for check-in, it will take a full year, after API data starts being entered in all new PNR's, before it is present in all PNR's any earlier than check-in.

As the Air Transport Association of the USA testified to Congress in June of this year:

[I]t must be clear that all participants in the reservation process share data-collection obligations, including travel agents and Global Distribution Systems [GDS's or CRS's]; ....it must be clearly understood that this is a massive, very challenging undertaking and that sufficient time and resources must be available to bring a successful outcome.... This cannot work with unreasonable timelines or mandates.

[Update: Revisions to the API rules to change them from an advance information reporting system to an advance permission system.]

".travel" launched. ICANN still ignores my request for stay.

Today the Tralliance Corp. subsidiary of TheGlobe.com (d/b/a "Voiceglo"), with approval from ICANN and the USA Department of Commerce, began accepting registrations from suppliers of travel services (travellers themselves aren't eligible, unless they sell travel services) for second-level .travel Internet domain names.

I've received no response or acknowledgement at all to my latest inquiry : "When, if ever, do you expect that ICANN will consider or act on my requests for independent review [of the lack of openness and transparency in the process by which ICANN approved ".travel" and delegated control of it to Tralliance/TheGlobe.com], and stay pending independent review".

ICANN bylaws require ICANN to indemnify its officers and Board of Directors, but only to the extent that they are acting in good faith. It's hard to imagine how any of them could claim, at this point, to have made a good-faith effort to comply with the requirement of ICANN's bylaws that a request like mine be referred to an independent review panel IRP), and that the IRP be afforded the authority to recommend a stay of the questioned decision pending their review.

Certainly, if I were ICANN's liability insurance company, I would contest any claim related to their inaction on my requests, on the grounds of failure to act in good faith.

That means ICANN's officers and Board are probably at substantial risk of personal liability for their inaction on my requests -- liability, for example, to those registering ".travel" domain names should an IRP eventually recommend reversal of the "travel" delegation decision. It's the enormous personal financial risk they are taking that makes their continued inaction, and their willingness to allow the launch today of "travel" registrations, so surprising.

[Addendum, 3 October 2005: I'm quoted today in a widely-published Associated Press story on the launch of ".travel":

Although Tralliance billed the domain as an online space for the global travel and tourism community, travel journalist and author Edward Hasbrouck criticized the rules, saying they exclude travelers at the expense of promoting travel businesses.

"The domain appears to exclude the participation of the largest class of people who use the Internet to travel -- people who use the Internet to post their travel stories and photos and all sorts of things," Hasbrouck said.

Cherian Mathai, Tralliance's chief operating officer, said individuals might qualify as travel media if they offer a service, such as advice on how to get there. Simply creating a site with family photos from Peru's Machu Picchu won't qualify, he said.

Approval is made on a case-by-case basis, he said.

I had spoken at length with AP reporter Anick Jesdanun, but (as is inevitable) most of the conversation didn't make it into his story. In particular, I stressed that my most important, and time-critical complaints are not with the substance of the ".travel" proposal -- essential aspects of which have not yet been publicly disclosed or discussed, and which therefore is not yet ripe for decision -- but with the secrecy of ICANN's decision making process, and ICANN's refusal to follow its own rules requiring maximum transparency, a right of independent review, and right to at least the consideration of a stay pending independent review. It's particularly hypocritical, I told Jesdanun, that the USA government is insisting on retaining its oversight authority over ICANN, while refusing to take any action against ICANN for even the most egregious violations of ICANN's contracts with the USA Department of Commerce, or of ICANN's own bylaws.]