Edward Hasbrouck, a travel writer and privacy advocate, writes about airline reservation data, government travel records and draft registration.
HN commenters use it as a reference on passenger name records, the APIS date format, and government tracking of travel, and see it as informative on how much data is recorded.
> For one thing, it goes out of its way to paint fairly ordinary things (the use of regional carriers, and the fact that there are many regional carriers, and many of them have contracts with multiple mainline carriers) as "deceptive" (and implying that code-sharing among partner airlines is also "deceptive").
It is deceptive.
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001804.html
https://hasbrouck.org/articles/alliances.html
> Which says right off the bat that this is someone who doesn't know how airlines really work
Ridiculous assessment:
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001855.html
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001903.html
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002099.html
https://hasbrouck.org/articles/index.html
https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/cat_airfares_and_airlines.html
https://hasbrouck.org/bio/
https://papersplease.org/wp/hasbrouck-v-cbp/
"TECS was the first pre-DHS database of Federal government logs of international travel. Several other “systems of records” (a term of art used in the Privacy Act) about travelers, including the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and DHS copies of PNR data (airline reservations) were originally considered part of TECS. The TECS file for an individual traveler typically includes a log of their border crossings (with record locators that serve as pointers to their PNR data ) and free-text notes on anything that customs and immigration inspectors thought warranted inclusion in the traveler’s permanent file."
Example on http://hasbrouck.org/documents/secondary.pdf
Is there a way to consult this database? (FOIA?)
It could be interesting.
I would think the limiting factor is availability. You can pre-compute valid fares between cities super-fast with sufficient computing power, but you're still (somewhat) limited by the rate at which you can update availability, which _still_ has to be polled from airline systems (to some degree) and can't give you answers in <400ms :)
One of the bits ITA/QPX got really right was smart availability caching (http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001880.html) -
I would think they can do the fare search/assembly in realtime with their infrastructure, but they're relying on cached availability, hence the limit to "popular US cities" at the moment, to keep caches fresh enough within the practical throughput limits.
This is the comment I wrote almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6870933
I was not aware the USA has so many information about every single travel. According to this [1] they record everything.
- amtrack
- trains in the EU (including sit numbers)
- bus travel in the EU
- plane travel in the EU on a carrier that doesn't fly to the US
- hotel reservations
- pedestrian border crossing
Everything.
[1] http://hasbrouck.org/articles/Hasbrouck-Cato-2APR2013.pdf
From the article it appears that the ID card is using the ICAO eMRTD standard: http://www.hasbrouck.org/documents/ICAO9303-pt3.pdf
Field 15 of the card is reserved for PKI. Specifically, this field can be used to sign the rest of the data on the card. There's really no reason why the state can't sign the data on the card using a private key and make a public key available for verification.
The way to make women ad men equal with respect to the draft is to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, as supported by many feminists:
https://hasbrouck.org/draft/repeal.html
More on what femninists say about the dratt and draft registration:
https://hasbrouck.org/draft/women/feminism.html