Heathrow Airport has just (last Thursday) opened a new terminal -- Terminal 5. Things are not going particularly well, as this posting at the wonderful Boing Boing notes: British Airways loses 15-20,000 bags since Thursday at supremely b0rked Heathrow Terminal 5.
What does this have to do with your fingerprints? Only this, also from Boing Boing just a few weeks ago: Heathrow Terminal 5 to fingerprint domestic passengers
I'll connect the dots after the jump.
First, let's review that plan to collect fingerprints: Quoting Cory Doctorow:
[...] as of the end of this month, domestic passengers at the new Heathrow Terminal 5 will be fingerprinted and photographed twice, to "ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person." The airport says they'll only keep it for 24h -- unless the police need them to keep it longer.
This will all but eliminate terrorism.
Oh, wait, no.
That only works if terrorists are so picky about which domestic flight they blow up that they have to blow up one coming from terminal 5.
This is an example of "security theater": an expensive, completely worthless measure that its proponents KNOW is an expensive, completely worthless measure but are going to try to implement anyway by (a) concealing how expensive, completely worthless it is and (b) playing the fear card.
But just for the sake of argument: let's make the wildly optimistic assumption that this has non-zero security value. Hold onto that thought for a couple of minutes, I'll come back to it.
Now let's get to what started happening last Thursday:
The much-ballyhooed opening of Heathrow's \xa34 billion Terminal 5 has been a debacle. British Airways has canceled 208 flights since Thursday, and has "stranded" between 15,000 and 20,000 bags. Area hotels are crammed with stuck BA passengers and are gouging on pricing, prompting BA to lift its stingy (and possibly illegal) \xa3100 limit on hotels for stuck passengers.
And that's not all. as we learn from BA'S bosses partied as as Heathrow Terminal Five crashed - Sunday Mirror:
Yesterday the mayhem continued for the third day at the sparkling new terminal - with 67 flights cancelled. Alongside more luggage delays and snaking queues, basic facilities such as airport lifts and public telephones were out of order.
One Heathrow worker revealed: "There are 18 lifts and only one is working - how can you have an international airport like that? The airport looks a bit like Asda when they are in the middle of restocking - trollies everywhere."
and in reference to yet another issue on top of all that:
The problems were being caused by a huge shortage of baggage handlers who had arrived late for work because they couldn't find parking spaces. Others were left queuing at staff entrances because of a lack of security officers to let them in.
I trust it's now clear why Boing Boing's characterization of this as "supremely b0rked" may be an understatment. Several days later (Sunday) this was still going on:
Yesterday one fifth of flights to Europe were cancelled. One plane filled with passengers flying to Cyprus was held on the tarmac for four hours. Staff were still dealing with a backlog of 15,000 stranded bags.
Now, as you know, in a crisis like this, every available person needs to be called in so that the problems can be worked tirelessly until they're fixed. Right?
Wrong.
As chaos broke out at Heathrow Terminal Five, BA bosses were throwing a party to congratulate themselves on a job well done.
A free buffet, doughnuts and soft drinks were laid on at the T5 Celebration Party as BA managers enjoyed music from a string quartet.
A party? Why, yes! The timing was perfect:
And as thousands of passengers faced misery, BA Chief Executive Officer Willie Walsh gave a speech at the party thanking his team for their good work.
Last night an airport source said: "It was a bit like the Titanic - as the ship went down the band kept on playing. It's extraordinary that managers felt they should have a party at a time when front-line staff were being screamed at by the public.
"Turmoil was breaking out in the terminal, and staff were complaining they could not get in touch with some of the managers. It was difficult to raise them because they were at the party."
Let us now pause for a moment to drink from the fountain of wisdom that is the above-mentioned Willie Walsh, who might have needed a "Mission Accomplished" banner to make this complete:
He announced triumphantly: "I think it's great and it's going to get better. This is a hundred times better than anything else at Heathrow."
Soon afterwards the baggage system went into meltdown but some BA managers and other staff still went off to the party.
About now, you're wondering what this complete failure has to do with the title of this diary entry. So let's leave Terminal 5 in a state of complete pandemonium -- non-working elevators, missing staff, cancelled flights, a mountain of lost baggage, understaffed security checkpoints, and managers toasting their success -- and deal with this: Heathrow Terminal Five hit by security leak, where we learn:
Heathrow's Terminal 5 faced further embarrassment last night after sensitive security blueprints were handed to the Sunday Mirror.
[...]
The documents could enable someone with the right knowledge to shut down the building's fire alarms or even plunge the terminal into darkness, an expert said.
The bundle of documents contains four large technical drawings detailing circuitry and other workings of the fire alarm system, including the location of smoke alarms and emergency lighting. It also includes a series of spreadsheets and checklists, with dates and times of faults with the technology.
A reader contacted the Sunday Mirror saying he had found the documents in a gutter in Croydon, South London. [...]
They managed to lose security-critical blueprints. Worse, they didn't even know they'd lost them until a newspaper turned up with them. And yet they want to collect passenger fingerprints.
Why should anyone believe that they won't lose those too? Especially since the fingerprints will probably kept in an easy-to-lose, easy-to-steal manner since they've already said they're going to dispose of them in 24 hours. They've already proved that they can lose thousands of pieces of luggage AND security-critical documents, do you really think for a moment they can hang onto fingerprints?
And why does this matter? Ask the guy who had his fingerprints published online: Slashdot | Hacker Club Publishes German Official's Fingerprint.
Anyone with the right (simple, cheap) equipment can now plant his fingerprint anywhere. Or open any lock whose biometric key is his fingerprint. Of course, now that this is publicly known, presumably precautions will be taken.
But what if it wasn't? What if the party people running Heathrow's Terminal 5 lost YOUR fingerprints and either didn't know or didn't bother to tell anyone? And what if YOUR fingerprints turned up someplace that you never were?
One of the many problems with collecting data like this, aside from the civil liberties issues, is that once you have it, you have to keep it safe. That not only means not letting it be stolen outright, it also means keeping it from being copied -- in the digital world, a copy is a copy is an original. This requires fanatic attention to detail and relentless dedication to procedure: one slip and it's all over.
Few organizations are capable of that. And now we know about one more that's so clearly incapable it should never be allowed to try.