News and notes from around the interweb:
- People who don’t want Waze routing cars through their neighborhoods are feeding in false data (HT: Bruce Schneier)
- Here’s how TSA identifies you when you don’t have your ID at the security checkpoint
- How to stop mysterious plane crashes (HT: Alan H.)
- Ethiopian Airlines plans to turn Bangkok into a hub
- The Government Performance and Results Act requires federal agencies to set out goals and measure their progress towards them. But it’s a silly exercise, with agencies picking their own measures whether they’re meaningful or not. For instance, TSA reports 99% customer satisfaction. Essentially these are people in PreCheck lines happy not to be going through security that everyone else has to.
- What Caused the May 26th LAX Flight Delays?
- Former US Attorney General Eric Holder is against requiring fingerprint background checks for Uber and Lyft drivers.
Holder wrote last week that because of deficiencies in the FBI’s database, fingerprint checks can prevent people from getting jobs even if they were never convicted of crimes. He said requiring fingerprint checks can discriminate against minorities.
He wrote that the purpose of the FBI database is to aid law enforcement during investigations and investigators are expected to follow up on information to determine whether it is complete.
“It was not designed to be used to determine whether or not someone is eligible for a work opportunity. Relying on it for that purpose is both unwise and unfair,”
- I was on Boom Bust Thursday discussing travel and the economy, changes to the American Airlines frequent flyer program, Alaska Airlines’ acquisition of Virgin America and what’s next for Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood.
Holders law firm has Uber as client. At least in one respect this country is egalitarian. Once a person becomes rich and powerful, whether s/he is black or white, they become an asshole.
Hey, Gary
Love the reference to The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) – now the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 – GPRAMA (I pronounce it Gip-ra-ma – silly acronyms) which requires federal agencies to set out goals and measure their progress towards them. The TSA GPRAMA Measure certainly appears to be a silly exercise, but in my small agency at a large federal department, we take GPRAMA seriously. The law itself has great potential (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-509) and the Modernization ACT improved it. Pre Modernization, federal agencies did 5 years plan every 3 years – so you never got to the 5th year to see if you performed and met your goals for results 🙂 now that was silly – but now 4 year plans every 4 years starting a year after inauguration so each administration gets to set it goals and how to measure them, and at the end you could have accountability. Another silly part is that Congress doesn’t follow it’s duty in this very well.
My point (and I do have one) is that GPRAMA is not silly – only the way it gets implemented by some federal agencies is silly and at times like TSA just wrong!
Safe landings.