Bill Stewart wrote:
So I'm sitting in the airport listening to the latest Vice Presidential Hunter Safety Program TV news, and there's a commercial about the FAA's www.fly.faa.gov website which lets you sign up to get near-real-time airport status information, including giving them your cellphone number to get updates. It looks fairly innocuous (and says to contact your airline for details about your specific flight, so it may not be fully operational), and it also has a pointer to http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov/index.html which is the TSA's site for getting estimated papers-in-order wait time.
Are these purely honest services (maybe)? Or are the TSA Internal Passport folks tracking travellers who provide their info (maybe, maybe not, but if not, they'll certainly start abusing them once they realize they can)?
Obviously you're wasting time asking a stupid rhetorical question, since clearly you're a paranoid loon. What malfeasance will the government in your fantasyland perform on the hundreds, or thousands of people each day who might utilize the service to find out in general how the airport is functioning at any particular time? Are you ASSuming that anyone who voluntarily gives their phone # & a flight # is going to be expected to be a passenger on that flight, & thus subjected to whatever government evils your sad little mind creates? In the real world, plenty of friends, spouses, co-workers, etc. of the traveling party may also *volunteer* to give their phone # & a flight # to check the flight. Flight updates SMS'ed yo cellular phones have already been done for years directly through most of the major airlines. Perhaps the FAA should cancel the service, in order for you to sleep better at night...