When midnight rolled around and flight traffic thinned out, air-traffic controllers guiding planes in the busiest U.S. corridor whipped out laptops to watch movies, play games or gamble online.

Controllers on break inflated air mattresses and napped on the floor. Some left before their shifts were over. They cursed at managers, refused to train new controllers, and flouted rules requiring them to pass on weather advisories to pilots.

Those and other allegations made by Seeley were corroborated by investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to reports released this week by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an agency formed to help and protect whistle-blowers inside federal agencies.

Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner sent a letter on May 8 to the White House and Congress detailing findings in Seeley’s case and six other verified whistle-blower complaints, saying the FAA and Department of Transportation were slow to address them or hadn’t acted.

Although the seven made formal, whistleblower complaints, little was done until after Seeley went to the media.

While Lerner said she was satisfied with the outcome, she noted in her letter that the response occurred after Seeley took his concerns to the media.

On Sept. 6, the FAA replaced the facility’s top managers and brought in experienced supervisors from other locations to serve as mentors for the remaining staff.

The results of the investigation indicate an all-around lack of authority or enforcement of rules and regulations. Often, retaliatory action were taken again those that had complained.

In New York, investigators found a facility in which FAA managers were unwilling or afraid to discipline controllers’ union members, the reports said. Supervisors who tried to enforce the rules had their cars vandalized or were threatened. The result was widespread violations of rules that undermined safety, reviews by the special counsel and FAA found.

A controller cursed out another supervisor in front of Seeley his first day on the job. Within a week, copies of a photo from Seeley’s Facebook page appeared all over the facility, including in the men’s room. The manager who had informed him of the photos said it didn’t warrant a response, he said.

“She said they are just trying to get under your skin,” Seeley said. “They’re hazing you a little bit. If you make a big deal out of this, it will just get worse.”

One night, a controller using his laptop failed to notice a warning on his radar screen that he needed to switch to a backup system, Seeley said.

Seeley hadn’t made any effort to stop the use of personal electronics at that point. This was different, he said, because of the warning. So the young manager reported the controller.

Another manager urged him not to press the matter. “He said you need to think twice,” Seeley said. “I wouldn’t do this. It’s not going to go over well for you.”

Within weeks, someone ran a sharp object across Seeley’s car, scratching the paint, he said. On another occasion, one of his tires was slashed.

FAA regulations are precise in describing how controllers must issue instructions so that their staccato radio transmissions aren’t misunderstood. The regulations also require that controllers pass on weather reports and other information to pilots.

These rules often weren’t followed in New York, Seeley said. When investigators visited the facility last year, they listened in on 32 hours of activity. Almost half of the controllers they evaluated weren’t complying with FAA rules, according to the agency’s findings.

On Jan. 20, an AMR Corp. (AAMRQ) American Airlines Inc. jet and two U.S. Air Force C-17s almost collided while under the control of two New York controllers. They passed within 200 feet (61 meters) vertically and less than a mile of each other, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Poor communication between the controllers, one of the issues Seeley had raised, was one of the reasons for the incident, he said. He decided to take his story to the New York Post.

Seeley was later demoted, something which Seeley contends was retribution. Still, the threats did not stop.

“Rat fink, watch ur back,” it said, according to Seeley. An arrow pointed to the chair where he’d been sitting. Seeley complained to the special counsel.

Seeley has since transferred back to Ft. Worth, where he has been able to peacefully resume his career.

At the end of the TSA discussion, Feinstein tosses in a time-tested fear-mongering statement:

“When you see the number of people on these large planes, you’re aware of the fact that this is really necessary to do, and particularly right now.”

Ah. So we should not only put up with the abuse being dished out to us, we should be grateful for it.

Yes, that’s exactly how they want us to act.

Using a free iPhone or Android App, you can get a snapshot of the San Francisco bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, and crowd size — all in real time. In short, you can find out if there are enough women to hit on before you bother getting decked out for the night.

Hidden sensors will discreetly record the age and gender of the people entering and leaving and broadcast that information out to SceneTap users so that they can make an informed decision about going to that venue based on how crowded it is, the male-to-female ratio or the age range, said CEO Cole Harper.

Bar owners don’t see a problem with the system because they say it is detection rather than recognition and they don’t keep any identifying information long-term. They fail to recognize the intrusive privacy concerns and seem only concerned with how to monetize the information that they have gathered.

They will have access to this aggregated demographic information, and over time they can use it to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. In other words, did that ladies-drink-free special actually draw more women to the bar?

SceneTap is already up and running in a half-dozen other cities, and to date, the company’s cameras have tracked more than 8.5 million people in bars and restaurants in these cities. In any event, here’s a list of the bars that will be watching you, according to SceneTap:

• Bamboo Hut

• Bar None

• Eastside West

• Fluid Ultra Lounge

• HiFi

• John Colins

• Kozy Kar Bar

• Manor West

• Mayes Oyster House

• McTeague’s Saloon

• Milk Bar

• Monaghan’s

• Mr. Smith’s

• Noble

• Polo Grounds

• R Bar

• Southpaw

• Taverna Aventine

• The Ambassador

• The Wreck Room

• Tope

While many people think that SceneTap is a useful tool, many more are calling out the flaws of such a system. The “creepy” folks that like to stalk women will have access to the data via the app. While bars are busy trying to figure out how to bring more ladies into their establishments, creepers will use the information to harass women.

The fact that even some identifying information is kept, even in the short-term, is worrying. As long as it’s being stored, there is the potential to have that database hacked. Used in conjunction with door ID-scanners, there is a wealth of information collected about an individual that is valuable to corporations, advertisers, and identity thieves. The only way you can opt out is not to visit such establishments.

The problem, however, is that more and more people are becoming accustomed to being tracked in all aspects of their lives. This leaves those who are concerned about privacy issues with fewer and fewer places that they can venture out to and remain mostly anonymous. Once programs, such as SceneTap, are integrated into other programs like Facebook, it will become impossible to go anywhere in public without that information being used to market a product to you or track everything you do.

The only real solution is to boycott businesses who think such practices are acceptable. Individuals still have some privacy options left. They need to exercise their right to privacy now before it’s voluntarily taken away from them by others.

Via reddit.

Download (PDF, 325.72KB)

Source.

Download (PDF, 49.24KB)

Source.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Read the rest of my article at The Daily Censored.

I don’t even know how to respond to this.

On MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Ed Shultz reports Rick Berg – the 14th richest member of Congress – and his campaign staff did not know what the current minimum wage is in North Dakota, when asked at a campaign event. Berg has voted at least three times against raising the minimum wage but voted eleven times to raise his own pay.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.