ARTS & FARCES internet

American Airlines is the latest U.S. airline to reveal that it violated its customers’ privacy by disclosing passenger records—1.2 million of them—to the federal government. Moreover, the passenger records were passed to four private companies competing for a government security contract.

The third time was apparently the charm that prompted the Department of Homeland Security to “launch an investigation into possible government privacy violations,” according to Sara Kehaulani Goo’s account in today’s Washington Post.

JetBlue Airways provided similar customer records in September 2003. In January 2004, Northwest Airlines acknowledged that it, too, had disclosed customer data, after steadfastly maintaining for months that it “did not provide that type of information to anyone.” And now American Airlines acknowledges that it passed confidential customer information—including names, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, and itineraries—to the Transportation Security Administration in June 2002.

Fact-checking asses on the web has become such a widespread participatory sport that it’s almost a cliche. The Center for American Progress has published two truly masterful—and painstakingly sourced—examples of the exercise in top form:

• “Claim vs. fact: Condoleezza Rice’s opening statement”
• “Claim vs. fact: Rice’s Q&A testimony before the 9/11 Commission”

Here’s one excerpt:

CLAIM: “I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons.” [responding to Kean]

FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, “U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner” into the summit, prompting officials to “close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city’s airport.” [Sources: Los Angeles Times, 9/27/01; White House release, 7/22/01]

CLAIM: “I was certainly not aware of [intelligence reports about planes as missiles] at the time that I spoke” in 2002. [responding to Kean]

FACT: While Rice may not have been aware of the 12 separate and explicit warnings about terrorists using planes as weapons when she made her denial in 2002, she did know about them when she wrote her March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed. In that piece, she once again repeated the claim there was no indication “that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles.” [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04]

Carleton University’s Human Oriented Technology Lab has published an interview with usability/human factors expert Donald Norman. Focusing on mental models in design, the interview is well worth a read:

“I have argued that emotion cannot be separated from cognition. One (cognition), is understanding and the other (emotion), is evaluating and making an assessment. I had not thought about this relationship to mental models so that’s a good question. I think that the answer has to be yes, as a designer you should think about the relationship between emotion and mental models.”

President Bush flew to Nebraska instead of the White House after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as part of an “Armageddon” program designed, in part, by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld twenty years ago. So says Howard Kurtz in “‘Armageddon’ plan was put into action on 9/11, Clarke says” published in today’s Washington Post.

Under the plan, covered in ABC’s “Nightline” broadcast tonight:

“... three teams of 50 federal officials would be sent from Washington to locations across the country—each with a Cabinet member who was prepared to become president.”

Kurtz reports that ABC confirmed Rumsfeld ordered Paul Wolfowitz to leave Washington. Several Cabinet members also left for undisclosed locations, as did Cheney and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois).

Surprisingly, or not, most of Congress has not been told about the “Armageddon” program.

Steve Yelvington left the Minneapolis Star Tribune‘s news desk ten years ago to figure out this new-fangled online thing. Ten years on and he’s still pretty close to the top of the insight curve.

Although it’s written for the newspaper industry from an insider’s perspective, Yelvington’s “Ten years in new media: Looking back, looking forward” offers a concise agenda of what anyone in online publishing needs to be thinking about and putting into action.

Yelvington’s sole complaint about the past decade is a doozy and is applicable far and wide outside of the newspaper industry:

“We, the newspaper industry, are guilty of spending way too much time, energy and attention on technology (how we do it) and not enough on product vision (what we do).”