The Amazing Race 7, Episode 5

Vicente Casares (Argentina) - Johannesburg (South Africa) - Soweto (South Africa) - Gaborone (Botswana) - Francistown (Botswana) - Gweta (Botswana) - Makgadikgadi Pans (Botswana)

Road travel is the most dangerous part of most trips -- whether a trip to the next town, across the country, or around the world.

Travellers occasionally, although rarely, get so ill (most often with malaria or drug-resistant dysentery) that they come home earlier than they had planned, but most of the time when something happens to one of my clients that forces them to cut short their trip, that "something" is a road accident. (Despite fears of travel-related illnesses and injuries, the most common reason to abort an extended overseas trip is an injury or illness affecting a family member back home, typically a parent, rather than anything that's happened to the traveller.)

So it should be no surprise that the most serious injury that we've been shown to date in The Amazing Race was to one of the (usually invisible) camera operators accompanying the teams in the reality television race around the world, when one of the race teams' truck ("sport utility vehicle") rolled over on a dirt track in the desert in Botswana.

Sometimes the most effective way to teach a lesson is by negative example, and that's definitely the case here. Both the producers of the television show, and the racers themselves, did pretty much everything possible to maximize the likelihood of exactly such a predictable "accident" as in fact occurred:

They were driving as fast as possible, in top-heavy rollover prone trucks, on the opposite side of the road from what they were accustomed to, off pavement, in the desert, in a remote area where help could have been a long time coming or a long way to reach on foot once their vehicle was disabled (if they were real travellers not accompanied by a television production crew and its support and medical staff), while poorly rested and still severely jet lagged after flying across five time zones.

That's a great lesson in what not to do, if you don't want to end up like them, wondering if their eagerness for a television hit (in the case of the producers) or a million-dollar prize (in the case of the racers) might have led them to risk their own or someone else's life.

Don't try to drive or do other dangerous tasks requiring uninterrupted concentration, clear thinking, and quick physical reactions when you are tired (such as from a long flight) or, more importantly, when your body and is at the low point in its daily cycle of alertness -- as it may be, even in the middle of the day, if you are suffering from "jet lag".

At home, if you had to wake up and start driving at 3 a.m., you'd probably realize that you weren't at your peak, and as a result would (I hope) drive more slowly and with more care, if you drove at all.

But if, like the racers, you've just traveled from Argentina to South Africa, your body's internal clock could think it's the middle of the night when it's the middle of the day where you are. It could take as much as a week for your body's cycles to catch up with your own rapid flight around the planet, and the racers had only one 12-hour "pit stop" to try to rest between their intercontinental flights and their off-road race across the desert. In "The Amazing Race" around the world in a month, or course, much less in a trip around the world in eight days , your body clock might never catch up with your body until after you got back home.

Normal circadian rhythms reduce your alertness, reaction time, and ability at that hour of night (or, if you are jet lagged, day) as much as a fairly heavy dose of alcohol or other performance impairing drugs. You should pay at least as much attention to whether you are feeling "down" from jet lag as you would to whether you've been drinking too heavily. If you are feeling jet lagged, you should avoid driving and other suchlike activities as much as you would if you were feeling more than a little drunk or drugged.

Most so-called jet lag "remedies" are pure quackery, so far as I can tell. The most important thing you can do about jet lag is not to try to eliminate or "conquer" or "cure" it (that would require some means of resetting your body's internal clock or alertness cycle), but (1) to recognize when your mental and physical functioning, alertness, and reaction time are impaired by jet lag, and, (2) to act on that recognition by avoiding or postponing activities like driving or, if they are unavoidable, minimizing them and taking extra care (such as by going more slowly than you otherwise might).

For more on jet lag, see Wide Awake at 3:00 a.m. , by Richard M. Coleman, which in my humble opinion is the best book available for understanding and dealing with jet lag.

Special care, concentration, and quick reactions are also required when you are driving on the opposite side of the road than what you are accustomed to, especially if you've never driven on the "wrong" side of the road before. The worst time to learn to drive on the other side is when you have just gotten off a long, tiring flight from another time zone -- which, of course, is exactly when most people do attempt it, whether arriving in South Africa, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan (among places where they drive on the left) from the Americas (where, with a few small exceptions, they drive on the right), or in the opposite case when arriving in America from any of those drive-on-the-left places and immediately driving off in a rental car to explore the great American road. In either case, do yourself a favor: get a hotel at the airport, or reachable by public transportation, and give yourself a few days to rest and for your body clock to catch up before you try driving (in a parking lot for practice, please) on the "wrong" side for the first time.

The racers aren't just given cars, or required to drive them on paved roads (and on the opposite side). They are given SUV's, and required to race them on unpaved desert tracks. Former soldier Ron claims that he's the only one of the racers to have previous experience in high speed off-pavement Humvee driving in the desert. He's probably right -- several of the other racers speak openly of their inexperience at such driving -- and experience does make a difference.

The fact that local people do something all the time doesn't mean (as travellers sometimes falsely infer) that it's safe for them, for you, or for anyone else. But the fact that they do it all the time, and you don't, means that they are likely to be much more skilled at it than you are, and that you should take proportionately greater care than you see them exercising, and go more slowly.

Even on pavement, SUV driving requires special skill. Boosters of "SUV's" (Exactly what sort of "sport" is it to drive such a truck in city or suburban traffic? And exactly what "utility" do they have for the paved highway driving for which most of them are used?) admit in their current joint ad campaign that, "SUV's handle like trucks, not cars" and recommend that, to reduce rollover accidents, SUV drivers should "Slow down and avoid abrupt maneuvers". In their own words, "SUV's require special handling. Riding an SUV travelling at high speeds is dangerous. 40% of fatal rollovers involve excessive speed."

And that's on pavement! SUV advertising gives the impression that driving an SUV on a dirt track, or even across roadless country (especially flat desert, a common setting for SUV ads), is just like driving a car on pavement. But it's not. Driving safely on dirt or sand is at least as much about technique and practice as it is about the vehicle.

Some of the smallest cars, such as the Volkswagen Beetle and the Citroën 2CV, have been preferred off-road vehicles successfully used for decades in some of the world's worst conditions. Among other things, they have the advantage over "modern" SUV's that, being smaller and lighter, they are much easier to lift over or out of obstacles. Not for nothing was The People's Guide to Mexico (now published by Avalon Travel Publishing, the same people who publish my Practical Nomad books) the second book published by John Muir after his own "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive".

I've driven and ridden hundreds of miles -- slowly and carefully -- on dirt and other unpaved roads in a variety of "subcompact", low-clearance, small-tired cars, most recently en route to and from Alaska in a narrow-tired gas-electric hybrid Toyota Prius optimized for fuel efficiency rather than off-road performance. Given the choice of a riding in an off-road rally with a novice off-road driver in a truck or SUV, or an experienced off-road driver like my friend Russell in the battered and beloved little Beetle in which he lived while exploring the desert Southwestern USA , I'd choose the latter without hesitation. (Not that Russell can't drive trucks too, mind you.)

The racers and their crews, of course, had people watching (and filming them), and medical support and backup transportation standing by -- even in the African bush. That won't be true for you, and neither health nor medical evacuation insurance are likely to reduce the amount of time it takes the first responder to arrive if you are injured while travelling in such a place. But if you want to be sure you would be able to return home for any follow-up treatment (reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation, etc.) once your condition has been stabilized, rather than having it locally wherever you end up after getting hurt, you might consider medical evacuation insurance or a prepaid medevac program like those offered by Medjet Assistance .

CBS describes what happened to Greg, Brian, and the passengers in their race vehicle as an "accident", but in reality (as opposed to reality-TV), it was an entirely predictable consequence of the danger-maximizing set of choices imposed on the racers by the producers. The racers, presumably, had to sign waivers of liability assuming the risks of the race, but one wonders if that was also true of the camera and sound technicians accompanying them, whose lives were placed equally in danger but without the lure of a million-dollar prize.

Auditors question TSA use of airline reservations

Two reports by different sets of internal USA government auditors have questioned the appropriateness and legality, and revealed more details, about past, present, and proposed uses by the USA Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of airline reservation data for "passenger screening" and other purposes.

On Friday, 25 March 2005, the (acting) Inspector General of the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes the TSA, released a redacted (i.e. censored) version of their Review of the Transportation Security Administration's Role in the Use and Dissemination of Airline Passenger Data .

There aren't, on first reading, any bombshells in this report, but it does provide by far the most comprehensive list released to date of airlines, Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS's), and reservation data aggregators who have turned over Passenger Name Records (PNR's), or data extracted from them, to the TSA. It's worth reading, and will remain a useful reference.

The report reveals that these disclosures to the TSA (almost all of which violated European Union laws and the EU Code of Conduct for Computerized Reservation Systems, if not necessarily in all cases laws of the USA) were more extensive than has even previously been confirmed by any agency or official of the government of the USA, and puts the lie to a series of denials by TSA spokespeople and officials to reports of these disclosures, especially the reports by, and denials to, members of Congress, myself, and Ryan Singel of Wired News . Ryan's stories on this, with links to more background, are here and here ; further comments by Bruce Schneier, security expert and member of the TSA's advisory committee on "Secure Flight", are here .

Because this report was focused exclusively on the TSA, it doesn't discuss the more than 250 million PNR's obtained, aggregated into a data warehouse, indexed, and still held by the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Nor does it discuss whether the TSA had access to that data or any of the FBI's analysis of it, which could be significant to whether the TSA knew that the FBI had discovered that PNR's contain personally identifiable data on non-passengers such as travel agents and airline staff, which could be critical to whether TSA officials committed criminal violations of the Privacy Act in setting up databases of PNR data without notice to those non-passengers as data subjects.

On Monday, 28 March 2005, the USA Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report commissioned and mandated by Congress as a precondition to deployment and/or testing of the TSA's Secure Flight airline passenger surveillance and monitoring system, Secure Flight Development and Testing Under Way, but Risks Should Be Managed as System Is Further Developed . (Comments on the GAO report from Ryan Singel , Bruce Schneier , the ACLU , and EPIC .)

The initial focus on the GAO report has been on whether it constitutes the certification required by Congress before the TSA can proceed with "Secure Flight" deployment (clearly not) or testing with commercial data such as PNR's. With respect to testing with PNR's, I don't think so, but the report says the TSA has already conducted such testing, and recent reports such as this and this suggest that the TSA intends to continue and expand both testing and deployment of "Secure Flight" (perhaps defining the initial deployment as merely a very large scale "test") without waiting for the requires GAO certification. The TSA seems to assume that travel data such as PNR's is sui generis and thus exempt from all Constitutional, statutory, or regulatory requirements applicable to other categories of commercial data, just as it seems to think airline security in general is sui generis and outside normal constraints on search, seizure, or freedom to assemble. (Whether travel is, or should be considered, sui generis is a larger question I hope to address in a future article).

The GAO report seems to confirm, although it doesn't emphasize, the likelihood that the "Secure Flight" testing already conducted (or, more specifically, the handover of PNR data by airlines and CRS's for "Secure Flight" testing) was not authorized by any agreement with the EU, and thus that it may have violated EU laws.

It's clear from reading the GAO report that the TSA has defined the "success" of "Secure Flight" testing by the ability to match entries in PNR's with entries in watch lists. Difficult though that has proven in past tests, that's the (relatively) easy part. And that begs the more difficult questions of the degree to which PNR data matches "real identities" (or ever could, even if the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution of the USA were modified to authorize compulsory production and display of identity credentials as a precondition to exercising the right to travel), or the degree to which entries on watch lists correspond to threats sufficient to warrant restrictions on the exercise of Constitutional rights (especially in the absence of a judicial finding in each case of sufficient basis for such a restraining order).

But while the GAO report is damning, it still seems to me on first reading that the GAO auditors were entirely too credulous in several respects. Perhaps that's because, while they talked to (some) privacy advocates and some airline and CRS representatives, that don't appear to have talked to any travel agents -- the people who work with PNR's on a constant basis, and would have to do most of the "heavy lifting" of data collection and data entry for "Secure Flight" (the GAO does confirm that this would be difficult and expensive to a degree it can't yet quantify because the TSA still hasn't decided what data it will require, or in what format) -- or any independent experts on PNR data and associated business practices.

In particular, the GAO report consistently and repeatedly adopts the TSA's false categorization of data in PNR's as "passenger provided" information. This is more than a semantic error.

By describing PNR data as "passenger provided", the TSA is trying to imply -- falsely --- that the subjects of data in PNR's are limited to passengers, that the data was voluntarily provided by the data subjects, and that their "consent" can be inferred from their having provided it and by their subsequently seeking to board flights. But PNR's contain personally identifiable data on people other than passengers, obtained from and through sources other than the data subjects themselves.

The GAO seems to have adopted the TSA's simplistic, and wrong, conception of a unitary transaction, engaged in directly between the airline and the passenger (who never subsequently changes or cancels their reservations), in which a reservation (PNR) is created, all PNR data is entered, and a ticket is issued, at the same time and place and by the same person. Any reservation agent, and especially any travel agent, would find this over-simplification laughably inaccurate.

The GAO misunderstanding is most clear in its statement that, "even a wholly domestic U.S. flight could involve European Union data if the passenger purchased the ticket in the European Union." Actually, this has little -- possibly nothing -- to do with where the ticket was purchased, and everything to do with where the data was collected from the original source for entry into the reservations. It's clear that the GAO didn't understand that distinction, and assumed that the making of reservations, purchase of a ticket, and issuance of the ticket necessarily occurred as part of a single transaction. But it's possible to collect data for one PNR in different places and at different times. It's possible to make reservations without buying a ticket, and it's possible to buy an "open" ticket without making any reservations.

A PNR is, in industry lingo, "built" by a series of entries, often over a considerable period of time, in which different bits of data (much of which the prospective passenger(s) never see), originating with different parties, are entered through different intermediaries. At Airtreks.com where I work with complex around-the-world itineraries, the audit trail or "history" for a single PNR routinely contains more than 100 distinct entries, each identified uniquely with its source. As I've discussed previously, "Most PNR data is provided to airlines by a chain of between two and four intermediaries: (1) the travelling companion who makes the travel arrangements for the typical travel party of more than one person, (2) the travel agency they deal with (online or offline), (3) the CRS used by that travel agency, and (4) the CRS that hosts the airline's PNR database." Their role (and the necessity for them to obtain and document consent for onward personal data transmission) remains unacknowledged by the TSA.

The GAO report describes a "Secure Flight" process in which the TSA would obtain all PNR's containing reservations for each flight (it's silent on whether this would include only confirmed reservations, all confirmed or waitlisted reservations, or all reservations including cancelled ones) 72 hours before scheduled departure. At this point, or any point prior to "wheels up" (and then only if the TSA limited itself to PNR's of those who actually boarded), names in PNR's correspond not to "passengers" but to a vastly larger class of what might more accurately be called "prospective passengers". In many cases, a prospective passenger has made reservations not just for themselves but for their travelling companion(s), who may not even know they have done so, and from whom no consent to anything can be inferred.

A large percentage of reservations are cancelled, or expire unticketed. Airlines can't always tell which reservations have been ticketed, and don't necessarily cancel them, so there are always some confirmed reservations for prospective passengers who fail to "materialize", as we say in the industry, and present themselves for boarding. That's why airlines overbook. There are no-shows on every flight, and for every no-show there is PNR data on a non-passenger in a confirmed, possibly even ticketed, PNR. And that's at departure time: 72 hours in advance, there are even more live, confirmed PNR's for prospective passengers who won't actually become "passengers".

Aside from all that, every PNR -- as the FBI found out -- contains a unique "agent sine" for the travel agent or airline staff person who made each manual entry. This is clearly "personally identifiable information" that can't be described as "passenger" information.

Aside from the degree of TSA ignorance this reveals, it's significant because the TSA's Privacy Act notices for CAPPS-II and Secure Flight, for which it has received entire PNR's, claim -- falsely and, since I had pointed out their mistake in my comments , knowingly falsely -- that the only people about whom those PNR's would contain personally identifiable information would be airline passengers. No mention of prospective passengers who did not actually travel (cancellations, no-shows, etc.) and no mention of travel agents or airline staff.

In its response to my comments , the TSA said it was "rare" for PNR's to contain personal data on non-passengers. This claim is obviously false, and I don't find it credible that anyone competent at the TSA could believe it to be true, even if they hadn't read my comments. It's rare to cancel or change reservations? It's rare to no-show? These things happen on every flight. And every PNR contains the unique agent sine of the person who first created it, as well as the history of who made each subsequent entry.

PNR's contain personally identifiable information on at least four obvious categories of people, not just the single category of "passengers" admitted by the TSA and GAO: (1) airline passengers, (2) prospective passengers in whose names reservations are made (whether or not they are ever ticketed or flown), (3) travel agents, and (4) airline staff members. They also contain information about a variety of other, possibly less obvious, classes of people, such as the holders of credit cards used to pay for other people's tickets.

Knowingly creating a Federal government database of personal information without formal notice of all the categories of people with respect to whom it will contain personal information is a Federal crime in the USA, under the Privacy Act. Those TSA personnel responsible for the creation of the PNR database used for "Secure Flight" testing are criminals. Their only possible defense to such a charge would be an implausible degree of ignorance (including failure to read the comments calling their attention, in advance, to this crime), amounting to gross incompetence.

[Addendum, 29 March 2005: In my first posting of this article, I neglected to mention another item of unwarranted GAO credulity: the GAO report repeats without question the TSA claim that, "in its order requiring airlines to provide historical PNR data for Secure Flight testing, TSA allowed air carriers to exclude from the June 2004 PNR submission any European Union flight segments." That's not true: the TSA's Final Order a much narrower category: "PNRs which include any flight segments between the EU and the United Sates." The difference between what the TSA actually ordered, and what it told the GAO (and the GAO repeated), is that the order actually included flight segemnts within the EU, and between the EU and places other than the USA. It's unclear whether the TSA and GAO are so USA-centric that it has never occurred to them that airlines based in the USA operate flights between points outside the USA (including within the EU, and between the EU and other places), or if this was a knowing (and successful) attenpt by the TSAislead the GAO. They can't plead ordinary ignorance, since I had explained this point in detail in my comments to the TSA on the proposed order.]

Deadlines loom for RFID tracking chips in USA passports

There's still time for USA citizens to get a new passport without an embedded RFID remote tracking chip -- but if you want one, you should apply at once. The Department of State is moving as fast as it can (slowed down only by technical difficulties -- RFID chips are proving more difficult to manufacture, more fragile, and less reliable than their boosters have claimed) toward the rollout of the new "electronic passports". And there's still no plan to encrypt any of the information on the RFID chip. Each chip will be digitally "signed" by the State Department, but that's for authentication, not as a control on access to the data.

Anyone who gets close enough to your passport with an RFID reader will be able (without your knowing the chip has been read) to determine your nationality, name, gender, date of birth, place of birth, passport number, etc. as well as receive a digital copy of your passport photo, for the convenience of identity thieves in forging a duplicate passport (with a clone of the RFID chip, including the digital signature) or other identity documents in your name and with your image, but perhaps with a signature in their handwriting (the signature, which might be slightly harder to forge, won't be digitized or digitally signed) for the use of criminals, terrorists, or anyone else who resembles your appearance.

RFID chips in passports would also be available for use by merchants, marketing companies, and commercial data aggregators who could use them (secretly and remotely) at entrances and exits to commercial establishments, checkin and checkout counters, cash registers, etc.) as unique personal identifiers to compile logs of consumers' (travellers') movements, purchases, and other behavior. Since international travellers almost always have to carry their passports, embedding RFID chips in passports would effectively remove any possibility to opt-out of such tracking (especially in jurisdictions, such as the USA, where such data collection, usage, and "sharing" is unregulated), much less to require consent or "opt-in".

The USA State Department is currently accepting public comments through Monday, 4 April 2005, on new proposed regulations related to passports with RFID chips, which they are referring to as "electronic passports".

These are not the regulations to establish the inclusion of RFID chips in passports. That requires no change in regulations, and has already been decided. But the new regulations are critical to enforcing the requirement that holders of passports issued with RFID chips allow themselves to be tracked. The crucial element of the new regulations is a new clause which would allow the State Department to invalidate any passport issued with an RFID chip if the chip was no longer functioning for any reason. The point of this rule is to prevent citizens from defeating the tracking function of the RFID chip embedded in their passport. Use of any "technical fix" to prevent reading of the passport would, under these proposed regulations, invalidate the passport (in the same way that physical mule or alteration of the photo or any other essential element of the passport currently invalidates it).

A new Web site, RFIDkills.com , offers more information about the proposed regulations, including links to denunciation so of them by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the Business Travel Coalition .

Anyone can submit comments on the proposed regulations. Comments must be received by 5 p.m. Washington, DC, time on Monday, 4 April 2005. You can either send your comments by e-mail to PassportRules@state.gov or use the form on the RFIDkills.com Web site . (All submitted comments will become part of the public record, but you don't have to give any further information than your e-mail address and perhaps a name.)

[Addendum, 20 August 2005: The format doesn't make them easy to navigate or browse, but the State Department has posted more than 2000 of the comments they received on their Web site. I didn't read them all, but all those of the comments I sampled were opposed to the RFID passport proposal.]

Anti-draft movement begins to come together

As the likelihood of a military draft in the USA becomes more apparent, anti-draft activism is beginning to move beyond individual Web sites (like those I have created and maintain, Resisters.info and MedicalDraft.info ) to the formation -- mainly on the initiative of parents of potential draftees -- of small, local, grassroots community anti-draft groups in scattered cities and towns. More recently, organizers of those groups have begun a discussion among themselves, with existing groups whose concerns relate to the draft (peace and anti-war organizations, organizations for conscientious objectors, civil libertarians, etc.), and individual anti-draft and draft resistance activists (including past generations of draft resisters such as myself and my circle of aging draft-resister friends) on the formation and structuring of a more organized anti-draft movement.

Last week I was part of an initial conference call with a few such activists. There was a considerable degree of agreement on the desirability of coordination and communication, although it remains uncertain what structural form that might best take.

In this context, Tom Reeves, who was one of the anti-draft activists from the Vietnam War period who was most helpful in their support of draft resistance and resisters in the 1980's, has just published a lengthy and useful survey of the forms a draft might take, the political forces behind it, and (towards the end of the article) of the embryonic state of anti-draft organizing, A Draft By Any Other Name... Is Still Wrong: Exposing the Coming Draft . (If anyone has his current contact info, please let me know.)

Meanwhile, there are signs that the "hot button" character of the draft as an issue is attracting interest, as it did before the 2004 USA Presidential election, from groups for whom it hasn't previously been a priority. NoDraftNoWay.org , a Web site set up by the International Action Center (IAC) / Workers World Party and associated groups, has posted a call for a national day of anti-draft actions on 31 March 2005 (not mentioning the national anti-draft lobbying day on 16 May 2005 initiated by the Center on Conscience and War (NISBCO) that several other groups have already endorsed for May 16, and that seems to be gaining momentum, as also mentioned in Tom Reeves' article), and a one-day "national anti-draft conference" in New York City on April 16 (a date oddly out of sync with the annual focus of many peace groups involved both with draft resistance and tax resistance on "tax day" actions at that time, many of which are already planned).

While I welcome more organizing around the draft, this does raise -- sooner than I expected -- concerns about co-optation of the issue of the draft by groups with a particular political "line", and/or that may seek to use the public appeal of the issue of the draft to further that line and recruit people into their organization (and not primarily to get people working specifically against the draft), as well as much of the specific history both of IAC itself, and previously of CARD (Coalition Against Registration and the Draft) in the 1980's.

The leaflet for the conference refers to "draft resistance counseling", a term neither draft counselors nor draft resisters would be likely to use, reinforcing the degree to which this plan has been developed in isolation from groups already working with a focus on the issue. I don't know what NoDraftNoWay.org's actual position will be on illegal forms of draft resistance.

Perhaps the most telling thing about IAC's intentions is that they issued this call with no consultation with any of the groups I (or anyone I know, including in New York City) is in touch with that are working specifically on the issue, calling severely into question their commitment to genuinely cooperative coalition work, shared leadership, or sharing in defining the political line of the "coalition" which, I presume, will be formed as an outcome of the conference.

I've been trying to find out more about their plans, but with no success. I have gotten no response to e-mail sent to "info@NoDraftNoWay.org" or the local IAC office, and the phone number on the Web site routes to the general phone line at the IAC office in New York. When I called a couple of weeks ago, no one there knew anything about "NoDraftNoWay.org" -- it was just one of the IAC Web sites, not an organization as such. There are no individuals identified with the "organization" on the Web site. All the "local contacts" initially listed on the NoDraftNoWay.org Web site were other IAC offices, atlhough the site does include articles from a variety of perspectives (including one of mine, I was somewhat surprised to discover) and links to right-wing and Libertarian anti-draft Web sites as well as leftist ones.

It's a positive sign (even though a symptom of bad things happening in the world) that a new anti-draft movement is emerging and coming together. I just hope it organizes itself in an empowering and democratic way.

The Amazing Race 7, Episode 4

Mendoza (Argentina) - La Lunta (Argentina) - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Tigre (Argentina) - Vicente Casares (Argentina)

Train to Tigre at Retiro station (photo by Ruth Radetsky)

Argentina is a huge country -- the eighth largest in the world in land area, larger than any country in Africa -- with the best infrastructure of any major country in South America, including what was once the largest and best network of railroads on the continent, extending from the subtropical southern edge of Amazonia far down into Patagonia. This was the setting for much of one of the best selling of modern train travelogues, Paul Theroux's "The Old Patagonian Express".

The Amazing Race has visited Argentina in three seasons, spending as much time or more time there as in any country other than the USA. And the race has been all over the country by almost all possible means: 3000 km (2000 mile) domestic flights, 1500 km (1000 mile) 24-hour bus rides, and hundreds of miles of driving in rented cars through all sorts of terrain from the tunnel through the Andes near the Chilean border to the wine country around Mendoza to the flat "pampas" in Buenos Aires Province, where they finished this leg at the Estancia La Martina polo ranch.

So why was this week the first time we saw the racers set foot on an Argentine train? And that only for an hour's journey to Tigre on the Mitre Line commuter train operated by Trenes de Buenos Aires .

Retiro (train) Station in Buenos Aires was once the transportation hub of a subcontinent, but today it's overshadowed by the vast Retiro bus station next door, where "The Amazing Race 5" arrived from San Carlos de Bariloche . (Bus timetables and departure boards throughout Argentina are more likely to list "Retiro" than "Buenos Aires" as the the terminus of their routes.)

The unfortunate (for those who love train travel) fact is that the modes of transport chosen by the television producers of the race reflect the contemporary reality of limited and rapidly disappearing options for long-distance train transportation in Argentina, throughout Latin America and Africa generally, and even in the USA (where the Bush administration has proposed to eliminate all Federal funding for Amtrak in a deliberate and explicit attempt to force it to shut down most of its service) and Canada.

The city of Buenos Aires still has an excellent Subte (subway) system which reaches within walking distance of most tourist destinations (although not to either of the city's airports). Other than that, passenger trains are limited to a few commuter lines around Buenos Aires, and a few vestigial or restored long-distance services underwritten by tourists and/or provincial governments. This is very much like the situation for Amtrak, which owns the trackage on the densely populated and well-served "Northeast Corridor" between Boston and Washington, but operates only a skeletal national passenger rail network, underwritten by tourist traffic and state governments, over tracks owned by freight railroads, in the rest of the USA.

When "The Old Patagonian Express" was first published 25 years ago, it was still possible, with difficulties (which formed a major theme of the book) for Theroux to cover most of the distance from Boston to Tierra del Fuego by train. But even then, long-distance rail services throughout Latin America were already deteriorating, as both governments within the region and external providers of "development" aid shifted their priorities to highway construction from railway maintenance. Today, that process is largely complete: the remaining long-distance trains are the exceptions, destinations in themselves for railfans rather than a means of transportation one can normally count on existing, even in places where the map shows a railway line.

There've been a number of queries posted recently on the Internet, for example, from people planning to attend the meeting of ICANN (the global governing body of the Internet, although it is actually a private California corporation) next month in Mar del Plata , Argentina. No international flights go directly to Mar del Plata, and there are only a few scheduled flights each day from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata.

So is there a train to Mar del Plata? No, not any more. The only alternatives to the plane are a private car (somewhat expensive, and pointless unless you want to visit some out-of-the-way place in between) or the variety of classes of bus service I discussed the last time the race was in Argentina.

For those going to the ICANN meetings, or to Argentina or Chile for other reasons, the best resources in English are the series of Moon Handbooks by Wayne Bernhardson . Useful excerpts on Mar del Plata are available online, but I'd recommend buying the relevant books from this series before your trip, since they aren't readily available in Latin America.

Waiting for the "Tren de la Costa" to Tigre (photo by Ruth Radetsky)

[Addendum, 18 April 2005: I got the big picture right, but the details wrong. Wayne Bernhardson ("back in California after four months in Buenos Aires and a few weeks in Chile including Antarctica" and Rapa Nui/Easter Island) advises me that there are still passenger trains operating between Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata, among other regional routes in Buenos Aires province. You can't follow the whole route of "The Old Patagonian Express" any more, but you can still take a train to Mar del Plata.]

FBI releases details of its files of airline reservations

I've been meaning to comment on two documents released by the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation in January 2005, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by EPIC , giving details of the data from airline reservations collected by the FBI during its "PENTTBOMB" criminal investigation of the events of 11 September 2001.

I had expected to discuss these in the context of the Transportation Security Administration's plans for testing of the proposed Secure Flight airline passenger identification, surveillance, and "screening" system.

But despite news reports, apparently confirmed by TSA officials, that "Secure Flight" testing has begun, the TSA has made no official statement about "Secure Flight" testing since its order to airlines to turn over all reservations that included flights in June 2004 for "Secure Flight" testing.That's probably because any testing begun before 23 February 2005, and possibly any being conducted now, would have violated a Congressional mandate that any testing of an airline passenger screening system using commercial data -- such as the commercial airline reservation records at the core of "Secure Flight" -- not begin until after "TSA has developed measures to determine the impact of such verification on aviation security and the Government Accountability Office has reported on its evaluation of the measures".

The GAO report on the criteria for 'Secure Flight' testing was released 23 February 2005, and concluded that:

TSA measures developed to date for commercial data testing do not, and were not designed to, provide information on overall Secure Flight system operations (i.e., system response time, connectivity with air carriers, security, and privacy) or identify impacts of using commercial data on aviation security in an operational environment. Accordingly, the measures do not generally reflect attributes of successful performance measures for this purpose. Additional work reviewing TSA’s refined measures, should DHS and TSA decide to pursue the use of commercial data for Secure Flight, would be needed to determine if the measures are designed to identify relevant impacts on aviation security, and reflect attributes of successful performance measures for that purpose.

It's not at all clear that this report constitutes the finding by the GAO that "TSA has developed measures to determine the impact of such verification on aviation security" required by Congress as a prerequisite to "Secure Flight" testing using information from airline Passenger Name Records (PNR's)or other commercial databases. The GAO report is also fundamentally mistaken in referring to data in PNR's as "passenger-provided information". In fact, almost no PNR data is entered by passengers, and some of it (such as in cancelled PNR's naming people who never became passengers) doesn't pertain to passengers at all. Most PNR data is provided to airlines by a chain of between two and four intermediaries: (1) the travelling companion who makes the travel arrangements for the typical travel party of more than one person, (2) the travel agency they deal with (online or offline), (3) the CRS used by that travel agency, and (4) the CRS that hosts the airline's PNR database.

The TSA has also directed the appointment of a privacy advisory committee on "Secure Flight" under the auspices of the pre-existing Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC). But the TSA privacy advisory committee on "Secure Flight" has complied with none of the public notice and transparency requirements applicable to the ASAC or other Federal advisory committees, making it impossible to know what, if anything, it has been assigned to do, or has done.

Anyway, while the TSA has been going about its business in secret, the FBI has admitted to having received, compiled into an integrated database, and indexed more than a terabyte of data from airline reservations and passenger manifests including 257.5 million PNR's covering flights between 31 December 2000 and 30 September 2001.

The FBI and/or the grand jury investigating the hijackings on 11 September 2001 would have been remiss not to subpoena PNR data that might have helped to identify the hijackers and, perhaps, co-conspirators who might still have been alive and subject to prosecution. But there are two particularly notable revelations in the FBI declaration describing the acquisition of the PNR and manifest data, and the outline of the structure of the aggregate data warehouse created by the FBI from this reservation data:

First, the FBI declares that "This airline passenger data was provided by the airlines to the FBI with implied assurances of confidentiality. One exception is one set of airline passenger data which was acquired through a Federal Grand Jury subpoena."

While airlines and CRS's wouldn't have violated any USA law in "voluntarily" turning over data collected in the USA, they would have violated European Union law, and the EU code of conduct for CRS's, by turning over any of this data originally collected in the EU, or transmitted through a CRS which does business in the EU (as, of course, all the major CRS's do), without the affirmative consent of the data subjects.

The FBI declaration thus reveals a massive violation of the law and the CRS regulations with respect to probably several millions of people whose reservations on USA-based airlines for 2001 flights were made in the EU. Anyone who made reservations from the EU for flights in the USA in January-September 2001 should ask the airline, the travel agency, and the CRS they use whether their data was handed over "voluntarily" (but without their consent) to the FBI -- and, if it was, should request enforcement action and sanctions by EU data protection authorities and the European Commission as enforcement agency for the CRS regulations.

Second, the structure of the FBI Oracle database includes a field for the "AgentSine" (unique identifier for the travel agent or airline agent who created the PNR) for each PNR.

What makes this significant is that it shows that the FBI not only received data concerning, but actually retained and used as an indexing (and, presumably, retrieval) field, as early as late 2001, unique identifiers for people in a category -- airline and travel agency staff -- completely distinct from airline passengers. Yet, three years later, the TSA was still claiming to believe that, "It is our understanding that the inclusion in PNR's of names other than passengers is rare", when in fact every PNR is required to include a unique ideitifier of a person other than the prospective passenger(s).

Once again, the question comes down to whether the TSA was incompetent or lying: Was the TSA actually unfamiliar with the FBI's analysis of the content of PNR data, even as the TSA was devising massive, and massively intrusive, systems highly dependent on what such data might contain? Or was the TSA actually aware, from its familiarity with at least the structure of the FBI data set, that PNR's invariably contain personally identifiable information on people other than passengers, in the form of the required unique agent sine?

If the latter, than the creation of the "Secure Flight" testing database, without proper notice of their inclusion to travel agents and airline staff, constituted a criminal violation of the Privacy Act .

And regardless of what the TSA knew (and they should have known, since I had told them this specifically in my comments on the "Secure Flight" proposal), this also constituted a further violation of the rights under EU law of travel agents and airline staff who made reservations in the EU that ended up in the FBI database without their knowledge or consent.

"The Draft Debate Heats Up"

My article on the possibility and likely character of a military draft, the potential for draft resistance, and the state of anti-draft organizing, The Draft Debate Heats Up , has been published in the Winter 2005 issue of The Nonviolent Activist , the magazine of the War Resisters League . (Since it's the season for filing U.S. Federal income tax returns, you might also want to look at WRL's annual analysis of Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes .)

Meanwhile, I've updated my FAQ's on the draft, which are now available at their own easier-to-remember addresses:

• Resisters.info -- FAQ's about the military draft, draft registration, and draft resistance
  
  
• MedicalDraft.info -- FAQ's on the possibility of a draft of health care workers

In addition, I've started a highly irregular mailing list for information about the draft beyond what I'm including in this blog. If you're interested in receiving occasional news and updates by e-mail, please let me know .

Finally, I'll be speaking about the likelihood of a draft, my experience as a draft resister and resistance organizer, and the choices available to those threatened by the draft, at a student-organized teach-in at Berkeley High School this Wednesday, 23 March 2005. Schedule permitting, I'm always happy to talk to other individuals or groups, especially those considering or wanting more information about draft resistance and its history since 1980.

[Addendum: I've made a first experiment at scanning some of the draft resistance posters from the archives in my basement, so others can use them. If there's interest, I'll try to dig out some more (and re-do these better). I believe that rights to the use of these were donated by the artists at various times to the National Resistance Committee. If the artists or anyone else knows that not to be correct, please let me know.]

Travel writing contests and conferences

Yesterday's meeting of the Bay Area Travel Writers reminded me of several upcoming contests and events for travel writers, including a new travel writing contest for high school seniors in the San Francisco Bay area, and a travel writing contest with a grand prize of a ticket around the world.

• High school seniors from throughout the San Francisco Bay area are eligible to enter the first Bay Area Travel Writers high school travel writing contest . There's no fee to enter, and the first three winners (as judged by a panel of BATW member professional travel writers) will receive cash prizes of $300, $200, and $100 respectively. Entries must be postmarked by 30 April 2005, and each entry should consist of "a 500-word essay, concerning a travel destination, experience or activity. Travel essays concern the idea and experience of travel;whether the writer has traveled to the other side of the world, down the block or anywhere in between."
  
  
• Once again for the 14th time this year, Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA (just north of San Francisco) will host the nation's, and one of the world's, leading travel writers' and photographers' conferences from 18-21 August 2005. And once again, for the fourth consecutive year, Airtreks.com will be presenting the winner of the conference travel writing contest (entry is limited to registered conference participants) with a ticket around the world. So register soon, and start working on your entry in the contest: a travel article of up to 1,500 words on the topic of "an adventure or encounter that opened a place up for you and what you learned as a result".
  
  
• Entries are now open for the 2005 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Works entered in most categories must have been published by 31 March 2005, and entries must be postmakred by 20 April 2005.
  
  
• Registration is now open for SATW's annual Insitute for Travel Writing and Photography 20-22 May 2005 in Orlando, Florida. It's practical, focused, and the faculty includes some of the best in the business.

Good luck, and bon voyage!

AFP sues Google for copyright infringement

In what I expect will prove the most significant test case since Tasini vs. New York Times (in which the U.S. Supreme Court found the Times liable for damages to writers -- which it still has yet to pay, more than three years later -- for systematic electronic bootlegging of articles to which it had purchased only print rights) of rights to electronic distribution of written text, and possibly the most important case to date on the limits of permissible Internet archiving, excerpting, and redistribution without the consent of copyright owners, Agence France-Press (AFP) has filed suit against Google for the inclusion of AFP news headlines, leads, and photo thumbnails in the Google News Web site -- a site that might more accurately be titled "News Stolen by Google" than "Google News".

Publishers of music and video have taken vigorous legal action to police their copyrights against Internet and other electronic infringement, through action against Napster, individual "file sharers", and the like.

Publishers of text have taken little similar initiative against infringement, even against such all-encompassing schemes of infringement as redistribution of "cached" Web pages by Google and Archive.org.

Publishers (such as the New York Times, Time Warner AOL, Newsday, Lexis/Nexis, and the other big media conglomerates convicted of wholesale plagiarism in the Tasini case) have been the leading thieves of electronic rights to freelance writing. AFP vs. Google is one case, however, in which publishers and writers have a common interest in protecting their rights against electronic plagiarism. Authors -- who are rarely able to afford litigation like this -- have a great deal at stake in this lawsuit, and a great deal to gain if AFP is successful.

On first reading of the news report on the lawsuit (I have not yet seen the complaint), two issues would seem to be at the heart of the case:

1. Is Google's commercial use of the entirety of AFP's headline news feed, as well as the leads of every AFP story, "fair use"? This seems highly unlikely, given the statutory factors in determining "fair use", the comprehensiveness and quantity of the redistributed material, and the fact that Google is doing so as a commercial service that generates Web traffic, brand awareness and loyalty, and advertising and other revenues for Google. As a wire service, AFP sells a variety of information products, including a headline and news summary feed whose value is largely destroyed by Google's systematic and complete bootlegging of it.
   
   
2. Can Google permissibly engage in this Internet redistribution on an opt-out" basis ("We're allowed to put your words on our Web site until you ask us to stop"), or does Web reproduction without an "opt-in" or license from the owner of the relevant rights constitute infringement? According to initial news reports, AFP says that Google ignored AFP's requests to cease and desist, while Google claims that AFP could have "opted out". That suggests to me that Google would have allowed AFP to "opt-out" only if AFP had explicitly or implicitly conceded that Google's actions prior to that "opt-out" were legal, without the need of any license from AFP. But that's clearly, unambiguously, and directly the opposite of what the current copyright law in the USA (and most other jurisdictions) provides: If what Google was doing was such that AFP had the legal right to "out out", then it required an affirmative grant of rights from AFP to be legal in the first place. Copyright infringers cannot protect themselves against liability by providing an opportunity for copyright holders to opt out of having their work stolen. Nor should they be able to do so.

Google is also claiming that its reproduction of AFP headlines and leads benefited AFP by generating traffic to the AFP Web site. But if that were true, AFP would be giving away their news headline and summary feed to any Web site that wanted it, rather than charging for it. And, more importantly, possible benefit from the infringement to the copyright holder is legally relevant only to the amount of damages for which the infringer is liable, and not at all to the definition of infringement. "I bootlegged your work for what I thought to be your own good", even if true (which it rarely is), is not and should not be a defense to a complaint of copyright infringement. If the copyright holder thinks that a particular usage would be beneficial to them, in their own judgment, they can license it for free or for a reduced price.

Any precedent set in this case will likely be directly applicable to Google's distribution of archived or "cached" Web pages and Usenet postings, to the Alexa division of Amazon.com, and slightly less directly to Archive.org (which might be distinguished with respect to fair use by being operated by a non-profit entity rather than a for-profit corporation like Google).

Among the many consequences of Internet bootlegging on the scale practiced for different types of texts (Web pages, Usenet articles, books, etc.) by Google, Alexa, Amazon.com, and Archive.org is an almost total sabotaging of the potential revenues to writers from excerpting or long-term or time-limited licensing or resale of electronic rights to their work. Even if a writer licenses a work for only limited-duration electronic distribution, Google and others make it available in "cached" form in perpetuity, making it essentially worthless for resale once the original license expires, and depriving the author of any opportunity to earn advertising or other revenue through viewing of the archived article. (In marked contrast to the situation with respect to ongoing compensation for re-use of "residual" rights in music, film, and video.)

Federal lawsuits take years, but this one warrants watching as it crawls through the courts, and joinder as friends of the court by writers, writers' organizations, and writers' advocates.

[Addendum: Legal complaint (PDF) by AFP against Google.]

"Around the World in Eight Days"

No, the headline above is not a typo.

Last month I arranged flights for a trip around the world in eight (8) days by USA Today travel reporter Laura Bly. She tells the story of her trip and how she planned it in today's Friday weekend travel section, concluding:

While no globe trotter in his or her right, un-jetlagged mind would duplicate my whirlwind trip, I wouldn't trade a nanosecond.

Want to do it yourself? See my books and the rest of this Web site, starting with my top tips for travel around the world .

Here's more about the trip from Airtreks.com , where I work:

Airtreks and The Practical Nomad send USA Today "Around the World in Eight Days"

SAN FRANCISCO, March 18, 2005 -- In 1873, Jules Verne defined an enduring travel fantasy with his novel, "Around the World in Eighty Days".

In 1889-1890, New York World reporter Nellie Bly proved that a trip around the world in 80 days was possible in reality (and by a single woman), not just by men in a novel.

Now, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne's death, Airtreks.com has slashed that record, sending USA Today travel reporter Laura Bly (no relation to Nellie Bly), around the world in just eight whirlwind days!

Laura Bly's solo air trek, chronicled in today's edition of USA Today , in Bly's blog and photos , and in a series of articles on the USAToday.com Web site, started with a visit to the art installation "The Gates" in Central Park in New York, and included tai chi and acupuncture in Hong Kong, a full-moon tour of the Taj Mahal in India, well-earned mid-trip pampering at one of the world's most luxurious hotels in Dubai, a camel ride past the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Reform Club in London (where Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg started and ended his 80-day trip), and a final soak in an outdoor hot geothermal spa in mid-winter Iceland before returning home to Washington, DC.

Bly's tightly scheduled flights were arranged with the efficient help of Airtreks' around-the-world expert Edward Hasbrouck and cost US$2635 including taxes. That's more than a thousand dollars less than the cheapest around-the-world ticket available from any of the major airline alliances, and many "RTW" tickets from Airtreks.com cost even less.

Airtreks.com is the world leader in around-the-world travel, and Airtreks' travel guru, Edward Hasbrouck, is the author of the definitive planning guidebook, The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World . Each Airtreks.com customer works personally with one of Airtreks' well-travelled consultants to help them optimize their trip.

If you want to follow Bly's path, tickets are currently available through Airtreks.com for $2499 plus tax. And you don't have to do it in just eight days: you can take until November 30th to enjoy the sights and activities along the way. Or you can customize your own trip, and get instant online price estimates at Airtreks.com for tickets on alternate routes around the world, starting from as little as $1500.

"People think that a trip around the world takes an impossible amount of time and money. But that's not true, and this trip proves it." Hasbrouck says. "A trip around the world is within the means, the time, and the money of almost anyone who decides to make their dream come true. There's no longer any excuse not to fulfill your travel fantasy."

"Identification and Anonymity of Travellers" at CFP

The program for this year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference 12-15 April in Seattle has been posted.

I'll be giving a presentation on "Identification and Anonymity of Travellers" as part of an all-day workshop on "Vanishing Anonymity" organized by The Anonymity Project on Tuesday, 12 April. The workshop, and the conference, will also include discusssions of other travel-related topics including anonymous road tolls and travel and the privacy risks of new passport technologies .

If you're interested in hosting a presentation while I'm in the area, let me know ASAP.

If you're on a budget, Hostelling International - Seattle has dorm beds for US$19 per person per night, less than half a mile from the expensive conference hotel. (Few attendees sleep much during CFP anyway -- conference sessions are scheduled until after midnight -- and even fewer stay in their hotel rooms while they are awake.)

If you are coming from elsewhere on the west coast of the USA, check the prices on Amtrak . The Bush administration has proposed to eliminate all Federal funding for Amtrak, in order to force it to shut down most of its service. (There's no comparable proposal to eliminate Federal funding and subsidies for road, air, or water transportation.) But for now, Amtrak is both a bargain and a great travel experience. Enjoy it while you can -- and tell Congress to keep it alive.

You can get a 10% discount on Amtrak fares by joining the National Association of Railroad Passengers . NARP membership can pay for itself in discounts in just one or two Amtrak trips.

At the moment, there's an even better deal: enter promo code V212 on the Amtrak.com Web site for a 25% discount on West Coast Amtrak fares. That brings the round-trip fare to Seattle from the San Francisco Bay area, in a seat larger and more comfortable than first class on most airlines, down to as little as US$117 -- less than half the price of the cheapest coach-class airline ticket.

And you can even earn mileage credits in the Alaska Airlines frequent flyer program for west coast Amtrak rail travel. "Simply ask your on-board conductor for a Mileage Accrual form, fill it out, and return it to the conductor before you disembark." Or redeem Alsaka Airlines miles for Amtrak travel. It takes only 5000 mileage points for a round-trip Amtrak ticket within the Pacific Northwest, or within California.

The Amazing Race 7, Episode 3

Santiago (Chile) - Mendoza (Argentina)

The master at work: an Argentine asador and his parrilla (photo by Ruth Radetsky)

You never know what food you'll be served when you travel in unfamiliar places, how it will be cooked or presented, or how much of it you'll be served.

This week on The Amazing Race in Argentina it was beef. Barbecued over an open fire ("a la parrilla") and served on a wooden platter. Four pounds (1.8 kilos) per person.

Per capita beef consumption in Argentina exceeds 60 kg (130 lb) per year -- second in the world to neighboring Uruguay. It's the world's best beef, and Argentina's most important and best-known export. It's well cooked: the "asador" or barbecue-meister is among the most honored of Argentine professions, and no residential real estate listing would be complete without including a "parrilla" or barbecue grill, typically a dedicated permanent structure at least the size of a large office desk.

For stupidly protectionist reasons the USA doesn't allow the import of Argentine beef, forcing even the best Argentine restaurants here to make do with inferior local beef. So the only way to experience it is to travel, preferably to the source in Argentina itself. My souvenirs from Argentina included memories of meat, as well as half a suitcase full of steak knives, roasting pans, wooden plates, and other kitchen equipment.

All in all, this meal should have come as no surprise to the racers. As soon as they knew they were going to Argentina, they could count on a barbecued beef dinner, whether as a "roadblock" on the race (as this week), or at the next "pit stop" (as happened when The Amazing Race 5 arrived in Argentina).

Four pounds of meat may sound like a lot, and indeed it is. But it's not nearly as much as it may seem to Americans who think in "meat and potatoes" terms, and compare it with a quarter-pound hamburger that we assume to be wrapped in a large roll or piece of bread, and accompanied by fried potatoes.

The mix of foods in the diet varies around the world:

At an Argentine parrilla, meat is the meal, accompanied only by small amounts of garnishes and salad (and of course, especially in Mendoza in the heart of the wine country, quantities of good red wine or hard cider). Filling up on starch would be an insult to the asador. Excellent vegetarian food is available, but it's not as ubiquitous or regarded in the same way.

In parts of Asia and Africa, on the other hand, meat is an expensive luxury, used in small quantities not as a "main dish" but as a flavoring ingredient in the sauce for the grain (rice, cornmeal mush, etc.) or other starch that forms the essence of the meal.

The voice-over describes the racers' meal in Mendoza as including beefsteak, beef ribs, and then some other unsavory-sounding things like "beef salivary glands". It doesn't mention that these are generally known in English cooking as "sweetbreads", by which name and others they've long been considered a delicacy throughout Europe and America. Yum! Just writing this makes me hungry for their distinctive texture and flavor, the taste for which -- along with a taste for the blood sausage or "morcilla" the racers also had to eat -- I developed in Argentina.

Especially in translation, what matters is not how the food sounds on the menu but what it tastes like. Imagine trying to translate the list of ingredients in a package of typical American "hot dogs" into a language you speak only poorly, and then try to imagine how appetizing (or not) things like "meat by-products" would sound in that crude rendition. "This is your national dish?", I can almost imagine a foreigner asking incredulously.

The only time people are likely to serve you something inedible is if they try to serve you something they think you want, but that they wouldn't eat themselves and therefore don't know how to cook. That's why ordering the familiar "home-style" dishes from a menu written for foreigners is likely to result in a much worse meal than ordering "whatever you normally eat", "whatever the people at the next table are eating" (the easiest thing to order, since all you need to do is point), or "the local delicacy" (although that might be a specialty for which you haven't yet acquired the taste).

Travellers sometimes worry that they won't find anything edible on a foreign menu. But that's the last thing you need to worry about: Even if it looks, smells, or tastes like nothing you've ever eaten before, the one thing you can count on is that it's edible. People aren't going to serve you poison in a restaurant. And whatever the local diet, it's axiomatic that once you get used to it, you can live on it just as well as the local people do.

Relax, and give local food a chance. Don't treat it as a challenge or a trial. I knew I'd like the food, but my partner went to Argentina in spite of the food ("Nothing but meat?") and fell in love with the country in part because of the food ("The world's best and best-cooked meat, and other good food").

The moral of tonight's story: "Try it, you might like it."

The Amazing Race 7, Episode 2

Cusco (Peru) - Arequipa (Peru) - Santiago (Chile)

Must you see the "must see" attractions?

This week The Amazing Race said, "No", leaving Peru for Chile (via, inexplicably, Argentina, once again forbidding the racers from taking the nonstop flight on LAN Chile) after a "pit stop" in Cusco without a visit to Machu Picchu, the World Heritage Site that is most visitors' first, and often only, destination in the region.

Few foreign tourists go to Peru and don't go to Machu Picchu. Even fewer get as close as Cusco -- the nearest airport and nearest large city -- without going there. Certainly no tourist goes to Peru without at least considering a detour to Machu Picchu.

Does this mean there is there something wrong with the race producers' choice? Not at all. Cusco itself is a World Heritage Site, and there would be plenty of good reasons to go to Peru even if Machu Picchu didn't exist.

But many viewers are likely to be surprised, and question this choice, just as your friends would probably be surprised, and some might expect an explanation, if you went to Peru but not Machu Picchu, India but not the Taj Mahal, Egypt but not the Great Pyramid, or Paris but not the Eiffel Tower.

We may never know why the producers of the race chose the route they did. To some degree, that choice reflects the success of the show, and the power of the fantasy to which it appeals: the idea of a trip "around the world" is more significant than the specific places it passes through, and in its seventh season the race no longer feels the necessity to prove its bona fides by visiting the marquee attractions in every country where it touches down.

Most people never live out their fantasy of a trip around the world. Even for those who take such a trip, it's most often planned as a once-in-a-lifetime journey. As a result, around-the-world travellers often feel obliged to include certain icons of world travel, or think that "if I'm going to Country X, I have to go to Site Y". The same thing happens even on shorter trips to places people expect to visit only once in their life.

A typical result is that someone with little interest in oil paintings, who would rarely spend a free day in their hometown in a museum of visual art, reads a guidebook that lists art museums as a "must-see" in every major city in Europe. Convinced that "You couldn't go to Paris and not go to the Louvre", they spend half a day, out of their two or three days in Paris, waiting in line to see the Mona Lisa. After repeating this process in half a dozen other cities, they wonder why they didn't enjoy travel in Europe as much as they enjoyed travelling in other places where they did things more in line with their own interests.

For me, there are no hard-and-fast rules. There are places that, for most visitors, live up to their reputations, and others that disappoint most visitors yet somehow remain on the "standard" tourist routes. There are reasons -- often good ones -- that particular sights and sites have acquired their iconic status, and there are reasons to avoid any such place and -- all else being equal, which it never is -- to choose destinations of lesser repute where there's a higher ratio of locals to tourists, and/or of local tourists to foreigners.

Most people who've been there think -- and I concur -- that the Taj Mahal is a special place, and worth a considerable detour. But so are many other places in the South Asian subcontinent. For what it's worth, if I had to recommend a single side trip to a city in India other than an international gateway, to visit a spiritual and architectural monument of great symbolic importance, I would have no hesitation in choosing the Harmandar Sahib ("Golden Temple") in Amritsar, rather than the Taj Mahal.

I spent a week in the Paris area, and I have no regrets that I didn't choose to spend any time at the Louvre. I'd take it as an insult to the richness and diversity of Paris and its inhabitants if you tried to tell me that nothing else in the area could possibly be as rewarding as that particular museum.

That's a matter of taste, of course. My point is not to suggest an (alternate) hierarchy of must-see's, but to point out that that there are more places to go, things to do, and equally valid choices of priorities than are admitted by even the most exhaustive list of "musts". No one can see the whole world, and few people would agree on what are its "highlights". Any lifetime of travel will, inevitably, leave most of the planet unvisited.

If someone in the USA says they are going to Europe, they aren't likely to be asked, "But why aren't you going to China?" even though that might be a possible alternate way to spend the same budget of travel time and money (or less). The question I would ask is, "Why is Europe your priority?" In the same vein, the question for The Amazing Race or the real-world traveller who follows the same path isn't, "Why didn't you go to Machu Picchu?", but "What interested you about Cusco and Arequipa?" or wherever you did choose to go.

In choosing destinations, the important thing is to be aware of your own interests and preferences, and to plan a trip that reflects what you want rather than what anyone else with different priorities might choose. Pay little or no attention to recommendations -- especially to "top 10" type lists -- unless you know something about who is making those recommendations, and why. That means not just, "Do they know something about travel, and about this place?" but "What kind of person are they, and what do they like?"

It's your own life. Take your own trip, for your own reasons.

The Amazing Race 7, Episode 1 (airline codesharing)

Long Beach, CA (USA) - Lima (Peru) - Ancon (Peru) - Lima (Peru) - Cusco (Peru) - Huambutio (Peru) - Pisac (Peru) - Cusco (Peru)

The Amazing Race began its seventh season with the racers being required by the producers of the reality-TV show -- at the behest, presumably, of the airlines that have bought product placements within the show along with their sponsorships -- to take connecting flights from Los Angeles to Lima via Miami or New York on USA-based airlines, rather than the nonstop flight on LAN Chile, leaving at about the same time, that would have gotten them to Lima almost six hours earlier. That's exactly the same LAX-Lima flight on LAN Chile that would have been part of the fastest route for the contestants in the first leg of The Amazing Race 5 a year ago. Amazing indeed!

Even given a free choice, of course, it's often difficult to figure out which airlines fly to where you want to go, especially because so many airlines put their code-share flight numbers on flights actually operated by other airlines, in order to pretend they fly to more places than they actually do.

Codesharing is fraud. It gives no benefit to travellers or consumers. Airlines lie about this, but they've had "interline" agreements in place for years that allow them to offer through fares, through ticketing, through baggage checking, and frequent flyer mileage credits between airlines completely independently of which airlines' codes are placed on the flight.

No actual airline service or benefit to travellers is actually dependant to the slightest degree on cadesharing. Codesharing is done for the sole purpose of misleading consumers about which airline operates the flight, which destinations the airline "serves", how many flights they actually operate to those places, and what services and amenities will be available on those flights.

In a more complex way, by making a set of connections appear to be on the same airline, when it's actually between different airlines, codesharing causes flights to be ranked higher in the responses to flight availability requests provided to travel agencies by Computerized Reservation Systems -- misleading travellers directly by distorting which connections are shown first by travel agency Web sites, and misleading travellers indirectly by misleading offline travel agents who have no easy way, in any of the CRS's I've used, to override the display mis-prioritization of interline connections fraudulaently labeled as online codeshare connections.

Quite simply, Airline X puts its shared code on a flight operated by Airline Y because it believes that more people will buy tickets on that flight if it is labelled as a flight by Airline X than if it is truthfully labelled as a flight by Airline Y. There's no "need" for that, no excuse for that, and no reason for the DOT not to exercise its authority to ban codesharing as a deceptive business practice.

I've talked about this before in relation to previous seasons of The Amazing Race and, more importantly, the problems it causes for real-life travellers. This time, however, there is something you can do about it: the USA Department of Transportation (DOT) is soliciting public comments through 14 March 2005, for consideration in the DOT's first major review in years of its rules for codesharing.

Not surprisingly, there's a catch: the DOT is not proposing to crack down on the deception of codesharing, but to Do The Wrong Thing by reducing the extent to which airlines have to disclose which service labelled with the airline's flight number is actually operated by other airlines.

That's an outrage, and deserves the strongest public condemnation.

If you've ever gone to the wrong terminal to check in, maybe even missed a flight, because it was really operated from a different terminal by a different airline; if you've ever had to change terminals inconveniently while making connections because your "online" connection between flights "on the same airline" involved a codeshare flight at a different terminal; if you've ever booked a flight you thought would be on one airline, and found yourself on a different one that you wouldn't knowingly have chosen, or wouldn't have paid as much for; if you've ever found yourself on a codeshare flight that lacked the in-flight amenities or service that the airline in whose name you booked advertises that it offers on all its own flights (but doesn't offer on flights with its label that are actually operated by other airlines) -- this is your chance to give the DOT an earful.

Read the new rules proposed by the DOT and the sleazy and disingenuous arguments from United Airlines (supported by American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, US Airways, and Orbitz.com) on which they are based. If it isn't obvious what's wrong with the DOT proposal, see the argument against the proposal from Southwest Airlines (self-interested but nonetheless accurate) and my analysis of code-sharing and airline alliances. (The DOT Web site also includes the complete docket of comments from airlines and the public.)

By government standards, it's (relatively) easy to submit your comments:

1. Go to the comment submission Web page.
2. Enter "19083" in the "Docket ID" box.
3. Choose "OST" [Office of the Secretary of Transportation] from the "Operating Administration" pull-down menu.
4. Click either the "Enter a Comment" or "Attach a File" box next to "Submission Method".
5. Fill in as much of your personal information as you like. (Keep in mind that whatever you fill in will be posted on the Web with your comment.)
6. Click "Continue". Depending on which option you chose, you'll either get a box to type in your comments (4000 characters maximum), or a page to upload a file of comments of any length that you've prepared on your own computer (in text, PDF, RTF,TIFF, Wordperfect, or MS-Word format).

To be considered, your comments must be received by 5 p.m. Washington, DC, time on Monday, 14 March 2005.