A couple of years ago, blog posts like this:
Gov Now Wants More Air Flyer Data, Redux | Threat Level from Wired.com
and this:
went by my eye, more or less under the radar. So noted, but not really impacting my daily working life. But today I somehow got my reservation computer (SABRE) to cough up the following in response to a normal request for “direct connect” availability for a specific light out on United (UA) that somebody was trying to change. This was while there was a snap FAA grounding of all American (AA) MD-80 aircraft (I thought it was just Dallas, but apparently it was systemwide). So I was checking availability on a competitor flight to try to get someone home. And this is what came up on my screen. My own entry is in the upper right – a perfectly correct entry, but some system glitch sent this back:
1¤I1« UA **** INFO ONLY **** NSA TEST TOOL BIT SETTINGS FOR GTID F1170E ------------------------------------------- DISPLAY INCOMING POLL KEYWORD FILE BIT1‡ ? ON DISPLAY OUTGOING POLL KEYWORD FILE BIT2‡ ? ON DISPLAY INCOMING LSA KEYWORD FILE BIT3‡ ? OFF DISPLAY OUTGOING LSA KEYWORD FILE BIT4‡ ? ON DISPLAY INCOMING FS KEYWORD FILE BIT5‡ ? ON DISPLAY OUTGOING FS KEYWORD FILE BIT6‡ ? OFF
“What the ???” was my first thought. But then I saw “NSA” and “GTID” and keyword queries and I started to wonder.
I made the
1¤I1«
entry a couple of times, because I really did want to get direct connect availability off of that first line of itinerary, but this kept coming back. And then it started returning what I expected to see, but I had already copied and pasted it into an email to myself. Should have taken a screenshot, too, but I was kind of busy trying to help the lady who is still stuck in Dallas.
But this is very, very weird.
