newsrackblog.com

This is just a quick survey of recent posts from some of the interesting, specialized blogs I read now and then from my “specialty” blogroll — maybe you’ll start reading one or the other of them, too.

Schneier on Security — Those tiny little yellow dots you never noticed? They’re Secret Forensic Codes in Color Laser Printers: Many color laser printers embed secret information in every page they print, basically to identify you by. Here, the EFF has cracked the code of the Xerox DocuColor series of printers.

Mystery Pollster — Getting Past the Noise: Bush Slide Continues (10/19/2005): The bottom line: the President’s approval has fallen all year, declining about 1% every month since January. But since August we’ve seen a sharper drop. Call it the “Katrina effect.”

Lunar Development — Shall McArthur return?: “Russia has met all the engagements on transferring NASA employees to the ISS. Formally, we even do not have to return McArthur to the Earth,” Russia’s space agency Roskosmos senior official Alexey Krasnov said.[Moscownews.com] Karen Cramer writes that the story is connected to the Iran Non-proliferation Agreement as well.

Savage Minds — No more “Bushmen of the Kalahari.” Bushmen expelled from Homeland: All but a few of the Bushmen living in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been forcibly removed from their homes in recent days in what spokesmen for the affected communities said is a final push by the government to end human habitation there after tens of thousands of years. [Washington Post, 10/10/2005] … Before forced removals started in the late 90s, there were over 2,000 Bushmen living there.

The Panda’s Thumb — Covering the “intelligent design” case in Pennsylvania with Waterloo in Dover: The Kitzmiller v. DASD case: The defense needs to defeat the plaintiffs’ arguments concerning both the purpose and the effect of the “intelligent design” policy. For the second, they are most likely to try to convince Judge Jones that “intelligent design”, and specifically the policy adopted by the DASD, are scientific in character, and thus have a place in the science curriculum regardless of any secondary effect they might have in the way of having implications for religious belief. DASD is the Dover Area School District, which is trying to enforce ‘intelligent design’ teaching in biology classes. The post is now updated with new developments every couple of days or so as the case proceeds.

RealClimate — Global Warming On Earth discusses the latest NASA Goddard Institute surface temperature data analysis: The 2005 Jan-Sep land data (which is adjusted for urban biases) is higher than the previously warmest year (0.76°C compared to the 1998 anomaly of 0.75°C for the same months, and a 0.71°C anomaly for the whole year) , while the land-ocean temperature index (which includes sea surface temperature data) is trailing slightly behind (0.58°C compared to 0.60°C Jan-Sep, 0.56°C for the whole of 1998).

Chris Mooney — Henry Waxman (D-CA-30) is Busy, busy on a number of Bush vs. science fronts, including avian flu, misinformation about sexual health on a government web site, and the ongoing Plan B “morning after pill” fiasco at the FDA. On the latter: The chronology ends with yet another resignation: that of Frank Davidoff, a former FDA advisory committee member who voted for the approval of Plan B and who wrote, “I can no longer associate myself with an organization that is capable of making such an important decision so flagrantly on the basis of political influence, rather than the scientific and clinical evidence.” (link added)

Blogrel — Return to Gyumri: What lessons could Pakistan learn from Armenia’s sputtering reconstruction process, which, 17 years later, has 3,500 families in the city still living in “temporary accommodation” - a euphemism for shacks, metal containers and disused railway wagons? [Guardian]

Effect Measure — You can’t stop a wrecking ball in mid-swing: As state and local health departments gear up to battle a possible avian flu outbreak, they face a sharp cut in funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. However, the loss could be fixed through funds intended to cover the costs of controlling a pandemic, added as an amendment to the 2006 Defense Department Appropriations bill.

Yesterday, Billmon noted that amid all the justifiable interest in the Rove/Plame affair (and now the Roberts nomination), a very important development was going nearly unremarked: the extension of the Patriot Act. He links to Thom Haslam (”Societas”), who writes:

I have no objections to political junkies getting their fix. But now would be a good time to take brief break from bingeing. Your country really does need you. Chances are, to be brutally honest, nothing you do over the next few days will make a huge difference either way with Rove or Roberts–not unless you have access to information that even Patrick Fitzgerald or the White House does not. But you can make a huge difference–as a citizen and as blogger–with the Patriot Act.This, as the saying goes, is a limited opportunity. Congress will vote to renew and possibly expand the Patriot Act today, tomorrow or early next week. This will all be over long before Roberts has a hearing, before Fitzgerald finishes his investigation.

Click here to at least send an e-mail petition to your Senators, via the ACLU. Here’s their summary of the Patriot Act:

Expands the government’s power to search your home in secret and to delay telling you for months or indefinitely. Section 213 made it easier for government agents to get courts to issue “sneak and peek” search warrants, which let them break into your home, rifle through your belongings, swab for DNA, copy files from your computer, seize property and keep you in the dark about the search for an indefinite amount of time. This provision is permanent, but would be reformed under the SAFE Act. At a minimum, it should be limited to a set amount of time and only allowed in true emergencies. The Justice Department recently admitted that 90% of these sneak and peeks have been used in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Facilitates access to secret court orders that allow agents to seize personal records. Section 215 lets the FBI apply for secret court orders to compel libraries, bookstores, hotels, hospitals and other institutions to turn over personal records without showing any facts connecting your records to a foreign terrorist, let alone probable cause that you did anything wrong. The judge is required to issue such an order if federal agents certify that they want these records for a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation. The business that receives the order is forever gagged from telling anyone about it. This provision is set to expire. It should not be made permanent. It should be fixed to require a showing of specific facts connecting your records to a foreign terrorist and there should be a meaningful right to challenge, as supported by the SAFE Act.

Lets the FBI access business, credit, Internet and banking records without going through a judge at all. Section 505 broadens the government’s ability to issue “national security letters,” which allow the FBI to demand records about you from financial institutions, Internet service providers, telephone companies, credit agencies, insurance companies, car dealerships, and libraries that provide Internet services to patrons—all without going through a judge or demonstrating any facts connecting your records to a foreign agent or foreign terrorist. If not repealed, this provision should be amended to incorporate the modest SAFE Act fix and should include an expiration date.

For any readers (unjustifiably) allergic to the four letter acronym “ACLU,” here’s former Republican Representative Bob Barr:

The Patriot Act needs some common sense fixes to keep our liberty safe. Our Founding Fathers would want us to courageously defend our country and the Constitution. This is their legacy of liberty. We should rise to the challenge and preserve it rather than make a false sacrifice for extreme powers that don’t make us safer but actually make us less free.

See also this NPR summary of the bill and the issues.

I wrote “Senators” above because it’s already too late in the House (Billmon: “Chamber of People’s Deputies”) which voted early this morning to pass the Patriot Act 257-171. But, as Haslam notes in a comment at Seeing the Forest, it’s not too late to blanket the Senate with e-mails, phone calls, and letters urging them to hang tough with their version of the bill in the Senate and when they reconcile that bill with the House version.

Undoing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act — and sunsetting the rest — should become a central plank of the Democratic Party going in to 2006 and 2008.

I’ve mentioned this before, but not enough, and only in passing (”Feingold in Nashville“). I regret not doing more. Spread the word. E-mail your Senators. Blogswarm it. Do something. Better “too little, too late” than nothing at all, ever.

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UPDATE, 7/23: One compilation of reactions to the Patriot Act is in progress at The Heretik: “Red, White, and Very Blue.” See also John Cole (”Balloon Juice”).
UPDATE, 7/25: Thom Haslan has a new post at Shakespeare’s Sister and his own blog urging people not to give up on either the Senate or the House (your representative may have some influence on the conference committee reconciling the two versions of the bill). He also has a Patriot Act Fact Sheet, prepared by the “Red, White, and Blue Alliance in PA” detailing the House bill’s effects on health, financial, gun, religious, and library privacy. The alliance includes Pennsylvania chapters of the ACLU, League of Women Voters, Council on American Islamic Relations, and others.

In a couple of recent posts, Stygius proposed a kind of mental doctrine he says should inform all progressive/liberal national security thinking:

1. There are a group of fanatic killers who want to kill as many Americans as they can; and,
2. Dead terrorists can’t kill Americans.

In the second post, which should be taken as the more definitive statement, Stygius elaborates on what he does and doesn’t mean with what might be called the “Stygius doctrine”:

Hopefully, readers see that I’m talking about sentiments about right actions; about practical values. Thus, this is not a “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out!” sentiment. I fully acknowledge and embrace the notion that there can be conditions where killing terrorists can be impractical, or imprudent. That is why I’m talking about “appropriateness” and a broad, multi-faceted calculus of values. Rather, I’m asking skeptical progressives to accept the idea that there can be and are conditions where terrorists can be legitimately fought and killed.

I certainly accept that being prepared to fight to kill is a necessary part of dealing with any mortal foe. I think most people, even “skeptical progressives,” do. You enumerate the possibilities, and prepare yourself for them — as Hamlet concludes, “the readiness is all.”

My critique of Stygius’ doctrine isn’t so much to quarrel with it as to say the house is only half built. One problem is in the vague concept of ‘terrorist’; I’m not trying to be sarcastic when I say that they don’t come clearly labeled.

Unlike in a classic war, we can not be sure we know who the practitioners of terrorism are, much (much, much) less who are potential terrorists, and less yet what to do about these not-yet-terrorists. We have further problems with the term itself. Not long after 9/11, I tried my hand at defining “terrorism”. I decided that it was the self-appointed, unaccountable nature of terrorism that was its crucially dangerous and reprehensible feature. If so, it would seem obvious how not to fight against it.

I’ve grown a little wary of my own early certainties about the “war on terror,” yet I also know I still feel the incandescent anger I felt after 9/11. Then, “war” seemed right and just. Now, maybe it is still the best word, but the question is whether incandescent anger, shrewd moderation, or some judicious mixture thereof best serves us in protecting ourselves and our society against our foes.

I recall celebrating a Predator strike in 2002 on some terrorists — I was led to believe, and have little reason to doubt — in Yemen. Yet in the years since 9/11, I’ve grown so disillusioned with the directions American fighting and policy have taken, and the half-truths, quarter-truths, and one sixty-fourth truths offered in explanation, that I can wonder: was this strike, too, a publicity stunt or a necessary act? How sure are we — whether “we” who had our finger on the button launching the missile, or we the people — that those killed were part of al Qaeda, that they were involved in the USS Cole attack, and so forth? Will anyone with a critical mind ever get a chance to find out? I may have little reason to doubt the right thing was done, but in truth I have little reason to credit it either.

Whether such doubts are evidence of my liberalish lack of firm resolve, or of my government leading me down a primrose path one too many times is probably a matter of little importance to anyone but me. But if I’m not the only one with doubts, I think they illustrate one small price we, the people of the United States, pay for the unaccountable methods — foreign and domestic, political and military — that we’ve allowed in our name.

In his book “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror,” (Princeton University Press, 2004) Michael Ignatieff examines the issues of proper and effective self-defense by liberal democracies against terror attacks. In it, Ignatieff proposes that all responses to the challenge of terror attack campaigns be subject to four tests: the dignity test (does the response respect human dignity?), the conservative test (if the response calls for changes to our own system, are those changes really necessary?), the effectiveness test (will the response work?), and open adversarial review (is the response subject to institutional and/or public review and approval?) It seems to me that we are failing, or close to failing, on all four counts. Ignatieff asks,

If force must be the ultimate response to violence against a constitutional state, what is to keep state violence from becoming as unconstrained as the enemy it is seeking to destroy? The only answer is democracy and the obligation of justification that it imposes on those who use force in its name. [...]

The evil [of terrorism] does not consist in the resort to violence itself, since violence can be justified, as a last resort, in the face of oppression, occupation, or injustice. The evil consists in resorting to violence as a first resort, in order to make peaceful politics impossible.

We should not flirt with emulating that evil; we should make our war (when that is necessary) with terrorists the antithesis of theirs: transparent, subject to debate, principled. Fighting terrorists to the death — even apocalyptic, undeterrable ones like those on 9/11 — is a lesser evil only when their methods and outlook are clearly not adopted.

Stygius is a principled person, and I know he* does not support the excesses and ‘look the other ways’ of the Bush administration policies (plausibly deniable as such or not) at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere; his statements on his own blog and his frequent and welcome comments here underline that.

But I suspect many Bush administration people did not wake up on 9/12 knowing that’s the direction they were headed. (I also suspect some did; but that many did not.) Regardless; our country’s single-minded emphasis on a narrowly conceived national security and on death to our foes — while ignoring every other principle — has got us where we are now: in the mud, with far too much innocent blood on our hands, and far too much human indignity and injustice on our consciences. I dare not deny it: on my hands and on my conscience, too. Regarding his tests, Ignatieff writes:

If all this adds up to a series of constraints that tie the hands of our governments, so be it. It is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behnid its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does.

To be clear: there is a variety of terrorist that needs killing. To be equally clear: that’s not all there is to it. Not if we want to keep our principles and country intact.

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* Or she, as the case may be.

Andreas “dekaf” Schaefer commented on the story below about “no-fly” lists, pointing out that the Wall Street Journal has an April 23 item about it. From an excerpt of Ann Davis’ article (via a Chicago Indymedia contributor):

In checking passengers against the No Fly List, some airlines use techniques that were designed decades ago, and for an entirely different task: to let agents find passenger records quickly without having a full name or a name’s precise spelling.

These “name matching” systems also help airlines spot abusive bookings, in which travelers reserve a bunch of flights under slightly varying names. The idea is to cast a wide net. But when applied to a watch list, they have the perverse effect of flagging numerous travelers whose names are merely similar to one of those on the list.

One name-matching technique that airlines have used, called Soundex, dates back more than 100 years, to when it was invented to analyze names from the 1890 census. In its simplest form, it takes a name, strips out vowels and assigns codes to somewhat-similar-sounding consonants, such as “c” and “z.”

The article says that the airlines system is an updated version of Soundex, but the problem remains the same: you need a quick way to flag names you’re supposed to be watching out for, and you can either opt to reduce false positives or false negatives. A quirk in the system that has probably not helped Transportation Security Administration (TSA) credibility is that

…groups that purchase their tickets together end up in a single travel record. If one member triggers a hit on the watch list, computers lock up on them all.

This was the case for both the Gordon/Adams and the Lawinger examples of possible politically motivated “no-fly” hits mentioned in the Chronicle article that broke the story last year.

None of this argues against the ACLU lawsuit or the need for better oversight of the process, but it does suggest that there may be an innocuous explanation for surprising “no-fly” list “finds.” A new system, “CAPPS II,” (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) is being developed that the TSA hopes will “dramatically reduce” the number of people flagged. As Davis’ article concludes, though:

Privacy and civil-liberties advocates fear just the opposite — that the increased ways to attract suspicion will result in even more passengers being wrongly tagged.

In March, Senator Wyden (D-OR) won Senate Commerce Committee approval of an amendment to require some Congressional oversight of the CAPPS program. From the Senator’s press release:

“I’m all in favor of finding ways to be smarter about aviation security and to target aviation security resources more efficiently,” said Wyden. “But a system that seeks out information on every air traveler or anyone who poses a possible risk to U.S. security, and then uses that information to assign a possible threat ‘score’ to each one, raises some very serious privacy questions. It’s a matter of good public policy for the privacy and civil liberties implications of this program to be reported to Congress.”

The amendment envisions a report by the Secretary of Homeland Security detailing, among other things,

- what safeguards will be in place to guarantee that the information will be used only as officially intended;

- what efforts will be in place to mitigate errors and what procedural recourse will be available to passengers who believe they were wrongfully barred from a flight; and,

- what oversight procedures will be in place to guarantee that privacy and civil liberty concerns will be a priority as the program is installed, operated and updated.

I’d prefer spelling out those safeguards and oversight procedures for Mr. Ridge, rather than waiting to see what he’ll do. But I’ll take what I can get, and I’ll hope this measure makes it into law.

Meanwhile, via genealogy site RootsWeb.com, here’s a handy-dandy converter for you to get Soundex codes of your own. Bin Laden’s is B543 and Zawahiri’s is Z600, by the way. I share mine, N100, with “Newby.”

In “pack not a herd” mode, or at least in “herd member dully wondering what’s going on as he plods to work” mode:

Following the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA) made a relatively big deal of moving trash cans and so forth to safer locations. From the WMATA “Safety and security FAQ“:

…we have relocated all newspaper vending machines, trash receptacles, and recycling bins to station entrances/exits …

Not at Courthouse Metro, anyway. There are a couple of trash cans and recycling cans in a tight bottleneck just past the station-booth/turnstile area. While a May 2000 “Security Management” article I found says the cans are special reinforced cans, I’d rather there were none at all, or at least that they were near true open air entrance/exits, so blasts, germs, or gases wouldn’t be as confined as they would deep inside a Metro station.

I’ll keep you posted on this exciting story: I’m writing to WMATA, we’ll see what they say. If you know of other examples of poorly placed trash cans or other security-related questions, leave a message via “comments” or e-mail; better yet, let WMATA know.

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UPDATE, January 24: I’ve added the text of WMATA responses to my emails as comments. The upshot as of today, and where things will probably remain, is that WMATA likes the cans where they are. My suggestion to remove them if the Homeland Security “threat level” increases to “orange” has been forwarded to Those Who Make Decisions In The Rail Department. (My suggestion for WMATA to pre-emptively attack the cans if we reach threat level “red” remains a closely guarded secret of the “newsrack” web site.)

UPDATE, February 10: Well, we’ve been in condition “orange” for a few days now, and no trash can movement.

Chad Orzel (”Uncertain Principles”) may have peaked too soon with When They Came for Me, I Said, “Hey! You Forgot the Jordanians!” I especially like how it will go “whoosh” right over a lot of heads, so here’s a little background.

That’s the title of Katha Pollitt’s attempted dismissal of Christopher Hitchens in the latest edition of the Nation. Pollitt delivers a number of well-placed jabs at the pompous Orwell wannabe who, despite being an avowed contrarian, left the bulliest pulpit possible for debating the anti-war left. But these jabs weren’t among them:

Sure, there are plenty of people (not all of whom are leftists) who oppose this war because they oppose all US military intervention on principle, and maybe there is even some graduate student out there, mind addled by an all-Ramen diet, who believes that Osama bin Laden is merely a “misguided anti-imperialist.” But surely you know that lots of people oppose invading Iraq who supported the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Kosovo–why aren’t Mark Danner, Aryeh Neier and Ronald Dworkin on your radar screen? Who died and made Ramsey Clark commissar?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Pollitt pretty firmly in the anti-Afghanistan-war camp? Here’s what she wrote on September 20 a year ago, in “Put Out No Flags“:

Bombing Afghanistan to “fight terrorism” is to punish not the Taliban but the victims of the Taliban, the people we should be supporting. At the same time, war would reinforce the worst elements in our own society–the flag-wavers and bigots and militarists.

As was her perfect right of course, but it seems pretty disingenuous for Pollitt to make those particular comments about Ramen-addled grad students or those “lots of people who supported the war in Afghanistan.”

At minimum, she might have acknowledged Hitchens was righter than she was about Afghanistan, or explained why she was right after all about that not being the right way to tackle the “more difficult task of going after Al Qaeda,” the task she’s now focused her laser beams on. Hitchens is hard to take, but as it stands, it seems to me he at least got one person right: Pollitt.

(Article and pull quote via Electrolite’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who is more appreciative.)

Ginger Stampley replies (”Johnny Go Home”) to my item below (”Passport, please”) about Mr. Lindh:

If he’d come back and committed a terrorist attack, as Nephew suggests, things would be different. But he didn’t.

Once Lindh had done that, of course, we wouldn’t be arguing about the justification for charges. My argument is that the equally true insight “but he could have” justifies, as a matter of legal and political theory, Lindh’s harsh prosecution and sentencing by the United States in the United States.

I believe Ms. Stampley may be mistaking my point: I’m not saying Lindh should be prosecuted for something he didn’t do. Instead, I’m explaining why the book should be thrown at him for what he did do. (For the charges against Walker, click here.) The “nationality” argument that the New Republic contributor Matthew Hoffman outlines is not itself legal code, it is one common law underpinning of the laws on the books, helping to determine whether they apply. Hoffman claims the “nationality” argument didn’t apply, but focused on ephemeral and reversible “decisions” by Lindh, rather than on the fact that he had not renounced citizenship in a way that a U.S. government official could be aware of.

Exile is nowhere near good enough a deterrent to snakes with U.S. passports who sign on with foreign terrorist organizations. People like Lindh — American sympathizers with valid passports — are potential weapons on the order of a cruise missile for Bin Laden. They should know, as they weigh their choice to join a terrorist organization before surrendering their passport and their U.S. citizenship, that fence-sitting of that sort may still land them in a United States jail for life if they’re caught.

Matthew Hoffman reviews the case of Tali-boy John Walker Lindh in The New Republic, and finds it wanting. Mr. Hoffman, an attorney, identifies “three principles that could justify America’s prosecution of crimes committed outside the United States”: “territoriality” (the crime is intended to have a substantial effect within the U.S), “nationality” (punishment of U.S. citizens for crimes committed abroad), and “passive personality” (crimes against U.S. citizens abroad, regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality). Mr. Hoffman believes none of the three apply to Mr. Lindh, and recommends that a different statute be applied that simply strips Tali-boy of his citizenship (a suggestion also made earlier by blogger Reid “Photodude” Stott).

But read how Hoffman dismissed the “nationality” basis for prosecution:

But it’s unlikely this principle applies to Lindh, since the evidence suggests he voluntarily and intentionally renounced his American citizenship. Not only did Lindh join a foreign army and swear allegiance to jihad, he also reportedly referred to George W. Bush as “your new President … I’m glad he’s not mine,” in an e-mail to his parents. In another message, he wrote, “I don’t really want to see America again.”

The point, though, is that whatever Lindh’s frame of mind was about his U.S. citizenship, he had not formally renounced it (as far as I am aware): he retained his passport (or at least the rights to that passport). While he apparently turned down Bin Laden’s offer to enroll him in a terrorist squad once, there was no guarantee he would turn it down another time. And if or when he arrived in the U.S. to carry out an attack, and presented his passport, no customs agent would have known about his membership in a Taliban regiment or his e-mail correspondence with his parents.

Whatever the strength of Hoffman’s other arguments (and I think they are arguable as well) the “nationality” principle applies. I continue to hope Mr. Lindh spends a long, long time in Federal prison.

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Edit, 10:30pm: quote “three principles” directly, to clarify that (according to Hoffman) any one suffices, rather than that all “should govern … prosecution” as originally written.

Via the Washington Post, Mary Beth Sheridan’s article “Visa Tracking Limited by Lack of Personnel“:

With great fanfare, the Bush administration has pledged to fortify the nation’s anti-terrorism protections by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new computer systems to keep tabs on millions of foreign students and visitors.

But even if that complex effort succeeds, immigration officials and experts say there is a gaping hole in the strategy: Because of a shortage of investigators, there are few people to chase foreigners flagged by the computers for overstaying their visas or dropping out of school. [...]

“How do you cope with the identification and questioning and perhaps apprehension of a couple hundred thousand people when you don’t have the resources trained or in place to do it? That’s the void. You’ve got a nice car but no engine,” said Tom Fischer, a retired INS district director whose Atlanta office oversaw a test of the student tracking system. [...]

More drastic measures to detect illegal immigrants haven’t won much support. Proposals for a national identity card, for example, have raised concerns about civil liberties. And INS officials are reluctant to deputize local police to arrest visa violators because of the complexity of immigration law and concerns about racial and ethnic profiling.

INS investigators discovered the difficulty of finding foreign student dropouts in an operation in San Diego in December. They sought the records of local universities and found about 50 apparent visa violators from countries linked to terrorism, officials said. When they went looking for the students, they located only 10, one of whom had his papers in order. Other students weren’t home, had moved or transferred.

According to the article, a number of the 9/11 hijackers could theoretically have been detained and expelled for visa violations. Hani Hanjour, one of the Pentagon plane pilots, arrived on a student visa and never showed up to class; two other hijackers had lapsed visitor visas. So the problem is real. It seems to me we can either: