Category: America

Farhad Manjoo in Salon: “‘Please step to the side, sir.’” Good article summarizing recent occurrences around airline screening, including newly-FOIA’d complaints of customers mistakenly profiled on the “no fly” blacklist. Also points to the MIT grad student paper on the flaws in CAPPS, which I had forgotten about. A nice complement to the earlier piece in the Data Mining Review that I wrote about last week.

LawMeme, riffing on NYT: Patriot Act may not ride off into the sunset. Summary: Orrin Hatch wants to do away with the “sunset provisions” of the Act, which put a five year time limit on the various flagrant Bill of Rights violations therein. As a parallel act, The Kyl-Schumer measure, currently approved by the Senate Judiciary committee and facing an uncertain future in the larger Senate, would eliminate the need to prove that a suspect is linked to a foreign agent or terrorist group when getting a secret warrant. This would eliminate the last vestiges of due process currently standing between the justice system and a world where warrants are easy to get and impossible to contest. I think it’s time to write your senators, folks.

Greg’s been on fire this week, reporting on outrageous political news from all over, including:

• Norm Coleman, the Republican senator elected to replace Paul Wellstone, dissing the late Democrat: “To be very blunt and God watch over Paul’s soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone”…
• Putting the war in Iraq in its proper context: “it was never the first three weeks, or three months, that worried me. It was the first three years of discovering festering, unintended consequences of conquest—or, God help us, the first three decades”…
• and my favorite of this week, providing eyewitness testimony to the filibuster of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus to block further efforts at bringing Confederate symbolism back to the Georgia state flag, effectively killing the legislation: “Payback’s a mother, ain’t it?”

Anyway. Work has gotten hellish and my own blogging is falling off, but Greg is burning up. So go read.

According to just about every news source, Baghdad fell to the coalition forces today, marking the apparent end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Statues are falling, the Minister of Information and Saddam himself are nowhere to be found, the public is rioting happily in the streets.

Great. Now what?

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a bullet in Memphis, TN, on this day in 1968.

DM Review: “TIAin’t.” Herb Edelstein points out four major problems with the TIA strategy from a technical point of view:

• Data integration and data quality: How much time and money will the TIA folks spend just on trying to match disparate records from fifty state drivers’ license bureaus, hundreds of utility bill providers and credit application sources, and all the different banks, credit card providers, and so forth?
• Too much data, too few examples: With only a handful of domestic terrorists and a US adult population of about 220 million, Edelstein points out, there’s way too low a signal to noise ratio: “Let’s assume there are 1,000 active terrorists in the U.S. (a number that likely overstates the case by an order of magnitude) out of a population (age 16 and up) of approximately 220 million. An algorithm could be 99.999995 percent accurate by saying no one is a terrorist. Even were we to look only at non-citizens (an arguable tactic), we would still have an accuracy rate of 99.99995 percent by declaring no one a terrorist.”
• Lack of sufficient examples to create good signatures (identifying patterns). This is a technical refinement of the previous point, but basically the sample size of terrorists is so small that it’s hard to build patterns from them that can reliably be used to predict future terrorist activity. Further, Edelstein points out, terrorists exhibit adaptive behavior, learning from what gets other terrorists caught.
• False positives. Edelstein summarizes this point as a kind of Hobson’s choice: you don’t want to falsely accuse anyone but you don’t want to miss any terrorists. And if you have a failure rate of your algorithms of 0.1%—an overwhelming success in most data mining applications—that’s still over 220,000 potential false positives!

Edelstein concludes that the right answer is to improve the technology and use it to answer fixed questions rather than look for patterns in all possible available data—to use the system for decision support rather than rely on it to make the decisions.

My question: given the large amount of money to be spent, and the large likely consequences of arresting and incarcerating innocent people, how big a disaster do we have to be able to predict and eliminate before a system like this justifies its cost?

BBC: Halliburton, the company once headed by US vice-president Dick Cheney, is out of the running for a $600m US government contract to rebuild Iraq. (Thanks to Adam for the pointer.)

The contract in question is the big infrastructure rebuild (the role that Bechtel played in Kuwait after Gulf War I). The article states that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root was awarded a “contract” without competition to put out oil fires in Iraq. As we all know by now, that should be task order, not contract. And calling it noncompetitive is interesting; this is the first time I’ve seen that confirmed in print. Oh, to get my hands on that DD350…

Another techblogger, Ed Felten, has been politically active lately. After his initial report on state level bills that go beyond the DMCA in criminalizing non-criminal computing activities such as encryption, he’s put up a page that tracks the progress of these new “super DMCA” bills. The Michigan laws, which have already been passed, are a bit scary…

In the spirit of The Smoking Gun, I went looking for the Halliburton contract that was announced this week. What I found answered a few of the wilder conspiracy claims floating around, but still raises additional questions about disclosure and future business prospects for Halliburton. (Why are we interested in Halliburton? Remember, it’s all about the Harken-Halliburton Presidency.)

Summary:

1. The “contract” that was let this week is a task order under Halliburton’s existing indefinite delivery contract vehicle, contract DAAA09-02-D-0007.
2. The scope of this task order is the development of a contingency plan to extinguish the oil well fires in Iraq; execution of that plan will be under another contract.
3. The value of the contingency plan task order is almost certainly less than $5 million, probably less than $100,000.
4. The real value will be in the follow-on work to this award.

Details, including a discussion of how I found this data, are here.

As a former contractor on the DOD’s standard procurement system, I’m very curious to see how this particular contract award was explained on the official Congressional contract reporting form, the DD-350. Particularly Blocks C8 (how the contract was solicited to vendors), C3 (the extent to which it was competed), and C9 (authority for other than full and open competition).

A little long to print on an index card for easy reference, as someone suggested, but worth reading anyway: A warmonger explains war to a peacenik. My favorite part:

WM: The main point is that we are invading Iraq because resolution 1441 threatened “severe consequences.” If we do not act, the security council will become an irrelevant debating society.

PN: So the main point is to uphold the rulings of the security council?

WM: Absolutely. …unless it rules against us.

Sad: Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Dead at 76. It may come as a surprise to casual readers (and as no surprise to a few close friends) that I don’t follow the machinery of government closely. I tend to kneejerk very handily in favor or disapprobation of whatever crosses my radar screen, but it wasn’t until I spent time talking with Lisa about her former career as a Congressional staffer and public policy maven that I understood how pivotal Moynihan had been in shaping intelligent, humane public policies during his career. His like will not come again for a long time, I’m afraid.

Bad: Use a firewall, go to jail. Ed Felten points to legislation pending before Massachusetts and Texas (among other states, including Georgia) that would extend the DMCA to criminalize the “possession, sale, or use of technologies that ‘conceal from a communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication.’” Firewalls, anyone? Encrypted email? NAT (such as is performed by a wireless hub)? Not if you value your liberty, ironically. Call your state representatives and let them know they’re being idiots…

Funny: The Index of Evil at Warblogger.com. A brilliant application of Weblogs.com, this one uses the hourly changes feed and scans all the newly updated websites for four keywords—“bin Laden,” “Ashcroft,” “Hussein,” and “Poindexter.” While their methodology may be suspect (surely Saddam is more commonly used?) their intent is sterling. And the Index may be syndicated. If I have time, look for an Ashcroft ticker to appear on this blog soon…

The Iraqi blogger’s website is pretty slow, but it looks like the PyGoogle folks are taking pity on his excessive bandwidth usage. He’s giving some amazing insight on how the war is being felt in Baghdad:

While buying groceries the woman who sells the vegetables was talking to another about the approach of American armies to Najaf city and about what is happening at Um Qasar and Basra. If Um Qasar is so difficult to control what will happen when they get to Baghdad? It will turn uglier and this is very worrying. People (and I bet “allied forces”) were expecting things to be mush easier. There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are oing what all of us are, sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn’t fall on them and keeping their doors shut.
The smoke columns have now encircled Baghdad, well almost. The wids blow generally to the east which leaves the western side of Baghdad clear. But when it comes in the way of the sun it covers it totally, it is a very thick cloud. We are going to have some very dark days, literally.

From the weekend, lots of protest notes around the blogosphere:

• Esta notes that the riot police had to be called out in Richmond (“Richmond has riot police?”)
• George notes that the protests in San Francisco didn’t necessarily convince people on the fence (“Graffiti, destruction of public and private property, disruption of traffic, and destroying police cars do not exactly bring me around to their cause.  In addition, it alienates more peaceful protestors who might actually be able to intellectually articulate their point of view”)
• Tony posts a brilliant photo essay that bridges the Oscars and the pro- and anti-war protests in LA.
• Jessamyn talks about the disconnect between protestors’ rhetoric (“shut down the town”) and reality (“my electricity and water were still running safely, as was my network connectivity and phone. There were no holes in the walls of my house and my life was in no danger. My family and friends were likewise fairly safe. Food was readily available and inexpensive. I could take a bus to within about eight blocks of my final destination and I like to walk. I had no shopping to do, or businesses to visit, and I feel comfortable among teeming throngs of activists. Shut down? Not to me.”)

Now, a confession. I still haven’t been to a protest. This is probably creeping suburbanism at its worst, but I have this funny feeling. It says I shouldn’t go to a protest unless I’m so sure of my convictions I’m willing to get arrested. And I’m not there yet. But God bless those who are.

Washington Post: U.S. Steps Up Secret Surveillance: FBI, Justice Dept. Increase Use of Wiretaps, Records Searches. This is pretty disturbing:

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Justice Department and FBI have dramatically increased the use of two little-known powers that allow authorities to tap telephones, seize bank and telephone records and obtain other information in counterterrorism investigations with no immediate court oversight, according to officials and newly disclosed documents.

The article credits the PATRIOT Act, which loosened restrictions on when these “national security letters” and “emergency foreign intelligence warrants” may be used, for the increase in use of these tactics. With no checks and balances, these powers may be the most immediate threat to civil liberties out there.

Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. Remember, the secret court that oversees the requests for these warrants has said that the Justice Department isn’t doing a good job of justifying them. And much of the case for war was made with dubious information. Can the Justice Department be trusted to process the information it already has? If not, why should we grant them a blanket right to reach into our bank and telephone records?

Qui custodiet custodies?