Via Saffo: journal:
The TSA screeners at SFO (San Francisco International Airport) are handing out these stickers to deserving young travelers.
Personally, I’m reminded of this poster:
(See also DC Metro poster post and Students for an Orwellian society.)
I’ve written before about the ugly “Miami Model” of suppressing protesters, free speech and civil rights in general all in the name of making the city safe for the FTAA negotiators. (See Notes From FTAA Fontlines (Nov. 20, 2003); Miami’s FTAA Aftermath: Happy Officials, Allegations of “Police State” Tactics (Dec. 04, 2003); More on Miami FTAA Protests (Dec. 23, 2003).)
Well, it seems it was even uglier than we suspected. The post-FTAA investigation of the police’s tactics didn’t just whitewash police who fired on innocent civilians, but actually praised them. In a training video. While laughing. Cut to yesterday’s Herald, Attorney incensed after viewing FTAA police video:
As a middle-aged Coral Gables attorney, dressed sharply in a red suit jacket, skirt and black slingback heels, Elizabeth Ritter stood out among the throng of protesters on Nov. 20, 2003.
Frustrated that she couldn’t do business because the Miami-Dade County Courthouse was shut down that week during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, she hastily made a sign that read ”Fear Totalitarianism” and decided to stand with the protesters.
The sign, however, became her shield against a barrage of rubber bullets fired at her by a legion of Broward Sheriff’s deputies in riot gear. And, in an image captured by a videographer, she is shot in the head as she cowers in the street.
And now another video, recently released, raises questions about the degree to which police, specifically, Broward Sheriff’s deputies, were encouraged, — and even praised — for using force against Ritter and other protesters.
…
The tape, recorded for training purposes, shows Major John Brooks — then a captain — addressing dozens of deputies in an outdoor BSO tent.
”How about yesterday, huh?” Brooks says, complimenting the officers for their work during the protests. “I would go to war with everyone here.”
Brooks continues, “I went home, I couldn’t sleep, I was just so pumped up about how good you guys were . . . Nobody broke ranks. You’re the best I’ve ever been with.”
Sgt. Michael Kallman, a BSO counterterrorism unit officer, addresses the group next. A voice off-camera says, “What about the lady behind the sign? We have intel on her?”
The officers laugh.
Kallman smiles and says, “The good news about being able to watch you guys live on TV is that the lady with the red dress, I don’t know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head!”
He raises his forefinger and zooms it toward his forehead.
The cops all laugh.
Another officer asks, off-camera, “Did I get a piece of her red dress?”
BSO’S RESPONSE
No disciplinary action has been taken against any officers in the video, said BSO spokesman Elliott Cohen.
Having been rumbled in public, the chief cop caught red-handed…or red-mouthed…is of course suddenly contrite. But that’s a bit late — having put the verbal equivalent of a smoking gun on video, they’re going to be sued.
John S. Quarterman has a typically intelligent essay, Perilocity: What can We Do about Terrorism?,
Well, for one thing, [we] can continue to discourage use of methods that have little promise of working, such as blanket scans of all telephone numbers or electronic mail, which just increase the haystack without making finding the needle more likely, or national ID cards such as the British government has been pushing lately.
…
As to what could [we] encourage, how about more Arabic and Farsi-speaking intelligence people, more intelligence and law enforcement agents who understand the cultures that are producing the terrorists and what their grievances are; maybe even agents who can infiltrate them.
And there’s more…
[Bonus update: TSA Insanity by George RR Martin (via Making Light)]
Secrecy News has the scoop at Recipients of “Leaks” May Be Prosecuted, Court Rules.
Basically — for the first time and I’d argue contrary to the First Amendment and legislative intent — the a US court has held in US v. Rosen (the AIPAC case), that private citizens who have no contractual obligations to keep government secrets, and no security clearances, can nonetheless be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for sharing classified information they receive.
Judge T.S. Ellis, III (ED Va – where else?) argues in his opinion that this ruling is but a narrow one since it requires that the private citizen know the information is classified and that release would be potentially detrimental to national security, intend to share it, and do so knowing that this is illegal.
Seems to me that Nixon would have used this argument to prosecute newspapers for publishing the Pentagon papers; perhaps, given what we know now, they might have won on the merits, but surely the fear of jail (for Espionage) would have acted as a substantial deterrent to that and other important publications.
Indeed, it’s not hard to see this ruling as pushing us well down the slippery slope to a world in which in practice only Official Leaks, those giving the pro-administration side of a story will be published.
Don’t look for the 4th Circuit, the most statist in the nation, to overturn this. But I’ll bet even Scalia will vote to overturn it, as will the Supreme Court with at least six judges in the majority.
There’s been much gnashing of teeth about the proposal to give every voter in Arizona a lottery ticket in a $1 million lottery. (See Arizona Ballot Could Become Lottery Ticket for details of the proposal.)
Some opponents of the idea have expressed their shock and horror at the idea the purity of the voting booth would be sullied with money. After all, paying people to vote is currently a crime.
Others are appalled that low-quality voters will be drawn into voting by the draw of lucre when they don’t care enough to vote otherwise, and — say the critics — are thus going to be uniformed or random voters motivated only by the chance of a free chance at the post-election drawing. For example,
Editorial writers, bloggers and others have panned the idea as bribery and say it may draw people simply trying to cash in without studying candidates or issues.
“Bribing people to vote is a superficial approach that will have no beneficial outcome to the process, except to make some people feel good that the turnout numbers are higher,” said an editorial in The Yuma Sun. “But higher numbers do not necessarily mean a better outcome.”
I disagree with that idea on principle — I think more voters is a better outcome even if they’re not what critics think are the right sort of people. Indeed, I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the Australian system of compulsory voting. But that’s a lengthy debate for another day.
Today I want to make a simpler suggestion: that there would be significant side-benefits if tomorrow’s voting machines were also lottery machines. One of the very strange things about today’s voting machine technology is that while the some of same people who make voting machines also make slot machines, we subject slot machines to much stiffer auditing than voting machines.
It’s hard to believe that our society could so casually determine that casino money merits greater protection against fraud than elections — especially after we have seen so clearly the great cost of a stolen election. Indeed, this apparent social insanity regarding relative risks gives rise to the conspiracy theory version of electoral history: the machines are insecure because it serves someone’s interests that they be easy to hack.
But take it instead as a public choice failure: casinos have a direct private interest in protecting their pocketbooks; the people who buy voting machines have limited budgets and many competing pressures; lousy machines may sometimes help their bottom line if they come with campaign contributions, cost few tax dollars, or whatever.
So suppose instead of the current scenario, our voting machines were transformed into something closer to the slots — lottery ticket machines. And suppose we designed them in a way that there might be more than one winner. All of a sudden, there’s a need for serious auditing capabilities….
Just a thought.
The home network situation remains somewhat weird. Last Friday, Bellsouth’s Indian outsourced tech support promised to ship me a filter to make the new modem go, one that they had neglected to include in the original packet. They swore it would go out Monday and arrive Tuesday. It did not, and the tracking number they provided when I called to complain made it clear that it didn’t leave their hands until Tuesday morning. The Indian help desk line person was amazing Tuesday night, though, and kept insisting that his computer had better access to the United States Postal Service computer than mine did, and his display showed it had shipped Monday.
So after that fruitless and frustrating telephone experience I thought I’d try the network again. Friday morning I’d turned everything off and let it cool down. Friday night I’d turned it all on again but it remained dead as a post – couldn’t even reach the router. I’d left it all on since then…but Tuesday night I discovered it was working again once I resaved the router’s login info, which had been erased by the hard reboot. Had the Alcatel 1000 risen from the dead? Was it the router? Or was it an upstream issue after all? I had no idea, but who cared so long as it worked… In an abundance of caution, I turned of all logging on the Linksys router — even though it has been on for months — as I’d read that my version of the firmware got unstable sometimes with any logging tunred on.
And so all went fine … until this evening when one of the kids fired up the family room computer and found that it could not access the internet. Oddly, and differently from the earlier symptoms, the other computers in the house still could. Was this a different problem or a symptom of the same one? Was it relevant that the last thing he’d done was to start up the Stagecoach Island download?
I did my usual round of diagnostics. IPCONFIG /ALL showed normal. Ping was dead. Other computers on the network were fine. We rebooted. No change. But I’d noticed that this machine, unlike the others in the house, didn’t have Microsoft’s IPv6 implementation even though it is running Win XP (Sp2) (dual booting with SUSE 10, but that’s another story). So, grasping at straws, I installed IPv6. And immediately it was happy again, without even rebooting.
I find that odd — as I understand it, IPv6 is supposed to co-exist happily with IPv4. And the router is old enough not to expect IPv6 anyway. I’ve rummaged around a little online and haven’t found anything that speaks to this problem, which may mean it is just a coincidence.
But my search did disclose the some mundane facts and one delightful one: It seems that Win XP uses its own IPv6 implementation rather than the standard one called 6to4. The Windows version is called Teredo tunneling. Indeed it was seeing the references to a Teredo tunneling adapter on my computer plus some DNS gunk of the form fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::2%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::3%1 which put me on to this issue in the first place: On investigation that gunk proved to be an IPv4-encoded IPv6 address … whose absence elsewhere later alerted me to the absence of IPv6 from the family room machine.
So here at last is the delightful fact, straight from the Wikipedia:
The initial nickname of the teredo tunneling protocol was shipworm. The idea was that the protocol would pierce holes through NAT, much like the shipworms bore tunnels through wood. Shipworms are pretty nasty animals, responsible for the loss of very many wooden hulls, but Christian Huitema in the original draft noted that the animal only survives in relatively clean and unpolluted water; its recent comeback in several Northern American harbors is a testimony to their newly retrieved cleanliness. Similarly, by piercing holes through NAT, the service would contribute to a newly retrieved transparency of the Internet.
Christian Huitema works for Microsoft, and was obviously pressed by Microsoft’s public relations to pick a slightly less offensive name. Teredo navalis is the latin name of one of the best known species of shipworm. At least, the name Teredo does not immediately evoke computer worms.
Gotta love it. And, it seems (maybe), gotta have it too.
Meanwhile, the DSL modem line filter has arrived — a day late — but I haven’t yet installed it, or re-installed the ‘new’ Westell modem. If it ain’t broke…
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