Almost had some great tinfoil today, via Dave Farber’s list, which reports that an anonymous (Russian?) website claims there’s a keylogger built into Dell laptops. Comes complete with pictures of the chip and FOIA refusal to comment from DHS!
Alas, follow-ups report that both engadget and snopes.com say this is utterly false, as do people who’ve actually taken Dells apart.
So just worry about this instead.
Back in September ’03, in a more innocent time, I suggested only somewhat tongue in cheek that there might be a market-based solution to the Iraq quagmire: Rather than spend the billions in Iraq that the administration was then requesting, we just give the Iraqis $3,230 each and go home. It was more than their pre-war GDP per person, and they’d probably make better use of the money than we would.
Of course, by now we’ve spent a great deal more in Iraq than the administration ever budgeted, let on, or (I suspect) imagined. The current estimate of the US cost of the war is around $283,000,000,000 and counting and of course that ignores the personal cost to Iraq, Iraqis, and the families (here and abroad) of all the fatalities and casualties. Had we taken that $283 billion and handed it out to the 25 million or so Iraqis, that would be $11,300 or so for every man, woman and child — or 4.7 times the pre-war GDP/person.
But that’s all money down the rat hole (well, mostly — a few billion here or there was simply stolen).
Today I want to suggest a different market-based solution to an aspect of the current crisis. It’s been years that the US has supposedly been searching for “most wanted terrorist” Osama bin Laden with all its might, yet without success. (Some cynics have suggested that in fact US interests are served by not finding bin Laden since his continued freedom justifies the Long War and that the failure to find him is not entirely unwelcome or accidental; that’s too cynical even for my blood.)
The bin Laden hunt has been handled by the military and the intelligence services. Neither seems to have been up to the job. My proposal is simple: unleash capitalism.
Currently the US offers a paltry reward for the capture of bin Laden — a mere $25 million dollars (There is a separate, private offer of $2 million on the table as well.) While this amounts to a great deal of money, especially in the impoverished regions in which bin Laden is thought to have his secret undisclosed location, it clearly hasn’t been enough.
And if capitalism teaches us anything it is that if you want the goods and the other side won’t sell, then you have to raise your price.
Considering that we’ve spent some $283 billion invading a country that was no threat to us and had not recently done us any particular harm, surely we could find under a thousandth of that for the bin Laden buyout? Suppose the reward were not $25 million but $250 million — a quarter of a billion? People get very excited about powerball lotteries in that range, and a payoff that size might encourage someone to snitch.
Heck, offer a cool billion. Pay it out like lottery winnings and the present value is half that. Tax it and it’s down back in the neighborhood of that quarter billion. But still real money.
The only downside I can see to this plan is that there’s a danger that al-Qaeda will turn in bin Laden themselves, in order to get money to fund their next attack. I suppose the reward offer would have to be conditioned in some way to make this more difficult without descending into the catch-22 that anyone who knows bin Laden’s location is presumptively a terrorist or a fellow traveler and thus the sort of person we don’t want to give the money to…
Forgive me for quoting myself, but it’s time to reprint Lest We Forget: Gonzales Appeared to Obstruct Justice in the Plame Affair, with a little extra commentary. First, the rerun:
Do not forget that Gonzales — nominated to be the nation’s top cop — is the guy who when the Plame investigation was bearing down on the White House ensured that the guilty parties had all the time they could want to shred everything incriminating:
Senator Harkin, quoted in the “Congressional Record” (emphasis added):
Let me give a quick recap of the timeline. It started with the President’s deception in his State of the Union Address in January. In his remarks, Mr. Bush stated Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. A few months later, in July, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s op-ed appears in the New York Times, questioning the President’s assertion.
Then in order to discredit Wilson and “seek revenge” on Wilson, senior administration officials leaked to the press the identity of Wilson’s wife and the fact she was a CIA operative, thereby undercutting our national security and clearly violating Federal law.
This happened in early July. Let’s see what happened since.
On July 24, Senator Schumer calls on the FBI Director to open a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative based on that column.
In late July, the FBI notified Senator Schumer that they had done an inquiry into the CIA.
Then it appears nothing happened for 2 months.
On September 23, the Attorney General says he and CIA Director Tenet sent a memo to the FBI requesting an investigation.
On September 26, the Department of Justice officially launches its investigation.
Interestingly, it took 4 days after that “official” launch for the Justice Department to call White House Counsel Gonzales and notify him of the official investigation. Gonzalez then asked for an extra day before the Justice Department gave the White House the official notice, which means all documents and records must be preserved.
A recent letter was sent to the President from Senators Daschle, Schumer, Levin, and Biden which also expresses concern about this break from regular procedure.
They wrote:
Every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that the first step in such an investigation would be to ensure all potentially relevant evidence is preserved, yet the Justice Department waited four days before making a formal request for documents.
Interestingly, the letter goes on:
When the Justice Department finally asked the White House to order employees to preserve documents, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales asked for permission to delay transmitting the order to preserve evidence until morning. The request for a delay was granted. Again, every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that such a delay is a significant departure from standard practice.
That is what has been happening–departure from standard practice.
I am also troubled that the White House Counsel’s Office is serving
as “gatekeeper'” for all the documents the Justice Department has requested from the White House. Mr. Gonzales’ office said he would not rule out seeking to withhold documents under a claim of executive privilege or national security.What kind of a zoo is this outfit?
What’s new is the fevered speculation about Rove either being indicted, or becoming a cooperating witness. The blogs are atwitter with the idea that this could be bad for Cheney, and I suppose in the highly unlikely event that Rove sings, this might be true.
But I can’t help but wonder if a good prosecutor like Fitzgerald might not have had his eye drawn to the chronology above, which certainly suggests the possibility of obstruction of justice. Enabled — intentionally? — by the now-Attorney General of the United States, our nation’s top law enforcement officer.
Eric Muller points us to this revolting information about the Saudi bigotry-indoctrination program.
This isn’t an oversight: this is government policy from our great ally in the Middle East.
I know the state of Florida has no shame, and I suppose that anyway this probably is no different from ads appearing on the sides of public buses but even so I was very surprised to have ads for satellite TV and satellite radio fall out of the envelope when I got my annual car registration renewal notice.
When the state sells off public functions we call it privatization. (When it sells or leases land we have unfortunately gotten used to calling it a ‘rip off’.) When the state takes on formerly private functions we call it a vast number of things, depending on the circumstances and how we feel about it.
But when the state lends its good offices to put an advertisement into every home (or, who knows, just demographically selected homes?), do we just call it “advertising”? Surely there’s a better word for this?
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