I have long been a critic of many things our current government, as faithful readers are aware. I came across a very insightful interview with Michael Chertoff which I found both surprising and depressing.

The good news is that in some ways, Chertoff has some good ideas. For example,

The larger challenge -- and frankly one that is further out -- is to find a way to partner with the private sector to enable and encourage them with some to the capabilities that we have to increase their defensive capacities, but on a voluntary basis, meaning not making them do it or regulating them into doing it. But instead offering them the opportunity -- much the same in the non-cyber-world, we go to people who run power plants and dams and we share information and best practices that they can use to defend their own assets.

That's a great use of government resources. It's not in private industry's interest to make security a priority, since security is a cost with no immediate return. The government can fund research, encourage secure practices and require security. That makes us all better off and combines the advantages of legislation and free markets.

Next he addresses the recent hubbub about laptop seizures,

The only thing that happened recently is that I ordered the policy to be put online in the interests of openness and transparency. We get about 80 million people a year coming to our airports, and a very small number are put into secondary inspection and that's based on some suspicion that the inspector has about the person.

It is that pool of people in secondary that have their things gone through, they can have their luggage and documents gone through. And nowadays because you can bring contraband through on a laptop, they can have their laptop looked at.

If things are really as he describes, it really doesn't sound that outrageous. What I think is that the policy they posted is written poorly and doesn't indicate what's actually going on. So if this policy only applies to those who are suspected of something and therefore brought in for secondary screening, put that in the policy already! This whole flap would have been avoided.

Now, on for the more interesting bits. Wired asked him about the huge mess knows as the no-fly list. He says,

In the airport environments, supposing there is a terrorist Jim Smith and that person should be on the watch list, the question is how do you distinguish them from the other Jim Smiths and the answer is you need an additional bit of data, such as a birthday.

That would override or eliminate most false positives.

So the solution to a bloated list is to make the list even bigger? Mr. Chertoff, when you realize you're at the bottom of a 10 foot hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. There is no way that 1,000,000+ terrorists are walking around in this country just chomping at the bit for their chance to hop on an airplane and blow it up. It's not realistic. Given that 99% or more of that list is cruft, of course you're going to have false positives. That's all you're going to have and even in the off chance you find a bad guy, everybody will assume it's just another incorrect assessment. The whole no-fly list needs to be junked.

And then the shoe drops. He reveals the true motive for most of the "security" measures deployed of late.

If you stopped using the watch list and basically anybody could get on a plane without knowing their identity, sooner or later something would happen -- and people would lose their lives, and then there would be another 9/11 Commission and we'd hear about how you had this system and you would have kept them off and these people lost their loved ones on a plane.

Let me rephrase that for you. "If something happens, even if I had no way of actually preventing it, my butt is going to be dragged before Congress. I would rather inconvenience hundreds of millions of innocent people than risk that to happen. At least then I would be able to say I had 'done something'."

What we really lack here is a way to effectively measure how well security mechanisms are working because terrorist events are very rare. Between the time the World Trade Center was bombed the first time and when it was attacked on 9/11, we very well could have said "whatever it is we're doing, it must be working". Well clearly it wasn't but how would we know that? Chertoff even gives us a great example of this,

I don't know if they do it anymore, but when I was a kid we all had polio shots, and after a while, you just don't know anyone with polio. And the question was raised was, why are we taking these shots? There's not that much polio around. And one of the reasons there's not that much polio around is that everyone is getting inoculated.

It's very easy to measure whether a polio vaccine is working because it was so widespread and results were quickly available. It's simple to see that spending money on the polio vaccine is worth the money. The same is definitely not true of terrorism. We can spend billions (as we have) and still not know whether we've actually made a difference or not. That's money wasted for no appreciable amount of security, and that folks is the current motto for the Department of Homeland Security.

Accordig to The Register a man was indicted on fraud charges for opening thousands of accounts with ETrade and Charles Schwab. He had them send micro-payments, just a few cents each, and then collected the booty. Interesting story and may he rot in jail. But what I find particularly interesting is that his "undoing came as a result of the USA Patriot Act, which requires financial businesses to verify the identity of their customers". Wait, wait, wait. I thought the Patriot Act was to catch terrorists. Surely that isn't what they're claiming.

Make no bones about it, all these new laws to fight the "war on terror" have ulterior motives. Sure, they may help find terrorists but there is no doubt that LEAs have received a carte blanche for laws they've always wanted. They've learned well from Microsoft, it appears, and have passed around so much fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that our lawmakers have given them pretty much whatever they want. What we really need is to settle down and quite acting out of instinct and fear, and instead use a little of that logic stuff.

Another great opinion on Net Neutrality which closely (if not exactly) mirrors my own. For those too lazy to go and read for themselves, here's a quick snippet.

We need policy to help cut a path for more competition, rather than protecting incumbents -- a Bandwidth Competition Act of 2008, not bogus net neutrality. All takers should be allowed access to poles or underground conduits. This is where neutrality should be enforced, instead of being a choke point.

As I've long said, a government bureaucracy isn't going to solve the problem. It's going to create less incentive for Internet companies (like mine, full disclosure) to even toss their hat in the ring. Try forming your own telephone system and you'll know what I mean. The rules are ridiculously complicated and it takes an army of lawyers to sort through them. Please please please don't turn the Internet into the phone system.

Over the last week here in Idaho Falls we've received a lot of snow. I'm too lazy to track down official numbers, but I know there's about 18" of snow on the table in my backyard. That's an accumulation over the last 3 weeks or so. It's been great since we need the water. My one concern of course is that the spring will warm up too quickly and we'll have floods and avalanches.

That all brings to mind something that's been bugging me for the last year or more. Every now and again I'll hear somebody mention "sure is hot today. Must be the global warming," or "see how cold it is? Global warming must be a fraud." Well you know what? Just stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Global warming is not marked by a particularly hot day in the summer nor by an especially cold day in the winter. As the earth gradually warms, there will be plenty of each. It's all about the averages, baby. According to the latest IPCC report, global temperatures will rise by 1 to 6 degrees C over the next 90 years. 90 years! Humans just aren't geared to that sort of sensitivity. The earth is, of course, but that's getting away from my original point.

And that point is that just because it's hot today doesn't mean global warming is trying to kill you. And just because my son's school was canceled today due to snow, doesn't mean global warming isn't happening. Both will continue to happen, albeit with slightly different frequencies.

I ran across a site today named Leads Online. It's a tool for law enforcement to collaborate with pawn shops and the like. Essentially the pawn shop uploads all of its transactions at the end of the day and then if a law enforcement agency is looking for some stolen stuff, they search through the database. Leads Online tells how it's such a convenient and easy service, and helps good guys catch the bad guys.

My first thought was substantially different. I don't really relish in the thought of law enforcement having carte blanch access to business records, possibly without warrants. There's some good potential for abuse there. I recently read through all the Idaho Falls city ordinances (yes, it was actually interesting) and I'm aware that pawn shops are required to keep records of purchases for 2 weeks (IIRC), just in case a question of ownership arises. But there is not a requirement for them to proactively send those details to the police department. That seems to be a fair trade.

One immediate concern I have is that being a private company, they are not subject to laws that courts and police would be. They don't have to answer Freedom of Information Act responses. They aren't subject to public oversight. I don't think we should be outsourcing our key public infrastructure to private industry whose primary motivation is the almighty buck.

Even more than that, what really scares me isn't the intended uses but the ways the system could be expanded. There are all sorts of ways the database could be reused for marketing purposes, thus invading the privacy of sellers and buyers alike. There are pathetic privacy laws in the country, so it's hard to believe that anyone would have any recourse.

And what if law enforcement decided they wanted to browse through the database? The obvious abuse would be looking for religious material. Yeah, it seems pretty unlikely but the point isn't that we trust good people. I know a few law enforcement people and I would have no qualms with them using something like this. The point is that just as there are unscrupulous citizens, there are unscrupulous police. We need to make sure the system fails gracefully and I don't believe this one does.

Certainly you haven't missed the rash of food recalls. One that stands out in particular is that of the Topps Meat company, which recalled 21.7 million pounds of hamburger patties due to possible infections of E. coli. This eventually led to the company going bankrupt and closing its doors. I also remember the bagged spinach debacle from last year, because a local kid died from the illness and because I grew some mighty fine spinach in my garden last summer so I didn't worry for a second that I would be at risk for eating the affected food.

Well just today, moments ago in fact, I discovered that the latest recall has hit my freezer. General Mills has recalled a number of frozen pizza products including the "10.7-ounce packages of 'Totino's The Original Crisp Crust Party Pizza, Combination Sausage & Pepperoni Pizza'". I purchased them some weeks back to feed to the kids and in fact the only reason they're still in my freezer rather than in my children's bodies is that the smell of them makes my wife vomit. Don't be surprised by that though. She's pregnant and everything makes her drive the porcelain bus.

Seeing all these food recalls has really got me to thinking about food policy in this country, specifically to the lack of a sane food policy. Look no farther than the farm bill which subsidizes food in the exact opposite proportion of that which the FDA recommends to us for better health. I have just a few questions which I would really like some answers to.

1. What is the USDA actually doing since they're clearly not protecting our food supply? You can see the little "Inspected" symbol on my box of pizza, but obviously they didn't check closely enough. I could cut them a little slack if they missed this E. Coli outbreak because they were all busy playing Halo 3. I mean, c'mon. That's a fair excuse. But I suspect instead it's because the USDA is so filled with corporate goons from the very industry it's meant to police. They've got little incentive to do anything about all the problems.

2. Why do people keep buying this crap? Literally. You do know were E. Coli comes from, right? Perhaps I should explain why I bought "this crap" in the first place, especially since I really should know better. It's because of the aforementioned pregnancy, which has sent me scurrying around the supermarket trying to find something, anything, that we can eat without disgusting my wife. It's getting pretty tough. This was just one of the many things I would normally not buy.

   Consider also that this is the cheapest form of calories in the store. Dollar for dollar you can buy more calories in a frozen pizza than you can in say a carrot (props to my man Michael Pollan whose book I will review shortly). If you look at the waistline of Americans, those are typically calories we can do without. But profits are to be had, so companies go for it.

3. Why are these pathogen outbreaks a nationwide epidemic? While food contamination is a mostly preventable problem, it's going to be impossible to completely obviate them. But let's go back to the spinach incident of last year. If the spinach I bought this year (mine all died the moment it sprouted), I would know exactly who infected it, the wonderful folks at Shoemaker Farms in Blackfoot, ID who sold me a big bag of fresh spinach at the farmers market. He told me that when the news came out, he couldn't give his spinach away until he put up a sign saying that he grew it locally. What a crying shame because they have some of the best produce I've ever had.

   Of late I've been trying to change to a more local diet. We now get our milk at the local dairy (and in fact, it's cheaper now since gas prices have skyrocketed). I spent more time at the farmers market this year than last. I intend to join the new food coop that is getting started up here in Idaho Falls, possibly tomorrow even. We've gotten into canning our own food, my favorite probably being the tomatoes (which we got from Shoemakers).

   It's impossible to change our track and revert out of this global economy that we've constructed, and I'm not sure that I would want to anyway. But just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should. We definitely need to import chocolate from Africa and South America. It just doesn't grow here, so that's our only option. But we shouldn't be bringing in New Zealand apples during the height of North American apple season. Give me a break! (And if you're buying apples in September, you've clearly got no friends.)

That's enough ranting for now. I hope dear reader that you will be spurred to some introspection. I am definitely not the model of perfection, as evidenced by the fact that I bought the contaminated pizza-like cardboard object in the first place. Slowly I'm getting better though. I find that I think a lot more about my food purchases and that's really what I hope to inspire in you. I think I'll send in the UPCs from my pizza boxes, just to send General Mills through the hassle, but I can tell you for certain I won't be redeeming any coupons for frozen pizzas.

Ed Felten has a wonderful blog entry on Net Neutrality, unsurprisingly. Also no shock is that he totally agrees with me. That's how we know he's a smart guy.

To sum up, net neutrality sounds like a good thing and I believe it is, but I fear that many are too quick to rush to legislate it. I mean, this is Congress we're talking about. That's who you want controlling your Internet? Seriously?

The far better solution is competition. The more players in the game, the better the service will be for the customer. There's no doubt about that in my mind. I think a much better use of tax dollars would be to build municipal fiber networks and allow one and all to offer services on it. I see a lot of benefits and few drawbacks to a model like that. Well, few drawbacks unless you're a mega-ISP who hates its customers. Which is a pretty good benefit too.

I had the dubious pleasure the other week of flying to Oregon to pick up my wife and drive her home. She was feeling pretty sick and just wasn't up to the drive. The trip was planned at the very last minute and while I'm glad to help out my wife of course, it was a fairly stressful adventure. It's a good thing the TSA was on the job to keep my from relaxing.

Understand that I haven't flown on a plane since 1999. So first I went to the TSA's website and read up on the rules for what I could have in my carry-on. They say to think of "3-1-1" to help you remember the rule. Apparently it means "take 3 things you want to have with you, put them in 1 box, leave them at home and take your 1 sorry self to the airport". I couldn't make heads or tails of the rules, so I didn't take any liquids or gels.

If you look closely at the boarding pass to the right, you'll see at the bottom it says "SSSS". That's code for "we think you're a terrorist". I think between the fact that I booked the night before, that I was flying one way, that I didn't check any baggage, that I'm male, and that I'm not a frequent flier contributed to that assessment.

What annoyed me most wasn't the fact that I had to go through these absurd security checks. If they were done randomly, I would feel a lot better about their use. But mostly it bugged me that I didn't find out about it until after I showed them my ID, a rule I think is totally ridiculous. As if the 9/11 hijackers didn't have valid IDs. As if the no fly list is even a useful tool. At last count it had around 500,000 people. If there were that many terrorists in this country, we'd we be finding bombs on every corner.

Then I hear that the next tool the TSA wants to deploy is forcing everyone to book 3 days in advance! It just defies logic. By their count, they'll inconvenience 7-10% of passengers. The only numbers I could find (I admit I stopped at the first hit) was that in 1997 500 million passengers flew in the US. They seriously think that 35-50 million people are now terrorists? It's mind boggling.

I understand that people want to do something about terrorists, but there's too much doing without thinking. Most of our politicians and bureaucrats are acting based on emotion, which is a poor way to function.

Go read the Podcasting Legal Guide. Be careful, it took me about three days to make it all the way through. It's Long. Then, once you've read it, tell me that the copyright system hasn't become bloated and unweildy. It would take a cadre of lawyers to produce a podcast that incorporates commercially available music. I don't even want to think about the difficulty that say a movie producer must go through. Not that I really feel sorry for the media companies who have made their own bed.

And considering all the parties affected by a possible redrafting of title 17, I find it doubtful that we could ever come to a reasonable solution that would accurately reflect the Constitution's original compromise. Yes, I'm saying it's pretty much hopeless. Except for Lawrence "The Hopester" Lessig's Creative Commons. It's concise, easy to read (in both legalese and lay terms) and it puts real power into the hands of the author. It's a breath of fresh air in these times of muddy copyright law. Go Larry!

(This blog post, like all the others on this site is provided under the Attribution-ShareAlike CC license)

A great article about why President Bush's warrantless spying program, and the recently revealed phone record database, are a bad idea. I'm all for catching terrorists but let's not through out the baby (democracy) with the bath water (murderers). cue cliched use of Jefferson quote about trading freedom for security. What really ticks me off the most is when the Whitehouse whines about how we've let "the enemy" know about this weapon. Well excuse me, but I thought we lived in an open society here. And in other news, open source programmers are worried sick about Microsoft reading their code, possibly finding bugs. Duh, that's just part of the deal. The idea is there are more of us working on solutions than there are of them breaking stuff. Introducing heinous policies like these is like saving a tree from a diseased branch by chopping it down. Yeah, that's bound to work out well.