Unleashing the NSA: What's the real story?

We have been told that Bush secretly loosened restrictions on the National Security Administration.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Okay, old news. Europeans, who've been monitored by Echelon for decades, must find this all very amusing.

Problem is, it doesn't make sense. Even Bush's fervent supporters acknowledge his reasons for bypassing the secret courts that used to mediate these actions don't hold water. All the monitoring anyone's discussed publicly is perfectly doable without new law or new presidential powers. Sure, Bush could be nuts -- but I don't think he is. So what's the story that the New York Times either missed, or, more likely, has decided not to discuss?

Here's my guess. The NSA couldn't use the FISA process because they weren't really spying on individual people. No identified target, no warrant. Instead the NSA was doing in the US what they've done overseas for decades -- monitoring voice and data traffic to selected nations. Trolling, in other words. That's what Bush had to authorize; it goes well beyond FISA. The whole business about targeted monitoring is just a smokescreen.

Anyone else have a theory that makes sense?

Update 12/20: Others are drawing similar conclusions. (The date on my posting is off, I originally posted on 12/19.)
Update 12/21: Respectable sorts (WaPo) suggest this was really about monitoring based on phone and email targets rather than identified senders.
Update 12/21: Slate publishes an article by a longtime NSA watcher that puts things in a (dark) perspective.
Update 12/23: Another editorial today in WaPo is saying the same thing, though they abbreviate it as "monitor everyone". The editorial points out that a clause in Patriot I may be interpreted to allow this expansion of the NSA's mission.
Update 12/24: That didn't take long. The NYT has confirmed my suspicion. Now it makes sense. Monitoring traffic across the USA goes well beyond the FISA mandate, it required an executive order. Echelon America indeed.

Newsweek is talking about impeachment ...

The Bush spy scandal
, and the implication of "what else has he done that we don't know about" is starting to outrage even those who've handled other Bush transgressions with kid gloves:

Bush’s Snoopgate - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

... This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974...

It is unlikely that the Dems will take Congress, but this is indeed why the articles of impeachment were created. Not to punish a philandering spouse, but to remove a power mad president.

Revolt of the Professionals (WaPo): Will reason return?

David Ignatius claims the professionals are in revolt (WaPo). One of the many disturbing aspects of the Bush regime is its deep disdain, even hatred, for intellectuals. This shows in their attitude towards scientists, economists, sociologists and just about anyone with an agenda of evidence and rationalism. The Bush regime favors instinct, emotion, faith and conviction. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot all felt the same way.

Ignatius claims the professionals are striking back. Maybe. It's a nice thought, and the judgment in Dover does give one some (irrational) hope. Of all the things Bush has done, perhaps the strangest for me is that I now remember Newt Gingrich with a tepid fondness. Yes, he's a bit of a nut. Yes he's ruthless and vengeful. He did, however, have some marginal respect for reason.

Judge Jones is not amused: Intelligent Design takes a Dive in Dover

Judge Jones was not amused (MSNBC.com). Indeed, he comes across as very annoyed at having to listen to the inanities of the ID crew's desperate attempts to hide a fundamentally religious agenda. I get the sense he felt they were insulting the intelligence of everyone in the courtroom.

Jones says, as does every reasonable person, that there's nothing wrong with "teaching the controversy" -- in social studies class. Or, for that matter, in a state sponsored religion class (that's a different court battle). Not, however, in a science class.

The new post-ID Dover school board is unlikely to appeal. A landmark decision indeed.

Update: The Loom has some great commentary.
Update 12/23: eSkeptic has a thorough background analysis. This trial was a legal massacre. This is a bigger setback for ID than I'd realized. The plaintifs have created a template for the annihilation of "ID as science".

Left head bites right head -- Gmail filters blogger comments to spam box

Gmail is mostly impressive -- except for the spam filtering. Creakly old Yahoo mail, or even my local ISP, does a much better job at separating the wheat from the chaff.

Gmail errs in both directions. It puts spam in my inbox, and not-spam in my spambox. It invariably filters comment submissions from blogger into the spambox -- even though both Blogger and Gmail are Google properties. Google's a multi-headed monster, and the heads aren't necessarily on good terms.

Credit to the young scientists of South Korea

In a sad but not unfamiliar story of fame and failure, a once famed and now infamous South Korean scientist is suspected of faking a series of breakthrough articles. His scientific career is finished, though one hopes he will use his talents to good aims in other areas.

South Korea is said to take his downfall very much to heart, but there's another angle to the story:

Scientist Faked Stem Cell Study, Associate Says - New York Times

... Although the new disclosures are being presented as a blow for South Korean science, they can also be seen as a triumph for a cadre of well-trained young Koreans for whom it became almost a pastime to turn up one flaw after another in his work. All or almost all the criticisms that eventually brought him down were first posted on Web sites used by young Korean scientists.

Now there's a story that deserves to be told. The difference between science and the Alternative, is a system for challenge and disproof. (South) Korean scientists showed real skill and leadership in exposing a scientific fraud. They deserve to be honored.

Winner of the Homeland Security Incompetence Award

Bruce Schneier, security guru, rails against the extraordinary stupidity of a "watch list" for airline passengers:

Wired News: Airline Security a Waste of Cash

... Consider CAPPS and its replacement, Secure Flight. These are programs to check travelers against the 30,000 to 40,000 names on the government's No-Fly list, and another 30,000 to 40,000 on its Selectee list.

They're bizarre lists: people -- names and aliases -- who are too dangerous to be allowed to fly under any circumstance, yet so innocent that they cannot be arrested, even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act. The Selectee list contains an equal number of travelers who must be searched extensively before they're allowed to fly. Who are these people, anyway?

The truth is, nobody knows. The lists come from the Terrorist Screening Database, a hodgepodge compiled in haste from a variety of sources, with no clear rules about who should be on it or how to get off it. The government is trying to clean up the lists, but -- garbage in, garbage out -- it's not having much success.

The program has been a complete failure, resulting in exactly zero terrorists caught. And even worse, thousands (or more) have been denied the ability to fly, even though they've done nothing wrong. These denials fall into two categories: the "Ted Kennedy" problem (people who aren't on the list but share a name with someone who is) and the "Cat Stevens" problem (people on the list who shouldn't be). Even now, four years after 9/11, both these problems remain.

Can I weep now?

This is similar to the same problem of deciding that two health records belong the the same person. That's a hard problem, but if you use a combination of attributes (various identifiers, SSN, age, address, name) from reasonably robust sources you can make some trade-off between false matches and false non-matches. Having a national identifier (passport number) or even a state identifier (driver's license) makes the problem a bit simpler.

The reason using this in airport screening is completely stupid is:

1. Intelligent terrorists don't want to be matched, so they'd obfuscate data they provided. Duhhhh.
2. If name and age are the only identifiers, and the goal is to avoid misses at all costs, the error rate (false accusation) will be incredible. I'd imagine well over 10,000 to 1 (10,000 mistakes for every success, probably it's more like 1,000,000 to 1).
3. There's no mechanism to deal with mistakes, and the outsourced vendors don't pay a price for their errors.
   

The matching part of this could be made to work -- through a draconian system of biometric authentication. Even then, as Schneier points out, this would only identify known terrorists, and it would still leave the option of using non-terrorists as unwitting accomplices.

Read Schneier's essay. This is a stupid program proposed by idiots and implemented by dolts. It wins the prize.

nthposition online magazine

"Follow Me Now" lead me to an article in nthposition online magazine. It's quite a fascinating production, but I'd never heard of it. There's so much out there in the shadows of the Net. Alas, their RSS feed appears to be quite broken. I sent them a note.

If you're interested in literature, fine arts, and the world - take a look!

Update 12/21/05: Alas, they have lost the tech person who built the site -- so they can't fix the feed problem. If you know anyone who'd like to volunteer, they're looking!

The internet and "white flight"

"White flight" was an old term for the departure of euros from Birmingham, Detroit and many other American cities during the 1960s and 1970s. I suspect it wasn't merely a matter of melanin deficiency, I think many middle-class folk with adequate melanin also decided to decamp for less troubled spots.

My sense is the same thing is happening with the internet, and with email in particular. Over the past few years my neighbors have increasingly given up on email -- particularly outside of the workplace. They usually can't explain why, but if you drill down it's spam, viruses, worms, etc. It just wears people down. They stop checking their email regularly, and then the spam pile-up is even worse. Eventually they give up on email. They may even give up on the net entirely.

The Internet is simply becoming a "bad neighborhood". I don't think that reality is getting factored into enough business plans. I would not be surprised to see a decrease in internet use over the next few years, even as the net is increasingly used for media distribution ....

Eating the egg -- earth and humanity

Monbiot writes for the Guardian. He's sometimes interesting, but more emotional than analytical. So it's noteworthy that he's starting to confront some ugly realities about CO2 emissions and energy alternatives:

George Monbiot: Worse Than Fossil Fuel

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44 *10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.” In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us – with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states – such as ours – which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they’re not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel’s destructive impact...

Minnesota is big on biodiesel, but it's really a side-show. Sigh. Not much has changed since the energy crisis of the early 1980s, when OPEC gave us a preview of "peak oil". One of the best books of that era was an analysis of the scope for conservation without impacting lifestyle. I wish I had a copy of that book, I suspect that, by and large, we've implemented many of the recommendations.

Even so, with some lifestyle changes (smaller homes, denser communities) that aren't all negative, we still have a lot of room to conserve. I suspect we could reduce our consumption 20% or more without new technology and without making our lives miserable; maybe we'd even lose some weight. It's sad that Bush has foreclosed this option for the US ...

Roy Moore, Alabama, and Christian Reconstruction

Orcinus writes about Roy (10 Commandments) Moore, Alabama, and the Christian Reconstruction movement. My one Alabama contact assures me Roy won't win the governorship, but the article is still well worth reading. Christian Reconstruction (think "Left Behind" and "The Crusades") is a fringe movement, but like many fringe movements it influences much mainstream thinking. I am so tired of theocracy.

Gwynne Dyer has 3 new essays up

Gwynne Dyer, the last man to enter the internet age, will be the last man to get an RSS feed. In the meantime, he has 3 new essays on his pleasantly spartan web site:

Dyer 2005

28 November Kyoto and the Blair Switch
2 December Japan, China "Congagement"
5 December Rice and Count Metternich
8 December The Last Anti-American

As usual, each essay provides unique historical and geopolitical insights. For example:

The flights were presumably carrying Muslim detainees between the US-run prison camps in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, other secret CIA camps that allegedly existed in Poland, Romania and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, and places like Egypt and Syria in the case of those destined for major torture or death. Thousands of detainees may have been carried on these "ghost flights" over the past four years, and Lawrence Wilkerson, a former US army colonel who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 until early this year, told the BBC last week that between 70 and 90 prisoners have died in "questionable circumstances."

Incidentally (somewhat relevant to the 12/8 essay), the USA Today had an article buried in the paper about how some pompous wretch in the Bush administration was suggesting Canada's Prime Minister tone down his anti-American rhetoric lest he endanger US-Canadian relationships. Either this was an attempt to help Martin by suggesting Bush dislikes him, or the Bushie wants to see just how seething anti-American rhetoric can get. Hmm. Devious or stupid. That's always the question with the Bush administration ... (I personally suspect both are sometimes true.)

Blind spots, tech commentary and complexity

"Digital music" (odd term, CDs are digital - really should be "lossy compressed music") is "big". So it wasn't surprising that NPR spent an hour or so this morning with a tech columnist talking mostly about "MP3" (meaning AAC, MP3, MP4, etc etc) players. What was a bit surpising, and annoying, was that the expert seemed to have never of heard of something called "iTunes". He compared Dell's MP3 player to the iPod as though the devices existed in isolation and felt they were of roughly equal value.

His advice was thus fairly worthless. An "MP3 player" today is only as good as the desktop software it works with; for the moment the billions of CDs in circulation keep iPods and their competitors bound to XP or OS X. (There are lots of ways this could change dramatically, but that's another story.) iTunes is a brilliant piece of software, and much of the success of the iPod is due to iTunes. He was comparing jet engines instead of jets.

I see this kind of glaring omission reasonably often. Is the complexity of our world ovewhelming the "experts", or is this simply an old story -- the popular 'expert' is selected more often for entertainment value than expertise ...

Samsung - hiring 5000 engineers for DRAM work?

This is astounding:

Among Makers of Memory Chips for Gadgets, Fierce Scrum Takes Shape - New York
Times:

...Samsung also said it would hire 5,000 more engineers to increase research and development of new chips...

Five thousand engineers? That's not a typo, though the hiring is over 7 years. Even so, if they mean real engineering school graduates that's a heck of a lot of brainpower. That's 50 years output from a typical engineering school. They'd have to pillage the engineering powerhouses of the world: India, China, Taiwan, South Korea ...

I can't see how they could effectively use that many engineers ...

Illogical design - the Narwhal's tusk

Only evolution could produce such as klduge, such a hack, as the Narwhal's tusk:

It's Sensitive. Really. - New York Times

The find came when the team turned an electron microscope on the tusk's material and found new subtleties of dental anatomy. The close-ups showed that 10 million nerve endings tunnel from the tusk's core toward its outer surface, communicating with the outside world. The scientists say the nerves can detect subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and probably much else, giving the animal unique insights.

The tusk started out as a tooth; the research was led by an adventurous dentist. It makes a bizarre sort of sense; anyone with an exposed tooth root or broken tooth knows how sensitive teeth can be to temperature. Invert the tooth, put the soft tissue on the outside, and you have a weather sensor.

Evolution works with the tools at hand. The Narwhal is now Darwin's poster child.