Unleashing the NSA: The real story.

I called this on the 19th:

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

I'm sure most journalists had the same thoughts I had, but of course they actually have to gather evidence. They moved very quickly to put this story together.

This is oddly reassuring -- because it makes sense. The "bypass FISA" story didn't hold water if the NSA was indeed targeting individuals. Echelon-style monitoring of all traffic, however, cannot be approved under existing law. It required an executive order.

The great thing about the Bushies is that they make conspiracy theories real, and whacky delusions almost plausible. The Patriot II debate this January should be quite interesting.

Hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast

George made the wrong call. A wonderful sendup of It's a Wonderful Life: Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | All hail Pottersville!.

Ideological transformations and the elderly

Salon has an interesting story of ideological transformation. It feels like a classical tale:

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The real war on Christmas

...The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he's slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O'Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything. Thanks to this abdication of rational thinking, both of my parents completely bought into the Swift Boat liars, still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and recently decided to move to Montana, which my mother described as 'the real America' to me and my siblings. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, my mom's impression of him, having worked with him as a model in the 1960s, mysteriously transformed from 'a steroid-shooting lech' to 'a total gentleman, who was always taking his supplements, which were injected in those days.'

They both ended up voting for Tom McClintock, not because Arnold was so clearly incompetent, but because he wasn't a 'real' enough Republican for them. These are the same people who took me to nuclear-freeze rallies almost every weekend when I was in elementary school. These are the same people who introduced me to the teachings of the Buddha and Gandhi. The same people who smoked pot in front of me, introduced me to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and taught me to throw a Frisbee when all my peers were learning how to throw a football.

They are, of course, the same people. I would bet they are both very directed towards groupthink and tribalism. At one time that meant smoking pot in front of children [1], today it means taking O'Reilly as their guru. I would wonder too if both are desperately seeking simplicity, a trend that grows with age and the sadly normal senescence of the human brain (our brains are in bad shape by the time we hit retirement age).

Is there anything new here? It's tempting to think of Rush and O'Reilly as new, but the hate mongers of the 1930s to 1950s did quite well with the same radio Rush and O'Reilly use. Imitation and the urge to emulate dominant tribe members is quintessentially human. Alas, senescence has always been with us. So, no, this is not new.

[1] Many of us, of course, drink wine in front of children. I suppose it's not so much the substance as the intent of its use; I still suspect his parents were demonstrating the judgment flaws that later led them to Bush. Of course by writing this article about his family, their son has demonstrated a similar lack of wisdom.

Sixty years of peace

David Brin quotes from a quoting from a Democratic Leadership Council Report:

Contrary Brin: Some Good News... for a change...

...Between 1000 A.D. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace among great powers was the 51-year stretch between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Europe's present peaceful stretch hit 60 last spring and shows no signs of strain...

India. China. One day, Africa. Fantastic hope. Immense risk.

It feels as though we live on the tipping point, though other generations have felt the same way.

The NSA unleashed: widening suspicion that the NSA was doing broad data intercepts

I've added a few update links to my posting:Gordon's Notes: Unleashing the NSA: What's the real story?. More than a few mainstream journalists appear to have come to the same conclusion. It doesn't make sense that Bush would bypass the courts to do something they were already routinely approving. He had to be doing something the courts wouldn't have approved without new legislation. The most likely explanation is massive data and voice monitoring, extending the historic Echelon project into the US.

We should put a 'BCC. NSA' at the end of every email :-).

Beyond Dover: legal costs, tort changes and wealth for lawyers

In theory, since the Dover Decision will not be appealed to a higher court; it is only a precedent for Pennsylvania. Some speculate the legal costs will deter future creationist efforts to alter science curricula [1], but I suspect the battle has only just begun (emphases mine):

Schools Nationwide Study Impact of Evolution Ruling - New York Times

... The Dover school district is now liable for the legal fees incurred by the plaintiffs - which plaintiffs lawyers say could exceed $1 million. The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as wells as lawyers with Pepper Hamilton, a private firm.

Eric J. Rothschild, a Pepper Hamilton lawyer, said in a news conference after the ruling that holding the Dover board to a financial penalty would convey to other school districts that "board members can't act like they did with impunity." But Mr. Rothschild said the fees were still being totaled, and he left open the possibility that the lawyers might go after individual board members who voted for the intelligent design policy to pay the legal costs....

The next thing we'll see is that the GOP will put legislation in place to provide tort immunity for those who challenge the science curriculum. That legislation will then be challenged in the Supreme Court, which may well then find it to be unconstitutional.

The religious right will simultaneously use this defeat to claim that liberals and "the elite" (i.e. Jews and intellectuals) are launching a war on "Faith" (ie. fundamentalist christianity), with a particular emphasis on the financial implications of the Dover defeat. They will use a distored version of the judgment, and the usual appeals to tribalism and fear, to raise hundreds of millions to finance further assaults across the public school system.

If I were a lawyer with an interest in this domain, I'd be buying new office space. In the meantime, school board elections should get a lot more attention from everyone.

[1] Note to the usual dolts -- the judge has no problem with incluuding ID/creationism in philosophy, history, social science, and/or religious studies curriccula. Neither do I. Indeed I recommend it. Of course one will need to include Hindu (population), and Animist (first Americans) perspectives as well as biblical ones.

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 ....