It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong. But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.
Dr William Gray
October 12, 2007
Gore gets a cold shoulder
[Man is not causing global warming. Policitial correctness, desire for political power, and a hatred of capitialism are the driving forces behind the global warming scare.–Joe]
We also need real control of identification. We need the right to be anonymous while exercising all other rights. So that even with our photos, our fingerprints and our DNA profile, they can’t link our communication and trade and financial activities to our person.
Now I’m not talking about lack of accountability here, at all. We must be accountable to the people we communicate with. We must be accountable to the people we trade with. And the technology must be built to enforce that. But we must not be accountable to THE PUBLIC for who we talk to, or who we buy and sell from.
John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991
[Another way of saying this is that government control of financial and communication identification fails my Jews in the Attic Test.–Joe]
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein
This started out to be a comment in response to Lyle then it got a little out of scope. The short background story is that Lyle says gun control advocates are vacuous loons and that if we had our act together would have politically crushed them decades ago.
Lyle, It’s a little more complicated than what we would like. Read what Dar Korra’ti has to say to get a feel for just one of the issues involved. Another is, as I like to say, it is irrational to expect people to be rational. For example, people have a very strong tendency to believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts.
Also, many would like to believe that it’s possible to create a perfect world–if only someone was given sufficient power/control/money to do it. They don’t understand that trade-offs are a part of any engineering task whether it is an automobile, a plane, a computer, or a society you are trying to engineer. Most people accept a certain number of automobile, plane, and computer crashes while realizing, at some level, that with the money, time, and other constraints things are working pretty good and certainly they wouldn’t be able to do any better themselves.
But when attempting to engineer a society nearly everyone believes themselves to be an expert and that anything short of perfection is reason to throw some baling wire and duct tape at the perceived deficiency. Then with nothing more than opinion they forge ahead. The rare few that bother to try to put numbers on things and pretend to do an actual engineering analysis almost always only look at one side of the equation. They only look at the potential good that might occur from their changes. They fail to look at the actual and/or potential damage their proposed changes will cause.
Are they “vacuous loons”? Well, yes. But I’m of the opinion that is the present state of the average person and there isn’t much we can do about that. And that a form of society/government in which the loons are unable to participate is likely to have serious deficiencies of its own.
A loaded handgun was found in an airport men’s room.
[Yawn.]
No big surprise. It’s an impossible “problem” to solve.
What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone’s intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.
And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there’s greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.
That’s why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can’t give an answer. It doesn’t even belong on a scale.
Bruce Schneier
April 1, 2004
A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer
[See also my web pages on National ID Card Flaws.–Joe]
Xenia made a video of John and her in the park. John is now headed back to the sandbox to guard convoys with his video game.
Good luck and thanks John. Please come back in one piece.
But it’s no wonder we are concerned about privacy, because we are all “lawbreakers”, We all break the law, but few of us are criminals. The problem is that simply attracting the attention of the police is enough to put the best of us at risk, because we break the law all the time and it’s set up to make that happen!
John Gilmore
March 28,1991
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
[Remember what Ayn Rand said and Huffman’s rule of firearms law.–Joe]
In winning our Independence, and to make certain that it could never happen again, the Founders wrote that the Citizen was to be SUPREME AUTHORITY, and that our authority was to be backed by force, forever. In their living this reality which they knew could occur in any age, any era, any administration, the reality of life today was that liberty must always be backed by citizen force.
John Longenecker
Original Intent–Citizen As Supreme Authority–Liberty — How American Gun Control Is Adverse To The Public Interest In An Abuse Of Due Process
[There are lots of great quotes in this whitepaper.–Joe]
Syria is shamed and silent. Iran is freaking out in panic. Defenseless enemies are fun.
Dr. Jack Wheeler
Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran
September 25, 2007
[Via David.–Joe]
For a while I’ve been saying that this whole national ID debate will be irrelevant soon. In the future you won’t have to show ID; they’ll already know who you are.
Bruce Schneier
September 26, 2007
The Technology of Homeland Security
[It was this article that inspired the above comment. My comment to Schneier’s article was:
I used to specialize in biometrics and was underwhelmed at the actual capabilities compared to the marketing hype. And that was with people that weren’t even actively engaged in trying to defeat the technology. If someone really wants to defeat it the odds of success are very close to 100%.
“Novelty” contact lens easily defeat iris scans. Remote fingerprint scanning can be defeated with Band-Aids (or just the sticky tape part of it). More sophisticated/determined people will use contact lens with someone else’s iris pattern and be wearing someone else’s fingerprints.
The bottom line is that for the average person they might be able to know who you are and where you have been. Great information to use against your political opponents and for stalkers with access to the databases but useless for stopping smart and determined criminals.–Joe]
Instead of addressing the deficiencies or giving it up as a bad idea they are hiring “public relations” consultants to convince the people a national ID card is a good thing. Why don’t they be honest about it and go for the tattoo on the forearm or the RFID chip under the skin? Of course they probably would need Joseph Goebbels reincarnated to get that “PR” campaign off the ground.
Details are here:
As controversy rages over forthcoming federal Real ID requirements, state officials should be plotting public relations strategies to counteract the well-publicized rebellion, past and present state motor vehicle administrators advised their colleagues Monday.
Civil liberties and privacy groups, as well as organizations like the National Governors Association, have attacked the 2005 law as insufficiently protective of privacy and too costly to implement. But that’s exactly the sort of message motor vehicle departments need to offset with their own materials trumpeting the plan’s perceived benefits, suggested Lucinda Babers, interim director of the District of Columbia DMV, and Betty Serian, a retired Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official who now runs a private consulting firm.
“I think it’s a classical textbook case of good communications planning, knowing who your audience is, and working that into your implementation plan for Real ID,” Serian said during a panel discussion on the first day of the Government ID Technology Summit here. About 100 state and federal officials and representatives from technology vendors were in attendance.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to issue final rules in the fall, but draft rules say that starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved, “machine readable” ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. (States that agree in advance to abide by the rules have until 2013 to comply.)
[…]
But even those states that fall into the anti-Real ID category should be thinking about how to make their residents feel happier about the requirements, the conference speakers said.
Sample messages could include, according to Serian: “It’s an improvement to your existing process, it’s a way to do the right things for the right reason, it will help prevent identity theft.”
They admit they have to make their residents feel happier. I’ve heard “arbeit macht frei” too. Do you feel happier now?
That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.
Joseph Goebbels
Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, 90
[Does this remind you of any politicians and/or media outlets in the present day?–Joe]
I suppose its to be expected. You can’t get more government contracts if you were to tell them the problem cannot be solved as long as they are headed in that direction. But what you can do is sell them millions and millions of dollars of technology that can be defeated with a few dollars worth of mu-metal and/or a Faraday Shield. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s just government money. They have to spend it on something anyway, right?
Here are the details:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a comforting prospect for the million or so daily passengers on U.S. airlines. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on an alternative to the “sandwich bag” solution for carry-on liquids.
Passengers’ ability to carry liquids with them during boarding has improved since the original total ban installed after a plot involving liquid explosives on transatlantic flights was busted in London in August 2006.
A total ban has given way to a partial ban because current X-ray machines can detect liquids, but they don’t know the difference between Gatorade and a liquid explosive.
But the so-called “3-1-1” plan for placing smaller-than-3-ounce liquid containers into one separately scanned, quart-size plastic bag per passenger remains an annoyance for many airport travelers, a fact that has not been lost on the department.
Within a month after the London scheme was foiled, said Michelle Espy, LANL’s co-principal investigator on the project, the laboratory had sketched out a “proof of concept” for a liquid-sensing instrument that has come to be called SENSIT.
In May this year, Brian Tait, a program manager in the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency made a presentation on LANL’s demonstration for using magnetic resonance technology to perform non-invasive “liquid and solid explosive detection at ultra-low field without radiation.”
Espy said the technology is a variation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a very low-field approach that the lab has been using for studying the brain in a technique known as magneto-encephalography, which is a way of reading signals emanating from the brain.
The sensor or magnetometer used in both the brain study and the bottle analyzer is known as a SQUID, an acronym that stands for Superconducting Quantum Interfering Device.
Comforting? I suppose you could say that. It will give some people a false sense of comfort. But then that’s what TSA is all about anyway. A Security Theater that makes some people feel good.
We spent this weekend out camping in an Idaho mountain meadow, in an “open range” area (where cattle wander free, and are branded for later roundup). Aside from being stunningly beautiful, with the fall colors coming on and the abundant wildlife resulting from recent logging operations (you did know that logging results in copious new foliage for the grazing of deer and elk, and cover for small game, didn’t you?) there are quite a lot of cow pies.
Grass and water go in one end of the bovine, you see, and cow pies are what come out of the other end. The name applies whether the bovine in question is male or female. That saves you the trouble of determining whether a given pie is a cow pie, a bull pie, or a heifer pie, etc..
I’d been doing some shooting out there with several firearms, and asked my 10 year-old daughter to get out her .22 rifle. She wasn’t much interested until I pointed out that she could try shooting at small pieces of wood floating in a pond. She quickly discovered that if you place a bullet just under the floating stick it will jump 15 feet into the air. That got her attention, and she was soon asking for more ammo. She’s a fairly new shooter, so her hit rate wasn’t very good, and she lost interest until she discovered that a fresh cow pie will explode if hit with a .22 Long Rifle hollowpoint.
In other words, her shooting may not be minute-of-angle accurate (one M.O.A. equals one sixtieth of a degree) but she can shoot “Minute Of Cow pie” (M.O.C.) which allows her to enjoy a 100% hit rate on these impromptu, reactive targets.
She spent the rest of the afternoon shooting cow pies with a big grin on her face (and me laughing to myself, thinking how wonderfully stereotypical, North-Idaho-redneck an activity that was).
For further study, I picked up some beer cans (probably discarded by some pale, leftist San Franciscans who thought getting drunk and littering in Idaho would be a hoot) filled them with water and shot them with various calibers. It happens that a .223 Remington cartridge, pushing a 55 grain, hard-jacketed spitzer at around 3,000 feet per second will cause the water-filled aluminum can to burst out in all directions, yet still hold together in one piece, whereas a soft lead sphere of .495″ diameter (50 caliber patched round ball – the patched ball is an American innovation that was used with deadly effect against King George’s officers during the Revolution) traveling at about half that velocity will blow the can into several pieces, scattering them up and out about 15 yards, leaving the base of the can still holding water where it stood (I picked up the pieces and took them home if you must know, leaving the meadow cleaner than we found it).
I also discovered that you can hit gallon jug-sized targets at 200 yards (you do travel with a rangefinder, don’t you?) with a little youth model .22 rifle, zeroed at 20 yards, if you aim about 5 1/2 feet high. You have enough time to bring the rifle down and listen/watch for the impact at that distance.
Ain’t freedom grand?
Every time I hear or read something about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming to the U.S. to address Columbia University I keep thinking this is going to go down in history the same as if Adolf Hitler had come to the U.S. to address some university in September of 1937.
We have to realize that people who run the government can and do change. Our society and laws must assume that bad people – criminals even – will run the government, at least part of the time.
John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991
[Gilmore’s primary concern is privacy. He is a big name in the opposition to a national ID card, unreasonable search and seizure, etc. But the justification for that concern, as stated above, is also applicable to being opposed to restrictions on firearms.–Joe]
Of course it was in Boston where the cops all went bonkers because someone was carrying around some wires and LEDs (via Bruce):
Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.
This is not a bomb:
And furthermore, being the nit-picky engineer that I am, it’s a breadboard, not a circuit board.
If someone wanted to carry a bomb around at the airport they would almost for certain put it in a suitcase instead of wearing it in the open on their sweatshirt. And since it was in the open you can easily see there is no detonator and no explosives attached. But this is Boston. And so:
Outside the terminal, Simpson was surrounded by police holding machine guns.
“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands, and not make any movement so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said at a press conference at Logan. “There was obviously a concern that had she not followed the protocol … we may have used deadly force.”
Simpson was arrested…
Bruce says Refuse to be Terrorized. I say Boston was just exercising their authority as a police state. And the police probably hadn’t gotten to play with the sub-guns in weeks. They had to justify having their toys by actually pointing them as someone occasionally.
I do agree with Bruce that the true terrorists are probably laughing at us.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
H. L. Mencken
[I keep thinking there has got to be a better system. The competing political systems of today are a minimum of 100 years old. Our communication technology, mass media, and perhaps other technology surely make some sort of new freedom based political system viable rather than enhancing a police state. But what is it?–Joe]
From the U.K. we find (via Bruce):
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.
[…]
We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it’s not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.
Not entirely clear? What could be more clear? It appears that the rate of crime resolution is inversely proportional to the number of cameras present.
But they are apparently so accustom to Big Brother being there they are afraid to consider his absence. But don’t expect them to remove the cameras and spend the money on something better like more police and/or better enforcement. You should expect them to conclude they don’t have enough cameras and to increase proselytization. It’s just one of those things about human nature that is hard to accept.