Say Uncle has an interesting suggestion:

I think I’m going to start mailing highlighted copies of the fourth amendment to addresses in Tehran.

At GRPC 2000 I hinted at an alternative to this general idea in terms of email instead of snail mail. Now I present this idea with a little more detail.

You can send 1000 encrypted emails a day for less money than one letter to Tehran per week. And you probably don’t need to send it to Tehran to get the attention of the spooks. Just sending encrypted email to Europe with interesting subject lines would probably be sufficient. From your own home here in the states you can set up a computer account in Europe pretty easily. You install program on that computer which automatically accepts email messages and replies back a few random minutes later with another encrypted email. You do the same with a few computers at home and the homes of your friends (or perhaps your enemies). Basically you have a bunch of bots talking about “interesting subjects” to each other with the contents encrypted.

There are some twists on this such as doing it in such a way you can find out if the snoops were successful in decrypting the mail and reading it. Another twist is to make it impossible for them to read it. Yes, there are unbreakable encryption methods–in general you have a terrible key distribution problem but in this case you don’t have to actually open the email on the receiving side. Your bot just replies with another unbreakable email message with an interesting subject line. Hence the decryption key doesn’t have to actually be delivered to the bot that receives it.

Of course this might result in you becoming acquainted with your local FBI agents on a first name basis no matter how innocuous the decrypted messages and no matter how much effort you put into hiding your identity. It just depends on the number of hours of laughter required to compensate you for the hours of laying naked on a concrete floor in the dark with buckets of cold water being thrown at you every few minutes.

The lawyer in Oregon that was arrested by the FBI because they “identified” his fingerprints on materials related to the bombing of the train station in Spain is going to be getting $2M from the U.S. taxpayers:

Two years ago the FBI branded Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield a terror suspect, secretly searched his house and eavesdropped on his conversations with his family and co-workers.

On Wednesday, Justice Department officials agreed to pay Mayfield $2 million to settle one part of his lawsuit for his wrongful arrest in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people.

Mayfield, a former Army officer, also got a formal apology. And the settlement allows him to continue his legal challenge to the USA Patriot Act, which Mayfield charges violates the Fourth Amendment by permitting government searches without demonstrating probable cause that a crime has been committed.

“The United States acknowledges that the investigation and arrest were deeply upsetting to Mr. Mayfield, to Mrs. Mayfield and to their three young children,” said Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokeswoman, in a prepared statement. “And the United States regrets that it mistakenly linked Mr. Mayfield to this terrorist attack.”

Mayfield believed he was singled out because of his Muslim faith. FBI agents, however, insisted that his arrest was based on a faulty fingerprint identification that linked him to the attack.

Either way, Mayfield’s arrest is one of the FBI’s most embarrassing episodes in its five-year campaign to detect terrorist cells inside the United States.

The case also cast doubt on the accuracy of the FBI’s troubled fingerprint-identification program and raised questions about sweeping anti-terror measures passed by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Mayfield, 40, was detained for two weeks after agents matched the print of his left index finger with one found on a bag of detonators connected to the Madrid attack.

What most people don’t know is that fingerprint identification is often as much an art as a science. Sure if you have excellent quality prints from the nice man carefully rolling your inked finger back and forth on the fingerprint card even a computer can match that to another fingerprint card carefully made some other time. But if they have a smeared fingerprint left from you gripping a textured hand railing, or just the tips of your fingers from typing on the keyboard, or if you soaked your fingers in bleach the night before it’s not clear whether you can get a match at all. And if you are elderly and do a lot of hand labor then the nice man may not even have usable fingerprints from your carefully inked and rolled fingers on the card.

But the U.S. legal system has a tremendous amount of case law built up that says a fingerprint match is positive identification. The problem is there aren’t good standards for what constitutes a “match”. How many little arches and swirls much be in agreement before it’s considered good enough that no one else could have left those fingerprints at the crime scene? Or how may discrepancies can exist before the defense can argue that it definitely wasn’t the suspect that left them? The courts have left it up to “experts” to decide. And the experts don’t agree. The “science” of fingerprints isn’t science. You can get two “experts” to look at identical data and reach opposite conclusions. And what of the ability to spoof fingerprints? It’s not that difficult. And you leave some pretty high quality fingerprints on those soda cans you recycle, the water glass at the restaurant, and restroom door at work.

Until the case above the FBI experts had a much lower threshold for an “identical match” than did the forensic experts in other countries. And I don’t think this issue has been settled yet. I expect there will be other cases where the “experts” want to “help” or have pressure put on them to claim matches when there shouldn’t be. Innocent people will be arrested, imprisoned, and perhaps sometimes even executed because of shaky fingerprint evidence.

A good part of the problem is that many people think of science as some sort of magic that can give black and white solutions to almost anything. In some cases it can but in others it’s simply not possible. But that’s beyond the scope of this post. So I’ll save that for later.

Nuclear fusion is a wonderful idea. Clean, no risk of people making bombs from it, and nearly limitless energy. And we have people working on it. The problem is it’s not just some government program–which would almost for certain doom it. There are numerous governments working on it. Think of a committee of bureaucrats that don’t speak the same language. Now give them billions of dollars and tell them they aren’t expected to deliver a working prototype for years or even decades. Oh, and they aren’t ever expected to turn a profit.

When General Electric, Chevron, or even Toyota tells me they are building a nuclear fusion plant I’ll willingly buy their stock. But the government is going to have to get my money for this boondoggle they way they always do–at the point of a gun.

So… just how good do you think those security checks at the TSA checkpoints are? How poor of a job would they have to do before you would say, “We need to figure something else out. This just isn’t working.”? Suppose they let 10% of the knives and explosives through. Or may be 25%. Surely if 50% of the people could get guns and explosive through you would say they should be fired, right? Well… the real numbers are:

Federal authorities have launched an investigation to determine who leaked test results showing security screeners missed 90 percent of the explosives and guns agents attempted to sneak past checkpoints this month at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The probe was launched by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration after The Star-Ledger, citing information from federal security officials, reported Thursday that screeners failed 20 of 22 covert tests and also violated standard operating procedures at the busy hub.

Don’t you just love it? The government agency gets caught not doing the job they said private enterprise was too incompetent to handle what is their response? Why it’s, “You weren’t supposed to know that! Who told you?” They are going prosecute whoever it was that let us know they are playing Keystone Cops to the extent they succeed only 10% of the time. Just like Christopher Soghoian said, it’s “security theater”.

It’s time to consider alternatives to airplane security.