We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Computerworld has an opinion article by Jay Cline about the privacy scare surrounding RFID technology who explains that the RFID hype has outpaced reality. Manufacturers and retailers have yet to agree on a universal electronic product code. RFID scanning is also far from error-free. But more important, RFID signals are so weak that they’re easily blocked by metals and dense liquids. It’s infeasible today for someone driving a vehicle down your street to intercept signals from RFID-tagged goods inside your home.
He also argues that the economics of RFID chips also limit how they’re used. Until the price of RFID chips comes down to about a penny apiece, they’ll mostly be used at the case and pallet level, clear of any personally identifiable activity. So we have several years to identify the privacy controls we want to see in RFID systems. Some companies are already creating these privacy controls. Chip makers and users are discussing how the principles of data privacy could be built into the RFID process. A top priority is notifying customers that certain items are tagged with these transmitters – which could be done by placing a common RFID logo on product packages. To give customers the ability to turn off the transmitters, some companies plan to make them peel-offs. RSA Security Inc. is also developing a chip that could be worn on watches or bags to block nearby RFIDs from transmitting certain information. So the RFID privacy ball is rolling.
Glad to hear that. Nevertheless, I will still be watching the RFID development with interest…
Notwithstanding the result of the Spanish election that David so poignantly blogged about yesterday, one thing that the commentators note is the turnout. Apparently, the extra 3 million voters who turned out to vote were spurred by the terrorist attacks and disgruntled by the Aznar government’s handling of the information in the aftermath. It transpires that the popular opinion in Spain was against supporting the US in the conflict with Iraq and the country’s participation in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’.
The BBC commentators have a field day – the ‘power of democracy’ has been demonstrated and the Spanish voters have chosen a socialist government. It don’t get better than that. It is a dream come true.
Oh, wait. The Russians have elected its President. In an extraordinary and widely predicted result, the former KGB agent crushed his closest rivals by securing 70 per cent plus of the vote, according to preliminary exit polls:
Russians overwhelmingly turned their backs on western-style democracy yesterday, voting for stability and a strong hand at the helm by giving four more years in office to President Vladimir Putin.
Although there was a small chance of under 50 per cent turn out, the Russians were forcefully encouraged to exercise their democratic rights, or else:
Officials are trying to bolster interest with patriotic advertisements showing Soviet-era rockets blasting off and glossy pictures of model Siberian mines. Others exhort parents to vote for the sake of their children.
Some officials have used bribes, threats and other schemes. Last week hospitals in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk put up notices saying they would refuse to treat patients who could not prove they had registered to vote in hospital.
So in one country we have a socialist government taking over as a result of democratic elections that were influenced by terrorist attack whose horror is still fresh in the people’s mind. In another, an overt authoritarian has cemented his already powerful position for another four years. I doubt very much that either election was determined by anything resembling rational discourse. No, I am not naive and do not expect every single voting decision to be rational or even sensible, however, the events of yesterday point to the other extreme.
[Retiring back to his cave, mumbling something about “emotionally incontinent” times…]
The oil-for-food scandal keeps bringing up some interesting although by no means surprising evidence that the program was corrupt.
A letter has come to The Wall Street Journal supporting allegations that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Program. As detailed on this page on Feb. 9, Mr. Sevan’s name appears on a list of individuals, companies and organizations that allegedly received oil allocations or vouchers from Saddam that could then be sold via middlemen for a significant markup. The list, compiled in Arabic from documents uncovered in Iraq’s oil ministry, included many of Saddam’s nearest and dearest from some 50 countries, including the PLO, pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, and French politician Charles Pasqua. (Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua have denied receiving anything from Saddam.) According to the list, first published by the Iraqi daily Al Mada in January, Mr. Sevan was another beneficiary, via a company in Panama known as Africa Middle East Petroleum, Co. Ltd. (AMEP), about which we have learned quite a bit.
There is more and the evidence is mounting. As Claudia Rosett puts it in her NRO guest comment:
U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.
Read the whole thing as they say. It appears that there is a positive side to totalitarian regimes… they are sticklers for bureaucracy and record-keeping.
Via Instapundit.
Bruce Schneier has a view essay in Wired about how all the money spent on security to turn the country into a fortress may make us feel better, but it doesn’t make us any safer. As most readers of this blog will know, Bruce Schneier is CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Many of the security measures we encounter on a daily basis aim pinpoint the bad guys by treating everyone as a suspect. The Department of Homeland Security counts on technology to come to our rescue: databases to track suspected terrorists, facial recognition to spot them in airports, artificial intelligence to anticipate plots before they unfold. But that creates a problem similar to the one you see when airport security screeners waste their time frisking false alarms. Terrorists are so rare that any individual lead is almost certainly a false one. So billions of dollars are wasted with no assurance that any terrorist will be caught. When an airport screener confiscates a pocketknife from an innocent person, security has failed.
…
Security always involves compromises. As a society we can have as much protection as we want, as long as we’re willing to sacrifice the money, time, convenience, and liberties to get it. Unfortunately, most of the government’s measures are bad trade-offs: They require significant sacrifices without providing much additional safety in return. And there’s far too much “security theater” – ways of making people feel safer without actually improving anything.
A lone (or so it often seems) voice of sanity and common sense – just what I needed to get me through today…
Information Week reports that the State Department plans to begin issuing passports with chips containing biographic information later in the year. Maura Harty, testified at a Congressional hearing Thursday that the United States needs to take the lead in issuing the new passports to encourage other nations to do likewise. Doing so, she says, will help secure our borders against terrorists and other potential troublemakers. Harty told member of the House Government Reform Committee’s hearings on the government’s US-Visit program, which requires many foreigners entering and leaving the United States to have their fingerprints and face electronically scanned.
We recognize that convincing other nations to improve their passport requires U.S. leadership both at the International Civil Aviation Organization and by taking such steps with the U.S. passport. Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.
Of course, biometrics is foolproof and fingerprinting your citizens is going to improve border security how exactly?! Another example of a fallacy typical of the statists that if only we had total surveillance, then no crime, threat or terrorism would be possible. Balls, balls, balls.
Sorry for the outburst, it is just one stupid statement by a state official too many… Sadly, I am sure there are many more to come.
ZDNet.com reports that computer-security software maker RSA Security has developed a new technology for protecting information emitted by radio frequency identification tags.
The RFID cloaking system is intended to guard proprietary data located on chips used to carry product information. The RSA Blocker Tag technology uses a jamming system designed to confuse RFID readers and prevent those devices from tracking data on individuals or goods outside certain boundaries.
The blocker tags work by emitting radio frequencies designed to trick RFID readers into believing that they are being presented with unwanted data, or spam, causing the information collection devices to shun the incoming transmission. RSA claims that by placing an RFID-loaded product into a parcel bearing one of the blocker tags, the system would cause RFID readers to miss any information carried by the product in the bag, thereby protecting consumers.
The company also promised that its cloaking system would not interfere with the normal operation of RFID systems or allow hackers to use security technology to bypass theft control systems or launch denial-of-service attacks.
What happens when idiotarian values, movements or policies collide? When EU clashes with animal rights activists…
Thousands of animals face laboratory tests involving industrial chemicals because of new European Union legislation. The EU measure, called Reach (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), is intended to impose strict regulation on Europe’s chemical industry. It will require new laboratory tests on animals for 30,000 separate chemicals currently in production in Europe. At present, each country has its own laws governing testing.
In reply to Dr Spink’s question, Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, said Reach required 20,000 chemicals to be tested on at least 25 animals – a total of 500,000 tests. Another 4,000 substances would require 1,500 animal tests each – six million in all. The number of tests for the remaining 6,000 chemicals was not stated.
Or when “environment-friendly” energy sources meet conservationists…
Wind farms – the “environment-friendly” energy source – are threatening to push the golden eagle, one of Britain’s rarest birds, into extinction. Conservationists say that the rapid spread of the farms in Britain – encouraged by Government subsidies for renewable energy projects – poses a grave threat to birds of prey. Other species at risk are osprey, red kites, merlins, kestrels, honey buzzards, ravens and peregrine falcons.
Both of these articles in one day. More and faster, please.
The Americans will always do the right thing…after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.
-Winston Churchill
90% crud has an excellent post about government, security and privacy. He includes a quote by Bruce Schnier about central databases and data mining programmes from his article How we are fighting the war on terrorism/IDs and the illusion of security.
But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don’t fit the profile. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The Unabomber taught mathematics at UC Berkeley. The Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli activities. Even the Sept. 11 hijackers went out of their way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier numbers, a history of first-class travel and so on. Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity — and profile — of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.
There’s another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile. Whether it’s something as simple as “driving while black” or “flying while Arab,” or something more complicated such as taking scuba lessons or protesting the Bush administration, profiling harms society because it causes us all to live in fear…not from the evildoers, but from the police.
The rest of the post is equally sound:
The problem with these data mining programs is that they don’t work. There simply isn’t enough data to build a good terrorist model. Let’s take two recent American terrorists: John Allen Muhammad and Timothy McVeigh. What did their records have in common before they acted? The only common data point between the two is that they both served in the military. If we had a system that could spot these two men, it would also falsely identify every single male who served in the US Military.
That of course assumes that the data is properly mined and analyzed. But let’s go back to the initial story, where we find out that the TSA sucks at analyzing data. Where does that leave us?
Some might say finding an evil-doer among regular people is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. I say that since there’s no way to tell the bad from the good it’s closer to finding a specific needle in a needlestack. Is that really worth giving up our privacy for an illusion of security?
Wired writes about the case of a Nevada rancher who covets his privacy. Dudley Hiibel refused to hand over his identification to a police officer in 2000, an act which landed him in jail and his name on the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket.
At issue in the case, which will be heard March 22, is whether individuals stopped during an investigation of a possible crime must identify themselves to the police. Nevada state law says that individuals must do so if a police officer has reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed.
Hiibel’s attorneys argue that in such situations, known as Terry stops, individuals already have the right to not answer questions and that requiring individuals to show identification violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments’ protections against unreasonable searches and self-incrimination.
The case runs as follows: Police responded to a report of an altercation between Hiibel and his daughter in Hiibel’s pickup parked on the side of the road. Hiibel was outside the pickup when deputies arrived and asked for his identification before asking about the alleged fight. A tape of the incident shows Hiibel refused 11 requests to produce identification, after which the deputy arrested him for impeding a police officer.
Police then arrested Hiibel’s daughter, Mimi, when she protested the arrest of her father. Both her charge of resisting arrest and the domestic violence charges against Hiibel were later dismissed. He was, however, found guilty of obstructing a police officer and fined $250, but the public defenders on the case appealed the conviction to a district court and the Nevada Supreme Court. Hiibel said:
I feel quite strongly I have a right to remain silent and I didn’t commit a crime. (The deputy) demanded my papers. I exerted my rights as a free American and I was cuffed and taken to jail.
Harriet Cummings, one of three Nevada public defenders working on the case, said that while the case might seem like “no big deal,” the legal issues at stake are huge.
This goes to the very nature of what our society is going to be like. We believe that exercising your right to remain silent should not be something that can cause you to be imprisoned.
If an officer acting under suspicion that a crime has been committed comes up to a person, starts asking questions and demands identification, and if the person, as Mr. Hiibel did, declines that demand, they can be hauled off to jail. And we think that is not something that should happen in a free society.
Solicitor General’s Office and the National Association of Police Organizations also filed briefs supporting the identification requirement, arguing that it was a necessary and not overly intrusive tool in fighting crime and terrorism. Here we have it, crime and terrorism wheeled out yet again…
Though the hearing is still weeks away, the case is already being widely debated in the blogosphere, thanks to the publicity efforts of privacy advocate Bill Scannell.
And on the topic of databases and governments – the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s brief ties the identification requirement to large-scale law enforcement databases, such as the FBI’s criminal database. The problem, according to EPIC staff attorney Marcia Hofmann, is not just that a police officer can use a driver’s license to pull up reams of data on a person from massive databases. It’s also that the encounter itself will be added to the system, Hofmann said.
Every little time something like this happens, the police question you and want to know who you are, it’s an incident that gets put into a database. And there will be a record of it thereafter, regardless of whether you did anything wrong.
Quite.
The front page of the Telegraph today has news of Michael Howard facing a shadow cabinet revolt last night over his plan to impose a public spending freeze, with senior members of his front-bench team protesting bitterly about proposed cuts in services.
So far, so good. Cuts in budget, good news for the likes of Samizdatistas. Thumbs up for Howard? Bad front-bench team who reveal themselves for the incorrigible statists they are? Not quite.
The Conservative leader has been told by several senior colleagues that they are particularly angry at proposed defence cuts of £1.5 billion that, they fear, could badly damage the party’s standing in the Tory heartlands.
The Tory party is trying desperately make themselves credible by pre-emptying Labour’s smearing them with spending less on ‘schoolzandhospitals’. As one frontbencher puts it:
If the Tory Party is going to get its message across, we have to be in the marketplace. If people think we are going to slash spending, then we are not in that marketplace.
The Tories are so obsessed about getting elected that they are losing their grip on substance. Mind you, they lost that with Thatcher’s departure… She may have actually increased the size of the state in some measures, which is evidence of how hard it is to cut the hydra down to size, but she was certainly aware of the true role of the state. Michael Howard is not.
Some people say it is still worth voting – maybe but not when a a sad greedy bunch of oily politicians out of power are competing with a faltering greedy bunch of oily politicians in power.
Wired reports that Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday. The prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make “any missile defense useless,” Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.
This exchange of statements has an air of nostalgia about it:
Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn’t be seen as Russia’s response to U.S. missile defense plans. “The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defense because we designed this thing.”
In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement. “If you’re in that business — intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads — you want them to be survivable, and maneuverability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defenses.”
I suppose the signs of new era are the following bits:
Putin said that Russia has no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle. “We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow.”
Baluyevsky said that Russia had informed the United States about its intention to conduct the experiment and added that U.S. officials issued no objections.
We shall see.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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