Anything Else

Is boiling.

PS: I know frogs are more intelligent than people.

PPS: Counterpoint.

Compensation?

More than 2,000 Indian farmers commit suicide every year because they can´t sustain their farms and pay their debts. Of course globalisation has been blamed for this, just like it´s been blamed for everything else going wrong in the world. But others have pointed out that the real villain is agricultural subsidies - US taxpayers are forced to pay for the dumping of cotton in India, which destroys their market. And without a sophisticated financial system or micro credits, the Indian farmers can´t deal with even a temporary loss of income. 

But I just talked to a person with some insights into Indian agriculture who mentioned another, terrifying reason. The Indian government pay Indian families who have lost their father after a suicide about $3,000. It´s a way of helping of course. And it´s a fortune. About ten times the annual wage. Unfortunately it´s also a powerful incentive for someone who can´t provide for his family.

Sad but plausible.  

In his futile attempt to fight terrorism, Mr Mukhi asks us a question:

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Not only Mr Mukhi is completely clueless about cyber security, he has no idea why the notion of privacy is so important. So what is wrong if our password are stored and is available to police. Why is someone potentially reading our mails such a big problem?

Privacy relates to access of private information about individuals. Human beings associate trust with this information. Imagine someone coming to you and accusing your wife of adultery, in one case he just proclaims, your wife sleeps with other people. This is meant as an insult and you will take it as such, and will just ignore it. But imagine if he has access to your wife's calendar, and says dude yesterday you thought your wife went to laundry in the evening, well she went some other place, and that movie thing she did with her friends last Friday, well, she dint go to the movie either :-), and few other such tidbits. Ignoring the allegation has become so much difficult now. Imagine if he has access to your wife's email account and told you that she still is in touch with her collage ex boyfriend, your wife will not be able to deny this, but she never saw him, and knew how you hated him. The marriage is in deep trouble don't you think? He might not approach you and might blackmail your wife and make some money out of it.

Everybody has stuff about them that if taken out of context can be a cause of great deal of embarrassment or in many cases much worse. Privacy is our weapon against people finding out things about us and misusing them.

Now imagine, 30-40 percent of Bombay accesses internet through cybercafes. If all passwords are being recorded, sure someday someone will discover where they are and steal them. May be the security would be tight, but may be not.

More about trust aspect of privacy. If I call a girl and ask her to come to some place, she will most likely not, but if I have access to her email password, I can find out about her trusted friends from it, and can pretend to be a friend of them calling her to tell her that the good friend of hers is in accident, and caller found her number from the cellphone in his pocket. The chances that the girl comes to the desired place become so high now, don't you think.

There was a case about a guy being lured to a place and kidnapped and I guess murdered using orkut. The guy made a mistake of trusting an unknown person, but imagine if passwords are stored for lackhs of people in some police computer and its gets stolen, how many potential blackmail and murder crimes might get facilitated.

The passwords would be stored in the cybercafe, one point of attack, anyone sitting on this computer can potentially get the passwords. Next passwords will be collected by cybercafe operator, he might steal them himself, or someone might steal them from him. The passwords would be stored in CDs and collected by someone, or electronically uploaded to some site. Sites get hacked all the time, millions of passwords will just give extra incentive to the hackers. Then there are numerous personnel involved in maintaining the remote database that stores all keypresses, any of them could make a copy for himself.

I know of kids of millionaires and billionaires on Orkut, and if I can kidnap them, I can demand hefty ransom. I might be willing to sell this idea to some underworld don to just kidnap kin of system administrators responsible for the database.

Do you really think Mr Mukhi that such risks are worth the near zero benefit that we are going to get out from the privacy invasive plan that you are rolling out? What have you done to protect such privacy invasion? And if you did do anything, you would be a misreable sob if you did not, then why did you decide to redicule privacy concern instead of convincing us that suitable measures are being taken to protect our privacy?

Any data that is collected can be retained and stolen. A lot of privacy information can be gleaned from those datum and trust system inherent with privacy can be exploited to harass people or engage in criminal activities against them. Privacy is thus important. Especially against such un-thought-out measures by government officials, who usually do it under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Vijay Mukhi, President of the Foundation for Information Security and Technology, is introducing a plan for Mumbai police to install a keylogger and screen grabber on all cybercafe machines in Mumbai. Why only cybercafes? Mr Mukhi explians:

"The terrorists know that if they use machines at home, they can be caught. Cybercafes therefore give them anonymity."

To me this is on the verge of bullshit. Has the president of foundation of information security and technology, heard of Tor?

Tor (The Onion Router) is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing — a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet.

It is a US Navy funded project, I guess Mr Mukhi knows something that US Navy and EFF security experts do not that gives him the confidence that anonymity offered by Tor is not enough!

Tor is just one example, there is SSH dynamic port forwarding that acts as a proxy, and if you have access to a server outside India, it provides complete privacy against Indian surveillance. Getting access to a server outside India costs as low as a dollar per month.

These two solutions give access to privacy that even a complete novice can use [once you realize you have something to hide from government, and have spent a few minutes on Google for basic instructions on how to set things up]. There are more advanced techniques, I can hide encrypted information in unrelated files, like images, upload it to flickr for instance, and my friends can access it, and government can not do anything about it, unless they are sitting right next to me while I am doing all that.

It is an impossibility to even conceive that such communications can be tapped, unless the sender has made some obvious mistakes. Terrorists aren't making many otherwise police must have stopped them in action!

Lets talk about keylogging and screen grabbing for a minute. What if someone is using codes to transmit messages? This is how the world war I and II were fought, encryption. The encrypted text could be written on a piece of paper, typed and Mumbai police will keep staring at the screen wondering what the hell to do with those garbage looking text?

Further, keyboard is just one of the input mechanisms available to enter some information on a computer. First thing that comes to mind if Keyboard is not safe is mouse. There are on screen keyboard that one can use. Screen grabber might help a little bit, if mouse movement is tracked, and screen shots are taken at enough frequency as to not miss any mouse clicks, it might be of some help. But only if no code has been employed. Then many cybercafe allow USB thumb drives, these may contain mails that I want to send my fellow terrorists, how would keylogging and screen grabbing help? Many offer microphones, I can imagine few offering bluetooth. Terrorists are smart, much smarter then the police at least, and they have proved it on numerous occasions, thinking otherwise would be foolish.

This entire exercise is futile against anyone with very basic knowledge about the subject.

Mr Mukhi asks an interesting question:

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Terrorists are using cybercafes for planning terrorism related activities. I would be really surprised if they are not using their home computers for doing the same. If my assertions are correct, and the measures taken by Indian police is completely futile in stopping any of them, the question is, did the police know how futile these are, or they are really ignorant enough that all this is coming as news to them? Is this move an honest attempt by police to stop terrorists, or an attempt to save their face for not doing anything. This is not just a casual question, if Mr Mukhi knows that these measures are futile, and yet pretends it will work, I will consider him a part of terror network, who is helping the terrorists.

The blood will be on the hands of Vijay Mukhi for either being actively part of terror network by misusing his position as president of foundation of information security to use inappropriate measures to stop terrorists, or for being an incompetent officer who does not know the basics of information security and yet is egoistical/selfish enough to continue to be as president, and not let other more competent people take over.

Here is what I would have done if I was the president. First of all, I would impress upon everybody that all such mass surveillance is a seductive but bad idea to capture determined individuals. They never work. What works against terrorist is the same that works against any crime and specially the ones involving international parties, and that is solid ground investigation. The old fashioned investigation based on clues obtained in questioning and crime scene, pursuing it with diligence, tracing all the leads, and so on. As a president I would build information infrastructure to help in such investigation, finger print database, car license information database, analysis of bank accounts. I would try to introduce the 100 year old information technology that is radio to more police officers. I would try to build systems in which various police forces in India can share investigation progress and findings. I will help build data-mining systems to mince all information conceivable from data collected all over the country by ground agents.

I would at least realize that my actions, as president of that institution, must be helping terrorists unless they are deterring them.

Indian police is helping terrorists by not getting rid of people like Mr Mukhi, who is either incompetent or terrorist's accomplice.

Am I overstating? Do you think president of such information technology security thing will know something about blogs? Could he have posted his plan on some place and invited discussion from security experts? Did he get his plan reviewed from anybody in any computer science professor specializing in Comptuer security? There are many in IIT Bombay. Or did he just say to himself: oh I am the president, whatever plan I come up with must be right, and other people would not know better, because it is my job to research validity of such plans ha ha ha. Terrorists are using internet to plan bombings, no doubt about it, did he really feel he has outsmarted all of them? This arrogance is costing us lives, and I do not feel right to mince words and call him anything less than a terrorist himself. They kill for religion and misplaced ideologies, he lets them kill for money, I guess he can be counted as worse than them.

Doctors get sued all over the place for malpractices. This is malpractice to me.

This is not just a minor mistake: there is a scarcity of police resources that we have for fighting against terrorists. Instead of trying to coordinate with ground investigators to narrow down to individuals that might give some real progress, this fellow is starting a program that will tie our scarce police resource to excessive cybercafe monitoring, and prosecuting, in the name of fighting terrorism, when its nearly theoretically impossible for the program to make smallest dent in the terrorists networks ability to utilize internet to plan next terror attacks.

Seeing Yellow:

When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. These marks exist to allow the printer companies and governments to track and identify you -- presumably as a way to combat money counterfeiting.

...

Most color laser printers made and sold today intentionally add invisible information to make it easier to determine where (and when) a particular document was printed. This seems to have been done as part of a secret deal between the United States Secret Service and the individual manufacturers. Some of the manufacturers have mentioned the existence of the tracking information in their documentation, and others haven't. None of them have explained exactly how it works or what information is conveyed. No law requires printer companies to help track printer users this way, and no law prevents them from stopping this practice or giving customers a solution to avoid being tracked.

This information is most famously known to be coded by patterns of yellow dots that the printers add to the background of all the pages they print. The yellow dots are hard to see with the naked eye, but can be seen under bright blue light or with a microscope. Their arrangement reveals which printer was used to print a particular document, and sometimes also shows when it was printed. Some of the codes have been understood while others are still mysterious, but none of the printer manufacturers has denied that the dots are intended to help track a particular document to a particular printer (or that they can actually be used for this purpose). This is a direct attack on the privacy of the owners and users of printers, and in particular, on their right to free, anonymous speech.

More details with EFF.

Is it really paranoia to ask "what if Microsoft Windows is similarly rigged, so that US can spy on India?" They have reasons and means and this establishes enough precedence. They would be idiots for if they are not trying.

Does India deserve right to keep something to itself?

Came across this innovative idea on The India Story:

... In the article “Ten commandments for Dr. Singh”, Swaminathan has come out with, “Thou shalt propose a law giving seniority to all cases of elected legislators over all others.”

I think it is a brilliant suggestion. More so because of its utter simplicity. I wonder why our founding fathers did not think of this simple bit of legislation. Maybe they never imagined that a day would come when the state legislatures and also the Parliament would play host to people we would rather have behind bars.

...

Now if getting elected to any official position becomes a catalyst for all the pending cases against them to be brought to the front burner, then only the most brain dead of criminals would like to be involved in the political process.

I would go further to suggest that all state legislatures and the Parliament should have a fast track court established on their premises to try the worthies who have broken the law. Why should courts be located inside State Assemblies? Can’t justice be served from the current premises of the High Courts? Of course it can. Just can’t resist the idea that as Legislators enter the Assembly they can also see the Annexe of the High Court and know for certain that they can’t escape a visit to its premises if they run foul of the law.

And for career politicians who have a lot of frivolous cases registered against them, there is nothing to despair. Because all the law would say is that, “all your cases will be fast tracked and tackled by a special court”. So in case of complaints that are completely frivolous or are obviously the result of leading an agitation against some policy of the government they could also get some judicial respite. Immediately. And such a rule should be welcomed by those politicians who claim that they are being victimized.

This proposal should get more attention.

As a follow up to my yesterday's post, I was looking for replies to my comment in Schneier's blog. The very first comment was:

One of the suggested responses to "I've got nothing to hide" is "can I see your credit card bills for the last year?" Good luck trying that when you're pulled over by a cop or when the FBI is at your door.

It is quite easy to make people agree that it makes sense to have privacy from one another.

It is much harder to disprove the notion that "I've got nothing to hide from the government," and I don't see this essay addressing the question why individuals need privacy from the government.

This reinforces my argument that privacy advocates are not doing their job well enough. If I was to do this job, about the first thing I will do is create awareness about the difference between the notion of privacy against government vs the privacy against citizens/private firms/marketers. These are so different concept when you are talking about privacy, these should have been two different words, and yet a 25 page paper written in support of privacy, that is trying to define it, evaluate its value, could not point this out. Half page long bullet list of taxonomy of privacy and such a basic thing missing, this is failure to me.

I will do the needful, I call privacy against government "absolute privacy" and privacy against citizens/private firms: "general privacy", or just privacy. This is the first taxonomy one should understand before one starts making further arguments for or against privacy. A lot of arguments in favor of privacy are only applicable to general privacy, and are wrongly used against absoulte privacy.

Moving on:

@Amit:

The government is not forced to collect data under the covers, it chooses to do so. This is not a problem of privacy, but of a government which is not the servant of the people (as it should be, at least in a democracy or realanarchy), but has its very own agenda.

In the same way, one could argue that governmental torture should be legalized, as otherwise the government will still torture, but secretly (IIRC this argument came up on this blog before).

Kristine

P.S: The "terrorist" horseman of the apocalypse is a bit overused, especially in conjunction with "might potentially help". So it does not scare me

Let me repeat why I feel government is forced to collect data under covers: privacy is a very abused term, privacy advocates to blame mostly, and the masses are not educated. I trust politician much less than security advocates(who have failed in my thesis), if privacy-loss has widespread negative connotation in public, government would be tempted to avoid disclosing, this is the nature of democracy.

Torture is real, privacy is made up paranoia, if you differ, I will give you my gmail password, and you courier me your chopped fingers. :-)

Terrorism is a funny business, if Americans have had enough of calling themselves victims of terrorism, may be, just may be, they should consider the countries really suffering from terrorism, like India for example. 10 years of evidence of direct support by Pakistan in Kashmir, and the American press still calls terrorism in India "freedom struggle". Imagine millions of suffering because an entire state being victim of real terrorism, and then compare with flukes like 911 that had just few thousand dead, years ago, you may get some perspective. Anyways, coming back to topic.

Let me summarize my position. Privacy is an important issue. General privacy should be my constitutional right, no one should have right to post my emails or phone call records, on internet for example. This is not freedom of speech. This is not a IP/copyright issue. This is a privacy issue. This is missing today. Absolute privacy, governments should have right and means to do data-mining, to go through my emails and phone records, to study demographic trends, to look for unusual activities. We as society has to come up with systems and norms to make sure these things do not get misused. If government singles me out, it is an abuse. If government does not take suitable precautions to keep my data safe, or shares it with private parties, it is an abuse. We should help build public awareness towards these issues, and participate in government's data warehouse building projects with suitable gaurds to avoid the real issues. This is missing too. A knee jerk, "privacy is the holy grail, anything else and you are totalitarian government in making" argument would only hurt privacy in the long run.

Schneier links to a 25 page paper about why privacy is important, and how "I have nothing to hide, so its okay for govt to collect data on me, to fight against terrorists" argument is invalid. At-least it is supposed to "exposes its faulty underpinnings". 12 pages into it, after reading 1 million times that this argument is not valid, I am yet to see any strong argument. Schneier and group trying to brain wash people about something that might potentially help stop terrorists?

Why is privacy required? Do we need privacy? Is it our right? It would have been a good thing had there been reasons to call privacy a fundamental right, but there isn't. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. This is fundamental.

I am an advocate of privacy actually, but when I see criticism of data mining projects in the name of privacy, it sounds more like security analysts/watchdogs are taking the wishful simpler but wrong way out of "privacy is fundamental therefore data mining is wrong" approach, where as they should be pointing out the details of the programs. The reasons are simple, if I have to tell a common person that government is doing something wrong, I would rather want my argument to be one sentence long rather than one para or a book long. Common people have short attention span, they know anyone, who has invested anything in any field of expertise, will want everyone to know how valuable whatever they know is, is to everybody. Basic human psychology, common people understand it, and will take the experts opinion with a grain of salt.

It is wrong for security experts to call privacy card. For one there is the cause vs the champions thing going on, you take the cause of privacy, and make lame arguments in its support, all privacy supporters suffer the loss. The fact of matter is government has been collecting information on us. The automobile registration papers, the passport, the death and birth certificate, the tax papers. They are going to keep collecting information on us, no sane person would try to argue government should stop collecting any of the information I mentioned above for example. Information collection is the part of life, and we have to live with it. We have to live with the concept that there should be a comprehensive information collection system. Years of privacy advocates have really made that system sound so bad, that instead of developing such a system openly, taking citizen interest and feedback into account, government has to do this under the covers. Should government do it? Yes. Is it possible that there can be problems with the implementation? Yes. Why not there be a open source project about the same. But privacy advocates will just kill that project, and force government to do it under covers, which actually leads to systems that are under scrutinized, and bad for the privacy in the first place.

Let there be a data collection agency. Let everyone public or private collecting data on citizens operate under the laws governed by such an agency. Let security experts participate in building such an agency taking into account the concerns of government/law enforcement and citizens alike. Let privacy have a chance.

It would be a sad world to live in if history remembers him as anything else.

Commendable.

According to information from Heise, Google warned that they might disable Gmail in Germany as last fallback should the German government maintain its position in regards to a newly passed law on record-keeping and supervision of internet traffic. According to this law, email services here will be forced to maintain personally identifiable records attached to email accounts.

Lets see how it unfolds.

Rediff:

The pages of history are littered with the ruins of countries that were indifferent to erosion of the balance of power. Losses on the periphery where a country's interests appear marginal, never seem to merit a response or warrant a confrontation with the enemy. But small losses add up. Expansionist powers thrive on picking up loose geopolitical change. When it comes, it usually takes place under the worst possible circumstances for those on the defensive.'

--Former US President Richard M Nixon, quoted in my book India's Defence Policies and Strategic Thought, A Comparative Analysis, to highlight how Indian policies ignored the balance of power concept, and how India was inclined to marginalise its far flung peripheries.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, oblivious to the crucial strategic significance of Aksai Chin (North Ladakh), gifted it away to China, a Himalayan blunder that India still rues. Nehru hid the fact of the Chinese annexation of Indian territory for nearly eight years, and later justified the loss by describing Aksai Chin as a desolate area where not a blade of grass grew.

Half a century later, the present government seems set to repeat history.

While we are busy fighting who would get bigger share of the cake.

Schneier says: .

Great op-ed in The New York Times on why the NSA's data mining efforts won't work, by Jonathan Farley, math professor at Harvard.

The simplest reason is that we're all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960's when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other -- but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings -- the famous six degrees of separation -- for the package to reach its intended destination.

Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.

A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the "strength of weak ties." As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.

(This, by him, is also worth reading.)

Namit is furious at the "indifference" of Indian consulate in Armenia over the death of some Indian student who was denied basic first aid, and dean apparently stopped others from helping him out. Read more here. This reminded me of an essay Ayesha was writing, and hasn't finished due to her exams:

Indifference versus incompetence

A lot of people are accusing our past & current governments of indifference to the plight of common man. Consider the plight of religious victims, the delay in investigations and trials thereafter which seem to never end and not even a handful of convictions to those who killed numerous and more importantly murdered India. I don't think it's entirely fair. Moreover, I don't think it's useful.

It comes back to the same old razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." And it becomes clearer with every passing day that incompetence is more than adequate to explain our government's inability to react quickly enough to circumstances across our country.

"Indifference" is a charge that defies empirical data, because we can never truly know the hearts of others. "Incompetence," however, can be quantified: So let's keep our eye on the ball. There's no benefit to anyone by getting personal, and by claiming that "the government doesn't care about poor people or is dead set against a particular religion." It's much more useful to make it crystal clear that the government has been just plain negligent, and that their negligence led directly to the deaths of thousands of people -- because a negligent government is something that, with enough support, we can change.

Incompetent journalists, criminally negligent journalists or liars who are complicit in the mass deception of the Indian people; there are no other ways whatsoever to describe the men and women who comprise the news institutions of India. From the hired face you see every day on the CNN's of India and aaj tak to the journalism interns. Every person currently employed in the corporate media today has some soul searching to do.

The members of today's news media warrant outrage from the people of the world who have fallen victim to their despicable practices. With each new day brings new crimes while a false sense of reality is passed to Indian people via our media. In olden times when street justice was the norm we would be dragging our beloved anchormen and women into the streets and having a public execution, for these people have been the empowering force behind the most despicable and
dangerous Indian administration in history.

NOTE: I use this word: Lie. Not mislead, not mistake, misspoke, neglected to inform, omitted, left out, misrepresent, factually incorrect etc. Part of the definition of a lie is to leave a false impression. These people lie to us.

I (we) should be angry. There has been too much writing and discussion about the state of the media. The good people who are trying to address the problems with the media have been dignified, intellectualized, soft spokened and IGNORED. IT IS TIME TO GET LOUD! It is time to get angry! It is time to stop the madness! With dignity and fairness the media critics and watchdogs tried to alert the public of the information being withheld by our news media. Dignified and standard methods of communication can not defeat the hugeness of false reality that emanates from our TVs, and news papers.

With dignity Media wrote about many events. They did their own investigations, held hearings and they exposed the complicity of our ruling government and its administration in those events. They wrote with dignity until their fingers hurt. They spoke with dignity until their voices gave out. They filmed documentaries until they ran out of film. They were ignored, suppressed, murdered in the literal sense. The Congress administration has devastated this nation and the world. Everything that is Indian is being destroyed while the media continue to sell catch phrases and concepts to public like "democracy" and "security"; empty words that in most cases have described the opposite of what is actually taking place. This is the stuff that ignites revolutions! Where are all the revolutionaries? Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? From the environmental terrorism and no way that our government is sensitive to this topic and failure of the dignified commissions to bring about any major changes this in itself will kill more people than all terrorist combined have issues like these go unmentioned by the media. The fact is that the not many Indian public can believe there is a reality other than the one presented on their television, news papers and radios. This, in essence, gives the broadcast media the power to control perceived reality. They abuse this power.

In response to this article the Government supporters are going to talk about the liberal media and they will sarcastically start to bring up menacing entities that control the media. I don't care who controls the media. It is a secondary issue. As long as you know that the deception is taking place you can counter it. As long as you know that there is a pickpocket in the crowd you can protect yourself. It is a bonus if you can identify him/her. It is a double bonus if you can
arrest and convict him/her. Suffice to know you are being lied to. Protect yourself Get angry.
One thing that we do know is who is lying to us. They splash their names all over your life. They lied about virtually every aspect of the Mau Attacks (just for your information Mau is a very small town some where in UP where over 100s of Hindus literally got butchered by Muslim fanatics who entered the trains and killed almost all the passengers) and I am sure lots of people would try to justify this as an act done by media to avert greater harm or probably media
was ordered to do so by our very prestigious government . But what about our right to know, what
about solace to the victims and their families and what about their unanswered sense of vengeance or the most required pressure on judiciary and our lethargic police system to wake up and find these gruesome murderers who are roaming free in our society, our government which promises us safety and media which can ensure this, are betraying us on our face, isn't this outrageous.

Enough is enough!

I am asking you to get angry. Get furious. When you turn on your TV and find that the top story
is one that you used to have to read about in a supermarket tabloid, ask yourself what news is NOT being reported. Then try to figure out how the on screen pretend journalist keeps a straight face as they try to pretend that a domestic crime is national news and worth deep thoughtful journalistic discussion.

We have to educate the public about the people who lie to them every day. You should be furious. You should feel rage. You should do something. At least spread the word!

Emphasis mine.

Schneier explails with an example:

There's a helicopter shuttle that runs from Lower Manhattan to Kennedy Airport. It's basically a luxury item: for $139 you can avoid the drive to the airport. But, of course, security screeners are required for passengers, and that's causing some concern:

At the request of U.S. Helicopter's executives, the federal Transportation Security Administration set up a checkpoint, with X-ray and bomb-detection machines, to screen passengers and their luggage at the heliport.

The security agency is spending $560,000 this year to operate the checkpoint with a staff of eight screeners and is considering adding a checkpoint at the heliport at the east end of 34th Street. The agency's involvement has drawn criticism from some elected officials.

"The bottom line here is that there are not enough screeners to go around," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "The fact that we are taking screeners that are needed at airports to satisfy a luxury market on the government's dime is a problem."

This is not a security problem; it's an economics problem. And it's a good illustration of the concept of "externalities." An externality is an effect of a decision not borne by the decision-maker. In this example, U.S. Helicopter made a business decision to offer this service at a certain price. And customers will make a decision about whether or not the service is worth the money. But there is more to the cost than the $139. The cost of that checkpoint is an externality to both U.S. Helicopter and its customers, because the $560,000 spent on the security checkpoint is paid for by taxpayers. Taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the true cost of the helicopter trip.

The only way to solve this is for the government to bill the airline passengers for the cost of security screening. It wouldn't be much per ticket, maybe $15. And it would be much less at major airports, because the economies of scale are so much greater.

The article even points out that customers would gladly pay the extra $15 because of another externality: the people who decide whether or not to take the helicopter trip are not the people actually paying for it.

Bobby Weiss, a self-employed stock trader and real estate broker who was U.S. Helicopter's first paying customer yesterday, said he would pay $300 for a round trip to Kennedy, and he expected most corporate executives would, too.

"It's $300, but so what? It goes on the expense account," said Mr. Weiss, adding that he had no qualms about the diversion of federal resources to smooth the path of highfliers. "Maybe a richer guy may save a little time at the expense of a poorer guy who spends a little more time in line."

What Mr. Weiss is saying is that the costs -- both the direct cost and the cost of the security checkpoint -- are externalities to him, so he really doesn't care. Exactly.

BLANK NOISE PROJECT is trying to create awareness against this.

Harassing women in the buses, passing remarks, in the streets, is generally not considered very serious, but if rape affects the life of a woman, street harassment in daily doeses, potentially ruins the life of whole locality. A woman would be deterred by her family to go though street that are known for harassment, and will possibly miss education and employment opportunity. This is not to be laughed about, such "seemingly harmless lads" are ruining people's life over a period of time by creating a negative enviorenment, they must be stopped.

I ran into this article from conservative Paul Craig Roberts. Despite the growing excuses, I believe it spells out a few interesting bits.

Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. As the government's power grows, the people are eclipsed.

We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.

[...]

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.

The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.

(Emphasis added)

In particular I like his point about the no-fly list. It always felt dumb to have the no-fly list in the first place and all of the side effects we have heard from it are the result of this dumbness. Maybe it was naivete on my part, but this makes sense:

Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush's critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?

This is priceless:

If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability. People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.

I am certain that there are more Bush critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.

He has a follow up article, on the State of The Union, focusing in particular on the economy bits here.

On that note, Bilmes and Stiglitz claim that the actual cost of the Iraq war will end up being between one and two trillion dollars.

In the meantime there is a Sundance short that makes fun at the actual state of the economy. I found it entertaining, but it might not be appreciated by everyone (sorry, requires an updated Flash): here.

Update: Robert's second article goes well with the previous video link:

[...] The US trade deficit in ATP now exceeds the US surplus in Intellectual Property licenses and fees. The US no longer earns enough from high tech to cover any part of its import bill for oil, autos, or clothing.

This is an astonishing development. The US "superpower" is dependent on China for advanced technology products and is dependent on Asia to finance its massive deficits and foreign wars. In view of the rapid collapse of US economic potential, my prediction in January 2004 that the US would be a third world economy in 20 years was optimistic. Another five years like the last, and little will be left.

By Miguel de Icaza.

Om Malik reports:

If you watch Law & Order or The Wire as much as I do, you know that your cell phone records, your locations etc is all stored in a giant database at a phone company. What you also know that cops and legal officials can call up that information, but what you don’t know is that now this information is available for sale on the web for a couple of hundred dollars, thanks to sites like Locatecell.com. The ease with which this information is available, has sent FBI and others in a tizzy.

Chicago Sun-Times reports that FBI is worried that agents can be compromised, just like their snitches. The potential for wide-scale abuse is not only imaginable, but quite possible. Chicago Sun-Times doesn’t really talk about how the information ends up with sites like Locatecell.com. Why aren’t the cell phone companies doing something to make sure that this information doesn’t leak out? I mean shutting down the supply is the best way to prevent this from happening. Anyone have more knowledge about this, please post a comment!

BTW I have heard quite a few stories about how easy it is to read SMSs from/to perticular cellphone for call center employess in Mumbai. Hopefully incidences like this will highlight the importance of privacy. If you have data, it is only a matter of few Rs.10/- CD for it to spread out, if you care about it, you will stop people from recording data in the first place, and if you won't you will see some major event that will shock you when you would realize you were stupid not to.

A must read article by Bruce Schneier on the recent Sony rootkit scandal.

Update: This story on USAToday gives a good overview of the case.