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September 30, 2007
Your dignity or your life
Is it just me or is it highly ironic that this op-ed by Ilana Mercer was published just hours before a woman died in custody at the Phoenix airport after being detained for screaming when she was not allowed on a flight.
Phoenix police were investigating Sunday how a 45-year-old woman died over the weekend while in police custody at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport.Carol Ann Gotbaum, in an undated family photo, may have accidentally strangled herself while in custody.
Carol Ann Gotbaum may have accidentally strangled herself while trying to get out of her handcuffs, Phoenix Police Department spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill said Saturday.
"According to investigators, it appeared as though Ms. Gotbaum had possibly tried to manipulate the handcuffs from behind her to the front, got tangled up in the process, and they ended up around her neck area," he said.
Witnesses told police that Gotbaum was "yelling and screaming" and running through the terminal Friday. She was arrested for disorderly conduct.
While handcuffed, the New Yorker became "disruptive" and she was taken to a holding room, where she was left alone, Hill told CNN affiliate KTVK.
Investigators said officers went to check on her five to 10 minutes later. Police policy requires that be done every 15 minutes.
Finding Gotbaum "unconscious and not breathing," Hill said, officers performed CPR.
"Sometime during the time she went into custody, she went into medical distress," he said.
Gotbaum was the mother of three young children and the daughter-in-law of longtime New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa County medical examiner said an autopsy would be conducted Monday morning.
Liberty is a simple thing. It's the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured and even killed.Evidence of tyranny in America is mounting. For the "offense" of questioning John Kerry persistently and vociferously, Andrew Meyer, a journalism student, was pounced upon, tasered, detained overnight, and charged with violently resisting arrest (a felony) and disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor)....
Freedoms, you say, are secure so long as citizens can check police excesses by recording, photographing or videotaping these public servants performing their duties. Not so. The police can video us without our consent, but we film them at the risk of a felony prosecution.
"There's been a rash of arrests of late for videotaping police," writes Radley Balko, a civil liberties specialist. Balko has catalogued countless cases where individuals who've filmed police excesses have been arrested on felony wiretapping charges and threatened with lengthy jail sentences. Balko has called for a repeal of laws "explicitly forbidding the recording, photographing or videotaping of police officers. [W]hile they're on duty, they serve the public. And the public, their employer, should have every right to keep them accountable."
As Thomas Jefferson said, "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Posted by Mike at 08:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
September 29, 2007
"The only thing we have to use is fear itself"
Great quote from Countdown on MSNBC:
Jonathan Alter: "Well, you know, you mentioned my FDR book. I sometimes think the motto these folks have is 'The only thing we have to use is fear itself.'"
Posted by Mike at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Beyond the pale?
Republican leaders are outraged at today's Democratic radio address:
Hi, my name is Graeme Frost. I'm 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably havent heard of CHIP, the Childrens Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today.CHIP is a law the government made to help families like mine afford healthcare for their kids. Three years ago, my family was in a really bad car accident. My younger sister Gemma and I were both hurt. I was in a coma for a week and couldn't eat or stand up or even talk at first. My sister was even worse.
I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half months and I needed a big surgery. For a long time after that, I had to go to physical therapy after school to get stronger. But even though I was hurt badly, I was really lucky. My sister and I both were.
My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but the hospital bills were huge. We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program. But there are millions of kids out there who don't have CHIP, and they wouldn't get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. Their parents might have to sell their cars or their houses, or they might not be able to pay for hospital bills at all.
Now I'm back to school. One of my vocal chords is paralyzed so I don't talk the same way I used to. And I can't walk or run as fast as I did. The doctors say I can't play football any more, but I might still be able to be a coach. I'm just happy to be back with my friends.
I don't know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I'm glad I could see them because of the Childrens Health Program.
I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address.
Thanks for listening.
A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) sharply criticized Graeme’s appearance:
To use an innocent young child as a human shield and misrepresent the position of the president of the United States is, frankly, beyond the pale.
A human shield? I'll tell you what's beyond the pale. Letting kids die or suffer from permanent injuries because their parents can't get a home equity line of credit big enough to pay for their medical care.
Posted by Mike at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 21, 2007
Goldsmith to testify on October 2nd
NOTICE OF FULL COMMITTEE HEARINGThe Senate Committee on the Judiciary has scheduled a hearing on
“Preserving the Rule of Law in the Fight Against Terrorism” for Tuesday, October 2, 2007 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.By order of the Chairman
Witness ListHearing before the
Senate Judiciary Committeeon
“Preserving the Rule of Law in the Fight Against Terrorism”
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 226
10:00 a.m.Jack Landman Goldsmith
Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Posted by Mike at 12:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 16, 2007
Think of all the exciting cruise packages
Arctic ice melt opens Northwest Passage
PARIS - Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.
Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.
"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected," Pedersen said in an ESA statement posted on its Web site Friday.
Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected — but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful Saturday.
A U.N. panel on climate change has predicted that polar regions could be virtually free of ice by the summer of 2070 because of rising temperatures and sea ice decline, ESA noted.
Posted by Mike at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 14, 2007
So long SCO
SCO Group files for bankruptcy
SALT LAKE CITY - The SCO Group Inc., licenser of the Unix operating system, filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, drained by unsuccessfully filing lawsuits claiming its software code was misappropriated by developers of the open-source Linux operating system.The Lindon, Utah, company said it is seeking protection from creditors under Chapter 11 as it continues to license and improve Unix for corporate servers.
"We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their critical business operations," Darl McBride, president and chief executive, said in a statement Friday.
McBride has blamed competition from Linux for operating losses and the ongoing slide in company revenues. The company said its operating loss in the quarter ending April 30 was $1.1 million. A year earlier, it lost $3.9 million.
In August, U.S. District Court Dale Kimball ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO, owns the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. SCO licenses the Unix software for corporate servers.
The case could leave SCO with a bigger liability: Kimball said SCO may owe Novell software royalties.
"They were going to owe Novell a ton of money that they probably didn't have," said Rob Enderle, an industry analyst in San Jose, Calif. "They had been taking a major hit from legal fees and were burning through cash at a high rate. I don't think this is a big surprise."
Kimball's ruling was a relief for IBM Corp., the target of one lawsuit by SCO claiming Big Blue dumped Unix code in Linux.
Separately, Novell is countersuing SCO for damages in a trial that was to begin next week but is now on hold because of the bankruptcy filing.
Posted by Mike at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 09, 2007
What does a police state look like?
I'm sorry, but this is not right:
Oversalted burger leads to chargesKendra Bull was arrested Friday, charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct and freed on $1,000 bail.
Bull, 20, said she accidentally spilled salt on hamburger meat and told her supervisor and a co-worker, who "tried to thump the salt off."
On her break, she ate a burger made with the salty meat. "It didn't make me sick," Bull told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But then Police Officer Wendell Adams got a burger made with the oversalted meat, and he returned a short time later and told the manager it made him sick.
Bull admitted spilling salt on the meat, and Adams took her outside and questioned her, she said.
"If it was too salty, why did (Adams) not take one bite and throw it away?" said Bull, who has worked at the restaurant for five months. She said she didn't know a police officer got one of the salty burgers because she couldn't see the drive-through window from her work area.
Police said samples of the burger were sent to the state crime lab for tests.
City public information officer George Louth said Bull was charged because she served the burger "without regards to the well-being of anyone who might consume it."
Posted by Mike at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 02, 2007
Good news from North Korea
The chief U.S. nuclear envoy says North Korea has agreed to identify all its nuclear programs and disable them by the end of this year.The U.S.-North Korean nuclear agreement was announced Sunday after two days of negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, chief of the U.S. delegation, says the talks were "very good [and] very substantive," and that he anticipates further progress at the next round of six-nation talks about North Korea, later this month.
Hill's North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Kwan, confirms his country is ready to "declare," or list, all of its nuclear programs, and then dismantle them, although he did not mention a specific date, while speaking to reporters on Sunday.
Kim says his country will receive additional "political and economic compensation" in return for the agreement reached in Geneva, but neither side has disclosed any further details.
In addition to nuclear programs, the U.S. and North Korean teams in Geneva were discussing efforts to normalize relations between Washington and Pyongyang, and what needs to be done if the United States is to remove North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.
Posted by Mike at 07:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 01, 2007
Can you name this unnamed Navy official?
Many thanks to keshavsmilitaryblog for pointing out this article from Seapower magazine back in October 2005:
Digging DeepMunns, David
The use of data mining reportedly helped unmask a terrorist leader months before 9/11, but there are concerns about coordination and privacy
26 Terabytes of Data
The Navy mines large volumes of data each day, but converting it into intelligence is still the work of human analysts.
* New software tools cannot determine the significance of data.
* An executive office to foster coordination among data mining programs could be helpful.
* Coming soon: Project Rockwell will plumb the depths of news reports.
Recent reports by The New York Times and Fox News that the Pentagon identified 9/11 ring-leader Mohammed Atta as part of a U.S.-based terrorist cell months prior to the attacks on Washington and New York have sparked new interest - and controversy - about the Defense Department's relatively nascent abilities to assess huge volumes of data for patterns of behavior that are indicative of terrorists and their activities.
According to press reports, Atta was identified in early 2000 by several military officers, including Navy Capt. Scott J. Phillpott, who managed a Pentagon program called "Able Danger" that employed an analytical process called "data mining." The process allows intelligence analysts armed with specially designed software to aggregate multiple data sources, such as lists of terrorists and decades of reporting by the Associated Press, and search for specific patterns of behavior, anomalies and relationships. The findings become the basis for refined analyses by intelligence specialists.
The New York Times reported in August that Defense Department lawyers forced three meetings to be canceled where military officials involved with "Able Danger" were to report Atta's name to the FBI after the program identified him. These claims have not been confirmed by the Pentagon.
U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who arranged a meeting between the news agencies and Phillpott, released a statement in late August describing the program's objective as "to identify and target al Qaeda on a global basis, and, through the use of cutting-edge technology ... to manipulate, degrade or destroy the global al Qaeda infrastructure."
After the public speculation about "Able Danger," the 9/11 Commission stated Aug. 12 that it had learned about the program in October 2003. Initial informants did not mention Atta or any other future highjackers. In July 2004, a different informant knowledgeable about "Able Danger" told the Commission he had seen Atta's name and photo in another analyst's notes. However, this informant was not able to substantiate that assertion to the satisfaction of the Commission, and "Able Danger" was not mentioned in the Commission's final report.
The alleged identification of Atta has attracted high-profile attention to the potential of data mining technologies and processes as intelligence tools. However, the usage and processes of data mining remain relatively immature in the military arena.
One official told Seapower that coordination of data-mining efforts and requirements between federal agencies should be much improved. Also, implementation and oversight issues remain a key challenge in balancing the use of data-mining tools with privacy concerns.
Data mining is not new. Industry has reaped benefits from it in sectors such as health care, insurance and banking. But the lack of coordination between government agencies sometimes creates barriers that prevent valuable intelligence from reaching the proper authorities.
At the forefront of acquisition and development of Navy data-mining tools are the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the Naval Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). There is little to no coordination between these commands to acquire data-mining tools in concert, a Navy official said, adding that one of the biggest problems with Navy data-mining tools is the number of various commands working on acquiring these tools, "some of which overlap, and it's not always as well coordinated as it could be."
The official suggested establishing a maritime domain awareness program executive office as a means to "deconflict" some of the divergent acquisition of data-mining tools between commands, which leads to conflicts in data and hardships in comparing data sets. The Navy had no comment on the plausibility of this suggestion.
"There have been times where ONI needed information that existed in other agencies' data sources" and it was not available, the Navy official said. "It's certainly not seamless and it's not as well integrated as it could be. Today, there are still lots of places where things can fall through the cracks and where connections might not be made.
"For example, there is not a single source of, or a single list of, terrorists" that all intelligence commands share, the official said. "If someone boards a ship in the Mediterranean and gets a crew list of people who are on that ship and that ship's en route to the United States, we can take that crew list but we have to run it against multiple lists to see if anybody who's on that ship pops up as a bad guy. ... It could be easy to not check against somebody's database."
ONI shares a working relationship with Naval Networks Commander Vice Adm. James McArthur, who wears a lesser-known hat as the assistant chief of naval operations for Information Technology. McArthur's office provides oversight and guidance to validate ONI's information technology spending on tools such as data mining.
McArthur's office was reluctant to discuss these tools because of the "Able Danger" controversy, citing their immaturity and the relative lack of "concrete" examples of how they can be used successfully, according to a Navy spokesperson.
Several experts told Seapower that data mining is destined to be a valuable asset in the war on terror, but should be viewed as a capability with advantages and limitations rather than a cure-all for the nation's growing intelligence requirements.
Jeffrey W. Seifert, an analyst in information science and technology policy for the Resources, Science and Industry division of the Congressional Research Service, released an overview of data mining last December. The report points to a limitation in data mining as being unable to determine the value or significance of intelligence. It also mentions an inability of data-mining tools to determine causal relationships.
"For example, an application may identify that a pattern of behavior, such as the propensity to purchase airline tickets just shortly before a flight is scheduled to depart, is related to characteristics such as income, level of education and Internet use. However, that does not necessarily indicate that the ticket purchasing behavior is caused by one or more of these variables," the report states.
Regardless of the particular data-mining tool or its limitations, the first step in data mining is to concentrate data into a single, normalized architecture or data model. That can be done physically, by actually moving all the data into a common disk form, or "disk warehouse," so it can then be digested to resolve ambiguities, or the sorting can be done automatically by a computer. For example, if one set of data is recorded in meters and one is recorded in feet, then the data-mining process would initially make a conversion so that when the actual tools are run against the data set a consistent outcome would be produced. Once data is normalized, the tools scan through it and create a statistical model.
Data-mining tools look through the existing data and identify patterns. From those patterns, anomalies, or out-of-place data patterns, are recognized and then analyzed. One notable outcome from the analysis of these patterns is the ability to make predictions about what is missing in the data, or what elements of data are not included.
This, however, is an extremely difficult task when working with 26 terabytes of active data on a daily basis, an amount that would fill up about 85 high-end 300 gigabyte hard drives each day. This quantity of information being processed by the Navy is also growing at a rate of 10 percent per year, according to ONI.
Nonetheless, data mining is an asset to government agencies that have taken on new roles in the aftermath of 9/11.
A new interest of the Navy and other government agencies is to track the movement of more than 130,000 commercial vessels and the 17 million cargo containers they carry, which could be used by terrorists as a means of attack against U.S. ports, or to smuggle arms or people into the country. ONI looks at transit plans, bills of lading, intelligence reports, and years of reporting by internal analysts and news agencies to identify vulnerabilities or suspicious activity within the shipping industry. Today, the Navy is shifting its focus from the ships themselves to terrorist use of the commercial shipping network, according to a Navy source.
"Many of the problems that we're looking at in the commercial shipping industry are very much analogous to fraud detection; we want to track norms and we want to identify things that are outside of the norm," said the Navy official.
Data-mining tools take some of the manpower out of the loop, but the likelihood of them ever reaching a capability to replace the need for analysts is unlikely. Data-mining tools provide some of the manipulation of data that data entry analysts have historically had to deal with, and the development of these tools now allows analysts to focus on the actual threats and their dissemination to the appropriate authorities for mitigation.
There are typically 10,000 messages on an analyst's desk at ONI every morning. One tool ONI has been exploring, and is deploying this fall to approximately three-dozen workstations, is Project Rockwell. Derived from another agency and an industry partner, Project Rockwell allows analysts to go through open wire news feeds, such as Reuters or the Associated Press, and run queries against the feeds in the areas that they have highlighted.
If there is a subject an analyst has particular interest in, they can highlight it, and pertinent information will be color-coded on their desktop. For example, if there is a topic of concern that normally has one news-feed pertaining to it and suddenly there are hundreds of feeds, Project Rockwell brings that information to the analyst's attention and directs them to that topic or subject of interest.
"What it allows them do is go through the thousands of messages that they would get normally in a day and does it four times faster," said the Navy official. "That's not taking the man out of the loop, but it's certainly freeing up the man to do more analysis and less data sorting and initial review."
In the homeland security realm, there are some legal privacy constraints, not necessarily restrictions, on sharing information outside of Department of Defense boundaries, depending on what that information is. Intelligence commands, for example, have limitations on how and how long they can retain information on U.S. persons or companies.
"What we're hoping to build is a capability that, if we can't keep the data, will allow us to connect the data that might be held by the FBI or by the U.S. Coast Guard, as examples of law enforcement agencies, so they can easily extract value from our data," said the official.
Posted by Mike at 02:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)