Jamie Boyle: Deconstructing Stupidity. It
is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that
required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without
asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial,
no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These
are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They
have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why
are we making them?

This important essay asks,
and begins to answer, the key question of why IP law has gone so wrong.
Boyle points out that there's money on the side of a less Draconian
system than we have — the technology industry dwarfs the entertainment
cartel — yet the law totally favors the entertainment side. The
answers, he says, are complex and rife with mythology, pushed on all of
us by the copyright interests, that skews the result.
Read it. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.]

• the anti-entrepreneurial “Indentured Servitude Promotion Act“,
• the “American Aristocracy Tax“,
• and a crackdown on moral turpitude in the media

Of course, Victorianization wouldn't be complete without a good dash of hypocrisy. More signs that are becoming a rentier state with abandon… [John Robb's Weblog]

According to the AP:

Security at American airports is no better under federal
control than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks, a congressman says two
government reports will conclude.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of
Congress, and the Homeland Security Department's inspector general are
expected to release their findings soon on the performance of
Transportation Security Administration screeners.

This finding will not surprise anyone who has flown recently. How
does anyone expect competent security from screeners who don't know the
difference between books and books of matches? Only two books of matches are now allowed on flights; you can take as many reading books as you can carry.

The solution isn't to privatize the screeners, just as the solution
in 2001 wasn't to make them federal employees. It's a much more complex
problem.

I wrote about it in Beyond Fear (pages 153-4):

No matter how much training they get, airport screeners
routinely miss guns and knives packed in carry-on luggage. In part,
that's the result of human beings having developed the evolutionary
survival skill of pattern matching: the ability to pick out patterns
from masses of random visual data. Is that a ripe fruit on that tree?
Is that a lion stalking quietly through the grass? We are so good at
this that we see patterns in anything, even if they're not really
there: faces in inkblots, images in clouds, and trends in graphs of
random data. Generating false positives helped us stay alive; maybe
that wasn't a lion that your ancestor saw, but it was better to be safe
than sorry. Unfortunately, that survival skill also has a failure mode.
As talented as we are at detecting patterns in random data, we are
equally terrible at detecting exceptions in uniform data. The
quality-control inspector at Spacely Sprockets, staring at a production
line filled with identical sprockets looking for the one that is
different, can't do it. The brain quickly concludes that all the
sprockets are the same, so there's no point paying attention. Each new
sprocket confirms the pattern. By the time an anomalous sprocket rolls
off the assembly line, the brain simply doesn't notice it. This
psychological problem has been identified in inspectors of all kinds;
people can't remain alert to rare events, so they slip by.

The tendency for humans to view similar items as identical makes it
clear why airport X-ray screening is so difficult. Weapons in baggage
are rare, and the people studying the X-rays simply lose the ability to
see the gun or knife. (And, at least before 9/11, there was enormous
pressure to keep the lines moving rather than double-check bags.) Steps
have been put in place to try to deal with this problem: requiring the
X-ray screeners to take frequent breaks, artificially imposing the
image of a weapon onto a normal bag in the screening system as a test,
slipping a bag with a weapon into the system so that screeners learn it
can happen and must expect it. Unfortunately, the results have not been
very good.

This is an area where the eventual solution will be a combination of
machine and human intelligence. Machines excel at detecting exceptions
in uniform data, so it makes sense to have them do the boring
repetitive tasks, eliminating many, many bags while having a human sort
out the final details. Think about the sprocket quality-control
inspector: If he sees 10,000 negatives, he's going to stop seeing the
positives. But if an automatic system shows him only 100 negatives for
every positive, there's a greater chance he'll see them.

Paying the screeners more will attract a smarter class of worker, but it won't solve the problem.

[Schneier on Security]

In an Ohio sting operation
at a strip bar, a 22-year-old student intern with the United States
Marshals Service was given a fake identity so she could work undercover
at the club. But instead of giving her a fabricated identity, the
police gave her the identity of another woman living in another Ohio
city. And they didn't tell the other woman.

Oddly enough, this is legal. According to Ohio's identity theft law, the police are allowed to do it. More specifically, the crime cannot be prosecuted if:

The person or entity using the personal identifying
information is a law enforcement agency, authorized fraud personnel, or
a representative of or attorney for a law enforcement agency or
authorized fraud personnel and is using the personal identifying
information in a bona fide investigation, an information security
evaluation, a pretext calling evaluation, or a similar matter.

I have to admit that I'm stunned. I naively assumed that the police
would have a list of Social Security numbers that would never be given
to real people, numbers that could be used for purposes such as this.
Or at least that they would use identities of people from other parts
of the country after asking for permission. (I'm sure people would
volunteer to help out the police.) It never occurred to me that they
would steal the identity of random citizens. What could they be
thinking? [Schneier on Security]

The Economist has an excellent editorial on security trade-offs. You need to subscribe to read the whole thing, but here's my favorite paragraph:

The second point is that all technologies have both good
and bad uses. There is currently a debate about whether it is safe to
install mobile antennas in underground stations, for example, for fear
that
terrorists will use mobile phones to detonate bombs. Last year's bombs
in Madrid were detonated by mobile phones, but it was the phones'
internal alarm-clock function, not a call, that was used as the trigger
mechanism. Nobody is suggesting that alarm clocks be outlawed, however;
nor does anyone suggest banning telephones, even though kidnappers can
use them to make ransom demands. Rather than demonising new
technologies, their legitimate uses by good people must always be
weighed against their illegitimate uses by bad ones. New technologies
are inevitable, but by learning the lessons of history, needless scares
need not be.

[Schneier on Security]