Skating on Stilts

"They should have told me not to pull the trigger"

Journalists are buying into a fired air marshal's claim that he's a whistleblower who's been done wrong.  Robert MacLean went to the press when he got a text message cancelling overnight trips by air marshals for two months during a budget crunch.  He was accused of revealing sensitive security information and fired.  Advocacy groups are claiming the whistleblower protection act is now a dead letter because the agency didn't tell him this was sensitive information.  Put aside how you do that in a text message ("Pls dnt lk ths"?), MacLean's bid for whistleblower status is based on the notion that he went to the press because he thought suspending long-distance coverage was "dangerous."  But revealing publicly that coverage had been suspended?  He couldn't figure out that that might be dangerous too?  He needed a little note at the end of the text message before he could see that the disclosure might get into the wrong hands? 

Somehow I'm glad this guy isn't carrying a gun on commercial flights any more.

Are You A Privacy Victim? -- Part 4

My father died in April at the age of 88.  My mother, who is 81, has all of her mental faculties -- but Dad shielded her from all of the bureaucracy of the world. 

That's going to change a bit now -- she will have to leave my father's group health plan and start by signing up for Medicare Part B (we'll also get her a supplemental insurance policy, I imagine).  To help get this done, she gave me her power of attorney.

But that isn't good enough for Medicare.  They won't accept a power of attorney for "privacy reasons."  So, in order to help Mom through the bureaucracy of Medicare I have to do one of two things:  a)  get her on every call to Medicare to verify that I can act for her; or b) get a doctor to deem her not capable and become her "personal representative" (which means I'm responsible for all of her health issues -- they will send ME the money and I'll have to disburse it and account quarterly to Medicare on how I spent it).  Neither's exactly sensible.  Another victim of privacy rules.  -- Paul Rosenzweig

Why does Russia want a treaty barring cyberwarfare?

The NYT is giving prominence to a Russian proposal to ban cyberwarfare.  The idea has been kicking around for years, but the Russians have been pushing it more strenuously in the last few months.  How come?  Some possibilities:

1.  The Russians think the US is ahead of them in cyberwarfare.  Negotiations would allow the Russians to catch up.

2.  The Russians have finally figured out that the US actually adheres to these arms-control treaties while the Russians can violate them secretly (see, e.g., the biological weapons convention).  The treaty would mean a one-sided stand-down.

3.  An arms control treaty would be good for both sides.

I lean to answer 2, but answer 1 is also a possibility. 

Answer 3 is not. You can't have a real arms control agreement unless you can verify compliance.  How would that work?  Turn every computer monitor into an international arms control monitor?  A principal feature of computer attacks is the difficulty of attribution.  The problem is so painfully obvious that it's hard to imagine the treaty idea is serious. 

The Russians compare their proposal to the chemical weapons convention, but the more apt model may be the biological weapons convention.  There the US took lots of grief for saying that the emperor really had no clothes, that verification was impossible, and that there was no point in pretending to negotiate a follow-on protocol.

In the end, though, answer 2 makes the most sense.  The US military is increasingly hobbled by  arguments about what the law of war permits, so why not give the JAG lawyers something else to worry about?  The Europeans are always eager to find a new realm for international limits on warfare, so why not divide NATO over the issue?  Just making the proposal creates tensions that have an asymmetric impact on the US.  It's no-lose for Russia.

Running barefoot

I couldn't resist.  Inspired by "Born to Run", a good story about ultramarathoning and the role of running in human evolution,  I decided to try running barefoot.  To protect my soles, I bought some remarkably silly-looking Five Finger Vibram slip-ons.   They're like a removable callous, with a separate "finger" for each toe. 

Bottom line:  running barefoot slows you down and keeps you on your toes -- almost literally.  You land on the middle of your foot, rather than the heel.  And in case there's something painful under your foot that you didn't see, you must be ready at all times to take your weight quickly over to the other foot.  You watch the trail much more closely.  And since my weekend trail has at least one stream crossing, I don't have to worry about high water any more.  The "shoes" shed water immediately.  Minor worries:  grass and small plants get caught between your toes; hitting a stone toe-on would be really painful; running on pavement is no fun at all; and the shoes themselves probably cause some callouses.  Over all, though, quite nice.  Light enough for a backpacking camp shoe, too, where the separate toes and flexibility will restore foot function after a day of tenderizing in hiking boots.

Just exactly what kind of news have we been getting from Iran?

Iran is arresting Western journalists.  That's not a big surprise.  What is surprising is the journalists' defense, particularly of a colleague, Maziar Bahari, who works for Time Magazine.  In this article, two reporters give a glimpse of the conditions under which they've been reporting, and then say some revealing things about how they've shaped the news to please the ayatollahs:

 "Dual-citizen journalists often report on subjects the Iranian government considers the most sensitive and endure inconceivable degrees of scrutiny," said Azadeh Moaveni, an Iranian American who has reported from Iran for Time magazine in recent years. "Bahari's journalism these past years has always struck me as textbook objective, which suggests that during this crisis the rules may be changing."
 ...

Bahari's editor, Christopher Dickey, said Bahari, whose partner in England is five months pregnant, had been "treated with respect" during earlier questioning and during his arrest.

"The big risk for Maziar is that his case will be judged not on the basis of Maziar's reporting but on the basis of an idea about him, on the idea of the foreign press" as conspiring against the regime, Dickey said of Bahari, adding that if government authorities read his reporting on the recent protests, "they'd see very quickly how balanced it was." 

It's pretty clear from these quotes that Western journalists in Iran have spent the last few years carefully watching what they report, trying to write only stories that the Iranian government will consider "balanced" and "objective."  Hmm.  I'll bet that Chris Dickey has never once in his life expressed the slightest interest in whether the U.S. government considers his work balanced or objective.

Are You A Privacy Victim -- Part 3

Have you or someone close to you been victimized by online fraud or a stolen identity?  Are you still waiting for someone to catch the hackers who trashed your computer and invaded your privacy?

You're a Privacy Victim.

While you've been worried about online crime and foreign government network attacks, privacy groups (and Wired magazine) have been Mau-Mauing the most prominent politician who's indicated an interest in computer security.

Meanwhile, privacy advocates will keep fighting computer security efforts -- until there isn't any privacy left. 

(And props to Marc Rotenberg for refusing to pander to Wired on this issue.)

Malware market

Hacking isn't about counting coup any more.  It's all about the money.  So maybe we shouldn't talk any more about "zero day" exploits.  That's old-style thinking from a day when vulnerabilities were found and publicized on day zero, then exploited later.  Now, though, a lot of people are looking for vulnerabilities so they can sell them, not announce them.  There never is a day zero, just the day when we discover we've been pwned.

Bad news for the mullahs

Losing the Iranian street isn't good, but imagine how bad things have to get for an authoritarian Islamic regime to lose even Robert Fisk.  The only thing that could turn Fisk around would be a hint that the U.S. is on his side.  That would be too much for a man whom bin Laden once praised as "neutral" in the struggle between al Qaeda and the United States.

The Oppressive Skies

Pilots of private planes are complaining that TSA is applying to them some of the security rules that apply to commercial flights.  Applying security rules to private planes, they say, is just like fascism.  Or, as one pilot puts it, TSA's claim that it has discretion to apply the rules to private planes "is exactly what the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) said when anyone complained."

A picture shows just how shocking this assertion of authority is. Here's the Google private plane:
                                             

Really, you can see immediately that there's just no chance a terrorist could ever scam a ride on such a plane, or that a plane like that would do any damage if it were flown into a building.  Private planes, after all, are for our kind of people, not the hoi polloi that travel commercial.

Remarkably, the libertarian blogosphere buys the whole Nazi analogy.  Rand Simberg writes, "First they came for the pilots, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a pilot…" Yeah, that's it.  Wealthy pilots who want a special exemption from rules that apply to everyone else are just like, uh, Jews in Nazi Germany.

And Glenn Reynolds buys into the same meme.  Maybe he really does plan to take the Boeing.

International Tribunal Begins Eating Its Young

The International Tribunal established to prosecute war crimes in former Yugoslavia is now prosecuting its former spokeswoman for publishing a book about the tribunal.  Florence Hartmann faces up to seven years in jail for contempt of court.

The crux of the dispute is a set of Serbian government minutes that implicated Milosevic in war crimes.  In 2003, when the Milosevic trial seemed to be falling apart, the Tribunal made a deal with Serbia, which handed over the minutes with the assurance that they'd remain confidential except as needed to convict Milosevic.  Keeping them confidential may have compromised the ability of Bosnia to prove that Serbia was responsible for genocide in a separate case brought before the International Court of Justice.

So it looks as though the tribunal essentially sacrificed Bosnia's claims because it was desperate to make sure that the Milosevic case actually produced a conclusive verdict.  If that was its goal, it made a bad bet; Milosevic died while still on trial.  Later, in 2007, Hartmann wrote a book about the trial, mentioning the minutes despite the confidentiality promises that the tribunal had made to Serbia.

This is a hard case in many ways.  All prosecutors need to cut deals.  All courts need to enforce their orders and the confidentiality of their deliberations.  But both are inclined to mask their mistakes in clouds of self-righteousness and threats of prosecution.  Journalists, too, are remarkably good at dressing up self-interest as righteousness.  Nobody looks good in this fight.

One thing is clear, though.  The tribunal's decisions here were profoundly political. What's more important, convicting Milosevic or determining Serbia's role in the Bosnian genocides?  Should the story told by the minutes be made public?  These are hard questions, and they ought to be made by someone without an ax to grind -- or at least by someone who can be held accountable for grinding its ax too enthusiastically.  In this case, it's likely that the tribunal is indeed grinding its own ax with the enthusiasm of bureaucrat scorned -- making secrecy deals to stave off a debacle in the Milosevic trial and then prosecuting employees who expose the deal to public scrutiny and second-guessing.

So, what if we think the tribunal got it wrong?  Where do we go if we want to stop  an institution that seems to be sacrificing everything in pursuit of self-vindication? 

In a democracy, the elected leader of the government would be held responsible, and fear of being held responsible would force the leader to take a close look at the Hartmann prosecution.  But there is no democracy at the tribunal.  The institution answers, vaguely, to the United Nations, where responsibility is diffused and in any event entirely lacks democratic accountability. 

If the only conviction that comes out of the Milosevic trial is Florence Hartmann's, well, that's life in a transnational world.

Are You A Privacy Victim -- Part 2

Have you ever called to find out the status of a friend or relative sent to the hospital on short notice?  And been turned down flat?  Spent hours or even days trying to locate a loved one?

You're a Privacy Victim.

HIPAA, the 1996 health privacy law, prevents the disclosure of health information without the patient's consent.  Hospitals must get consent before revealing who is in the hospital, for how long, and in what condition.  Hospitals don't have to get consent, but if they don't, then they must withhold all information about a patient.  In a coma?  Not HIPAA's problem.  Maybe someone who loves you will show up with a power of attorney.  You've got one of those handy, right?

I didn't think so.  Yet this is just one of the privacy disasters that HIPAA can cause.  The police in Chester, Delaware, got a call from one man who told them that his wife, in need of a psychiatric evaluation, "was transferred to another hospital and the hospital wouldn’t tell him what hospital she was transferred to."  

Surely HIPAA has some good effects that balance out the inconvenience.  Well, let's see.  Millions of people try to call hospitals to get information about relatives and friends.  Many of them are brusquely turned away, and they must spend hours or days trying to find their missing friend -- at a nearly incalculable cost in anxiety and fear.  That's on one side of the ledger.  On the other, there may be a small number of battered spouses who are hiding from their assaulter in the hospital.  HIPAA preserves their privacy.  Plus the privacy of a few politicians whose condition might be compromised if their hospital stay were leaked. 

You'd have to weigh the privacy of a few politicians pretty heavily to make that balance work.  Surely that's not how HIPAA was ... oh ... Never mind.

Are You A Privacy Victim -- Part 1

Ever been hassled by the airline because you're on the terrorist watchlist?  Can't use e-tickets for the same reason?  Can't get off the list?  Even though your most subversive act was once tearing a "do not remove under penalty of law" tag off the bottom of the couch?

You're a Privacy Victim. 

There's always been a pretty easy solution to overbroad "no-fly" lists.  The solution hasn't been implemented, though, because the ACLU and other privacy advocates campaigned against it.  Why?  Well, to save you from the risk that Big Brother might find out, uh, well, your birthday.  That's right.  The same birthday that's on the license you hand over to TSA every time you go through inspection.  And, come to think of it, wasn't the license was issued by state government -- a sort of little Big Brother?  But never mind, the ACLU fought hard to keep that birthday out of TSA's electronic files.  No matter how many people the fight would inconvenience.  Aren't you glad they're on the job?

There's a long story here, but the short version is this.  The no-fly list has always been pretty short -- a few dozen people in the US and a few thousand worldwide.  But it's administered by the airlines, not by the government.  Airlines with bad computer systems may truncate names; airline employees may spell names in many different ways; so the government has had to include all possible spellings of the names on the list, bloating the list and inconveniencing many people.  If the government ran the system, it could standardize the process.  And, most important, it could use data like birthdates to say, once and for all, "this infant is not the T. Kennedy you're looking for."  It only takes a little data to differentiate the handful of people we don't trust on planes from people with similar names.

The 9/11 Commission said that TSA should take over the program and solve these problems.  Congress mandated that TSA do so in 2004.  But it still hasn't happened.  Why not?  Because the ACLU campaigned against letting the government gather data on travelers, and it persuaded Congress to stall the program for years.  The stall is at an end (TSA has passed several demanding and time-consuming tests to show that it can be trusted with your birthday), but implementation will still take many months.

So will the ACLU apologize for all those years of hassle that as many as a million passengers have endured?  Not likely.  For privacy campaigners, the fight over the no-fly list is a two-fer.  First they get publicity and attorney's fees fighting to keep data out of the hands of TSA. Then when the lack of data predictably produces a system that's bad for travelers, the ACLU spends years complaining about how bad the system is.  TSA takes the blame either way.

Are You A Privacy Victim?

Privacy victims are people who've been harmed by heavy-handed privacy regulation.  Usually privacy victims don't know that the source of their troubles is a privacy law or regulation.  In fact, privacy victims often are enthusiastic supporters of privacy regulation.  Until they realize just how much harm the regulation has caused them.

There are plenty of privacy victims out there.  I'll suggest some, but I welcome hearing about other candidates.

The wisdom of Marion Barry

The ACLU has sued Janet Napolitano over the "detention" of Steven Bierfeldt.  Bierfeldt is a Ron Paul official who put $4700 in cash in a moneybox through TSA's xray machine and then refused to answer questions about the box or the cash.  He recorded everything on his iPod and got 15 minutes of fame for the exploit in April.  Now he wants a declaratory judgment and attorney's fees.  His conduct was wacky at best. He was asked where he works, where he obtained the money and why he was in St. Louis.

In response to the questions, Mr. Bierfeldt never provided answers.  Instead he met each question with a question, asking again and again whether he was required by law to answer the questions. It's definitely not normal behavior. 

Or, as one officer put it, "Are you from this planet?"

We live in a world where power is decentralized.  Things that only government could do in the past can now be done by anyone.  Once upon a time, only the police could set someone up for a crime.  Now, ordinary citizens can aspire to set up the government. 

Color me skeptical, but I think that's what Bierfeldt was doing.  His nonresponses are carefully couched (and maybe coached) to be weird and uncommunicative; it's the sort of thing you'd expect from a passive-aggressive wuss who's hoping to provoke -- and tape -- an angry response. 

And what do you know, he just happens to be carrying his iPod in a pocket where he can turn on the "record' function -- just as the search begins. 

But what really strikes me is the laptop case he puts through security.  After the laptop's been removed, the complaint says, it contains "several books, a Bible, copies of the U.S. Constitution, political stickers, Campaign for Liberty material, and other personal items."  Now maybe, just maybe, you'd carry cash from a fundraising event around the country, although making deposits is a lot safer -- for the fund raiser and the organization that needs the funds.  But how many people who carry cash on to a plane in a moneybox also tote both the Bible *and* a copy of the Constitution in their carryon luggage?  I've never sat next to anyone who was reading either one on the plane, let alone both.  On the other hand, if you're planning to issue a press release five minutes after clearing inspection, that's the kind of reading matter you would choose, since it allows you to claim that TSA was "illegally detaining God's word and the Constitution -- probably because they really really hate Ron Paul."

All in all, TSA and Janet Napolitano could paraphrase Mayor Barry in responding to this suit:  "The wuss set me up." 

This isn't a lawsuit, it's a skit.

There is no sanctuary

An American student has reportedly been physically attacked in Ohio for providing secure Internet proxies to Iranian election protestors.  Sounds like a case for the FBI's hate crimes investigators.  Or the counterintelligence unit.  If we can't punish this kind of behavior, there will be plenty more.

A European abuse of human rights that couldn't happen in America, but will happen to Americans

UK libel law has always been a great way for the wealthy to bankrupt their critics.  Now it's not just being used by terror financiers and their friends.  Chiropractors are suing to shut up their critics, and it appears that U.K. judges are enthusiastically stacking the deck against Internet critics of chiropractors' dubious claims.  This kind of human rights violation could not happen in the US, but UK courts are surprisingly willing to impose their values on the rest of the Internet, so it can happen to Americans who have the temerity to use the Internet. 

You might almost think that Europe is the seat of legal imperialism and unilateralism. 

Do hospitals and governors make money off medical identity theft?

OK, here I'll go out on a limb. I would appreciate some help from any readers, because I'm a little out of my area of expertise, but I've been doing some more thinking about medical identity theft, and there's a scary possibility that hospitals and governors might actually profit from some forms of medical identity theft.

Here's my thinking. Contradictions welcome:

Let's start with something I know for sure. If you're an illegal immigrant in the United States, you're not supposed to work here. With some modest exceptions, though, illegal workers have found that they can beat the system if they steal the name and Social Security Number of an American. And in many industries, such as meat-packing, identity theft by illegal workers is endemic. All of those workers, then, have IDs in the name of an American and they also have that American's social security number, which they used to get their job.

Now suppose you're an illegal worker who's just been laid off from an Iowa meat packing company when you discover you've got a serious disease -- heart problems or cancer or diabetes, say. You can't afford treatment for such a thing. So you go to the local hospital, and they tell you that, under federal law, only legal immigrants can get subsidized nonemergency treatment.

This is a problem for you, and for the hospital. You still want treatment, and the hospital is full of people who would feel pretty bad about themselves if they turned you away. You might die untreated or go home to get what they consider substandard care. Doctors don't like to think they would turn away anyone just because they can't pay, but realistically they can't afford to treat all the poor illegal immigrants in the community. Most of them probably think Congress made a terrible mistake in refusing treatment to anyone in the U.S. But not strongly enough so they want to provide the care without reimbursement.

That tension sends the hospitals back to the rule book. Is there a loophole? Well, maybe. Exactly what, they ask, do you need to do to prove that you are a legal immigrant? In 1996, Congress said you had to produce actual evidence that you were here legally -- a passport or a birth certificate, mainly. But that was a hassle for Americans and for hospitals. Not to mention illegal immigrants. So Congress decided last year to ease the requirement. Now you only have to produce proof of identity, plus a social security number that matches your name.

That's good for deserving poor people who've lost their documents. But it's even better for illegal workers, many of whom have already obtained a driver's license in the name of some poor American, whose SSN they've also borrowed. If the illegal worker presents that license and SSN, everyone's problems are solved. The illegal immigrant gets treatment, the hospital workers feel good about themselves, plus they don't have to pay a price for feeling good about themselves, because Medicaid is picking up the tab. And the State, which is on the hook for reimbursing the hospital, can pass the cost on to the the federal government. Everybody wins, except for the federal budget and the poor schlub whose medical records will be screwed up forever.

In short, the state and the hospital have a powerful economic incentive to look the other way when patients use stolen identities to get medical treatment. If no one looks too closely, the hospital and the state will come out fine. They'll all get paid, and the patient will get treated. But if the state or the hospital cracks down on fraud and stolen identities, they'll end up stuck with patients who can't easily be turned away but whose care will go unreimbursed, costing the hospital or the state a lot of money.

So, what could mess this sweet deal up? Well, better security standards for driver's licenses could. The harder it is to get a license using a fake name, the more likely it is that illegal immigrants will not be able to fake their way into the Medicaid program. And that will put hospitals and state reimbursement authorities back in the moral and economic dilemma of how to handle illegal immigrants with serious diseases.

So getting rid of REAL ID and making sure that driver's license security continues to be bad may save the states money in two ways. First, they won't have to pay for things like validating breeder documents. And second, by making identity theft easier, it will allow states and hospitals to get federal reimbursement after they treat people who aren't actually eligible for Medicaid. As long as they don't look too closely at their patients' actual legal status.

So the complaint by governors that REAL ID will cost them billions might actually be true. Of course, not having REAL ID will cost federal taxpayers those same billions, but that's not the governors' problem.

Oh, and the risk that your medical records will be contaminated by an identity thief's blood type, allergies, and health conditions? Also not the governors' problem. They've got budget problems to worry about, and this is a twofer. What, did you think they were elected to worry about you?

***

OK, that's harsh. And maybe I've missed something in the way the incentives of the Medicaid and Medicare programs work; that's not my field. I'm happy to correct myself if I've been too cynical about the way all this fits together. Let me know.

Wait! Does that mean the National Governors Association is going to kill us?

The medical identity theft report I cited earlier shows a startling connection between medical identity theft, REAL ID, and the National Governor's Association.

The report contains this charmingly clueless passage about what health care providers are doing to stop medical ID theft.

Some providers at Kaiser Permanente, a health network with 30 medical centers and 431 medical offices, now ask to see a driver’s license in addition to the program’s health card. The University of Connecticut Health Center, concerned after a case of medical identity theft occurred there, began checking patient driver’s licenses.

That would be a great idea if driver's licenses were actually a secure form of identification. But they aren't. They suffer from a variety of bad security practices that make it easy to get a real license issued in a false name. That's something that REAL ID was designed to fix. To take one example, it would have required states to actually perform an electronic validation of "breeder documents," like birth certificates, before the documents could be used to obtain a license.

But the National Governors Association doesn't want states to have to spend money improving driver's license security, and it bridles at the federal government setting standards for license security. NGA is leading the charge to repeal REAL ID and substitute a new driver's license law that would among other things eliminate any need for states to validate breeder documents. The NGA is likely to win that battle.

If they succeed, of course, it will remain easy for people to get driver's licenses in other people's names. And then to get medical treatment in other people's names. And in the process to change the blood types on record for the poor sucker whose identity they've stolen with that driver's license.

(The privacy advocates who neglected identity theft when HIPAA was passed are playing an even worse role here. The ACLU and others are campaigning to repeal REAL ID, and they've laid down covering fire for the NGA's attack. So in the name of protecting privacy, they're making the world safer for what could be deadly forms of privacy invasion.)

So if you're wondering whether your governor is trying to kill you, the fairest answer is "Not exactly." That's just a side effect of the effort to unravel REAL ID.

Identity theft can kill you?

Yep. How so? Well, first, medical ID theft is a growing problem. Here's a fascinating report on this undercovered problem: http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/pdf/wpf_medicalidtheft2006.pdf

It turns out that doctors and nurses with a drug problem make fake entries in patient files to justify prescriptions that they fill for themselves. Medicare and Medicaid fraudsters concoct entire courses of treatment for real people and bill for them. And illegal immigrants who wouldn't be eligible for services on their own use the identities they've already stolen to get jobs as a way of getting treatment.

That's bad, but what's especially troubling for ordinary citizens is the way it screws up their medical records. They may only find out about the fraud when they're told they've used up the lifetime health insurance limits they paid for. Or, worse, they could go in for treatment unconscious and be given a transfusion of the wrong blood type because their records had been altered to match the blood type of the identity thief. That's a pretty heavy price to pay for identity theft. And it's likely to get worse as the Administration's electronic medical record initiative takes hold, and medical records are increasingly consolidated into a single electronic patient history that is accessible by all providers.

HIPAA, perhaps unsurprisingly, is more or less useless in addressing the problem. The privacy advocates who helped draft it were so busy abusing pharmaceutical companies and insurers that they evidently didn't have time to think about privacy violations that might kill us.

Does hacking fund terrorism? Maybe so

I'm still waiting to see evidence that music and move piracy has been used to fund terrorism, but the Post has a remarkable story about hacking that may have funded terrorism.

The story also shows how hard it will be to deal with this problem. The scam featured a Jordanian and a bunch of Pakistanis and Filipinos operating out of the Philippines and Italy; they hacked into PBXes with weak security and then charged calls around the world to the unsuspecting companies that owned the PBXs. The calls were made from Italian call centers and generated profits that the authorities suspect went to terrorist groups in the Philippines.

But after a three-year FBI investigation, the Bureau arrested exactly zero suspects, and the indictment filed by Justice will sit in the NJ district court while the authorities in Italy and the Philippines decide what to do with the people they arrested. For a law enforcement culture that values busts and convictions, this can't be an entirely satisfying conclusion to a heavy investment in resources. But without that investment, our infrastructure will be increasingly at the mercy of organized crime and perhaps even terrorists.

Missing the point on cyber security

The Washington Post decides that the new cyber-command is mainly interesting because it is an opportunity to raise privacy concerns. Here's the lead:

The Pentagon's development of a "cyber-command" is prompting questions
about its role in the larger national strategy to protect government
and private-sector computer networks and whether privacy can be
protected. And the command is fueling debate over the proper rules to
govern a new kind of warfare in which unannounced adversaries using
bits of computer code can launch transnational attacks.

We're actually closer to 1984 than most people realize. Antidemocratic forces have the ability to turn on cameras in our homes and offices -- to monitor our every action and every keystroke. That's the lesson of the ghostnet report. http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network

But you won't find any sign of that problem in today's story.

That's because the 1984ish powers aren't being exercised by the US government or NSA. And apparently there's no room in the Post for a story that doesn't make the US and NSA the chief privacy villains.

Downgrading Biological Weapons Funding?

If H1N1 gets bad, the Obama administration plans to fund its response effort by pulling billions out of the fund devoted to bioweapons defense.  The bipartisan WMD commission thinks that's irresponsible.  The commission is right.

Sec. Napolitano: " I'm a big supporter of E-Verify. "

Whew!  That's a relief.  Otherwise, she might, you know, just keep delaying the federal contractor rule -- over and over and over again.