Skating on Stilts

Excerpt 5 - Biotech

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

If jet travel and computers were the ghosts of technologies past and present, biotechnology is a specter that haunts the future. It became my personal nightmare while serving on the Robb-Silberman commission. The United States agreed to give up biological weapons in the 1970s. And it stopped all work on them at that time. The Russians signed the same treaty but if anything they expanded their biological weapons programs, making ever more loathsome and unstoppable diseases. Little wonder then that their client states and allies, like Iraq, also had biological programs.

Most troubling from an intelligence point of view, our spies had little or no insight into these programs, in Russia or in Iraq, until defectors revealed them. It was just too easy to hide them, in medical or insecticide factories, say, or in anonymous laboratories in obscure cities.

Just as bad, the death and demoralization that biological weapons cause can be equivalent to a nuclear detonation. That made it crucial that we do a better job of tracking foreign governments’ illicit biological programs, as the Robb-Silberman commission recommended.

But that wasn’t the scariest part. What scared me was how rapidly the ability to make biological weapons is being democratized. Biotechnology is growing as fast as jet travel and computers. The cost and difficulty of biological engineering is being reduced at an exponential rate.

And scientists’ ability to build dangerous organisms is increasing just as fast. In 2005, the deadly 1918 flu virus was rebuilt from scratch. Smallpox has been eradicated in the wild; it is more dangerous to humankind than ever, now that vaccinations have stopped. It has not been synthesized, at least not that we know of. But the failure to recreate smallpox is now a matter of choice, not capability. Larger and more complex organisms have already been created, and the cost and difficulty of assembling such DNA sequences keeps dropping.

In fact, the current state of the art has moved from viruses (which some would describe as less than living) to bacteria. In 2008, scientists assembled the entire DNA sequence for a small bacterium that causes urinary tract infections.

Of course, you have to be really talented to assemble that large a sequence. Only a handful of labs could accomplish that feat today. But Moore’s law will do soon do for DNA synthesis what it did for mainframes. DNA experiments that were once the province only of big institutions with sophisticated staffs will in a few years be the playground of smart high school kids.

Indeed, that’s the dream of a lot of influential and wealthy industry leaders. The people who lived through the information revolution would like the biotech revolution to be a straight replay -- complete with DNA hackers operating out of their parents’ garage, DNA synthesis IPOs, and “open source” DNA coding languages. They’re not concerned that biotech and synthetic DNA haven’t really delivered big improvements in human health yet. Massively democratizing computer power was good for all of us, they say, pointing to the results of the personal computer and the Internet. Why shouldn’t the mass democratization of DNA synthesis also produce an outpouring of creativity, playfulness, and unexpected progress? Besides, they conclude, it’s going to happen whether we like it or not, so we might as well get on the bandwagon.

But you don’t have to be Cassandra, or Ned Ludd, to see that a world where millions of people can make smallpox from scratch might turn out to be a dangerous place.

That's not a future that wants to kill you; that’s a future that could kill you in a fit of adolescent pique.

Justice -- 50% off?

The Al-Marri case was supposed to be a demonstration that the courts and prosecutors could handle terrorism cases, even the big ones.  Al-Marri was indicted after years in the brig under the Bush Administration's enemy combatant program, instituted because that administration didn't think the justice system could handle these terrorism cases effectively. 

Now the first results are in.  And they aren't good.  The Justice Department has been forced to let al-Marri plead to a single count of material support for terrorism, presumably because they weren't sure they could get a conviction on anything worse.  And the judge has given him credit for all the time he spent (cue violins) in "a dark and chilly cell without a blanket, a mattress and his prescription glasses."  Al-Marri, who came to the US on September 10, 2001, with personal instructions from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, will walk free in a little over eight years. 

His lawyer thinks that's just dandy.  It "shows our system can handle [terrorism cases] in an evenhanded way, consistent with our ideals of justice."  And the administration?  It wants to change the subject:

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because a government task force is still reviewing the cases of Guantanamo detainees, said possible criminal charges against them could be far more serious and could carry much longer prison terms than Marri received.

 Is that how we show the effectiveness of the justice system in international terrorism cases?  Because some of the terrorists could get long prison terms -- if they're convicted?

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 4

                        We wake up 11 hours later at 7:30.  Breakfast is included in the price of the room, and it’s served out by the pool – goat cheese, boiled eggs, olives, honey, and bread. 

                        We start eating, and the eating seems to go on forever.  We get up again and again to fill our plates and glasses.  We even drink multiple refills of the watered-down Tang that Turkish hotesl serve under the label “orange juice”.  (As far as I can tell, Tang was last served in the United States in 1971.  I suspect that the Turkish army must have bought up all remaining supplies that year, and some Turkish oligarch with connections has been making a fortune selling off the government’s stockpile ever since.  There’s no other explanation to the ubiquity of this pitiful concoction in a country that grows some of the best oranges in the world.)

                        Other guests come and go.  We keep eating.  The manager grows uneasy.  It begins to look as though we’ll eat $25 worth of olives and bread.  A waiter clears our place.  We don’t take the hint.  We just get new plates and fill them up again.  And again.  The manager can’t bear to watch any more.  He retires into the hotel.  At last we are done.  Cool, clean, full of liquid and food.  We lean back and plan the day.

                        Today we’ll be passing through some of Turkey’s oldest seaports.  We’ll begin with Phaselis.  Since that ancient city is north of us, and the rest of the Lycian Way runs south from Tekirova, we decide to leave our packs with the manager (who’ll agree to anything if we’ll Just Stop Eating), take a bus to Phaselis, and walk back without the packs.  Soon we’re in a dolmus, rattling a few miles up the coast and climbing down at the entrance to Phaselis.

                        Of all the ruins we will see on the trip, Phaselis may be the most evocative.  The town was built on a small peninsula that is broken by several small harbors, notably a tiny and deep circular inlet used by the Romans as a military harbor.  The whole harbor is smaller than the floor of a modern basketball arena.  The town, too, takes up an area that would be no more than a few square blocks in a modern city.  It’s remarkable how the internal combustion engine has changed everyone’s sense of urban scale.

Phaselis was settled around 700 BC.  By 500 BC, it was wealthy enough to negotiate as an equal with the pharaohs of Egypt.  It had been rich and strong for two hundred years when Alexander the Great showed up on the city’s outskirts.  Showing a well-tuned instinct for the main chance, the Phaselians invited him to spend the winter with them before he marched off to conquer the known world.  Thanks to its fine harbors, Phaselis maintained a high degree of independence for centuries thereafter, even acting as a pirates’ haven during the early years of the Roman Empire.  When the city finally became too much of a nuisance, though, the Romans conquered and destroyed it, finally selling off the land to a new batch of settlers and incorporating it into the Roman Empire shortly after the birth of Christ.  Since then, it has been subjected to Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman rule, but the Ottomans encouraged the rise of Antalya and the decline of Phaselis, which was gradually abandoned and now lies at the end of a long, nearly deserted road.

                        The military harbor still has its sea walls – intact but now sunk below the water and tumbled about -- and it’s easy to see how a simple chain could have closed off the little entrance that was left when the Roman engineers were done.  Other features of the town include a short but massive stone aqueduct from the town center, apparently built simply to make sure that water pressure would stay high for residents near the harbor.

                        We climb to the well-preserved and even more ancient Greek theater.  From its seats you can see the high mountains that forced Alexander to winter here.  We sit in the bleachers, where Alexander’s officers and men must have sat as he laid out the next year’s campaign.  Then we stand where Alexander would have stood.  You can look into the eyes of every member of the audience, speak to them in something close to normal tones.

                        Back in Tekirova, we pick up our packs and buy supplies -- a kerchief to wipe the sweat off my face while hiking, plus lunch for two more days.  We eat the first day’s lunch as we walk south along the Tekirova strip -- succulent peaches and heavily flavored grapes.  Turkish fruit is a joy -- still grown for the human palate rather than the convenience of mechanical harvesters.  Gordon eats his oranges skin and all, observing that he could never eat an American orange the same way.

                        It’s midday.  Shade is sparse.  The guy who sold me this kerchief two kilometers back wouldn’t recognize it if I brought it back.  In fact, I doubt he’d touch it. Soon the Tekirova strip ends, and a signpost tells us that the Lycian Way is leaving the paved road.  We are embarking on a roadless stretch of Mediterranean coast.

                        With the shadows at their smallest, the tractor path we are following is in full sun, and it is hard to haul the packs up even the mild slopes of this rolling countryside for more than half an hour at a time.  We take a long break, and by 2:30 the shadows have begun to creep across the track.  We drag ourselves from shadow to shadow.

                        But the country makes it all worthwhile.  We are marching along a coast defined by coves and headlands.  We climb the headlands to the breeze and a view of the deep blue Mediterranean and the turquoise inlet waters.  Then we drop down to sea level as we pass each inlet and start our climb to the next headland.

                        The first cove we encounter after leaving the blacktop has no cars, but it is full of tourist boats that have moored here to give a sense of isolation without actually getting too far from the “No Fear” outlet.  The boats are rigged to look like two-masted sailing ships, but they never use the sails as far as we can tell.  Instead they cruise along with a powerful inboard engine.  From the headland, they make a pretty sight, romantic vessels in a picture-perfect setting. A few swimmers dive from the top decks.  Rock music echoes off the far headland as we march over the next rise.

                        Here, the scene is different.  The cove is nearly deserted.  One small boat is anchored near two rocks that rise straight from the sea.  A bright white beach curves from headland to headland.  A winding pool lies behind it at one spot, like an old river too tired to reach the sea.       The path drops straight to the valley floor, and we walk toward the beach, dying for a swim.

                        The water is as warm as blood here by the shore.  It cools a bit as we wade to our chests and float on our backs, totally limp.  Refreshed, we explore.  The winding pool we saw from the headland is indeed a river that lacks the strength to break through the last thirty meters of beach.  Instead, the water must be draining slowly through the sand.  But it’s fresh and cool enough to wash the salt off our clothes and ourselves.

                        We lie in the sand for a time.  But we’ve got one more headland to climb. Humping over the rise as the heat eases, we reach the third inlet and now are utterly alone.  A deserted cabin sits at one end of the beach, Turkish flag flying proudly in the wind.  The cabin looks as though the inhabitants left yesterday.  Clothes hang on pegs.  Plastic chairs sit around a table.  But the newspapers littering the ground are from May.

                        Exploring further, we find another failed river just back of the beach.  It is deeper than the last, but swampier as well.  A small boat is tied up on the bank, and we pole out to the center of the deep, river-shaped pond.  A turtle swims below the boat, startlingly visible in the clear water.  We fill our bottles.  The water will have to be boiled to be safe, but it’s fresh and there’s plenty of it.

                        Sleeping under the sky, the night air is perfect. There seems to be no barrier between our bare skin and the soft air. The stars and half-moon shine down brightly.  Every few minutes, we catch a distant rhythm -- music from boats moored at offshore islands.

Excerpt 4 -- Information Technology

This is excerpt 4 from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

For decades, information technology has been driven by Moore’s Law. One version of the law holds that the number of transistors that can be cheaply placed on a chip will double every 18 to 24 months.

It’s true. A computer that cost $1 million in 1970 could be duplicated for $500,000 in 1972 and for $10,000 in 1984. By the end of the 1980s, personal computers were giving individuals capabilities that were once available only to government and the Fortune 500; electronic spreadsheets, word processors, contacts files, and email began changing the way we all do business.

Surely one of the oddest results of going to work for the National Security Agency was my initiation into the vanguard of this trend. NSA controlled encryption, and especially exports of encryption. But as cheap home computers made the Internet a potential source of mass electronic commerce, Microsoft and other software companies wanted to build encryption into their products. They rightly saw a need for more security if computer networks were going to carry large transactions.

So, to defend NSA’s encryption policy, I had to understand the Internet, and the changes it would bring. While I never fully accepted their encryption policy proposals, I came to believe that the Internet revolution was coming. After leaving government I built a law practice around that technology, representing Netscape before its IPO launched the revolution and dozens of other Silicon Valley firms.

That meant I had a ringside seat as Moore’s Law worked its magic. By the late 1990s, computing power that had cost $1 million in 1970 could be had for a hundred dollars.

Cheap computing and telecommunications (not to mention a gradually softening policy on encryption exports) did indeed create a mass market Internet. We were able to search the accumulated wisdom and folly of humanity in seconds. We could download books, music, and movies – what we wanted when we wanted it. We could bank, play games, trade securities, salute friends, trash enemies, and gossip, build businesses, lose and find lovers, all on line.

Oh, and a few more things: we could be defrauded, robbed, extorted, and blackmailed with stolen secrets on line, too. The effort to export strong encryption turned out to be a red herring. Crooks easily found ways around even the strongest encryption.

But, as with commercial jet travel, it took a while for the bad news about information technology to arrive.

Some of the first hackers discovered that they could obtain free phone service by fooling AT&T’s computers in the 1970s, and the first computerized “worm” to clog the Internet wasn’t launched until 1988. Computer viruses emerged in 1980s, passed from disk to disk. They were an annoyance, but little more. Most were written to show off the skills of the author, a twentieth century version of “counting coup.”

But as we moved our lives on line, criminals followed. Hackers discovered that there was money in compromising other people’s computers. Spammers could use those machines to send messages without fear of being shut down. Nigerian spammers learned to defraud gullible men and women who had never traveled out of the country.

Networks of compromised machines were marshaled into vast zombie armies that could attack a single website together, knocking it off line. For some sites, being off line even for an hour was so costly that they’d pay extortionate fees to stop the attack.

Suddenly, exploiting computer security holes wasn’t the cyberspace equivalent of spraypainting graffiti on subway cars. It was a new form of organized crime. It paid well enough to attract real talent. And that talent found new ways to make insecurity pay.

Compromising the computers of credit card processors and merchants allowed identity theft and credit card fraud on a massive scale. Sending booby trapped emails to known individuals, in contrast, might only compromise a single machine, but it would allow the criminal to steal every name and password used on the machine – and to empty the bank account of the victim.

As the criminals demonstrated what could be done on line, governments followed their example. Governments didn’t steal money, though. They stole secrets. Protected from prosecution and motivated by patriotism, government hackers turned out to be even more effective than the crooks. Countries that depended on computer networks began to wonder whether they had any secrets left.

Bad as it was to lose secrets, that wasn’t the worst threat from government hacking. Once a system has been compromised, the attacker can choose its fate; he can keep the system alive and milk it of its secrets or he can kill it – shut it down for an indeterminate period. This meant that government attackers could exploit critical adversary systems for intelligence purposes for years, and then, in a crisis, they could shut the systems down.

The tools to infiltrate our information systems grow more sophisticated every year. The United States is the most at risk. It is probably among the top five intelligence targets of every government on earth. Why? Because our unique global military reach means that no government on earth can safely ignore the likely US reaction to its actions. Put another way, every tinpot president-for-life who wants to attack a neighbor has to worry first about whether he can beat the neighbor and second about whether the U.S. will stop him. So every government wants to know how we will react to what it does, and ideally it wants a weapon that can persuade us not to get in its way.

For many governments, hacking US information systems serves both purposes. Hostile nations can gather intelligence about our view of them while they plan attacks on a neighbor. And once the attack is launched, if the US interferes, the code that once spied on us can be used to shut our systems down. Electricity, aviation, communications, and banking can be disrupted, perhaps even sabotaged irreversibly. Without a shot being fired, without even a clear sense of who the attacker is, much of the United States could find itself living in post-Katrina New Orleans, but without hope of a rescue any time soon.

How effectively this weapon could be deployed today is in dispute. But there is little dispute that the attackers have been gaining on the defenders by leaps and bounds. Two nations have already suffered serious, coordinated cyberattacks originating in Russia during disputes with that country. The attacks were effective, but not crippling. So perhaps foreign nations cannot use information technology to kill or harm Americans on a large scale today. But it seems likely that they will have that capability soon. Just as it took decades for terrorists to cause catastrophic failures in the air transport system, it will take decades to find and exploit the most damaging holes in our information networks. So far, there is no sign that the spies and the crooks who are trying to do that are running out of ideas or money.

And what are we doing as this threat gathers?

More or less what border officials were doing in the 1980s. We are embracing information networks with the same enthusiasm we have displayed since the 1970s, and doing very little to close the security holes this technology opens.

We are up on the bike and flying downhill. Only now, as the scenery begins to blur, are we starting to understand that maybe this technology, too, will find a way to kill us.

Who Decides on Security?

In a letter to Congress today, a coalition of privacy advocates have called on Congress to investigate the DHS Privacy Office.  The gravamen of their complaint is that the Privacy Office is insufficiently independent from the Department and isn't protecting privacy.  Proof of this, they say, lies in the Privacy Office's approval of Privacy Impact Assessments for several programs (e.g. Whole Body Imaging) that allegedly erode privacy interests.

Talk about shooting the messenger.  It's not as if the current Privacy Officer has a long-history of anti-privacy activity.  Quite to the contrary. One has to wonder exactly what the privacy advocates are expecting from the Privacy Office?  Do they really expect the creation of a system where the Privacy Officer can substitute his or her judgment on security necessity for that of the Secretary of Homeland Security (or the President, for that matter)?  While that might be something the advocates hope for, its not likely in the cards anytime soon. 

And as for their call for independence, the history of independence, at least here in the United States, is less than comforting.  We are, after all, still waiting for the appointment of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (first called for in legislation in August 2007).  And that same legislation formally enhanced the independence and powers of the very Privacy Office the critics are now complaining about -- adding a probably unconstitutional direct Congressional reporting requirement and subpoena powers.  So it really can't be the architecture of the system that is problematic.

Rather, the advocates real complaint seems to be that the Privacy Office doesn't just substitute its view of the security requirements of the United States for that of the Cabinet Officer under which it serves.  To which the rest of us can only  say "huh?"

Excerpt 3 -- Technology and Terror

This is excerpt 3 from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

Four years after the attacks, I joined the Department of Homeland Security. Chertoff asked me to create and run a policy office that would let DHS could lift its head above the scrum of daily crises and think about its biggest challenges.

DHS was still a startup, barely two years old, and it had spent those two years getting organized, finding desks and office space – and at the same time frantically trying to build defenses against an unseen enemy. No one had had much time to think about the future. That was one of the reasons we needed a policy office, or so I thought.

I wanted to think about 9/11 in a new way. It seemed to me that it was an event driven as much by technological change as by evil men and government errors. Sure, there were evil men, and there were errors. But we had to get beyond the immediate mistakes and focus on the long term trends that had made the attacks possible in the first place.

It’s when we started tracing the roots of the 9/11 attacks that we realized how jet travel and a growing flood of travelers had wrecked our traditional border defenses. That’s when we began to ask what other technologies might have in store for us.

***

Technologies like jet travel are seductive. That’s why we flock to them. They give us more choices and more reach. Commercial jets allowed us to work and play on any continent in a matter of hours. More recently, computers and the Internet gave us instant access to knowledge that once was available only to a handful of librarians. Biotechnology, just emerging as an exponential technology, will give us the power to create and design life itself.

Giving individuals these choices, reach and power is a great thing -- most of the time. In the end, though, technologies that empower ordinary individuals will also empower Osama bin Laden and John Wayne Gacy. It may take a long time. Commercial jet technology had been around for nearly half a century before nineteen men were able to use it to kill three thousand. But something like 9/11 was inherent in the technology from the start.

The 9/11 Commission criticized officials for a failure of imagination in the runup to the attacks. We didn’t see it coming. I resolved when I joined DHS to keep that failure in mind. Where else was our imagination failing us, I asked.

Once I began to think about it that way, I realized that jet travel is not the only technology that will put Americans at risk. Technologies like computers and bioengineering are more recent. Their power to change our lives is still growing, and their future is harder to predict. But if we wanted to get ahead of tomorrow’s terrorism, DHS had to begin thinking about their risks as well.

Based on my own experiences, I knew of two that were bearing down on us fast.

"Rescue me" messages for wireless broadband

Today, I filed a quick comment in the FCC's broadband proceeding, urging the Commission to ensure that any wireless broadband plan included an opportunity for the use of standardized, low-bit-length messages in emergencies.

After a disaster, many wireless voice systems fail, but wireless data, which can accept latency, is much more likely than voice to get through, particularly if it is formatted in a way that can be recognized and prioritized by whatever towers and switches are still functioning.

Ideally, it should be possible to send a standardized message with just a few characters that will say "I'm safe" or "I'm in trouble" or "I will need help soon" and provide to location data by pulling the E911 data, then adding name and phone number from subscriber records.

The standardized message could be sent to a predesignated group of recipients, or to everyone in the subscriber's speed dial or contacts list. It could also be sent to a single government server (perhaps run by DHS) for distribution to first responders based on the subscriber's location. (This would require the user's consent, but hopefully consent could be obtained beforehand, especially with moderately predictable disasters like hurricanes.)

Conceivably, the "rescue me" could also be sent to a predesignated public site so that rescues and assistance are not slowed by government coordination. It is easy to imagine a website maintained by volunteers where messages are prioritized for assistance by "crowdsourcing" the prioritization process much the way Digg identifies the top stories of the day. This too would require consent, but it would allow Americans to rescue themselves, their friends and neighbors, without a debilitating (and often imprudent) reliance of government agencies.

The FCC could play a useful role in convening the service providers and determining the best way to standardize the protocols associated with such messages and encouraging government and perhaps private parties to supply reliable servers to which the messages could be sent for organization and priority.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 3

                        We arise refreshed, break camp, haul on our packs, and cross to pick up the trail.  Which, unfortunately, is nowhere to be found.  Back at our camp, there’s a trail marker not ten feet from the water, and higher up are the blazes we followed down to the river.  The trail must cross the river.  We search again, this time without packs, going upstream and down, climbing the far bank in hopes of intersecting the trail.  If this is Kate Clow’s trail, it should climb the ridge that marks the far bank, drop to the main valley then climb to Göynük Yayla.  But, rereading her description, we read that our campsite is not exactly the “grassy open spot” she describes.  This isn’t her camp and we may not be on her trail after all, despite the red and white blazes.

                        Have we missed a turnoff earlier?  We pack up and walk slowly back to the puddle with the dead fish.  There are no branch trails.

                        Perhaps with lighter packs or cooler weather (we are already sweating heavily), we would scramble downstream to the main valley, counting on crossing the main trail sooner or later.  But yesterday has made us cautious.  We are no longer sure that we’ve ever been on the Lycian Way, and we’re not ready to double what looks more and more like a bad bet.  We decide to go out the way we came in, looking again for Kate’s landmarks now that we’re traveling in her direction.

                        But the trail still has a few tricks up its sleeve.  Just after a spot I’m sure I remember from the trip down, we turn a corner and find – a pure clean spring, with water pouring out of a pipe and into a large stone trough.  How could we have missed this on the way down, when we needed it so badly -- only to find it now, when our water bottles are still full?  Is Kate Clow the magical realist of trail guide writers?

                        In fact, without warning, we’re on a new trail, also blazed in red and white.  It’s going in the same direction, but unlike yesterday’s trail, this one searches out the views (and the long drops) to be found by hugging the cliffs where each ridge drops into the valley.

                        Trudging up the same slope we came down yesterday afternoon, we relive the first harsh hours of the previous day’s hike.  But things are better today.  We are still pouring sweat, still soaking our clothes, but the trees keep the sun off our heads.  And the cliffs offer not just great views but strong breezes.

                        Sitting in the shade after a long climb, looking at the tiny braided river far below, feeling the breeze evaporate moisture from our shorts, we are almost content.  Except for the fact that we don’t know where the hell we are and have been forced to retrace our steps.

                        Soon, though, we do know where we are.  Kate Clow’s landmarks passed unrecognized while we were going west, but now they leap into focus on our eastward journey.  Bathed in sweat at midday, we reach the top of the climb and start down.  On the rocks, painted messages advertise Ali’s Garden Café. 

                        When we get down, we’ll want a cold drink – at least a liter or two of cold drink, in fact.  Ali’s Garden Cafe begins to sound better and better.  Especially because the only alternative is Mr. Malik’s establishment, and we’re, well, not that eager to see him again.  We’d have to admit that, in fact, we couldn’t get there from here.  And face the contempt of his bandit father.  Silently, we agree.  Ali’s Garden Cafe is our destination.

                        Descending out of the forest and into the sun, we find the trail full of loose stones.  They slide under our feet as we jolt down the path.  Who would have though that going downhill would be such hard, sweaty work?

                        At last we reach the irrigation ditch, the river.  And the stark unshaded rocky road in full afternoon sun. It’s forty minutes to Ali’s Garden Cafe from here.  We are steeling ourselves for the walk when behind us we hear the clip-clop of horse hooves.  We turn to see a peasant wagon headed our way. Actually, it is a peasant cart that’s been turned into a tourist attraction, complete with tourists.  The young Turk with the reins says something to the tourists, stops, and waves us up onto the cart.  It’s a miracle!  Now we sit under an awning, jolting over the harsh rock instead of struggling to swing our tired legs down this unprepossessing stretch of baking road.  The tourists, meanwhile, eye us warily and try to stay upwind.

                        We don’t care.  Ali’s Garden Cafe is coming up.  We can taste the cold drinks.  Our cart trots right up to the front door.  And past it.  We aren’t stopping at Ali’s, and as hitchhikers it seems rude to insist on being dropped off.  Especially because I now see that the driver has handed a card to the tourists.  It is an advertisement for Malik’s pension.  We are driven directly to Mr. Malik’s front door and sent into the café.  So this is the price of the ride – a glass of water and a large serving of crow.  Mr. Malik conveys in rough German his surmise that we spent the night lost on the mountain before admitting he was right.  Neither my German nor my Turkish is equal to a more elaborate explanation.  Indeed, I’m not sure how much more there is to the story.

                        His father stares down stonily from the wall.  As quickly as decency permits, we decline dinner, hoist our packs, and walk out to the main road.  There we flag down a dolmus to Tekirova.  Tekirova is a “strip city” – a Turkish version of the strip city that can be found all along Route 1 in the U.S.  Hotels spread out along the beach, while the road runs behind them.  Across the road are the pensions and grocery shops and leather goods stores and restaurants that serve less affluent tourists.  So arriving in Tekirova is has an element of ambiguity; somewhere along the strip, you have to decide you’ve arrived.  At what looks like a vaguely urban clump of shops, we decide we’re there and get off the bus.

                        We walk to the nearest pension, drop our packs outside, and I stroll in to negotiate the usual discount off the hotel’s rack rate, trying to look like a tourist who’s left his car at the curb and would easily try another half-dozen establishments if the price isn’t right.  This might not work if the desk clerk has a good nose; so I stand well back from the desk.  Success; the price for a double room (With air conditioning!  I try to contain my glee.) drops a third to about $25.  We move in, showering in our underwear to kill two birds with one stone, wander around in town luxuriously unburdened by our packs, eat a modest meal in a courtyard restaurant, and do some window shopping.  The stores are tiny, but the brand names are all too familiar.  One shop seems to be devoted to “No Fear” clothing, all sold at prices that resemble those at Target stores in the U.S.  Compared to Tekirova’s charms, bed looks good.

European lesson on protecting privacy

Now I see why the Bush Administration needed all those lessons from Europeans on data protection. Evidently, we should have followed the example set by Norway, which publishes everyone's tax returns each year for the edification of their neighbors.  Somehow, I don't remember the European Union refusing to share data with Norway because it didn't meet European data protection standards.  Of course, the US wanted travel data to fight terrorism, whereas the Norwegians are pursuing an overriding public interest when they publish tax returns:

Christine Ingebritsen, a professor at the University of Washington, said the Norwegian tax list exemplifies a time-tested, distinctly Scandinavian custom of egalitarianism.

"This is how you make sure that you're being legitimate in the eyes of the community — you show that the wealth of a CEO isn't off the charts," she said, adding that unlike the U.S., Norway "places the wealth and health of all as a priority above the individual success stories."

So there you go.  That's what matters. It's still a European morality lesson for the United States.

Excerpt 2 -- Yesterday's Technological Revolution

This is excerpt 2 from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

                                       

Lots of technology is like the bicycle. It seems implausible at first. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Once we relax and learn to trust it, it really does give us new, nearly magical powers.

Then it starts finding new ways to kill us.

***

In a way, that’s what happened on September 11, 2001.

Technology – cheap commercial jet travel – made the attacks possible. In fact, it made attacks like September 11 more or less inevitable.

It may be hard to remember now, but air travel was once seen as the great technological achievement of the twentieth century. Futurists marveled at how it would change our world.

In 1907, as heavier-than-air flight was just becoming a reality, Alexander Graham Bell declared that it would not be long until “a man can take dinner in New York and breakfast the next morning in Liverpool.”

By the 1920s and 1930s, airplanes and air travel were to young men what computers became in the 1970s and 1980s – a way to revolutionize society, make a better world, and find a fortune. After World War II, the youngsters of the 20s and 30s set about building their dreams, and they succeeded.

As late as 1958, European flights were still a special event. That year, Life Magazine ran a feature story “Off for Paris in Jet Time,” describing a Pan Am flight from Idlewild (not yet LaGuardia) airport in New York. Actress Greer Garson was in “de luxe” class, along with 40 other passengers paying $909 for their round trip tickets. Another 71 economy passengers, dressed mostly in suit and tie, or dresses, also made the trip.

Fifty years after Bell envisioned trans-Atlantic travel, it was still remarkable enough to deserve a gushing feature in the pre-eminent magazine of the era.

That ended in 1959, when Boeing introduced its 707. The new jet cut flying time between New York and London from twelve hours to six. In an instant, international air travel went from luxury to commonplace. By 1965, 95 percent of transatlantic travelers were crossing in the fast jets of Pan Am and European airlines such as British Overseas Air.

In the 70s, Boeing introduced the jumbo jet. By then, jet travel had lost any resemblance to magic and had acquired an unfortunately close resemblance to, well, bus travel. Yet jet tourism kept growing. In 1950, air travelers flew about 28 billion kilometers. By 2000, that number had grown to three trillion.

In those years, international air travel had roughly doubled every five years. That’s fifty years of exponential growth.

Any technology that grows that fast is going to have some unexpected effects. As it grew, jet travel brought a slow revolution to the border.

The Department of Homeland Security is our youngest department, but its border agencies can trace their heritage to the beginning of the American republic. They had lived through the era of exponentially increasing international travel. They had watched as a rising tide of international travelers slowly overwhelmed their 1950-era security measures.

Border checkpoints and searches, travel visas and printed passports – these things had changed little since the 19th century. Some were even older; written safe conduct passes for travelers go back to 1414 in England, and the oldest existing passport was issued in 1641 by King Charles I. Even the name “passport” reveals its antiquity. Passports were used to pass through the gate ("porte") of a city wall in medieval Europe. By the 1980s, though, the walls were down and the gate was open.

Border controls that depended on a serious inspection of individuals, their passports and their luggage, simply could not keep up. Border officials could not spend much time with each traveler. The lines at the border were getting too long.

By the 1980s, governments had begun to vie with each other to dismantle these border security measures. U.S. Customs abandoned individual inspection of travelers, allowing those with nothing to declare simply to stroll through the Green Lane. The United States also adopted the Visa Waiver Program. The VWP abolished the single most important restraint on international travel, the visa.

Visas are travel permits. Issued by a country's embassy or consulate abroad, they authorize the visa holder to travel to that country. The process of issuing a visa can be quite simple or quite elaborate, but it typically requires at a minimum that the visa applicant go to the embassy of the country he wants to visit to provide whatever information the consular official requires.

As a control mechanism, the visa is highly flexible. To discourage illegal economic migration, countries may grant very few visas in poor countries -- and those only to the well-to-do. They may also deny visas to potential troublemakers, criminals, or terrorists. They may insist that the local government vouch for the visa applicant. They may require that applicants fill out detailed forms, or provide fingerprints, to help in the clearance process.

These control mechanisms worked pretty well in the first half of the 20th century. But a flood of commercial jet travelers turned visas into costly barriers to casual travel. Barriers that soon began to fall.

In 1988, the United States stopped requiring visas for nationals of Japan and the United Kingdom, and these governments did the same for Americans. The United States was certainly not alone. If anything, other countries moved further and faster. In 1985, for example, most members of the European Union began simply abolishing controls at their borders with other member states. In countries like Belgium, border inspectors were deployed only at international airports. Everywhere else, travelers were free to enter and leave the country without a glance from officialdom.

By the end of the 1980s, even the world’s most notorious border barriers had fallen. The fortified Iron Curtain cutting Eastern Europe off from the West was broken -- by governments and by crowds of citizens from East and West.

Soon, the retreat from border control measures became a rout. Thirteen years after admitting two countries to the visa waiver program, we had opened the doors to two dozen. By 2001, half of all the foreign visitors to the US – a million a month or more – were coming without a visa. No American official laid eyes on these travelers or even knew they were coming, right up to the moment they reached the immigration booth at LAX or JFK.

Even when visas were required, they were streamlined to eliminate the hassles, as well as the safeguards. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the U.S. State Department launched the Visa Express program in June 2001. The program allowed applicants to get a visa by submitting a two-page visa application to their Saudi travel agency instead of going to a US consulate to provide visa information.

Commercial jet technology had triumphed. It had made mass international travel possible, empowering millions. And almost without noticing it, these millions of empowered travelers had broken down a system of border security that had existed for decades.

Border officials noticed, of course, but they could not resist. If they insisted on the old controls, tourism and foreign investment would lag behind the rest of the world. As they saw it, they had only one choice: surrender the old control system or let their country stagnate.

So they surrendered.

We all know what happened next.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 2

                        We carry our packs to a dolmus stop.  Dolmuses are a combination taxi, bus, and minivan.  They run a standard route but will stop anywhere along the route if hailed.  Dolmus also appears on most Turkish menus, where it refers to grape leaves stuffed with rice and delicacies.  It’s the concept of being “stuffed” that the two uses have in common, so it’s not hard to imagine what the trip was like.

                        On the other hand, dolmuses are efficient, cheap, and a good way to force ourselves to learn a few basic Turkish phrases like, “Where is the bus to Göynük?  How much does it cost?”

                        These phrases come in handy on the outskirts of Antalya, where we switch to an intercity bus.  It’s also here that we encounter our first difficulties with Kate Clow’s guidebook.  She has written the book from west to east, so that it ends near Antalya.  So we’re starting near the end of her guidebook and walking toward the start. This means reading all of her directions backwards, but since she’s written the book in short segments, this does not seem too hard.  One segment ends at the coastal town of Göynük, which looks like a good place to begin our hike.

                        Except that Göynük is not on the map that Kate Clow has supplied.  And on a close reading of the text, Göynük is simply listed as a good place to hike out for supplies – perhaps two or three kilometers off the main trail.     So we actually have no idea exactly where in Göynük we should start.  I’m hoping that we can just go to the town center and start from there, but the driver asks for a specific location.  I tell him we’re going to “Göynük Yayla” – the high Göynük mountain pasture that is on the Lycian Way.  He thinks for a moment, says “OK,” and a half an hour later drops us in the middle of nowhere.  He points to a rough track headed west, into the hills, and says “Göynük Yayla” with emphasis.

                        Well, this is not exactly downtown Göynük, but we see a few some crude painted signs that say “to the waterfall” in German, and the driver seems pretty sure of himself, so we drag our packs out of the dolmus.  The bus drives off, leaving us blinking in the hot sun. 

                        Strapped into the packs, we begin marching along a dusty road toward the Germans’ waterfall.  Immediately, we begin sweating seriously.  This is dry country, and there’s a big difference between the temperature in sun and in shade.  But the air is not as dry as the country.  I estimate that humidity is in the 40 to 50% range – low enough so a good breeze brings refreshment, high enough so any exertion, especially in still air, quickly builds a saturated microclimate around our bodies.  Our sweat no longer cools, it simply drips everywhere -- into our eyes (mixed for piquancy with sun tan lotion), down our backs, along our legs, and into our heavy boots and socks. 

                        Of course, there’s one problem.  We had planned to buy bottled water, bread, cheese, and a few other supplies in downtown Göynük.  There aren’t any stores on the dirt road we’re following now.  In fact, so far, there aren’t any buildings.  We march on anyway.  Perhaps we’ll find the center of town this way.

                        We don’t.  But we do find Mr. Malik.  Mr. Malik runs a inn (or pension) about twenty minutes’ walk down the road we are following.  He speaks only a little English, but we get by in Turkish, German, and English, each of us trying to speak the other’s tongue and relying on German as a fallback.  Mr. Malik is not a Turk, he says with emphasis.  He’s a Macedonian, from the Balkans.  He shows us the framed picture of his father, hanging on the wall above two wicked looking daggers that could double as swords and would come in handy if you had an elephant you needed to disembowel, quickly.

                        The old man looks like he knew how to handle the daggers, too.  He stares fiercely out at the frame, piercing eyes above a thoroughgoing bandit’s mustache that must have been his pride and joy.  “Why are you wimps sitting in a café when you’ve got mountains to climb?” he seems to say.

                        Well, for a start, because his son insists that we can’t get there from here.  The trail is out – rockfalls or something.  But Kate Clow’s book was published less than a year ago, and she doesn’t say anything about rockfalls.  We invoke her authority, and Mr. Malik wavers.  Or perhaps he sees that we’re going to try no matter what he says.  He sells us water and fills a plastic bag with bread and goat cheese.  As we leave, he waves warily.  I suspect he’s worried about having to bring our bodies out next week, and who will pay for that?

                        We soon come up on a second pension and café – “Ali’s Garden Café.”  It has a map out front for German hikers.  It looks nothing like Kate Clow’s map, but after long study we conclude that Ali’s “Pfad No. 1” (Path No. 1) will take us to a place that also seems to be on her map and that avoids the waterfall that Mr. Malik assured us was a dead end.  We march up the road, looking for Pfad No. 1 and grumbling about Kate Clow’s mapmaking and route descriptions, which have left us without a clue how to find her trail from Göynük. 

We save some ire for the Turkish government.  Ordinarily, we’d buy good contour maps of the route, and that would allow us to identify roads, rivers, mountains, and routes on our own from the map.      But the Turkish government, which has such maps, refuses to release them to the public.  National security, it says.  Perhaps they’re afraid the Greeks will come back -- storming ashore to set up a Lycian National Liberation Front in the mountains -- and use the maps to launch raids on Göynük. 

                        So, mapless, we march on, the sun falling heavier and heavier on the dusty white road.  The way is still flat, running near a dry riverbed, but the ground is rising steeply all around.  Soon we’ll have to launch ourselves on the real hiking.  Right on schedule, a rough arrow painted on a rock points us off the road to Pfad No. 1.  We cross the river, then a small open concrete irrigation channel, and the trail launches itself up the slope.

                        Now it’s really hot.  The brush provides only occasional shade.  The air is heavy and still.  Our shirts sweat through, then our shorts.  We have only two thoughts – putting one foot in front of the other and hoping to God we aren’t on the wrong damn trail.  Because the only thing worse than grinding up this hill would be heading back down to start over somewhere else.  On past vacations, we have hiked for an hour, taken a break, then hiked another hour.  Now we can barely plod twenty minutes without a rest.  Sitting in whatever shade we can find, we consult Kate Clow’s guide, which naturally describes this stretch of trail (if it is this stretch of trail) with the breezy fondness of a woman walking downhill.  We don’t recognize any of the landmarks she ticks off on her jaunty descent.  But Gordon points out that many of the trail markers match the red-over-white blaze depicted in Kate Clow’s book.  This is comforting, though inconclusive.  For all we know, that’s how all Turkish trails are marked.

                        As we keep stumbling up the mountain, Gordon begins to look bad – flushed and slowing, even though we stop often for water breaks.  Around noon, after another break, he walks a hundred meters and stops dead.  Heat stroke.

                        We drop onto our packs and think.  I jog outside in the Washington summer, I’m familiar with heat stroke.  In fact, it’s a standard feature of my first run in temperatures over 90 degrees.  Plus, there was the infamous Baker family incident at Yosemite, when my daughter and I walked a friend of hers from Germany most of the way up a set of valley switchbacks, stopping only with her friend dropped unconscious on the trail from heat stroke.

                        That time, we poured water on her and walked her back down.  But here our options are more limited.  We don’t have enough water for that.  Besides, if water could cool us, why hasn’t all this sweat we were soaking in do the job?  And walking out isn’t much of an option unless we want to call off the hike.  How could we face Mr. Malik, whose doubts we’d brushed off?  How could we face his bandit father, who probably ran down other men’s goats on this very trail just for a change of diet?

                        Still, Gordon can’t go on like this.  Since I am feeling better than him, I decide to carry his pack as well as mine.  This is really brutal.  But it works.  Soon, Gordon is looking better, sometimes leading the way and doing the trail finding.  After an hour or two, he gets his pack back.  What a relief.  I now appreciate the joke about the guy who hits himself with a hammer “because it feels so good when I stop.”

                        We’re still at least half lost.  We’ve seen one or two spots that might correspond to Kate Clow’s descriptions, but we’re missing more than half of them.  We reread the already memorized paragraph.  Have we really spent an agonizing day on one measly paragraph?  Or is it worse than that?  After describing a long stretch of trail, Kate says that it “eventually” crosses an irrigation ditch, the only landmark we’re sure we’ve seen.  Perhaps all our sweat and heatstroke is encompassed in that one word.  The thought is too much to bear.  Still, the view to the north across the valley is what we expect.  Besides, the trail has begun to descend.  We’re not going back now. 

                        As we’ve climbed, the brush has grown up in a sparse evergreen forest.  The trail is shaded now, and the landscape has a classic charm.  Stark white rocks and twisted three trunks break through a carpet of pine needles.  The trail is dead quiet.  We have not seen a single human being since leaving the road.  Our breaks are peaceful and calm, though in the still air of the forest every part of our clothing is saturated with sweat.  And we’re running out of water.

                        Among the guidebook’s landmarks that we haven’t seen are the springs and water sources Kate describes.  This is serious.  You can’t sweat for hours the way we have – drops falling every second from arms and face – without replacing fluids.  We started with well over a gallon of water, but it’s nearly gone, and we’re deep into fluid debt.

                        If we’re right about our location, we’re descending to a stream that divides two mountains and then merges with the main river.  Kate describes a charming camping site on the shores of the stream.  And even if we’re not there, this trail is clearly going into a major valley, and it’s hard to believe there isn’t water at the bottom.

                        At 3:30 we stop for lunch.  Hammered by the heat, we’re still not hungry.  We just figure we should eat.  Mr. Malik’s goat cheese has leaked all over the plastic bag, soaking much of the bread. 

“Ordinarily, that would be disgusting,” Gordon says as he digs in, “but right now it’s just a good source of fluid.” 

In fact, we cannot eat the dry parts of the bread.  We don’t have enough saliva to soften it, so chewing and swallowing the harsh crust seems to cut our mouths. 

                        Suddenly, as the trail swings around the bottom of a ravine, we spot a pool.  Of a sort.  It’s actually more of a mud puddle, actually, topped by a fuzz of green algae.  As we approach, frogs leap to safety in the three-inch-deep swamp. 

“Hey,” Gordon says, “if frogs can live in it, how bad can the water be?” 

“Fish, too,” I say, pointing to a small one, which is unfortunately floating on its side at the surface.

                        Still, it’s clear we’ll be drinking this water, using our purification tablets, unless we can find a better source upstream.  Luckily, exploring a hundred meters upstream we find another pool.  No scum, no dead fish.  A frog jumps in as I approach, and the water is so clear I can watch him swim several feet to the bottom and try to hide in the shadow of a stone.  In fact, I can see him sitting in the shadow watching me take off my shoes and wade in up to my waist.  It is cold but not freezing.  Nothing could be better.

                        Gordon joins me.  We treat the water and then drink it by the liter.  When we finish, the world seems very different.  We are cooled, dried, and no longer desperately thirsty.  It is past 5:00.  The air is merely warm.

                        A few minutes’ hiking brings us to a larger stream wide enough to require boulder-jumping to cross.  At the edge of the stream is an area that must have been mud in the spring, so perfectly smooth is the ground.  It will make a perfect place for the tent.  It is surely the camping place with water that Kate Clow told us to expect.  We are on the trail!

                        We swim again while boiling water.  The air is just a bit warmer than balmy.  We will need no sleeping bags.  We boil and drink, boil and drink.  There is no end to the boiling and drinking.

                        By 8:15 it is pitch black.  I lie out on a rock in the stream on a kind of natural chaise lounge that spring floods have smoothed into the top of this great boulder.  The stars are sharp.  Life is good.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 1

                         After our flight to Antalya, a taxi takes us to the old city. Down a few alleys, around a few shops and cafes that seem to be doing all of their business in the street, and we’ve arrived at the Doğan Hotel – a rambling complex of houses built around a garden and swimming pool.  (At least the brochure called it a pool.  In the United States, we’d fill it with warm water and call it a hot tub.)

                        Antalya stands on cliffs that are broken briefly by the old port, a tiny inlet made nearly circular by two breakwaters.  The cliff walls here are heightened by ancient Byzantine (and older) stone fortifications.  One can easily imagine the great ships of vanished empires rowing up to the docks between the high stone walls.  Now, the walls echo with the thrum of outboard and inboard motors, as wooden tour boats and fishing vessels putter in and out of the harbor.

                        Beyond the harbor, across a large bay, I catch a first glimpse of our destination – the high mountains of Lycia.  In the dusty evening light, they rise one behind the other like paper cutouts.  However two dimensional they look, though, one of the dimensions is definitely up.  The coastal mountains seem to soar straight out of the sea, and the range behind them is just as steep and twice as high.  For the first time, I realize how tough the next few days will be.

1 part really cool; 1 part really creepy

Flies only devote 12 brain cells to learning from experience.  Now, scientists have discovered how to program those cells directly, according to BBC NEWS.  It required a genetic modification of the cells so they had a receptor for a particular chemical, plus laser-activated release of that chemical in the presence of a particular odor, but at the end of the process, the flies had learned to treat that odor as though the worst thing in the world had happened to them the last time they smelled it.

In short, we are not far from being able to write directly to organic memory.  At least with simple insect brains, we will be able to teach living things to love or hate odors and perhaps other experiences.

I sort of like the idea of, say, hundreds of cockroaches programmed to swarm out of TSA checkpoints and home in on the smell of explosives.  Now that would solve the booty call problem in a way that would deter even the most hardened of terrorists.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 0

                        On top of everything else, my son is falling into heat stroke.  We’ve been dragging our packs and too little water up the dusty mountain trail for hours, the Turkish sun lying like a dead weight on our heads.  Our shirts, our shorts, even our socks are sodden with sweat.  We haven’t seen another hiker, another human, since we started up the trail, and we’ve been half lost or worse for almost as long.  Now this.  Gordon stops, stunned, in the trail.  He is flushed a dark red, and he complains that his heart is running out of control.  He’s no longer sweating. He can’t walk any farther.  I’m only in a little better shape.

                        But we can’t stop here.  The next water is over the mountain we’re climbing.  If we’re on the right trail, that is – something I’ve come to doubt as we slogged up the endless ascent, trying desperately to match our guidebook’s landmarks to the trail we’re on.  There are no signposts, and we can’t expect a park ranger to come along.  We’re deep in the Turkish mountains on a trail that hardly existed a few years ago, a trail that few have heard about, let alone hiked. 

                        Well, if nothing else, heat stroke is a good excuse for a break.  We drop our packs and fall onto them, hoping for a breeze.  Two days ago,  I was practicing law in Washington, DC.  Just how did I manage to get us into this fix so quickly, I wonder.  As usual, it’s a long story, and it begins with a book.  Casting about for a summer hiking trip with my son, Gordon, I learned that Turkey had just opened its first long-distance hiking trail – the 500-kilometer Lycian Way -- linking the mountains and coastline of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast between Antalya and Fethiye.  An Englishwoman, Kate Clow, had just released a guidebook, and The London Times had already rated the Lycian Way one of the world’s ten best hikes.

                        I was intrigued.  I’ve traveled in Turkey before and liked it, even though the country has been relentlessly trashed by the American media.  Most of us saw “Midnight Express,” an Oscar-winning movie in which the young drug-smuggling hero is cruelly mistreated in a Turkish prison.  What none of us realized at the time was that the screenwriter, an unknown by the name of Oliver Stone, was launching an entire oeuvre of politically correct lies served up as fact.  In fact, Turkey is by no means a perfect country.  But it looks pretty good next to its neighbors – Syria, Iraq, the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia. 

                        The trail sounds delightful.  The Lycian Way winds through 6000-foot mountains.  It passes Mediterranean coves and inlets that cannot be reached by road, promising solitary noontime swims as a break from hiking.  It drops into villages and climbs to mountain pastures that rarely see visitors, let alone foreigners.  And it carries its hikers through a mass of history unmatched by any region of the world.  When Alexander the Great marched through this neck of the woods, wintering near Mt. Olympos, the Lycians he met must have viewed him as an upstart barbarian.  They already had a centuries-old urban culture.  The Lycians yielded in the end -- first to Greek, then Roman, then Byzantine and Genovese and finally to Arab and Ottoman influences – all of whom left homes and religious buildings strewn casually across what are now lonely goat pastures.

                        We’re sold.  How can we go wrong?

Good news for the good guys

Facial recognition software is finally hitting its stride.

Earlier this year, investigators learned that a double-homicide suspect named Rodolfo Corrales had moved to North Carolina. The FBI took a 1991 booking photo from California and compared it with 30 million photos stored by the motor vehicle agency in Raleigh.

In seconds, the search returned dozens of drivers who resembled Corrales, and an FBI analyst reviewed a gallery of images before zeroing in on a man who called himself Jose Solis.

A week later, after corroborating Corrales' identity, agents arrested him in High Point, southwest of Greensboro, where they believe he had built a new life under the assumed name. Corrales is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles later this month.

"Running facial recognition is not very labor-intensive at all," analyst Michael Garcia said. "If I can probe a hundred fugitives and get one or two, that's a home run."

San Ysidro

Like Stewart, I'm mystified at the NYTimes article complaining about the failure to have a comprehensive exit program in place.  It seems typical of Congress --  if you don't like a particular program (say, interior enforcement) support some different program as "more effective."  It is always the "other" program or the "other" war or the "other" immigration expenditure that deserves support, not the one before us today.  But as Edward Alden says, the exit program isn't a good candidate -- the security justification for an exit system has yet to be made.

But what really seems unimaginable is that nobody has given the least thought to what a system like this would really cost.  And to work it would have to be installed at the land borders as well as the airports.  So, to take just one example, take a look at San Ysidro border crossing.  That's 27 lanes of traffic coming into the US and just 4 lanes outbound.
Take the left side of this picture and just double it to the right side, and that's what needs to be built -- and San Ysidro is just one of our hundreds of land border crossings.  The costs would be many billions of dollars -- and all for a program with marginal security benefit.  Color me skeptical.

Tracking overstays

The NYT has just woken up to the debate over tracking travelers' departure from the US.  The story highlighting the lack of exit monitoring builds on the arrest of a Jordanian overstay who was plotting the bombing of a Dallas skyscrapter.  It's a troubling story:

Mr. Smadi’s arrest on Sept. 24 for the attempted bombing was not his first encounter with American law enforcement. Two weeks earlier, a sheriff’s deputy in Ellis County, Tex., pulled him over for a broken tail light just north of the town of Italy, then arrested him for driving without a license or insurance.

When the deputy checked his identity, Mr. Smadi’s name showed up on a watch list by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was already investigating him. But the background check turned up no immigration record. The deputy called the F.B.I. and was told there was no outstanding arrest warrant for Mr. Smadi. So on the evening of Sept. 11, Mr. Smadi paid a $550 fine and walked out of the county jail.

I'm stll not persuaded that this makes a good argument for a large-scale exit monitoring program, though.  Right now, we've got a system that identifies 92.5% of all departures.  So we're trying to determine what happened to the other 7.5%.  Some are overstays, others left on time but the leakiness of our exit controls made it impossible to figure that out.  So, to decide whether we should build an exit monitoring system, all we need to know is how much a new system will improve the accuracy of the current system, and how much that will cost.  I don't know (probably no one does) but I doubt the cost-benefits ratio is good, especially when compared to more targeted approaches to the problem identified in Smadi's case.

Here are the two questions we ought to ask about the Smadi case before we ramp up an exit monitoring system (or at least at the land border; it's easier to justify, and run, an exit system for airport departures):

1.  We know that ICE gets records from which it can identify the 7.5% of possible overstays.  Smadi was one of them.  Why didn't ICE go looking for Smadi when he showed up as an overstay?  Is it that ICE isn't worried about nineteen-year-old unaccompanied males from Jordan who overstay any more?  Or is it that the relevant ICE office coesn't have enough staff even to look for high-risk overstays?  If the answer to one of those questions is yes, then either ICE's program for pursuing overstays needs to be overhauled or it needs more resources.

2.  Why didn't Ellis County know Smadi was an immigration violator?  My guess is that Ellis County didn't know because ICE doesn't want it to know -- that ICE still hasn't made its immigration records available to local law enforcement.  Why not?  Probably because it's afraid that giving local law enforcement agencies access to immigration records means that the agencies will start running all the people they arrest through DHS's computers.  The agencies will inevitably find that some of the suspects are illegal immigrants.  Then they will ask ICE to come pick the suspects up and will complain bitterly when ICE says it doesn't have the resources, that it can't pick up everyone.  Which will be followed by a local story claiming that ICE isn't doing its job. 

At the end of the day, that's an understandable bit of bureaucratic self-protection.  But preventing people from seeing the problem isn't the same as solving the problem.  Worse, as in the Smadi case, it could keep ICE from finding out about high-risk illegal immigrants.

There's a solution to this problem too.  DHS should share its immigration data with any state that agrees to share fingerprints and criminal records with all of DHS.  Neither of those things happens today, and the two facts are equally shocking, considering how much DHS has invested in fingerprint technology. 

Well, you might ask, how does DHS get access to fingerprint and criminal records today?  The answer is that DHS relies on the FBI, which collects the fingerprints and criminal records, for free, from state and local governments.  But the FBI charges DHS tens of millions of dollars (maybe more than $100 million; I haven't checked recently) for access to them, claiming that the state and local officials have refused to share these records outside a criminal context.  So DHS should go to the source, trade its valuable immigration information for valuable information that the locals have and that DHS needs to administer the immigration law. 

Presto, we eliminate the middleman. And we eliminate two embarrassing information sharing failures. 

The only downside is that ICE will occasionally face a bad story about how it refuses to pick up every illegal immigrant arrested by local authorities.  That's not the end of the world.  ICE should say without embarrassment that it would be glad to do that if Congress gave it the money, and that, without the money, it has to set priorities. 

In fact, legislation requiring this could be called "The Truth in Immigration Enforcement Act."

Excerpt 1: The improbable bicycle

A bicycle is an implausible thing. To see how implausible, take it out in the street and stand it up. Now let go.

It falls over.

Stand it up in the street and put a man on it; it falls over faster, and he’s likely to skin his knee. The thing is utterly unstable.

So who would imagine that the way to solve the instability is to put a man on it and roll the bicycle down a long hill? 

Nobody. It defies common sense that something so unstable could become more stable when it's moving. Perhaps that's why nobody imagined the bicycle, at least not for a couple of thousand years after it became perfectly possible to build one.

It took a lot to make the bicycle imaginable. In 1815, the battle of Waterloo brought an end to nearly twenty years of European war. At the same time, the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history occurred, at Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia.

The next year, summer never came. Snow fell in every month. Crops failed. Without the crops, pack animals died.

Everyone in Europe cast at wary eye on St. Helena, where Napoleon was imprisoned, and wondered how they’d fight a war without pack animals.

The year after that, in 1817, a German official named Karl von Drais solved the pack animal shortage by inventing the bicycle. He demonstrated that soldiers could carry heavy weights quickly over long distances by riding and pushing a crude bicycle. His model weighed nearly 50 pounds, was built of wood and had no pedals. But once he showed that it worked, others improved the design until by the turn of the century the bicycle as we know it was everywhere.

The Romans -- perhaps even Alexander the Great -- could have built a bicycle like Karl von Drais’s, something with crude bearings and no pedals.

They didn’t, though, probably because the whole idea must have seemed so implausible. Who could imagine traveling at high speeds on a vehicle that can’t even stand upright by itself? 

But moving forward is the key to the bicycle’s stability. A bike moving at 1 mile per hour is a lot more stable than a bike at rest, and at 5 mph it’s more stable still. At even higher speeds, the bike can adjust faster and roll over obstacles that would bring it to a dead stop at lower speeds.

Go faster and feel safer. We all remember discovering this amazing rule as kids. If 5 mph is good, 10 should be better. And it is!  We remember how it ends, too. Fifteen mph is better still. And twenty. Everything is better on a bike when you go faster. Until, quite surprisingly, it’s not.

That’s when you discover that falling off a bike at 30 mph means something a lot worse than a skinned knee.

And suddenly the Romans don’t look quite so dumb.

Baker's book survives prepublication review by DHS and NSA

The good news for all of you who aren't mentioned in the book is this.  The draft has now completed a quick and very professional prepublication review by both NSA and DHS.  Both asked for changes and had plausible reasons for the requests, which I have honored. 

So I'm free to start putting up excerpts, taking comments, factual corrections, and random abuse.  I'll try to categorize the pieces so that you can find them and read them in more or less the right order, though I'll probably publish them in a different order from the postings. 

Is Senate Judiciary rebuilding the wall?

The blogs are full of complaints that the Senate Judiciary committee didn't do enough last week to restrict the Patriot Act when it voted to extend several of the Act's provisions until 2013.  On the whole, that's good news.  Hostility to the Patriot Act long ago came unmoored from the actual substance of the Act, which was always more a cleanup than the wholesale rebalancing of rights and government authority that its opponents have portrayed.  See, for example, the balanced set of essays I put together for the ABA.

The Obama Justice Department seems to have worked hard to achieve a reasonable outcome, while at the same time agreeing to new restrictions, audits, and reports intended to satisfy at least some critics. 

In the process, though, a new and dangerous amendment was introduced by Sen. Feingold and adopted by the committee (almost alone among the left-leaning amendments).  This amendment requires minimization procedures for data obtained by the FBI under a national security letter.  In particular, it requires the FBI to "to minimize the acquisition and retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of nonpublicly available information" consistent with the need to disseminate foreign intelligence (emphasis added).  If the data isn't foreign intelligence, it must be anonymized "unless the identity of the United States person is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance."

These concepts are borrowed from FISA, where the sensitivity of the intelligence (intercepts of the content of communications) and the relatively limited reporting of those intercepts makes it possible to anonymize data during dissemination.  But NSLs mostly obtain transactional data with a limited expectation of privacy.  And the data is often valuable only when combined with other data, or when searched by another agency that has encountered the same person in another context and wonders what else is known about the person. 

For example, let's suppose DHS questions someone at the border because he's returning from a long unexplained stay in Pakistan and DHS asks whether he's ever transferred funds to a terrorist front in that country.  He says no.  If the FBI has used an NSL to get financial records in the course of a separate investigation, and these records contradict the returnee's story, that's a big deal, and it will turn the routine questioning into an investigation.

How can DHS find out about the data obtained by the FBI unless it has routine access to the information?  And if it has access, how can we say that the minimization procedures "prohibit access" to the information? 

It's possible to square this circle by adopting a broad interpretation of "foreign intelligence" and of what it takes "to understand or assess the importance of the intelligence."  But bureaucratic interests are going to work against adopting such a broad interpretation. A broad interpretation of those terms will require DOJ and FBI to take risks -- they'll be criticized by Judiciary, maybe sued, and abused in the media.  And the beneficiaries of that broad interpretation won't be the FBI; it will be DHS and the National Counter Terrorism Center and the CIA.  Why should DOJ and FBI take risks to help those other agencies? 

In fact, it's worse than that.  At the margin, DOJ and FBI are always engaged in a bit of competition and conflict with all of those agencies.  Limiting access to information is a time-honored bureaucratic weapon in such conflicts.  So, if only the FBI can search NSL databases, the FBI has to be cut in on any investigation that it might like to be part of, just so its rivals can see NSL data.  In my example, if DHS can only check the statements of the returnee by going through an FBI agent, it will have to explain what it's found, and the FBI will be able to take over the case right away if it wants to.  That's a bureaucratic advantage.  Of course it also adds greatly to the complexity of getting the NSL data, and at the margin the DHS questioner may not have the time or inclination to go through a complex process just to check the returnee's statement. 

So, the Feingold amendment creates both a legal and a bureaucratic incentive to set up "minimization" procedures that will make it hard for agencies other than the FBI to review data quickly and easily, even in a counterterrorism context.  That's how the wall was built, brick by brick, in the 1990s. 

My questions are whether (1) DOJ signaled that it could live with the Feingold amendment and (2) whether other agencies that need access to NSL data got a chance to weigh in.  I'm guessing that the answers are (1) yes and (2) no.  But if the answer to either question is no,this amendment needs to be dropped.

The Down Side of Running Barefoot

The NY Times has discovered barefoot running and written a long piece about it.
Meanwhile, I've lost some of my enthusiasm for it.  Maybe it does force runners into better posture and shorter steps, but I find that landing on the fore part of the foot, rather than the heel, seems to cause calf injuries.  I've had a persistent left calf injury that only bothers me when I run barefoot.  But it recurs even after a several-week layoff and makes continued barefoot running impossible.

Can this study possibly be as stupid as it sounds?

This University of Pennsylvania study says that having a gun doesn't help when you're assaulted.  In fact, it makes things worse.  Much worse:

In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.

That's newsworthy.  It's both counterintuitive and supports conventional liberal views of guns.   What's not to like?

Well, look how they came up with the statistic.  First, they found people who had been shot in Philadelphia and discovered that six percent were carrying a weapon when they were shot.  Then they compared those people to "random Philadelphians" called by "trained phone canvassers."  These "random Philadelphians" turned out to be 4.5 times less likely to own a gun than the people who got shot. 

So let's suppose you lived in Philadelphia, in a really bad neighborhood where you thought you were likely to get shot.  Would you be more likely than a "random Philadelphian" to buy gun -- and to have it on you when, as feared, you got shot?  Yup.  How about women who've been threatened by angry ex-lovers?  More likely to get a gun?  More likely to get shot?  Yup and yup.  Same for drug dealers.  Same for police officers.  All more likely to get shot than random Philadelphians, and all more likely to have guns.  So, does this study actually tell us anything?  Hasn't Charles Branas, the author, simply made a remarkably stupid error in choosing the control population? 

I can't find the study on line, only the university press release, so maybe there's a good answer, though releasing the press release without the study isn't comforting.  And even the press office seems to have realized there might be a problem.  So they put on their white coats and tell us not to worry. We're the stupid ones.  You see, they tell us, "This is the same approach that epidemiologists have historically used to establish links between such things as smoking and lung cancer or drinking and car crashes." 

Sure, that makes sense.  Same thing exactly.  I've been thinking about buying some cigarettes to protect against attackers wielding lung cancer, but first I've got to lay in a supply of liquor to fend off the drunk drivers.

Laugh if you like, but the study is being published by the American Journal of Public Health -- the same people who are supposed to protect you from H1N1.

Who is Syed Shahid Ali?

He's the IOC member who asked about the "harrowing" experience of entering the United States.  Some are already seeing him as the Voice of the World, condemning America for its arrogance in trying to protect US borders.  But it's worth remembering that the IOC membership represents, well, the IOC members.

When Uday Hussein ran the Iraqi sports program, he was its top Olympics official.  In fact, when presented with evidence that Hussein was torturing Iraqi athletes who disappointed him, the IOC stalled until the U.S. invasion made the point moot.  Here's what Sports Illustrated said about the lackadaisical IOC investigation when a complaint was filed about Uday's practices:

Attached to the complaint were sworn statements from several Iraqi athletes detailing torture and imprisonment on orders from Uday. In February the IOC agreed to investigate Uday's behavior. As of last week, however, none of the athletes who had given sworn statements for the INDICT complaint had been contacted by the IOC.

IOC president Jacques Rogge acknowledged last week that his organization received the complaint and says it is in the hands of the ethics committee. But IOC member Richard Pound says that it is "important to remember these are just allegations, and you have to make sure this is not all tied to the Iraq-U.S. dispute, that we are not being used for propaganda. You just never know."

Sounds right.  In the IOC, "you just never know" about this sort of thing.  But you always know about the United States.  Because in the weird world of IOC politics, the worst thing that has happened in living memory was the impertinent US criminal investigation into bribery of IOC officials in the award of the Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City. 

And Syed Shahid Ali certainly seems to be bearing a grudge.  The LA Times quoted him back in 1999 as evidence that IOC members were bitter, angry, and unreconciled to the way the US investigation had broken in on their clubby world.  In Ali's view, the whole thing should have been blamed instead on the "Satanic" inducements offered by Salt Lake City and its backers:

Perhaps most important, it remains unclear how many delegates are genuinely committed to real change, or whether an overwhelming majority simply opted Sunday to bow to Samaranch for the moment--for their remarks revealed a group bubbling with members who sound angry, frustrated, even bitter.

Some are still pointing fingers, such as Syed Shahid Ali of Pakistan, who decried the "satanic chores [used] to mislead some of our members." He explained later that he was referring to the inducements offered in Salt Lake.

So maybe the Obama Administration's rebuke wasn't payback for Bush Administration security rules.  Maybe it was payback for the Clinton Administration's criminal investigation.  Hold your breath waiting for that theory to show up in print.

Two remarkable claims about moderately famous men

Two surprising things I learned from reading The Candy Bombers by Andrei Cherny --

1.  Walter Bedell Smith, a CIA director and Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the postwar era, was Eisenhower's chief of staff during WWII.  In that capacity, Cherny reveals, he proposed dividing up Nazi gold as war loot, saying "Can't some of us quietly arrange some of our own bonuses?"

2.  James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, suffered from mental illness that could be traced to Forrestal's insistence on witnessing the first landings on Iwo Jima.  From shipboard, Forrestal watched three days of butchery on the beaches, then landed on the fourth day, walking ashore over the bodies and torn body parts of American soldiers.  Cherny argues persuasively that the experience was so traumatic for Forrestal that it caused a kind of combat fatigue, ultimately driving the Defense Secretary to suicide.

Quick! Tell Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Jarvis

We all know how hard it is to monetize the news.  One-to-many distribution is old school and losing its revenue model.  Many-to-many is just too hard on an old news-hound's ego.

Luckily, a CBS news veteran is showing the way with an entirely novel approach.  One-to-one news distribution:

"And in an undeniable black eye for the network, prosecutors said Friday that the extortionist was a veteran CBS News producer who proceeded to deposit the bogus $2 million check handed him by Letterman as part of the undercover sting."

Now that's disintermediation. 

Still a few bugs to be worked out, of course, but the true pioneers are the ones who take the early risks.