How to Successfully Live in a Police State

Here is yet another example of the West's descent into a police state under the "War on Criminality" (or was that a "War on Terrorism"?) initiated by George Bush but vigorously prosecuted under Barack Obama. From a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:

Scottish mall-cop: it's illegal to take pictures in the mall; Scottish cop: photographers can have their devices confiscated under terrorism laws

by Cory Doctorow

A security guard in Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow questioned a man who was taking pictures of his young daughter looking cute while eating an ice-cream. The guard told him that photography in the mall was "illegal" and demanded that he delete any photos he'd taken while there. When the man told him he'd already posted the photos to Facebook, the guard summoned a policeman, who said that he could confiscate the phone under the UK's terrorism laws. The policeman took his details and "he was eventually allowed to leave."

The official statements from the mall and the police are maddeningly bureaucratic and every bit as stupid as the original incident: "a full review of the circumstances surrounding the incident and the allegations made is under way" say the police; "Our priority is always to maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for all of our shoppers and retailers," says the mall.

Just a reminder: pretty much everything that's legal on the public street is legal in a private store. A store or mall can have a policy saying "You can't wear purple here" or "You must enter the premises backwards" or "No photography allowed," but those are policies, not laws. A store's representatives can ask you to leave for violating their policies, but that's pretty much it (of course, if you refuse to leave, that's a different matter).

The "War on Terrorism" is like America's "War on Drugs". It has no end. There will always be drugs. There will always be terrorists. To start a war that has no end is very George Orwellian and reminds us that governments are not our friends. They are power mad crazies who will use any excuse to aggrandize power to themselves and ever more tightly circumscribe out lives to turn us into mindless robots "in service to the nation". Nuts!

Al Qaeda was a "police action". If Clinton had had the guts to do the right thing in the late 1990s Bin Laden would have been dead and there would have been no 9/11. If Bush had had the guts to do the right thing and put American boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001 they could have killed Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. One good thing I can say: Obama has the guts to use special ops to get the job done. He has taken out a fair amount of Al Qaeda leadership. Good for him. But Obama is no friend of liberty. He has clamped down on whistle-blowers. He has extended the hopeless "war" in Afghanistan. He has kept the torturers going in Guantanamo. He only meekly supported the Arab Spring.

Update... and here is more by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about the German government ignoring its own laws to spy on its citizens and insert malware that makes their computers vulnerable to attack by anybody.

Chaos Computer Club cracks Germany's illegal government malware, a trojan that spies on your PC and lets anyone off the street hijack it

By Cory Doctorow at 10:11 pm Monday, Oct 10

Germany's Chaos Computer Club published the sourcecode for a piece of malware used by the German government to spy on citizens. The software was discovered in the wild and reverse engineered. It can be used to spy on or control remote PCs. Because of flaws in the software, anyone who was infected with this by German police was vulnerable to spying by "anyone on the street." The German supreme court banned the use of trojans to spy on German citizens in 2008.

The analysis also revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected. Not only can unauthorized third parties assume control of the infected system, but even attackers of mediocre skill level can connect to the authorities, claim to be a specific instance of the trojan, and upload fake data. It is even conceivable that the law enforcement agencies's IT infrastructure could be attacked through this channel. The CCC has not yet performed a penetration test on the server side of the trojan infrastructure.

"We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities", commented a speaker of the CCC. "The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to '1234'".

To avoid revealing the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction. The instrument could therefore violate the fundamental principle of national sovereignty. Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.

Electronic Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany [spiegel.de]

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I love anything by Cory Doctorow. He is a smart dude and he is concerned about issues that are close to my heart: intellectual property rights, human rights, technology. I confess I've only read a couple of his fiction pieces. I know that's his "day job". But I love the hobbyist Doctorow more than the career Doctorow.

US "Justice" Ascends to a New Height of Idiocy

Most Americans do not realize that they belong to a rogue state. Not only does the US indulge in "extraordinary rendition", it also has secret courts with secret decisions and secret measures which individuals can't talk about.

Here is a bit from a Wall Street Journal article mentioning the unmentionable:

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sonic said it fought the government's order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was "rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do," said Sonic's chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government's request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full emails.

Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years old, hasn't been charged with wrongdoing.

The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government secretly obtain information from people's email and cellphones without a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Jacob Appelbaum's case demonstrates that in the US one can be deemed "innocent" but still be subjected to arbitrary detention at the pleasure of the government. Worse, there can be secret restrictions on the mentioning of any "measures" taken against this innocent person by the security organs of the state. Such are the black arts of "legalized" by the US's Patriot Act.

From Wikipedia:

• In a resolution passed on June 29, 2005, they stated that "Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act allows the government to secretly request and obtain library records for large numbers of individuals without any reason to believe they are involved in illegal activity."


• Secret Service jurisdiction was extended to investigate computer fraud, access device frauds, false identification documents or devices, or any fraudulent activities against U.S. financial institutions. [Funny, the $13 trillion fraud by US financial institutions isn't covered and the US Justice department has shown no interest in investigating those frauds despite the fact that it has deprive life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness from 25 million unemployed, 8 million foreclosures that removed homes from people, and the whole ugly mess of banks "managing" property titles outside the law and getting them so messed up that people without mortgages are being foreclosed by banks and have to fight to save their homes from seizure by banks with no rights to the homes!]


• In 2004, FBI agents used this provision to search and secretly examine the home of Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully jailed for two weeks on suspicion of involvement in the Madrid train bombings. While the U.S. Government did publicly apologize to Mayfield and his family, Mayfield took it further through the courts. On September 26, 2007, judge Ann Aiken found the law was, in fact, unconstitutional as the search was an unreasonable imposition on Mayfield and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.


• In 2005, Library Connection, a nonprofit consortium of 27 libraries in Connecticut, received a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI, along with its accompanying perpetual gag order, demanding library patrons’ records. George Christian, executive director of Library Connection, and three members of the executive committee of the board engaged the ACLU to file suit to challenge the constitutional validity of the NSL. Because Section 505 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which authorizes the FBI to demand records without prior court approval, also forbids, or gags, anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone else about receiving it, they also challenged the validity of the gag order. For almost a year the ACLU fought to lift the gag order, challenging the government’s power under Section 505 to silence four citizens who wished to contribute to public debate on the PATRIOT Act. In May 2006, the government finally gave up its legal battle to maintain the gag order. On June 26, 2006, the ACLU announced that, after dropping its defense of the gag provision accompanying the NSL request, the FBI abandoned the lawsuit entirely. The Connecticut Four were honored by the ALA with the 2007 Paul Howard Award for Courage for their challenge to the National Security Letter and gag order provision of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Connecticut Four are: 1. George Christian, executive director of Library Connection 2. Peter Chase, vice president of Library Connection, director of the Plainville (CT) Public Library, and chairman of the Connecticut Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee 3. Barbara Bailey, president of Library Connection and director of the Welles- Turner Memorial Library in Glastonbury, Connecticut 4. Jan Nocek, secretary of Library Connection and director of the Portland (CT) Library. In a summary of the actions of the Connecticut Four and their challenge to the USA PATRIOT Act, Jones (2009: 223) notes: “Librarians need to understand their country’s legal balance between the protection of freedom of expression and the protection of national security. Many librarians believe that the interests of national security, important as they are, have become an excuse for chilling the freedom to read.”


• Another controversial aspect of the USA PATRIOT Act is the immigration provisions that allow for the indefinite detention of any alien whom the Attorney General believes may cause a terrorist act. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed, Anita Ramasastry, an associate professor of law and a director of the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, & Technology at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, Washington, accused the Act of depriving basic rights for immigrants to America, including legal permanent residents. She warned that "Indefinite detention upon secret evidence — which the USA PATRIOT Act allows — sounds more like Taliban justice than ours. Our claim that we are attempting to build an international coalition against terrorism will be severely undermined if we pass legislation allowing even citizens of our allies to be incarcerated without basic U.S. guarantees of fairness and justice."

It is interesting to note that Obama who ran on a platform of "transparency" and "accountable government" has happily continued the Bush-era trampling of human rights and the extension of secret government. Obama has pushed into new areas by putting in place laws that more savagely deal with whistle-blowers who try to identify abuse of power by government!

If you wish to read about the abysmal trampling on human rights by the US government, read the Wikipedia entry for Maher Arar. Just one of many Canadian citizens subjected to state terror, torture, and high-handed illegal treatment by the US. The Canadian government has publicly apologized to Maher Arar and given him C$10.5 million to compensate for the severe trauma and injuries he suffered at the hands of the US and its third-party torturers. An innocent man was whisked off a flight and held in secret for 374 days. So much for "justice" from the US. The courts are a mockery in the US since Maher Arar can't get his case heard in the US. The US refuses to give him "standing" before the courts to even hear his case!

Required Reading

Here is a bit from an ACLU report on America and the need to reclaim civil liberties:

Rather than working to allay public fear, our political leaders (with few exceptions) have manipulated it, to the point where it can be difficult to determine whether their expressions of alarm are genuine or merely opportunistic. Is it possible that many members of Congress actually believe that U.S. prisons are not secure enough to hold terrorism suspects? (And is it remotely conceivable that a member of Congress believes his own warning that if Khalid Sheikh Mohamed is brought to the United States for trial, he might be released on a technicality, granted asylum, and be on a path to citizenship?) These are arguments based on cynicism, not strength or resolve.

And that cynicism is emboldened by a political discourse that rewards those who inflate the terrorist threat and marginalizes those who accurately describe it. Thus, those who proclaim that Muslim terrorists represent an unprecedented threat to our way of life; that our existing laws, courts, and institutions—even our prisons—are inadequate in the face of this threat; that we have no choice but to dispense with core principles—including even the prohibition against torturing prisoners—to defeat this ruthless enemy; that, in short, “9/11 changed everything”—are extolled as hard-nosed realists, warriors who are willing to “take the gloves off.” By contrast, those who defend the vitality and viability of our constitutional system, who insist that our existing institutions are equal to the challenges posed by transnational terrorism; who demand that we abide by core principles, including fair trials for and humane treatment of prisoners, even if that means that terrorism suspects must be released and political leaders must be prosecuted; who, in short, do not believe that the threat of terrorism requires us to abandon our core principles—are dismissed as weak and naïve.

...

On May 26, 2011, a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to give President Obama—and all future presidents—more war authority than Congress gave to President Bush two days after the 9/11 attacks: under the House bill, a president would no longer have to show a connection to 9/11, or even any specific threat to America, before using military force anywhere in the world that a terrorism suspect may be found—including within the United States.
The House vote was a discordant spectacle because it sought to place the nation on a permanent war footing at a time when responsible policy-making called for the opposite.

This is must reading for Americans as they allow their civil liberties to be frittered away on endless "wars" against something that will never disappear "terrorism".

The actions of the US since 9/11 have been disreputable... except for the new policies of Obama in the Middle East, particularly in Libya, which have allowed these people to democratically fight for their rights against oppressive regimes.

Here is an article in Salon by Glenn Greenwald that discusses Obama's security state. He notes that the PBS program Frontline: Top Secret America discloses that Obama has continued Bush's obsession and tactics:

Here is one quote they include from Rizzo:

With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations. Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.

Frontline adds that while candidate Obama "promised a sweeping overhaul of the Bush administration’s war on terror" and "a top to bottom review of the threats we face and our abilities to confront them," Rizzo explains that, in fact, Obama officials during the transition made clear to the CIA that they intended almost complete continuity. And Rizzo was joined in this assessment today by Dick Cheney, who -- as recounted by his long-time faithful stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen -- cites this continuity to (once again) claim "vindication"; said the former Vice President, “[Obama] ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation.”

Pathetic. Obama promised "hope" and "change you can believe in" and "transparency" in government but he has delivered the economy over to the Wall Street bankers and the endless wars over to the Pentagon and has taken draconian steps against whistle-blowers.

Paul Krugman Notices an Oddity of 9/11

Here is a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul Krugman takes a lot of flak for telling things as he sees them. He is courageous and modest, and he has stayed in the fight despite being ignored and hated. To me, he is like an Old Testament prophet: reviled in his own land, but one day he will be recognized for his honest, heroic, and prescient stand. He's been dead right on almost every issue.

Meanwhile, for comic relief, there is Michael Moore who has done much to publicize problems and wrongs, but who can't resist putting his own ego front and centre. If you want to read something that is 180^o out from Krugman's quiet stance, read this article by Michael Moore where he turns the focus off the big issue and instead focuses on "me, me, me". I like Michael Moore but I don't like his narcissistic egotism. Krugman stays at his post focused on the issues, while Michael Moore makes sure he is in the shot when he does a documentary or writes up the injustice or tragedy with his own ego front and centre. I prefer the quiet hero.

As for 9/11... here is a post by Barry Ritholtz at his The Big Picture blog that best captures my opinion about the way the media is milking the situation:

Relentless Media Hype

I’ve already had my say about what happened 10 years ago. I do not feel a compelling need to revisit it again and again and again.

MSNBC is replaying their September 11, 2001 broadcast; the WSJ made their entire 9/12 paper available online. Other outlets are doing similar “tributes” if thats the right word.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but the relentless 9/11 coverage and tributes feels both ghoulish and exploitative. Sorry, but this is simply too much, I’ve had more than I can take of this. I do not care to spend the entire day crying, but if I watch any more of this coverage that is what will happen.

To those people who can find some consolation in this, I wish you well. Its a macabre spectacle to me. I need to find something more joyous and upbeat.

Between narcissistic egoism and bathetic maudlinism and commercial exploitation, I'm finding early September to be the doldrums of the year.

Update 2011sep12: Here is an added post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that gives his thoughts about the exploitation of 9/11:

More About the 9/11 Anniversary

It looks as if I should say a bit more about yesterday’s anniversary. So:

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, when people who made speeches, then feathered their own political or financial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – those who put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after.

So it was a shameful episode in our nation’s history – and it’s one that I can’t help thinking about whenever we talk about 9/11 itself.

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

Obama's Claim of "Transparent" Government

In 2008 Barack Obama promised so many wonderful things he would do if elected. It is 2.5 years later and he has done precious little of what he promised.

Here's a post by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine that highlights Obama's failure at "transparency":

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

...

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished.

Go read the original to get the whole article and the embedded links.

The treatment of Ali Soufan is sleazy and criminal. So much for "constitutional lawyer" Obama and his promises about transparency. This demonstrates that Obama has no respect for the law or for democracy. He is just another "politician" like Bush and the rest of the Republicans and a majority of the Democrats. They give lip service to democracy, but ultimately they don't believe in government "of the people. by the people, and for the people". They believe in government of the bureaucracy, by the office-holders, and for the vested interests.

The Ugly Truth of Citizens United

The US Supreme Court has accepted the argument in the Citizens United case that corporations have an unrestricted right to use shareholder money to buy politicians. Why? Because "corporations are people". Yeah, sure.

Here's a reminder from an article written by Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and posted on the Naked Capitalist blog:

Unlike real people, corporations cannot be sent to jail. Corporate shells shield owners and managers from criminal prosecution for the wholesale frauds that have left Countrywide Financial, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and other pillars of the banking community free to make civil settlements for deceptive policies without admitting wrongdoing. And whereas individual crooks need to pay their own lawyers, corporations pick up the tab for their managers, while contributing generously to politicians who rewrite the laws to decriminalize fraud and deceptive business dealing. The corporate-backed media applaud politicians who insist that families “take responsibility” for their unemployment risk, debts and health care – while bailouts free the wealthy from having to suffer losses on bad loans.

Funny how the same Supreme Court which couldn't bother to let the ballots be counted in 2000 to decide the election has been able to sift the tea leaves and discover that corporations are "people". Well, if so, let's start sending corporations to jail! Take the whole kit and caboodle off and lock them up right down to the night watchman.

If we make corporations accountable as "persons" then people will be more cautious about taking a job at a corporation. They will want bigger salaries for the higher risk that they can go to jail as part of the "corporate body" that did a criminal act. That might be salutary for everybody. Better wages. Slower growth for corporations. More workers ready to be whistle-blowers about corporate corruption and crime.

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors, the SEC Edition

Matt Taibbi has an excellent article in Rolling Stone magazine documenting the malfeasance and criminality in the SEC that has facilitated the crime wave on Wall Street.

Here is the intro to that article. This is a must read:

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

Go read the whole article.

Taibbi ends his article with the following:

It goes without saying that no ordinary law-enforcement agency would willingly destroy its own evidence. In fact, when it comes to garden-variety crooks, more and more police agencies are catching criminals with the aid of large and well-maintained databases. "Street-level law enforcement is increasingly data-driven," says Bill Laufer, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "For a host of reasons, though, we are starved for good data on both white-collar and corporate crime. So the idea that we would take the little data we do have and shred it, without a legal requirement to do so, calls for a very creative explanation."

We'll never know what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we'll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We'll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street's dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.

It is pretty clear to me that the SEC has joined the criminals in a vast criminal conspiracy and the officials at the SEC should be forced to do a "perp walk" and be jailed for dozens of years. They have contributed to the meltdown of the US economy and the theft of literally trillions of dollars.

If You Want a Betterr Government

Then you need whistleblowers who can point out corruption and failings within government. But if you crack down hard on whistleblowers, you will get a corrupt government.

Here is a bit from Wired magazine on one NSA whistleblower:

Days before he was set to go on trial on charges that he illegally retained classified documents, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor count of exceeding authorized access to a computer.

Drake had been charged under the Espionage Act after he allegedly provided information about waste and mismanagement at the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2006 and 2007.

The former NSA linguist, who was set to go to trial next Monday, rejected two pleas offered by the government on Wednesday before finally agreeing to a third proposal, according to the Washington Post. He turned down an offer to plead guilty to the charge that he retained classified documents without authorization.

Drake, who left the NSA in 2008 and has been reduced to working at an Apple Store outside Washington, D.C. while he awaited trial, was facing a possible sentence of 35 years if convicted of the charges he was facing. He has long maintained that he never provided the Sun with classified information and also disputed that any documents investigators found at his home contained classified material.

Here's the real alarm signal. I've added the emphases:

The government’s decision to prosecute Drake and the resulting media attention has already led to more public disclosures about the NSA’s illegal surveillance program than the government likely wanted.

...

Drake’s revelations to the Baltimore Sun exposed the government’s waste and mismanagement of the programs.

Last year the government had dropped a criminal investigation of another whistle blower who helped expose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to the New York Times in 2004.

Go read the original article to get all the gory details about corruption and crime within government and how they are using "the Law" to suppress anybody who tries to point this out.

Obama Attacks a Free Press

Not only has the Obama administration been brutal with the not-yet-guilty-until-judged-in-a-court-of-law Bradley Manning. They are now going after the press to stop journalists from printing news. Funny, the Constitution is very clear that the press must be free of undue control by the government. The press must be free so that a "free" people can make judgements about their representatives so that the democracy is real and not fake. The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even Richard Nixon didn't go so far as to jail Daniel Ellsberg over releasing the secret Pentagon Papers, documents that proved that the US government had been systematically lying to the American people about its policies, intentions, and actions in Vietnam. Sadly, the Obama administration appears not to favour a free press. As well it does not appear to believe in "due process" of the law, i.e. you are innocent until proven guilty. Otherwise it would not be torturing Bradley Manning.

From BoingBoing:

Federal prosecutors, with the approval of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., are trying to force the author of a book on the C.I.A. to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about an effort by the agency to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

What if 90% of the population thinks it should be illegal for agents of the US Government to be trying to assassinate the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? If the press isn't allowed to report the leak that the government is pursuing such a heinous plot, then the people will not have the requisite knowledge to protest and urge their legislators to stop the executive before it commits this crime on "behalf" of the American people. But Obama doesn't believe the US people should know about crimes its agents are doing in other countries. Otherwise it wouldn't be forcing a reporter to break the confidentiality of sources and undermine a free press.

We do know that when Obama says "capture" Osama Bin Laden, that mean "shoot to kill" and don't bother capturing him because we don't want the messy business of having to interrogate, try, and imprison him. We just want him dead. Gosh. I bet police forces all around the US would like to take up that policy when it comes to dealing with violent criminals. Why bother trying to capture them, going through the messy and expensive details of a trial, and then the long and expensive incarceration. Just shoot to kill and then "no fuss, no muss". So you kill a few innocent people. This will "expedite" justice and lower the cost of delivering "justice".

Despite what the rabid right wing Republicans think. Having an effective, lawful government is expensive and messy. It is important that goverment servants don't just short cut "red tape" and deliver what they perceive as "justice" or "services" without any oversight or measure of efficiency, utility, or justice. By its very nature, government is slow and expensive.

Update 2011may24: I watched the PBS Frontline program entitled WikiSecrets. They studiously avoided what I consider the key facts:

1. The US military used "top secret" as a technique to deny facts about a crime to Reuters that wanted an explanation of why their reporter was murdered in cold blood. There was no "secret" here other than ass-covering by the military. If the American public can't find out how badly the war is run, how will the public ever decide that it is doing more harm than good? How can the electorate be "informed" if the US government uses secrecy claims to keep critical information out of the hands of voters?


2. Bradley Manning is being tortured before he is convicted. That is criminal. The Obama administration is allowing the military to torture somebody who is presumed innocent, because he has not yet been tried and found guilty. This is a crime. But Frontline doesn't think that is a significant fact.

My opinion is that Frontline wasted most of an hour. It was fine that they give some background on Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, but they focused on sensationalism and spent little time of facts and they ignored very important issues. That is a disservice to their viewers.

They mentioned the sex charges against Assange, but they didn't bother to point out that it was consensual sex or look at the strange behaviour of these women. They didn't complain until the police got involved. I'm guessing the US twisted arms behind the scenes because they see these charges as their ticket to get Assange extradicted. The fact that the charges are bogus is obvious, but Frontline didn't bother.

The one truthful moment in the Frontline documentary was when they showed the hacker conference in May 2010 when Assange was supposed to show up to speak. The chair of the meeting asked people whether they believed that Assange would walk into the room. The fact that many said "no way!" was the most truthful moment in the documentary. They knew that the US had laid a trap and was hoping desperately that Assange would walk into it. But Frontline didn't talk about the entrapment. They didn't wonder why such a large audience would have a majority that were cynical about their own government and its motives and actions.

I watched three administrations lie about Vietnam. They put every effort into vilifying anybody who opposed that war. But the truth came out. The war was bogus and built on lies. All that money was wasted. All those lives lost for nothing. Today the US is "good buddies" with the Communist regime in Vietnam. But the lie that was fed by the government and the media was that if the youth of America didn't go over and die in some god forsaken jungle, then under the "Domino Theory" the commies would next be in San Diego and take over the US. It was a lie. The government knew it was a lie. But they spread that lie. The government knowingly ruined the lives of many good people who conscientiously opposed the madness of the Vietnam war.

This Frontline "documentary" is just one more bit of government propaganda that willingly smears somebody who does no immediately "buy" the government line that secrecy is sacrosanct and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are noble missions that will "save the world". They aren't. They won't. And all that money and all those lives are wasted for nothing. It is out-of-control militarism now as it was in the 1960s.

More "Transparency" from the Obama Administration

Yep... if you criticize the policy, then Obama will give you all the transparency you need. You get kicked out and get to wander the lonely political wilderness for your honesty.

Whistleblowers beware! Obama takes letting the truth out very seriously. He will fire you for telling the truth. He won't fire you for incompetence or studpidity or greed or lying, but he will fire you for telling the truth. This is the Obama policy on "transparency".

From BoingBoing:

Report: State Dept.'s Crowley out, days after criticizing Manning treatment as "counterproductive, stupid"

Xeni Jardin at 9:47 AM Sunday, Mar 13, 2011

CNN reports that P.J. Crowley, State Department spokesperson, has left (or been sacked) just days after widely reported comments critical of the Defense Department's treatment of accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning.

What is Bradley Manning's crime? He was frustrated that the US military refused to respond to Reuters inquiries about the killing of a news team. Why did the miltiary cover up? Because it was the killing of a news team and several civilians, and some young children by a trigger happy Apache attack helicopter in which the pilots exult over their "victory". Watch for yourself!

Seems the US military didn't want the "bad publicity". So Bradley Manning spilled the beans. The military kept the lid on, so Manning opened the whole can of worms. So the military grabbed him and has been torturing him in isolation during pre-trial ever since.

Yep... the US military is a classic case of how not to "control" the news. If you squash it you make it worse. Rather than "man up" and tell the truth and discipline the Apache helicopter crew, the US military has unleashed hellish punishment on Bradley Manning... and of course on the Truth. But everybody knows that the first victim in war is the Truth.

When Obama ran for office he indicated he wanted to stop the senseless Bush military offensives. He was going to close Guantanamo. But he has brought a bigger war effort in the quagmire of Afghanistan and he has not only kept Guantanamo, he has now reinstated the senseless and fruitless military tribunals. Most of the people plucked randomly off the streets and shipped to Guantanamo. No wonder Obama wants no "transparency" about this war he is continuing, this war on anything that moves.

Watch Ethan McCord's witness testimony about the war on anything that moved in Iraq.

How the US Wages War on its Own Citizens

The US loves to pretend that its is "law abiding" and never petty or vindictive. But when you run afoul of what Uncle Sam wants, then surprisingly strange things happen to you. Things that look vengeful and vindictive, but Uncle Sam claims that just isn't so. Here's a bit from a Wired magazine article:

PayPal has frozen the account of a group that has been raising money for the legal defense of accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, citing a failure to meet PayPal’s requirement for nonprofit groups.

According to Courage to Resist, a military veterans advocacy group that has been raising donations for Manning’s defense, PayPal froze the account after the group refused to link its PayPal account to its checking account, which would give the online payment provider access to funds in the checking account.

“We exchanged numerous e-mails and phone calls with the legal department and the office of executive escalations of PayPal,” said Jeff Paterson in a press release. “They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization’s checking account by default. Our accounting does not allow for this type of direct access by a third party, nor do I trust PayPal as a business entity with this responsibility given their punitive actions against WikiLeaks — an entity not charged with any crime by any government on Earth.”

[PayPal has since unfrozen the account. See update at bottom of this post.]

The advocacy group has been raising funds for the Manning Support Network and has so far paid Manning’s defense attorney at least $50,000 from money that it raised on the soldier’s behalf. Paterson did not respond to a call for comment, but said in the press release that his group opened the PayPal account in 2006.

Funny how that group was using Pay Pal for four years with no problem, but suddenly after the US has declared war on Julian Assange and everybody and everything associated with him, Pay Pal suddenly "discovers" a policy and decides to enforce it very selectively on just this one advocacy group for Bradley Manning!

Here's the really sleazy part:

Asked why, if the Courage to Resist account was opened in 2006, PayPal hadn’t raised the issue of linking it to a bank account earlier, Nayar did not have an immediate response. He said only that nonprofit organizations are allowed to open accounts easily and quickly.

“We don’t limit them prior to opening and saying they’re a nonprofit before allowing them to open an account,” he said.

With regard to PayPal’s assertion that it’s only following company policy, Courage to Resist says it repeatedly requested and was refused formal documentation from PayPal describing its policy.

“They opted to apply an exceptional hurdle for us to clear in order to continue as a customer, whereas we have clearly provided the legally required information and verification,” the group wrote.

Hannah Arendt made clear that great evil can be put forward in a form that is boringly banal. It uses the cover of indirection, denial, bureaucratic "requirements" to cover the unrelenting evil within its intentions. This soporific approach is sufficient to go under the moral radar of most people, so sleazy, evil regimes can work their murderous intent undisturbed. Uncle Sam is just using these "tools" to carry out an under-the-radar war against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It is sleazy. It is evil. Obama should be ashamed of himself!

But I've learned since the 2008 election that Obama isn't "change you can believe in". He is the same old bureaucratic evil slime that went before him. He is just "more of the same". Sure he is a toned-down evil. He is definitely preferable to the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Reagan, Oliver North, E. Howard Hunt, Nixon, and Scott Walker characters, but he is not on the side of the angels. He is just their "little brother" who believes that you shouldn't beat an old lady with a big and bloody stick, instead you should quietly put a pillow over her mouth and "relieve her of life's burdens".