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One for John
Where was it you wanted to go diving on holiday, John?
An amazing set on Flickr!
Modern product announcements
These days, if you want an product announcement, just read the CEO weblog
The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation
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The Bush administration and the National Security Agency (NSA) have been secretly monitoring the email messages and phone calls of all Americans. They are doing this, they say, for our own good. To find terrorists. Many people have criticized NSA’s domestic spying as unlawful invasion of privacy, as search without search warrant, as abuse of power, as misuse of the NSA’s resources, as unConstitutional, as something the communists would do, something very unAmerican.
In addition, however, mass surveillance of an entire population cannot find terrorists. It is a probabilistic impossibility. It cannot work.
What is the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s mass surveillance identifies them as terrorists? If the probability is zero (p=0.00), then they certainly are not terrorists, and NSA was wasting resources and damaging the lives of innocent citizens. If the probability is one (p=1.00), then they definitely are terrorists, and NSA has saved the day. If the probability is fifty-fifty (p=0.50), that is the same as guessing the flip of a coin. The conditional probability that people are terrorists given that the NSA surveillance system says they are, that had better be very near to one (p=1.00) and very far from zero (p=0.00).
The mathematics of conditional probability were figured out by the Scottish logician Thomas Bayes. If you Google “Bayes’ Theorem”, you will get more than a million hits. Bayes’ Theorem is taught in all elementary statistics classes. Everyone at NSA certainly knows Bayes’ Theorem.
To know if mass surveillance will work, Bayes’ theorem requires three estimations:
1. The base-rate for terrorists, i.e. what proportion of the population are terrorists;
2. The accuracy rate, i.e., the probability that real terrorists will be identified by NSA;
3. The misidentification rate, i.e., the probability that innocent citizens will be misidentified by NSA as terrorists.No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists.
I will not put Bayes’ computational formula here. It is available in all elementary statistics books and is on the web should any readers be interested. But I will compute some conditional probabilities that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of mass surveillance identifies them to be terrorists.
The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA.
Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA’s surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.
Suppose that NSA’s system is more accurate than .40, let’s say, .70, which means that 70% of terrorists in the USA will be found by mass monitoring of phone calls and email messages. Then, by Bayes’ Theorem, the probability that a person is a terrorist if targeted by NSA is still only p=0.0228, which is near zero, far from one, and useless.
Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.
NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge. So, why does NSA spy on Americans knowing it’s not possible to find terrorists that way? Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if there is a higher base-rate. Higher base-rates arise from two lines of thought, neither of them very nice:
1. McCarthy-type national paranoia;
2. political espionage.The whole NSA domestic spying program will seem to work well, will seem logical and possible, if you are paranoid. Instead of presuming there are 1,000 terrorists in the USA, presume there are 1 million terrorists. Americans have gone paranoid before, for example, during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s. Imagining a million terrorists in America puts the base-rate at .00333, and now the probability that a person is a terrorist given that NSA’s system identifies them is p=.99, which is near certainty. But only if you are paranoid. If NSA’s surveillance requires a presumption of a million terrorists, and if in fact there are only 100 or only 10, then a lot of innocent people are going to be misidentified and confidently mislabeled as terrorists.
The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people in the prison camps of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Kandahar shows that the US is paranoid and is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent people. The ratio of real terrorists to innocent people on Bush’s no-fly lists shows that the Bush administration is not bothered by mistaken identifications of innocent Americans.
Also, mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA’s domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p=1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans’ phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.
But finding a few terrorists by mass surveillance of the phone calls and email messages of 300 million Americans is mathematically impossible, and NSA certainly knows that.
With the above statistics, the NSA program really is a success. It just depends on how you define “success”. If the agency investigates 30,000 positives a day, the unofficial standing order would be to pick out the few who would most easily be framed. (With 30,000 random people to pick from, finding the idiots should be no trouble.) Run the picks through kangaroo courts and make sure the press sticks to the party line. Keep reminding the public what a great job the government war on ‘terrism’ is doing. Meanwhile remember to occasionally put out nonspecific warnings to take no specific actions at no specific time in no specific place. “Fear” has been very useful in managing the American public, and this program is a tremendous help in that respect.
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Vista likely to be ready in January
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Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company’s next-generation operating system, Windows Vista, would be ready in January.
However, Gates said at a presentation in Cape Town to Microsoft software partners that he would delay the launch if beta testing uncovered shortcomings.
[..]
He said Microsoft was investing $8 billion to $9 billion in developing Vista and the company’s next version of Office, its key cash-generator. He said the company’s software partners, in developing and adapting their own products for the two launches, would invest 20 times as much as Microsoft.
So implementing Vista costs 20 times 9 billion - if a country has a 180 billion GDP, it would rank in the top 50 countries in the world.
Boing Boing: BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet
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The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has written to two broadband ISPs, asking them to terminate the DSL connections of customers whom the BPI claims are engaged in infringing file-sharing. The BPI is basically asking to replace the “notice-and-takedown” regime that allows anyone to censor any web-page by claiming it infringes copyright with an even harsher regime: notice-and-termination, where the ability to communicate over the Internet can be taken away on the say-so of anyone who claims you’re doing something naughty with copyright.
It’s hard to imagine anything more perverse, really. Copyright is supposed to protect expression, but the BPI thinks that protecting its business should take precedence over due process or free speech. They want to be able to silence anyone whom they think might be breaking the law, without having to go to the expensive mediapathic bother of bringing a lawsuit, with evidence, and proving their case to a judge.
I actually attended a preliminary meeting on notice-and-termination the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) last year. WIPO is the entity that gave us notice-and-takedown, which is now embedded in Europe through the EUCD and in the USA through the DMCA. Notice-and-takedown allows people claiming to be be rightsholders to have any web-page removed from the Internet just by claiming that it infringes their copyright. The Church of Scientology uses this all the time to shut up its critics, and Diebold used it to suppress the publication of a whistle-blower memo that detailed the critical failings in their voting machines (for more examples of bogus takedowns, see Chilling Effects).
The music and movie and software industries are notoriously careless with their takedown notices. ISPs receive thousands of these at a time, generated by software. Kids’ book-reports about Harry Potter, MP3s of lectures by university profs named Usher, and even copies of Linux are routinely mistaken for infringing materials by the takedown bots.
Notice-and-takedown is a censor’s best friend, but as the music and film industry can attest, it hasn’t made any kind of dent in copyright infringement. For one thing, it’s wholly ineffective against P2P file-sharing — notice-and-takedown only works on stuff hosted on an ISP’s web-server, not on a customer’s own PC.
The new proposal for notice-and-termination aims at creating an even more radical version of this judge, jury and executioner privilege the entertainment industry has secured for itself. Under notice-and-termination, you need only claim to be an aggrieved rightsholder to actually knock someone’s DSL circuit offline.
This sounds like something similar to notice-and-takedown, but there’s a gigantic difference: the cost of connecting a DSL circuit is vastly higher than the cost of putting some files on a web-server. Indeed, ISPs have told me that it can take years to recoup the cost of connecting a customer to the Internet.
If termination notices could be sent in the same volume (and with the same negligence) as takedown notices, it could potentially destroy ISPs, who would be forced to terminate customers — on the mere say-so of the entertainment industry — long before the customer had made a penny of profit for the ISP.
Indeed, I pointed this out to a rep of one of the industry lobby groups I met at WIPO and he agreed, but proposed a simple solution: ISPs could cripple their customers’ Internet connections, throttling their bandwidth, banning certain protocols and spying on file-transfers and terminating anything that might be an infringement. By prohibiting all large file-transfers, by constraining upload speeds, and by blocking any non-Hollywood-approved protocols, ISPs could ensure that their businesses wouldn’t be destroyed by an avalanche of termination notices.
And since this is being proposed as a United Nations treaty obligation, every ISP in the land would have the same restrictions, so no customer would be able to jump ship for a less censorious provider.
If this regime had been in place when VoIP was invented, there would be no VoIP — after all, the protocol didn’t exist, and for it to take hold, every ISP in the world would have to be convinced, a priori of its value and allow it at the firewall. Hell, this regime would have made the Web itself impossible; Tim Berners-Lee was smart enough to invent the Web, but would he have had the wherewithal to convince the world’s ISPs to let http on port 80 through their liability-limiting firewalls? link
And later:
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One of the ISPs that the British recording industry tried to strong-arm into terminating customers’ accounts on accusation of file-sharing has refused. In a letter to the British Phonogram Industry, Tiscali’s legal department lectures the BPI on how the law works and why the “overwhelming” evidence of wrongdoing was quite underwhelming.
Webuser has more details on this, including a complaint from Tiscali that the grandstanding BPI issued a press-release about its letter before it had been reviewed at Tiscali: “A Tiscali spokeswoman described the move as a ‘media ambush’. She said the BPI had ‘[sent] their letter to the media before we even had a chance to read it and the information they went to press with was not strictly correct’.”
You have sent us a spreadsheet setting out a list of 17 IP addresses you allege belong to Tiscali customers, whom you allege have infringed the copyright of your members, together with the dates and times and with which sound recording you allege that they have done so. You have also sent us extracts of screenshots of the shared drive of one of those customers. You state that such evidence is “overwhelming”. However, you have provided no actual evidence in respect of 16 of the accounts. Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time.
Similar requests we have dealt with in the past, have included such information and, indeed, the bodies conducting those investigations have felt that a court would consider it necessary to see such evidence, supported by sworn statements, before being able to grant any order.
peanut butter disaster
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oh, the wretched. the worst thing about this whole debacle, as my husband later informed me, is that i TOLD Violet to “go play with the peanut butter.” she liked to roll the jar around in the kitchen. unfortunately, big sister figured out how to open the jar and pile the entire contents onto the little one’s head. it was very hard to convince them that they should never do this again when i was laughing and crying and taking a million pictures.
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The Bush Pilot
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A German TV station produced this I believe.
This solves the mystery.
email signature
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My email sig has gotten some compliments, so here it is:
[Confidential to all US government personnel to whom this private letter is not addressed and who are reading it in the absence of a specific search warrant: You are violating the law and you are co-conspiring to subvert the Constitution that you are sworn to defend. You can either refuse to commit this crime, or you can expect to suffer criminal sanctions in the future, when Constitutional government has been restored to the United States of America. I do not envy you for having to make this difficult choice, but I urge you to make it wisely.]
Feel free to use in your own mail.
In Big Shift, U.S. to Follow Geneva Treaty for Detainees
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In a sweeping change of policy, the Pentagon has decided that it will treat all detainees in compliance with the minimum standards spelled out in the Geneva conventions, a senior defense official said today.
The new policy comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling last month invalidating a system of military tribunals the Pentagon had created to try suspected terrorists, and just before Congress takes up the question of a replacement system in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today.
As part of its decision, the court found that a key provision of the Geneva conventions, known as Common Article 3, did apply to terror suspects, contradicting the position taken by the Bush administration.
[..]
Since the Hamdan ruling was announced, some legislators had said they would consider rewriting the law specifically to make Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, no longer applicable.
“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,? Admiral Hutson said. “They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same.?
He said it was “unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’ ?
“If you don’t apply it when it’s inconvenient,? he said, “it’s not a rule of law.?
Does this include the ghost detainees, who the U.S. won’t admit to holding and doesn’t report to the Red Cross? (Existence of these was publically admitted by the U.S. military in 2004.) Does it include the ones at prison camps in eastern Europe? (Denied by the U.S., though the evidence is overwhelming.) How about the ones held in Afghanistan and Iraq? How about the ones held by the CIA, not the DoD?
Dog Running For Governor In Alaska
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One Alaskan gubernatorial candidate is an extreme long shot to win. But he’ll keep barking up every tree to turn out the vote.
Brinkley is a two year-old golden retriever who is the center of a write-in campaign for Alaska’s highest office.
At least one candidate will sniff your asshole… two, if you count the dog.
Gay cycling club
Disabled
Honk
Me and My Shadow.
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Some old news regarding Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Further proof that tigers don’t change their stripes. Tiger Force in operated in Vietnam, led by the recently-deceased Colonel David Hackworth), with the task of out-guerilla-ing the guerillas. Their attrocities were covered up by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and James Schlesinger, who most recently headed an independent panel probing Abu Gharib.You can also see how our dynamic duo successfully re-heated the Cold War via some fear mongering over some new secret (non-existent) Russian weapon, despite Nixon’s actions to the contrary. Also check out their earlier Nixon-sanctioned hatchet job on the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), as well as thier (as well as a young DOJ lawyer by the name of Antonin Scalia) epic struggle AGAINST the strengthening of FOIA in the post-Nixon era.
Most interesting of all, however, is how strategically placed leaks to the New York Times were the deciding factor for Ford’s veto of the bill strengthening FOIA:
“The question remains, why did Buchen and President Ford change their minds? The available documents do not provide a definitive answer, but notes from key meetings in September and October provide clues to Ford’s priorities - and these were far from government transparency. For example, handwritten notes of the first White House senior staff meeting presided over by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Richard Cheney (September 30, 1974) [PDF] show Rumsfeld’s rising concern about leaks, a discussion that takes up a major part of the meeting. Similarly, notes from the National Security Council meeting on October 7, 1974 [PDF] reveal Ford himself opening the session by complaining about leaks for a full two pages of the transcript, asking for ‘recommendations on how to tighten up this system,’ and telling his advisers that ‘I could have ordered an FBI investigation on this, but Don and I thought it would be better to see what you could do first.’”
Now, what were these leaks? Ford and Rummy had previously supported strengthening FOIA - what changed. The second document from the senior staff meeting in October 1974 involved a 2 New York Times articles related to Israel. Both (link#1, link#2) were from the “Working Group” of the NSC (National Security Council), covered the defensive and offensive capability of the Israelis, as well as their request for future funding. So who did the leaking?
High drama spacewalk ends in success
(click photo for hi-res version)
Using Space Shuttle Discovery’s Remote Manipulator System/Orbiter Booster Sensor System (RMS/OBSS) for maneuvering, astronauts Piers J. Sellers (red stripes) and Michael E. Fossum, STS-121 mission specialists, work on the S0 Truss of the International Space Station. The 7 hour 31 minute spacewalk was the first of three scheduled EVA sessions for the STS-121 mission. Photo Credit: NASA
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In a high-drama spacewalk on Monday, a pair of NASA astronauts overcame an issue with a loose jet pack to make crucial repairs to the International Space Station.
The jet packs are designed to whisk astronauts back to safety should they float away from the ISS and into space. But once Mike Fossum had helped his partner Piers Sellers secure the jet pack, the two completed their work preparing the ISS for the expansion planned during future shuttle missions.
The astronauts replaced a key system that sends power and commands to a railcar attached to the station’s truss. The truss acts like a backbone to the station and supports its power-generating solar arrays.
The station’s robot arm moves on the railcar to access hard-to-reach areas, making the railcar critical for the installation of more solar arrays and truss segments.
“If we didn’t get this successfully changed and checked out, then we couldn’t proceed with the next mission, which is right on our heels,” says ISS lead flight director Rick LaBrode. The next shuttle is currently scheduled for a lift-off on 28 August.
Yep, were thinking about this type of content in your pics
Hope you see som