News and/or Media
Pun of the Year goes to ABC News…
Saturday, May 12th, 2007Dateline: Seoul, South Korea. 18 high-wire artists compete for a $15,000 prize by trying to set the best time for crossing a half-mile long high-wire strung across the Han river.
ABC’s Headline?
Bravo, ABC. Bravo…
(hat tip: Mike Starr)
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Where’s the Civil Rights Discussion?
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007Yesterday, we learned about two violations of our civil liberties, the latest evidence of a much publicized trend that has earned the Bush administration their reputation as constitution shredders. Ironically, these particular offenses seem to have gone largely unnoticed.
The first involved a group of six friends, including three brothers who owned a simple roofing business, a Philadelphia taxi driver, and a convenience store clerk. The brothers are illegal aliens, two others are here on green cards, and the taxi driver is a U.S. citizen. In January of 2006, one of these men brought a video cassette into a local video store and asked to have it copied onto DVD. The video happened to be footage of arabic men shooting assault rifles and yelling “Allah-o-Akbar” and “Jihad!” and the customer happened to be of muslim descent. Based on this purely circumstantial evidence, the FBI infiltrated this group of friends and tracked them for sixteen months, including putting them under video surveillance during trips they took to the Pocono mountains.
We only learned about it yesterday when this came to light:
The suspects conducted surveillance of Fort Dix and other U.S. military installations in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, plotting attacks inspired by an international call for holy war against the West, officials said.
“My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of American soldiers, light up four or five Humvees full of soldiers,” [a U.S. attorney] quoted one of the suspects as saying.
They also discussed attacking two U.S. warships when they docked in Philadelphia and staging an attack on the annual Army-Navy college football game, prosecutors said.
[The FBI] obtained computer files [including] the wills of at least two of the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks [and] images of Osama bin Laden urging viewers to join their movement.
Fascinating that no one is complaining about the FBI’s egregious actions in this case.
The other event we learned about yesterday involves the data mining of U.S. citizens to determine what news articles they are reading, in order to “determine hidden patterns of uses.” You’ll recall the public outcry over this kind of analysis by the TSA for no-fly lists, by the federal government over Microsoft & Yahoo’s search results to prosecute online pornography, and by the NSA for obtaining phone records of known terrorists. Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize in December, 2005 for their investigative reporting on the subject.
But this time, the New York Times is silent on the issue. Why? Because it’s The New York Times that’s doing the data mining. Janet Robinson, the Times’ president and CEO calls the R&D department, who came up with the idea, “a concept unique in the industry.”
Jeff Porten and I had several long debates on the subject back in May of 2006. His argument at the time was that searching the entire population for patterns is invasive because it gives them the ability to search for a particular individual. Specifically in the search engine case, the concern was not so much about the Yahoo checking up on what I was searching for, but about the government one day requiring that data via subpeona to make a case against an individual. Surely the same concern applies here, no?
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
The FBI gets cyber-tricky…
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007OK, so there’s a nutcase out there writing threatening letters to the TV networks because they’re only televising cheerleaders who are not dressed provocatively:
The FBI had decided it was time to go public with its investigation into a series of bizarre, threatening letters — some laced with insecticide — that complain about the way television networks depict college cheerleaders.
[FBI Agent Fred Gutt] said investigators want the public’s attention and help in locating a person whose tirades appear unique: The author says sports broadcasters give more coverage to cheerleaders who show the least skin.
“It does seem the opposite of what you’d associate with exploitation,” Gutt said.
I guess nothing should surprise us at this point. But here’s what I found most interesting:
Investigators had hoped that the letter writer would surface during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, when television coverage peaks.
“There were things we were attempting to do to identify people,” Gutt said. Gutt didn’t elaborate, but one OSU source said that a fake cheerleading Web site was created to try to trap the letter-writer.
The source said the Web site address was put on the side of an Ohio State cheerleader’s megaphone, and the FBI got the television network to show the megaphone for 3 seconds. Those who visited the Web site got an error message, which was intentional. The source said the FBI was looking for hits from the northwestern United States. The site got about 1,000 total hits, the source said.
I think this is as fascinating as it is creative. A weirdo like this would seem almost guaranteed to visit such a site. First of all, he’s probably watching the games intently, especially when the cheerleaders are on camera. Second, the website seems like a perfect outlet for him to rage against the machine, so to speak.
But then my mind wanders back to the discussions we had during the whole wire-tapping, bank-record-tracking, Google-search-history-subpoenaing craze of 2006. About 1,000 people were investigated by the FBI without their knowledge and for doing something completely legal and totally harmless. One would assume that the FBI captured their IP addresses and endeavored to find out more about them: where they live, where they send/receive mail, what other sites they visited, etc. Is this warrantless wire tapping? An invasion of people’s privacy? Or is it a smart way to build your case against a potentially dangerous individual, in hopes of making your case for a warrant and/or arrest? Certainly the other 999 people weren’t harmed in any way by the investigation (unless of course they were caught doing something else illegal at the time). I find myself uttering the phrase that automatically loses this argument: “innocent people have nothing to hide…”
All in all, I’m glad the FBI does things like this. If I’m one of the people they’ve investigated for something over the past few years, that’s fine with me. As long as they don’t accuse me of a crime I didn’t commit, inconvenience me in some way, or damage my reputation by implying that their interest in me implies some guilt, I honestly don’t care (or even want to know, for that matter).
But I can see how others would. This line is grey and will remain grey until some bright lawyer out there figures out a way to codify it into a law people can agree on…
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All the Wrong Things
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007Like everyone else, I’ve been listening to and reading about the horrible events that took place at Virginia Tech yesterday.
While this was the most deadly, it was not, unfortunately, the first of it’s kind. This time around, though, the discussion of what happened and how it could have been prevented/mitigated seems to be focused on a strange mix of topics.
One discussion thread is the two-hour delay between the first shooting and the e-mail notifying students about it. There seems to be an implication here that the University’s primary role in this situation is communication, not security – as if the students would have been perfectly capable of defending themselves, had they only known sooner that there was a shooter on the loose. Personally, I’d have been happy if they had secured the campus and not informed anybody, as opposed to the other way around.
Another discussion I’ve seen floating around is about VT’s “open campus,” and whether the ability to walk freely into and out of buildings without metal detectors, ID cards, etc. is worth enduring the occasional tragedy:
It is very difficult, because we are an open society and an open campus. We have 26,000 people here. The best thing that we can do is to have people report anything that they saw that was suspicious. We obviously cannot have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year. What we try to determine is are they kept out of harm’s way by staying in the dorms or staying in the academic buildings. We send out communications by e-mail, we have an emergency alert system to get the word to our students as quickly as we can.
Virginia Tech University President
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Don Imus – the Mourning Show
Friday, April 13th, 2007
As the 2007 NCAA tournament wound to a close, I bet the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team figured they’d remember this basketball season for the rest of their lives. Other than losing to Tennessee in the finals, it was a dream season. They accomplished (almost) everything they set out to do, and had achieved national recognition for their efforts. They would all graduate from a fine school and move on to successful professional careers, some in the basketball realm, others not. No matter – they would always be remembered as the 2007 Rutgers team – the one that made it to the finals against the mighty Tennessee Lady Vols.
Well, all of that is gone now.
As it turns out, they’ll always be remembered as the women that a popular morning radio DJ made a stupid, racist comment about. The news articles coming out about them now don’t even mention the basketball season, and we’re not even a month past it yet.
So here’s my question: who did this to these poor women? Who ruined their legacies? I would submit that it was not Don Imus. He said a stupid thing that was only heard by his ever-shrinking audience, and most of them probably ignored it or deemed it a lousy attempt at humor. The small minority of folks who took him literally probably brought their own racist and/or sexist attitude to the table to begin with. All the same, he attacked these women without provocation, and he got his punishment – both from the court of public opinion and the unemployment line.
But it was the so-called “civil rights leaders” that affixed the “victim” label on these women for the rest of time. As racism continues its slow decline in our society, folks like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson run the risk of losing relevance. To combat this trend, they need to elevate public displays of racism to “national scandal” status. To do any less would suggest that this instance is somehow less awful than the last one. And so we see a steady stream of condemnations: Trent Lott, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, Don Imus.
This Sunday marks the 60th anniversary of the start of Jackie Robinson’s major league baseball career. Baseball is acknowledging the day with a league-wide celebration, in which every player on every team 200 players throughout baseball (and of every skin color) will wear Jackie’s number 42 for the day. Yet, there are some who believe that Robinson’s legacy is in danger, because only 8.4% of current major leaguers are African American (more than 40% are minorities – primarily Latinos, as well as a growing number of Asians).
Like Revs. Sharpton and Jackson, I believe these folks completely miss the point. And that point is this: skin color is no longer relevant in becoming a major league ballplayer. Black, brown, yellow and white have all succeeded. Kids of all colors cheer players of all colors, and there is very little talk of who’s in who’s group. What matters is what you can do on the field. That’s why all the so many players are wearing #42, not just 8.4% of them. That’s what Jackie Robinson helped bring about. That is his legacy.
The Rutgers women should be remembered for what they did on the court, not what they said in some press conference or on the Oprah Winfrey show. They’ve earned that legacy. To the extent that it’s been stolen from them, I think it’s a shame.
UPDATE: Apparently, some players felt that having everyone wear the number lessened the impact of it, and preferred to have one or two representatives wear it for their team. Four teams, including the Dodgers (Robinson’s former team), had all the players wear it. All in all, it came out to about 200 people, with at least one on every team.
Categories: News and/or Media, Sports Talk | 2 Comments »
DST2K7 – Y2K’s forgotten stepchild
Friday, February 23rd, 2007I blogged about a month ago about the new Daylight Savings Time rules, and their impact on corporate IT environments. Since then, there has been a lot of time and effort dedicated to patching and testing various systems and environments to make sure that everything continues to run smoothly after 2AM on March 11, 2007.
Here, for example, is the Security Industry Association (SIA)’s Business Continuity Page regarding Daylight Savings Time. It has links to more than thirty technology vendors, each of which have specific recommended procedures for testing and verifying their products. The page also includes a log of commentary by SIA members which also gives a good sense of how seriously this is all being taken.
I still remain mystified about why this hasn’t gotten the same kind of hysterical press coverage that Y2K did. Don’t get me wrong – I prefer it this way. I’m just surprised the media hasn’t taken the opportunity to news catalog this with the Y2K story and sell some papers leading up to 3/11/07.
I guess what I said before still applies:
The implications of the world’s computers being one hour off are relatively minor, whereas having them be 1,000 years off requires the building of underground bunkers, the purchasing of copious amounts of duct tape, and a deep introspection about our society’s dependency on technology.
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Wouldn’t it be funny if OJ, oh wait – nevermind…
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Have you ever noticed that anything O.J. Simpson does sounds like a parody of something that O.J. Simpson would do? Take, for instance, this:
O. J. Simpson . . . has written a book and will appear on television telling “how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible,” his publisher and the Fox television network said on Tuesday.
According to a news release, the book and the TV special, which has a working title of “O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened,” will depict Mr. Simpson describing “how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade.”
As far as I can tell, this is not a joke. If it were a joke, it wouldn’t be all that funny because it would sound so unbelievable…
Categories: News and/or Media, The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »
Another Lancet Report – Let the Misinterpretations Begin…
Monday, October 16th, 2006The new Lancet Report is out, and the media headlines are saying “Study estimates 655,000 deaths due to Iraq war.”
The last time Lancet issued a report (November, 2004), the headlines said “Study estimates 100,000 deaths due to war.” At the time, though, very few articles were talking about confidence factors. What the 2004 report actually said, was that with a 95% confidence factor, the number of excess deaths (deaths over and above the amount expected to die in the same time period prior to the war) was somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000. Quite a range, huh? At the time, this reflected the poor conditions in Iraq, the difficulty in collecting the data, the lack of a random sample, etc. In order to narrow the range of the estimate, researchers would have had to lower the confidence factor. Logic dictates that pinning the number of dead to a single number (100,000) makes the confidence factor approach zero. In other words, it was just as likely that 8,000 people had been killed as it was that 194,000 were killed, and we had absolutely zero confidence in a single number like 100,000.
This time around, the confidence ranges are better, but still large: Total excess deaths is estimated at somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 (95% confidence factor again). Violent deaths are estimated at somewhere between 426,369 and 793,663. The report also re-examines the first 18 months of the war (the span used for the 2004 report), and has narrowed the estimate to somewhere between 69,000 and 155,000. Better, but still a ~50% swing in both directions from the publicized 100,000 number.
No matter, though. Years from now, the only thing we’ll remember is “655,000 killed due to Iraq war.” File this one away with the NIE that said the war was creating more terrorists, even though that’s not what it said at all.
The report itself is only 8 pages long, but as is typical, most people will gladly read dozens of pages of commentary, rather than read the actual 8 pages in question. If we take the time, though, we notice Page 3, which provides the raw data from which the estimates were drawn. And when we look at the raw data, the numbers don’t seem to add up:
Researchers interviewed 12,801 people in 1,849 households and recorded 629 deaths in the past 54 months. Of these, 82 (13%) occurred prior to the invasion, and 547 (87%) occurred after the invasion. Of the post-invasion deaths, the raw data says that 247 (46%) were non-violent (e.g., heart disease, cancer) and 300 (55%) were violent (e.g., gunfire, explosive device, car bomb).
Now, if the 629 deaths, extrapolated across all of Iraq, comes to an estimated 654,965, then the number of post invasion, violent deaths should be 654,965 x 87% x 55%, which is 313,400 (as opposed to the 601,027 that is mentioned in the oft-quoted report summary). Either I’m missing something big here, or something is drastically wrong. Either way, I’m amazed that no one in the blogosphere has noted and/or explained this discrepancy…
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The Daily Show: Where Presidents Come to Play…
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006Last week, I marveled at The Daily Show’s ability to book Bill Clinton as their guest.
Last night, John Stewart announced that tonight’s guest will be President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. I’m quoting from memory here, but Stewart said something to the effect of:
Our guest tomorrow night will be President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. The actual President of Pakistan. Why this is, I have no idea…
When I think about the planning that went into Musharraf’s book launch, it absolutely boggles my mind that a sitting president of any country, let alone one that is deeply allied in a war with major world powers like the U.S. and Britain, could possibly have this kind of time on his hands.
First, he wrote the book (or at least we assume he wrote it), and included salacious details that would play well to American audiences. Then he coordinated its release with his trip to New York for the UN General Assembly. Then, he recorded an interview on 60 Minutes, leaking one of his salacious claims, and got them to air it right around the time he made his keynote speech to the UN. Then, after creating the controversy, he remained in New York long enough to do several additional interviews after the book’s release (including The Today Show and The Daily Show with John Stewart), guaranteeing that the interviewers would say something like “there has been much controversy lately about your claims regarding Richard Armitage,” followed by quotes from the book itself. All he has to do now is sit in his chair, smile, and make tell a few stories, and his book will sell millions of copies. Not only that, but he’s probably also improving the American people’s perception of Pakistan in the process.
Impressive piece of marketing. The guy should run for office one day…
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Formerly Current Events to be Revealed in History Book
Friday, September 22nd, 2006President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is accusing the United States of threatening his country in the days just after 9/11/01:
In an interview to air Sunday on CBS-TV’s ’60 Minutes’ program, Musharraf said that after the attacks, Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, told Pakistan’s intelligence director that the United States would bomb his country if it didn’t help fight terrorists. He said that Armitage had told him, ‘Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.’
Armitage denies the accusation. President Bush says the first he heard about it is when he read it in the newspaper. Tony Snow, the White House Press Secretary, says the U.S. Policy was to ask Pakistan to make a choice – support us or support the Taliban and Al Qaeda – not to issue bomb threats.
President Musharraf was asked for more information on the issue, but declined to give any. You’ll never guess why. Internal Pakistani politics? No. Concern over the ramifications of straining relations with the United States? Wrong again. Concern for Pakistani national security and/or the release of classified information? Good guess, but no cigar. Here’s the reason:
Musharraf declined to comment and cited a contract agreement with a publisher on an upcoming book.
So let me see if I got this straight: the sitting president of a country we’re counting on to catch Osama bin Laden and defeat the Taliban & Al Qaeda accused a former U.S. official of making what he calls a “rude remark,” all in order to drum up business for his upcoming book? And this right after Hugo Chavez of Venezuela sent Noam Chomsky’s book to #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller List.
Remember the good old days when the most powerful person with a book club was Oprah?
Categories: News and/or Media, Political Rantings | 1 Comment »