Healthcare Debacle

President Obama bet the farm on health care reform, then did nearly nothing to help its passage, and got what he deserved. Of course, we deserve better. We deserved a decent health care bill in the Senate that wasn’t held hostage by Senator Nelson. We deserved something that improved the circumstances of a good chunk of 45 million Americans, just as many are put at risk because of lack of health care, thanks to 10% unemployment. Here’s a little math: 10% of 320 million people that live in the U.S. = 32 million people right there.

Shame on Democrats for not getting a bill through. Great shame on them.

Now we have nothing. If the situation remains as is, if we get nothing by the election, then no party is going to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole for our lifetimes. How good that must be for insurance companies! If we get nothing, our elected officials deserve less. I say THROW THE BUMS OUT, ALL OF THEM, Republicans AND Democrats.

Including President Obama.

Washington Post: The FBI broke the law

And all in the name of terrorism. According to the Post, agents made up non-existent terrorist threats and emergencies in order to gain access to information that should have remained private. While the crimes didn’t rise to the level of the president or even to the director, it doesn’t make them any less offensive. The FBI has demonstrated that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is why our founders designed a system of checks and balances. When Congress recreated the imperial presidency under George W. Bush, through the Patriot Act, and when they failed to properly exercise their oversight powers, they shirked their responsibility to the citizenry.

And so when Dick Cheney thinks it’s a mistake to give a defendant a trial by jury in a court of law, he demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how that power corrupts absolutely. This is why President Obama is absolutely correct in doing his best to close Guantanamo, and to see that everyone gets a trial, not just the people who were caught red handed and confessed. Otherwise what would stop that same government from arresting you?

Can America use Israel’s Security model?

So now I’ve ranted about just how awful the TSA is. A friend says that we should throw them away and start doing airport security the way the Israelis do it. CNN recently carried an interview with Isaac Yeffet, the former chief of security for El Al. In the interview, Mr. Yeffet points out any number of failures, and he is particularly damning when it comes to Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, because our security system missed many warning signs that Mr. Reid wasn’t planning to come home, and he wasn’t planning to stay in America. In those circumstances, either you’re having a very short visit, or you don’t plan on landing. He goes on to point out how making people take off their shoes is “a patch on top of a patch.” He’s 100% right. Mr. Yeffet goes on to describe his view of strong security, the key message simply being: you have to have smart and observant people scrutinizing travelers. Of course this model could work in America, but would we get the exact same results?

Possibly, but the length of the interviews will vary. For one, while Mr. Yeffet claims that they can easily determine a “bona fide” in a few minutes, the truth is that there is a clearer profile of what such a person is in Israel. Israel is a small country. They don’t need to profile Arabs or other muslims or anyone else, because they have profiled the small number of types of legitimate travelers. America is far more diverse, and hence far more difficult to determine who is a legitimate traveler.

As an example, the last time I traveled on El Al, I was asked point blank why I was going to Israel, and if I am Jewish. I was going on business, I am Jewish, and I could name my temple. I think I produced a business card. That was the end of my interview. I can also say it wasn’t so easy for others who spent quite a bit more time being interviewed.

What do you think?

And so in answer to my friend, yes. I agree with should disband the TSA and start again, with properly trained professionals who are able to better manage threats. But I do not believe that simply applying Israel’s approach will yield perfect results. The law of numbers is playing against us.

It happened again! TSA Risks lives at JFK!

If there’s one thing that I can’t stand, it’s people who don’t learn from their mistakes, and here once again, the TSA has failed to learn. Once again they evacuated a terminal, took many people and crammed them into small spaces, and created a huge target for a bomber, this time in Terminal 8 of JFK. This time the incident occurred because someone went through a door he shouldn’t have gone through.

Unwitting Mules and Computers

Scales of Justice When I first traveled through Switzerland some 16 years ago, I went to France for the day, leaving from Geneva. On entering France, the guards saw a long, curly haired, American in a rental car, and they assumed I would be carrying drugs, so they took apart the car. I didn’t mind it until it occurred to me that perhaps the last guy who rented might have left something behind. Fortunately, none of that happened.

Last year, I attended one of my favorite conferences, the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS08). I met there a number of good folk from the law enforcement community, and some talked about some of their successful investigations into crime on the computer. In one case, the investigators found megabytes of illicit material on someone’s hard drive. An astute and bright man from Microsoft by the name of Stuart Schechter pointedly asked the question how the investigators knew that the owner of the PC had stored the illicit material. The implication here would be that bad guys could be using the computer without the knowledge of its owner. The detective answered that such evidence is only one component used to charge and/or convict someone.

Now comes a case reported by AP in neighboring Massachusetts where this scenario has been brought to the fore. Michael Fiola, an employee of the state government, was fired, arrested, and shunned because some criminal broke into his computer.

What are the lessons to be learned? There is this common notion by many that end users aren’t generally the victims of the people who break into their computers. Not so in this case. There is also a belief that faith in government prosecutors alone will get an innocent person out of trouble. Not so in this case. They did eventually drop the charges, but only at the cost of his entire savings, large amounts of stress, etc.

This is not the only such case in which this has happened. So, do you know what’s on your computer? Are you sure?