The DHS National Asset Database

The Department of Homeland Security's National Asset Database has come under fire recently for the absurdity of some of the more than 77,000 items on the list, most of which were added in 2005--there were fewer than 32,000 items in 2004. Indiana leads the nation as the state with the most entries on the list, with 8,951 (up from 322 in 2004), including Amish Country Popcorn near Berne, Indiana. New York has 5,687 (up from 1,634 in 2004) and California has only 3,212. Washington state has 3,650, which includes 65 "national monuments and icons"--more than Washington, D.C. Arizona has a mere 675 entries on the list, up from 597 in 2004.

Absurd entries on the list include a petting zoo in Huntsville, Alabama, the Columbia, Tennessee Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market near Knoxville, Tennessee, and items like "Beach at End of a Street," "Nix's Check Cashing," "Mall at Sears," "Ice Cream Parlor," "Tackle Shop," "Donut Shop," "Anti-Cruelty Society," and Arkansas' Bean Fest.

In Seattle, the list includes Auburn's SuperMall (which received a $50,000 DHS grant). There are 1,305 casinos on the list, 234 restaurants, and 700 mortuaries. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has called for reader submissions of their own items, "as absurd as you want"--"No way can it top the spectacle going on at homeland security."

Not included on the list: Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, or the Brooklyn Bridge.

The list has made the press because auditors at the DHS Inspector General's office have questioned the value of "unusual or out-of-place sites ... whose criticality is not readily apparent." But the DHS is unapologetic: "We don't find it embarassing ... The list is a valuable tool," says DHS deputy press secretary Jarrod Agen. Agen claims that the list is not used for funding decisions, but the DHS budget for Arizona was cut in half for 2006.

The committees in Congress responsible for oversight of the DHS are the House Judiciary Committee (which includes two Arizonans, Rep. Jeff Flake and Rep. Trent Franks) and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs (no Arizonans).

How about setting some reasonable standards for what submissions from states get put on the list?

Radley Balko paramilitary police paper

Radley Balko's paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, has been released by the Cato Institute today. It is available for download (PDF) and is accompanied by an online interactive map of incidents. The executive summary:

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

You can hear Balko talking about his paper here (MP3 podcast).

Via The Agitator.

Another lottery casualty

The Arizona Republic reports on the story of Shefik Tallmadge, who won $6.7 million in the Arizona Lottery in 1988 at the age of 29. He was the biggest Pick winner at the time, taking the payment as 20 years of $335,000 payments. He quit his job, bought a Porsche, took his family around the world, completed a political science degree, and married a pharmacist. He cashed in on the remainder of his lottery winnings in 1998 to get a large lump sum, which he used to buy an expensive house and four gas stations. Last year he filed for bankruptcy and continues to play the same numbers he won with on the Florida Lottery.

This seems to be a not-uncommon story for lottery winners.

Kent Hovind and Ali G

Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

Under the headline "The end of the high road," The Economist reviews Joseph Margulies' new book, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. The review begins:

IN HIS new book on the American jail at Guantánamo Bay, Joseph Margulies recounts the story of a prisoner who told his interrogators of plans to use bacteriological weapons. The man named many others involved, and before long his interrogators had confessions from 35 further prisoners, “page upon page of chilling, meticulously detailed admissions”. The problem is that the prisoners he is writing about here were not suspected members of al-Qaeda, but American soldiers. The questioning took place 50 years ago and the interrogators were North Korean.

The confessions were false and had been extracted after the Americans were subjected to extreme psychological torture. Mr Margulies, a lawyer who has represented some of the men at Guantánamo, describes what happened in Korea to illustrate how, in its eagerness to prosecute the “war on terror”, the current American administration has borrowed from some of its most ruthless past enemies, abandoning practices that had allowed it for decades to take the high road in the conduct of war and international affairs.

Read the rest of the review here.

Monty Python: International Philosophy competition

Coulter fundraising reception raises no money

Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO), running for Governor of Colorado, had a fundraising reception at the Paramount Theater in Denver with Ann Coulter as the guest. Beauprez himself did not attend, being busy in D.C., but his wife was present. The event didn't attract any donors, leaving Mrs. Beauprez and Coulter to chat with each other, a dozen campaign volunteers, and a few radio station listeners who had won free tickets to hear Coulter speak. Funds raised: $0.

Craigslist no longer uses TCP window size of 0

The erroneous claim that Cox was blocking Craigslist turned out to be a combination of a bug in a firewall driver from Authentium and the fact that Craigslist was using a TCP window size of 0 in the initial TCP handshake. Authentium took full responsibility for the issue, but no one was ever able to get Craig Newmark to answer why Craigslist was using a TCP window size of 0. My speculation was that this was being done as a way of avoiding congestion, possibly by a load-balancing switch in front of the web servers. Although Craig politely responded to some private emails from me, I never got an answer to whether my speculation was correct.

Now Craigslist has stopped using a TCP window size of 0 in the initial handshake, which indicates that it was always within Craigslist's power to fix the problem. Here are some packets I captured a couple of days ago (66.150.243.20 is www.craigslist.org); see the first link above for a more detailed explanation of what the TCP window size means and what caused the problem:

TCP SYN from my machine to craigslist, window size 16384:

15:13:18.469829 [my IP].50845 > 66.150.243.20.80: S 4043800370:4043800370(0) win 16384 (DF)

TCP SYN-ACK from craigslist.org, window size 4380 (this was the one that used to have a window size of 0):

15:13:18.504234 66.150.243.20.80 > [my IP].50845: S 1583028840:1583028840(0) ack 4043800371 win 4380 (DF) [tos 0x80]

TCP ACK from my machine, completing the three-way handshake, window size 16384:

15:13:18.504640 [my IP].50845 > 66.150.243.20.80: . ack 1 win 16384 (DF)

Dr. Dino Busted

The Pensacola News Journal reports that the law has finally caught up with tax-evading creationist Kent Hovind:

A Pensacola evangelist who owns the defunct Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola was arrested Thursday on 58 federal charges, including failing to pay $473,818 in employee-related taxes and making threats against investigators.

Of the 58 charges, 44 were filed against Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, for evading bank reporting requirements as they withdrew $430,500 from AmSouth Bank between July 20, 2001, and Aug. 9, 2002.

At the couple's first court appearance Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis, Kent Hovind professed not to understand why he is being prosecuted. Some 20 supporters were in the courtroom.

"I still don't understand what I'm being charged for and who is charging me," he said.

Kent Hovind, who often calls himself "Dr. Dino," has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.

"The debtor apparently maintains that as a minister of God, everything he owns belongs to God and he is not subject to paying taxes to the United States on money he receives for doing God's work," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Lewis Killian Jr. wrote when he dismissed a claim from Hovind in 1996.

...

In the indictment unsealed Thursday, a grand jury alleges that Kent Hovind failed to pay $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes on employees at his Creation Science Evangelism/Ministry between March 31, 2001, and Jan. 31, 2004.

...

The indictment alleges Kent Hovind paid his employees in cash and labeled them "missionaries" to avoid payroll tax and FICA requirements.

On Thursday, a message on the Dinosaur Adventure Land telephone welcomed visitors to the place "where dinosaurs and the Bible meet" and stated that the museum and science center were closed temporarily.

The indictment also says the Hovinds' made cash withdrawals from AmSouth Bank in a manner that evaded federal requirements for reporting cash transactions.

The withdrawals were for $9,500 or $9,600, just below the $10,000 starting point for reporting cash transactions.

Most of the withdrawals were days apart. For example, the indictment shows three withdrawals of $9,500 each on July 20, July 23 and July 26 in 2001.

...

Over Kent Hovind's protests, the judge took away his passport and guns Hovind claimed belonged to his church.

Hovind argued that he needs his passport to continue his evangelism work. He said "thousands and thousands" are waiting to hear him preach in South Africa next month.

There's more (and comments) at Pharyngula and the Panda's Thumb.

Today's content owners are yesterday's pirates

I posted this review of Larry Lessig's book Free Culture to Amazon.com:

Lessig has written a very clear and entertaining book about copyright, piracy, and culture, filled with lots of real-world examples to make his points. The book covers major events in the history of copyright in the United States (from its beginnings in English common law and the UK Statute of Anne) in order to show how its meaning has changed, and how those who are making accusations of piracy today were the pirates of yesterday. (Jessica Littman's book, Digital Copyright, is a nice complement to this book, covering the history of copyright in greater depth.) Lessig makes a strong case that the direction of copyright, giving greater control over content to a very small number of owners than has ever existed, is eroding the freedom that we've historically had to preserve and transform the elements of our culture.

Lessig begins by describing how the notion of a real property right for land extending into the sky to "an indefinite extent, upwards" became a real rather than theoretical issue with the invention of the airplane. In 1945, the Causbys, a family of North Carolina farmers, filed a suit against the government for trespassing with its low-flying planes, and the Supreme Court declared the airways to be public space. This example shows how the scope of property rights can change with changes of technology, in this particular case resulting in an uncompensated taking from private property owners, yet leading to enormous innovation and the development of a new industry and form of transportation. He follows this with the example of the development of FM radio, which was intentionally back-burnered by RCA and then hobbled by government regulation at RCA's behest in order to protect its existing investment in AM radio. This example shows how powerful interests can stifle technological change through its ownership of intellectual property (in this case, the patents regarding FM radio).

He then discusses how intellectual property laws have developed in the U.S., pointing out that Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse made his talking picture debut in the movie "Steamboat Willie" (he had earlier appeared in a silent cartoon, "Plane Crazy"), which was a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill." Many of Disney's characters and stories were taken directly from the previous work of others, such as the Brothers Grimm--works in the public domain, freely available for such copying. As new forms of media have been created, they have borrowed from previous forms. Today, however, the creators of content who have borrowed from their predecessors have successfully changed the rules so that their successors cannot borrow from them, both by extending the term and scope of copyright protection and by developing technologies that have greatly reduced the ability of successors to borrow or re-use content. The specific rules are completely inconsistent, based on the political power of the relevant parties at the time the laws were changed. When Edison developed the ability to record sounds, including recording music written by others, copyright law was changed to provide for compulsory licensing for a fee paid to the composer. With radio broadcasting, the fee still goes to the composer, but not to the recording artist. But put that same radio broadcast on the Internet, and now fees must be paid to both the composer and the recording artist.

Where there used to be a sea of unregulated uses of copyrighted material containing a small island of restricted uses (with shores of fair use), there is now a vast continent of restricted uses, a stark cliff of fair use, and a tiny channel of unregulated uses. Lessig shows a table on pp. 170-171 showing commercial and noncommercial uses and the rights to publish and transform for each. In 1790, copyright only governed publication rights for commercial uses, the other three cells of the table being free. At the end of the 19th century, publication and transformation for commercial use was governed by copyright, while noncommercial use was free. The law was changed to govern copies, including much noncommercial use. Today, all four cells of the table are governed by copyright.

Lessig discusses Eric Eldred's attempt to defend the right to transform public domain works into electronic versions by fighting Congress's continuing extensions of the term of copyright in the face of the Constitution's restriction to "limited Times," and how the case was lost at the U.S. Supreme Court to inconsistent reasoning from the conservative justices who failed to even address the commerce clause argument and the precedent they set in Lopez v. Morrison case. This is a wonderfully written, persuasive, entertaining, and dismaying book. It deserves to be widely read and understood, so that ultimately intellectual property law in the U.S. will be reformed.

This book is available online at no charge. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/