Help expose earmarks

The Sunlight Foundation (along with Porkbusters, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, and the Examiner Newspapers) is attempting to identify the sources of over 1,800 earmarks in the 2007 appropriations bill for the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. They've got a Google Map showing the locations of each recipient. There are a number of them in Arizona; a cursory look suggests that most of them are in the districts of Arizona's Democratic Representatives, Grijalva and Pastor.

How the terrorist watch list decreases border security

The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General has issued a report on U.S. Customs and Border Patrol activities at U.S. ports of entry that "indicates a significant decrease over the past few years in the interception of narcotics and the identification of fraudulent immigration documents, especially at airports." The problem is that when people are stopped whose names resemble those of individuals on the terrorist watch list, they have limited discretion about how to proceed, which causes them to spend a large amount of time dealing with each such case. Spending time on those cases detracts from their ability to do anything else, and the accumulated information collected in such incidents doesn't appear to be put to effective use:

When a watchlisted or targeted individual is encountered at a POE, CBP generates several reports summarizing the incident. Each of these reports provides a different level of detail, and is distributed to a different readership. It is unclear, however, how details of the encounter and the information obtained from the suspected terrorist are disseminated for analysis. This inconsistent reporting is preventing DHS from developing independent intelligence assessments and may be preventing important information from inclusion in national strategic intelligence analyses.

The report advises giving more discretion to supervisors at ports of entry, giving security clearances to port of entry counterterrorism personnel, establishing consistent reporting standards, and reviewing port of entry staffing models. It also advises that port of entry personnel collect biometric data from persons entering the country "who would not normally provide this information when entering the United States."

More at Bruce Schneier's blog.

Travel with liquids--the viscosity test

In Stephen Colbert's discussion of the liquids he takes with him while traveling (on YouTube), he asked whether custard is a liquid. A USA Today "Today in the Sky" blog entry on "Putting TSA to the viscosity test" reported on the author's experiment to see what she would be forced to discard. She carried a number of items in her bag to the screening area at the Baltimore airport for a flight to St. Louis on Friday night. The items were a container of Silk soy milk, Edge shaving gel, Ban deodorant, a small container of yogurt, a sealed two-pack of Advil capsules (gel caps), some makeup items, and a packet of mustard (see photo).

She was only required to discard the soy milk, one of the makeup items, and one other item (the mustard?).

I don't remember the details and cannot verify them because USA Today has removed the blog post, probably on the grounds that it encourages readers to test the limits of security screening. But shouldn't the rules about what is permitted be clear?

Is water in a frozen state permitted?

Are there any beverages or food items which have the properties of being thixotropic (solid until shaken) or rheopectic (temporarily solid after being shaken)? There's now (at least temporarily) a market...

Schneier on security theater

Bruce Schneier writes about last week's terrorism arrests:

Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry onboard. Last week's foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.

None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 -- no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews -- had anything to do with last week's arrests. And they wouldn't have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn't have made a difference, either.

Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.

The new airplane security measures focus on that plot, because authorities believe they have not captured everyone involved. It's reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details -- much of the "explosive liquid" story doesn't hang together -- but the excessive security measures seem prudent.

But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

More at Schneier's blog.

Naked air travel

CNN:

Tisha Presley, bound for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, hurriedly sipped from her bottled water before going through security at the Atlanta airport.

"I assume before too long we'll be naked on the plane -- and that's fine with me," she said.

My wife Kat jokingly suggests that TSA require passengers to change into TSA-provided unitards, returned for cleaning and reuse upon arrival at the destination.

Of course, the real question is whether air travel continues to be economically viable under high levels of travel restrictions without completely transforming the industry's business model.

One thing for sure--the level of restrictions currently imposed in the UK will provide incentives for telecommuting and audio and video conferencing, which are services provided by the company which employs me, Global Crossing.

Sierra Mist commercial and the liquid explosives plot

Comedy Central is still showing this commercial, which weakly foreshadowed the restriction on liquids put in place on Thursday. This restriction occurred months after the UK and U.S. governments were aware of this recent plot and eleven years after they were aware of the existence of terrorist plots involving liquid explosives (and twelve years after such a device was successfully tested--it killed one passenger and injured between five and ten).

ZeFrank on London liquid explosive terror plot

The Brits caught some douchebags who were going to blow up some planes.

Now, the way I see it, you can't have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.

Airline industry stocks plummetted today, while the industry braced for a rash of cancellations. This, despite the fact that even with the risk of airplane bombings it's still more dangerous to drive your car. Or smoke cigarettes.

As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.

London's police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson said that the plot was "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale." No, it is imaginable: between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.

Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don't think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it's a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government's responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation.

Today the President said, "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom to hurt our nation." Generalized statements like this which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism.

Video here. (Hat tip to James Redekop on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

Along similar lines is John Mueller of Ohio State University's "A False Sense of Insecurity? How does the risk of terrorism measure up against everyday dangers?" (PDF), published in the Cato Institute's Regulation, Fall 2004.

The additional security measures, which are creating long queues of people waiting to go through security checkpoints, are actually creating greater risks of terrorism--against those people waiting to get through the checkpoints. But that risk pales in comparison to every day risks which we accept (or allow others to accept) as a matter of course: falling off ladders, driving in automobiles, eating fast food, smoking. If a terrorist act on the scale of 9/11 occurred every month in the United States, it would only begin to approach the number of Americans killed every year in automobile accidents, and would still be far short of the number who die as a result of smoking.

Responsive actions like unreasonable and inefficient security screening measures increase rather than decrease the costs of terrorism.

Hate mail from suggestion that Jesus was a liberal

There's a website, www.jesusisaliberal.org, which suggests that Jesus was a liberal. (I'd go further and suggest that Jesus offered some views which were close to communism.) This site has provoked some interesting hate mail which seems somewhat at odds with what Jesus would do.

How to get a charitable donation tax deduction and get the money back

The Leavitt family gave $443,500 to the Dixie and Anne Leavitt Foundation, which gave it to the Southern Utah Foundation, which gave the money to Southern Utah University (along with another $135,000 from Leavitt Land and Investment), which gave the money to students in the form of scholarships that could only be used for housing at apartments owned by the Leavitt family. The Leavitt's Cedar Development Company got $578,000 from the student rent payments.

The Leavitts specifically asked the Southern Utah Foundation (whose board member Steven Bennion was also president of Southern Utah University) for the arrangement.

The really interesting part? One member of the Leavitt family involved in these decisions is Mike Leavitt, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration (and former Governor of Utah).

The Leavitt Foundation had already been under scrutiny because the Leavitt family had made large donations but the Foundation had paid out little to charity until last year.

The IRS is investigating. The Leavitts, the foundation administrators, and the university say they see nothing wrong with the arrangement, and a Leavitt spokeswoman says that the Senate Finance Committee reviewed this arrangement as part of Leavitt's confirmation last year.

This kind of arrangement is not surprising to me given what I've heard about other Mormon business arrangements, which commonly use family-owned companies and partnerships to do business with each other in order to gain tax advantages.

(Hat tip to Trent Stamp at Charity Navigator.)

Time fountain

Here's a gadget Harold Edgerton would have appreciated--Nate True built a little device that pumps dyed water through a tube, drops at a time, with strobe lights that illuminate individual drops as they fall. You can adjust the frequency of the strobe lights so that the drops appear to change in speed, freeze in place, or move backwards. He calls it a "time fountain."