41st Skeptic's Circle

The 41st Skeptic's Circle is now out at Interverbal, in the form of an Awards Night presentation.

Judge grants injunction against warrantless wiretapping

Although the ACLU's lawsuit against AT&T in Illinois was thrown out, a separate case in Michigan filed on January 17 of this year against the NSA for warrantless wiretapping without approval of the FISA Court has resulted in a ruling by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that the practice is unconstitutional and must stop immediately. This is not the final decision in the case, but the granting of an injunction for the plaintiff.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T also continues.

Forbes' Best Places for Business

Phoenix cracked the top ten for the first time in Forbes magazine's best metropolitan areas for business (at #6); Arizona is down at #15 in the list of best states for business. Tucson ranks #77.

Phoenix scored high for colleges, cost of doing business, culture and leisure, job growth, and net migration; it scored poorly for cost of living, and crime rate, and was somewhere in the middle on educational attainment, cost of doing business, and income growth. Tucson scores better than Phoenix on educational attainment and income growth, but is worse on every other measure.

Arizona was ranked highly for labor costs (#7), economic climate (#1), and growth prospects (#13), poorly for regulatory environment (#36) and quality of life (#43), and in the middle for business costs (#24).

Arizona has four billionaires--John Sperling and his son Peter of the Apollo Group (and University of Phoenix and Kronos Group), Campbell Soup heir Bennett Dorrance, and Arturo Moreno of Outdoor Systems.

An interesting point in the summary is that the United States now has the highest corporate taxes of any OECD nation.

UPDATE (March 9, 2007): Forbes has updated its billionaire list for 2007, and there are no changes for Arizona--the same four Arizonans are billionaires, with none dropping off the list and no new ones showing up. Bennett Dorrance is at #432, Arturo Moreno, John Sperling, and Peter Sperling are all tied at #799. Last year the list was much smaller--Bennett Dorrance was at #153, John and Peter Sperling were tied at #297, and Arturo Moreno was at #354.

Skepticism about the UK liquid bomb plot

Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray raises some questions about the UK liquid bomb plot. Bruce Schneier points to a similarly critical discussion by Perry Metzger on Dave Farber's interesting people list.

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).