FBI breaking the law with National Security Letters?

A Justice Department review of 293 National Security Letters issued by the FBI found 22 instances (7.5%) of apparent violations of FBI and Justice Department regulations. The FBI issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters in 2005.

UPDATE: This story has now hit CNN, which has more details. The Justice Department's inspector general says the FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of National Security Letters and that use of them may be underreported by as much as 20%. The audit found that more than half of NSLs were used to get information about U.S. citizens.

CNN reports 26 violations, of which 22 were the FBI's fault and 4 were caused by errors by the recipients of the National Security Letters.

UPDATE (March 10, 2007): FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have acknowledged that the FBI broke the law, apologized, and promised to stop further such intrusions. Gonzales left open the possibility of criminal prosecutions against FBI agents or lawyers who misused their PATRIOT Act powers.

UPDATE (June 14, 2007): An audit has discovered that the above-reported 26 violations were the tip of the iceberg. 10% of National Security Letters have been reviewed, and the total number of violations is now over 1,000.

UPDATE (March 7, 2008): This year's audit has shown that the NSL abuses continued through 2006 and that the FBI underreported to Congress the number of NSLs by more than 4,600.

UPDATE (January 20, 2010): Yet further evidence of FBI abuses in collecting telephone records has been uncovered.

Windows, Mac, and BSD security

Kearny's mayor speaks out

Alberto Santos, the mayor of Kearny, New Jersey, has spoken out on the David Paszkiewicz affair, with a cogent statement.

Was the Death Star attack an inside job?

Websurdity asks some uncomfortable questions...

(Via An Information Security Place.)

Inside the TSA

Barbara Peterson took a job as a TSA screener and has written an interesting description of her experience for Conde Nast Traveler. She blames TSA's incompetence not on the individual screeners (who are generally doing as well as they could be hoped to under the demands of the job) but on Congress.

Religion and sex

Glendale Community College philosophy professor Victor Reppert posted at his blog, Dangerous Idea, about whether there is a secular argument against homosexuality. He concluded that there doesn't seem to be a plausible case (at least, not based merely on evolution), which prompted this comment from ex-Jehovah's Witness Derek Barefoot:

I agree with you partly. However, people who defend homosexuality from a naturalist perspective almost without exception also see nothing perverse about transsexulaity. That one is baffling. It is one thing to dislike some feature of one's body that falls short of a societal ideal. A person with an unusual nose may want a usual one. A shorter than average person may understandably wish they were taller. But for someone to feel that he or she has literally been "born into the wrong body," as transsexuals often put it, is naturalistically unfathomable. Perhaps a wasp has by mistake been born into the body of a mouse. Perhaps the tomato plant yearns in some inarticulate vegetative fashion to be an oak. Transexuality is literally a rebellion against nature, yet somehow it is included (commonly) with homosexuality. So perhaps the argument that homosexuality is just an expression of nature is called into question by the related phenomenon of transsexuality.

The problem with this response is that Barefoot is making erroneous assumptions about sex in nature. There are not always well-defined boundaries between male and female. I responded in the comments:

I think that Darek Barefoot's analogies of tomato/oak and wasp/mouse are inapt--sexual differences within a species are commonly smaller than genetic and morphological differences across species. There are human individuals whose genetic makeup puts them into categories which are outside of or span the normal male/female boundaries. For example, those with XXY chromosomes may visibly appear to be male or female, and there are those who have both male and female genitalia. Further, there is far more variety to the sexes than mere duality within the animal kingdom. I recommend Olivia Judson's book, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation for an entertaining look at some of that variety.

Transsexuality, like homosexuality, is evidence against an oversimplified view of sex in nature, not against naturalism itself.

And I followed that up with another comment:

I was looking for but unable to find a set of online forum postings I came across a year or two ago from an intersexed individual who was a Christian, and honestly had no idea what was appropriate dating for her. I believe the church she was involved with took the position that she was not permitted to date or have sex with anyone. It seems to me that most Christians have a real problem with the existence of such individuals, and have a very poor record of inhumane response to them.

I did find this post from an individual raising the question of how religious views can make sense of such individuals. It's an excellent and interesting question. Here's a brief quote from that post (rest of this comment is quoted from it):

The english language has no gender terms we can use for intersex people, instead why try to force them into either female or male which may not be appropriate.

Here is a run down of only some intersex conditions:

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH)
XX (female) fetus ovaries produce a masculising hormone that results in ambigious external genitals . normally the ovaries do not produce hormones as the female is the default sex, none are needed to create a female fetus. the addition of the masculising hormone therefor creates a female with some male charactistics

Testosterone Biosynthetic Defects
an XY(male) fetus does not produce testosterone, therefor,as female is the `default setting` it is born with full female parts, or parts rudimentary malformed female parts, despite being genetically male.

Androgen sensivity syndrome
Testes in the abdomen, external female parts.
they also grow brests but do not have cycles (note: im trying to avoid using catch words here, as im not sure what is allowed and what isnt!)
Klinefelter Syndrome
Genically 47 chromosomes XXY and classed as men. They are males with a female chromosome attatched, small male parts, my develop female characteristics in teenage years.

Turner Syndrome
45 chromosomes, XO. Turner women have female external parts but illformed ovaries and no estrogen.

"Hermaphroditism"
can be EXACTLY one ovary, one teste a small penis AND a female genitalia. Their genetic makeup can be a mosaic of XY and XX genes, they truly are not male or female, but both.

Roughly one in a thousand births is an intersex child. so it isnt that rare.

The issue this presents to religion is that here we have a group of people who are neither here nor there and will grow up with issues to do with their sexual aurientation. What is the view of religions on say an XXY male, who looks mostly male but wishes to date other men? What is the view on a XY female who feels she is a lesbian (after all she is genitcally male) These are issues many people with intersex come up agaisnt. often their parents assign them a gender at birth and corrective surgery is given to `make` them into a gender (usually female) This quite often results in the girl growing up feeling male and later on reqesting a sex change.

Its a tricky issue. Many Intersex people wish they had not been assigned a gender and feel their body is their right and they should have been left to choose a gender when they were older.

But anyway, To me,(I am theist, not religious and very firmly rooted in science) it shows how our gentically evolved bodies can and do go wrong, for a religious person I think it presents an issue worth thinking about. I dont know of any biblical reference to intersex, nor what the christian take is on people who are not male or female but are a bit of this a bit of that, netiehr here nor there or exactly half of each gender. What is their take on how these people should "morally" behave?
Heres what I think it boils down to.

1 God doesnt exist
2 God exists but is fallable and makes mistakes
3 god exists and does not make mistakes, therefor, he wishes intersex conditions to exist , but condemns them to hell if they choose the wrong aurientation later in life to what they look like externally
4. He wishes intersex to exist, either because he has no issues with gender and sexuality .

....feel free to add more...

There are some further comments at Victor's blog.

Lawsuits against mortgage fraud

Today's Arizona Republic reports that "Big lenders and Wall Street investors are going after Arizona mortgage brokers, appraisers, real estate agents, title firms, and home buyers for fraud":

Dozens of civil lawsuits alleging the gamut of mortgage fraud, from cash-back deals to lying about income on loan documents, have been filed against Valley firms and individuals during the past few months.

Fraud experts and regulators say the lawsuits are only the beginning as the fallout from mortgage fraud starts to hit the Valley. Cash-back scams involve getting a mortgage for more than a home is worth and pocketing the extra money. The deals inflate home values and leave lenders with losses from loans worth far more than the house itself.

A few specific suits mentioned:

Phoenix's Biltmore Bank is suing Security Title, appraiser Kittelman & Associates, and Tucson resident and house flipper Frank Padilla (who already was indicted and pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering) over a $1.3 million loan for $800,000 property.

A Lehman Brothers investment trust and Aurora Loan Services are suing the parent company of First National Bank of Arizona for 38 home loans which misrepresented home values and income, debt, and employment of borrowers. The plaintiffs bought the loans and want the bank to buy them back.

Transnational Financial Network is suing Lending House Financial and a Scottsdale investor "who purchased 22 homes within days of each other last spring" for failure to disclose debt level or the fact that the investor was purchasing multiple homes (which were all foreclosed upon).

Tucson mortgage lender First Magnus is suing its former Phoenix-based loan officer, Tyson Rondeau, for fraud and negligence, saying that bad loans are costing it $1 million. That lender itself has been investigated by the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions for misrepresentations and failure to disclose facts, and has agreed to pay a $200,000 fine.

The article quotes attorney Michael Manning, who is working for some of the above plaintiffs, saying that "This is the tip of the iceberg, but I think regulators got on top of it faster than in the mid-1980s." I'm not sure how fast they got on top of the S&L issues in the eighties, but they're at least three and a half years late to the party this time around--when these fraudulent deals were working, the regulators were uninterested. Now that they're failing and the house of cards is collapsing, suddenly they gain an interest. This is because all of these players--the plaintiffs and the defendants--knew what was going on. They were all profiting from it.

The regulators and lawsuits are just a way for the larger players to cover their asses after the fact and avoid paying the full price for what they must have known was bound to ultimately happen.

Switzerland invades Liechtenstein

What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered more than a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

(From the Arizona Republic.)

Where the wisdom of crowds fails

Richard Bennett has an interesting post about Wikipedia and the decentralization of knowledge collection titled "Teaching the hive mind to discriminate." He argues that while Wikipedia is good at accumulating the knowledge of a large number of individuals, it also collects their "prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition." It is unrealistic to expect that these erroneous beliefs will automatically be weeded out because "expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation":

So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (”discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.

Readers of this blog know that I would argue that many religious and political beliefs are examples that support Bennett's position.

On a related point, Ed Felten has a recent post about how reputation systems on the Internet can be manipulated, referencing a pair of articles at Wired by Annalee Newitz. A common flaw is that the reputations of the raters themselves is either not taken into account or is easily manipulated. If there were a way of reliably weighting expertise of raters within appropriate knowledge domains, that could provide a method of discrimination to sort out the good from the bad information.

This is a subject that my planned (but never completed) Ph.D. dissertation in epistemology (on social epistemology, specifically on obtaining knowledge based on the knowledge of others) at the University of Arizona should have touched upon.

One philosopher who had touched on this subject at the time I was working on my Ph.D. (back in the early 1990s) was Philip Kitcher, whose book The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (1993, Oxford University Press) contains a chapter titled "The Organization of Cognitive Labor" (originally published as "The Division of Cognitive Labor" in the Journal of Philosophy, 87(1990):5-21).

The Number 24