Cinco de Mayo: Celebration of kicking a French bill collector's ass

Long or Short Capital gives some historical detail on Cinco de Mayo that's generally lacking from most descriptions (with a little bit of exaggeration and humor). It's not a celebration of Mexican independence, but of a successful victory by Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragozea Seguin against French occupation forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

The Mexican government owed money to the English, the Spanish, and the French, and was late on debt payments. All three creditors sent armed representatives to Mexico. The English and Spanish were successfully negotiated with, but the French decided to obtain repayment by taking possession of Mexico, and sent a large military force. General Zaragoza led a force of Mexicans and Indians and were victorious.

Banning the distribution of AACS keys is futile

AACS keys are used to encrypt the content of HD-DVDs (this is an oversimplification; see Ed Felten's Freedom-to-Tinker blog for more detail). A particular "processing key" for AACS has recently been distributed on the Internet, with the AACS Licensing Authority issuing cease and desist orders to try to stop it. This has led to new and creative ways of distributing this 128-bit number, just as occurred with the DeCSS code for decrypting DVDs. When a cease-and-desist order went to digg, digg's users proceeded to give diggs to many different sites, at one point leading to the entire front page of digg being full of nothing but links to pages with the AACS key.

A couple of the more interesting methods include making the number into a song and displaying it with satellite photos of buildings that resemble hex digits. One individual appears to have had it tattooed on his chest.

This is exactly what we saw with DeCSS, which is memorialized in Dave Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

This case is even more absurd, in that AACS LA is claiming ownership of a number--and a relatively short one--not because it encodes any content or algorithm, but because it's one of potentially millions of keys assigned for use with its system.

UPDATE (May 11, 2007): As this t-shirt makes clear, trying to protect against the distribution of a 128-bit number is futile when knowledge of the number can be easily distributed without using the number itself. I'd love to see AACS LA try to make a case against the marketing and sale of this shirt.

Bush's Iraq funding veto

Bush has vetoed the second bill of his presidency, the bill to continue funding the war on Iraq and specify a timetable for withdrawal. Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review points out that he signed the bill with a pen given to him by the father of a Marine killed in Iraq in 2005:

Bush signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, the father of Marine Corps Reserve Cpl. Dustin Derga, who was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005. The elder Derga spoke with Bush two weeks ago at a meeting the president had with military families at the White House.

David Weigel at Reason magazine asks why Bush didn't go all out:

At first you think "that's a little bit much, four years to the day after he appropriated different military imagery and it blew up in his face." And then you think - just a pen? Why not do it up proper? Drive up the road to Dover AFB, lean over a flag-draped coffin, and sign the bill with the Pen of Martyrs as 24 white doves are released into the air. Get Col. Bud Day to give color commentary. Set the whole tableau to the ringing tones of Dennis Madalone.

And Weigel also offers this interesting addendum:

Then there's this:

Derga asked Bush to promise to use the pen in his veto. On Tuesday, Derga contacted the White House to remind Bush to use the pen, and so he did.

He had to be reminded?

Where Are We Headed?

Given the explosive growth Maricopa County's Trustee Sale Notices saw in the second half of 2006, the numbers for the first four months of 2007 have seemed somewhat like a plateau. April’s total was 11 below March’s 1720, leading me to seriously wonder what the future holds.

From a recent Reuters article:

Subprime mortgages to less creditworthy borrowers comprised only 13.7 percent of outstanding U.S. mortgage debt in the fourth quarter of 2006, and their delinquency rate was 13.3 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

If, like the article, you believe that the woes of the subprime mortgage market are “well contained,” then perhaps we have a hint of what the remainder of 2007 has in store.

Assume, for (extreme) simplicity’s sake, that...

1) All 1,250,231 houses in Maricopa County have a mortgage, and
2) The percentages quoted above remain the same for all of 2007, and
3) No one who does not have a subprime loan will become delinquent,

... then that means the average number of Phoenix-area trustee sale notices per month should come to 1898. I’m inclined to take it as a good sign that we’ve only seen a peak of 1720 so far, in spite of Mish’s contention, over at his Global Economic Trend Analysis, that containment is spreading.

However, the graph below, far more than Mish’s falling sky pronouncements, gives me pause:


Trustee’s Sale Notices are a lagging indicator, since they don't happen until the borrower has been in big trouble for several months. That fact, in conjunction with the data behind the Credit Suisse graph, leads me to believe that late 2007 through early 2008 (and beyond) is when we should be expecting the big wave to hit. How big? Who can say?

Who's to blame for the Virginia Tech shootings

The Cynical-C Blog is keeping a running tab, and are up to a list of 72 items so far...

Individual armed resistance can bring school shootings to a halt

Classically Liberal reports on multiple school shooting incidents which have been successfully stopped by private individuals with handguns--though the media has mostly failed to report that the individuals apprehending the gunmen were armed, so these examples aren't widely known.

Patri Friedman at Catallarchy observes:

Anyway, I am not claiming that any one story (or in this case, four stories) prove anything about the overall tradeoffs. But these stories are in direct contrast to explicit statements some of you have made about how you think the world works. So please realize that you were wrong, and that guns are demonstrably capable of stopping massacres short. Doesn’t mean we should have them, but it is directly relevant to yesterday’s incident. We don’t know what the distribution of death reductions would have been if the massacre hadn’t been in a gun free zone, but it surely has a non-zero mean, and quite possibly a significant one. After all, this was an extremely bad massacre, which means more people involved and more time to get armed.

But of course, probabilistic lives saved by guns are vastly less visceral than actual lives ended by them, hence much more difficult for us to view as real.

How sleazy real estate gurus make money

Einzige has a great post at his blog titled "Making Fortunes* in Foreclosures (* Once you've discarded your ethical compass)" which describes the details of how some sleazy real estate gurus make money off of gullible homeowners in distress.

Back from the UK

We are back from a trip to London (with side trips to Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and a couple days in Cambridge). Although we didn't plan it, we happened to see a number of interesting things on St. George's Day--the immediate aftermath of the attempted suicide jumper rescue at Millennium Bridge (my own photos are much less interesting than the Daily Mail's) and the Guinness Record attempt (successful, I believe) for largest coconut orchestra at Trafalgar Square (with Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and the cast of Spamalot in attendance, singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"). We got to see both Oxford and Cambridge's respective Bridges of Sighs (Cambridge says theirs is better because it's over water; Oxford's is really named Hertford Bridge), had lunches at the Eagle Pub and at The Orchard.

The photo is me in a doorway at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Unfortunately, we did not make it to Logic Lane.

CREW points out there are millions of missing White House emails

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington points out that there are millions of emails missing from the White House servers (the official ones, not the Republican National Committee ones):

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today has released a report, WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act, detailing the legal issues behind the story of the White House e-mail scandal.

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, "It's clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration -- that they didn't want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn't clear on the law -- are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing -- and potentially incriminating -- emails have gone missing. It's the Nixon White House all over again."

WITHOUT A TRACE covers the following areas:

Presidential Records Act (PRA): Enacted in 1978, requires the president to preserve all presidential records, which are defined as those records relating to the "activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of [the president's] constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties..."

Clinton Administration Policy: In 1993, then-Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary John Podesta sent a memo to all presidential staff explaining that the PRA required all staff members to maintain all records, including emails. Podesta stated that the use of external email networks was prohibited because records would not be saved as required. The 1997 White House Manual and a 2000 memo issued by Mark Lindsay, then Assistant to the President for Management and Administration echoed this policy, requiring staff to use only the White House email system for official communications.

Bush Administration Policy: The Bush Administration has refused to make public its record-keeping policy. A confidential source provided CREW with a 2002 document indicating the use of "non-EOP messaging-enabled mechanisms should not be used for official business."

Bush Administration Practice: In the wake of the scandals surrounding Jack Abramoff and the fired U.S. Attorneys, emails were released showing that top White House staffers routinely used Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts to conduct official business. For example, J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, used an RNC account to communicate with the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regarding the appointments of new U.S. Attorneys. Similarly, Susan Ralston, a former aide to Karl Rove, used RNC email accounts to communicate with Abramoff about appointments to the Department of the Interior.

PRA Violations: 1) The administration failed to implement adequate record-keeping systems to archive presidential email records; 2) two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails; 3) White House staff used outside email accounts to conduct presidential business, ensuring that emails were not adequately preserved. In fact, former Abramoff associate Kevin Ring said in an email to Abramoff that Ralston had told him not to send emails to her official White House account "because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."

Hatch Act Excuse: The administration has claimed that Rove, Jennings and other staffers use RNC accounts to avoid violating the Hatch Act. This is untrue. The Hatch Act prohibits White House staff from using official resources for purely "political" purposes. "Political" refers to the president's role as either a candidate for office or as the leader of his party. Email communications regarding presidential appointments for U.S. Attorney and Interior Department positions clearly fall within the PRA as making appointment is an official presidential function and does not relate to the president's role as party leader.

I ask once again, can we impeach Bush now?

UPDATE (January 19, 2009): The Washington Post reports that some 14 million emails have been found and will be transferred to the National Archives.

UPDATE (December 15, 2009): Looks like 22 million "missing emails" have been located.

FBI focus on counterterrorism leads to increase in unprosecuted fraud and identity theft

With the FBI being directed to focus its attention on counterterrorism, its investigations of fraud, identity theft, civil rights violations, and crime in general have plummeted:

-- Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop.

-- White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000....

-- Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000.

...

"There's a niche of fraudsters that are floating around unprosecuted," said one recently retired top FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not going to jail. There is no law enforcement solution in sight."...

By the time the bureau started putting together its fiscal 2007 budget in mid-2005, "we realized we were going to have to pull out of some areas -- bank fraud, investment fraud, ID theft -- cases that protect the financial infrastructure of the country," [Dale Watson, who left in 2002 as the FBI's executive assistant director over counterterrorism programs] said...

[FBI Assistant Director Chip Burrus] acknowledges that the bureau has reduced its efforts to fight fraud. He likened the FBI's current fraud-enforcement policies -- in which losses below $150,000 have little chance of being addressed -- to "triage." Even cases with losses approaching $500,000 are much less likely to be accepted for investigation than before 9/11, he said.

There is "no question" that America's financial losses from frauds below $150,000 amount to billions a year, Burrus said. The top security official for a major American bank agreed, saying unprosecuted fraud losses easily total "multibillions."

Is America safer?

(Via TPM Muckraker.)