Bruce Schneier thinks the NSA's plan to fire 90% of its sysadmins and replace them with automation has a flaw:
Does anyone know a sysadmin anywhere who believes it's possible to automate 90% of his job? Or who thinks any such automation will actually improve security?
[NSA Director Kieth Alexander is] stuck. Computerized systems require trusted people to administer them. And any agency with all that computing power is going to need thousands of sysadmins.
Some of them are going to be whistleblowers.
Leaking secret information is the civil disobedience of our age. Alexander has to get used to it.
The agency's leaks have also forced the president's hand by opening up our security apparatus to public scrutiny—which he may have wanted to do anyway.
Andrew Sullivan puts it best: "Every now and again, a writer needs to find a new way of expressing the notion that fundamentalism is not actually faith, but a neurosis built on misunderstandings and leading nowhere. And then you just read the AP:"
A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday.
Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us” when they took their two small children and her father-in-law and set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May.
Well, praise be!, Venezuela has a coast guard.
The title comes from this joke, in case you haven't heard it before.
Security guru Bruce Schneier warns about the lack of trust resulting from revelations about NSA domestic spying:
Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative.
There's much more to come. Right now, the press has published only a tiny percentage of the documents Snowden took with him. And Snowden's files are only a tiny percentage of the number of secrets our government is keeping, awaiting the next whistle-blower.
Ronald Reagan once said "trust but verify." That works only if we can verify. In a world where everyone lies to us all the time, we have no choice but to trust blindly, and we have no reason to believe that anyone is worthy of blind trust. It's no wonder that most people are ignoring the story; it's just too much cognitive dissonance to try to cope with it.
Meanwhile, at the Wall Street Journal, Ted Koppel has an op-ed warning about our over-reactions to terrorism:
[O]nly 18 months [after 9/11], with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ... the U.S. began to inflict upon itself a degree of damage that no external power could have achieved. Even bin Laden must have been astounded. He had, it has been reported, hoped that the U.S. would be drawn into a ground war in Afghanistan, that graveyard to so many foreign armies. But Iraq! In the end, the war left 4,500 American soldiers dead and 32,000 wounded. It cost well in excess of a trillion dollars—every penny of which was borrowed money.
Saddam was killed, it's true, and the world is a better place for it. What prior U.S. administrations understood, however, was Saddam's value as a regional counterweight to Iran. It is hard to look at Iraq today and find that the U.S. gained much for its sacrifices there. Nor, as we seek to untangle ourselves from Afghanistan, can U.S. achievements there be seen as much of a bargain for the price paid in blood and treasure.
At home, the U.S. has constructed an antiterrorism enterprise so immense, so costly and so inexorably interwoven with the defense establishment, police and intelligence agencies, communications systems, and with social media, travel networks and their attendant security apparatus, that the idea of downsizing, let alone disbanding such a construct, is an exercise in futility.
Do you feel safer now?
Via Sullivan, a look at a 45-story abandoned tower in Caracas that now houses 2,500 people:
Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake, David Brillembourg.
Today, as the government is grappling with a citywide housing shortage, the tower is a stark monument to what could have been in the country’s crime-plagued capital. The tower is dogged by accusations of being a hotbed of crime, drugs and corruption. But to residents, many of whom have spent their entire lives there, it’s just home.
More from Wikipedia, the New York Times, and the Beeb.
Ezra Klein points to this graph and raises the question:
The core issue here is that the unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work. That means there are two ways to leave the ranks of the unemployed. One way — the good way — is to get a job. The other way is to stop looking for work, either because you’ve retired, or become discouraged, or begun working off the books.
The yellow line on the left shows the official unemployment rate since 2008. It’s fallen from over 10 percent to under 8 percent. But the red line on the right shows the actual employment rate — that is, the percentage of working-age adults with jobs. What should scare you is that the red line has barely budged.
The economy is a lot worse than a glance at the unemployment rate suggests. And instead of doing anything to help those people get back to work, Washington canceled the payroll tax cut, permitted sequestration to go into effect, and is now arguing about whether to shut down the federal government — and possibly breach the debt ceiling — in the fall.
This is yet another consequence of the opposition party refusing to participate in governance.
Observer columnist John Naughton explains how the practices Edward Snowden revealed have hurt us:
[H]ere are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.
The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.
Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.
His conclusion: "The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system." And no European country wants to deal with that.
So, great. United States paranoia and brute-force problem-solving may have destroyed the Cloud.
New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow lays out the awfulness of "stand your ground" laws better than I:
Something is wrong here. We are not being made more secure, we are being made more barbaric. These laws are an abomination and an affront to morality and common sense. We can’t allow ourselves to be pawns in the gun industry’s profiteering. We are real people, and people have power.
Attorney General Eric Holder told the N.A.A.C.P. last week: “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods. These laws try to fix something that was never broken.”
We must all stress this point, and fight and not get weary. We must stop thinking of politics as sport and spectacle and remember that it bends in response to pressure. These laws must be reviewed and adjusted. On this issue we, as Americans of good conscience, must stand our ground.
Well put.
According to a new study, it's because of poor impulse control:
It’s not that they are ignorant. Studies show that smokers are at least as informed as nonsmokers about the risks of smoking — and possibly more informed.
You might suspect, then, that smokers tend to be risk takers by nature. And some evidence suggests that smokers do take more risks than nonsmokers: they are more often involved in traffic accidents, less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior. Women who smoke even have mammograms less frequently than their nonsmoking counterparts.
So what accounts for smokers’ risky-looking behavior? Our contention is that smokers exhibit poor self-control in the face of immediate temptation — which can look like a willingness to assume risk. (For instance, you might choose to have sex without a condom not because you are comfortable with the risk but because you are too weak-willed to bother with the inconvenience.)
I've thought a lot about the differences between rural and urban residents, including how more people smoke in the sticks. Smoking and carrying guns have something in common: they're nearly as hazardous or noxious to people nearby as they are to the people doing them. It's obvious, isn't it, that smoking stinks up the area, and having a gun makes you more likely to shoot someone else. Living in a dense city forces people, through legislation or social pressure, to behave in ways more appropriate to being around other people.
So, if people smoke because they have poor impulse control, yet we're obligated to issue at least some concealed-carry permits, we really shouldn't give them to smokers, should we?
Urban planner Pete Saunders, a Detroit native and Chicago resident, doesn't see many similarities between the two cities:
Chicago has a much larger and more diverse economy to draw from to address its debt concerns. A report from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis released in February shows that Chicago metro area GDP in 2011 was $548 billion annually, making it the third largest in the nation after New York and Los Angeles. That makes the Chicago economy nearly three times larger than Detroit's, which checks in at $199 billion. Chicago's economy is also more diverse than Detroit's, with no one industry sector making up more than 13 percent of the metro area workforce. Chicago's economy also enjoys demonstrated strengths in areas where Detroit is weaker — specifically, finance, transportation and warehousing, and education. There is simply a broader and deeper reservoir that Chicago can tap.
Perhaps more important, there are key historical differences that led Detroit to bankruptcy but kept Chicago on a growth path. Circa 1950, Chicago and Detroit were mid-century manufacturing doppelgangers — economic powerhouses teeming with industrial businesses, each with a bevy of skilled and unskilled workers to employ. However, governance differences caused their paths to diverge. Mayor Richard J. Daley is often remembered as the quintessential machine politician, but he cut his political teeth in fiscal policy before occupying the fifth floor at City Hall. He put that expertise to good use while in office. Also, the dozens of municipal corporations and special-purpose districts here, lacking in Detroit, meant the fiscal burden could be spread around. As a result, City Hall ends up having fewer direct responsibilities and a slightly rosier fiscal picture.
When Detroit doubled down on flinging its population into the suburbs in the last half of the 20th century, Chicago cleaned up. I remember the smog, dirt, and crime of the 1980s vividly—and the stunning clean-up in the 1990s. During the same time, Detroit emptied out even more.
Detroit shows just about ever method available for killing a city; Chicago shows the opposite. Urbs in horto is a reality.
Crain's takes a look at how concealed carry affects private property:
Building owners have the authority to prohibit people from entering their property with a concealed firearm. To exercise this right, building owners “must post a sign . . . indicating that firearms are prohibited on the property.” Signs that say the carrying of firearms is prohibited must be “clearly and conspicuously posted” at the entrance of a building, premises or property where it is prohibited. The Illinois State Police is charged with adopting rules and standards for these signs. Building owners should also consider the implications of posting signs. If they prohibit firearms and then do not enforce the rules, are they opening themselves up to additional liability?
Do landlords want to prohibit the concealed carrying of firearms on their property and in their buildings? If they do, then they should consider what policies to adopt and where to post the signage to prohibit it. Landlords should review their standard lease rules and regulations to ensure that they implement the concealed carry policies. Even though Illinois is the last state to permit concealed carry of firearms, the new law may be a good opportunity to review standard lease provisions in other states.
The author also talks about how the new law affects bars and third-party property managers.
But think about this: in one of the most advanced countries in the world, in the 21st century, we have to put up signs to prohibit armed people from entering. You know, I recognize the necessity of having armed police on the streets. I submit that allowing everyone else to carry guns will make us less safe, both from the guns and from the police response to having more guns around.
Welcome back, 19th Century.