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"Your Liberty is Our Interest"
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Jefferson Review |
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"Your Liberty is Our Interest" |
January 5, 2004 | |
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Reason's Weekly Dispatch December 30, 2003
1. Remember Masood 1. Remember Masood The best indication that the threat of imminent terror may be real lies not in any passengers missing from the Paris-to-LA flight, nor in the nondescript, easy-to-bias "chatter" we hear so much about. Rather, it lies in the repeated attempts to take out Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Last week's failed assassination echoes the fate of another nominally pro-U.S. leader in the region: Anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Masood was killed via suicide bomb only days before the 9/11 attacks, a clear attempt to prevent, or at least hamper, any quick U.S. retaliation against terror bases in Afghanistan. The current preoccupation with Musharraf indicates that terror plotters now count Pakistan as their home base. This is not exactly a revelation, but it should encourage American officials to make the Pak-Afghan border ground zero on the war on terror. Meanwhile, the apparent obsession with securing themselves via such assassinations should remind us that while terror plotters have no problem ordering up martyrdom for their followers, they want a clean getaway for themselves. http://www.boston.com/news/packages/underattack/globe_stories/0911/Taliban_opponent_ http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4052770 2. Perp Squawk Perhaps the best result that will emerge from the 24-7 coverage of the Michael Jackson and Rush Limbaugh cases will be a greater understanding of how law enforcement operates in America. Both Jackson and Limbaugh are attempting to stir up outrage over what are very commonplace prosecutorial tactics. P?Slapping handcuffs on Jackson and parking him in a filthy bathroom at the booking station is the treatment any suspect can expect if he is thought to be easy to break or new to "the system." Authorities do this kind of thing because it works. Scared suspects start talking. Who knows what Jackson might've copped to if he hadn't been so thoroughly lawyered. Limbaugh is outraged having to open his medical records to investigators looking for evidence of doctor shopping, calling it a "fishing expedition." That's just what it is. Such expeditions are routinely mounted by police task forces that have invested a lot of time and effort in a case, and who are on the hook for believing a story peddled by an informant. People have their lives turned upside down until a guilty plea falls out. The public will have to decide if this is the kind of policing they want, mindful that if celebrities get the once-over, average Joe gets the same thing two or three times over. http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2003-12-29-jackson-interview_x.htm 3. Scan and Pan Before you go out and spend serious Homeland Security cheese on some hyped face-scanner tech -- state and local governments, this means you! -- consider that they can be defeated with a widespread counter-measure: a photograph. Simple pictures of human faces can fool scanners that attempt to measure such physical characteristics as the width of one's nose as an ID method. Turns out that biometrics cannot the escape the primary design rule for a good security system: It must be simple to use, but not simple to break. Biometrics looked like an easy, passive route to good security. The end user did not have to do much of anything except be themselves. But it turns out not to be that easy. For the foreseeable future, humans in a secure loop will have to do something to prove their identity, something really lo-tech like remembering a password or bringing a key. So in 2004 the U.S. might well have to choose between Osama bin Laden and Hamid Karzai. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/ZDM/biometric_security_pcmag_031229.html 4. Quick Hits Quote of the Week "I'm furious. I'm aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used." -- Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, on going to Iraq for a yearlong tour of duty under a Pentagon stop-loss order which forbids personnel from leaving the military even after their hitches are up. Eagle had planned to retire this past spring. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36979-2003Dec28?language=printer
Carted Away A South African supermarket plans to equip its shopping carts with transmitters in order to stem a rash of cart thefts. About 4,000 carts a year go missing. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1017127.htm Black Email Crooks are evidently convincing office workers to send them protection money lest their employers get hit with a crippling cyber attack. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=569&ncid=738&e=1&u=/nm/20031229 Language Barrier Voice over Internet Protocol systems are slowed by an incompatibility amongst different software packages. The industry says it is working to fix the problem. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5133196.html PETA Sandwich Indonesian villagers reportedly feed a 49-foot python three or four dogs a month. The snake, if it exists, would be the largest ever recorded. http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/12/29/offbeat.giant.snake.ap/index.html 5. New at Reason Online Ride the Death Spiral 6. The Print Edition Get your personal copy of the latest issue of Reason's print edition each month -- before it hits the newsstands and before it's posted on the Web! Subscribe Today! 7. News and Events New Book!
"Jacob Sullum has produced a thoughtful, sane, and logical analysis of our drug laws. Is that even legal?" -- Dave Barry, syndicated columnist
After decades of a futile war on drugs, Saying Yes makes public what many Americans discuss only in private: Drug use as it is described by politicians and propagandists is dramatically different from drug use as it is experienced by the silent majority of users--the decent people who, despite their politically incorrect choice of intoxicants, lead productive and fulfilling lives.
For more information and to purchase a copy, click here Buy Reason T-shirts and coffee mugs! Click here for the latest on media appearances by Reason writers. Want even more Reason? Sign up for Reason Alert to get regular news from Reason Magazine and Reason Public Policy Instiute, as well as advance notice about media appearances and events. We encourage you to forward Reason Express. If you received this issue from a forward, please subscribe. It's Free! ---
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Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Reason Senior Editor