The TSA Hates Most States Starting With The Letter M

If you’re a resident of Maine, Minnesota, Missouri or Montana your driver’s license will no longer be valid to pass TSA-checkpoints starting in January 2018, and you will instead have to use an alternate form of ID. This means you’ll have to bring a passport, military ID or permanent resident card next time you go to the airport, even if you’re just traveling within the United States. This new rule won’t go into effect until January 22, 2018[.]

From here.

I have serious doubts about the constitutionality of this legislation.

TSA Now Enforcing Teen Girl Dress Code

Wonkette has the story.  The fifteen year old girl clothing that a TSA officer found objectionable is depicted below:

A Question Of Regulatory Priorities When It Comes To Terrorism

The question of what sort of laws and policies are necessary to prevent terrorism, or at least to make it harder to carry out terrorist acts can be a difficult one that requires careful balancing of the public interest in security against personal civil liberties. 

For example, questions regarding whether there should be some legal authority for preventative detention of suspected terrorists without the probable cause necessary for a criminal arrest, and involving the targeting of U.S. citizens and their companions who may be innocent to be killed with armed drones, can be hard ones.

But, as the examples below illustrate, many aspects of the existing set of laws and policies on these subjects defy common sense.  Seemingly very serious threats are regulated quite lightly, while other aspects of American life that pose far lesser threats to public health and safety are sometimes regulated much more strictly.

Mortars Are Easier To Buy Than Sudafed, Oral Contraceptives Or A Gun

In the United States, you can buy a mortar and mortar rounds over the counter (although not the full strength version, although it contains some gunpowder and easily modified to replace firework colors with more gunpowder), over the counter, for $100 with nothing more than a merchant's voluntary decision to take a copy of your ID.  No license, no permit, no background check, no entry in a centalized database is required.

One of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers purchased two large reloadable mortar kits from a fireworks store in New Hampshire, an executive with the pyrotechnics company said Tuesday.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev paid $199 cash for two “lock and load” kits, each of which contained four tubes and 24 shells, said William Weimer, vice president of Phantom Fireworks. Such kits cannot be legally sold in some states, including Massachusetts and California.

It takes a background check to buy a gun from a retail vendor and certain groups of people are not legally allowed to buy them.  You are required by law to show ID and be entered in a centralized database to buy Sudafed (an allegery medication that can be used as an ingredient to make methamphetamines).  You need an actual doctor's prescription to buy oral contraceptives that have fewer health risks than asprin.  But, none of that is required to buy your own artillery set, or the gunpowder needed to charge these rounds to full military strength.

Of course, there are some people in the United States who have been banned from possessing and using small mortars for a while as recently as a month ago.  Those would be U.S. Marines.

People On Terrorism Watch Lists Can Legally Buy Guns And Routinely Do

The United States also has a national terrorism watch list that is routinely used to prevent people from getting onto commercial airplanes even after their possessions are carefully searched by TSA officials.  But, people on the national terrorism watch list are still free to buy firearms even when the background check done for someone purchasing a gun from a retail vendor shows that they are on it.  On average, five people on the national terrorism watch list buy a gun each week.

Under current laws, if a background check reveals that your name is on the national terrorism watch list, you're still free to walk out of a gun dealership with a firearm in your hands — as long as you don't have a criminal or mental health record.

Data from the Government Accountability Office show that between 2004 and 2010, people on terrorism watch lists tried to buy guns and explosives more than 1,400 times. They succeeded in more than 90 percent of those cases, or 1,321 times.

I recognize that the national terrorism watch list has flaws.  The grounds for putting someone on it are very flimsy, and the process for finding out that you are on it or getting yourself removed from it are flawed.  This tool needs to be fixed.  But, the notion that it should be easier to buy a gun than to get onto a airline after TSA inspection of your baggage is pretty problematic. 

While Michael James Barton, a former counterterrorism official during the Bush Administration quoted in the linked story argues that the constitution protects gun purchases but not travel, there actually is a well recognized express protection of the right to engaged in interstate travel without undue interference.

While one justification for allowing people on a national terrorism watch list to buy guns is that this avoids tipping them off while allowing the federal government could follow up on gun purchases by people on a national terrorism watch list, there is no indications that it actually does so, or even that it has sufficient resources to do so.

It is also widely acknowledge that there a huge holes in the background check requirement to purchase guns in many states making it easy in practice for felons and people with restraining orders against them to actually buy guns in practice, that many people barred from buying guns are not routinely stripped of the guns already in their possession when a background check trigger kicks in, and that the background check database is woefully incomplete, particularly with regard to keeping track of people who have been committed for mental health issues - something that pending legislation in Congress with widespread support, even from gun rights groups, may change.

Knives On Planes Almost O.K.'d, Shampoo And Toothpaste, Not So Much

Then again, until yesterday, the TSA was planning to permit passengers to carry knives on commercial flights (of the same size as the box cutters used in the 9-11 attacks) (as well as "ski poles, lacrosse sticks, billiard cues and up to two golf clubs").  

It still has no plans, however, to discontinue its ban on carrying regular sized shampoo and toothpaste tubes or bottled water in carry on luggage, or its requirement that all abled bodied adults have their shoes X-rayed before flying unless they have a pre-approved safety clearance.

Ordinary People In The U.S. Are Allowed To Own Tanks With Operational Weapons

There are several hundred to 1000 private tank owners in the United States according to the Wall Street Journal.  The tank can even have live weapons if the owner obtains the functional equivalent of a concealed weapon permit (although obviously, tanks are not themselves concealled weapons).

A tank in the U.S. can have operational guns, if the owner has a federal Destructive Device permit, and state laws don't prohibit it. The permit costs $200, and the applicant must swear he hasn't been a "fugitive from justice," "adjudicated mentally defective" or convicted of "a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence." A local law-enforcement official, usually a sheriff or police chief, has to sign off on the application.

Tanks generally aren't street-legal, so owners usually drive them off-road or on other private property. Some say local authorities sometimes make exceptions for parades, a quick test drive or a trip to the gas station.

There Are 488,065 Privately Owned Legal Machine Guns In The United States

Incidentally, while private ownership of fully automatic weapons (i.e. machine guns) is highly regulated, it is possible for a private citizen in the United States to get a permit to own and possess one, and there are quite a few such permits are outstanding (488,065 as of 2012 up from about 240,000 in 1995).

There were 30,220 registered machine guns in Virginia as of March, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

That's more than any other state in the nation.

Florida and California, with far larger populations than Virginia, ranked second and third in the number of registered machine guns, with 29,128 and 28,774, respectively.

Nationally, there are nearly 500,000 registered machine guns, according to an annual report compiled by the ATF. . .

Private citizens who want to legally own a machine gun face a lengthy approval process. Meeting the standard requirements for gun ownership — including no felony record, no psychiatric commitments and no domestic assault convictions — is just the beginning.

After passing a background check, applicants must submit their photograph and fingerprints to be used in a registry maintained by the ATF. Also required is a signed statement from the chief law enforcement officer in the locality where the applicant lives, stating there is no indication the machine gun would be used illegally.

Like tank ownership, the requirements that must be met to legally own a machine gun are similar to those for a concealled weapon permit in many states (although in Colorado and a many other states, a concealled weapons permit is easily available after a brief training course to almost anyone who can legally buy one).

There is no indication that the officials who have to sign off on permits to own tanks with operational firearms or machine guns have access to information regarding whether or not the applicant is on the national terrorism watch list which they can then use as a cue to investigate for themselves.

Also, keep in mind that once a permit is issued in one local jurisdiction where a local sheriff may be lenient in granting permits to obtain a firearm, nothing prevents the machine gun owner (at least for all practical purposes) from taking the machine guns to a new jurisdiction and using them there.  This is a list common denominator system of regulation.

It is worth noting, however, that many privately owned machine gun owners have multiple machine guns, so the number of privately owned machine gun owners is significantly smaller than the number of private owners of machine guns.  But, with that many machine guns in circulation, the risk that one could fall into the wrong hands, for example, via burglary or a relative who gains access to a legal owner's gun safe, is real.

The Second Amendment Is Unique In The World And Only Recently Enforceable In The U.S.

The United States is the only country in the world with constitutional protections for the right to bear arms.  Several Latin American countries that once copied the U.S. and had similar protections have repealed those protections in the last half-century.  It has been more than a century since a new constitutional protection for the right to bear arms was adopted by a country. 

Moreover, while the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, the first time that a court determined that it created an enforceable individual right against the federal government (at least in the case of ownership of handguns for self-defense) did not come until 2008 in the case District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).  The question of whether that right was enforceable against state and local governments, as well as the federal government, was not resolved until the case of McDonald v. Chicago (2010).  Before 2008, the not fully resolved but majority view was that the Second Amendment was a collective right that prohibited the federal government from banning state militias, rather than an individual right to bear arms for personal self-defense.  McDonald v. Chicago made clear that the Second Amendment was not primarily just a federalism protection.

Even those cases and precedents decided since 2008 have upheld many gun control laws, including all current nationally applicable gun control laws, as reasonable regulations of the right to bear arms.  The laws struck down have overwhelmingly been nearly complete bans on handgun ownership enacted by big city municipal governments like the one struck down in the original Heller case in Washington D.C.

Why A Boston Marathon Explosion Is Not A Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion

There appears to be video capturing the Boston Marathon bomber, although not yet an arrest. I suspect that the end result will be more Ted Kazinski and less Oklahoma City or 9-11. It also illustrates dramatically that the frequent Hollywood device of secret agencies being able to access all video surveillance in real time and analyze huge volumes of it to find a particular individual is a bunch of bunk.  Notably, the FBI, local law enforcement, and other criminal justice actors are taking the lead role in the investigation and achieving success with it. (Source: ABC News, national website and other news reports.)

An explosion at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas, just a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, killed at least five people and injured more than two hundred, including more than a dozen critical injuries.  The casualty toll was very similar to the Boston Marathon bombing but slightly worse across the board.  Both events involved unexpected explosions of things known to be explosive and a facile utilitarian take on them might suggest that they are equally problematic.

But, the fertilizer plant explosion is far less worrying and rightly so.  Why?

1.  The fertilizer plant explosion was very likely a simple industrial accident caused by failure to exercise reasonable care in running a factory, not an intentional effort to cause malicious harm.  We can see that in part because the fertilizer company suffered great damage to its own property and valued employees in the process that it didn't want, while the bomber will not suffer any harm to himself unless he is caught and his actions clearly show that he was trying not to be caught and probably believed that he might succeed in doing so (even if he was wrong).

2.  There is a balancing act here.  The Boston bomber's motives have no societal value to counterbalance the harm, so it remains a problem.  Producing fertilizer helps farmers make food and an increased ability to make food has societal value - and it is impossible to have a large scale industrial economy that makes our lives much better without taking the risk that sometimes there will be accidents.

3.  The fertilizer plant's owner or its insurance company, will almost surely provide the full amount of compensation determined to be owed to those harmed through the accident according to the dictates of the law and will cooperate within reason with the process of making that determination.  The Boston bomber, if he is caught, will almost surely be unable to provide any meaningful compensation to his victims and will almost surely not cooperate in the process.  This helps balance the scale.

4.  Cynically and politically speaking, the upper middle class and wealthy people who drive the political system in both political parties, work in offices where they don't face these kinds of risks and can choose to live away from potentially dangerous factories without impairing their lifestyles.  In contrast, a Boston Marathon bombing disproportionately impacts those very people living those very lifestyles (and on a bipartisan basis, no less, marathon running is among the least definitively partisan recreational activities out there).

On the other hand, policy measures in response to the fertilizer plant explosion have great potential to make the entire industry safer and reduce future incidents (something that mere regulatory agencies can impose without express legislative authorization, by the way). 

In contrast, it is exceedingly hard to come up with policies that will prevent future Boston Marathon bombing type incidents.  Indeed, as noted in a pithy way at Mother's Jones and more seriously elsewhere, acts of terrorism in the United States have declined steadily since a peak in the 1970s where systematic records started being kept to the present, with only a handful of blips along the way.  The existing anti-terrorism policies are working, even if they aren't perfect.  The problem of terrorism is not mostly the absolute number of deaths and injuries it causes.  Ordinary, non-terrorist harms (e.g. industrial accidents and prescription drug overdose deaths) dwarf terrorist harms in terms of direct impact.  But, while other harms have many self-regulating aspects to them that naturally try to limit their impact, terrorism allowed to go unchecked can become immensely damaging and the impact on society of greater measures to prevent it can be very costly (witness the daily burdens associated with air travel security).  So, decisive efforts to shut down terrorists when discovered makes a lot of sense. 

Notably, however, there is almost no empirical evidence that military as opposed to criminal justice approaches work better in responding and there is some suggestive evidence that the reverse is true.  Criminal justice reduces the likelihood of a cycle of retaliation and reduces distrust of the authority imposing it, and thus makes citizens more willing too cooperate in helping government to capture criminals.  Criminal justice has a focus on accurately finding out who commited the crime since it operates where an ability to capture an identified and located perpetrator is a secondary consideration.  It works so long as there is near universal support for authority vis-a-vis the criminals and apprehending as opposed to killing the criminal is the usually circumstance.  Criminal justice obviously doesn't work when law enforcement is too weak to apprehend perpetrators who have been identified and located reliably, it doesn't work well when accurately identifying the enemy is not an important consideration, and it works less well when at least a meaningful minority of the population in the relevant communities take the side of the perpetrators rather than law enforcement. As a result, in the absence of a civil war, criminal justice is almost always the better approach for responding to domestic terrorism.  But, the situation may be different in abroad or the in the midst of a civil war. 

Still, even then, when local conditions favorable to a criminal justice approach exist where the perpetrators are located, it is almost always the preferred option, and if it is possible to arrest and remove someone where criminal justice approaches are not viable to face criminal justice in a place where it is viable, this is generally a preferred option to a military one.  Fighting terrorism is ultimately as much about quashing future terrorist acts as seeking retribution for past ones or controlling territory, and that requires public legitimacy which is enhanced by the use of the criminal justice system which is all about making the state use of force against alleged wrongdoers appear legitimate.

TSA Style Security Measures Counterproductive

A new book, "Against Security" by Harvey Molotch, reviewed here, cogently argues that the approach to securing public places exemplified by the Transportation Security Administration, is really "security theater" that may actually put us at greater risk.

Sometimes we implement security measures against one threat, only to magnify another. . . . special “high-entry” subway turn­stiles make it much harder for people to sneak in for a free ride but also make platform evacuations much slower in the case of an emergency. . . .

[E]ffective security comes less from the top down and more from the bottom up. . . . When we don’t know what sort of threats we want to defend against, it makes sense to give the people closest to whatever is happening the authority and the flexibility to do what is necessary. In many of Molotch’s anecdotes and examples, the authority figure—a subway train driver, a policeman—has to break existing rules to provide the security needed in a particular situation. Many security failures are exacerbated by a reflexive adherence to regulations. . . . this kind of individual initiative and resilience [is] . . . a critical source of true security.

We get much more bang for our security dollar by not trying to guess what terrorists are going to do next. Investigation, intelligence, and emergency response are where we should be spending our money. . . .we do better as a society when we trust and respect people more. Yes, the occasional bad thing will happen, but 1) it happens less often, and is less damaging, than you probably think, and 2) individuals naturally organize to defend each other. This is what happened during the evacuation of the Twin Towers and in the aftermath of Katrina before official security took over. Those in charge often do a worse job than the common people on the ground. . . . we should focus on nurturing the good in most people—by giving them the ability and freedom to self-organize in the event of a security disaster, for example—rather than focusing solely on the evil of the very few.

A low key, liberal society has a lot of payoffs that even its advocates often don't fully appreaciate. A society where people are comfortable passing along tips to the right people are more effective than checkpoints, and reliance on every day heros may be more effective than efforts to creat giant bureaucracies of security specialists.

We would also be well served, generally, by learning to better teach our children the generalized skill of self-organization, something that Americans have tended to do less well in the last half century or so, for example, than their Japanese and British peers.

Paranoia Waning

This winter's semi-annual family trip by plane revealed some good news for once. A decade after 9-11, the airport security system run by the Transportation Security Administration has gone from paranoid to merely ineffectually earnest. The constant soundtrack of elevated security levels attached to a color code has faded to a periodic warning not to leave bags unattended. Children no longer have to remove their shoes at security checkpoints. Dare I say that the attitude of the TSA workers is also not quite so on edge? Let's hope it lasts.

In hindsight, what did 9-11 mean?

Ten years later what are the enduring legacies of 9-11?

The heroism of the crew of Flight 93 and the first responders who rushed into a burning skyscraper. The Afghan War that is still with us, and for twisted reasons particular to the misguided mindset of George W. Bush, the Iraq War. The marginalization of the Taliban, the death of Osama bin Laden (followed just weeks later by the only dimly related deaths of many members of the unit that killed him, shot down from a helicopter over Afghanistan), the deaths of at least half a dozen people claimed to be al-Queda number twos. New skyscsrapers are under construction to replace the old ones at ground zero.

The intelligence community budget has soared to $80 billion a year and probably hundreds of thousands of people working in it. We have the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act (which doesn't actually say what popular culture believes it does, the more controversial parts of the war on terror go far beyond the Patriot Act), a chilling and dubious extraordinary rendition and enemy combatant doctrine and the thin lingering doctrinal commitment to those doctrines carried over by President Obama in the absence of Congressional support at Guantanmo Bay, dark plots of torture and abuse in secret cells where waterboarding was conducted and prisoners died from abuse and in the humiliation of Abu Grahib prison in Iraq - although the secret terror prison network and regime of torture was far smaller when real information came out that most on both sides had assumed. We have the continue legal black hole that is Baghram Airforce Base in Afganistan. We have an evolving military concept of targeted killings by drones that General Petraeus has been appointed as head of the CIA to manage.

We have the surprising fact that the last decade has not been riddled with terrorist acts related to 9-11 in the United States. We have new air travel security (we've just shed a decade of useless security level color codes) of dubious value and the TSA - the largest expansion of the federal government civilian workforce in recent memory. We have a variety of federal grant purchased law enforcement resources that were ill accounted for, are all over the United States and have negligable relationships to real terrorism. We have a lot of good scholarship that shows that neither military tribunals or torture are effective in dealing with terrorism and a lot of bad politics that is ignoring that scholarship.

Ten years later, the ominous threat of "Islamo-Fasicism" has been undermined by a wave of democratic reform across most of the Islamic world. It is not complete, but it is there. Ten years later, we still haven't come to terms with the fact that Saudi Arabia has very little to recommend it as an ally and is at the heart of the violent extremism that threatens global human rights and peace. Ten years later we still don't collective understood what experts have been saying all alone - that opposition to Americans and the West in the Islamic world has as much to do with our support with authoritarian Islamic regimes as it does to do with American support for Israel. We have forgotten the soft power that comes from support for democracy, liberty and justice for all.

We mourn the 9-11 dead and the roughly equal number who have died in military adventuries seen by those who advanced them as avenging it. The litigation arising out of 9-11 itself is pretty much concluded and left little more than a ripple of impact. The Pentagon building has been restored to almost its prior incarnation. Tom Clancy, who wrote books predicting terrorist attacks similar in targets, methods and national consciousness impact to 9-11 managed to escape any finger pointing. The military itself has had to refocus from Cold War style conflicts to asymmetric threats, a task that it has not taken to gracefully, exacting an immense toll in treasure with its strategic indecision.

The Iraq War has come and it has also gone. Support for continued involvement at current levels in Afghanistan is waning. Early decisive victories in both wars quickly evolved into prolonged counterinsurgencies.

The world changed, but not as much as we might have expected.

Bureaucratic Bloat Revisited

The driving force behind the growing number of federal regulatory employees can be explained with one very simple reason: 9-11.

Almost all of the Homeland Security growth, moreover, is due to the federal socialization of the previously private sector and state and local government function of passenger air traffic security in the federal Transporation Security Administration. Also note that the Tea Party faction in Congress has pledged not to make cuts to Homeland Defense, a pledge that clearly extends to the TSA.

Via Rortybomb.

3-1-1 Still Annoying

The security theater of the Transportation Security Administration's 3-1-1 policy, limiting travelers to a quart bag of liquids and gels of no more than 3.4 ounces each still doesn't make sense. And, in case you were wondering, the security level at American airports is still not green. Per Wikipedia:

The HSAS threat level has changed 17 times as of September 2009. In August 2004, DHS began identifying specific sectors under possible threat, including aviation, financial services, and mass transit.

Severe (Red)

The threat level has been raised to Severe only once, which applied only to flights coming from the United Kingdom:

* August 10–14, 2006, in response to British law enforcement announcing it had disrupted a major terror plot to blow up an aircraft, DHS raised the threat level for commercial flights from the United Kingdom to the United States to Severe.

High (Orange)

On a nationwide level, it has been raised to High five times:

* September 10–24, 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
* February 7–27, 2003, near the end of the Muslim religious holiday Hajj. Intelligence reports suggested the possibility of terrorist attacks against "apartment buildings, hotels, and other soft or lightly secured targets."
* March 17 – April 16, 2003, around the beginning of U.S. and Coalition military action in Iraq.
* May 20–30, 2003, after the Riyadh compound bombings and the Casablanca bombings. According to Tom Ridge: "The U.S. Intelligence Community believes that Al Qaeda has entered an operational period worldwide, and this may include terrorist attacks in the United States."
* December 21, 2003 – January 9, 2004, citing intelligence information suggesting large-scale attacks around the holiday season.

In addition, the alert has been raised to High on a select or partial basis three times:

* August 1 – November 10, 2004, for specific financial institutions in northern New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C., citing intelligence pointing to the possibility of a car or truck bomb attack, naming specific buildings as possible targets.
* July 7, 2005 – August 12, 2005, for mass transit systems only. The DHS secretary announced the level after the 7 July 2005 London bombings despite the absence of "specific, credible information suggesting imminent attack" in the United States.
* August 10, 2006 – present, for all domestic airline flights and all international flights to or from the United States, with the exception of flights from the United Kingdom to the United States. Flights from the United Kingdom to the United States had been under a Severe alert, but were downgraded to High on August 13, 2006.

Elevated (Yellow)

* March 12 – September 10, 2002
* September 25, 2002 – February 6, 2003
* February 28 – March 16, 2003
* April 17 – May 20, 2003
* May 31, 2003 – August 1, 2004
* November 10, 2004 – July 8, 2005
* August 12, 2005 – present (excluding domestic and international flights)

Low (Green) and Guarded (Blue)

The threat level has never been lowered to Low (Green) or Guarded (Blue).

Hearings on ending Saturday delivery for the U.S. Postal Service start July 12, and rate increases are also in the offing.

TSA Still Sucks

The latest TSA gaffe is merely mildly irritating. A checkpoint employee played a gag on a random passenger, duping her into thining that she had been unknowningly tricked into being a drug mule or carrying something dangerous for a terrorist. There was no enduring harm. When the story hit the papers, the rogue employee was canned, even though the issue wasn't taken seriously by supervisors at the time.

Why Encourage Carry On Luggage?

Airlines don't charge for carry on luggage, but most airlines do charge for checked luggage. While I understand the desire to raise more revenue, I don't understand why an airline would want to encourage carry on luggage, in preferrence to checks luggage. Planes are built to carry checked luggage, as long as someone checks luggage you still have to keep all the fixed costs associated with having checked luggage, and carry on luggage can reduce passenger satisfaction, reduce safety and slows down departures and arrivals. Carry on luggage also increases TSA burdens and security line lengths.

Why don't airlines increasing ticket prices and then offer discounts if you check luggage rather than the full allotment of carry on luggage, instead?

TSA Stupid As Usual

Gunpowder, no problem; bamboo flutes, a serious threat.

Republican Socialism

One of the main talking points for Republicans in this Presidential election has been to label Obama a "Socialist." But, when it comes to nationalizing industries, involving government in private economic decision making, favoring existing programs to redistribute wealth, and increasing government's share of the economy, Republicans look a lot like socialists themselves.

Governor Palin is a firm supporter of the socialist message of collective ownership of resources so that the government can share the wealth with the common man.

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that "we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."

From here.

McCain has repeatedly favored taxing the wealthy more than the middle and working class, something he now attacked Obama for as a form of "Socialism." Republicans also voted together with Democrats, and President Bush agreed, to create Medicare Part D, the new prescription drug program that is the largest expansion of the social safety net in the United States in a couple of decades. Medicare Part D costs an amount comparable to the cost of providing bare bones universal health care to all in the United States.

The Bush Administration, as a result of a proposal that both McCain and Obama voted in favor of, and that both men went to the White House to help negotiate, is currently in the process of taking equity stakes in all nine of the biggest banks in America, plans to do the same with many smaller banks, and has taken an 80% stake in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that collectively own 50% of the mortgages in America. The foreign press, and some of the domestic press, has accurately described this as a partial nationalization of the banking system.

The Bush Administration has also invested in a major international insurance company (AIG), brokered a banking merger (PNC and National City) designed to avoid the limitations on golden parachutes in the bailout bill despite the fact that the merger is financed with bailout bill money, and is reported by the Wall Street Journal to be working on a plan to use $5 billion in federal funds to broker a General Motors acquisition of privately held Chrysler.

According to the conservative Cato Institute:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.

Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

Fiscal responsibility has suffered as a result. Bush has run up record deficits and is not the exception in this regard either. Republican Presidents have added far more to the federal debt than Democratic Presidents.

In the wake of 9-11, one of the Bush Administration's first responses was to nationalize the previously private sector function of providing airport security screening, creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The TSA is the biggest new federal government function, in terms of employees added to the federal payroll, in recent memory, and has made a name for itself for its ham handed handling of its job.

Republicans have also favored prohibiting voluntary accurate labeling of U.S. farm products or additional inspections of U.S. farm products that would increase the marketability of these products abroad. Concerns about the safety of imports of food from the U.S. in the absence of these inspections and labeling has led to riots in the streets of Seoul, South Korea. And, the Bush Administration has also strongly favored protectionist prohibitions on importing prescription drugs from Canada, despite the fact that there are no genuine reasons to doubt the safety of Canadian drugs. Both Bush and McCain have proposed setting government targets in imports of oil to the United States. This doesn't sound like a party driven by a desire for free trade.

Pro-government conservatives have become one of the main constituencies for the Republican party as the Pew Research Center has noted for several years. They make up 10% of registered voters, and are 58% Republican, with most of the balance considering themselves to be independent voters. While pro-business "Enterprisers" and "Social Conservatives" make up larger shares of the Republican Party coalition, pro-government conservatives make up much of the balance of the Republican party.

In short, present day Republicans seem to favor bigger government, a larger role for government in the economy, redistribution of wealth, and a bigger social safety net, without much concern for the size of the national debt. This makes the sting of their "socialist" taunts unimpressive.

TSA Still Stupid and Humiliating

The idiots responsible for keeping us safe on airplanes at the Transportation Security Administration insisted that a woman remove small nipple rings with pliers before she would be allowed to board the plane.

Once again we get tasteless security theater instead of real security.

Terrorist Watch Lists Broken

The GAO via Unbossed, has the scoop:

As of May 2007, the consolidated watch list contained approximately 755,000 records.

From December 2003 through May 2007, screening and law enforcement agencies encountered individuals who were positively matched to watch list records approximately 53,000 times. Many individuals were matched multiple times. The outcomes of these encounters reflect an array of actions, such as arrests; denials of entry into the United States; and, most often, questioning and release. . . .

[S]ome subjects of watch list records have passed undetected through agency screening processes and were not identified, for example, until after they had boarded and flew on an aircraft or were processed at a port of entry and admitted into the United States. . . . the government lacks an up-to-date strategy and implementation plan for optimizing use of the terrorist watch list. Also lacking are clear lines of authority and responsibility.

Just 1% of nominations to put someone on the list are rejected (GAO report, pdf page 27). About 596,000 records have been added to the list since June 2004. Since the system's inception about 100,000 records have been removed from the list (pdf page 29).

The administration agrees that using the list may be useless or counterproductive (at pdf pages 41-42, emphasis added):

According to TSA, the administration has concluded that non-use of the full watch list does not constitute a security vulnerability; however, TSA did not explain the basis for this determination. Also, DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties emphasized that there is a strong argument against increasing the number of watch list records TSA uses to prescreen passengers. Specifically, the office noted that if more records were used, the number of misidentifications would expand to unjustifiable proportions, increasing administrative costs within DHS, without a measurable increase in security. The office also noted that an expansion of the No Fly and Selectee lists could even alert a greater number of individuals to their watch list status, compromising security rather than advancing it. Further, according to the office, as the number of U.S. citizens denied and delayed boarding on domestic flights increases, so does the interest in maintaining watch list records that are as accurate as possible. Also, the office noted that an increase in denied and delayed boarding of flights could generate volumes of complaints or queries that exceed the current capabilities of the watch list redress process.

The report notably doesn't identify what percentage of the 53,000 watch list related matches were false positives, but implies that the percentage is high, and expressly notes that many people are repeatedly dogged by false positive matches.

[T]he number of matches has increased each year—from 4,876 during the first 10-month period of TSC’s operations to 14,938 during fiscal year 2005, to 19,887 during fiscal year 2006. This increase can be attributed partly to the growth in the number of records in the consolidated terrorist watch list and partly to the increase in the number of agencies that use the list for screening purposes. Our analysis of TSC data also indicates that many individuals were encountered multiple times. For example, a truck driver who regularly crossed the U.S.-Canada border or an individual who frequently took international flights could each account for multiple encounters.

I'll also state the obvious. The United States government does not know the name of 775,000 terrorists in the United States and there aren't remotely that many terrorists who come anywhere near the United States. I very much doubt that there are even 7,750 terrorists in the United States. And, I very much doubt that the United States has any awareness of the threat posed by a majority of the terrorists in the United States. Also, few potential terrorists pose a theat to civil aviation after the passenger screening process is completed. There probably aren't even 775 people on that list who are actual threats to civil aviation or public safety.

Moreover, because the list is disproportionately of suspected "international terrorists" rather than of suspected "domestic terrorists", the percentage of foreign and immigrant persons who trigger false positives is astoundingly high. It doesn't help that in many parts of the word, certain names are very common. Everybody and their brother in the Islamic world has a name from the Koran. The vast majority of people in East Asia share fewer than forty last names. Latin America, similarly, is dominated by a small number of surnames (sociologists regularly use them as a proxy for Hispanic heritage) and has many common first names. One Jose Garcia or Fatima (no last name used) in the terrorist watch list puts a lot of people in a world of hurt.

A 99.9% inaccurate terrorist watch list is worse than nothing.

Six years later

The day started out a lot like today for me, six years ago. It was pleasant enough. I had breakfast and read the morning paper, and started my morning way across town for a work related matter, leaving directly from home. I chose to listen to a CD rather than news on my drive.

I arrived at court that morning ignorant that anything was going on. Most of those around me, as I waited in the county court cattle call, knew little or nothing. Some mumblings started just as I was sent by a court clerk to schedule a hearing at a different office, but it sounded so absurd that it must be a joke. By the time I'd made it upstairs, it was clear that it was more serious. Security was starting to seal off the court house as I left that morning. I spent the better part of the rest of that day on the Internet, trying to glean news of the day's events.

Six years later, it is still almost impossible to start your day before thinking about anything else. The date, 9-11, is how we have collectively chosen to describe the events of that day.

No, 9-11 did not change everything. It didn't impact how we provide health care to one in seven Americans who lack it. It didn't change the lackluster state of public education. It didn't make much of a dent in the economy in the long or medium term, outside the airline industry. But, it did leave an indelible mark on our nation.

The response to 9-11 has defined the Bush Presidency, and he has badly bungled it. The Afghan war began rather well at the beginning. A small U.S. force, about a division in size, toppled a Taliban regime on the verge of completely winning a civil war, and a home grown political regime to follow it was put in place rather cleanly. The regime was not all we might dream of, but it had reasonable legitimacy. Osama bin Laden got away, due to bungling, but he was on the run.

But, five and a half years later, the new regime may be in charge, but the Taliban are resurgent and certainly not wiped out. Osama bin Laden or his successors have regrouped at a new base in the wilds of Northwest Pakistan, a nation whom we cannot invade as we did Afghanistan, because its undemocratic regime has nuclear weapons. Detainees from that conflict remain at Guantanamo Bay, symbols of a failed detention policy that has destroyed our nation's international standing, even as the war in Afghanistan itself that these men were fighting (never intending to fight Americans in the first place) is arguably over. There hasn't been another 9-11 attack, but there is little evidence to indicate that the policies taken in reaction to 9-11 helped. It turns out that we had more warning of 9-11 than one would have expected and failed to act.

We have the Patriot Act, but there is little indication that it has made us safer. In any case, the administration has gone far beyond the longer leash it was granted in that legislation. We have the Transportation Security Administration and the terrorist watch list, neither of which has made us safer. We have an ominously named, but half sensible in concept, Department of Homeland Security. But, the Department of Homeland Security has frittered away its credibility with anti-terrorism grants to municipal safety departments in the middle of nowhere, undue attention in its financial transaction and emigration monitoring to Cuba, and an immigration policy focused on deporting Mexican family men supporting their families in construction and meat packing jobs. We have gutted civil liberties and pardoned American war criminal with the Military Commissions Act and the President's pro-torture and anti-due process policies that it ratified, again, with no practical benefit in making us safer. We have reorganized the intelligence establishment and grown the CIA enormously, but it isn't clear that this has been more than a bureacratic reshuffle or that the increased investment is producing increased results. Instead, we've learned just how poor an instrument of policy the CIA has been historically.

We have every reason to quarrel with Saudi Arabia. It was the main sponsor of the Taliban. Most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden. It has no respect for human rights. It is a powerful anti-Democratic force in the Middle East, and a powerful supporter of radical Islamists. It is a main source of foreign fighters in Iraq. But, instead, we routinely sell them many of our most advanced weapons in large quantities, arming them for a war in which Israel, our ally, is the most plausible opponent. But, they have oil, and that changes everything when we have an oilman in the White House.

Mysteriously, 9-11 was used as a justification for the Iraq War, despite the fact that it had nothing to do at all with Iraq, and contrary to our claims, had no weapons of mass destruction. Honestly, Iraq was one of the more multi-ethnic and secular countries in the region and had a larger middle class than most. Like the Afghan War, it began with a stunning victory for U.S. troops. No country so large, with a military comparably modern, has ever fallen so fast, with such a disproportionate casualty rate between the invaders and the invaded. Iraq was conquered in a couple of months. But, things fell apart. We were prepared to invade, but not to occupy. We blew the brief honeymoon period in which we could have established a legitimate successor government and a climate of peace and order. As a result, we have spent four and a half years fighting a brutal guerrilla war with multiple insurgent groups. The political institutions we have put in place haven't worked well. Iraq is now a breeding ground for terrorism and a failed state. We remains there solely because we broke it and haven't managed to fix it. We are simply looking for a graceful exit and can't find a way out.

Moreover, we have fought the Iraq war on a peacetime footing, with reserves, the national guard, and by overtaxing our troops. Funding of non-war related defense expenditures has continued largely on a business as usual basis. The active duty Army and Marines have grown only slightly, unlike every other war we have fought, and the total active duty military is constant in size, although we have spent much, much more money to fight a war than we would in peace time -- but we have financed the war with debt, while allowing tax cuts for the rich to remain on the books and growing domestic spending. There has, of course, been no draft, either. We have also, adapted our procurement to the current military demands slowly, at considerable cost in loss of life, as items like armored patrol vehicles and body armor and improved small arms have taken a back seat to medium to long term big ticket purchases like new ships and supersonic stealth fighter aircraft.

The 9-11 lawsuits are almost over. Rudy Giuliani was crowned as a leader for how he reacted, George W. Bush was shamed as an incompetent coward. The structural engineers have almost finished digesting the lessons learned from the collapse of the towers. The reconstruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has begun. The passengers of flight 92 that prevented another tragedy by fighting back, are epic heroes of the American consciousness. American business and the American military, the targets of the attacks successfully hit, have fully recovered from the direct damage caused by the attacks. New York is still thriving. The 9-11 widows and orphans have been provided for now, shoved out of the national consciousness by the families of soldiers in our Afghan and Iraqi war who return dead, brain damaged, afflicted with post traumatic stress disorder, or who are simply in peril and far away for long periods of time.

Six years later, we are ready to try to return to normalcy and ordinary problems, but afraid that another attack will set us back all over again. We are weary of war. We are not safer. We are not doing much that is constructive to solve the problem. We need a leader to take out out of this wilderness. We hope that one of the leading Presidential candidates will rise to the challenge. We don't have high hopes.

TSA Still Stupid

Seven year olds, even seven year old Muslims who share a name with suspected terrorists, aren't a threat to air travel.

No Fly List Strikes 7 Year Old Florida Boy

The no fly list has made trouble more than once to this 7 year old boy in Florida.

TSA=Too Stupid Agency

The TSA is not a paragon of good decision making.

The most recent situation: an eight year old boy prevented from flying because he was on the "no fly" list. Sadly, this is all too common. Also, while the TSA is good at seizing water, it is less good at finding bombs. For example: "In Red Team testing at Denver earlier this year, screeners missed 90% of fake guns and explosives smuggled through checkpoints."

The problems probably have something to do with the fact that this huge government agency (about 60,000 employees the last time I checked) was created by an administration that doesn't believe in government and hence doesn't understand public administration. They don't understand terrorism very well either, which is why they invented the "war on terrorism" concept.

BTW, they also don't really understand the gender equality concept.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

The kid's five day Thanksgiving weekend (I took four and a half days) is over. The pilgrimage to and from the ancestral homestead is complete. Here are some left over stray thoughts in its wake.

1. The airline magazine makes a strong case that Apple OS X based computers are more stable, more secure and easier to use. They can also use Window's based data filed. The main drawback now is that Windows software is much cheaper and often a sunk cost, and the Apple hardware (especially accessories) are expensive. Maybe this chasm could be ended by having Microsoft simply selling OS X under license as Windows 2007. I can dream? Can't I?

2. A recent issue of the Economist reports that one place you would expect to be the heart of the anti-nuclear movement, Ukraine, home to the worst nuclear disaster of all time, is buying more nuclear reactors as part of a global trend driven by global warming concerns. Politically other nations are warming to nukes as well.

3. The Economist also claims that Milton Friedman actually has far less of an influence on Chile than is commonly assumed.

4. The liquid and gels on planes ban is stupid and implemented poorly. Instead of discarding such things, they could offer to gate check them. Worse yet, the Transportation Security administration flier on security rules incorrectly implies that the ban applies to checked luggage, even though it doesn't, and also gets other things wrong.

Of course, also nuts is the TSA color coding threat system. We've had no days on green, blue or red, lots of yellow days and a few orange days that haven't demonstrably improved security.

The TSA also don't trust its own systems -- the deeply paranoid keep your bags with you every moment rule is very intrusive despite the fact that it makes little sense if only ticketed passengers whose bags have been scanned are allowed in the airport after the security gates.

5. Alcohol regulation is another heart of darkness. Colorado, for example, allows you to get booze in a restaurant, but not a liquor store on Sunday. And, why does it make sense to allow sales of 3.2 beer, but not other alcohol in grocery stores, except four that have special licenses (most notably the Target Store in Glendale, Colorado's own Las Vegas). Regulatory distinctions between different kinds of alcohol consumption are fundamentally irrational. And why in the world is it illegal to buy a car on Sunday? Massachusetts had a ballot issue on the subject this fall (I don't recall if it passed or failed).

6. One of the first warning signs of domestic violence on the horizon is loud, angry fighting. Neighbors hear it. (Insert "My Name Is Luca" lyrics here.) It is unpleasant. It is frightening. As long as nobody hits anybody, and the sound isn't louder than a raucous college party, no laws are broken and law enforcement can't intervene. And, this is probably largely good policy. Inserting police into a volatile relationship is a recipe for escalation and permanently broken relationships, that might otherwise heal.

On the other hand, doing nothing when the community is aware of crisis brewing isn't great either. Perhaps the best kind of person to intervene would be someone with almost no power. Not like the social services worker who can take your children away. Not like the policeman who can put you in jail. Just someone to say, "yes, the world has noticed", who can offer voluntary, constructive options.