Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[James A. Donald]

--
John Young wrote:
> There is a decreasing chance the US can apply its military might to
> defeat an unconventional enemy. That kind of enemy is not what
> long-standing military strategy and most tactics are aimed at.
> Rumsfeld was hoping to revise that when yet one more mighty military
> war appeared to head off changing military policy.
The US never intended to use its military might to defeat an
unconventional enemy.
It intended to use its military might in the entirely conventional way
to destroy or deter governments that foster terrorism, as was
accomplished very successfully in Afghanistan.
Regime change in Iraq was supposed to deter Syria and Iran, but they
have not in fact been deterred.  Saudi Arabia and Libya have been
deterred.  Indonesia has changed its policy on terror, but it is
unclear whether this was the result of the spectacle of Saddam and his
bullet ridden sons or honest soul searching.
--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 nVs3V7urdcH8GOjfhlNYzb0/JWqCDKupA3RE8WE3
 4YdwLgC/LWPMsXcHeSFlqJW/NrcK/eDjuprNNcJok

The "plagues" are Mosaic asymmetric attacks, not biological

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 05:21 PM 10/31/04 -0800, John Young wrote:
>To state the obvious to Major Variola, CDC will have first
>indication of a devastating US attack, reported fragmentarily
>under its links to hospitals, clinics and physicians, against
>which the might military and law enforcement have no defenses.

You thought I meant bio plagues?!  Jeezus John, is your metaphorizer
broken?  Any
bio hazard is accidental, or Detrick, not Osama.  A *succession of
attacks against the Empire* is what I mean, alluding to the Jews
attacking
the Pharaoh, until he let them alone.Pharoah=US, Moses=UBL,
Jews=Moslems.
Get your head around that one.

News:
The infectious biological "attack" will be an accident of the modularity

and recombination of influenza on some chinese duck/pig/human
farm.  It will not be intentional but it will kill a lot before the
vaccine
can be produced, which takes ca. 6 mos..  See 1918 pandemic,
and add jet airplanes.  A recent _Science_ article described
a model of this.  You are one or two days away from that duck/pig/human
incubator nowadays, no matter where you live.  That will happen,
but it won't be intentional.  The geopoli implications will be fun, but
UBL is not involved there.

Observation:
A non-infectious biological attack (eg anthrax which isn't
infectious) is cheap, but not Al Q's preferred MO.  They go
for the special effects type attacks, simultaneous so you
know its them.  (Otherwise it could be a suicical egyptian,
a rudder jerked too hard, a screw-jack improperly lubricated,
the NTSC is very creative.)

Of course the Ft Detrick folks enjoy sending
the occasional sporulated letter to senators, but hey, their funding was

running out, you do what you gotta do.

Implementation:
A chem attack is pretty nifty, and in many ways easier than
fission or RDDs.  Since there are so many chems moving
around, and rad sources are so easy to detect, by virtue of the
energy of the emissions, and controlled/surveilled materials.

A tanker into a school is double the fun,
its been years since Columbine, and the underbelly is itching
for a scratch.  (Again, you need to pull off 2 the same day.)
I wonder if there is a school that enrolls only
first born sons, that would be interesting to read about in your mosaic
er netscape er IE browser, eh?   Since your allusion-detector is broken,

"mosaic", get it?

History:
"Let my people go" and taking a beating only works if you have
wannabe-moral brits who want to divest anyway and your name is
Ghandi.  Otherwise the biblical plagues, aka asymmetric attack, approach
is
guaranteed to work in the limit.  All you need is enough popular
support.
Its there.

It only took 200 dead marines and one bomb
to evict us from Lebanon, maybe 50K corpses for S. Nam, don't know about

N Korea, but do the math.   .mil are disposable, but they have families
that
whine and vote.  And the press is not *entirely* 0wn3d by the .gov, yet.

Conclusion:
Again, the Mosaic approach of repeated asymmetric attacks on the Pharoah
is what Al Q
is up to.  Eventually the Pharoah/US gets fed up and says fuck it.
Maybe not this election, but eventually, and Al has time.  GW has only
4 more years, at best, and Rummy & Cheney are scheduled for a box in the
ground pretty
soon.  Wolfy has more time, but after a few more kilocorpses will lose
power with
Joe Sixpack and Joe's post-Bush "leader".

Operation Just Cause
Just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean I have to ignore
Egyptian/Hebrew history.
Just because I live here doesn't mean I don't think the US deserves the
treatment
that any Empire deserves.  Just because I'm an American doesn't mean I
can't use
sophisticated allusions.  Just because I say Mosaic Plagues doesn't mean
I'm
talking about frogs & locusts.  Dig?

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The Revolutionary

[R.A. Hettinga]

   

Esquire

The Revolutionary
Dick Cheney is the calmest man in the room. Too calm.

by Walter Russell Mead | Nov 01 '04

 He has many faces, all gray. He is a symphony in gray. He ranges the
spectrum from vanilla to colorless to dull. Even the pink of his lip and
the blue of his eyes are gray. As the Trojan horse for a contemporary
American revolution, he is magnificent, as radical behavior would be the
last thing suspected of someone who comports himself as he does. He is an
accident of history. He is a world-historic figure. He is the greatest
enigma in American public life. His name is Dick Cheney.


 1. The West Wing

 Portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson-the country's first two
vice-presidents-gaze benignly past the cream-colored walls toward the
blue-carpeted floor. A copy of a Remington sculpture and a
nineteenth-century painting of the Grand Tetons add a hint of the West.

 Vice-President Cheney meets me at the door, shakes my hand, and shows me
to a seat in the half of his office furnished for guests.

 I think and write about U. S. foreign policy for a living at the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York. Before getting this far-my first contact
with the vice-president-I'd gone through months of screening. My latest
book had circulated among the vice-president's staff to determine whether
my political attitudes passed muster. Call me unaligned; there are days
when I can't decide whether to worry more about the Bush administration or
its critics.

 But I had come to the White House on a mission. This man, and this
administration, were wrecking my life. I wanted to know why.

 I hate the decision I'm being forced to make this November. I hate the
choices that the war on terrorism is imposing on us. The gravest threats of
an unimaginably difficult and challenging future are coming together with
some of the unhappiest unresolved conflicts in our national life, creating
a perfect political shit storm. I don't like the storm and I don't like the
choice. But the war is real, our divisions are real, and the choice isn't
going away.

 You can talk about Bush all you want, but for me the choice is not so much
either hating Bush or voting for him (or hating him  and  voting for him,
which quite a few people I know seem to be doing) but about the man in
whose office I was now sitting, the most powerful vice-president in history.

 In a very real sense, the Bush administration is a Cheney administration.
There are a lot of people-and a fair few are among my friends and
relations-who think of Dick Cheney much the way Captain Ahab thought of
Moby Dick. In poll after poll last summer, he scored the lowest approval
ratings of any of the four top national candidates. One poll showed that
four times as many people think he needs his teeth whitened as think John
Edwards does.

 That's not quite my beef with Dick Cheney. Rather, for virtually his
entire adult life, he's been engaged in the systematic destruction of what
I was raised to believe was progressive, decent, and forward-looking in the
United States of America. Now, with Cheney's determined backing, the Bush
administration had invaded Iraq in the teeth of world opinion, had stumbled
into an occupation for which it was clearly unprepared, and, whether you
looked at the Atlantic alliance or the United Nations, seemed to be
mounting an assault on what two generations of American statesmen had grown
accustomed to regarding as the fundamental principles of sound American
foreign policy. And they won't even tell us why they really did it. Their
stated reason-Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction-was patently
wrong. They had bigger and even better reasons for what they did, reasons
that would calm their critics if not win them over, but we are in the last
laps of an endless presidential campaign, and on this momentous subject
they remain mute. Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney are as silent as the Sphinx.

 And so, how to make coherent what is incoherent-U. S. foreign policy in
the Bush years? The great question in America today is this: Are Cheney and
Bush the bearers of bad news who are adjusting American foreign policy to a
new and ugly reality, or are they themselves the bad news, making the world
more squalid and more dangerous as they mislead the country on a ruinous
course?

 You have to give Cheney credit: Although he sits in the eye of the
tremendous shit storm encircling the world, you will never find a calmer,
more rational guy.

 "Looking back on the last three years," I ask, "what would you say are the
administration's lessons learned from fighting the war on terrorism?"

 Looking a bit like Jeeves bringing his hangover remedy to Bertie Wooster,
Cheney deflects the question with reassuring blandness about the difficult
task.

 Cheney projects calm no matter what it is he is saying, which makes it
possible to miss the portent of things that 

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Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[John Young]

To state the obvious to Major Variola, CDC will have first
indication of a devastating US attack, reported fragmentarily
under its links to hospitals, clinics and physicians, against 
which the might military and law enforcement have no defenses.

By time the attack is understood it will be too late to mount
a national defense. Food and water are the means and methods,
not the hardware and electronic infrastructure, seaports and
airports, so loudly warned about. The last terrorist attack is not
the next one.

Elderly and children first to show the signs. Those not watched
all that carefully by the big warfighters, indeed overlooked by
design, so disdainful are they of caregivers.

Re: Osama's makeover

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 1:18 PM -0800 10/31/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>>And unlike Bush, he can actually read.
>
>C'mon Bill, that's not fair.

You keep thinking that, Mr. Pox. That's just the way he likes it...

Cheers,
RAH
---




The New York Times

October 24, 2004
POLITICAL POINTS

Secret Weapon for Bush?
By JOHN TIERNEY


To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the
military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W.
Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.

 That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative
columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of
presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer
estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the
mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.

 Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a
comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records.
They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough
to make reasonable extrapolations.

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again
suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th
percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was
about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation
of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it
a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so
many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be
misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated
they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

 Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the
Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's
I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report
from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

 You might expect Kerry campaign officials, who have worried that their
candidate's intellectual image turns off voters, to quickly rush out a
commercial trumpeting these new results, but for some reason they seem to
be resisting the temptation.

Upon hearing of their candidate's score, Michael Meehan, a spokesman for
the senator, said merely: "The true test is not where you start out in
life, but what you do with those God-given talents. John Kerry's 40 years
of public service puts him in the top percentile on that measure."
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 1:12 PM -0800 10/31/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Which way do the winds blow in the middle
>east?

East of Jerusalem. :-).

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[John Young]

There is a decreasing chance the US can apply its military
might to defeat an unconventional enemy. That kind of enemy
is not what long-standing military strategy and most tactics
are aimed at. Rumsfeld was hoping to revise that when yet
one more mighty military war appeared to head off changing
military policy.

The US has demonstrated in Afghanistan and post-Hussein
Iraq that it does not know how to fight unconventionally. That
inability appeared in Korea, then Viet Nam and has been shown
in every combat the US has engaged in since WW 2.

Military professionals know this and are hamstrung by the
narcotic dependency the defense industry and its beneficiaries
has for big iron and every bigger and more expensive platforms.
This has been coupled with gigantism in intelligence, big science
and big technological research advocated and overseen by giant
corporations and institutions. And to gloss this a huge spin
and propoganda machine has been funded to pump up the
threats and the hefty defense tax boondogling.

Special forces and operations were devised to piss-ant an alternative 
to this spread across the US pork-barrell behemothicism. But they 
have seldom been applied beyond pinprick displays, with much 
hoorahing about their stealthy effectiveness: "we can tell you about 
our successes, only failures make it to the media."

Commentators have noted the corrupting influence of empire
Britain thinking its global navy would assure continuance of
hegemony. The more that conceit was believed the weaker
the military became by its failure to recognize new forms of
warfare and new ways of thinking. That empire was undermined
by non-hegemonic forms of combat and thinking.

The US might get a bye with its arrogant belief in military might
for another generation if its lucky, if unlucky it will not survive this 
one. Well, parts of it may survive, away from the cities. Imagine
one of the few cypherpunks holed-up in northwest Utah and
one bunkered in Corralito escape the food-and-water-borne 
disease.

President Attila or May?

Re: Osama's makeover

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 12:03 PM 10/31/04 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
>At 08:23 PM 10/30/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>>And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece?
>>
>>Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan.
>
>Nah - he's allowed to use a Teleprompter,
>unlike Bush and Kerry at the debate-o-mercials.
>
>And unlike Bush, he can actually read.

C'mon Bill, that's not fair.  Even Osama commented on how
Bush was making good progress on that book about the goats
in the school on 9/11.  How W didn't even want to put it down,
he enjoyed it so much.

His fine reading skills even got shown in Fahrenheight 911,
along with some amusing footage of his handlers,
and that's a documentary, so it must be true.

Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[Major Variola (ret)]

12:22 AM 10/31/04 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
>Major Variola
>> The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not
>> an option..
>
>Why not?

They're called downwinders.  Which way do the winds blow in the middle
east?

>You keep assuming that Muslims unite, escalate, etc, but if
>they do, US will escalate also.

No, I assume you can nuke whereever you want, just because we can.
This is my take on your thesis that we are discussing.  Kicking hegemony

up a notch, finishing the job, let's roll...  It will get easier when a
US city
gets nuked.

The folks on the West coast might not like a few trillion curies in
their soup even
if we did get rid of the Indonesian Problem in the process.
Maybe they just need to suck it up,
ask not what their country can do for them, but how they can bend over
for it.
Childhood leukemia is getting easier to cure anyway.

Re: Osama's makeover

[Bill Stewart]

At 08:23 PM 10/30/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece?
Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan.
Nah - he's allowed to use a Teleprompter,
unlike Bush and Kerry at the debate-o-mercials.
And unlike Bush, he can actually read.


Bill Stewart  [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

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RE: Osama's makeover

[Tyler Durden]

Yeah...wasn't there an X-Files that was similar? I remember someone picking 
up a photo of Sadam Hussein and the TLA-dude saying, "Him? He was a truck 
driver in Detroit we found."

Perhaps the reason Bush hasn't 'caught' bin Laden yet is because he thinks 
he (ie, Bush) will win the election. He does have Florida locked up...

-TD
From: "Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Osama's makeover
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:23:19 -0700
At 05:23 PM 10/30/04 -0700, John Young wrote:
>Which returns to the Osama make-over. His nose looks
>much bigger, longer and wider, eyes closer together. The
>sage-of-the-desert color combination of his face and hands,
>beard, robe, hat and backdrop look as if it was shot in
>New Mexico, or maybe Israel pretending Lawrence of
>Arabia remake.
And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece?
Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan.
_
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Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

October 31, 2004

Need for Draft Is Dismissed by Officials at Pentagon
By THOM SHANKER

ASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - Rumors of a secret plan to reinstate the draft are
churning across the Internet, worrying some in Congress and even coloring
the presidential campaign, but senior Pentagon personnel officials and Army
officers insist that there is no need for a draft - and that they do not
want one, either.

 To counter public fears that conscription is returning, these officials
produced internal studies to illustrate the economic and demographic
reasons why a draft is not necessary, and why it would be a step backward
for the quality of the current all-volunteer force.

Army and Pentagon officials hope that efforts under way to reorganize the
service to form at least 43 combat brigades from today's 33 will create
additional deployable units and alleviate the stress on the Army. And as
both the Air Force and Navy shrink their personnel rosters, some of those
departing personnel are being courted by the Army in a program that also
serves as antidote to the draft.

 If a decision is made that the American military should grow, then the
Pentagon could ask Congress to finance a permanent expansion in personnel,
including enough money to attract recruits and retain those in uniform
without undercutting accounts for operations and weapons systems.

Officials note that Congressional proposals for expanding the military,
mostly in the range of 30,000 to 40,000 more troops, would hardly require a
new draft to force conscripts from across the approximately
two-million-strong cohort of current 18-year-old Americans.

In fact, the demographics of America are cited by Pentagon officials as a
major reason why the draft makes no sense today.

The Pentagon's top personnel officer, David S. C. Chu, said the size of
today's military - 1.4 million in the active component, and 1.2 million in
the National Guard and Reserve - is a much smaller percentage of a much
larger pool of possible recruits than the United States faced during World
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And since the military could not possibly absorb all the 18-year-olds in
the population should a draft be reinstated, there is little doubt that a
system of deferrals would be established that, just as in the Vietnam era,
could create a caste-like system separating the privileged of America from
the others.

"What do you do when not all need to be called and only a few are chosen?"
said Mr. Chu, who is under secretary of defense for personnel and
readiness. "It becomes a question of fairness."

Today's high-technology military also benefits from personnel who are
committed to staying in the service for several years, allowing the armed
services to reap full benefit from their costly training. During the draft,
soldiers were required to stay in the service for only two years. But
Pentagon studies show that current recruits need one to three years to
reach full competency in combat or support skills.

A study by Mr. Chu's office makes that point in arguing against reinstating
a draft that was allowed to lapse on July 1, 1973.

"Draftees quit early; volunteers stay - so today's midgrade and senior
noncommissioned officers are well experienced," said the study, written by
Bill Carr, deputy under secretary for military personnel policy.

"During the most recent draft, 90 percent of conscripts quit after their
initial two-year hitch, whereas retention of volunteers is five times
better - about half remain after their initial (normally four-year)
military service obligation," said the study, which was published in the
spring 2004 edition of "World Defense Systems," a military journal.

Those statistics may not be persuasive to those who believe the United
States is poised for a broader array of offensive military operations
against other adversaries that would require a draft, nor to those who feel
that a program of required national service would benefit the nation and
America's 18-year-olds.

But senior officers stress that the all-volunteer military is also more
competent, better educated and more disciplined than in the final years of
the draft.

"I served in the draftee Army," said Gen. Richard A. Cody, who is now vice
chief of staff for the Army, the service most under stress from worldwide
deployments.

"Those soldiers were just as loyal as today," he said. "But it was like
Forrest Gump. You know, 'Life is like a box of chocolates.' With
conscripts, you never know what you're going to get."

General Cody said the strain to meet current global commitments cannot be
minimized - nor the strain to meet recruiting goals. But he said the young
men and women who signed up today were of a higher quality than any he had
seen in 29 years of command.

"I don't have rose-colored glasses on," General Cody said. "But we don't
need the draft and we don't want the draft. There are plen

Check This Out

[R.A. Hettinga]

The New York Times

October 31, 2004
EDITORIAL

Check This Out
Never content to pass savings along to customers, banks - with a little
help from their friends in Congress - are again poised to turn a basic
service into a profit center.

 Last week, federal law began allowing banks greater latitude to process
checks electronically, reducing to minutes or hours the time it takes for
the money to be deducted from a check writer's account. But there is no
change in the length of time that banks can hold deposited checks before
making the funds available - up to two days for local checks, five days for
nonlocal checks and 11 days for checks over $5,000. So in addition to
saving an estimated $2 billion a year in paper processing costs, the banks
will make loads of money on the float.

And not just from that. By processing checks faster while placing holds on
deposits, banks are increasing the chances of bouncing a check. As banks
start using the new procedures, unsuspecting consumers will bounce an
estimated seven million more checks a month and pay an additional $170
million in monthly bounced-check fees. Worse yet, to promptly correct
problems that may arise from electronic processing, such as double payment
of a single check or payment in the wrong amount, the new rules require a
customer to present a copy of the check's electronic image, known as a
"substitute check." There's nothing to prevent a bank from charging a fee
for providing the copy.

Groups like Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America have
come out strongly against the law's lack of customer protection. The banks
should listen. At the least, banks that use the new electronic procedures
should adopt a no-hold policy for deposits by customers with problem-free
accounts. If the banks do not change their policies, the Federal Reserve
should force them to by changing the rules on fund availability. We would
also like to see a major bank step up and pledge to re-credit accounts
within 10 days of a customer's reporting an error, without the need for a
substitute check. That would, in effect, extend the same protection to
electronically processed checks that debit cards enjoy, as well as set a
standard of customer service for other banks to match.

 Banks do not have to gouge their customers just because the law permits it.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

[no subject]

[Hilary Whaley]

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RFID in Passports Could Lead to Identity Theft

[R.A. Hettinga]

CRM Buyer

 THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE
 FOR CRM SYSTEM PURCHASERS


RFID in Passports Could Lead to Identity Theft
By John Jerney
The Yomiuri Shimbun
 10/31/04 5:00 AM PT

Privacy advocates, by and large, are not against the idea of using a chip
in identity documents to store additional information. But many are asking
about the wisdom of including information that can be read remotely,
without the document holder being aware.

Personal privacy is fast becoming a thing of the past. And helping secure
its demise is a technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

I wrote about RFID systems a few months ago, at which time I proposed a
scenario in which these diminutive devices begin to appear in all sorts of
objects, ranging from currency, postal mail, and even our shoes and
clothing.

RFID systems typically consist of a small tag containing a microprocessor,
a small amount of memory, and an antenna. An RFID device communicates with
an external system using radio waves. These external systems can then, in
turn, be connected to networks of computers, enabling rather sophisticated
information processing of the collected data.

The core application of RFID systems is to enable the tracking of objects
and people. The beef industry, for example, was an early adopter of RFID
technology, using it to monitor the movement of cattle from grazing to
slaughter. Governments also are planning to use RFID, in this case to
monitor the movement of people by embedding RFID technology into our
principal systems of identification.

 Embedding in Passports

 The most recent news on this front came from the U.S. State Department,
which revealed that it would begin including RFID devices into all new
passports starting around the middle of next year.

The State Department says the idea is to make passports more difficult to
forge, and to ensure that the bearer of the document matches the
identification.

This means that each RFID device, in each passport, will contain at least
the name, address, and birthplace of the holder, along with a digital
photo. The first set of devices, equipped with 64 kilobyte, of memory, will
likely be capable of storing additional information, as required.

Immigration and border officials will no longer need to physically swipe
the document through a reader. Instead, since the RFID device uses radio
waves to communicate, the passport only needs to come within reasonable
proximity of a listening device in order for the information to be read.

And herein lies the chief problem, as identified by privacy advocates.
Without requiring the passport to be physically handled in order to
retrieve information, just about anyone will be able to read your passport
contents, remotely, and without your knowledge.

It all seems like a massive recipe for disaster.

 Abuse Opportunities

 Encryption could help the situation, slightly, but none of the data stored
on the RFID device in the proposed new U.S. passport will be scrambled,
either on the device itself or as it passes through the air.

Instead, the device will communicate a special digital signature
identifying it as an official government document.

Imagine the possibilities for abuse. As you walk through the main door,
hotels will immediately be able to determine your name, nationality, and
place of birth, beginning the profiling of guests even before reaching the
counter.

Sophisticated thieves, or even those less clever but with a few dollars to
spare on an RFID reader, will be able to comb crowds of people, searching
for individuals of a specific nationality or, by extension, those of a
particular religion.

Identity theft will become orders of magnitude easier, and stalkers at
overseas shops and boutiques will be able to quickly collect personal
information on targets of interest.

 Remote Access Concerns

 Privacy advocates, by and large, are not against the idea of using a chip
in identity documents to store additional information. But many are asking
about the wisdom of including information that can be read remotely,
without the document holder being aware.

Proponents of the new technology and security-minded individuals point out
that the RFID devices proposed for use in U.S. passports will be passive,
meaning without a self-contained power source, thereby restricting the
range through which information can be transmitted.

But that hardly addresses cases where people are either forced to pass
close to a reader, as when they are walking through a doorway to enter a
building, or when a reader is unknowingly brought close to them, as an
identity thief or stalker might do.

Once collected, the information can easily be processed and correlated
using any of a number of commercially available databases. The best-case
scenario is that enterprises will use this unknowingly mined information to
sell you additional services, based on existing marketing and behavi

Uk.gov database 'rationalisation', the ID scheme way

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register » Internet and Law » Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs »

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/id_scheme_eats_cip/

Uk.gov database 'rationalisation', the ID scheme way
By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 29th October 2004 17:01 GMT

Among the Home Office "concessions" on ID cards hailed (with quite
remarkable promptness) this week by Home Affairs Committee chairman John
Denham MP (Lab) was "the rationalisation of current database proposals and
the dropping of the Citizen Information Project." Denham appears however to
have been in error in cheering the demise of the CIP on behalf of his
Committee, for just 24 hours later Treasury Chief Secretary Paul Boateng
issued a written statement to Parliament indicating the CIP is actually
being reworked to use the national ID register.

Or vice versa? According to Boateng's statement: "The CIP team has
investigated the costs and benefits of a range of potential options for
delivering a population register. It has recommended that proposals for a
national identity register (NIR), as part of the Government's proposals for
ID cards, mean that if ID cards were to become compulsory then it may be
more cost effective to deliver these benefits through the NIR, rather than
develop a separate register. The Government has accepted this
recommendation."

The CIP has been going through the works via the Office of National
Statistics
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/05/uk_birth_certificates_to_morph/)
as a sort of cuddlier cousin to the ID scheme. The modernisation of births,
marriages, deaths and the like led government thoughts to turn to what kind
of additional related services could be offered to the citizen, with these
ideas being fairly neatly encapsulated in the concept of the "through life
record". As the white paper Civil Registration: Vital Change tells us "the
creation of a central database of registration records provides the
opportunity to make improvements..." Which is all well and good until
alongside this particular register of names addresses and sundry details
about the population there arrives another register with, as the Home
Affairs Committee report put it, "a very large degree of overlap".

In its response on Wednesday the Home Office did not say 'dropping' - it
did say: "The Government believes that the NIR has the longer term
potential to fulfil some of the functions envisaged for the national
population register. In the light of developments to the NIR, CIP is no
longer actively exploring options to improve the quality and effectiveness
of existing registers, including the possible use of personal reference
numbers." So the CIP is no longer developing its own population register as
the electronic implementation of births, marriages and deaths, and the
National Identity Register becomes that population register, with the CIP
going ahead, but now hinging on the NIR.

Which you might view as more of an expansion of the ID scheme than a
concession, as such. Alongside the specific CIP complaint, Home Affairs
expressed its concern over the growing number of government databases in
general. "We believe that the Government must tackle this proliferation of
databases, examining in each case whether the number, identifier or
database is needed, what its relationship to other existing or planned
databases, how data will be shared or verified and other relevant issues.
For this action to be effective, it must be co-ordinated at the highest
levels of the Civil Service... an identity card should enable access to all
Government databases, so that there would be no need for more than one
government-issued card."

In its response the Home Office appears to indicate that the CIP-NIR
approach could present a model for other services, saying "we believe that
the identity card will provide an opportunity for more joined up Government
by providing a consistent and standard business key for future systems
evolution." Which represents a strengthening rather than a weakening of the
ID scheme. Here however the Committee was effectively arguing for a
strengthening, and as David Blunkett envisages the ID card and register as
becoming the key to everything, this is precisely the kind of "concession"
he wants to make. It does rationalise (as Denham put it) current government
database proposals in the sense that it makes them dependent on the NIR.
The databases themselves will continue to proliferate though.

It's possible that shoehorning CIP functionality into the ID scheme may
cause some delay to the ID scheme bill itself. Spy Blog points out
(http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000482.html) that if the CIP stage
2 feasibility study plans aren't to come (as Boateng said) before Ministers
until June 2005, they might knock the ID bill back beyond the next
election. It's possible the CIP study migh

Re: Winning still matters, etc...

[James A. Donald]

--
At 05:09 PM 10/30/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> > The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an 
> > asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring 
> > its full array of assets to the struggle.

Major Variola
> The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not 
> an option..

Why not?

You keep assuming that Muslims unite, escalate, etc, but if 
they do, US will escalate also.

In fact, there is not much the Islamicists can do to escalate
beyond their current extremes.   There is a great deal the US
could do to escalate beyone its current measures. 

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 odq504QOMD1tmYFgnLderv0nS117FbcIG83t4MIX
 4GzccezZIfj7BfeEbPLrXimv+SU42yCuvTxkLS+Rn