Stolen passports missed at U.S. borders
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041223-113834-2445r The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Stolen passports missed at U.S. borders By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published December 24, 2004 Foreign nationals applying for admission to the United States using stolen passports have little reason to fear being caught and usually are admitted, even when their fraudulent documents have been posted on the government's computerized lookout lists, a report said. The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General said in a 40-page report that of the 176 foreign nationals who its investigators identified as having used a stolen passport in an attempt to enter the United States from 1998 to 2003, 136 were admitted. While most persons using stolen passports to enter illegally into the United States may be simply violating immigration laws, some could have more sinister intentions, said the department's acting inspector general, Richard L. Skinner. The report, completed in November but made public this week, also said when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers received new reports of stolen passports, they did not routinely review existing admission records to determine whether any already had been used. Even if there was such a procedure, the report said, CBP had no way to give the information on the stolen passports to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security's investigative arm. While the 136 successful entries using stolen passports is a relatively small number, it is significant for several reasons, Mr. Skinner said. First, the passports were obtained by criminal acts. Second, though small, the number could and should be zero, at least for those admissions that occurred after lookouts were posted. Third, there was no law-enforcement pursuit once it was recognized an illegal entry had occurred. Mr. Skinner said actionable information was reported and logged in the lookout system, yet entry was accomplished, defeating a costly apparatus established precisely to prevent such an occurrence. The inspector general's probe targeted travelers from the 27 foreign countries for whom a visa is not required, including France, Germany and Britain. Although those travelers were told in October to present either a machine-readable passport or a U.S. visa, CBP has given officials at ports of entry the discretionary authority to grant one-time exemptions in an effort to facilitate travel. President Bush also has signed legislation delaying until October 2005 the requirement for visa-waiver countries to include biometrics in their passports. Mr. Skinner said the vast numbers of stolen passports available presented a significant challenge for U.S. immigration authorities, noting that Interpol estimated last year that more than 10 million lost and stolen passports are in circulation. CBP records show that during 2003, more than 12.7 million travelers to the United States from visa-waiver countries were inspected at ports of entry -- nearly 35,000 a day -- and that 4,368 fraudulent passports were intercepted. The United States had 40.4 million international visitors last year. According to the inspector general's report, of the 98 foreign nationals who did not have lookouts posted for their stolen passports before their attempted U.S. entry, 79 were admitted -- a rate of 81 percent. Of those 78 aliens who had posted lookouts on their passports, 57 gained entry -- a rate of 73 percent. Of those 57 who gained entry despite lookouts on their passports, 33 did so after the September 11 attacks. The report also said that 18 aliens whose passports had posted lookouts were referred by immigration officers to secondary inspections for more intensive interviews, but got in anyway. We could not determine from the secondary inspections records, the inspectors' rationale for admitting the aliens with lookouts for the stolen passports, Mr. Skinner said, describing the records as nonexistent or so sketchy that they were not useful. Mr. Skinner's report made several recommendations: *Primary inspectors should refer foreign nationals to secondary inspections when their passports are the subject of a lookout. *The inspectors should record in detail the results of the secondary inspections and justifications for any subsequent admission. *There should be a supervisory review and approval of a decision to admit an alien who was the subject of a lookout. *Inspectors should enter new names into the lookout database on a timely basis. *CBP should initiate routine reviews of admission records to identify prior uses of stolen passports. *Information on the successful use of stolen passports should be reported to ICE for investigation. Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson, who oversees CBP and ICE, said the inspector general's report had
Fragmented nets, national borders, ebay, surrealism
Over on cryptography @ wasabisystems.com there's a thread about Ebay not showing items to folks whose languages were set to German (ergo they must fnord be ruled by the German State which prohibits showing the citizens in its fnord care various things). The item in question is a 3-rotor Enigma. .. Interesting, when i try to look at this from work (over in brighton, actually), i get: Dear User: Unfortunately, access to this particular category or item has been blocked due to legal restrictions in your home country. Based on our discussions with concerned government agencies and eBay community members, we have taken these steps to reduce the chance of inappropriate items being displayed. Regrettably, in some cases this policy may prevent users from accessing items that do not violate the law. At this time, we are working on less restrictive alternatives. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay. But I can hit it from my dsl line at home (right up the road). I guess Verizon T1-land is restricted... it depends solely on the preferred language settings of your browser. When I had German on the first position it was blocked too. When I rearranged it below English I could view the page.
Fragmented nets, national borders, ebay, surrealism
Over on cryptography @ wasabisystems.com there's a thread about Ebay not showing items to folks whose languages were set to German (ergo they must fnord be ruled by the German State which prohibits showing the citizens in its fnord care various things). The item in question is a 3-rotor Enigma. .. Interesting, when i try to look at this from work (over in brighton, actually), i get: Dear User: Unfortunately, access to this particular category or item has been blocked due to legal restrictions in your home country. Based on our discussions with concerned government agencies and eBay community members, we have taken these steps to reduce the chance of inappropriate items being displayed. Regrettably, in some cases this policy may prevent users from accessing items that do not violate the law. At this time, we are working on less restrictive alternatives. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay. But I can hit it from my dsl line at home (right up the road). I guess Verizon T1-land is restricted... it depends solely on the preferred language settings of your browser. When I had German on the first position it was blocked too. When I rearranged it below English I could view the page.
Confectioners without Borders.
CHAPEL OF LOVE There were 100,000 people and a mind boggling 1,714 events. They were crammed into a Catholic University, football stadiums, a gymnasium, five marquees and some dockside warehouses. Described by some as the People's UN, this was the World Social Forum (WSF) which happened in Porto Alegre, Brazil last week. Since the very first WSF three years ago, the event has become, according to Noam Chomsky, unparallelled in world history. So what is the WSF? Conceived as a direct alternative to the corporate knees up globalisation ball known as the World Economic Forum, the WSF is a week of workshops, discussions, and brainstorming for social change without profiteering and neoliberalism-and it runs at exactly the same time every year as the World Economic Forum. In addition to WSF workshops, several parallel conferences sprang up around the city, including an anarchist convention and a youth camp in a nearby park where about 10,000 people pitched camp, including representatives of Indymedia from around the world. The choice of Porto Alegre is symbolic too. For 15 years the city's governing Worker's Party - which now rules Brazil through the leftwing President Lula - has been deciding the budget through a process of popular participation, redistributing wealth, reducing poverty and eliminating corruption as a result. One SchNEWS hack sorting through the myraid of events and opinions said that three issues seemed to stand out: Palestine, opposition to the war on Iraq, and the Latin American issue of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, which Bolivian Indian leader Evo Morales described as a charter for transnational pirates. This year, Brazalian President Lula went to both the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre AND the World Economic Forum in Davos. Many weren't happy with that - the leader of Lula's Worker's Party, José Genoino, received a pie in the face as a protest. As the Confectioners without Borders who delivered the pie-ing said in their communique, The wave that carries Lula's Worker´s Party to electoral success is not, in any form, the same wave that supports the movement against capitalist globalization. Our movement is without leaders or representatives. No one can speak in our name. If someone in Davos 'represents' the movement, it is ourselves, the thousands that occupy the roads of Geneva in protest against the reunion of bankers, businessman, and governments that the Worker´s Party legitimates. The hope for change that we carry cannot one more time be co-opted and frustrated by politicians and political parties that wish to promote themselves at our expense. This time we are going to do things differently. http://www.portoalegre2003.org/publique/ CRAP ARREST OF THE WEEK For writing about Cuba on the internet. When his friends attended an unsanctioned conference in Cuba and attracted the attention of the Treasury Department, Tom Warner, the 77-year-old secretary of the Seattle / Cuba Friends Committee was unsurprised. What did surprise him was when a letter arrived accusing him of 'organising' the event and threatening to fine him $20,000. This was all the more surprising due to the fact that he wasn't even AT the conference! Tom's major mistake was to put details of the conference on his website. Making his mark on history, Tom's nefarious actions have made him the first man to be arrested by the Bush Administration for using the internet to promote something against government policy. POSITIVE SchNEWS The government has just announced they have £10 million in grants for households and communities to develop their own renewable energy projects. Free info service availabe from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), for individuals and groups who would like advice about participating in the renewable revolution. 01654-705950 www.cat.org.uk DON'T ATTACK IRAQ! On the 15th of Feb, London will see Britain's biggest ever anti-war demo. There are 3 starting points: 12 noon @ Embankment or 12.30pm @ Gower Street. Or for cyclists, a 'Wheels against the War' critical mass, 12 noon under Waterloo Bridge. The march ends at Hyde Park. There will also be a mass sit-down at Picadilly Circus, meet 5pm Green Park. Transport to London is being organised from across the country - www.stopwar.org.uk. Tickets on coaches from Brighton can be bought from Community Base, Queens Road £7/£4. RAF AMERICA On Wednesday, the Defence Select Commitee agreed to the use of Menwith Hill and RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire for U.S. Ballistic Missile Defence systems otherwise known as the 'Son of Star Wars' (see SchNEWS 307). Fylingdales will house an early warning system and Menwith Hill will process the data. A public discussion paper on upgrading the facilities at these two sites was released in December, but even then it was clear that the decision to use the bases had already been made. Minister of War Geoff Hoon has come under severe attack from peace campaigners and even from his own backbenchers
No Borders
STRASBOURG: A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS Jul 26 2002 Bordercamp Grows Despite Ban on Protests All actions and demonstrations relating to the bordercamp in Strasbourg were declared illegal on Wednesday, July 24. That day, a demonstration for freedom of movement was attacked with pepper spray, baton charges and tear gas, with more than ten arrests and multiple injured protestors. The ban of assembly was enforced on July 25 when media activists from the Publix Theatre Caravan and Indymedia were removed from the Strasbourg city center. Demonstrations have continued despite the ban, however, with prison solidarity actions and street theater. This camp initiated by the NoBorder network, and organized by activists from across Europe. It opened on July 19, and has included demonstrations, workshops, and discussions around the central demand of 'Freedom of Movement and Settlement' for all persons. The camp's goal is to bring together activists, migrants and artists from across Europe in a laboratory of creative resistance and civil disobedience. Read reports and view photos from the camp - July 22 [ 1 | 2 | photos ] - July 23 [ 1 | 2 ] - July 24 [ 1 | 2 | 3 | photos ] - July 25 [ 1 | 2 | 3 | photos | video ] - July 26 [ 1 | 2 | 3 ] FROM http://www.indymedia.org/
Slashdot | Geolocation Enables Internet Borders
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/04/1258255.shtml -- -- Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'/ ``::/|/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com.', `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
Reporters Without Borders Attacks U.S. Pact on Satellite Images
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABC3LEZSC.html Reporters Without Borders Attacks U.S. Pact on Satellite Images The Associated Press Published: Oct 18, 2001 PARIS (AP) - A media advocacy group on Thursday criticized the U.S. military for buying exclusive rights to commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan and said the move amounts to censorship because it blocks media access to views of the war zone. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders urged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to revoke a deal that gives the U.S. military sole access to pictures taken by Ikonos - considered the most efficient civilian satellite - that display the area involved in Operation Enduring Freedom. The Pentagon duty officer could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday night. This contract, effective since the first day of U.S. military strikes on Afghanistan, is a way of disguised censorship aimed at preventing the media from doing their monitoring job, Reporters Without Borders director Robert Menard said in a statement. Though there are other imagery satellites with pictures for sale, Ikonos pictures are considered the best available to civilians.
Re: Borders UK and privacy
Ken Brown bragged: OTOH I know people who have sampled the air in underground stations for spores and bacteria so on. There are a lot of odd organisms down there :-) A skivvied MoD scientist from Portland Downs raced past me ogling Buckingham in my red plaid tam and matching sweater, whispered, you ugly fuck, and sliced a sample of my nose for cloning a least beloved cousin, and my half-blind soused SO yelled at the one-legged runner Markov, help Bear Hatted Bobby, 'e pelleted him. BHB twitched, 'is nose twitched, by God in truth, in Morse, cow. If you saw the fighting for seats we saw in the London Underworld you'd nere doubt how much skin and hair is afloat, and the skinning of the tourists with double ugly cashmere and Monty Python legends and Beatle-mania ad nauseum aint odd it's royal history.
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: Maybe, but it seems like offense just got a boost. Passive biodefenses don't work against an active offense. Ablative, camouflage, and contact poison ones do. Nature is full of 'passive' defenses that are effective. Evolutionary Wars: A 3 Billion Year Arms Race The battle of species on land, at sea, and in the air C.K. Levy ISBN 0-7167-3775-2 If sniffers start landing on your skin and taking a microscopic sample, then they won't be trivial to defend against. Then you build nano-hunters. If the thing is mobile enough and smart enough then the technology is suitable to build a hunter-killer. Since you built it, and programmed it the security is quite high. Since the security is high the safety factor is high 'for you with respect to your technology'. This is another reason that 'reputation' is not as important as one would believe. Because of the requisite safety/security requirement of technology vetting nobody is going to believe a word that is said. The reason people will exist in transactions/relationships is as exchange brokers or personal interest. The ONLY(!!!) defence against a technological attack is a technological defence; passive/active, pro/re-active, etc. are digressions into minutea. They don't effect the fundamental balance of the situation. Attack/Defend. This is exactly why 'economics' and 'government' as we know it will cease to exist over the next couple of hundred years (maybe quicker). You will get your population of nano-bots when you're born from your parents. You'll inherit as a matter of course both a nano- and bio-technology when you become an adult. It will be keyed to you via a variety of mechanisms. They will get it from others in their 'chreche' (my 'zaibatsu') related by blood and long term personal relationships (note that this is not a driving force for inter-creche transfers). People will not have 'jobs' as we know them. Automation, bio-engineering, and intelligence technology will make that pointless. Exchages between chreche will be people and technology. People will have duties, obligations, responsibilities with respect to the business of the creche and inter-creche relations. Those relations will consist of almost nothing but technology/research/information transfers. As the technology increases the need for heirarchy with respect to survival and social behaviour limitations becomes less. Because of the (apparent) nature of technology growth two things will happen. The first is that individuals will be able to better fend for themselves. Consider an aggregate technology (psycho/digital/nano/bio-technology) that will allow a person to walk out into a field; filled with trees, grass, bushes, birds Program their nano-bots to create a steak. And within a couple of hours the field and its raw minerals and bio-mass are consumed, transformed, and delivered at your feet. A steaming steak sitting on a fine china plate; accompanied by a heap of gray goo piled next to it. Awaiting their next orders from your PDA...all in a silent, barren, stripped field. Weapons of mass destruction? You ain't seen nothing yet... What will keep some nutcase from killing everyone? Everyone will be providing both individual and community service with respect to building pro-active defences. You won't die from some Mujahadin bio-bug or nano-hunter-kill because it's against the law (and just exactly whos law might that be?), you'll do it because you've deployed(!) an active pre-emptive counter-measure technology. Probably both bio- and nano-. The thesis has been made that a critical point will be reached when countries become, as a matter of course, armed to such a point they can take on other countries 1-1. Now consider the sorts of societies that will be needed when that is person to person. Consider what it means when, as a result of this technology we must finally come to grips with the fact that the depravities of mankind are one of psychology and that the bad will always be with us. Consider what it means for things like 'trust', 'reputation', 'nation', 'independent', 'individual'. It is also a strong argument why freedom of speech with respect to taboo subjects like bombs is the wrong way to go. If everyone knows how to do it then nobody can hide their actions since they must collect and arrange resources. It also means that the number of potential observants goes way up. This increases the chances of early detection. The rational thing to do is teach people how to make bombs so they can recognize when some nutcase decides they want to make a bomb. The FBI should be teaching public classes. Jefferson said something about when a nation is threatened by the ignorance of the people, you don't change the law. You educate the people. -- natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: Maybe, but it seems like offense just got a boost. Passive biodefenses don't work against an active offense. If sniffers start landing on your skin and taking a microscopic sample, then they won't be trivial to defend against. Biology can't help leaking bits, it's riddled with multiple fingerprints. The only way to make sure is to rent a random telepresence box, the control flow being routed through realtime traffic remixers. By the time you have litte gadgets buzzing around who're after your DNA or volatile MHC fragments we'll surely have these. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/;leitl/a __ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3
Re: Borders UK and privacy
It makes sense that human debris would be a portion of the waste removed, but compared to food items, dead rats, discarded trash and newspapers, it strikes me that it would not be an especially large portion. --Declan At 09:47 PM 8/29/01 -0400, Ryan Arneson wrote: Someone tell the Travel Channel in that case, they did a story on the London underground, including the Underground (big U) and mentioned this very thing. It was called Underground London and unfortunately, the last day they list as an air date is 8/25. Seems they even have a name for the people who have to clean the human debris up...fluffers, if I recall correctly. Brings to mind another occupation that I won't detail here.
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Duncan Frissell wrote: How about a tailored virus that modifies your DNA on a rotating basis in non significant fashion so that you're constantly new. I wonder Unless you go for full sequencing, you would have to jumble restriction sites. if that would be theoretically possible? Fun times. Theoretically, yes. It would kill you in no time, though. Also, quantitative transfection in an adult is a lot to ask for. Killer vector indeed. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/;leitl/a __ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Duncan Frissell wrote: How about a tailored virus that modifies your DNA on a rotating basis in non significant fashion so that you're constantly new. I wonder if that would be theoretically possible? Fun times. You would have to do it to the 'junk' and 'long term unused' portions (ie introns), I doubt it would work with exons. There's also the issue of timing. Using a virus it would be hard to hit all the cells at one time. -- natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty warriors'...dream-tracks Matsuo Basho The Armadillo Group ,::;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'/ ``::/|/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com.', `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 01:56:12PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Didn't John Young note that a large portion of the waste removed from the London underground was human hair and skin flakes? Waste not want not. Sounds like a bit of an urban legend. -Declan
Borders UK and privacy
BORDERS U.K. USES FACE-RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY TO MONITOR CUSTOMERS Borders Books in the U.K. is employing SmartFace technology to compare the unique digital face-maps of customers against similar face-maps of known shoplifters. Privacy advocates such as the director of the Scottish Human Rights Centre are outraged by the development: I can see why they don't want shoplifters in their store, but I would question whether this is proportionate to what they are trying to do. We are talking about having a bank of pictures of everyone going into the shop -- I would consider that a serious breach of privacy. There is no control over what they do with those pictures, or how they are kept -- are they safe? Nor is there much control over whether Borders could sell the information on, or whether people will actually know this is happening. (Sunday Herald 26 Aug 2001) http://www.sundayherald.com/18007
Re: Borders UK and privacy
BORDERS U.K. USES FACE-RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY TO MONITOR CUSTOMERS Borders Books in the U.K. is employing SmartFace technology to compare Slashdot is reporting that they've backed off in response to negative public pressure. So for the moment you don't need to wear a mask to shop there, though they're probably still using cameras, and in many parts of the UK the local government is also videotaping the street. David Brin's book The Transparent Society suggests that you might as well get used to it. Technological change driven by the Moore's Law effects in computing power are making video cameras and computer image processing get cheaper rapidly, so the marginal benefit of using them doesn't have to be very high to outweigh the marginal cost. The real issues are still getting data, but the costs of sharing data are low and getting lower, and the government intervention that forces everyone to use picture ID to do almost anything makes it easier. Brin's conclusion is that since we won't be able to stop it, we should work to make sure government activities are open and watchable by the public. Similarly, the cost of correlating non-image data has decreased rapidly - many of the information collection practices used today date from the 1960s and 1970s, when a mainframe might have a megabyte of RAM, less than 10 MIPS of CPU, 100MB of fast disk drive, and everything else was tapes and punchcards, and it required a large staff of people to feed it. These days you can get pocket computers with ten times that capacity, and a $5000 desktop Personal Computer can have a gigabyte of RAM and a terabyte of disk drive with the Internet to feed it data; that's enough for the name and address of everybody on Earth, or a few KB on every American, and online queries are much faster than the traditional methods requiring offline data sets. That means that not only can governments and a few big companies decide to correlate pre-planned sets of data about people, but almost anybody can do ad-hoc queries on any data it's convenient for them to get, whether they're individuals or employees of small or large businesses. So if there's any data about you out there, don't expect it to stay private - even data that previously wasn't a risk because correlating it was hard. European-style data privacy laws aren't much help - they're structured for a world in which computers and databases were big things run by big companies, rather than everyday tools used by everyone in their personal lives, and rules requiring making them accessible to the public can be turned around into rules allowing the government to audit your mobile phone and your pocket organizer in case there might be databases on them. American-style data privacy laws are seriously flawed also - not the fluffy attempts at positive protection for privacy that liberal Nader types and occasional paranoid conservatives propose, but the real laws which require increasing collection of data in ways that are easy to correlate, such as the use of a single Taxpayer ID for employers, bank accounts, drivers' licenses, and medical records, Know Your Customer laws, national databases of people permitted to work, documentation proving you're not an illegal alien, etc. There's lots more data that would be readily available, but the bureaucrats that collect it restrict access or charge fees that reflect the pre-computer costs of providing the information. If you need a reminder, go buy a house and look at the junk mail you get, or have your neighbor's deadbeat kid register his car with your apartment number instead of his and see what shows up.
Re: Borders UK and privacy
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Bill Stewart wrote: David Brin's book The Transparent Society suggests that you might as well get used to it. Technological change driven by the Moore's Law effects in computing power are making video cameras and computer image processing get cheaper rapidly, so the marginal benefit of using them doesn't have to be very high to outweigh the marginal cost. The real issues are still getting data, On the other hand, the technology of disguise and the public taste for radical body modification and active clothing all suggest that many of us will soon be denying a useful image to the opposition. Then we won't have to worry until genetic sniffers become popular. Genetic sniffers, however can probably be defeated by devices that give off clouds of genetically random human biological material. Offense and defense back and forth forever. DCF Marshal de Vaubin -- No stronghold be ever invested stood. No position he ever defended fell.
