Declan McCullagh draws a distinction between private snooping and government snooping.
If you don't like Safeway's discount card, shop at Whole Foods, which doesn't offer one. If Amazon.com's recommendations about books based on your previous orders are annoying, try barnesandnoble.com or walk down to your local bookstore instead. You have a choice.That choice vanishes when the government demands data.
Is there a magic bullet that will provide the ultimate cure for network security? This man thinks so.
"There's no point in requiring security if there's no secure product," Clarke said. "If the US government made it a priority as important as the moon project to somehow figure out how to write software without vulnerabilities, we could do it, then require vital parts of the economy to use it."
The experts I give credence to tend to believe that network security is a process, not a product. But somehow it does not surprise me that a government security expert would believe otherwise. I suspect that the very term government cyber-security expert is an oxymoron.
Randall Parker spots this announcement.
The standard location of the microchip is in the triceps area between the elbow and the shoulder of the right arm. The brief outpatient “chipping” procedure lasts just a few minutes and involves only local anesthetic followed by quick, painless insertion of the VeriChip. Once inserted just under the skin, the VeriChip is inconspicuous to the naked eye. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number.
My guess is that some people have already been chipped (not necessarily using this company's product) and that they were not volunteers. Think about that the next time you read about someone in the Middle East being arrested as a terror suspect and then released.
Bruce Schneier confuses data mining with racial profiling.
Even those who say that terrorists are likely to be Arab males have it wrong. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British. Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in 2002 as a "dirty bomb" suspect, was a Hispanic- American. The Unabomber had once taught mathematics at Berkeley. Terrorists can be male or female, European, Asian, African or Middle Eastern. Even grandmothers can be tricked into carrying bombs on board. One problem with profiling is that, by singling out one group, it ignores the other groups. Terrorists are a surprisingly diverse group of people.
The problem with this criticism is that it is backwards. You can do racial profiling without doing data mining. Data mining is a way of doing the opposite of racial profiling. Data mining is a way of finding groups of characteristics that in combination can separate potential terrorists from others. Racial profiling is based on factors that are not well correlated with terrorism.
If data mining were used, we could search fewer Arab Americans and stop more potential terrorists. It is the people who are opposed to data mining who are going to cause the security forces to resort to racial profiling.
If Schneier does not understand this--if he has no clue how Bayesian algorithms work--then his credentials as a security expert are way overblown. If he does understand statistical inference, then he is being a demagogue. Either way, my respect for Scheneier has evaporated.
