Category Archives: Government

Salvage Logging


AP Photo/Don Ryan, FILE

While the federal government tries to dump the costs of wildfires onto local governments, a new study indicates that federal policies have been making things worse:

"It was the conventional wisdom that salvage logging and planting could reduce the risk of high-severity fires," said Jonathan R. Thompson, a doctoral candidate in forest science at Oregon State, who was lead author of the study appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our data suggest otherwise."

They suggested that the large stands of closely packed young trees created by replanting are a much more volatile source of fuel for decades to come than the large dead trees that are cut down and hauled away in salvage logging operations.

—Scientists find logging dead trees after wildfire and replanting makes next year’s fire worse, by Jeff Barnard, AP, 11 June 2007

Salvage logging is removing dead trees after a fire. It turns out that doesn’t reduce the risk of fire, and close-packed new-planted trees increase that risk.

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Public Public Domain

malamud2006.jpg
James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media

In March, Carl Malamud finished organizing release on the Internet of videos of Congressional subcommittee hearings. Back in November 2006 Malamud was lobbying the Smithsonian Institution to rescind its exclusive contract with Showtime. Now he’s teamed up with others to multiplex such projects and get more done:

When you buy content, we get the material from the U.S. government and then upload the data to places like the Internet Archive, Google Video, and other fine content sources. Because this data is public domain, anybody can use the material without restriction!

— How Do We Do It? public.resource.org, accessed 9 June 2007

Already he says:

Per Lessig’s agreement with CNN, we’ve uploaded both Presidential Debates to the Internet Archive:

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REAL ID Blues

Fergie notes that apparently all those complaints to DHS had some effect:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), citing concerns about Americans’ privacy, signaled yesterday that he will push to repeal a provision of a 2005 law aimed at creating new government standards for driver’s licenses.

Leahy, who has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to repeal the provision, spoke out as the debate intensified over the Real ID Act, which requires states to create new tamper-proof driver’s licenses in line with rules recently issued by the Department of Homeland Security. States must begin to comply by May 2008 but can request more time. After 2013, people whose IDs do not meet those standards will not be allowed to board planes or enter federal buildings.

A similar Democrat-backed bill to repeal the provision is pending in the House. At least seven states have passed laws or resolutions opposing implementation of Real ID. Fourteen states have legislation pending. By yesterday, the DHS had received more than 12,000 public comments in response to the rules.

— Leahy, Others Speak Out Against New ID Standards, By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, May 9, 2007; Page D03

You may be wondering why you didn’t hear about this law in 2005, when it was passed.

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Real ID? No, Say DHS’s Advisors

The U.S. Government is proposing to implement a national identification scheme, yet the department that is supposed to implement it can’t get its own advisors to agree:
The Department of Homeland Security’s outside privacy advisors explicitly refused to bless proposed federal rules to standardize states’ driver’s licenses Monday, saying the Department’s proposed rules for standardized driver’s licenses — known as Real IDs — do not adequately address concerns about privacy, price, information security, redress, “mission creep”, and national security protections.

— Homeland Security’s Own Privacy Panel Declines to Endorse License Rules, Ryan Singel, Threat Level, Wired Blog Network, 7 May 2007

The committee says REAL ID is not “workable” or “appropriate”.

This doesn’t mean DHS won’t implement REAL ID, however, with is approx. $21 billion cost to taxpayers and greatly increased paperwork required of all citizens, increased likelihood of identity theft, not to mention the obvious surveillance state implications.

Today, 8 May 2007, until 5PM EST, is the last chance to comment to DHS about REAL ID.

-jsq

More SSN Exposures

Well, and I just signed up for a federal tree planting program:

The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.

— U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers By RON NIXON, New York Times, April 20, 2007

And she found not only her own farm and social security number on the web, but also 30,000 others. The Agriculture Dept. says probably 100,000 to 150,000 people are at risk. Ah, I see they’ve narrowed it to 38,700 people.

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Yahoo! Sued about China Again

A year ago, someone lodged a complaint against Yahoo! in Hong Kong regarding jailed activist Shi Tao. This month, there’s another suit against Yahoo! for revealing user information to the Chinese government, this time in a U.S. court:

A suit filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday by the wife of Wang Xiaoning accuses Yahoo of “aiding and abetting” torture and human rights violations by linking her husband and others to e-mail and online comments.

— Yahoo sued in US court for giving user data to China, Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 2007

The previous suit noted that Yahoo! operates as a Hong Kong company, so it’s not clear whether it actually had to go by mainland Chinese rules instead of Hong Kong ones. Continue reading →

Easy Management v. Monoculture

Why would any government want to mandate monoculture, anyway?
The long-term goal for the Air Force is to have real-time standard configuration management. Heitkamp said right now Air Force software ensures that a laptop or PC connected to the network has the standard configuration every 90 minutes. The service by 2008 hopes to have the real-time enforcement running, he said.

“We are fairly good now, but we will be much better next year,” Heitkamp said. “Moving to a standard desktop is about governance and policy, not technology. Our vision is real-time desktop management.”

Ease of management. What could be wrong with that? Continue reading →

Truth is a Property of Networks

Dave Weinberger types out of a drug- and fatigue-induced haze:

Truth is a property of networks.

I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn’t an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.

—Networked truth, Dave Weinberger, Joho the Blog, 13 April 2007

I think he’s right, except it’s not either/or: it’s both.

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Sentimental Education

Regarding Blogger Civility, I’d like to add that where there are real threats, of course the person threatened should complain, and if the threatener can be tracked down, there are already laws that apply. Also, some people think that technical subjects aren’t contentious enough to provoke threats; those people apparently haven’t yet gotten crazy rants from people who incorporate technology into their conspiracy theories, or who fear technology because it might help people oppose their favorite policies, or who don’t like technology because they’ve always been afraid of people who understand it, or who don’t like women/gays/blacks/whites/southerners/foreigners/whatever participating in it. And there are people who think the blogosphere is unusual in harboring threats; those people apparently don’t get out much. I wonder what sort of mail somebody like Condoleeza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain gets?

Anyway, the idea of a blogger code of conduct reminds me of something else:

A technique to detect favorable and unfavorable opinions toward specific subjects (such as organizations and their products) within large numbers of documents offers enormous opportunities for various applications. It would provide powerful functionality for competitive analysis, marketing analysis, and detection of unfavorable rumors for risk management.

— Overview, Sentiment Analysis, IBM Tokyo Research Lab, accessed 13 April 2007

Yet another artificial intelligence scheme; ho hum. Or is it?

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Government-Mandated Monoculture

Apparently Microsoft needs even more of a monopoly:

The Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department are taking similar but separate paths to ensure a standard Microsoft Windows desktop configuration is used by all agencies.

Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for IT and e-government, has recommended to Paul Denett, the administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, that the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council add a clause to the FAR, or OFPP send out a memo to all chief acquisition officers, that would require all IT contracts to include the requirement that all software and hardware does no harm to the standard configuration.

The Air Force, meanwhile, has submitted a three-part clause to the DOD chief information officer that would be included in every IT contract, said Ken Heitkamp, associate director for lifecycle management and director of the Air Force’s IT Commodity Council.

Eventually, Heitkamp said, DOD’s rule could be given to OMB for them to decide whether to take it governmentwide.

— OMB, DOD to enforce desktop standard through procurement, By Jason Miller GCN, 11 April 2007

From a security point of view, this is the height of foolishness, because it will establish a government-wide monoculture that will be very vulnerable to exploits.

-jsq