Axiomatic Breakfast

From Boing Boing, The Airport Security Follies – Jet Lagged – Air Travel – Opinion – New York Times Blog

Excerpt:

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

Corey from BoingBoing has posted a very interesting essay and open letter about his recent flight from the UK to the US. I’m sure that if this were on the news we’d see the obligatory “If it means we’re safer then I’m all for it” person but there is no justifiable reason for collecting this type of information.

Excerpt:

Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they’d gathered it.

Noted computer security expert Bruce Schneier has a good article up on his blog regarding the problem with Electronic Voting Machines. It’s a very good essay on what voting machines need to do to be successful.

Excerpt:

In the aftermath of the U.S.’s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we’ll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.

Here’s another interesting link from Boing Boing. A lawyer in Oregon has put together a great pdf describing photographers rights. Very interesting reading. (Link to the PDF)

Slate has an interesting analysis of one of those legal disclaimers on the bottom of an email message.
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The Register has an interesting article that looks into whether “fingerprints are really infallible, unique ID?”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/06/identity/

It seems that we haven’t given up enough civil liberties wrt safety. Yahoo has a story on how “US Air is going to start profiling all passengers”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/28170. Everyone will be given a ‘color code’ determining whether they should be harassed more or not. Grrr. (Link via metafilter)

It hasn’t been in the news lately, but after 9/11 everyone was coming out of the woodwork proclaiming the benefits of facial recognition software. The city of Tampa, FL even installed cammeras equiqed with it in their entertainment district. After 2 years, “Tampa is going to eliminate the use of facial recognition software”:http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0803/21tampacams.html. The main reason…it didn’t catch a single person!
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I’m a sucker for cop shows! If you know me you know that I can occasionally be found watching Cops or Law and Order or other garbage like that. One of the typical ways everyone seems to use to tell if someone is guilty or not is the polygraph test. Go check out the 3rd edition of “antipolygraph.org’s”:http://antipolygraph.org/ free e-book “‘The Lie Behind the Lie Detector’”:http://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf. Give it a read. Next time you hear someone passed a lie-detector you may not give it as much weight.

Update: Favorite quote from the book…from John F. Sullivan (p 28)

bq. Polygraph is more art than science, and unless an admission is obtained, the final determination is frequently what we refer to as a scientific wild-ass guess (SWAG).

The whole airline security situation has annoyed me for quite a while. It seems that everyone is too eager to let the government do whatever they want as long as they say it in the interests of ‘protecting us trom terrorism’.

Anyway, Rich Bowen has a good “letter he wrote to the TSA about his recent experiences”:http://www.drbacchus.com/journal/archives/000245.html

(Link from “Stupid Security.com”:http://www.stupidsecurity.com/ )

Here’s a very interesting article I found at BoingBoing.net titled How To Make A Telemarketer Cry (or, Suing Bozos for Fun & Profit)

Another link from Slashdot. “This one”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/1930203 is about someone from the Deop. of Defense wanting to censor information regarding how polygraphs work. The “free e-book referenced”:http://antipolygraph.org/lie-behind-the-lie-detector.pdf is very interesting reading.

The ACLU has an interesting collection of editorial cartoons about the current state of freedom and civil liberties. I don’t agree with all the cartoons but they certainly are thought-provoking.

USA PATRIOT Art Show

Penn, of Penn and Teller had a very interesting run-in with the new airport screeners. No, it has nothing to do with magic, but it does involve him being assaulted.

Article

Wired has an interesting article about the changes of personal privacy in the past year.
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