November 7, 2001 Airport Insecurity
The op-eds I noticed today were on airport security. OK, it's been almost two months since 9-1-1 and not much has changed, except lines are longer. I guess I'll find out for myself on November 21. There seem to be two sides to this issue: one, originally endorsed right here in Chicago by Mr. Bush, is for federalizing airport security; the other, lead by ideological Republicans in the House of Representatives (the Senate voted 100-0 to federalize), is to keep the security in private hands but to mandate federal oversight (in other words, to change nothing). In my opinion, the federalizers have the better argument. Here's why:

Airport security cries out to be a police function, not a profit-motivated one;
The work force would be well trained, well paid, unionized (I get to why that's a virtue anon), and pensioned;
Private firms are inept as keeping us safe and secure: Argenbright, the biggest firm, has been fined for lapses several times -- they have hired convicted felons (drugs, assault, burglary, receiving stolen property), provide little training and low wages. The private security forces have turnover rates of 100%-400% in some cities. I know Atlanta-based Argenbright's name only because they have promised to mend their ways: Argenbright was fined $1.2 million in 2000 for falsifying background checks and training records of 1,300 workers in Philadelphia; another contractor, International Total Services, was fined $126,750 the same year for not doing criminal background checks on screeners in St. Louis.
We trust our lives to police, firefighters, rescue workers, blood banks, and our security and freedoms to Customs, Immigration and Naturalization, and soldiers -- every one of them a government employee and most of them unionized (the union guarantees working conditions, benefits and due process -- that is, a voice in the workplace -- workers are not allowed to strike);
Market forces do not necessarily serve the public interest -- look at the public health care system, if you need proof of that!

ID cards are just one more thing a terrorist will forge -- there's no ID on this earth that can't be forged -- and true to supply-and-demand theory, as their necessity increases, so will the profitability of an underground ID card industry (just look at how profitable the "drug war" has made the drug trade!);
here would be endless stop-and-show opportunities, and failure to carry your card could get you detained or arrested, especially if you're Latino, Asian and Arab-looking ("ID cards were used by the South African government to keep apartheid in place and by Malaysia to separate religious people by group," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center);
back in October, Larry "zero privacy" Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle, publicly endorsed a "smart" ID card -- one he would be happy to create in return for a huge government contract (ah! the profit motive!);
Ellison's wonderland version would encode such data as Social Security number, and would be linked to a federal database containing detailed personal data, including digital records of the person's thumbprint, palm print, face or eyes -- but this means card holders would be carrying around data they can't read and therefore can't correct when the inevitable errors crop up, when they are denied their rights for mysterious reasons. The various governments already have lots of data on us, but most of it is wrong. Fortunately, governments are charmingly inefficient and turf-conscious, so there's some semblance of a silver lining to this lowering cloud.

How fast do you think the US can transform itself from a cardless society to an ID-carrying society for its 285 million residents? Don't you think there will be a lot of error in issuing cards, due to haste in instituting the system?
How expensive do you think such a system will be? Chris Christiansen, an analyst at research firm IDC, says, "If you set aside the civil liberties issues, it's very expensive, it's technologically challenging and the logistics are enormous." In other words, for technology vendors there are billions, perhaps even tens of billions, of dollars to be had from the technology and the services to make the system work -- not to mention the technical difficulty of setting it up;
And how much more like Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the Nordic countries, Mexico, and other countries -- who all have national ID cards -- does the US want to be?

November 2, 2001. Let's Face It
One of the news stories I read today ("ACLU: Face-recognition systems won't work," from ZDNet News) put into words what I had much suspected ever since hearing about the computerized face-recognition system used in Florida. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the technology was oversold. First, the software has a great deal of trouble getting a clean picture of a human face, even under ideal circumstances. Add to that the uselessness of the technology if there is no matching face in the database.

Of course, the answer to that problem is to get everyone's face into the database, right? Well, I don't think that idea will be too popular among most Americans. Well, how about just the criminals? That's fine, but most of them are in jail and won't be out on the street where the face scanners can see them. Well, then, how about just the "suspicious types"? Ah! Great idea! Except... who determines what people go on that list? And how is that category defined? Hmm. Back to the source code, I guess.