Yesterday I talked about how our government is monitoring everything we email or phone and, as a result, can mess up our lives, if it so chooses.
There’s nothing we can do about it.
The “anti-terrorism” Federal Government is basically out of control. Here’s another disturbing story. Read this and think:
If someone in Washington doesn’t like you (because you beat them at poker, or whatever), they could place you on the No-Fly List. Your life will now be irrevocably messed up. Worse, you’ll never find out who did it to you, nor why. Look at the numbers. You’ll be staggered. nearly one million people are now on government no-fly lists. Washington is out of control.
December 15, 2013
The Black Hole of Terrorism Watch Lists
By The New York Times’s Editorial Board
In 2005, a Stanford doctoral student named Rahinah Ibrahim tried to check in at the San Francisco airport for a flight to a conference in Hawaii. She was traveling with her 14-year-old daughter. Authorities arrested Dr. Ibrahim, a Malaysian citizen, at the ticket counter and detained her in a holding cell for two hours. After she missed her flight, she was released and told that she had mistakenly been placed on the government’s no-fly list.
Dr. Ibrahim flew to Hawaii the next day, then on to Malaysia, but when she tried to return to the United States she learned her student visa had been revoked on unspecified grounds relating to terrorism.
On Dec. 2, nearly eight years after she sued the United States government for denying her the right to travel into this country without giving her the opportunity to be heard, Dr. Ibrahim finally got her day in court – except she wasn’t allowed to be there. Instead, in the first-ever trial to challenge the terrorist watch lists, Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco had to take Dr. Ibrahim’s testimony over a video link from Malaysia, where she finished her degree and is now a professor of architecture.
Dr. Ibrahim was not allowed to see much of the evidence against her, because it was classified as a state secret.
The government conceded that Dr. Ibrahim’s original inclusion on the no-fly list was a “regrettable mistake,” but insisted it was unrelated to her visa revocation.
However the judge rules, the trial has provided a window into the vast and secret world of terrorism watch lists, which currently contain almost 900,000 names scattered among as many as a dozen lists. The no-fly list, which consisted of 16 names before Sept. 11, 2001, had approximately 21,000 names as of early 2012. (Nelson Mandela remained on one terrorist watch list until 2008, when Congress removed him through special legislation.)
The government doesn’t reveal listing criteria or the evidence it relies on to put people on the lists. For those who believe they have been improperly added, removal is a long, obscure process that requires appealing to the authorities responsible for creating the list in the first place. “A lot of innocent people are wrongly listed and hurt by your system,” Judge Alsup told the government’s lawyers.
In such a shrouded and unaccountable system, trials can do only so much to limit both honest mistakes and unchecked abuse. A first step toward reform would be for Congress to make it easier for people to challenge their inclusion on a watch list and force the government to either defend its decision or correct the error.
More techie stuff:
1. Verizon’s FiOS service offers something called a DVR — digital video recorder. It lets you record and play back shows. So far so good. The problem is the device is made by Motorola. It’s crap. After last night’s switch (thank you Verizon for being prompt about replacing my busted unit), I’m now on my third DVR.
There is good news: You can now join an external hard drive and increase your collection of movies and tennis matches from 60 to 360 hours. You can also save your settings to the cloud. Which means you don’t have to do what I’m doing this morning — again. Namely reprogramming the thing (for the third time).
2. Every time you buy something online and give them your email address, they will give (or sell) your email to someone else. This is life in December 2013. They will also inundate you with offers on specials, etc. It’s getting worse. There is only one solution: Regular new email addresses from Google, which you cancel every six months. JoeSmith2013A@gmail.com. JoeSmith2013B@gmail.com. etc.
3. Total piece of Swiss crap. Never buy this watch:
I own the watch and a wall clock from the same awful company, Mondaine. Neither work. The wall clock loses ten minutes a day. The watch has completely stopped working. The company’s US repair service is miserable. You’d think that a quartz watch from Switzerland would work better than a Timex. You’d be wrong. Stay with Timex. It keeps on ticking.
Harry Newton. who covered his shorts on LL and IBM yesterday. I made money on both. But they were going against me. And I didn’t want to be too greedy. This is a sentiment (also called momentum) market. Logic doesn’t always work. A quick trigger finger is useful. Take the profits and run. My friend is loading up on Softbank, though it’s weak because of talk of its Sprint buying T-Mobile and all the huge debt that would involve (a negative). I don’t think Washington will approve a Sprint-T-Mobile merger. There are a lot of people who feel ripped off by their cell phone provider. Washington would be under huge pressure not to let T-Mobile go and be swallowed by Softbank/Sprint. Under T-Mobile’s new management, it’s become a beacon of innovation and price-cutting. Its service is pretty good in metropolitan areas also.
I was traveling yesterday and couldn’t comment until this morning about what you wrote Monday:
Don’t email threats. Don’t say anything in jest. Don’t talk about guns or bombs. Don’t talk about your annoyance with the nice people at the TSA. Assume that everything you email, everything you post on the Internet and everything you say on the phone will be seen or heard by someone who can make your life miserable — should they so choose.
And then yesterday you wrote that the government can put you on a ‘no fly’ list. That’s the least of it, you didn’t mention sic’ing the IRS on you.
I guess I’m stunned by your advice and how easily you acquiesce to these ‘threats’. Don’t you know where this leads? We need a million man, no a10 million, no a100 million man march in every town and every city to stop this. Would you ever have thought, when you first came to this country that you would actually write, seriously, “Don’t say anything in jest?” Hasn’t history taught us anything?
With the gov’t interference in our lives (security, etc.), there is a MUCH bigger issue, and that is government. From FDR to Lyndon Johnson to Bush to Obama, the drive is for MORE, MORE, MORE. More government rules, controls, regulation, interference, taxes, employees, spending, spending, spending. With none of the competitive control or effectiveness reviews that businesses generally have to have to thrive and grow (unless they too live off the government payroll). And the core of that problem is the liberal Democratic Party supported by weakneed Republicans. The more growth they have, the more power they have. Time for change?
The public’s (that includes you and your readers) emotional rollercoaster around anti-terrorism efforts is amazing. WTC get’s attacked then people say we aren’t doing enough. Boston Marathon get’s attacked then people say we aren’t doing enough. A system (albeit imperfect and abused) to prevent things like this is leaked by that POS Snowden then people say we are doing too much. Personally, I’ll take a few sad NYT stories about a Malaysian losing her visa and the chance that the NSA is reading all the junk mail I get over another act of terrorism on US soil anyday. This is coming from someone most of your readers would describe as a “liberal”…but that’s just because the word has become synonymous with “non-idiot”
No one is denying the need for security. The point of what I’ve written is the system is out of control, and sadly not very effective. Instance: They can’t even point to one threat they stopped. (The New York City guys are an exception.) NSA listens in on their girlfriends’ conversations.And they have 900,000 names on a non-fly list. There are that many bad people in the entire world who shouldn’t fly into the U.S. or fly around it? It defies logic. There are many better ways of doing this. Talk to the Israelis. … And now a judge says that what the NSA is doing is probably unconstitutional. Congress needs to create a system for appealing being placed on the no-fly list. At present there’s no way. Think of the 900,000 lives we’ve ruined.
The list does cover the entire world Harry. Only about 30,000 on the list are US persons. Also the list is not a no-fly list it’s a terrorism watch list witch the no-fly list is a small subset of. Here read this.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/us-terror-watch/
Harry, how can I tell which stocks you are shorting from the column you created on the right? Thanks
You can’t, yet. I need to make a new heading and a new list. I’d rather focus on the investing, not on the programming side.. I’ve just spent two hours with Apple on the programming / legal side… That’s a nightmare. One guy (me) trying to negotiate with an organization that employs 80,300 people is challenging.I’m only short one stock at present — IBM.