Bush's carrier stunt
Well, how about that: Glenn Reynolds, Aziz Poonawalla, Andrew Sullivan, Jeanne D'Arc and I agree on something: Bush's little carrier stunt was embarrassing, and crossed the line into political grandstanding. (Roll over the links for the exact quotes, links via Poonawalla and Reynolds.)

I was resolved to skip listening to the speech as soon as I heard Bush was going to land on the carrier deck by plane like that. What is this, "Independence Day"? As a taxpaying American civilian, I'd prefer an address to the nation to be held in the nation, not from a warship out at sea somewhere. Kudos to the crew of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, by all means. But not as a campaign commercial.

I was amused to notice this from Sullivan later on, about reader disapproval of his Bush criticisms:

But what amazes me is the vituperative tone, and how many then accuse me of being anti-war, anti-Bush and anti-American. Me? Are politics so polarized that you have to either engage in hagiography or hatred of our leaders? Is there nothing permissible in between?

Pot: kettle. Kettle: pot. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:03:00 PM -- |  

 

Ms. G635, could you step this way, please?
Andreas "dekaf" Schaefer commented on the story below about "no-fly" lists, pointing out that the Wall Street Journal has an April 23 item about it. From an excerpt of Ann Davis' article (via a Chicago Indymedia contributor):

In checking passengers against the No Fly List, some airlines use techniques that were designed decades ago, and for an entirely different task: to let agents find passenger records quickly without having a full name or a name's precise spelling.

These "name matching" systems also help airlines spot abusive bookings, in which travelers reserve a bunch of flights under slightly varying names. The idea is to cast a wide net. But when applied to a watch list, they have the perverse effect of flagging numerous travelers whose names are merely similar to one of those on the list.

One name-matching technique that airlines have used, called Soundex, dates back more than 100 years, to when it was invented to analyze names from the 1890 census. In its simplest form, it takes a name, strips out vowels and assigns codes to somewhat-similar-sounding consonants, such as "c" and "z."

The article says that the airlines system is an updated version of Soundex, but the problem remains the same: you need a quick way to flag names you're supposed to be watching out for, and you can either opt to reduce false positives or false negatives. A quirk in the system that has probably not helped Transportation Security Administration (TSA) credibility is that

...groups that purchase their tickets together end up in a single travel record. If one member triggers a hit on the watch list, computers lock up on them all.

This was the case for both the Gordon/Adams and the Lawinger examples of possible politically motivated "no-fly" hits mentioned in the Chronicle article that broke the story last year.

None of this argues against the ACLU lawsuit or the need for better oversight of the process, but it does suggest that there may be an innocuous explanation for surprising "no-fly" list "finds." A new system, "CAPPS II," (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) is being developed that the TSA hopes will "dramatically reduce" the number of people flagged. As Davis' article concludes, though:

Privacy and civil-liberties advocates fear just the opposite -- that the increased ways to attract suspicion will result in even more passengers being wrongly tagged.

In March, Senator Wyden (D-OR) won Senate Commerce Committee approval of an amendment to require some Congressional oversight of the CAPPS program. From the Senator's press release:

“I’m all in favor of finding ways to be smarter about aviation security and to target aviation security resources more efficiently,” said Wyden. “But a system that seeks out information on every air traveler or anyone who poses a possible risk to U.S. security, and then uses that information to assign a possible threat ‘score’ to each one, raises some very serious privacy questions. It’s a matter of good public policy for the privacy and civil liberties implications of this program to be reported to Congress.”

The amendment envisions a report by the Secretary of Homeland Security detailing, among other things,

- what safeguards will be in place to guarantee that the information will be used only as officially intended;
- what efforts will be in place to mitigate errors and what procedural recourse will be available to passengers who believe they were wrongfully barred from a flight; and,
- what oversight procedures will be in place to guarantee that privacy and civil liberty concerns will be a priority as the program is installed, operated and updated.

I'd prefer spelling out those safeguards and oversight procedures for Mr. Ridge, rather than waiting to see what he'll do. But I'll take what I can get, and I'll hope this measure makes it into law.

Meanwhile, via genealogy site RootsWeb.com, here's a handy-dandy converter for you to get Soundex codes of your own. Bin Laden's is B543 and Zawahiri's is Z600, by the way. I share mine, N100, with "Newby."

Surname:   

posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:00:00 PM -- |  

 

HIV/AIDS lends SARS resistance?
Laurie Garrett, of Newsday, reports:

...Guangzhou authorities divided the floor of People's Hospital No. 8 in half, putting SARS patients on one side of the elevator bank, and AIDS patients on the other. Health care workers walked back and forth between the two sides of the floor, and some of those doctors and nurses contracted SARS.

Yet not one of the several dozen AIDS patients or their visitors, some of whom were also HIV positive, developed the disease. [...]

Some scientists speculate that the virus doesn't actually kill human cells -- that the immune system's overreaction actually precipitates the destruction of cells of the lung and other parts of the body, precipitating the acute pneumonia that is the disease' hallmark. In theory, they say, death may be the result of an aberrant or overly sensitive immune response. If that is proved correct, it's possible that HIV patients may actually be at lower risk for SARS precisely because they lack strong immune responses.

This is only speculation, of course, but the notion is garnering interest among physicians here. An added bit of evidence supports the theory: The most effective SARS treatment so far is steroids -- agents that stifle the immune response.

In other news
...I could hardly believe my eyes: the WHO estimates that 3000 African children die each day from malaria. That's over a million children per year. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:36:00 PM -- |  

 

New no-fly zone added, and I'm in it
A story I last mentioned late last year has resurfaced: anti-war activists Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon (a longtime friend of my wife's) and the ACLU have filed a federal lawsuit challenging so-called "no-fly" lists maintained by the government:

..[T]he ACLU lawsuit follows two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act requests filed in the last five months. The ACLU said the lawsuit was necessary because the government has refused to confirm the existence of any protocols, procedures or guidelines as to how the "no fly" lists were created or to detail how they are being maintained or corrected and, importantly, how people who are mistakenly included on the list may have their names removed.

"The government has so far failed to disclose even basic information about the 'no fly' list, such as why names are added to the list, how incorrect names can be removed from such lists, and what the guidelines and restrictions are regarding the use of such lists," [ACLU lawyer] Srikantiah said. "The public has a right to accountability about the 'no fly' list and other government watch lists."

I first learned of the lawsuit via Glenn Reynolds. The UT law professor surprised me by focusing on the superficial similarity to the Nancy Oden case, in which a Vermont activist helped get herself bumped off a flight, and then chalked it up to State Oppression. But there's no hint of the kind of behavior on Gordon's or Adams' part that marred Oden's case:

Gordon and fellow War Times co-founder Jan Adams, 55, were briefly detained and questioned by police at San Francisco International Airport Aug. 7 after checking in at the American Trans Air counter for a flight to Boston. While they were eventually allowed to fly, their boarding passes were marked with a red "S" -- for "search" -- which subjected them to more scrutiny at SFO and during a layover in Chicago.

Before Adams' return flight from Boston's Logan International, she was trailed to the gate by a police officer and an airline official and searched yet again.

The point of the lawsuit isn't really what happened to two particular activists. It's that there is no check on the development of a secret list, or on its alleged misuse to discourage political activists like Gordon and Adams. It's not the incident alone that is worrisome, it's the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) that is creating incidents like it.

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EDIT, 4/30: the link to the ATSA was changed to the version on a prior post of mine, which I got from the TSA. The link I had used above was to a Congressional House-Senate conference draft of the bill. The TSA web site itself leads to yet another (Acrobat) copy of the ATSA, but that link doesn't always work.
EDIT, 5/1: lawsuit link moved from "ACLU" to "filed..." posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:55:00 AM -- |  

 

Gary Farber
...sounds like he's had better days (see his first entry for Tuesday, 4/29/03). Relax -- just a bit o' pneumonia, high blood pressure, hospital visit, heart valve stuff, needles, etc. If you enjoy reading his stuff the way I do, now might be a good time to drop by and wish him well. That Paypal thingy of his (upper left corner) works, too, I just tried it. posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:43:00 PM -- |  

 

Present at the creation: M17 "Swan" Nebula


Department of Unprovable Assertions
Flying home from my dad's birthday (75!), I picked up a "Scientific American" in the news kiosk, intrigued by the "Parallel Universes" cover story. Among the simpler arguments presented was that (1) the available evidence apparently supports the intuitive notion that space is infinite (not "curved" so that a latter-day Magellan would return to his starting point), (2) there seems no reason to suppose the space beyond our viewing horizon (speed of light * age of universe) isn't full of stuff, too, so that (3) there's enough stuff to eventually make a duplicate galaxy with a duplicate you sitting in it reading a duplicate blog post by a duplicate me. This is called a Level I parallel universe (where "universe" is actually just "everything you can see," which is much less than "everything there is.")

Looking at that image above, or just at ants making their way across my lawn, I have trouble believing in that: there just seems too much detail, whimsy, and beauty for anything so vast as my universe to be repeated. On the other hand, it might be comforting to believe the whole universe is so dumb it would allow a parallel "Survivor" show somewhere 10^(10^28) meters away. At that rate, my own dumb habits would be a little easier to put up with.

But the idea seems seems to imply that once you've arranged all the atoms etc. identically, the whole process leading to the arrangement and the whole process following it must be identical. Otherwise, what accounts for the difference before or after the moment when the two universes are identical? Yet if the two universes are in different places, that can't be. So something seems wrong to me, and it's probably that I've stayed up too late again.

=====
UPDATE, 10AM: OK, thinking about it a little more, there's no need to assume two identical universes got identical the same way, any more than two paintings had to be completed with the same series of brushstrokes to be identical. So Level I universe cosmology is safe from my late-night criticism. I'm also not sure the two identical universes would have to stay identical once they got that way: at the periphery of the two identical universes, observers would see different things, and would thereby become different: different memories, science, etc. This would work its way to the center of each identical universe. Therefore: never mind.

UPDATE, May 14: I just noticed that Chad Orzel discussed the article and my questions yesterday. Thanks!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:19:00 AM -- |  

 
Weapons mess deconstruction, or
Who needs fools to rush in when I can do it myself?
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago -- well, in November 1998-- the London Sunday Times printed a report* titled "Israel Developing an Ethno-Bomb," by former Israeli intelligence officer Uzi Mahnaimi and war correspondent Marie Colvin. The report claimed that researchers at an institute in Nes Tziyona -- "the main research facility for Israel's clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons" -- were attempting to develop deadly micro-organisms that would attack only people with distinctive genes carried by some Arabs.

I'm not qualified to assess whether such a weapon could be successfully developed.*** I merely point out that this report features a number of people -- reporters, politicians, scientists -- who were or seemed respected, knowledgeable, Jewish, or combinations thereof, and who said the idea was conceivable and/or that Israelis were researching it. In addition to the reporters, the report features Knesset member Dedi Zucker and former Defense Secretary William Cohen (quoted on feasibility only; Israel's pursuits were raised by a second anonymous defense official). That doesn't mean they were right, of course.

I imagine Mahnaimi and Zucker -- now an ex-Knesset member who has left the Meretz party to form an Israeli Green Party -- may be dismissed as the usual "Peace Now" suspects by many, and perhaps even their non-self-hating-Jewishness will be in question for some.

For my part, although the story and its sources seemed reasonably credible at first, I've come to be skeptical. First, there's Dedi Zucker -- or rather, how he's used in the Times article:

Dedi Zucker, a member of knesset [sic], the Israeli parliament, denounced the research yesterday. "Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied," he said.

At first glance, Zucker's statement seems to corroborate the report (although "denied" is an odd choice of words). But on re-reading the article, I think he's just reacting to it. I'm trying to reach Mr. Zucker about this. It's possible that Mr. Zucker had some knowledge about Israeli research via his participation in the Knesset's "Committee for Scientific and Technological Research and Development." The committee concerns itself with research institutes, but probably not with military research, which I'd guess is overseen by a different committee. On the other hand, although (admittedly) judging by a Google search, Mr. Zucker's interests have seemed to lie elsewhere over the years.

Second, the Times story quotes a South African scientist named Goosen; he's popped up again recently in a Washington Post story about black-market bioweapons, so that I'm provisionally tagging him with my "shady?" and "joker?" mental magic markers.

The anonymous scientist at Nes Tziyona is the key to the story, of course. His anonymity is "convenient" if you dismiss the story, and understandable if you don't: Mordechai Vanunu has been in jail since 1986 since claiming Israel has nuclear weapons. The anonymous source "confirming" that Cohen meant Israel with his remarks is secondary. It seems fair -- and will hopefully not remain embarrassing -- to point out many of us have assumed Iraq had WMD on similarly unsubstantiated (albeit presidential) claims. (For what it's worth, it seems Mahnaimi's byline also appears on stories claiming Iraq developed nuclear weapons before 1991, and managed to keep a small stockpile after the Gulf War.)

So what's this all about? Only that it seems to me that Mr. Aziz Poonawalla had a reasonably good faith basis for believing such weapons were being developed -- especially because he relied on the WiredNews abridged version of the story, where Mr. Zucker's comment seems quite authoritative, at least to non-Israelis. Aziz stumbled into a hornet's nest of anti-Semitism charges of "blood libel" and the like for daring to repeat the story.** Given the Times article itself, I'd say that's not justified unless you also level the charge at Mahnaimi, Zucker, and possibly Secretary Cohen as well.*** Furthermore, although I'm not Jewish, nothing I've ever seen by Aziz justifies the charge.

One objection commonly raised about the story is that you couldn't keep such a weapon from affecting the many citizens of your own country who have "enemy" ancestry to one degree or another. That seems easy to counter. You somehow (1) tailor a disease virus or bacterium like smallpox or anthrax to be more lethal or contagious for people with a given genetic makeup. That's the hard part, of course. You then also (2) vaccinate your population, perhaps especially the susceptible members, against the disease. Step (1) wouldn't necessarily make existing vaccines useless; at any rate, you might also develop a custom vaccine. The motive for tailored bioweapons-plus-vaccination over regular bioweapons-plus-vaccination would be to limit the "collateral damage" outside the vaccinated population, and inside it as well if the vaccine were known or suspected to not be completely effective.

Here's something we may all agree on, though: I'd certainly prefer to believe that Israel would not even research such a weapon. The sheer volume of angry reactions to merely reviving the suggestion tells me it would be tremendously controversial among Israelis, and among Jews around the world.

Look at it this way: either Mahnaimi and Colvin were right, or they weren't. If it ever turns out they were right, shame on the Israelis responsible. If they lied or were wrong, shame on them, and the discussion was unnecessary -- but it may also have a small deterrent effect of its own.

=====
* The story is widely reproduced on the Internet. That doesn't make it true, but the texts copied seem to match up, so I'm reasonably confident my link is an accurate copy of the Times item itself, for which subscriber access is required.
** As the controversy about Aziz's post grew, he edited a sentence to read "Israel may be developing" instead of "Israel is developing," which seemed obvious anyway, but worth stating clearly.
*** I found indirect but credible evidence supporting the Cohen part of the London Times report in a very interesting SIPRI report by Malcolm Dando, where footnote 6 reads:'Cohen warns of new terrors beyond CW', Jane's Defence Weekly, 4 June 1997, p. 27; and Starr, B. and Evers, S., 'Interview: US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen', Jane's Defence Weekly, 13 Aug. 1997, p. 32.; I don't have access to JDW to follow that further. On the subject of Mahnaimi/Colvin items that more or less check out, they also mention that the British Medical Association was to consider the possibility of genetically tailored bioweapons. This seems to be the 1999 BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons & Humanity. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:54:00 AM -- |