On June 20th, Kareem Elnahal gave his valedictory speech at Mainland Regional High School in Limwood, N.J., quite different from the speech school administrators were expecting. He does not look fondly upon his education, challenging what education has come to mean.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost,” Elnahal said.
The Homeland Security Information Network, created to share information between the Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement and emergency responders, was deployed too quickly and without sufficient training to be effective at its goals, according to a report from the DHS inspector general.
A Department of Homeland Security test program to have U.S. employers verify all new hires against a central database to verify employment eligibility and immigration status will help cut down on illegal immigration, said Robert Divine, acting deputy director of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: The Surgeon General Lied And Misled About Secondhand Smoke.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson announced Thursday that the government had recovered a stolen laptop which contained personal information for over 26 million veterans and active duty military personnel.
Nurse-practitioners apparently shouldn’t be allowed to practice autonomously. The American Medical Association thinks they need to be supervised (read: employed) by a doctor at all times.
This amuses me given that there is a vast and growing shortage of doctors.
With a growing number of security breaches involving the U.S. government mishandling personal data, it seems one would become increasingly wary of entrusting government entities with any information of a sensitive nature.
Unless you are in Virginia and are trying to track sex offenders.
The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by President Bush January 8, 2002 includes as one of its measures the standard to staff our public schools with “highly qualified teachers” by June 2007. The main difficulty with this is that school districts are suffering chronic teacher shortages across the nation.
The Department of Homeland Security can barely protect its own computer systems from outside attack. Yet a group of business leaders wants to turn over their responsibility for coordinating with each other after a catastrophic disaster affecting the Internet to the department.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped a demand it made to a Connecticut library system for records relating to a library computer without a warrant, but said that the library system’s non-cooperation “could have increased the danger of terrorists succeeding.”
Democrats announced plans Monday to block a proposed Congressional pay raise unless the federal minimum wage sees its first increase in nearly a decade.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has removed from its web site archived records dating from the 1920s to the 1980s which contained names, Social Security numbers and other personal information for less than 1,000 individuals, the agency said Monday.
The American Medical Association has been proposing one protectionist or statist piece of legislation after the next, and while their motives are just as impure as ever when it comes to challenging the growth of retail-store healthcare services, as Dr. Thomas Davis points out, these retail-chain clinics aren’t the free market supporter’s wet dream that some would have us believe.
A secret U.S. government program instituted shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks searched large databases of international bank transactions for terrorist activity. Publication of the program has drawn criticism from conservatives, while the program itself, believed to be secret, wasn’t actually very secret after all.
I just don’t think we need an amendment against flag-burning. And my reason has nothing to do with the rarity of the practice or the sanctity of the First Amendment. Rather, my opposition has to do with the question of property rights.
They seized her property via eminent domain. She fought it all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. Still, Susette Kelo would not move.
A year after the controversial and widely unpopular decision, which gave cities the power to seize property for private redevelopment, the city of New London, Conn., is finally getting Susette Kelo out of the way of their Fort Trumbull project — house and all.
Spreadsheets containing the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of 28,000 U.S. Navy personnel and family members were found on a civilian Web site, the Office of Naval Personnel said Friday.
Are you sensing a pattern yet?
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that thieves stole two laptops from a locked vehicle containing personal data on about 110 people, many of whom were current and former defendants in FTC investigations.
Yes, that’s right, yet another one.
The People’s Republic of Kentucky began blocking political blogs Wednesday, one day after an unflattering story on indicted governor Ernie Fletcher appearing in the New York Times quoted a Kentucky political blogger.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Wednesday that a hacker broke into one of its databases during the first week of June and may have accessed personal records for up to 26,000 Washington, D.C.-based USDA employees, former employees and contractors, about one fourth of the department’s work force.
The mysterious Craigslist spy, or whoever it is, has returned. On Tuesday, a fourth phone numbers station message appeared on Boston Craigslist.
In a nondescript building near the junction of Interstates 70 and 270 near Bridgeton, Mo., just outside of St. Louis, lies what appears to be the heart of AT&T’s secret network surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government, former employees of the company said.
“The state is the Supreme Court. Our decision is as follows: No more private property. No more you.”
You are nothing. The state is everything.
America spent a good part of the 20th century battling that message, and inexplicably, just as it seemed we were winning, gave up and adopted the message as its own.
The First Amendment guarantees “the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Among other things, this means you have the right to contact your menbers of Congress and express your views.
This right, however, does not extend to automated computer programs, as much as some special interest lobbying groups would like it to.
Are your children in public school?
If they are, get them out now, before it’s too late.
Otherwise, this is what could happen:
We know how to teach children to read. The techniques are well known and private schools and tutoring systems do it all the time. One of the best known examples is Sylvan Learning Center, which guarantees to improve a child’s math or reading skills “by one full grade level equivalent in only 36 hours of instruction.” Why can’t public schools teach children to read?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has no idea when it will be fully staffed, director R. David Paulison said Friday.
The biggest problem with homeland security as it’s been presented to us is this: How do you know you’re secure if you can’t even provide a coherent definition for the word?
That’s the question that comes to mind as I consider several so-called secure phone lines run by the Department of Homeland Security.
Total Information Awareness was a post-9/11 Defense Department research program, written about publicly when it was introduced, to sift through and analyze vast amounts of information looking for potential signs of terrorist activity. The program was even to include security against abuse and privacy protections. But when Congress got wind of it, it stopped authorizing funds for the program.
That’s when it went underground, so to speak, and the security and privacy protections were thrown out.
Over the past month or so, a person or persons unknown have posted three messages on the popular Craigslist web site with telephone numbers which, when called, played automated recordings of long strings of numbers reminiscent of numbers stations which had been heard on shortwave radio for decades.
Many amateur cryptanalysts have tried their hand at cracking the code in these messages, and since they seem to be stumbling all over each other and missing things, I’m going to try to gather what I think is the best available information here.
At its annual meeting in Chicago this week the American Medical Association made several completely statist and asinine policy proposals.
Radley Balko jokingly refers to them as the American Meddling Association. And he’s completely on point.
Google launched a service on Thursday for consolidated searches of U.S. Government websites. Searches on the site seem to return more results and execute much more quickly than the U.S. Government’s own consolidated search site and portal.
The East German Stasi were ruthless in their efficiency and efficacy at keeping tabs on the population and rooting out anyone they wanted anytime they wanted. The Department of Homeland Security, however, can’t seem to find any terrorists, so it’s spending its time on Boston Red Sox fans.
If you’re like most of us, your e-mail box fills up daily with pure junk. I’m not just talking about spam, though that’s certainly a problem. I’m talking about chain letters, stupid jokes forwarded 384 times, news you don’t need, even wedding invitations.
Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff found a solution to his e-mail problem: He no longer uses it.
After Hurricane Katrina last August, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid out fraudulent disaster assistance which may have exceeded $1 billion, according to Government Accountability Office testimony before Congress Wednesday.
The American Medical Association is sticking their fingers in the statism pot and demanding that people carry a certain type of health insurance. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or break some skulls when I read the language used in the resolution: Personal responsibility through forced participation. It sounds like an oxymoron.
Security officers at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., let pass a man who used a fake Mexican consular identification card to gain entry to the building.
Superior Court Judge James Warren on Monday threw out San Francisco’s contentious ban on handguns, passed as a ballot initiative last November. The ruling threw out the entirety of Proposition H, which also included a ban on sales of guns and ammunition, as unsalvageable.
Russell Tice has become a hot commodity on Capitol Hill. Congressmen are climbing all over each other to get a chance to hear what Tice, a former employee of the National Security Agency, has to say about special access programs the agency is running which Tice says may be illegal.
Why does the press publish classified information? After all, laying government secrets out on the front page could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” Right?
Not quite.
To a government employee, for whom efficiency is something one hears about but is rarely able to achieve, the efficiency which the market can provide can seem like magic: mysterious and forever out of reach.
So it was on June 7, as 24 AT&T Network Disaster Recovery trailers rolled in to the parking lot at FedExField, normally the home of the Washington Redskins, and began setting up for a disaster recovery exercise, George Foresman, undersecretary for preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security stared slack-jawed and commented that government needs “to really begin to understand how these [communications] networks — that were like magic — work.”
In a case of closing the barn door after the cows have all gotten out, the Veterans Administration took steps to get its information security in order Friday, a half decade after security alerts were first issued and nearly two months after the largest personal data breach in U.S. history.
The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Friday in favor of upholding a Federal Communications Commission policy that treats interconnected VoIP providers and broadband Internet service providers the same as traditional POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) providers with regards to government wiretaps.
Welcome to another installment of Government Computer Security Sucks!
Today’s lucky government bureaucracy is the National Nuclear Security Agency. The NNSA, part of the Department of Energy, has control of all the nuclear weapons. And 1,500 of its employees may find themselves victims of identity theft after a security incident dating to last September which was only disclosed Friday.
For those of you following the mystery of two phone numbers stations found from postings on Craigslist, I have interesting news: A third posting, and a third message, have appeared.
The so-called “Citizens’ Health Care Working Group,” created by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute accurately labeled as a more or less leftist front group, is soliciting comments on its interim recommendations on how to fix American healthcare. They of course, don’t mention any of the obvious solutions.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate committee Thursday that making the Federal Emergency Management Agency an independent agency would cost billions of dollars, create a “schizophrenic” response to future disasters, and roll back progress made since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The basic problem of government healthcare is that no one feels the costs of their actions. Government isn’t held accountable for lack of access. Consumers aren’t held accountable for abuse of medical resources. And healthcare providers have no incentive either to enter the field or to maintain a high level of quality of care. This is your classic commons situation.
What to do about it? Surely the free market is an abysmal failure in this regard; just look at how much we’re spending for coverage, which half the time we can’t use anyway, right?
Cities are so addicted to the idea of federal funding that they’d rather be considered a terrorist target and get the money to attempt to combat that terrorism than not be a terrorist target to begin with.
As previously reported, computer security at the Department of Homeland Security sucks. I mean really sucks. (It sucks government-wide, but it’s particularly ironic that it sucks at DHS.) And there’s no end in sight to the sheer stupidity of how DHS’s IT infrastructure is being mismanaged.
Data on a VA laptop stolen May 3 from an analyst’s home may include as many as 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 Reserve members constituting nearly 80% of the active duty force as well. Some of those records included information about active duty personnel’s spouses and family members. These records could be used to target military members deployed overseas or their families at home.
Markos “Kos” Moulitsas writes today that he’s a “Libertarian Democrat.” You won’t believe what he means by that. But then he goes on to demolish his own argument. Kos is not a libertarian anything, just the same state-loving, corporation-empowering Democrat as all the rest.
These news updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity are a bit mixed.
Today we have a dying pig, scared air marshals, incompetent emergency planning and underappreciated intelligence.
I think we can all agree that no matter whether we’re talking international politics, economics, or conservation, our dependence on oil is a bad thing. It’s not enough to simply cut back on the habit. We’ve got to quit. And that’s something we’ll never do as long as we aren’t pushed to. The more the price of oil affects the consumer, the faster we’ll move away from it.
Long time readers will know that the site’s homepage features rotating quotations with libertarian themes. And I’m always looking for new quotations to add to the list. Perhaps, then, I should not be surprised to eventually run across Tao Te Ching, or roughly The Book of the Way and its Virtue. After reading for myself several translations of this section, I find myself shocked that the book isn’t banned in China.
When the Department of Homeland Security ends its catch and release policy toward non-Mexican illegal immigrants, and detains them all until deportation proceedings, where is it going to put the thousands — or even tens of thousands — of people? The whole catch and release policy came about because there simply isn’t enough jail space. Some bright bulb had the idea of stuffing them into old cruise ships.
The Internet has come a long, long way since the early days, when it was closed to the public, just sending an image through e-mail required the use of several command-line utilities, and there was no such thing as the World Wide Web. Those of us who were online anytime from the start through the early 1990s look back nostalgically on an Internet which had no spam and relatively few idiots, but had no web either.
Some people want that Internet back. Strangely, one of them seems to be Vint Cerf, the so-called “father of the Internet.”
What does your government provide to you that you can’t possibly live without? And how did you let yourself get into a position where the government is providing it? When push comes to shove, and the government activates its continuity plans, if you’re counting on that government service, you’re done for.
The Department of Homeland Security Privacy Advisory Committee published a draft report on the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to track people, urging caution and saying that the use of RFID “increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security.”
Wait just a minute. No national security benefit for using RFID?
President George W. Bush said Saturday that the venerable institution of marriage needs to be protected. He urged Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment that would redefine marriage as a union between one man and one woman. But who’s really threatening the institution of marriage, and does it need to be protected at all? Is there a better way?
If you’ve been out drinking and driving in California, or even if the police suspect you have, they can now walk right into your home without a warrant, arrest you and take your blood, according to a state Supreme Court ruling issued Thursday.
Environmental conservation and libertarianism aren’t words frequently heard in the same sentence, unfortunately. Instead when we think conservation, we think hippies. Hippies, annoying rangers and other officials tell us we aren’t allowed to play in the park anymore, build a house on our own property, or drive that gas guzzling sports car.
In a further example of Louisiana legislators’ incompetence, the state senate passed a bill raising the Louisiana minimum wage to $6.15, $1.00 above the national wage. The Democrat senator from Monroe, Charles Jones, had originally wanted the wage to be set at $7 an hour!
If you want to make a better life for yourself, if you have long-range goals, or if you reject collective ideologies such as socialism and Communism, Seattle Public Schools say you’re a racist.
You can bet your Blackwell the 2004 election was stolen — by the Republican Party — right from under the nose of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who, election scholars who studied massive irregularities in the election say, would have won the election if not for massive fraud committed by the GOP in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and elsewhere, according to a report in Rolling Stone magazine.
Yesterday I reported on what appeared to be a numbers station which, instead of being on shortwave radio, was located on an ordinary telephone line. These shortwave numbers stations, should you tune one in on the radio, read endless strings of numbers or letters, frequently in foreign languages. Most people believe that they are coded messages, but it’s not always clear for whom they’re intended. That’s certainly the case with the odd telephone numbers stations. Now there’s a second one.
