The Son of Patriot Act Also Rises

While activists and politicians work to repeal or change parts of the Patriot Act that they say violate constitutional rights, Patriot Act II legislation -- which caused a stir when it came to light last year -- is rearing its head again in a new bill making its way through Congress.

The bill would strengthen laws that let the FBI demand that businesses hand over confidential records about patrons by assigning stiff penalties (up to five years in prison) to anyone who discloses that the FBI made the demand. The bill would also let the FBI compel businesses to cooperate with record requests, and it would expand the government's secret surveillance powers over noncitizens in the United States.

"There is no reason for this legislation," said lawyer Chip Pitts, head of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Dallas and a former constitutional law professor. "Given the expanse of powers and secrecy already granted in the Patriot Act, and given the unclear security benefits and possible security detriments of that legislation, why do we need a further amendment of the law to grant more powers to the government?"

The bill, known as the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003, or HR 3179, was introduced last September by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) and was co-sponsored by Rep. Porter Goss (R-Florida), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a possible contender to replace departing CIA chief George Tenet.

It contains four sections that first appeared in a proposed piece of legislation dubbed Patriot Act II. That proposed law was discovered last year by the Center for Public Integrity just weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Patriot Act II, or "Son of Patriot" as critics called it, was written by the Justice Department to expand Patriot Act powers, but the department was forced to shelve the proposal after news of it created an uproar.

But critics, like conservative former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), say that rather than abandoning the legislation altogether, the department has been extracting provisions and having sympathetic lawmakers slip them one by one into new bills to pass the legislation piecemeal. At least five other bills pending in Congress also contain provisions from Patriot Act II, but HR 3179 is the one that's in imminent danger of being passed under the radar.

Last year, a Patriot Act II provision was slipped into the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2004 at the last minute and passed quickly before legislators opposed to it had time to fully examine it. The Intelligence Authorization Act, an annual bill that allocates funds for intelligence agencies, is a must-pass bill that generally gets drafted and passed quickly in secrecy.

The new bill, HR 3179, was set to pass through Congress without a hearing last year, but the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sensenbrenner, changed its mind and held a hearing May 18. The bill is waiting for markup in that committee, but critics fear that Rep. Goss and the House Intelligence Committee will slip the bill into this year's Intelligence Authorization Act during a closed-door hearing on June 16, and pass it quickly before lawmakers can revise or further debate it.

Proponents of HR 3179 say critics are overreacting to the bill. They say the bill will simply "plug a few gaps" in the Patriot Act by establishing penalties for noncompliance that were never specified in the Patriot Act.

But opponents say the bill grants the government more power to investigate people without probable cause and to do so under a cloak of secrecy. As a result, individuals being investigated will have no chance to protest unconstitutional searches and seizures.

Under the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II provisions passed in the Intelligence Authorization Act last year, the FBI doesn't need a court order or probable cause to obtain the transaction records for patrons of libraries, Internet service providers, telephone companies, casinos, travel agents, jewelers, car dealers or other businesses.

The FBI can simply draft a "national security letter" stating records are needed for a national security investigation, without being specific about the data being sought or the people being investigated. A nondisclosure provision prevents the letter recipient from telling anyone about it, including patrons whose records may be investigated.

Under HR 3179, anyone who knowingly violates the secrecy clause could be imprisoned for up to a year, and anyone who violates it with "the intent to obstruct an investigation or judicial proceeding" could be imprisoned up to five years. The bill also lets authorities force individuals and companies to comply with security letters under contempt-of-court threats.

Jeff Lungren, spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee where the bill currently resides, said HR 3179 simply gives teeth to the Patriot Act.

"Right now you can't disclose if you receive a national security letter," he said. "But if you do disclose it, there is no penalty for that. There's (also) no stick to deal with a person that refuses to comply with a national security letter."

But Jim Dempsey, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the bill tips the balance of power further into government hands while hampering the ability of people "to push back" and provide balance to government powers.
Currently, if government investigators request data that is too broad or intrusive, a company has some wiggle room to protect patrons' Fourth Amendment rights by resisting and negotiating a more targeted search, Dempsey said. But letting the FBI force cooperation while at the same time demanding secrecy and threatening imprisonment would make it unlikely that unreasonable secretive searches would ever be prevented or challenged.

"It's a way to increase the government's leverage," Dempsey said, noting that no company employee would want to go to jail for 30 days, let alone five years, to defend the privacy of the company's patrons.

Dempsey said he believes the original Patriot Act didn't specify penalties for disclosure because lawmakers were ambivalent about the act's powers and didn't want to eliminate opportunities for checks and balances.

Steve Lilienthal, director of the Center for Privacy and Technology Policy at the conservative Free Congress Foundation, said the gag rule is "a license for abuse."

"You have the right to talk to an attorney, but the attorney cannot talk to anyone else," he said. "You're prevented from going to the Department of Justice to communicate, or to the relevant congressional community to tell them when an abuse has taken place. It's almost un-American."

In addition to penalties for disclosure, HR 3179 expands surveillance of noncitizens by amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA. Currently FISA investigations involve individuals or groups acting on behalf of a foreign government or terrorist organization. But HR 3179 would let the government conduct secret domestic surveillance against noncitizens believed to be engaged in international terrorism, but who have no known affiliation with a foreign government or terrorist group.

Pitts, the attorney with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said the amendment could be used to justify surveillance of noncitizens for criminal activity, for work with organizations like Amnesty International or for donating money to an environmental organization that stages protests.

"Because there is no accepted definition of international terrorism, and because they're eliminating the need for someone to be acting on behalf of a foreign government, you're relying on subjective and perhaps arbitrary or politically motivated definitions" to determine who could be secretly investigated, he said.

Barr, a member of the American Conservative Union who has been practicing law since leaving Congress last year, testified against the bill during the May hearing and said that Congress should not be passing new laws to strengthen the Patriot Act while there are concerns about how the legislation has been used to date. The FBI has admitted using the Patriot Act for nonterrorism investigations, such as cases involving corruption in a Las Vegas strip club, drug trafficking and other criminal activity.

Barr said the surveillance powers of the Patriot Act play "fast and loose" with the Constitution and that the secrecy penalties in HR 3179 would make its assault on the Fourth Amendment even worse.

"If the government is able to conduct its powers in secret, then we never know the extent to which its power is being used or being abused," he said. "If the government wants to conduct more of its business in secret and without probable cause, then (we should) just amend or repeal the Fourth Amendment, not allow the government to eat away at it in small steps and pretend it's still there."

Barr said the law should allow recipients of national security letters the right to challenge them, just as they can challenge grand jury subpoenas.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently discovered just how daunting the secrecy provisions can be when it was forced to file a lawsuit in secret that challenged the constitutionality of national security letters under the First Amendment. The organization was able to reveal the existence of the lawsuit only after negotiating with the government about what it could say about the suit.

The lawsuit was filed after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information about how often and in what cases authorities have used national security letters to date, and the organization received six pages of blacked-out documents.

Pitts said that although HR 3179 is not yet on the radar screen of most congress members, activists are working to thwart what he calls a "stealth measure."

"The last time (a Patriot Act II provision) slipped through and got signed was on the day of Saddam Hussein's capture," Pitts said. "There was not a single activist who knew it was coming down the pike. At least this time we know about it in advance."

In total, six bills pending in Congress contain provisions taken from Patriot Act II. In addition to HR 3179, three other House bills (and two Senate companion bills) were introduced late last year:

• HR 3179: Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003
  
• HR 3037: Anti-Terrorism Tools Enhancement Act of 2003
  
• HR 2934 and S 1604: Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act of 2003
  
• HR 3040 and S 1606: Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003.
  

Let poor smoke, says health secretary

The health secretary, John Reid, angered health campaigners and anti-smoking groups when he said yesterday that smoking is one of the few pleasures left for the poor on sink estates and in working men's clubs.
Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and that smoking was not one of the worst problems facing poorer people.

"I just do not think the worst problem on our sink estates by any means is smoking, but it is an obsession of the learned middle class," he said. "What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette."

His statement provoked an angry reaction from anti-smoking campaigners. A spokesman for the anti-smoking group Ash said: "It's incredibly patronising to talk about smoking in this way. The argument is that we should have smoke-free work environments. John Reid has got this hang-up about the middle class imposing itself on the lower class, when it's the least empowered, people like bar workers, who are having smoking imposed on them."

According to Ash, men in socio-economic groups AB are twice as likely to reach the age of 70 as those in groups DE, with smoking being the biggest contributing factor. Women in social class 5 are almost twice as likely to die from lung cancer as women from social class 1.

Mr Reid's deliberately challenging remarks at a Labour Big Conversation event in south London suggests he will be cautioning against an outright ban on smoking in public places being included in the Labour manifesto.

He said he was an advocate of informed choice for adults, rather than bans, describing himself as favouring empowerment, rather than instruction. Mr Reid fears advocates of a ban are behaving as if members of the public are incapable of coming to their own sensible decisions.

Mr Reid's views were welcomed by Simon Clark, director of the smokers' lobby group Forest (Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), who said: "We're not looking to encourage people to smoke. There's a lot of people out there for who smoking is a lot of pleasure and it's encouraging to see that John Reid recognises that."

Mr Reid's comments put him at some distance from Tony Blair, who said last week the government was considering measures to ban smoking in public places but hinted such measures could be left to local authorities. Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, has also made clear that legal bans would be a last resort.

Faced by calls for a ban at the meeting attended by health professionals and the local community, Mr Reid said: "Be very careful, that you do not patronise people because sometimes, as my mother used to say, people from those lower socio-economic backgrounds have very few pleasures and one of them is smoking. I worry slightly about the unanimity of the middle class professional activists on this."

Ministers are currently wrestling over whether to back a nationwide ban on smoking in public places, allowing councils to impose bans.

Mr Reid insisted the government had not come to any decision, but added that if the government imposed any smoking restrictions, it would be done "in the British way", and not ape the bans introduced in either New York or Ireland.

Dr Reid, who gave up a 60-a-day habit himself 18 months ago, is deeply suspicious of bans on choice for adults.

He argued these people really needed help by changing the fundamental social conditions which led them to smoke. "My argument is that empowerment is different from instruction. You have got to be very careful that you do not say to the 75-year-old that 'you are better off if you are not going to be able to go to a working men's club and smoke'."

The British Medical Association said that it was surprised by Mr Reid's remarks, but it would continue to lobby for a ban. "Quite apart from the individual damage to smokers, there's passive smoking to consider. It isn't just damage they do themselves, it's the damage they do to others."

The minister was more sympathetic to calls for compulsory simplified food labelling setting out the sugar, salt and fat content of products. He also recognised that children needed better advice on nutrition and better school diets.

Mr Reid also said he wanted to find a new way to involve the ethnic minorities and working class in their own health, including by opening health care centres in shopping centres, or by using health advice from football clubs. "We need to find places where people work, that are more accessible, more identifiable for them, less preachy, less hectoring, less dictatorial, then we may achieve success in the field of public health," he said.

The Red Light World

< We here at Elite Inc. think it's a Good Idea to offer adult services in seperated locations. This isn't for policing purposes (although those will unfortunately be forwarded as well), but because when such things are seperated, it's hard from anyone to ignore the old adage "if you don't like it, don't go there". The obvious problems of censorship may be overcome through this technique as well. If a system gets large enough, there will always be back alleys for things to happen in and anonymous ways to enter. Red Light World is one way to approach this kind of solution. Another under much debate is the .xxx or .adult (etc.) domains. >

The digital revolution is giving way to 'digital terror,' says Bruce Sterling

JUNE 09, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - The Internet is a "god-awful mess," but few U.S. government officials are willing to take action against virus writers, spammers and other scammers, author Bruce Sterling said at the Gartner IT Security Summit yesterday in Washington.
Disorder and corruption are winning on the Internet, and computer users need the U.S. government to crack down on online thieves, said Sterling, author of futuristic novels Heavy Weather and Islands in the Net and the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier.

"We had a digital revolution in the 1990s -- now we've slid into digital terror," Sterling said during an hour-long critique on the state of cybersecurity. "Today's Internet is a dirty mess -- its revolution failed. E-commerce was extremely inventive for a while, but the financing model was corrupt. There was poor governance in the financial systems; there was worse industrial policy. The upshot was a spectacular industry-wrecking boom and bust."

Most of the advancements in Internet commerce since the dot-com bust have been illegal, Sterling noted, including spam, identity theft and "phishing" scams, in which credit card numbers or other personal information are stolen by directing people to bogus Web sites where they are told they have to change the settings of accounts they have with e-commerce companies. "If you advance into mayhem, that's not advancement; that's driving into a ditch," he said.

Sterling offered what he called a little good news about cybersecurity, the recent arrests of a handful of virus or worm writers, including the arrest in May of the 18-year-old German man who allegedly wrote the Sasser worm ,a href="http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,93040,00.html">(see story).

"The world is never going to run out of disaffected teenagers," said Sterling, who explained that he's not overly worried about bored 18-year-old worm writers who are unsophisticated enough to get caught. Instead, he's concerned about the creators of malicious code like that in Slammer, Code Red and Witty, because they haven't been caught.

The authors of the Witty worm targeted users of Internet Security Systems Inc.'s products, while the Bagel and Mydoom virus authors attempted to turn infected computers into spam-sending machines, Sterling said. "Bagel and Mydoom are the future of virus-writing because they have a business model," he said. "Those are organized-crime activities. ... These are crooks."
Virus- and worm-writing will grow as a weapon for terrorists and warring nations, he predicted. Terrorists operating in places with little central government control will begin to see cyberterrorism as an effective weapon because of a lack of international cooperation on cybersecurity enforcement, he said. He listed a dozen such countries, including Somalia, Bosnia and the Philippines.

"This is the birth of a genuine, no-kidding, for-profit ... multinational criminal underworld," he said. "I don't see any way it can't happen. We're going to end up getting pushed around by bands of international electronic thieves in a very similar way to the way we've been pushed around by gangs of international Mafia and international Mujahideen terrorists."

The new tools of terrorists and criminals will be "oil, narcotics, guns and broadband," he said.

With cyberthreats likely to rise, the U.S. government needs to focus on enforcement of existing laws, including antifraud laws, Sterling said. He praised New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted Buffalo spammer Howard Carmack earlier this year (see story), as well as other white-collar criminals. Although virus-writers and many spammers break existing laws, most prosecutors seem reluctant to take on computer cases.

"In my opinion, we need a thousand guys like [Spitzer]," Sterling said. "We've got a ridiculous amount of computer laws."

Efforts such as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, passed by Congress in late 2003, are "phoney-baloney gestures," Sterling said.

Instead of weak laws, the U.S. government needs to sponsor a multistate computer crime task force that enforces existing laws, he said. He also recommended that the U.S. post names of spammers and other Internet scammers on a Web site for everyone to see.

Sterling praised parts of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released by the Bush administration in February 2003, calling it "modest and feasible." The document recommended that nations work together to combat cyberthreats, and such cooperation is needed to fight borderless cyberterrorism, Sterling said.

Should Doctors Help With Executions? No Easy Ethical Answer

ATLANTA, June 7 - Dr. Sanjeeva Rao used to look after the inmates at the state prison in Jackson, Ga., treating their high blood pressure and more serious ailments. When the state started using lethal injections in 2000, he took on another task: helping to execute them.

Dr. Rao does not administer the injections, but he monitors the process, and occasionally, he has testified, he helps out. If the prisoner's heart monitor has not flatlined after the injections meant to kill him, Dr. Rao orders up more poison.

In 2001, after a nurse spent 39 fruitless minutes stabbing needles into Jose High, a former drug addict, in search of a sound vein, Dr. Rao put in a line through his neck that allowed the deadly chemicals to flow.

Whether promoting health or hastening death, Dr. Rao refers to the prisoners in medical terms.

"I always say 'a patient,' " he testified in a 2002 case filed by a death row inmate that unsuccessfully challenged lethal injections as inhumane. "That's by habit."

Doctors who participate in executions violate the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics, some critics say. But others defend these doctors, saying that lethal injections, the almost-universal form of execution in the United States, can be performed humanely only by medical professionals.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the director of health research for the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, said Dr. Rao and others like him should be disciplined. "The state medical boards should just yank the licenses of these people," Dr. Wolfe said.

Dr. Kenneth Baum, the author of a law review article on the question, disagreed, saying that doctors can play a valuable role at executions. The alternative, he said, is having prison employees with little training perform the procedures.

"In the absence of competent medical oversight," Dr. Baum said, "many of these executions are unnecessarily painful. There is no reason, given that we are going to execute these people, to leave them defenseless."

About 25 states allow or require doctors to be present at executions. But information on the number of doctors who participate in executions is hard to come by, as states generally refuse to name anyone who does so, citing security and privacy concerns. The Georgia Department of Corrections, for instance, says execution records are "privileged and confidential state secrets.''

Dr. Rao's name was disclosed in the 2002 lawsuit challenging Georgia's use of lethal injections. He did not respond to several messages left at his office and his home seeking comment.

Many of the states that encourage doctors to participate in executions have seemingly contradictory laws that allow doctors to be disciplined by state medical boards for violating codes of medical ethics. Those codes almost universally forbid participation in executions.

The American Medical Association's ethics code, for instance, says that "a physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution."

The code forbids doctors to perform an array of acts at executions, including prescribing the drugs, supervising prison personnel, selecting intravenous sites, placing intravenous lines, administering the injections and pronouncing death.

"They're not allowed to determine that the execution has been unsuccessful so that the execution can be repeated," said Dr. Stephen H. Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and author of "The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine."

But a survey of doctors in 2001 found that more than 40 percent would be willing to perform at least one of the forbidden activities.

Scholars who have studied the matter said they knew of no state board action against a doctor for aiding in a lawful execution.

Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a retired professor of psychiatry at New York University and a former director of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, aims to change that.

"My major thrust," he said, "is to identify physicians who have participated in executions in one way or another, with the objective of charging these physicians with professional misconduct for violating medical ethics."

Dr. Zitrin tried to have Dr. Rao expelled from the American College of Physicians, an internists' organization. The effort failed when the group determined that Dr. Rao was behind in his dues and was thus no longer considered a member.

Dr. Zitrin said he and two Georgia lawyers, Michael Mears and Matthew Rubenstein, would file a complaint against Dr. Rao with the Georgia medical authorities this month. "I'm also on the trail of a doctor in Virginia, and one in Illinois," he said.

The question of whether doctors should participate in executions is more difficult now that lethal injections are the dominant mode of execution in the United States. Firing squads and electric chairs did not require doctors to help in quite the same way, medical experts say.

"What's unique about this procedure is that it's specially designed to imitate medical procedures," said Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a surgery professor at Ohio State University and the trauma medical director of the Columbus Children's Hospital .

In a unanimous decision on May 24 allowing a death row inmate to challenge lethal injections as cruel and unusual punishment, the United States Supreme Court appeared to suggest that a doctor should be required for at least some procedures.

The inmate in that case, David L. Nelson, had badly damaged his veins by long-term drug use, and went to court to fight a plan by Alabama prison officials to make a two-inch incision in his arm or leg to allow his execution to proceed. "There was no assurance," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the decision, "that a physician would perform or even be present for the procedure."

At least eight states, including Georgia, also seek to shield doctors from professional discipline through laws saying that aiding in executions is not the practice of medicine.

Dr. Baum, who supports letting doctors participate in executions, said such laws are dishonest.

"What about this is not the practice of medicine?" he asked. "It's inserting the I.V.; it's infusing medicine; it's monitoring vital signs; it's declaring death. These are practices that in any other setting are the practice of medicine."

Some of those opposed to allowing doctors to participate in executions concede that their real agenda is abolition of the death penalty.

"It is true that this is my small way to get at an abhorrent process," Dr. Wolfe of Public Citizen said.

Others say it is possible to oppose the death penalty and approve of doctors aiding in executions.

"The physician's role is to treat when you can and to comfort when that is all you can do," Dr. Baum said. "I wouldn't see any conflict in a physician who participates in executions being vocally anti-death-penalty. There's not a conflict in my mind, ethically, morally or politically."

Suicide by Pseudoscience

The Union of Concerned Scientists in a February report pointed out something the science press has known for years: The Bush administration has no respect for science. Ideologues prefer to make up the laws of nature as they go.

Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.

When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Trofim Lysenko was Joseph Stalin's top stooge in Soviet agricultural science, a field that was mercilessly politicized by fanatics. His specialty was inventing nutty schemes - things like stimulating the evolution of trees by overcrowding them to get them to cooperate, as though they were communist minions. This totalitarian huckster spent his whole career promising exciting results and bringing about only disaster. But the party never judged itself on results, so he always got a free pass.

Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.

State-sponsored pseudoscience always fails, but slowly, like a wheat field choked with weeds. (This is a particularly apt comparison, because Lysenko claimed that the weeds infesting Soviet wheat fields had evolved from the wheat itself.) It fails in predictable ways, and these are the very ways in which the Bush science policy is going to fail.

The rot begins to set in when honest local institutions, appalled by high-level misdeeds, denounce federal policy as corrupt and corrupting, just as the UCS has done. There will be much more of this: congressional investigations, high-minded committees. Government officials will temporize by getting scientists to "compromise" and "split the difference" between actual science and partisan jiggery-pokery. This will fail because science just isn't politics. You can't legislate that E=mc21¼2.

Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to "American science" generally. (In Lysenko's heyday, when scientists abroad came across a halfway-decent Soviet scientist, they would charitably offer to publish his books offshore, then maybe help him defect to someplace where he could get serious work done.)

Meanwhile, gaps will open between research establishments in the US and other countries, much like the one that now yawns between American and Korean stem-cell producers. US science will come to have a stodgy, old-fashioned, commissar-style inability to think and act freely. Yankee initiative and ingenuity will bow to bulging pie-in-the-sky superprojects like unproven antimissile systems, hot-air broadband initiatives, and swashbuckling moon shots.

Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.

Trofim Lysenko was a funny case. He had the authority to reduce a major scientific-research power to a dismal Burkina Faso with rockets; he left behind practically no scientific achievement or discovery. As a scientist, he was a nonentity, but his menace is universal. Wherever moral panic, hasty judgment, arrogance, fear, brutal partisan ignorance, slovenly standards of research, overcentralization of authority, conspiratorial policymaking, jingoism and xenophobia, and spin-centric travesties of disinformation can flourish, Lysenko's spirit will never die.

Physians vs. Gun owners

(thanks pistoleirao)

Physicians:
a. The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
b. Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.
c. Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171. (Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept.of Health & Human Services)

Guns:
a. The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.
b. The number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) is 1,500.
c. The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188.

Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Forbidden Photos, Anyone?

< Please click the link above and read the interviews at the bottom. >

Mike Epstein is not a terrorist, but if a proposed ban on photography on New York trains and buses goes into effect, he might very well find himself treated like one.

"How can they ban photographing unusual sights aboard trains and in stations?" wonders Epstein, who operates Satan's Laundromat, a website dedicated to "urban decay, strange signage, and general weirdness." "What about when someone boards the 1 train with bags full of fully inflated orange and red balloons that almost exactly match the colors of the seats: Do they really expect me to keep my camera in my pocket?"

You bet. The MTA's move to stop the shooting of unauthorized pictures or video has pissed-off everyone from photobloggers to subway advocates and free-speech activists. To show their opposition to the ban, a group of photographers plan to gather at the main information kiosk in Grand Central station this Sunday, June 6, at 1 p.m. They'll fan out across several train lines, shooting photos throughout the system in a peaceful demonstration.

The demonstration will start mere yards from an MTA-sponsored photography show called "The New York Subway: A Centennial Celebration." Most of the 16 subway-themed prints were taken during an earlier photo ban, which was taken off the books in 1994. The work includes work from such giants of the form as Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The MTA isn't slated to vote on the measure until at least mid June, when a 45-day public comment period ends. Also included in regulation 21 NYCRR 1050.9c are stiffer penalties for hopping turnstiles, walking between cars, and using seats as footrests. Ostensibly designed to counter terrorist attacks, the new rules clearly extend to ordinary?and artistic?activity.

For New York City photobloggers like Epstein?amateur photographers who post digital images on their own sites?the proposed ban makes little sense. "It's utterly the wrong way to protect the subway," he says. "If there's anyone who won't be deterred by a $25 fine, it's an actual terrorist."

Others, like Jake Dobkin (bluejake.com), raise concerns about the ban's impact on civil rights. "First they cracked down on immigrants," he says, "then on people who were protesting the war in Iraq, and now they seem to be coming after artists."

Japan schoolgirl killer 'sorry'

Satomi Mitarai, 12, bled to death at her school on Tuesday
A Japanese schoolgirl who killed her classmate has offered an apology to her family and the victim's relatives as more details emerged of her motives.
The girl reportedly told police she was annoyed by comments Satomi Mitarai made about her appearance during their exchanges in internet chatrooms.

This has prompted Japanese media to question the dangers of this form of communication.

Satomi Mitarai, 12, died on Tuesday after being slashed with a small knife.

"She wrote something bad about my appearance several times on the Net a few days before the incident. I didn't like that, so I called her (to a study room) and slashed her neck after getting her to sit on a chair," the Yomiuri Shimbun quoted Mitarai's killer, 11, as telling police sources.

Her lawyers said she had begun to question her actions, and had repeatedly expressed remorse.

"I wonder why I did it. If I thought and acted properly it wouldn't have happened. I would like to apologise," she was quoted as saying.

The Mainichi newspaper said she told investigators she had planned the murder four days earlier, and had been inspired to use a paper cutter after seeing the method used in a television drama.

"I saw that drama. I thought I'd do it that way", she was quoted as saying.

The Asahi Shimbun said classmates at Okubo Elementary School in Sasebo, southern Japan, had often seen her reading horror books, including Battle Royale, about schoolchildren killing each other.

Children are increasingly using online chatrooms to communicate, according to Yomiuri.

The newspaper quoted a professor in media studies as saying that this could lead to misunderstandings.

"Generally speaking, it's true that people communicating on the internet can bring people closer, but unlike other forms of communication, such as the phone, it's very hard to pick up the nuances and subtleties when talking online," Tasuo Inamasu, of Hosei University, told the paper.

But he said the internet alone could not be blamed for this crime.

"There must have been a lot that went before... I don't think we can blame computers for causing a murder," he told Reuters news agency.

Juvenile crime

There has been considerable hand-wringing in Japan over youth crime, ever since a shocking incident in 1997 in which a 14-year-old boy killed an 11-year-old and placed his severed head outside the gates of his school.

That prompted the country's parliament to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14.

Last year a 12-year-old boy in Nagasaki was accused of murdering a four-year-old boy by pushing him off a roof.

The latest incident has shocked Japan's media.

"We must make children understand even more the basic importance of life," the Yomiuri said in an editorial on Wednesday.

Although Japan is still one of the safest developed nations in the world, youth crime has dramatically increased in recent years.

The number of children under 14 committing serious crimes in 2003 rose to 212, a 47% increase on the previous year.

Mitarai's killer, who is too young to be punished under the Penal Code, has been transferred to juvenile detention while her case goes before a family court, the Associated Press said.

China censors online video games

The WW2 strategy game Hearts of Iron distorts facts says China
China is tightening controls on online video games.
It has set up a censorship committee to monitor games following the banning of a Swedish game called Hearts of Iron, which portrayed Manchuria, Tibet and Xinjiang as independent nations.

A previous Norwegian game, Project IGI2: Covert Strike, incensed officials for its portrayal of the Chinese army.

The committee is charged with banning content that "could threaten national unity", said the state press.

Future imports

"Online games with content threatening state security, damaging the nation's glory, disturbing social order and infringing on other's legitimate rights will also be prohibited," said a Chinese Ministry of Culture statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency.

The Ministry of Culture will import some foreign online games whose contents accord with Chinese national conditions and bring positive effects to young people's mentality

Tuo Zuhai, Ministry of Culture
In future only the disks of online games that are authorised by the Ministry of Culture can be imported.

Games currently in China must be examined by the committee before 1 September or the game operators will face punishment the statement said.

Members of the screening committee include teachers, university scholars, foreign affairs officials, information industry engineers and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Sex and violence

There are in excess of 140 online games in Chinese markets at the current time, with more than 80% of those foreign.

IGI2: Covert Strike angered Chinese officials
There are concerns among Chinese officials that the contents of such games are too often related to sex, violence and superstition.

Such content could adversely affect young people's mental health, said Tuo Zuhai, an official with the Ministry of Culture.

"The Ministry of Culture will import some foreign online games whose contents accord with Chinese national conditions and bring positive effects to young people's mentality," he said.

Ashcroft, Snoops and Gag Orders

Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying information that will allow the government to target people who are plotting terrorism or who are otherwise potentially dangerous to national security. I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in our computers.

The same mechanism of NSLs is used to obtain information from librarians, health care providers, and business records of individuals and entities. The party from whom the government demands information is forbidden from telling the client that the FBI is being provided information. And the target of the investigation won't know about it until or if he or she is arrested for crime or detained without a charge (say, as a material witness).

Until now, we did not know much about how the government goes about this procedure. Now we do. Thanks to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York in behalf of an unnamed ISP. The government has tried mightily to keep the entire suit under seal, but the federal judge has allowed the ACLU to release some information about the case.

Following is a report on the case, with some interesting heretofore unknown details. Never has the ACLU needed your financial support more. Clearly, it is the only thing standing between us and our fascist government. Read the briefs and supporting documents in the case.

"The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) yesterday released more information about the heavily censored legal challenge it is bringing against the government's use of a controversial provision of the USA PATRIOT Act that allows the FBI to obtain from businesses sensitive personal information about their clients. Among the documents unsealed today is a declaration by the ACLU's anonymous client in the case, the president and sole employee of an unnamed Internet Service Provider (ISP), referred to only as "John Doe." John Doe is prohibited by law from revealing his identity to the public, even as he confronts the federal government over the very section of the Patriot Act that forces him to remain anonymous.

In his statement, Doe explains that his business provides access to the Internet, email accounts and space on the Web where people can post their own sites or store electronic files. He says some of his clients "are individuals and political associations that engage in controversial political speech," and that some "communicate anonymously or pseudonymously," which allows them "to discuss embarrassing, sensitive or controversial subjects without fear of retaliation or reprisal."

Doe and the ACLU are asking the court to deem unconstitutional the government's use of National Security Letters (NSLs), which allow FBI agents to demand, with no judicial oversight, personal information about clients of Internet Service Providers.

"I believe that the government may be abusing its power by targeting people with unpopular views," Doe writes. "I am challenging the constitutionality of the NSL provision in an effort to protect all of my clients' interests."

In a memorandum to the court, the ACLU wrote that the statute allowing the broad use of National Security Letters gives the FBI "unchecked authority" to require businesses to reveal "a broad array of sensitive information, including information about the First Amendment activities of ordinary Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing."

The memorandum continues: "The statute does not require the FBI to seek judicial authorization before demanding the disclosure of sensitive information, and it does not specify any means by which a person served with an NSL can challenge the NSLs validity before complying with it. In other words, the FBI issues NSLs without judicial oversight of any kind."

ACLU lawyers and their client are also disputing a section of the law that prohibits an entity that receives a National Security Letter request for information from telling anyone about the request. Ironically, this gag order is the same rule that prohibits the ACLU and John Doe from talking about many aspects of their case.

The ACLU challenge of the National Security Letters and the gag rule has been wrapped in secrecy since it was filed in early April this year. The civil liberties organization has been locked in constant disagreements with the government over how much can be revealed about the case. The group was not even allowed to announce the existence of the suit for over two weeks, and even after negotiating the right to publicize the case, has been subject to numerous restrictions on the kinds of information it can disclose.

Numerous words, sentences and entire sections of the documents related to the suit, which are posted on the group's website, remain blacked out.

Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Daniel Bryant defended the gag order last week at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, saying it prevents people from interrupting terrorism investigations. But critics say the secrecy rule is designed to keep the public in the dark about the government's invasion into people's constitutionally protected privacy.

"It is particularly troubling," writes ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero in a statement to the court, "that while the ACLU ... [has] been gagged from discussing the NSL power, President Bush and representatives of the FBI and Justice Department are engaged in a public campaign in support of the Patriot Act. The gag provision silences those who are most likely to oppose the Patriot Act. [We] believe we have the right to inform the public of a great deal of the information the gag is suppressing."

In filings with the court, Both Romero and Doe described the self-censorship they had been forced to engage in when asked by others about the National Security Letters in general or the case in particular.

"The government has now prohibited the disclosure of my name and my company's name in connection with the case," said Doe. "They have provided no further clarification about what I can and cannot say." He says that he has found it difficult to have normal conversations. "[I] used to discuss topics related to politics and current events, but now I feel wary when I communicate ... I have steered clear of numerous topics of conversation as I am afraid.... The gag has put me in a very compromising situation, as I do not want to be dishonest in my communications [words blacked out] but also do not want to violate the gag."

Romero said that not only is the gag order affecting how he and other staff at the ACLU can talk about the case, but it is having an impact on the broader activities of the organization, which has been actively engaged in educating and organizing against the Patriot Act since the law's inception in late 2001.

"[T]he scope of the gag in this case, and the refusal of the government to clarify what is prohibited, is intolerable," he writes. "The gag has severely disrupted our ordinary course of business... More importantly, the public and even members of Congress are denied non-sensitive information essential to public and legislative debate that is at the heart of democratic self-governance."

ACLU battles FBI over ISP customer data

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the FBI?s use of expanded powers to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers.

A lawsuit challenging secret FBI national security letters was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in New York but not made public until Wednesday because of its extraordinary sensitivity.

The FBI can issue national security letters, or NSLs, without a judge?s approval in terrorism and espionage cases. They require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers.

People who receive the letters are prohibited by law from disclosing to anyone that they did so. Because of this legal gag order, the ACLU was forced to reach an agreement with the Justice Department before a heavily edited version of the lawsuit could be unsealed.

?We believe the public has a right to know much more about this lawsuit,? said Ann Beeson, ACLU associate legal director.

Justice Department and FBI officials declined comment on the case.

The lawsuit challenges as unconstitutional one of several types of national security letters used by the FBI in counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations.

The letters in question involve records held by Internet service providers about their clients, including billing information, kinds of merchandise the clients buy online and the e-mail addresses of the clients? associates. The co-plaintiff in the case is identified only as an ?Internet access business,? with other identification blacked out.

Patriot Act loosens rules
The ACLU lawsuit contends that the USA Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law passed shortly after the 2001 terror attacks, expanded the FBI?s power to use national security letters by deleting parts of an earlier law requiring that there be some suspicion that the subject of the probe was linked to spying or terrorism.

?As a result of the Patriot Act, the FBI may now use NSLs to obtain sensitive information about innocent individuals who have no connection to espionage or terrorism,? the lawsuit says.

An FBI guidance document to its field offices acknowledges that the Patriot Act ?greatly broadened? FBI authority to use these letters in relevant investigations. But the document says that FBI supervisors must exercise care in their use, particularly because that part of the Patriot Act is set to expire in 2005 unless renewed by Congress.

?Supervisors should keep this in mind when deciding whether or not a particular use of NSL authority is appropriate,? the FBI document says.

Suit challenges veil of secrecy
The lawsuit contends that NSLs are unconstitutional because of the gag order, because a recipient has no way of challenging their validity and because the government is not forced to justify its reasons for not notifying the target about the records being sought.

The ACLU has also filed a lawsuit challenging another part of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to obtain a variety of records and documents in terrorism and espionage cases by obtaining a warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

President Bush has been pushing Congress to renew all of the Patriot Act before it expires next year, arguing that it is one of law enforcement?s best tools in preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack.

Technology Strains to Find Menace in the Crowd

Face-recognition technology, often touted as a promising tool in the fight against terrorism, earned a bad reputation after it failed miserably in some well-publicized tests for picking faces out of crowds. Yet, on simpler challenges, the technology's performance is improving and business has been growing.

Major casinos now use the technology to spot card counters at blackjack tables. Washington is planning to require the technology in the next generation of American passports. Several states are using face-recognition systems to check for individuals who have obtained multiple driver's licenses by lying about their identity. And Pinellas County, Fla., recently began deploying the system in police cars so officers can check the people they stop against a database of photographs without having to go back to the office.

Face-recognition systems, using cameras and computers to map someone's facial features, collect the data for storage in databases or on a microchip on documents like passports. Making the technology work has required nearly perfect lighting and cooperative subjects, conditions that are not present when trying to spot suspected terrorists and criminals in a crowd.

That kind of application, however, remains a goal. This summer, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will stage a competition, challenging vendors to cut error rates on systems it tested in 2002 by at least 90 percent, with the results to be published next year. The prize for top performers - bragging rights based on impartial tests - is a valuable marketing tool in an industry filled with small companies.

For now, sellers of the technology have to deal with much skepticism. "The companies have not done a good job of positioning it, and as a result the technology has gotten a black eye," said Thomas J. Colatosti, a security consultant who was formerly the chief executive of Viisage, one of the few publicly traded companies in the business.

The most damaging publicity came from tests of face-recognition software and video-surveillance cameras used to spot criminal suspects on the streets of Tampa, Fla., and Virginia Beach. Those programs have not led to a single arrest, but have angered privacy advocates. Another face-recognition system that scanned 100,000 football fans entering the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa picked out 19 people with criminal records, but none were among those being sought by the authorities.

Nonetheless, major integrators of security technology for governments, like the Unisys Corporation, Honeywell International and I.B.M., all support face-recognition technology for some uses. Viisage, based in Billerica, Mass., has seen its stock price double this year, and shares of its major domestic rival, Identix, based in Minnetonka, Minn., have also risen sharply. Viisage closed Friday at $9.81 a share, down 26 cents, or 2.6 percent, on the Nasdaq.

Though the sector remains volatile, some of the strength of those two stocks reflects the success of the companies in diversifying away from dependence on face recognition, said Joel P. Fishbein Jr., who follows security technology for Janney Montgomery Scott, a brokerage firm in Philadelphia that makes a market in the stocks but does not own any of them. Mr. Fishbein added that there is a high percentage of short sellers in the market, who are betting the prices will tumble.

Skepticism has also made it hard for entrepreneurs attempting to break into the field with new innovations.

"It soured the whole market," said Lawrence Schrank, co-founder and chairman of 3DBiometrics, a recent start-up in Boulder, Colo., that is pursuing the use of lasers to map facial structures. Dr. Schrank, a former researcher at Xerox Parc, said that the technology, currently used in medical-imaging equipment, could help the military identify individuals at long distances.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there have been numerous trials of identity-verification technologies at airports. Some trials involved matching volunteers posing as terrorist suspects to file photos of them on a watch list. Others tried to match authorized personnel like flight crews with photo databases.

The biggest problems were the large number of "suspects" and unauthorized people who passed through control points undetected. Critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have also complained that the systems routinely generate a smaller number of "false positives," which mistakenly identify innocent people as suspects.

Analysts and many industry officials say that too much is being expected from the technology, which is still one of the newest methods in biometrics, a field that includes analysis of fingerprints, voices, hand shapes, gait and patterns of the iris.

The total biometrics market this year will reach about $1.2 billion, with face-recognition systems accounting for $144 million, according to projections by the International Biometric Group, a research company in New York. Face-recognition revenues should double next year and climb to more than $800 million by 2008, according to International Biometric.

Advocates of face-recognition technology have long promoted it as one of the least intrusive biometrics, and potentially the most powerful because it can make use of a huge amount of existing data.

"There are 1.2 billion digitized photos of people in databases around the world," the chief executive of Identix, Joseph J. Atick, said.

In the late 1990's, entrepreneurs in the field raced to come up with the best mathematical formula for accurately describing a face and the software for quickly measuring it against databases. Pioneers like Dr. Atick played down the difficulty of getting useful images, contending the systems measured so many variables that they would be hard to deceive.

Experience showed otherwise. Performance plummeted in poor lighting, when subjects moved past control points without staring directly into the cameras and when eyeglasses or other objects covered part of the face. Success rates also declined as the databases of potential matches grew and as the photos used got older.

Government-sponsored testing revealed other unexplained anomalies, like the tendency of the systems to identify men more accurately than women, and Asians more accurately than other races.

Technology sellers are pursing a variety of strategies to improve the results. Some are developing systems that start with three-dimensional images taken by multiple cameras, allowing more varied head angles as a person walks through a checkpoint. Others are developing complex mathematical functions to transform two-dimensional images into three-dimensional models. They are also using software to compensate for poor lighting and to take shadows off a face.

The technical advances are having an impact. Viisage, for example, struggled to achieve a 50 percent recognition rate in tests last year at Boston's Logan International Airport. But Mohamed Lazzouni, the company's chief technology officer, claimed that Viisage's results would improve to better than 90 percent if it repeated the trial with its latest technology, including elements brought in when it acquired ZN Vision Technologies of Germany in January.

Combining face recognition with other biometrics or even nonbiometric security measures could also improve the success rate. Identix hopes to meet the goal set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology by combining a technology for measuring skin texture with its FaceIt feature mapping system, Dr. Atick said.

Last year, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a division of the United Nations, adopted the use of dual biometrics in passport standards. That agency's decision to have face-recognition technology and fingerprints incorporated in all passports has been endorsed by the United States, which recently began laying the groundwork for adding face recognition to fingerprinting in all visa applications.

Those documents will eventually contain microchips recording lasting facial characteristics like the distance between eyes and shape of the jaw. Scanners at check-in counters could then check whether the face of the traveler bearing the document matches the data on the chip.

But the challenge of including the technology in passports is still enormous. The Bush administration told Congress that neither the United States nor any other country could comply with the Oct. 26 deadline Congress had set for all travelers who do not require a visa to enter the United States to have the new biometrically equipped passports.

Most experts say including face data on microchips in passports will take at least another year, and deploying the systems needed to analyze the data at every port of entry could be delayed for years.

Drivers Want Code to Their Cars

Rachel Seymour, a college student from Portland, Oregon, has had her 2002 Kia Spectra serviced 12 times for a Check Engine light problem. Each time, she's forced to take it to a Kia dealership, where a technician hooks her car up to a computer, runs a battery of tests and charges her $120 to diagnose and repair the same problem: a loose gas cap.

Seymour said she has no problem screwing a gas cap into place, and that the light has even come on while she's driving home from getting her car serviced. But the dealership has stubbornly stood by its computer diagnosis, saying the car's sensors are detecting a loose gas cap and triggering the Check Engine light -- a "consumer error" that is not covered under the car's warranty.

Fed up with wasting time and money, Seymour resorted to a low-tech solution to mask the high-tech problem: She covered the warning light with electrical tape so she wouldn't have to look at it.

"There is really no time in my schedule for sitting around a car dealership listening to some fat guy in a clip-on tie tell me that the problem is my fault," she said. "Instead of explaining anything to me they just pull out a warranty sheet with a highlighted portion indicating that they don't cover Check Engine light problems."

A bill floating through Congress could help people like Seymour by forcing automakers to share diagnostic codes with car buyers and independent mechanics. The Motor Vehicle Owners' Right to Repair Act would give Seymour the means to determine whether the Check Engine light signaled another gas cap vagary or a major oil leak. The legislation would also allow Seymour to choose an independent -- and possibly cheaper -- repair shop instead of being forced to go to the dealership.

The legislation argues that consumers own their vehicles in their entirety and should be able to access their onboard computers. Just how the codes would be released to car owners isn't addressed, but possibilities include publishing them on CDs or websites, or requiring carmakers to create indicator lights that would pinpoint problems instead of lumping them together under the generic Check Engine-type warnings, said David Parde, president of the Coalition for Auto Repair Equality, a group representing independent mechanics.

The bill, which was presented in both the House and the Senate, would require the Federal Trade Commission to supervise the data disclosure and to mediate disputes.

Automakers oppose the legislation because they fear it would compel them to release proprietary codes that detail how different automotive components are made. These calibration codes would allow independent parts manufacturers to copy components that cost millions of dollars to develop, they argue.

Carmakers agreed to release the diagnostic codes online in August 2003 in an attempt to pre-empt the legislation, but many manufacturers have not fully cooperated, said Parde.

"We're auditing these sites and there are huge gaps in the data," he said. "The legislation is necessary to make sure they keep their word. Right now, they could just turn all the information off tomorrow."

Charles Territo, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group representing the major carmakers, said the delay is due to the complexity of modern cars.

"Each model contains hundreds of codes," he said. "It's a huge undertaking to take every vehicle and to put every single code on the Internet. As we find gaps, we are filling them in."

Computerized cars came on the market full throttle in 1996 after the passage of the Clean Air Act, which required onboard diagnostic systems to regulate exhaust emissions. Manufacturers quickly expanded cars' computing power to control additional functions ranging from airbag deployment to power steering.

According to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, today's cars have up to 50 microprocessors managing engine performance -- meaning the computing power in the average Toyota Camry is 1,000 times more complex than the system that guided Apollo 11 to the moon.

But carmakers have kept a tight grip on access to automotive computers, forcing consumers to get their vehicles serviced at dealerships when independent repair shops can't access the car's brain.

Historically, non-dealer shops have performed 75 percent of vehicle service and repairs, according to the automakers' own statistics. Independent shops charge that automakers are trying to muscle in on this lucrative business -- which some analysts estimate at $200 billion a year -- by increasing computer functions in cars and restricting the access keys.

Neighborhood garages must pay to download the diagnostic codes from automakers' websites and purchase pricey scanners to communicate with automotive computers. Nevertheless, independent mechanics are frequently forced to turn away longtime clients because so many of the codes are unavailable for late-model cars.

"A lot of these cars say 'code undefined' and require the dealer's scan tool," said Sam Giammalvo, who works at his family shop in New Bedford, Massachusetts. "It upsets independents like me because we're losing service dollars and it makes us look unprofessional in the eyes of our customers."

Ermino Caporole, the owner of P&E Auto in Morton Grove, Illinois, said he has separate scanners for each car model, but still loses 10 percent of his business to dealerships because of the information blackout. On several occasions, he has had to tow a customer's car to a dealership after realizing he couldn't access the codes.

Some weekend wrenches have bought scaled-down versions of the scanners used by auto shops to tinker with their engines. Jay Hamill, a PC technician from Macedon, New York, spent several hundred dollars on a product called AutoXray to perform checkups on his 1994 Ford Bronco, but said the device has saved him money on repairs.

"Knowing the problems that the computer is reporting can help keep you from getting ripped off by a shady mechanic or dealer," he said. "But this does require some automotive knowledge, something that most people just flat-out refuse to learn."

The scanner only lets Hamill decipher trouble codes and clear them. Other tools, such as the Hypertech Power Programmer, let consumers modify their cars' computer settings to increase horsepower and torque.

Bryan Hanks, who has taken his 2002 Toyota Prius to his local Houston dealership four times since a single sensor malfunctioned and the Check Engine signal prevented him from using the car's electronic display, said automakers should incorporate USB ports in dashboards to allow consumers to download error messages to a laptop.

"If this occurs again once the vehicle goes out of warranty, I'm going to have to fork over $90 or so to have the error message reset by the dealer," he said.

DIY DVD censorship causes storm

Imagine a bloodless Gladiator, a sexless When Harry Met Sally, a bowdlerised The Matrix and you've got ClearPlay, which copies DVDs that even the Pope could watch.

In the wake of singer Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," retail giant Wal-Mart launched ClearPlay for US$79 (AU$110), which filters out scenes from more than 100 films, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Terminator 3.

To the cheers of the morally conservative and the jeers of film buffs, for a monthly subscription of US$5 (AU$7), a company based in Salt Lake City, Utah offers nearly 500 film filters, which can be downloaded from the Internet.

Matt Jarman and his brother Lee founded ClearPlay. They now have 11 employees. Jarman said there is no religious message to his work. He only wanted to watch films the whole family could enjoy.

"In the same way that airline or television versions aren't edited for any particular religion, ClearPlay provides filtering options in areas where there are general public sensitivities like graphic violence, strong language and sexually explicit content," Jarman said.

The marketing idea came after Jackson showed her breast to 100 million Americans during the Super Bowl halftime show in February, according to Dave Arland of Thomson, which markets the player under the RCA brand.

"I think there is a market for something that gives parents more control. The issue of indecency on television or films was obviously highlighted by the Super Bowl scandal. This seems to be of heightened interest.

"There are people who have pushed the limit and there are people who want to have that control. "It is also a good tool for parental control. They can screen out, they know what their kids are watching," he said.

However, that is not what the labour union for film directors thinks. It sued Thomson.

The suit was seconded by Disney, MGM, Warner Bros, Sony, DreamWorks, Universal, Fox and Paramount, as well as directors such as Steven Spielberg. They argued that the filters violate their ownership rights.

"ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay's vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned," the Directors Guild of America said in a statement.

"Ultimately, it is a violation of law and just wrong to profit from selling software that changes the intent of movies you didn't create and don't own."

However, the directors of ClearPlay deny that they have changed the film.

"Parents can screen out, it is not a requirement," Arland said.

"ClearPlay offers the tool."

In each case, the options are varied. There are three main categories: violence, explicit scenes and nudity, and language.

Then, there are 14 sub-categories: moderate violence, graphic violence, disturbing images, sensual content, crude sensual content, nudity, explicit sexual situations, vain reference to deity, crude language and humour, ethnic and social slurs, cursing, and strong profanity.

The critics, like USA Today, were harsh.

"Too often the cuts are clunky, eliminating portions of sentences and leaving only dead air, or speeding over objectionable items so they emerge almost as blips," the nationally distributed daily said.

"The awkward presentation could backfire as a way to sanitise mass entertainment and make it palatable for family audiences.

"Plus, the cuts are so obvious they could pique the curiosity of young minds. Sometimes a vivid imagination can be worse than the reality."

However, many in the United States applauded the idea.

"Every negative comment I've heard about ClearPlay included the word censorship," said Carl on KZION, a Mormon Internet radio station.

"How can that be, since no one is forcing the consumer to purchase this item? Despite the proliferation of vulgar speech and graphic sex and violence in movies, there are some of us who want no part of it.

"ClearPlay would allow us to relax and watch a film that we would normally consider off limits. "Would I buy a ClearPlay DVD player? Yes!!!"

< I guess artistic integrity means nothing anymore, and since the creators don't control the content, we can throw copyright right out the window too... What about all the kids who have to watch movies that make no screeech sense without a choice? Are they not hurt? Not to mention the obvious future implications of course... >

Can Prints Lie? Yes, Man Finds to His Dismay

In front of the immigration judge, the tall, muscular man began to weep. No, he had patiently tried to explain, he was not Leo Rosario, a drug dealer and a prime candidate for deportation.

He was telling the truth. He was Rene Ramon Sanchez, an auto-body worker and merengue singer from the Bronx who bore not even a passing resemblance to Mr. Rosario, a complete stranger 12 years his junior and a half-foot shorter.

"Why don't you get his photo then?" Mr. Sanchez cried out in Spanish, pounding a fist into his palm. "And compare my fingerprints with his?"

The judge, Alan L. Page, had been told the prints were the same. "The general rule is, the prints don't lie," Judge Page had said earlier. "If you got the same prints that Leo Rosario has, you're Leo Rosario. And there's nothing I can do about it."

So Mr. Sanchez, in late 2000, was sent back for another week in a grim detention center in Lower Manhattan, severed from his family and livelihood, because his fingerprints had been mistakenly placed on the official record of another man.

Remarkably, this was not the first time Mr. Sanchez had paid for that mistake. He had been arrested three times for Mr. Rosario's crimes, and ultimately spent a total of two months in custody and was threatened with deportation before the mistake was traced and resolved in 2002.

Mr. Sanchez's ordeal, unearthed from court records and interviews, amounts to a strange, sometimes absurd odyssey through a criminal justice system that made a single error and then compounded it time and again by failing to correct it.

The limits of fingerprint evidence have been much in the news. An Oregon lawyer jailed as a material witness in the Madrid train bombings was freed this month after the F.B.I. said it had mistakenly matched his prints with others found near the scene of the attacks.

Mr. Sanchez's case, if less dire or public, is no less chilling a lesson in how easily a person's identity can be smudged in this era of shared databases, and how long it can take to cleanse it ? particularly if, like Mr. Sanchez, he speaks little English and has a minor police record of his own.

Over the two years in which his fate was tied to a man he had never met, the authorities repeatedly discovered the crossed identities and freed him. But until his lawyer filed notice that he intended to sue the state, no one tracked down and fixed the root problem: the faulty fingerprints in the state's vast criminal justice files.

At the immigration hearing in late 2000, Judge Page acknowledged the possibility, however slight, that an error had been made.

"Unfortunately, this type of problem you can't unsolve ? you can't undo ? in two minutes," he told Mr. Sanchez. "If it's a mistake," he added, "it's a terrible mistake."

The first mistake was made by Mr. Sanchez, a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic. On July 15, 1995, he was pulled over in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and charged with driving while intoxicated.

But what happened next ? as laid out in court records and in an affidavit by William J. Sillery, the state criminal justice official who helped untangle the mess in 2002 ? was a monumental piece of bad luck, and bad timing.

When the police fingerprinted Mr. Sanchez, then 33, they wrongly placed the prints on a card that bore the name, Social Security number and other data for Leo Rosario, a 21-year-old Manhattan man who had been arrested the night before on charges that he had sold a bag of cocaine to a police informer, Mr. Sillery wrote. The police then mailed the card to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, where Mr. Sillery was director of the office of operations.

Police departments across the state typically fax fingerprints to Albany after an arrest. But the faxed prints are often replaced with clearer copies that are mailed in later. "In this case, therefore, Rosario's actual fingerprints were replaced in our base files with Sanchez's fingerprints," Mr. Sillery wrote. (Spokesmen for his department, the police and immigration authorities declined to comment on the case, citing the lawsuit Mr. Sanchez has filed against each of them. The lawsuit, still pending, charges false arrest and imprisonment and deprivation of his constitutional rights.)

The errant fingerprint card lay dormant in the files for the next three years, as Mr. Sanchez went back to his life repairing cars, singing part time and visiting his two young daughters. The D.W.I. case was dismissed, said Andres M. Aranda, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Sanchez.

But in August 1998, Mr. Sanchez was stopped again by police officers, who said he had been swerving from lane to lane on Amsterdam Avenue in upper Manhattan. He admitted that he had drunk four beers, the police noted, and he apologized.

He was charged with D.W.I. and jailed for four days before being led into State Supreme Court in Manhattan, where the clerk announced his case as "Calendar No. 45, Leo Rosario."

Apparently a new set of prints taken from Mr. Sanchez matched those on Mr. Rosario's card in the files. Since his cocaine arrest, Mr. Rosario had pleaded guilty to an attempted drug sale, then violated his probation by disappearing, said a spokesman for the city Department of Probation. A warrant had been issued for his arrest.

"What's your name?" Justice Bonnie G. Wittner asked the man in front of her, according to the court transcript.

"Rene Sanchez," he replied.

"This is supposed to be Leo Rosario," the judge said.

Mr. Sanchez said through an interpreter that he was not Mr. Rosario.

"Who is this person here?" the judge asked.

As she tried to get that question answered, Mr. Sanchez seemed uncannily prescient about the real problem. "Get my prints," he said. "Maybe there was a mistake with my hands."

New prints were ordered, as they would be again over the next two years, but because of the earlier mix-up, they would always match the ones in Mr. Rosario's file.

This day, however, a court probation officer, Vera Thompson, checked a mug shot of Mr. Rosario, and said it did not match the man in court. Justice Wittner released him.

Even though the D.W.I. charges were ultimately dropped, the warrant for Mr. Rosario remained in place. It tripped up Mr. Sanchez again a year or so later, he says, when he was stopped for a defective taillight. An officer ran his license; he was handcuffed and taken into custody. It appears that by then Mr. Sanchez's name was linked to Mr. Rosario's in law enforcement computers as if it were an alias, leading the authorities to Mr. Rosario's warrant.

"I thought this was not possible, that the problem had been solved by the judge," Mr. Sanchez said. He said he was released after several hours after it was determined he was not Mr. Rosario.

His next brush with the law would not be so brief. On Oct. 11, 2000, returning from a visit to relatives in the Dominican Republic, he was taken into custody by an officer in the baggage-claim area at Kennedy International Airport and was told there was a warrant for his arrest under the name of Leo Rosario. Apparently, as he had passed through a checkpoint, his name had again snagged him.

The next day, he went before Justice Wittner, who appears not to have recognized him from his case two years earlier. She fended off his urgent pleas to be heard, saying she would hear him a day later, when his lawyer could be summoned.

It is unclear why, but no lawyer appeared the following day, and as Mr. Sanchez stood alone in court, the confusion grew. A court probation officer told the judge that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had made a formal request that Mr. Rosario be held for deportation proceedings.

Hearing that, Justice Wittner said she would end Mr. Rosario's probation and hand him over to the immigration service. "He'll have to face whatever charges he is facing," she said.

Mr. Sanchez, beyond astonishment, asked, "What case?" He said he was not aware he had any immigration problems.

"I don't know," the judge said, adding later: "I'm not an immigration judge. I have terminated your probation. I don't know about your other problems."

"Please, permit me to speak," Mr. Sanchez said in exasperation. "Please. Please, Miss."

"I can't help you, sir," she concluded.

Mr. Sanchez was held for about a week at a jail in Lower Manhattan, then moved to an immigration detention center on Varick Street, where he lived with scores of other detainees. When the guards called him Rosario, he answered, "My name is Sanchez." He felt abandoned and afraid.

"I was very confused, actually, because I thought, `There's so much intelligence in this country ? why is this happening to me?' " he recalled.

More than a month after he was stopped at the airport, Mr. Sanchez was finally taken before the immigration judge, Alan Page, who explained that the government wanted to deport him. "They claim that back in 1996 you were convicted of attempted criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree," Judge Page said, according to recordings of the hearings that were obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr. Sanchez, who again had no lawyer beside him, denied that. "I always work, pay taxes," he said at one point.

"You sure you got the right guy?" the judge asked the immigration service lawyer, Anne Gannon, who said she would "have them run the prints again."

"You better do something," the judge said, adding later, "A.S.A.P. ? maybe you got the wrong guy."

Settling that matter would take four more hearings and another month in jail for Mr. Sanchez. He ate little, his 185 pounds dropping to 165, and his hair began to fall out, he said.

At the next hearing, his lawyer, Peter Koenig, was there but the immigration service was missing a crucial file. At the third hearing, on Dec. 7, 2000, the judge said that a new comparison of the fingerprints had been made, and that the government believed "they're one and the same."

"Nobody has ever been able to prove that there are two people out there with the same exact set of prints," Judge Page said. "And they were using fingerprinting, I think, for approximately the last 100 years, or more."

He added: "He's Leo Rosario. There's no other conclusion I can reach."

But a week later, at the hearing where Mr. Sanchez broke into tears, some progress was made: His lawyer indicated that he was trying to obtain a transcript of the 1998 hearing in which Justice Wittner had released Mr. Sanchez.

A few days before Christmas, after someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service had gone to the police and seen Mr. Rosario's photo, Mr. Sanchez was released.

At a hearing a month later, which Mr. Sanchez did not attend, Judge Page remarked, "This is one of those odd situations."

So Mr. Sanchez was not Mr. Rosario, after all? the judge asked an immigration lawyer. "Two completely different people? No way you would mistake them?"

"No, there's not," the lawyer replied.

It is not clear who directed Mr. Sillery, the state official, to investigate two years later, after Mr. Sanchez's lawyer, Irving Cohen, filed a claim with the state that he would sue. But Mr. Sillery wrote in his affidavit that the two men's fingerprint records had been corrected.

Mr. Sanchez, now 42, says he has never received any apology from the authorities, but has had no more problems with them. Before he left on another trip to the Dominican Republic last fall, Mr. Cohen wrote a letter for him to show anyone who mistook him for Leo Rosario, explaining the mix-up.

Mr. Rosario's whereabouts are unknown, but he may not be entirely gone from Mr. Sanchez's life. This month, Mr. Cohen and the other lawyer, Mr. Aranda, went to court seeking Mr. Sanchez's case files. A clerk began searching in the computer, Mr. Aranda recalled, but seemed confused by what came up.

"Are you looking for Mr. Sanchez," she asked, "or Mr. Rosario?"

U.S. Lawmaker Seeks Hearings on Cellphone Directory

WASHINGTON ? Citing unanswered privacy questions about a controversial directory being developed by the mobile phone industry, Rep. Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) on Thursday called for congressional hearings into the matter.

The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Assn. is assembling a cellphone directory that would list as many as 75% of the nation's 163 million mobile phone users. Privacy advocates worry that the directory will make mobile phone users vulnerable to telemarketers and e-mail spam.

One carrier, Verizon Wireless, has refused to participate in the project.

"We've heard a lot of promises about this database," Pitts said. "Seems to me like there are a lot of unanswered questions about whether carriers retain the right to list users without their knowledge or permission."

Pitts added: "I think it's time we got some definitive answers to questions about how a central database listing of wireless numbers will impact the privacy of wireless users."

The industry group's spokesman, Travis Larson, said the hearings were unnecessary because "in this highly competitive marketplace, carriers have a simple choice: protect and value consumers or lose them to a competitor."

The organization has said the directory will be voluntary. And in a letter sent to Pitts last year, the group said "the privacy and integrity of the master database is of great importance to wireless carriers."

The telecommunications association added that "fears that telemarketers will abuse the wireless ? database are groundless" because the federal do-not-call registry allows customers to make their numbers off-limits to sales calls.

It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It

THE day was April 2, 2003, the town was Najaf, the mood was giddy, and, yes, the citizens did greet the American liberators from the 101st Airborne Division with cheers. One Iraqi was asked what he hoped the Americans would bring, and Jim Dwyer reported the answer on the front page of The New York Times: " `Democracy,' the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. `Whiskey. And sexy!' "

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

This joyous memory came rushing back after the grim revelation of yet another kink in the torture regime at Abu Ghraib. As if sexual humiliation and violent abuse weren't punishment enough, the guards also made prisoners violate Islamic practice by force-feeding them booze.

How do we square the tales of American cruelty with the promise of democracy we thought we were bringing to Iraq? One obvious way might be to acknowledge with some humility that our often proud history has always had a fault line, running from slavery to Wounded Knee to My Lai. (Read accounts of Andersonville, the Confederate-run Civil War prison at which some 13,000 died, for literal echoes of some of Abu Ghraib's inhumanity.) But there's an easier way out in 2004: blame Janet Jackson for what's gone wrong in Iraq, or if not her, then Jenna Jameson.

It sounds laughable, but it's not a joke. Some of our self-appointed moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu Ghraib as another front in America's election-year culture war. Charles Colson, the Watergate felon turned celebrity preacher, told a group of pastors convened by the Family Research Council that the prison guards had been corrupted by "a steady diet of MTV and pornography." The Concerned Women for America site posted a screed by Robert Knight, of the Culture and Family Institute, calling the Abu Ghraib scandal the " `Perfect Storm' of American cultural depravity," in which porn, especially gay porn, gave soldiers "the idea to engage in sadomasochistic activity and to videotape it in voyeuristic fashion." (His chosen prophylactics to avert future Abu Ghraibs include abolishing sex education, outlawing same-sex marriage and banishing Howard Stern.) The vice president of the Heritage Foundation, Rebecca Hagelin, found a link between the prison scandal and how "our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13."

Some of these same characters also felt that the media shouldn't show the Abu Ghraib pictures too much or at all ? as if the pictures were the problem rather than what they reveal. They are of an ideological piece with Jerry Falwell, who, a mere two days after 9/11, tried to shift the blame for al Qaeda's attack to the "pagans" and abortionists and gays and lesbians who have "tried to secularize America."

This time the point of these scolds' political strategy ? and it is a political strategy, despite some of its adherents' quasireligiosity ? is clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue's gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill but to clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a "few bad apples" in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or "Mean Girls," or maybe "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."

The hypocrisy of those pushing this line knows few bounds. They choose to ignore the reality that the most popular images of sadomasochism in American pop culture this year have been those in "The Passion of the Christ," an R-rated "religious" movie that many Americans took their children to see, at times with clerical blessings. Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.

The other hypocrisy of the blame-the-culture crowd is that "normal Americans" ? a phrase favored by Mr. Knight ? don't partake of the "secular" entertainment that is doing all this damage. In other words, the porn that led to prison abuse is all ghettoized in the blue states. The facts say otherwise. Phil Harvey, the president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country's largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last week that his business has "for years" been roughly the same per capita throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer sex toys and porn videos than everyone else. Even residents of the Cincinnati metropolitan area ? home to Citizens for Community Values and famous for antismut battles over Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe ? turned out to be slightly larger-than-average users of porn Web sites, according to a 2001 Nielsen Internet survey.

Americans, regardless of location or political affiliation, have always consumed a culture of sex and violence. David Milch's explicit HBO recollection of the cruelty and carnality that accompanied our "winning" of the west, "Deadwood," is hardly fiction. As Luc Sante and Susan Sontag have pointed out, the photographs from Abu Ghraib themselves have a nearly exact historical antecedent in those touristy snapshots of shameless Americans posing underneath the victims of lynchings for decades after the Civil War. The horrific photos were sent around as postcards in the same insouciant spirit that moved Abu Ghraib guards to e-mail their torture pictures or turn them into screensavers ? even though the reigning mass-culture pin-ups of the time were Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple rather than Janet Jackson or Britney Spears.

To blame every American transgression on the culture, whether the transgression is as grievous as Abu Ghraib or the shootings at Columbine or as trivial as lubricious teenage fashions, is to absolve Americans of any responsibility for anything. It used to be that liberals pinned all American sins on the military-industrial complex; now it's conservatives who pin them all on the Viacom-Time Warner complex. It used to be liberals that found criminals victims of "root causes"; now it's conservatives who find criminals victims of X-rated causes. Since it's conservatives who are now in power, we've reached the absurd state where we have an attorney general who arrived in Washington placing a higher priority on stamping out porn than terrorism; we have a Federal Communications Commission that is ready to sacrifice a bedrock American value (the First Amendment) to the cause of spanking Bono for using a four-letter word on TV. As Congress threatens to police cable TV as well, we face the prospect that the history in "Deadwood" may yet be airbrushed by the government until it resembles "Little Women."

All of this is at odds with one of President Bush's most persistent campaign themes. He has repeatedly vowed to introduce "a culture of responsibility in America" in which "each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life." Up to a point. Now he talks about how the Abu Ghraib pictures are not "the America I know." (Maybe he should get out more.) If he really practiced "a culture of responsibility" he would take responsibility for his own government's actions rather than plead ignorance and express dismay. He might, for instance, explain how his own White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, came to write a January 2002 memo that labeled the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete" for dealing with prisoners in the war on terrorism (of which Iraq, we're told, is a part). The dissemination of that memo's legal wisdom through the Defense Department and the military command over the past 26 months may tell us more about what led to Abu Ghraib than anything else we've heard so far from the administration, let alone any Heritage Foundation press release that finds the genesis of torture in the sexual innuendos of prime-time television.

In his speech last Monday night, the president, reeling in the polls and seeking a life raft, seemed to be well on his way to adopting the cultural defense being pushed by his political allies. He called Abu Ghraib a symbol of "death and torture" under Saddam Hussein and then said that the same prison also "became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops." The idea, it seemed, was to concede American fallibility, if not exactly error. But by reducing the charge to "disgraceful conduct," he was performing a verbal sleight-of-hand that acquitted those troops of torture and found them guilty instead of the lesser crime of pornographic horseplay. (He was also trying to confine culpability to a "few" troops.) Perhaps he hopes that we will believe that what happened at Abu Ghraib is the work of just a handful of porn-addled freaks, and that by razing the prison we can shut the whole incident down the way Rudy Giuliani banished the sex emporiums of Times Square.

But it's hard to imagine that any of this will fool that man in Najaf who had hoped we'd replace the terror of Saddam with that elixir he rightly called democracy. Whatever else America may represent ? whiskey and sexy included ? it stands most of all for the rule of law. We won't bring democracy to Iraq until those of high rank and low alike submit to an all-American prosecution for crimes that clearly extend well beyond the perimeters of pornographic pictures that, in the end, are merely the evidence.

< People taking justice into their own hands when they have no concept of justice is the obvious result of a system whereby everyonte "in" with the current government/status quo is seen as good no matter what (like any given soldier for instance). Not respecting other people's cultures and not respecting due process (ie innocent until proven guilty) are specifically taught. Not by the military but by our whole society and the military fails just as much by not trying to UNteach it in places where it's so vastly important. These particular soldiers need to be severely un-brainwashed (or shot in the back of the head) but the problem goes far beyond them. It's the prevailing attitude of our society. Most people just turn their heads and say "oh well, if they hadn't been trying to shoot us they wouldn't be in that position anyway" or some other totally unrelated bullshit. The Entire System is the problem. Help us solve it. >

'Smart bullet' reports back wirelessly

A "smart bullet" that can be fired at a target and then wirelessly transmit back useful information has been developed by US researchers.

The projectile, created at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, is 1.7 centimetres in diameter can be fired at from an ordinary paint-ball gun. The front is coated in an adhesive polymer that sticks it to the target.

Inside, the elongated projectile holds a sensor, a tiny wireless transmitter and a battery. This enables it to report back its findings to a laptop or handheld computer up to 70 metres away. It can also reusable, because compressed gas within the gun provides the propulsion.

The prototype developed by the researchers was fitted with an accelerometer. To test it, the students fired it at a target which was then shaken to activate the accelerometer and produce data for transmission.

But the US firm Lockheed Martin, which provided funding for the project, is interested in developing a version containing a miniature sensor capable of detecting traces of the explosive TNT.

Stand back

"If you had a good chemical sensor on this projectile, you could fire it into the trash, stand back and determine whether it could detect TNT leaking out," says Leslie Kramer, director of engineering for the Lockheed Martin subsidiary Missiles and Fire Control.

Loc Vu-Quoc, one of the university team, says the potential advantage of the system is that "you'd be able to stand far away from the target". He says other researchers are already working on miniaturising TNT detection

However Colin King, editor of the British defence industry magazine Jane's Explosives Ordinance Disposal says this goal may be unrealistic. "Methods for detecting traces of explosives require a lot of equipment," he told New Scientist. "I can't think of a sensible way it could work."

The smallest explosive vapour detectors currently available are handheld. King also warns that firing a projectile at a potential explosive goes against bomb disposal guidelines.

Nevertheless, King believes the projectile sensor might still be useful. "It sounds like there could be better applications in counter-surveillance," he suggests.

< Let's see... "this would be good for bomb detection" + "you can't use this for bomb detection" = say goodbye to your privacy >

Printing Problems: The inexact science of fingerprint analysis.

The release and exoneration this month of Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Ore., lawyer arrested in connection with the Spanish train bombings, raises important questions about the nature of scientific evidence. Mayfield, a 37-year-old lawyer, ex military officer, and convert to Islam, was jailed for two weeks after the FBI discovered his fingerprint on a bag of detonators recovered after the deadly Madrid bombing that killed 191 people in March. Mayfield, it was also quickly disclosed, represented a defendant in a child custody case who was linked to terrorism. After matching the print and reviewing the evidence, special agent Richard Werder swore out an affidavit and used it to get a material-witness warrant. Mayfield was quickly arrested and sent to jail. More quick and aggressive police work in a terrorism case, keeping the homeland secure.

Except for the part about how the fingerprint wasn't Mayfield's at all.

In the affidavit, Werder was unequivocal about whose fingerprint was on the bag?it was Mayfield's. "The FBI lab stands by their conclusion of a 100 percent positive identification," was the way the print match was described. They may have been 100 percent positive, but they were also 100 percent wrong. This sort of forensic puffery, usually practiced by government experts or agents, is both commonplace and deadly. Botched forensics, whether they result from oversight, sloppiness, ego (i.e., Martha Stewart's perjurious ink examiner), or malice can easily sink an innocent defendant who might be ill-equipped and sometimes unable to unscramble the convincing, if false, forensic hash cooked up by the government. And with fingerprint evidence, often elevated to "smoking gun" status by our culture and our courts, the chance for serious mischief is greatly increased.

In the Mayfield case, of course, the government did manage to correct its own error; small solace to Mayfield, who spent two weeks incarcerated as a witness to a crime he knew nothing about. The confusion, said Robert Jordan, the FBI agent in charge of Oregon, resulted from analyzing an image of substandard quality. Now Mayfield's case has a number of disturbing aspects to it, the arrest-first-ask-questions-later approach to the war on terror not alone among them. But one of the most frightening consequences of the Mayfield incident is the bureau's attempt to explain away Mayfield's total misidentification by blaming it on a bad digital print. The reality is that it's not the print that's bad, it's the science.

Clearly the digital image analyzed by the FBI wasn't so awful that they sought to see the original?they seemed to have passed up that opportunity when they were meeting with Spanish investigators in Madrid on April 21. Nor was the print so weathered that it couldn't be matched at all. And it didn't degrade in transmission, either. The FBI already has complex standards for electronic fingerprint transmission, which include things like geometric image accuracy and modulation transfer function standards*. No one suggested that there was a degraded print problem in the affidavit supporting the warrant. On the contrary, the FBI ran the print, matched it to Mayfield, claimed total certainty, and set about getting him into custody.

The use of digital prints isn't at all unusual. The FBI has already admitted that they regularly use digital images of fingerprints, and that, in this case "it was absolutely acceptable to examine a digital image." Ultimately, as I predict the FBI's internal investigation will conclude, the use of the digital print will turn out to have been just fine. So, what was the real fingerprinting problem, and why doesn't the FBI want to address it?

For generations, and until DNA came along, fingerprint evidence has been touted as the ultimate forensic tool. So unique and special are our fingerprints that DNA itself is often described as a "genetic fingerprint." And that essential truth remains. Done correctly, fingerprint analysis can be a powerful forensic tool of identification. The problem is that there aren't universal standards for what "done correctly" means. The supposed science of fingerprints is more like an elaborate boys club of certified examiners who decide?subjectively and not always consistently?what constitutes a match. This absence of basic uniform standards is the dirty little secret of Mayfield's fingerprint problem.

Fingerprint matches are made on the basis of what's known as "points of comparison," as a quick look at your thumb will demonstrate. What you will see are the friction ridges that comprise your unique fingerprint. The friction ridges whirl and spit, creating unique patterns that ultimately become the biometric data every burglar loves to hate. Comparing prints is a matter of looking for places where the ridges join or split?something that can be compared between prints. These points of comparison are used to both exclude prints (prove they are not the same) and to match prints. The problem is this: Print examiners and even the computers that do the preliminary scans don't actually match the entire print. In deciding if a print matches they almost always decide on the basis of a partial analysis.

Running a fingerprint against the massive database that contains all of the fingerprints from all of the people arrested all across America is a daunting technological task. It is accomplished by the feds with a system they call IAFIS?the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAIFIS does the heavy lifting of initially comparing a latent print against the vast database. When IAFIS finds what it considers a match, it spits it out, and a human (more often several) takes over.

In his 1892 book, aptly titled Finger Prints, Sir Francis Galton described a method of comparing points of similarity that is still used today. Indeed, despite high-tech labs and CSI:Miami, the process of fingerprint comparison at the human level hasn't advanced much since Galton's day. It still involves magnifying glasses and lots and lots of patience. Examiners comb over two prints, stripped of any identifying information, in order to find and highlight points of comparison. It is generally understood that there are between 35 and 50 points on a typical finger. How many constitute a match? The rather unscientific answer is, it depends. Some police departments require 10, others 12, some are satisfied with eight. This lack of uniformity can mean that one agency (the FBI, say) may declare a print match while another (the Spanish National Police, say) says no. Ultimately, as Simon Cole, the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification explains?and the FBI acknowledges?the decision to declare a match is a subjective one, based on the totality of the circumstances and the examiner's knowledge and experience.

Those subjective decisions mean that that the government can profess certainty and still be dead wrong. Without agreement on essential baseline standards, fingerprinting will remain a practice rather than a science. Make no mistake about it, fingerprints are valuable forensic evidence, based on unique biometric data. But when the evaluation of that data rests on a because-I said-so analysis, the door is wide open for injustice. And as Brandon Mayfield's case amply demonstrates, taking the government's say-so as definitive simply isn't enough. And when psudeoscience is turned loose in the context of the war on terror, the results may well terrify.