Excessive Surveillance Helps Criminals

by Lindsay Beyerstein

The attacks of 9/11 accelerated an alarming trend towards continual surveillance of ordinary people. Citizens were promised security in exchange for privacy. In fact the surveillance industrial complex is depriving them of both, and wasting their tax dollars to boot.

In today's Guardian, tech writer Cory Doctorow examines the technical side of information overload:

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It's better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow's weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don't get tomorrow's forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you'll get so much information that you'll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

California Pushes Back on DNA Testing

By David Ewing Duncan

Is reading someone's genetic code the same thing as practicing medicine? That issue has always loomed over the nascent direct-to-consumer genetic-testing industry, which includes such well-known names as 23andme, Navigenics, and DeCodeMe.

It has become very real now that California public-health officials have ordered 13 online companies to immediately stop offering their services in that state.

The companies offer genetic tests that look for DNA mutations associated with a higher risk of developing heart trouble, dementia, or other maladies. Some critics have said that the science behind some of these tests is relatively new and may be incomplete.

Others say the tests are dangerous because they can identify risk factors for some conditions that have no treatment, such as Alzheimer's disease.

The California Department of Public Health contends the services violate medical-testing rules that require a physician's involvement and proof that tests produce a valid medical result.

The real issue, however, may be as much about turf and how society will react to this new technology as patient safety.

Companies offering the tests have made a point of sidestepping doctors, insisting that consumers have a right to know the information coded in their genes. They also have said that the results they deliver are informational, not diagnostic.

Bypassing traditional medical outlets is an important issue for these companies, since much of the medical establishment hasn't yet embraced widespread genetic testing. Traditional health-care providers tend to be skeptical of the usefulness of the results.

That skepticism would not bode well for a business model that depends on them to be the gatekeepers for ordering these tests. Requiring a doctor's approval also seems overly paternalistic to many believers of the Web 2.0 ethos of free access to personal information.

In the past, the state public-health department has laid out five criteria for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies:

• Is there a California licensed physician involved?

• Are tests being authorized by a California licensed physician?

• Does testing include pre- and post-test counseling?

• Are tests being conducted at CLIA Certified [federally approved] labs?

• Are the tests validated?

The answers to these questions vary by company, and some of the questions are being debated as to exactly what they mean.

All three of the biggest providers—23andme, Navigenics, and DeCodeMe—conduct their tests in labs that have been federally certified, for instance, but do not offer counseling. One, Navigenics, says it uses doctors to process orders.

The question of what is meant by a "validated" test is also open to debate. The tests are all "valid" in that they usually provide accurate information about one's genetic makeup—that is, whether one has a particular base (adenine, cytosine, guanine, or thymine) at a particular spot in their genetic code.

But most of the tests have not yet been through rigorous testing with human trials to confirm their accuracy and validity as predictors of risk factors for disease.

California's move comes several weeks after its health department said it was investigating consumer complaints against online-testing sites. Karen Nickel, chief of laboratory field services for the California Department of Health, recently told Forbes: "The tests have not been validated for clinical utility and accuracy, and they are scaring a lot of people to death."

New York State has also written to several online genetic-testing firms warning them they are not in compliance with similar laws in that state. The companies have suspended operations there as they hold discussions with authorities.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services plans to hold hearings in Washington next month to investigate online genetic testing. The hearings could lead to federal regulations.

As society sorts through the promise of this technology, doctors, hospitals, and other powerful economic and political stakeholders are likely to join the debate. Public-health bureaucracies also will continue to weigh in if they feel that these tests are a danger to the public.

Eventually, the stakeholders will come together, as they should, to forge a new mandate. What exactly this new DNA regime will look like will depend on all parties working together to insure what I believe should be three criteria for genome-wide genetic testing:

• Individuals have freedom of access to their personal genetic data.

• A system of trials and approvals be implemented that insure the validity of genetic tests and risk factors.

• Doctors and other experts have a vital role in the analysis of disease-oriented information and should use it as part of an overall diagnosis for a patient's health.

Balance is the key here, as in so many debates about markets. Overregulation can squelch innovation; under-regulation may lead to commercial abuse, consumer confusion, and distrust of these tests.

Scientists Link Brain Symmetry, Sexual Orientation

By Alexis Madriga

A scientist with a brain scanner could figure out your sexual orientation based on the symmetry of your brain, new research from the Stockholm Brain Institute hints.

The findings support the notion that biological factors help determine sexual orientation and leave a specific neuroanatomical signature.

Using MRI scans of gay and straight men and women, the researchers found that people who liked women -- heterosexual men and homosexual women -- had larger right brain hemispheres, while people who liked men -- heterosexual women and homosexual men -- had symmetrical brains. As seen in the image, MRI and PET scans showed a similar pattern in two specific regions of the brain, the right and left amygdalas, which are thought to control fight-or-flight reactions.

"The results cannot be primarily ascribed to learned effects, and they suggest a linkage to neurobiological entities," the researchers, led by Ivanka Savic, write in a paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tomorrow.

Scientists have long tried to determine if sexual orientation is biologically determined, and if so, how. This research has been contentious in and outside the gay community. At stake is whether homosexuality is a choice or biologically inevitable. The groundbreaking work in the field of biological difference came from Simon LeVay, a self-identified gay neuroscientist, who found similarities in the brains of straight women and gay men in the early 90s. LeVay has his detractors, but recent studies seem to back his early research.

Pink News, billed as Europe's largest gay news service, cut straight to the chase about the implications of recent studies that have found measurable differences in the biology of men and women with different sexual orientations.

"These studies imply that the brains of the gay men have functional similarities to those of a straight woman, and that homosexuality is not of a moral choice, but one of biological substrate," wrote Jane Rochstad Lim.

While the research is suggestive, it does not address how such brain differences come to be, although the researchers noted that there could be genetic, environmental and/or sex hormonal factors.

This Land Is Their Land: How the Rich Confiscate Natural Beauty from the Public

By Barbara Ehrenreich

In the era of the superrich, if a place is truly beautiful, ordinary people can't afford to be there.

I took a little vacation recently -- nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and "opera house." What luck -- the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale! Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect micro-vacation.

But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister -- maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet? -- because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions -- a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike along the same pine-shadowed trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs -- Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford -- transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven't been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not know.

I witnessed this kind of deterioration up close in Key West, Florida, where I first went in 1986, attracted not only by the turquoise waters and frangipani-scented nights but by the fluid, egalitarian social scene. At a typical party you might find literary stars like Alison Lurie, Annie Dillard and Robert Stone, along with commercial fishermen, waitresses and men who risked their lives diving for treasure (once a major blue-collar occupation). Then, at some point in the '90s, the rich started pouring in. You'd see them on the small planes coming down from Miami -- taut-skinned, linen-clad and impatient. They drove house prices into the seven-figure range. They encouraged restaurants to charge upward of $30 for an entree. They tore down working-class tiki bars to make room for their waterfront "condotels."

Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes.

There are other ways, too, that the rich are robbing the rest of us of beauty and pleasure. As the bleachers in stadiums and arenas are cleared to make way for skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season, going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive for the average family. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, superrich collectors have driven up the price of artworks, leading museums to charge ever rising prices for admission.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the Pew Research Center finds happiness to be unequally distributed, with 50 percent of people earning more than $150,000 a year describing themselves as "very happy," compared with only 23 percent of those earning less than $20,000. When nations are compared, inequality itself seems to reduce well-being, with some of the most equal nations -- Iceland and Norway -- ranking highest, according to the UN's Human Development Index. We are used to thinking that poverty is a "social problem" and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden on everyone else.

If Edward O. Wilson is right about "biophilia" -- an innate human need to interact with nature -- there may even be serious mental health consequences to letting the rich hog all the good scenery. I know that if I don't get to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons and mountains piercing the sky for at least a week or two of the year, chronic, cumulative claustrophobia sets in. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, the need for scenery is hard-wired into us. "People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves," she told Harvard Magazine last year. "That's a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey." We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade) and animals (whose presence signals that a place is habitable).

Ultimately, the plutocratic takeover of rural America has a downside for the wealthy too. The more expensive a resort town gets, the farther its workers have to commute to keep it functioning. And if your heart doesn't bleed for the dishwasher or landscaper who commutes two to four hours a day, at least shed a tear for the wealthy vacationer who gets stuck in the ensuing traffic. It's bumper to bumper westbound out of Telluride, Colorado, every day at 5, or eastbound on Route 1 out of Key West, for the Lexuses as well as the beat-up old pickup trucks.

Or a place may simply run out of workers. Monroe County, which includes Key West, has seen more than 2,000 workers leave since the 2000 Census, a loss the Los Angeles Times calls "a body blow to the service-oriented economy of a county with only 75,000 residents and 2.25 million overnight visitors a year." Among those driven out by rents of more than $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment are many of Key West's wait staff, hotel housekeepers, gardeners, plumbers and handymen. No matter how much money you have, everything takes longer -- from getting a toilet fixed to getting a fish sandwich at Pepe's.

Then there's the elusive element of charm, which quickly drains away in a uniform population of multimillionaires. The Hamptons had their fishermen. Key West still advertises its "characters" -- sun-bleached, weather-beaten misfits who drifted down for the weather or to escape some difficult situation on the mainland. But the fishermen are long gone from the Hamptons and disappearing from Cape Cod. As for Key West's characters -- with the traditional little conch houses once favored by shrimpers flipped into million-dollar second homes, these human sources of local color have to be prepared to sleep with the scorpions under the highway overpass.

In Telluride even a local developer is complaining about the lack of affordable housing. "To have a real town," he told the Financial Times, "Telluride needs some locals hanging out" -- in old-fashioned diners, for example, where you don't have to speak Italian to order a cup of coffee.

When I was a child, I sang "America the Beautiful" and meant it. I was born in the Rocky Mountains and raised, at various times, on the coasts. The Big Sky, the rolling surf, the jagged, snowcapped mountains -- all this seemed to be my birthright. But now I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line "This land was made for you and me." Somehow, I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.

Tragic Traps: Make a Mistake in America and You May Pay a Heavy Price for Decades

By Joe Bageant

Unlucky citizens who fall victim to the U.S. justice system are treated like profit centers to be squeezed without mercy.

Late at night through my window by the computer I can see my neighbor Stokes bicycling at 10 p.m. to the local convenience store to buy groceries. Not only is that an expensive way to feed one's self, but it is the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting thrown in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not allowed to be near young women in a supermarket checkout line. Nor is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own grandchild, even though he is not a child molester by the court's own admission. He is not allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even allowed to read Playboy Magazine.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison). Got caught by police in a, shall we say, "a vehicular sexual incident" with a married woman. They were both drunk, big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by the time they got to court, the lady's testimony was that it was all against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender, while his public defender all but slept through the trial.

To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I'd be willing to bet there are more unregistered handguns than registered ones around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people down here in the southern climes of our great nation. It's also common practice nationwide to many thousands of cab drivers, night clerks, hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god only knows how many others. At any rate, thanks to the gun that he never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual purposes and did ten years.

He's been out for years now. But he was released into an entirely different world than he left -- one that seems scripted by Adam Smith and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been released from prison to serve a new sentence to serve time as a profit center for our economy. In truth, he has been one from the day he was charged.

First off, he was a profit center for the prison where he served his time. Now it is fairly common knowledge that America's burgeoning system of privatized prisons, "super jails," and related services has been a boon for corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp.) and their investors. Prisoner leasing programs such as Florida's, which rents out prison labor for less than 50 cents an hour to private industry in the name of "job training," make building more prisons an attractive option for state governments and investors. It also makes recidivism desirable, since it assures the prison labor pool. Somewhere between 1 percent and 2 percent of Americans are behind bars, locked up at any given time, and as many more are on probation or under state monitoring. Obviously, capitalist style punishment is a solid financial investment.

Now I am not about to screech here that our prison system is anywhere near that created by Uncle Joe Stalin. We do not have 9 million people in it, and we do not get sent there for being late for work at the factory, our factories having been outsourced. However, after 1929 Stalin's prison camps were transformed to an economic machine. And in order to fulfill the camps' economic goals, more and more prisoners were required, just as more prisoners are required to fulfill the investor goals of Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group. In any case, convictions are profitable and the more of them there are, the more money both private interests and the state take in.

That in itself is way the hell past just being strange. But throw in the term sex offender and get on the registered sex offender list (which seems to be mostly filled with Johns who solicited prostitutes, though you'd never know it by the way they name the offense) and it all gets really weird. Chilling even. This is partly because of the taboo and stigma associated, but mostly for the bizarre monitoring rules, and the money involved in enforcement. For example, Stokes must pay a couple hundred a month for counseling, group therapy and so on, until they tell him he can stop doing so. This therapy mainly amounts to listening to the stories of more serious offenders, such as child molesters, even though he is not one but is being treated by law as if he were. Such is the fate of being legally shackled to any of dozens of types of "certified sex offender treatment providers," an ever expanding industry they tell me.

He also must pay for registration as an offender, blood, saliva, fingerprints, palm prints, police registration of his internet address (within 30 minutes of obtaining it), and so on with the Department of State Police and the Sex Offenders Registry, providing a new photo, address, etc., for 10 years, effectively the rest of Stokes' life, not to mention registering with the local cops wherever he lives. After five years he may petition the court for relief from having to reregister monthly. He cannot leave the state. He is supposed to inform employers of his status as a sex offender. So he cannot get a normal job and subsists on handyman work. In the end he generates about $400 a month for one post-incarceration entity or another, whether he has a job or not.

Stokes' designated handlers tell him that the system would smile upon him if he would get more formal 8-5 employment, something that could be more easily tracked and taxed. Would that it were so easy for a 66-year-old man in this country. So he replies, "I'm retired dammit. I got the same right to live on my social security, if I can manage to, as anyone else."

Yes, but it's not much of a life for someone who once worked a skilled job setting up lights and stage gear in large arenas and performance venues. Now he lives in a basement workshop of an overcrowded apartment building/rooming house, in a space that is supposed to pass for an apartment but doesn't even come close. For that privilege he pays $600 a month and is allowed to work off part of it off by the landlord as a handyman.

Stokes tells me he could get out from under much of this by, and here's the legal wording, "satisfying the court's criteria for clear and convincing evidence that due to his physical condition the person no longer poses a menace to the health and safety of others."

"You could cut your dick off," I suggested.

"Sometimes I wish I had," he sighs.

In any case, I am pretty dammed convinced parole is a racket, just like incarceration has become a racket, just as everything in this whole goddamned country is a racket in disguise, from home mortgages to healthcare. If it is vital to ordinary citizens, it's a racket. But fear is the biggest racket of all. Even our rightful fear of sex offenders gets harnessed to the objectives of the corporate and political elites, woven into the weft and warp of the national delusion we call "the fabric of our society." The freedom loving one that currently has 2.2 million of its own citizens locked up and another 2 million walking around under strict post-incarceration supervision and monitoring.

At this writing there are supposed to be 117 registered sex offenders in this burg of 24,000 from which I write, Winchester, Va., yet only 61 in the surrounding county, which has a population of 73,000. Let me make a wild speculation here and say there may be a difference in the way justice is administered in the two localities.

As if Stokes' needed to catch any more bad breaks, Stokes' situation got worse. It seems he had the outrageous gall to get himself a dog. Stokes came upon a rather large black female mutt recently that looked like she had a little retriever in her, according to Stokes, though I could never see it. She was bone skinny, partially blind, and being neglected and abused by an old alcoholic woman down the street.

That dog, named Beulah, just loved Stokes. He lovingly fed her, and she stayed by his side constantly and obediently. But she kept getting skinnier and skinnier no matter how much he fed her. For a while we speculated it was worms, but I've seen enough dogs to know something worse was at work. Stokes spent money he didn't have on expensive worm medicine. But he surely did not have $150 for a vet and tests, and in a nation where uninsured folks are let to die slowly because they cannot pay cash, there was damned sure no more mercy for dogs.

Mercy too has been privatized and costs money. Meanwhile old Beulah is hanging out in the back yard in a friendly fashion, weak and sick as she is, sniffing and getting petted by all who come her way. Dogs are like that. Uncomplaining and decent unto death. I've had several who passed that way. She was old and getting ready top die, sure as god made little green apples. Broke as Stokes is, this was certainly was not going to be a veterinarian administered death, with a canine Kevorkian attending. And being a paroled felon, for damned sure Stokes was not going to produce a gun and shoot her, which is the way old dogs and other animals were put out of misery back in our day.

A situation like that is bound to draw the animal control officer's attention and rightfully so given the outward appearance of the situation. So Stokes was busted. An examination showed that Beulah had diabetes. Seems they'll get a vet to examine a dog to get a conviction but not to save a dog's life. Whereupon Stokes was charged with animal abuse by the animal control office of our city police department. "You should never have let that dog get in this condition; you should have taken her to a veterinarian!" Now Stokes has a court appearance on the docket for animal cruelty. And of course no money for a lawyer. That's where the compassion of a lonely old man for another sentient being will get you. Smack dab in the jaws of our justice system.

I hold middle-class America responsible for this deformed thing we now call justice. And I've wanted to write an article about the sex abuse crime industry scam in this country and proposed it to several magazines. Every one of them said that sex abusers are too unsympathetic as characters for them to publish. I pointed out that these are real people, not characters in a fictional work. The editors added that they were afraid the public might mistake such a story as being supportive of real sex offenders.

Governments and states exist to control people and for no other reason. If justice is achieved somewhere in the process, it's an added bonus. But control above all else is necessary for modern civilization to exist. Population grows by the minute, increasing social pressure on humanity.

More rules and more control are required to keep order. Order is defined as the way we think others should behave -- or imagine them to misbehave. We support the state's police machinery and massive incarceration of our fellow citizens, so long as they are being imprisoned for the right reasons. They should pay. Every action in a capitalist world must produce money. So they should pay in cash.

I was recently in Minneapolis and spent a couple of nights getting drunk with a friend, an apartment building owner who in his younger years did hard time for burglary. Things were somewhat different then, he avowed. In the '50s and '60s, a prisoner may or may not have worked off his "debt to society." But in these times, he says, "the system demands that you just deliver payment in cash. It's more efficient. But not fundamentally different. Back then, the rich still profited for our crimes more than we did. We stole $10,000 worth of stuff. Next day in the paper we found that the guy we burglarized claimed $30,000 worth for insurance purposes. Getting robbed was a winning situation for him. He made 20K on us."

It's also is a wining situation for the 20 percent of Americans in what we call the middle class -- those actually living the middle-class life as advertised by the commercial and financial state's marketing department. It works well for Stokes' psychologist, his piss tester, his lie detector service contractor, the people with the sex offender website contract, and all good citizens with investments on Wall Street. The psychologist needs money to send his kid on the private school trip to Italy this summer. The contractor providing the sex abuser services just built a summer down on the eastern shore of Virginia. The state police officer running the sex abuser monitoring program will retire in six years -- his investments need to earn another $50,000 in that time. But hold on!

Honest to God, as I conclude writing this -- and I swear on a stack of friggin' Bibles -- a police prowl car and two of the department's animal control officers in a police truck just parked in front of Stokes' place, across my driveway. They get out after rifling through some papers on a clipboard and talking on cell phones.

Now they have walked over to Stokes' back door. He comes out and they sit him down in a lawn chair while they stand over him, hands on hips, lips moving under dark sunglasses. And the neighbors are all peeking out their blinds, watching the cops accost the registered sex offender (once he was on the internet registry, word got around here fast). They are probably looking at the animal control officers' truck and thinking, "Oh my gawd! Bestiality too?"

Anyway you look at it, this cannot be good. Not for Stokes, not for you or me or anyone else less than enamored with the idea of a police state.

And Stokes? As he told me only yesterday, "I'm a goddamned magnet for bad luck."

No he's not. He's just one more anonymous human profit center to be squeezed, one more grape to be crushed in a grotesque blood and money press that has no mercy.

The Value of a Human Life: $50,000

By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY

In theory, a year of human life is priceless. In reality, it's worth $50,000.

That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.

Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000. To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios and his colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant. It is also the one procedure that Medicare has covered unconditionally since 1972 despite rapid and sometimes expensive innovations in its administration. To tally the cost-effectiveness of such innovations Zenios and his colleagues ran a computer analysis of more than half a million patients who underwent dialysis, adding up costs and comparing that data to treatment outcomes. Considering both inflation and new technologies in dialysis, they arrived at $129,000 as a more appropriate threshold for deciding coverage. "That means that if Medicare paid an additional $129,000 to treat a group of patients, on average, group members would get one more quality-adjusted life year," Zenios says. Based on patient surveys, one "quality of life" year is defined as about two years of life on dialysis.

Zenios's conclusions arrive amidst mounting debate over whether Medicare, the U.S. government health plan for seniors, ought to use cost-effectiveness analysis in determining coverage of procedures. Nearly all other industrial nations — including Canada, Britain and the Netherlands — ration health care based on cost-effectiveness and the $50,000 threshold. Medicare, on the other hand, decides whether to pay for new technology based on whether a treatment is "medically necessary and appropriate." But as health care expenses rise and entitlement programs grow fiscally strapped — at least one part of Medicare is now expected to be bankrupt by 2019 — more and more academics have called for this approach to be reconsidered, and for cost to become a factor. Such a move would mean that "if the incremental cost of a new technology was more than the threshold," Zenios says, "then the recommendation would be that Medicare not cover that new technology."

Assigning a dollar figure to Medicare patients' lives may sound crass, but such valuations are routine in Americans' daily lives. Take, for example, the $500,000 death benefit the government pays families when a soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the cost calculations that for-profit health insurers make to determine how much coverage they'll give customers. In fact, at least some Americans seem at ease with allowing money to play a prominent role in health care decisions. In a 2007 survey of New Yorkers, 75% of participants felt "somewhat" to "very" comfortable with allowing cost to inform Medicare treatment decisions, once they understood how the system worked. "Americans understand and are prepared to engage the issues that arise when setting priorities and limits for their public programs," Marthe Gold, the City University of New York Medical School professor who conducted the study, wrote with colleagues this past fall in the journal Health Affairs.

The Stanford researchers caution that if Medicare fully adopted a cost-benefit analysis model, too many patients could be denied life-saving treatment. They return to the example of dialysis patients. Their study showed that for the sickest patients, the average cost of an additional quality-of-life year was much higher — $488,000. "It is difficult to justify the burden and expense of dialysis when persons have other serious health conditions such as, for example, advanced dementia or cancer," says co-author Glenn Chertow, a nephrology professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. "In these settings, dialysis is unlikely to provide any meaningful benefit." But with organs including kidneys for transplant so scarce, is it justifiable to deny these patients a chance to live through dialysis? It is a question, Zenios says, everyone should approach with trepidation. "What is the true value of a human life? That's what we're asking people," he adds. "I wouldn't pretend to know."

Far From Always Being Right, the Customer Is on Hold

By ALINA TUGEND

REMEMBER the days when, if something went wrong with a product you ordered, you picked up the phone and there was a live person on the other end? Wait, there is more. You asked for customer service and were transferred — to another human! And that person perhaps even solved your problem.

I get a warm feeling when I think about that, like fondly remembering an old teacher. We have become so used to the impersonal and baffling labyrinth of automated voice systems at just about every company — and then poor customer service when we do reach an actual person — that we just grudgingly accept it.

We all have bad service stories and love telling them and they do not always involve giant corporations. One of my favorites is about the dry cleaner who returned two of my husband’s shirts with neatly torn holes in each right sleeve. Clearly, they had gotten caught on a machine.

He showed the clerk the holes and asked for replacement shirts. But she insisted that he must be rubbing his elbows so hard on his desk that the shirts wore through. Never mind that we had been going there for years with no such problem. Never mind that they were symmetrical tears.

She did offer to make good, though. She would turn them into short-sleeve shirts for him — at a price. We switched dry cleaners.

But most of my negative experiences involve trying to get help over the phone, whether for an insurance or an Internet problem. I dutifully push the buttons required or speak to the automated voice, and still I often end up at the wrong department or get disconnected. If the problem is not resolved the first time, I have to go through the process with a different agent.

Complaining about bad customer service is such a sport now that it should be an Olympic event. But I am curious about how it devolved into this, if there is anything I can do about it and if it is ever going to change.

A little history: These interactive voice response systems, known as I.V.R., which recognize speech or touch tones, began in earnest in the 1980s, and the idea was that they would cut costs by reducing the number of people a company needed to respond to customer complaints.

The trouble is, companies were more interested in saving money than customer retention.

“ ‘The customer is always right’ got totally lost,” said Michael Schrider, president of J. Lodge, a call-monitoring business (as in “this call is monitored for quality assurance.”). “It was ‘the customer is a pain.’ ”

About nine years ago, call centers started moving offshore, so that when you called about your computer, you did not know if you were talking to someone in Bangalore or Boston.

Despite common perceptions, however, fewer than 10 percent of call centers are based outside the United States. There are some 100,000 call centers located in this country, said Jon Anton, director of benchmark research at the Center for Customer Driven Quality at Purdue. The number does not include telemarketers.

But whether here or overseas, few of the systems seem to work very well, and the result is customer alienation.

Walter Rolandi is founder of the Voice User Interface Company, which designs and assesses interactive voice response systems for companies. As part of his job, he hears how people use the systems.

“I’ve listened to thousands of people interacting with machines,” Mr. Rolandi said. “You hear sighs of resignation. You hear people swear. If businesses knew what I knew, they would not design them this way. Many people do not take into account the emotional state of the customer. When you call someone for customer service, you’ve got a problem and you’re probably in a bad mood. You hear someone telling you your call is so important that we won’t let you talk to a human. Then they slap people with too many options, and eventually, you’re in a fight with the system. When you do get a customer representative, you’re loaded for bear.”

In general, Mr. Rolandi said, if people can use an automated system in less time than it takes to deal with a human, they will. Who would rather wait in a bank line than use an A.T.M.? And I love the automated prescription refill system at my CVS drugstore. But it is much more difficult when the request is not as straightforward.

John I. Todor, a psychologist and author of the book “Addicted Customers” (Silverado Press, 2007), said that in this fast-paced, complicated world, people were already being pushed out of their psychological comfort zones.

“A lot of people out there already have a hair trigger,” he said. And poor customer service makes us more frustrated and anxious, which increases our distrust of the company.

But things have started changing, for a number of reasons. For one, companies discovered that customer turnover was expensive.

For the first time, American corporations are acknowledging “customer service as something worth paying for rather than just red ink,” said Mr. Anton, who looks at call centers worldwide and, using a number of criteria, compares how well they work. “If you can satisfy customers and keep them buying, it’s as important as marketing.”

He said that in the last year or so some large companies have been creating a chief customer executive, whose success is measured not on profit, but on customer retention.

Another reason for this change is that the very technology that is driving us crazy is helping people fight back.

Consumers are posting their experiences with customer service online and warning people away from businesses that do not offer a good follow-up with customers. Secondly, there are Web sites that tell customers how to get around an automated system.

Two of them are www.gethuman.com and www.dialahuman.com. I tried a few of the numbers posted and some went through easier than others. Nonetheless, they are helpful.

And gethuman.com, in particular, provides a community for consumers to exchange information. Walt Tetschner, the director of the Get Human Web site, is an engineer by trade and now a consumer advocate. The Web site has been up for about two and a half years and has 10,000 visitors a day.

In May, the site also began asking visitors to rank those companies with great customer service. It then lists them on its Web site.

Mr. Schrider said that he would like to see companies have a real person answer the phones and then prioritize the calls, but businesses do not want that for at least two reasons: It would be more costly, and they think that most customers do not like to call in and then get transferred.

Why not at least give more control to the consumer, Mr. Todor suggested, by offering an option upfront to speak to an agent or continue with the automated system? If it will take 10 minutes to speak to a person, then the caller can decide whether to wait, without going through the entire automation system.

Netflix, the movie rental company, for example, last year moved from an e-mail customer service system to giving its subscribers a 24-hour phone number with a live agent. When I called, I got an automated system telling me that someone would be available within three minutes — and sure enough, I was soon talking to a real person.

Mr. Anton said other companies were also recognizing and responding to that desire by using an automated service that in natural language asks the caller initially, “How can I help you?” If the system does not understand what you say, there will be a human guide behind who can direct the call.

Why not just have a person initially? Because an automated system can handle four to five calls at a time while a person can handle only one.

“If you can lose callers over a bad call, you can increase loyalty with a good call,” Mr. Anton said.

So if things get so good, we will not have to spend our time wading through endless automated phone systems. Or indulging in long stories about bad customer service.

Life will seem so empty.

Think About It.

US residents in military brigs? Govt says it's war

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON - If his cell were at Guantanamo Bay, the prisoner would be just one of hundreds of suspected terrorists detained offshore, where the U.S. says the Constitution does not apply.

But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.

Al-Marri's capture six years ago might be the Bush administration's biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.

To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president's wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

There is little middle ground between the two sides in al-Marri's case, which is before a federal appeals court in Virginia. The government says the president needs this power to keep the nation safe. Al-Marri's lawyers say that as long as the president can detain anyone he wants, nobody is safe.

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A Qatari national, al-Marri came to the U.S. with his wife and five children on Sept. 10, 2001 — one day before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. He arrived on a student visa seeking a master's degree in computer science from Bradley University, a small private school in Peoria, Ill.

The government says he had other plans.

According to court documents citing multiple intelligence sources, al-Marri spent months in al-Qaida training camps during the late 1990s and was schooled in the science of poisons. The summer before al-Marri left for the United States, he allegedly met with Osama bin Laden and Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The two al-Qaida leaders decided al-Marri would make a perfect sleeper agent and rushed him into the U.S. before Sept. 11, the government says.

A computer specialist, al-Marri was ordered to wreak havoc on the U.S. banking system and serve as a liaison for other al-Qaida operatives entering this country, according to a court document filed by Jeffrey Rapp, a senior member of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

According to Rapp, al-Marri received up to $13,000 for his trip, plus money to buy a laptop, courtesy of Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who is suspected of helping finance the Sept. 11 attacks.

A week after the attacks, Congress unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It gave President Bush the power to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone involved in planning, aiding or carrying out the attacks.

The FBI interviewed al-Marri that October and arrested him in December as part of the Sept. 11 investigation. He rarely had been attending classes and was failing in school, the government said.

When investigators looked through his computer files, they found information on industrial chemical suppliers, sermons by bin Laden, how-to guides for making hydrogen cyanide and information about chemicals labeled "immediately dangerous to life or health," according to Rapp's court filing. Phone calls and e-mails linked al-Marri to senior al-Qaida leaders.

In early 2003, he was indicted on charges of credit card fraud and lying to the FBI. Like anyone else in the country, he had constitutional rights. He could question government witnesses, refuse to testify and retain a lawyer.

On June 23, 2003, Bush declared al-Marri an enemy combatant, which stripped him of those rights. Bush wrote that al-Marri possessed intelligence vital to protect national security. In his jail cell in Peoria, however, he could refuse to speak with investigators.

A military brig allowed more options. Free from the constraints of civilian law, the military could interrogate al-Marri without a lawyer, detain him without charge and hold him indefinitely. Courts have agreed the president has wide latitude to imprison people captured overseas or caught fighting against the U.S. That is what the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is for.

But al-Marri was not in Guantanamo Bay.

"The president is not a king and cannot lock people up forever in the United States based on his say-so," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer who represents al-Marri and other detainees. "Today it's Mr. al-Marri. Tomorrow it could be you, a member of your family, someone you know. Once you allow the president to lock people up for years or even life without trial, there's no going back."

Glenn Sulmasy, a national security fellow at Harvard, said the issue comes down to whether the nation is at war. Soldiers would not need warrants to launch a strike against invading troops. So would they need a warrant to raid an al-Qaida safe house in a U.S. suburb?

Sulmasy says no. That's how Congress wrote the bill and "if they feel concerned about civil liberties, they can tighten up the language," he said.

That would require the politically risky move of pushing legislation to make it harder for the president to detain suspected terrorists inside the U.S.

Al-Marri is not the first prisoner who did not fit neatly into the definition of enemy combatant.

Two U.S. citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, were held at the same brig as al-Marri. But there are differences. Hamdi was captured on an Afghanistan battlefield. Padilla, too, fought alongside the Taliban before his capture in the United States.

By comparison, al-Marri had not been on the battlefield. He was lawfully living in the United States. That raises new questions.

Did Congress really intend to give the president the authority to lock up suspected terrorists overseas but not those living here?

If another Sept. 11-like plot was discovered, could the military imprison the would-be hijackers before they stepped onto the planes?

Is a foreign battlefield really necessary in a conflict that turned downtown Manhattan into ground zero?

Also, if enemy combatants can be detained in the U.S., how long can they be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without access to the outside world? Forever?

These questions play to two of the biggest fears that have dominated public policy debate since Sept. 11: the fear of another terrorist attack and the fear the government will use that threat to crack down on civil liberties.

"If he is taken to a civilian court in the United States and it's been proved he is guilty and it's been proved there's evidence to show that he's guilty, you know, he deserves what he gets," his brother, Mohammed al-Marri, said in a telephone interview Friday from his home in Saudi Arabia. "But he's just been taken there with no court, no nothing. That's shame on the United States."

Courts have gone back and forth on al-Marri's case as it worked its way through the system. The last decision, a 2-1 ruling by a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel, found that the president had crossed the line and al-Marri must be returned to the civilian court system. Anything else would "alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic," the judges said.

The full appeals court is reviewing that decision and a ruling is expected soon. During arguments last year, government lawyers said the courts should give great deference to the president when the nation is at war.

"What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen, on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" Judge William B. Traxler asked.

"Yes, your honor," Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre replied.

The court seemed torn.

One judge questioned why there was such anxiety over the policy. After all, there have been no mass roundups of citizens and no indications the White House is coming for innocent Americans next.

Another judge said the question is not whether the president was generous in his use of power; it is whether the power is constitutional.

Whatever the decision, the case seems destined for the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the first military trials are set to begin soon against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Marri may get one, too. Or he may get put back into the civilian court system. For now, he waits

Nation's Poorest 1% Now Controls Two-Thirds Of U.S. Soda Can Wealth

Can magnates like this Chicago-based entrepreneur often take advantage of obscure deposit loopholes in ME, VT, NY (5¢), and MI (10¢)

WASHINGTON—A report on growing disparities in the concentration of U.S. aluminum-can wealth, released Tuesday by the Department of Commerce, revealed that 66 percent of the nation's recyclable assets are now held by the poorest 1 percent of the population.

According to the sobering report, the disproportionate distribution of soda-can wealth is greater than ever before, and has become one of the worst instances of economic inequality in the nation's history. Data showed that over-salvaging of cans by a small and elite group of can-horders has created a steadily growing and possibly unbridgeable gap between the rich and the mega-poor.

Enlarge Image

"Although our nation's upper middle class actually consumes the most beverages, a staggering percentage of these cans wind up in the hands of a very few," said economist Cynthia Pierce, who worked as a consultant on the three-year, $14 million government study. "It's a troubling trend. And as a tiny fraction of the population continues to maintain its stranglehold on redeemable can wealth, it's a trend that shows no sign of slowing."

According to Pierce, the study points to a distinct economic advantage for the most can-affluent—those who possess the resources necessary to collect, transport, separate, and accumulate more and more cans than the rest of the population.

"Members of this exclusive group come from exceedingly poor backgrounds and have access to outrageously low levels of education, which makes them much better prepared to reap the benefits of digging around in garbage," Pierce added.

The report details several key factors involved in the lopsided distribution of container wealth, including aggressive foraging, which leads to higher returns on deposits and a tendency to reinvest can profits in additional redeemables, such as beer. In addition, the report found that those involved in the returnable-gathering industry often minimize financial risk by diversifying between aluminum cans and glass-bottle holdings.

While less than 1 percent of Americans own the domestic rights to a majority of Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans, this same group has also cornered the international market by branching out into such imported container commodities as Fanta and Perrier.

"The typical American spends an average of $65 on beverages for every dollar he or she earns back through redeemable deposits, and the rest of that money goes to the country's can and bottle barons," the report stated. "Americans who are at a foraging disadvantage due to over-employment and home ownership therefore have limited access to these discarded commodities, causing the market to unfairly favor those with an exclusively disposables income."

Perhaps more alarming, the report continued, the can monopoly enjoyed by the poorest 1 percent has been unintentionally buoyed by millions of environment-conscious Americans who leave plastic bags full of recycling in front of their homes, which are in turn preyed upon by enterprising collectors.

"These people were born into a lifestyle, often going back generations, where any can left on the street is seen as their birthright, whether they purchased it or not," Houston resident Dale Palmer said. "They have the knowledge and ability to get out there and scoop up all the good cans before anyone even knew they were there."

The vast disparity in can-wealth distribution is difficult to understand for many Americans. Most people, according to the report, cannot relate to the lifestyles of the super-poor, who never have to go to work, pay a mortgage, or struggle to find money for rent.

One canned individual cited in the study is can tycoon Will Dorsey, a 33-year-old Detroit resident who spent his childhood living off the funds collected from his family's vast can holdings. At the age of 16, Dorsey inherited five carts and dozens of garbage bags overflowing with recyclables when his father passed away unexpectedly one cold December morning.

According to economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, people like Dorsey, who maintain an ultra-poor lifestyle that is vastly different from the rest of the population, are egregiously out of touch with the everyday economic realities of mainstream America.

"Dorsey is one of those select few who come from old can money," Krugman said. "They're just hoarding their assets so nobody else can benefit. And then they parade down the street with their carts full of recycling."

In the wake of the report's disturbing findings, many citizens claim to feel exploited by those who convert their discarded property into cash or change without sharing the incredible profits.

"It's not fair," Chicago native Melissa Arnold said. "Something should be done to even the playing field."

In an attempt to mitigate the disparities in soda-can wealth distribution, Congress is currently exploring numerous options, including levying an 80 percent tax on the incomes of those possessing 100 or more refundable containers, with the ultimate goal of eliminating all recycling programs by 2010.

AP Goes After Bloggers Under DMCA

by Liza Sabater

The AP is trying to eliminate the fair use rights of bloggers using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Rogers Cadenhead, founder and publisher of The Drudge Retort, has been Cease and Desisted by AP News for publishing fragments of their syndicated news articles and reports.

Yes, fragments, not the whole articles. Go to Rogers' site to read the reasons given by AP.

Adding a quote to a blog post is very much like the sampling of a hook or a beat on a song. It's why so many people were opposed to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's not only that albums like Beck's Odelay or Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet would never had happened. Documentaries, archival works, opinion or scholarly writing would be all but non-existent if it means that now journalists, bloggers, historians and scholars would need to pay publishing houses for every single quote and/or sample they need for their work.

That's why I blame Hilary Rosen, the woman who became the face of the RIAA and the lobbyists who successfully paid Congress to pass the DMCA. Granted, I applauded her for her recent "I am not a bargaining chip" post, in re: the other Hillary (La Clinton), but it doesn't mean La Rosen gets a free pass.

The DMCA's main purpose is to circumvent due process by saying that trade laws trump civil rights law. So a corporation's right to make money from their "product" however way they want trumps the rights of individual citizens who would want to express themselves freely about said product through comment, parody, sample or quoting.

The DMCA throws the onus of proving Fair Use on the individual "speaking" the copyrighted materials and not on the owner of the copyright. It was an unprecedented move and one that many consider anti-constitutional since it basically allows for individuals to be considered guilty of copyright infringement until they prove themselves only in a court of law to be innocent.

Rogers gives us the perfect example of how the "corporate bottom-line trumps free speech" shenanigans is rationalized by AP using the DMCA:

Here's one of the six disputed blog entries:

Clinton Expects Race to End Next Week

Hillary Rodham Clinton says she expects her marathon Democratic race against Barack Obama to be resolved next week, as superdelegates decide who is the stronger candidate in the fall. "I think that after the final primaries, people are going to start making up their minds," she said. "I think that is the natural progression that one would expect."

If you follow the link, you'll see that the blog entry reproduces 18 words from the story and a 32-word quote by Hillary Clinton under a user-written headline. The blog entry drew 108 comments in the ensuing discussion.

I have all the expertise in intellectual property law of somebody who's never been sued, so standard disclaimers apply. But I have difficulty seeing how it violates copyright law for a blogger to link to a news story with a short snippet of the story in furtherance of public discussion.

AP feels otherwise. In a June 3 letter, AP's Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman told me:

... you purport that the Drudge Retort's users reproduce and display AP headlines and leads under a fair use defense. Please note that contrary to your assertion, AP considers that the Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.

Keselman reverses the definition of fair use and claims in the take down that citizens only have the right to fair use if they pay for it : AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights.

In other words, unless you pay for the "sample" you don't have the freedom to speak it in your work. You can't comment it, you can't opine on it, you can't analyze it, dissect it, fisk it if it means you are not paying for the right to do so. In effect, AP is trying to extend the rules of music sampling to text.

Well thank Hillary Clinton, now a blogger at Huffington Post and it's Senior Political Editor, for fucking around with free speech. Instead of pussy footing with the Human Rights Campaign, Hillary Clinton and Arianna Huffington's blog, she ought to be working to undo the constitutional damage she brought to our country.

So in Rogers Cadenhead's mess with AP, don't just blame the Bush administration and the DMCA. Blame Hilary Rosen as well.

Who Owns the Moon? The Case for Lunar Property Rights

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it's only within the past few decades that it's been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate?

The first article on the subject, "High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty," was written by Princeton legal scholar John Cobb Cooper in 1951. Various theoretical discussions followed, with some scholars arguing that the moon had to be treated differently than earthbound properties and others claiming that property laws in space shouldn't differ from those on Earth.

With the space race in full flower, though, the real worry was national sovereignty. Both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to reach the moon first but, in fact, each was more worried about what would happen if they arrived second. Fears that the competition might trigger World War III led to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which was eventually ratified by 62 countries. According to article II of the treaty, "Outer Space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sover­eignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

So national appropriation was out, along with fortifications, weapons and military installations. But what about private property rights—personal and corporate? Some scholars argue that property rights can exist only under a nation's dominion, but most believe that property rights and sovereignty can be distinct.

In something of an admission that this is the case, nations that thought the Outer Space Treaty didn't go far enough proposed a new agreement, the Moon Treaty, in 1979. It explicitly barred private property rights on the moon. It also provided that any development, extraction and management of resources would take place under the supervision of an international authority that would divert a share of the profits, if any, to developing countries.

The Carter administration liked the Moon Treaty, but space activists, fearful that the sharing requirement would subjugate American mineral claims to international partners, pressured the Senate, ensuring that the United States didn't ratify it. Although the Moon Treaty has entered into force among its 13 signatories, none of those nations is a space power.

So property rights on the moon are still the subject of international discussion. But would anyone buy lunar land? And what would it take to establish good title?

The answer to the first question is clearly "yes." Lots of people would buy lunar land—and, in fact, lots of people have, sort of. Dennis Hope, owner of Lunar Embassy, says he's sold 500 million acres as "novelties." Each parcel is about the size of a football field and costs $16 to $20. Buyers choose the location—except for the Sea of Tranquility and the Apollo landing sites, which Hope has placed off-limits.

To convey good title, Hope essentially wrote the U.N. to say he was going to begin selling lunar property. When the U.N. didn't respond with an objection, he asserted that this allowed him to proceed. Although I regard his claim to good title as dubious, his customers have created a constituency to recognize his position. If he sells enough lunar property, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So there's demand, even for iffy titles. But what would it take to establish title, rather than Dennis Hope's approximation? That's not so clear. In maritime salvage law, which also deals with property rights beyond national territory, actually being there is key: Those who reach a wreck first and secure the property are generally entitled to a percentage of what they recover. There's even some case law allowing that presence to be robotic rather than human. Traditionally, claims to unclaimed property require long-term presence, effective control and some degree of improvement. Those aren't bad rules for lunar property, either. But who would recognize such titles?

Individual nations might. In the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, the United States recognized deep-sea mining rights outside its own territory without claiming sovereignty over the seabed. There's nothing to stop Congress from passing a similar law relating to the moon. For that matter, there's nothing to stop other nations from doing the same.

Ideally, title would be recognized by an international agreement that all nations would endorse. The 1979 Moon Treaty was a flop, but there's no reason the space powers couldn't agree on a new treaty that recognizes property rights and encourages investment. After all, the international climate has warmed to property rights and capitalism over the past 30 years.

I'd like to see something along these lines. Property rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again. I'll take a nice parcel near one of the lunar poles, please, with a peak high enough to get year-round sunlight and some crater bottoms deep enough to hold ice. Come visit me sometime!

Poverty Has Returned to the Public Agenda

by Jack Kemp and George Mitchell

Poverty is back. Or to be more accurate, it never left.

For almost a generation, talking about the problems of poverty in the United States has been political poison. Neither major political party paid enough attention to the issue.

Now, in this election year, the remaining presidential candidates have all said fighting poverty will be a priority in his or her administration. Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have pledged to appoint a poverty point-person and each supports setting a numerical goal and timeline for reducing poverty. Senator John McCain recently pledged to make “eradication of poverty a top priority.” And the issue has figured prominently in media coverage of the campaign. Last year, stories in the media about poverty and politics increased 145 percent over the previous election cycle.

The changing political winds are also evident at the state level. A new report released by the Center for Law and Social Policy and the foundation-led initiative, Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, found that a dozen states have taken significant steps to focus more attention on poverty, with ten states acting since 2006. The trend seems to be gaining strength; at least four more states are considering proposals to create poverty commissions.

The states are taking a variety of approaches. Connecticut, Delaware and Vermont have established dates for cutting child poverty by 50 percent. In Colorado and Iowa, bipartisan legislative caucuses were formed to push for new initiatives, while in Michigan a statewide summit has been scheduled. Eight states have formed commissions to make recommendations for action.

It is evident from all this activity that the nation has reached a moment of opportunity. Fighting poverty has moved from a secondary political issue to a cause with increasing bipartisan support. It is critical that we seize the moment and take strong action at the federal level to dramatically reduce poverty in this country.

What has caused the change? A number of factors have focused more attention on poverty at this time:

• The gap between rich and poor has grown worrisome to many of us, including those charged with national economic policy. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has warned that the unchecked growth in income inequality could threaten the nation’s economic vitality.

• A cherished piece of the American Dream – the notion that individuals have the opportunity to rise beyond their parent’s economic status – is not standing up to scrutiny. A study by the Economic Mobility Project finds that 42 percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of income distribution remain in the bottom, and 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top. Steps must be taken to strengthen our economy and expand opportunities for jobs, ownership and affordable housing.

• One-third of poor households with children include a full-time, year-round worker. Three million full-time workers live below the poverty line, therefore, streamlining, broadening, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is essential.
  

• The high cost of medical care is straining families. One state found that one-fourth of its foster care caseload resulted when unaffordable bills for child mental-health services left parents with no choice but to place their children in the foster care system, where they would be covered by Medicaid.

• During periods of very slow growth and recession, more lives are touched by economic insecurity, and more households that were near the margins tumble into poverty. Depending on how severe the current recession proves to be, it could submerge from 5 to 10 million more Americans below the poverty line.

The greater focus on poverty has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on solutions. The Center for American Progress found that poverty could be reduced by 26 percent through such straightforward measures as raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC and Child Tax Credit and increasing the availability of child care assistance for low-income families. The price for such efforts would be about $90 billion, compared with the estimated $500 billion cost to the nation each year from childhood poverty. More needs to be done to expand access to capital, access to quality education and creating greater access to job opportunities in the private sector.

There is a growing perception that compassion for our fellow citizens is not only a moral imperative but essential to strengthening our nation. We need to make the most of this window of opportunity. The public is sympathetic; the states are leading pro-actively; and the presidential candidates are saying the right things. In January 2009, when a new President and a new Congress take over, we need to be certain that they remember their promises and take decisive steps to sharply reduce poverty in this land of opportunity.

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies

By Alexis Madrigal

An artist's conception of what a large seastead based on the spur design could look like. The Seasteading Institute envisions vast clumps of these structures forming city-states in the open ocean.
Illustration: Valdemar Duran

Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?

If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."

"Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public-sector models around the world," Thiel said in a statement.

It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn't playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls "seasteads" -- homesteads on the high seas.

Within the pantheon of would-be utopian communities, there's a particularly rich history of people trying to live outside the nation-state paradigm out in the ocean. The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe. There was also Las Vegas millionaire Michael Oliver's attempt to create a new island country, the Republic of Minerva, by dredging the shallow waters near Tonga. And the Freedom Ship was to be a mile-long portable country costing about $10 billion to construct.

None of these projects has succeeded, a fact that The Seasteading Institute's founders, Google's Patri Friedman and the semi-retired Wayne Gramlich, are keenly aware of throughout the 300-page book they've written about seasteading.

Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.

"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," said Joe Lonsdale, the institute's chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

The seasteaders want to build their first prototype for a few million dollars, by scaling down and modifying an existing off-shore oil rig design known as a "spar platform."

This schematic illustrates the ballasting system that Wayne Gramlich imagines would keep the seastead from tipping over. The amount of water in the ballasts could be raised or lowered to move the seastead up and down.

Holl Liou/Wired.com

In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top.

The spar design helps offshore platforms better withstand the onslaught of powerful ocean waves by minimizing the amount of structure that is exposed to their energy.

"You have very little cross-sectional interaction with waves [with] the spar design," Gramlich said.

The primary living space, about 300 square feet per person, would be inside the tube, but the duo envisions the top platform holding buildings, gardens, solar panels, wind turbines and (of course) satellites for internet access.

To some extent, they believe the outfittings for the seastead will be dependent on the business model, say aquaculture or tourism, that will support it and the number of people aboard.

"We're not trying to pick the one strategy because we think there will be multiple people who want one for multiple reasons," Gramlich said.

Dan Donovan, a long-time spokesman for Dominion, an energy company that operated Gulf of Mexico-based gas rigs, including Devils Tower, the world's deepest spar structure, said the group's plan wasn't too far-fetched. His company's off-shore rigs, which are much larger than the institute's planned seasteads, provided long-term housing for its workers.

"They were sort of like mobile homes. We could move them from one place to another," Donovan said. "People did live on them."

But even the institute members admit that their plans aren't far enough along to stand up to rigorous engineering scrutiny. Some engineers, Gramlich said, have been skeptical of their plan, particularly their desire to do it on the cheap.

"We have some legitimate doubting Thomases out there," Gramlich said.

But if the idea turns out to be just crazy enough that it works, Friedman, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, envisions transforming the way that government functions.

"My dad and grandfather were happy arguing their ideas and were happy influencing people through the world of ideas," Friedman said. "I see a real need for people to go out and do something and show by example."

True to his libertarian leanings, Friedman looks at the situation in market terms: the institute's modular spar platforms, he argues, would allow for the creation of far cheaper new countries out on the high-seas, driving innovation.

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," he said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.

"You can change your government without having to leave your house," he said.

Of course, one major role of government is to provide security, which would seem to be an issue on the open sea. But Friedman's not worried about defense beyond simple firearms because he thinks pirates will lack the financial incentive to attack the seasteads.

"More sophisticated pirates will take entire container ships that have tens of millions of dollars of cargo and 10 crew [members]," he said. "On a seastead, there's a much different crew-to-movable assets ratio."

In fact, his only worry is that a government will try to come calling and force their jurisdiction upon them. Toward that end, they are planning to fly a "flag of convenience" from a country that sells them, like Panama, to provide them with protection from national navies.

"If you're not flying a flag … any country can do whatever they want to you," he said.

Even if their big idea doesn't end up panning out, their story should live on in internet lore for confirming the dream that two guys with a blog and a love of Ayn Rand can land half a million dollars to pursue their dream, no matter how off-kilter or off-grid it might seem.

"Everything changed when we got the funding," Friedman said. "Before that, it was two guys with some ideas writing a book and blogging about their ideas.... Now that we've got some funding, it's something I plan to make a full-time job out of."

10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer

By Debra Littlejohn Shinder

For many years, the Internet was the “final frontier,” operating largely unregulated — in part because of the jurisdictional nightmare involved in trying to enforce laws when communications crossed not just state lines but also national boundaries. That was then; this is now.

Legislation that affects the use of Internet-connected computers is springing up everywhere at the local, state, and federal levels. You might be violating one of them without even knowing it.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the existing laws and some of the pending legislation that can affect how we use our computers and the Internet. Nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice; this is merely an overview of some of the legislation that’s out there, how it has been interpreted by the courts (if applicable), and possible implications for computer users.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Most computer users have heard of this law, which was signed in 1998 by President Clinton, implementing two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties. The DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any kind of technological copy protection — even if you don’t violate anyone’s copyright in doing so. In other words, simply disabling the copy protection is a federal crime.

There are some exemptions, such as circumventing copy protection of programs that are in an obsolete format for the purpose of archiving or preservation. But in most cases, using any sort of anti-DRM program is illegal. This applies to all sorts of copy-protected files, including music, movies, and software. You can read a summary of the DMCA here.

If you’re a techie who likes the challenge of trying to “crack”DRM,” be aware that doing so — even if you don’t make or distribute illegal copies of the copyrighted material — is against the law.

#2: No Electronic Theft (NET) Act

This is another U.S. federal law that was passed during the Clinton administration. Prior to this act, copyright violations were generally treated as civil matters and could not be prosecuted criminally unless it was done for commercial purposes. The NET Act made copyright infringement itself a federal criminal offense, regardless of whether you circumvent copy-protection technology or whether you derive any commercial benefit or monetary gain. Thus, just making a copy of a copyrighted work for a friend now makes you subject to up to five years in prison and/or up to $250,000 in fines. This is the law referred to in the familiar “FBI Warning” that appears at the beginning of most DVD movies. You can read more about the NET Act here.

Many people who consider themselves upstanding citizens and who would never post music and movies to a P2P site think nothing of burning a copy of a song or TV show for a friend. Unfortunately, by the letter of the law, the latter is just as illegal as the former.

#3: Court rulings regarding border searches

Most Americans are aware of the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, this means that the government cannot search your person, home, vehicle, or computer without probable cause to believe that you’ve engaged in some criminal act.

What many don’t know is that there are quite a few circumstances that the Courts, over the years, have deemed to be exempt from this requirement. One of those occurs when you enter the United States at the border. In April of this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of Customs officers to search laptops and other digital devices at the border (the definition of which extends to any international airport when you are coming into the country) without probable cause or even the lesser standard of reasonable suspicion. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other groups strongly disagree with the ruling. You can read more on the EFF Web site.

Meanwhile, be aware that even though you’ve done nothing illegal and are not even suspected of such, the entire contents of your portable computer, PDA, or smart phone can be accessed by government agents when you enter the United States. So if you have anything on your hard drive that might be embarrassing, you might want to delete it before crossing the border.

#4: State laws regarding access to networks

Many states have criminal laws that prohibit accessing any computer or network without the owner’s permission. For example, in Texas, the statute is Penal Code section 33.02, Breach of Computer Security. It says, “A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.” The penalty grade ranges from misdemeanor to first degree felony (which is the same grade as murder), depending on whether the person obtains benefit, harms or defrauds someone, or alters, damages, or deletes files.

The wording of most such laws encompasses connecting to a wireless network without explicit permission, even if the wi-fi network is unsecured. The inclusion of the culpable mental state of “knowing” as an element of the offense means that if your computer automatically connects to your neighbor’s wireless network instead of your own and you aren’t aware of it, you haven’t committed a crime — but if you decide to hop onto the nearest unencrypted wi-fi network to surf the Internet, knowing full well that it doesn’t belong to you and no one has given you permission, you could be prosecuted under these laws.

A Michigan man was arrested for using a café’s wi-fi network (which was reserved for customers) from his car in 2007. Similar arrests have been made in Florida, Illinois, Washington, and Alaska. See

#5: “Tools of a crime” laws

Some states have laws that make it a crime to possess a “criminal instrument” or the “tool of a crime.” Depending on the wording of the law, this can be construed to mean any device that is designed or adapted for use in the commission of an offense. This means you could be arrested and prosecuted, for example, for constructing a high gain wireless antenna for the purpose of tapping into someone else’s wi-fi network, even if you never did in fact access a network. Several years ago, a California sheriff’s deputy made the news when he declared “Pringles can antennas” illegal under such a statute.

#6: “Cyberstalking” laws

Stalking is a serious crime and certainly all of us are in favor of laws that punish stalkers. As Internet connectivity has become ubiquitous, legislatures have recognized that it’s possible to stalk someone from afar using modern technology. Some of the “cyberstalking” laws enacted by the states, however, contain some pretty broad language.

For example, the Arkansas law contains a section titled “Unlawful computerized communications” that makes it a crime to send a message via e-mail or other computerized communication system (Instant Messenger, Web chat, IRC, etc.) that uses obscene, lewd, or profane language, with the intent to frighten, intimidate, threaten, abuse, or harass another person. Some of the lively discussions on mailing lists and Web boards that deteriorate into flame wars could easily fall under that definition. Or how about the furious e-mail letter you sent to the company that refused to refund your money for the shoddy product you bought?

Closely related are the laws against “cyber bullying” that have recently been passed by some states and local governments.

The best policy is to watch your language when sending any type of electronic communications. Not only can a loss of temper when you’re online come back to embarrass you, it could possibly get you thrown in jail.

#7: Internet Gambling laws

Like to play poker online or bet on the horse races from the comfort of your home? The federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 criminalizes acceptance of funds from bettors — but what about the bettors themselves? Are they committing a crime?

Under this federal law, the answer is no, but some state laws do apply to the person placing the bet. For example, a Washington law passed in 2006 makes gambling on the Internet a felony. The King County Superior Court just recently upheld that law, although challengers have vowed to take it to the Supreme Court.

Be sure to check out the state and local laws before you make that friendly online bet.

#8: Security Breach Disclosure laws

A California law passed in 2003 requires that any company that does business in California must notify their California customers if they discover or suspect that nonencrypted data has been accessed without authorization. This applies even if the business is not located in California, as long as you have customers there, and no exception is made for small businesses.

#9: Community Broadband Act of 2007

This is a piece of pending federal legislation that was introduced in July of 2007 as U.S. Senate Bill 1853. In April 2008, it was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders and is still winding its way through the legislative process. This federal law would prohibit state and local governments (municipalities and counties) from passing laws that prohibit public telecommunications providers from offering Internet services.

This is in response to laws passed in a few states, as a result of lobbying from the telecom industry, that prohibit cities from installing and operating public broadband networks, such as public wi-fi networks. The big telecom companies have a vested interest in preventing cities from establishing networks that could compete with their own services by providing free or low cost Internet services because the public services are partially or wholly taxpayer-subsidized.

If this law passes, it could make it easier to find free or low cost ISP services in cities that choose to build public networks. On the other hand, it could (depending on how it’s funded) cause tax increases for those who live in those municipalities, including those who don’t use the public networks.

#10: Pro IP Act

Back on the copyright front, the House of Representative recently approved by an overwhelming majority HR 4279, which imposes stricter penalties for copyright infringement. It creates a new position of “copyright enforcement czar” in the federal bureaucracy and gives law enforcement agents the right to seize property from copyright infringers.

This may all sound fine in theory, but when you look at the way other seizure and forfeiture laws have been applied (for instance, the ability of drug enforcement officers to seize houses, computers, cars, cash, and just about everything else that belongs to someone tagged as a suspected drug dealer — and in some cases not returning the property even when the person is acquitted or not prosecuted), it makes many people wary. Read more about the bill here.

Some local jurisdictions have already established seizure authority for piracy. See this article for more information.