WhirledView

E-Mails Gone Missing

by CKR

E-mail messages are disappearing in northern New Mexico. I'm wondering how widespread this problem is. I know it's not just happening to me.

It's been going on for several months now. E-mails just disappear. They don't turn up in spam filters. It's not confined to a single service provider. And it seems to happen in waves. One of them was from Friday last week (March 21) through Tuesday this week (March 25).

It's difficult, of course, to know what you're not seeing in your e-mail inbox. But people call or e-mail again to ask why you didn't tell them about a meeting or respond to their recent e-mail.

So here's what I know about how this recent outage affected me.

I know of one e-mail that was sent last Friday that didn't reach me. Another that I sent out to four recipients was not received by just one of those recipients; the other three got it. Another was sent to me Tuesday that I didn't receive. And I think there was one other, but I don't recall the details. The providers that were involved were Earthlink, Comcast, Cybermesa, MSN, and one other I'm not sure of.

Others have told me that they have had the same problem. I have complained to my provider, but it's hard to tell what they're doing about it, if anything. They take the usual tech support approach: it must be all my fault, and will I please go through their checklist under their supervision so that they can check the boxes for their supervisor.

Are any of our readers experiencing this? Can you give specifics: time, provider, etc.? Please respond in the comments or to me: crofer [at] gmail [dot] com.

Losing “the keys to the kingdom”

By Patricia H. Kushlis

This is the second time in two weeks that American passports, the keys to the kingdom, have been compromised. Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, of all newspapers, broke both stories. These are two separate instances of gross mismanagement and perhaps even malfeasance. Both relate to the outsourcing epidemic for which our current administration is famous.

Two separate Congressional oversight committees have begun investigations. The passport file snooping problem clearly lands on the heads of the State Department’s beleaguered Bureau of Consular Affairs and Passport Division. That Congressional investigation is being conducted by Congressman Berman, the new head of the House International Affairs Committee. Since Consular Affairs Bureau chief Maura Harty retired in February and Wanda Nesbitt, her principal deputy during last summer’s fiasco, has moved on to become Ambassador to Madagascar, two of the responsible officials at State for at least part of the time are – well – removed from the picture.

Meanwhile, leave it to the Consular Bureau and its public affairs chief to duck the issue – letting State’s Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy and Deputy Head of Public Affairs Sean McCormack take last week’s passport story heat.

This makes me feel really secure

But the breaches of etiquette or evidences of voyeurism on the part of three contract employees and apparently a Department new hire - whether politically motivated or not - are likely to pale in comparison to the passport production rip-off/compromise story that Gertz broke in a three part investigative journalism series just days thereafter. (Part I, Part II, and Part III) Not only did the GPO – the federal government’s printing press – grossly overcharge the State Department for the production of passports when GPO is supposed to undertake the work at cost, but it also outsourced the work to Smartrac, a European company with production facilities in Thailand. “Smartrac,” according to Gertz, “divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America's e-passports.” That makes me feel really secure.

I like Thailand. It was a fascinating place to serve in the Foreign Service at the end of the Vietnam War. I also enjoy Ayutthaya, the country’s ancient capital where the plant in question, according to Gertz, is located. Ayutthaya’s temples are a favorite tourist destination about a two hour boat trip up river from Bangkok’s steaming center.

Ayutthaya is also the same city where Hambali (Ridwan Isamuddin), the instigator of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing and apparent member of Al Qaeda’s inner circle, was finally caught by a joint CIA-Thai security services team in 2003 after being on the lam since late 2001. The prize money – or pay-off - that went to the Thai for their efforts, according to Sidney Morning Herald reporter Ray Bonner shortly thereafter, was on the order of $10 million. I guess the US government, that time at least, outbid Osama Bin Laden - but think of the number of potential implications.

Thailand also has a history of – well – forging documents, manufacturing fake antiques and copious narcotics smuggling and of police and security forces that too often look the other way. It has a simmering and lengthy Muslim insurgency in the country’s south near the border with Malaysia, and Thailand’s domestic politics fluctuate between unstable democracy and equally unstable military rule. What helps keep this country on course is its wise octogenarian monarch who is revered by the people, the Thai ability never to take anything too seriously, a bend-with-the-wind foreign policy, and a cohesive, deeply held national identity of Thai-ness.

Thailand, however, is also not the only Asian or other country where forgers manufacture vital documents with amazing accuracy, rapidity and finesse.

In my view, it is simply not in America’s national security interests to farm out the production of its citizens’ most precious documents to the lowest bidder. And the longer the supply chain and the more questionable the factory location the greater the security risk.

Far more than sleaze

This, therefore, is more than sleaze. It’s more than about a few politically connected former Republican Hill staffers enriching themselves at the public trough. True, that’s part of the story. I hope that Congress nails those involved: House Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell has already announced his committee will investigate the GPO mess. This is particularly important since the GPO answers to Congress, not the White House although State was very much involved in the final choice of E passport producing companies so there’s a State culpability component wrapped in here too.

The issue, too, is far more than privatizing yet another function of the US government supposedly so that the agency in question turns a profit. It is about privatizing a function that, in my view, shouldn’t be relegated to any country's private sector for reasons of national security if nothing more. Period.

The Airlines Are Melting Down

by CKR

Delta and American Airlines have been scrambling this past week to inspect electrical equipment on their MD-series planes. I have always worried about those planes, which invariably give a burst of electrical-smell as they take off. It has always cleared rapidly on flights I've been on, except for one long-ago TWA flight in which smoke added itself, and the captain decided to circle back and land in Albuquerque.

And before that, Southwest had to take a time out to inspect for fuselage cracks.

I'm wondering why the FAA all of a sudden woke up and remembered that it was responsible for safety inspections. They've probably been understaffed and oriented toward nonregulation, like all other government agencies during the Bush reign, so the surprising thing is that they're waking up.

Meanwhile, Heathrow is having a spot of trouble with luggage in their new terminal. Denver's airport had similar problems when it opened, so the Brits will probably figure this one out.

And the TSA is keeping us safe from nipple rings. This additional vigilance was undoubtedly prompted by the FAA's increased concerns for safety. Good to see our protectors at work. Now they need to tighten up on penis decorations.

Thursday First Flower Blogging

by CKR

My winter jasmine is blooming. I foresightedly planted it close to the front door, so that I could appreciate it even during allergy season. Last week of March seems to be its time. I thought I saw a vulture a week or so ago, and the hummingbirds should be arriving soon. Vultures, hummingbirds and swifts seem to arrive at about the same time. This year I plan to put out hummingbird feeders; haven't quite figured out where. I don't want them too close to the house because I have had some ants in the house other summers and don't want more.

Another plant that's blooming is a silly little cactus that a friend gave me.

When she gave it to me, it had only one stem, which got bumps and then bumps on bumps until it's quite a mass. The stems bend quite easily toward the sun; I rotate the pot about once every two weeks when I'm conscientious. The flowers are about a centimeter across. It needs to be repotted, but its fishhooky spines do some damagge. I'll probably wear gloves when I repot it. Some other repotting jobs to do too, all of which are more easily done outside, but not quite yet. I'm hoping that the junipers will be subsiding in a week or so.

Both photos are better if you click on them to enlarge them.

Nukes in the Gulf

by CKR

Marc Lynch asked whether any of us see the apparent rush to nuclear power in the Gulf, and the support from western nations, as having any significance beyond a need for energy.

Marc, of course, well knows that to ask the question is to answer it. I can’t add much beyond speculation on causes and possible effects.

One of the weaknesses of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as Iran has vividly showed us, is that nuclear technology is largely the same whether you’re desalinating water or depopulating someone else’s country. We’ve known this all along. It’s why we’ve got the NPT and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Brazil gave us fits some time back, but we’re feeling better about their enrichment now that it’s fully inspected.

Having a reactor is far from having the full capability. It’s not clear what each of these countries is looking for or can afford. But money is flush in the oil-producing states.

All the countries Marc mentions are signatories to the NPT, so presumably their plants would be properly safeguarded. They don’t have Iran’s dicey history. But, as Marc reasonably asks, why now?

Of Rear Ends and Holes in the Ground

by CKR

How does it happen that the military can’t tell helicopter batteries (presumably boxy or flattish, heavy) from, er, fuses for nuclear weapons (electrical-looking stuff, connectors)? (NYT, WaPo)

Or how is it that they didn’t notice that those cruise missiles just happened to be armed with nuclear weapons?

It’s not quite as simple as this, or is it? Does the military have great warehouses stocked with everything, they punch a number in, and the computerized mechanism spits forth a part and wraps it, just like Amazon.com?

Back a decade and more ago, I noticed that the military’s standards for classified information weren’t quite as careful as I was accustomed to. I sailed onto the base (and it wasn’t just any base, but Fort Leavenworth, the center for Army tactics and doctrine) in my rental car. My hosts escorted me to where I was to give my classified talk with my properly wrapped transparencies. “Here?” I asked. “Oh, we’ll post a sergeant outside the door,” they said. But I was referring to the open windows in the classroom, tall and wide. I persuaded them to draw the shades; it hadn’t occurred to them. I was also referring to being outside anything I could recognize as a security area. It wasn’t nuclear weapons data, I reasoned, so maybe it was okay.

I understand that security has been tightened on military bases since 2001, and I haven’t had occasion to test that. But when these little problems crop up, I recall how oblivious my military hosts seemed to what I took for granted in protecting classified information.

Where I come from, both those nuclear warheads and the “fuses” for them would be considered classified and therefore would be protected in the same way classified documents were. Perhaps there is a difference: in a research institution, of course we would emphasize the information content. In the military, these things are parts for doing their job.

Of course, when the job comes to nuclear weapons, we’re talking serious consequences if something goes wrong. An accident on that plane carrying the nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and whoops! there goes Memphis. Or shipping nuclear weapons parts, even if they don’t contain fissionable material, to Taiwan just might catch the attention of Taiwan’s large and nuclear-armed neighbor who wouldn’t like it much if Taiwan got nuclear weapons. Taiwan had a real, hands-on nuclear weapons program for a while, not just something on a laptop someone got from somewhere.

America’s Widening Income Gap, Gap

By Patricia H. Kushlis

A March 24, 2008 article in The New York Times features the now not-so-new information that the life expectancy gap continues to widen between rich and poor in the U.S. Seems to me that this is something this country needs to take seriously because, let’s face it at the very least hospital emergency rooms should not be the doctors of first, last - and only resort – for far too many people in this country as happens now. And longevity has much to do with access to good medical care and a healthy life style before illnesses turn into catastrophes.

Life expectancy differences, however, are only one aspect – or symptom - of the expanding inequality gap in this country. A Round Table Discussion last fall among six Harvard faculty members “Is the United States Coming Apart as a Society?” explored this and other dimensions of the far more complex problem affecting American society today. I came upon the discussion belatedly in the Fall/Winter 2007 edition of The Yard, a Harvard alumni magazine. It pulls together a number of issues which all Americans, including and especially those running for public office in November, should be considering, examining and addressing.

Here are some of the major points:

• A rise in social inequality has accompanied the rise in economic inequality; this reflects in the “growing residential separation symbolized by gated communities,” differences in “civic engagement, political participation. . . involvement in the criminal and justice systems, in mental and physical care, in access to education including elite universities” and in problems created by differences in environmental living conditions.

• Although polling data shows deep anxiety and division among Americans along religious (73%), racial (92%) and political lines (97%), when one actually looks at the issues the divisions are not as deep as they are felt. There’s a lot more agreement on what Americans want done on immigration (only a small minority feel strongly that one shouldn’t do anything for undocumented immigrants in the US) than “the sound bites suggest.”

• Too often in public discourse class “is taken as a code for talking about race. “In fact, class isn’t race” and although segregation by social class has increased “in some dimensions” “the numbers on racial segregation are . . . moving in the right direction.” “Upper income African Americans have seen remarkable progress in the reduction of racial segregation over the last 30 years.” “Interracial marriages are increasing, but inter-class marriages are decreasing” and there are much wider spaces, for instance, between white middle class kids and white working class kids. This economic divide seems to be hardening. It reinforces the differences – and differences of opportunity - between these two groups of American youth. Further, it tears apart the “fundamental (social and political) bargain” that Americans “can live with big gaps between rich and poor as long as there is also equality of opportunity.”

The End of PC?

by CKR

We’ve tried to minimize our commentary on the Democratic primary race here at WhirledView. There are a number of reasons for that, perhaps foremost that we feel we can contribute more to the discussion through analysis and our various expertises than through partisanship.

So I’ve thought long and hard about saying something about Barack Obama’s speech on race in America. I’ve waited a bit because it seems to me that the response to it will be more important than the speech itself.

Lyndon Johnson took a big gamble in signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Not so much a gamble in one sense; he knew that it would lose the South’s support for the Democratic Party. He was right. In another sense, it was indeed a gamble, and he was on the right side there: most of us now recognize that it was the right thing to do.

It was an enormous change, and the Republican Party’s willingness to politicize racial differences in the service of increasing its power (Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”) contributed to the exploding tensions of the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps even without that politicization, dreadful things would have happened, as they happened before in changes between the races in America.

But no society can endure continuing open strife between internal groups, and we found the way to a ceasefire. We would not discuss such matters openly, except in extremely structured venues. Like any ceasefire, it was unstable and occasionally breached. As Obama noted, the discussion went on in segregated forums. That tended to harden views into patterns.

Saturday Pruning Blogging

by CKR

The wind wasn’t blowing on Wednesday. Usually, when the wind dies down for a day or so (the best we can expect in the New Mexico spring), I am crabby enough about the days I wanted to go out and couldn’t that I decide that I’ll show the weather: I won’t go out even when it’s nice. My mother called that cutting off my nose to spite my face.

So until mid-afternoon, when I felt I owed it to the birds to fill the feeder and retrieve the birdbath from the tree it had blown under and fill it, I stayed in. But it was so beautiful, and I have been so annoyed looking at some of the things that need to be pruned or cleaned up (not least the trash that blew in, including a large Home Depot drop cloth), that I decided to stay out.

Not much is coming up yet. Those little sprouts whose photo I posted a week or so ago haven’t increased much. Three tulips just starting out of a half-dozen or so in that spot. No sign of the daylilies or evening primroses. The iris are beginning to grow, including from some of the places where the tops totally died. So maybe I won’t have to dig them up and replant this year.

Except for a week in which water meters froze around town (not mine, fortunately!), it had seemed to me that this past winter was warmer than the one before. But the plants aren’t acting like it. Of course, that little tulip is on the north side of the house, still in shade all day.

I removed the tops of some ornamental grass that was in a pot all last summer. It was listed as a perennial, so I planted it out in one of the beds. One of the clumps had a small sprout, not yet distinguishable from cheatgrass. I also planted rosemary, chives and thyme from a pot last year. The rosemary is beginning to green up. Its leaves seem to be perpetual. It too is on the north side of the house.

I pruned one chamisa bush that I can see from my office window. Eager to get it done, I didn’t bother to get the camera for a “before” photo, but I left the prunings there, to the left, so you can see what I removed. There are two to go, and I provide their “before” photos. I think I will use the branches for erosion control around the yard. I also pruned two lilacs, three Russian sage (transplanted too many times now, but still alive), and one crabapple tree.

But I haven’t been out since. Thursday evening I went to a panel discussion at the Santa Fe Institute. Someone opened the doors to cool off the very full house, and at least two people left coughing and choking. I could feel my eyes getting itchy, and yesterday was spent recuperating from what must have been astronomical concentrations of pollen. Today has been relatively still, but I’m wary about going out. I took this photo in my yard before my pollen-induced incarceration. The Siberian elms are doing it. I think that my problem is mostly with the junipers, though.

A Few Thoughts on Maundy Thursday Night's Massacre at Foggy Bottom

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Here I thought the State Department's inept handling of passport matters had ended last summer. Not to mention Ambassador Maura Harty's too lengthy tenure as head of the Bureau of Consular Affairs when she recently sashayed out the door - apparently with a more than gentle push.

I was wrong.

This late breaking Easter week flap over unauthorized State Department contractor employee access to presidential candidate passport files - evidently not just Obama's but also Clinton and McCain's - is competing for the breaking headline Good Friday announcement with New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama's candidacy for president.

I don't equate the two news items - just that when all is supposed to be quiet - even reverential, it never is. A slow news day? Guess not.

Clearly there's more to the latest passport file snooping story than meets the eye: but in my view, the meeting-the-eye problem has as much to do with State Department mismanagement over a period of years than as it relates to the whiff of a potential election year political plumbers' type scandal. Or maybe the two will turn out to be intertwined. We'll see.

Two of State's many management problems are structural. All have political and potential legal overtones. They can and should be corrected. Now. Not later. I hope Congressional oversight looks into the systemic problems behind this latest Consular Affairs Bureau fiasco as well as focusing on the two companies and the employees involved thereby skimming the surface of the huge management morass lurking just under the surface at Foggy Bottom.

But then the State Department is not known as a Speedy Gonzales. We'll also see if the names now in the media of the employees' companies are delivered by State to Waxman's oversight committee by Monday as he has demanded.

Condoleezza Rice told MSNBC earlier that the passport file access matter is being turned over to State's Inspector General. Well yes. But State hasn't had a confirmed IG since the most recent politically appointed IG, Howard "Cookie" Krongard left under a cloud late last year. Krongard's premature departure happened for excellent reasons relating in part to fallout from yet another private contractor embarrassment, namely trigger-happy Blackwater contract security guards playing shoot-em-up with innocent Iraqis as targets at Mansour Square in the middle of Baghdad in September.

In short, this latest passport file fiasco is yet another outsourcing scandal to be laid at the foot of the current disastrous administration and the ill-fated State Department during Condi's tenure as its Secretary.

Oh and by the way, during his tenure at State, Krongard also managed to all but destroy the IG's office to the point that the few employees left complained to Congressman Henry Waxman's House oversight committee about Krongard's gross mismanagement last fall. State's IG, by the way, does have a responsibility to the Hill as well as the Executive Branch. It's probably a good thing that Krongard is long gone because this new passport file investigation clearly needs someone who will act far more responsibly and rapidly than "cover-up" Cookie would have ever done.

State's Acting IG, William Todd obviously has his hands full this Easter weekend and they aren't with Easter eggs to be hidden for the kiddies. Todd's credentials certainly look better than Krongard's on paper at least. If Todd and the head of the office's Investigations Unit handle this one right, it may be the case that makes their careers. Or if not, the one that breaks them.

Meanwhile, State has four, if not five or more fundamental problems that relate to this latest mess.

The first problem is the over-zealous outsourcing to the private sector of work that should be being undertaken by career professionals and not minimum-wage contract employees with minimal background checks. The second problem is a Department that is strangling itself and its accountability with top heavy hierarchy as a result of an outdated management structure: it doesn't manage itself well - as the latest AFSA employee survey demonstrated - so how can it possibly begin to oversee outside contractors adequately. The third problem is the lack of a functioning mechanism to enforce internal integrity. The fourth problem is the Constitutional question of invasion and protection of individual privacy. And the fifth problem is the over-politicization of the bureaucracy.

Outsourcing run amok again