WhirledView

Those RFID passport chips are secure? Really? Think again

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I guess it’s that time again for another post on the continuing saga of US passports, e-passports and the proliferation of the ubiquitously insecure RFID chips embedded in both American documents required for US citizens to travel abroad and then return home.

The problem is that despite the sound and the flurry last spring when Washington Times reporter Bill Gwertz reported on the personal security breaches that the embedding of RFID chips into American travel documents creates, the US government ignored the warnings. Instead, it's gone full-speed ahead with the controversial technology acquired from a controversial company based in the Netherlands with production facilities in Thailand.

Now the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs in bed with Homeland Security’s Border and Customs Control folks are seeing to it that these wonderful little mechanisms designed to control supermarket inventories are also in the new e-passports for frequent border crossers. From what I discovered last year and reported here on WhirledView, one has to ask why the rush. Why was the latest decision taken in January – just days before the new administration came to power? That alone, it seems to me, needs an answer. There’s a lot here that doesn’t meet the eye. Or at least mine.

According to an AP story on February 27 carried in Physorg.com, the new RFID technology at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego, this country’s busiest crossing, “can read chip-enabled travel documents up to 30 feet from an inspection booth.” Paul Miller on Engadget.com stated a little earlier that the private information contained on those tiny chips can only be read from a distance of 20 feet.

Ah, well. So that makes them secure?

Whichever distance of insecurity, 30 feet or 20 feet - both make me squeamish. And what about keeping one’s e-passport in an aluminum storage sleeve until use the mode the US government decided to employ as the fix? I suppose better something than nothing – but, hello there – how about when the e-passport is in use? Or what if someone forgets the sleeve – or forgets to put the e-passport in the sleeve? Hmm? Then who’s negligible?

Back to San Ysidro

San Ysidro is, according to AP, the “13th land crossing to get the technology . . . and US Customs and Border Protection plans to have it in place at the 39 busiest crossings with Mexico and Canada by June., reports AP.

Yes, speed in this Internet age has its advantages: the e-passport with its RFID chip reportedly reduces wait times by 6-8 seconds per car at the US border.

But slow down. All that long distance scanning is not as it seems. Besides I have to wonder: does it really matter since the Mexicans don’t use it on their side? So, apparently, the wait times in Mexico can be up to three hours on a busy day. If Mexican border officials – slowed by the lack of questionable technology at their fingertips - only allow x number of cars to cross to the US in a given minute, wouldn’t that likely determine the time for US border crossings to be completed anyway?

Here’s the problem for you and me.

The RFID technology was not, I’m assured by John Oram West Coast Reporter for ITEXAMINER.com who follows these matters closely, designed to be secure. If you think it is, take a look at this video which was filmed in San Francisco earlier this year. Then, think again.

Another Quant Tries Her Hand at Economics

by Cheryl Rofer

Economics uses mathematics, but it is quite different from the physical sciences. Whereas the physical sciences describe reproducible phenomena, what economics describes contains a great deal of human behavior, which varies in unpredictable ways. Or at least unpredictable at our current level of understanding.

My training is in the physical sciences, as regular readers of WhirledView know. I have never taken an economics course, which I am presenting as a fact. You may make your own value judgement as to the reliability, therefore, of what I am about to say.

Wired has a long article about what another physical scientist did for, or possibly to, the markets with his foray into economics. Besides the limitations the article cites that were ignored all too often, I would add that I find it circular to use CDSs to judge the risk of CDOs. This would be part of the broader picture that the article is talking about:

In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent.

To miss this or the other factors that the article lists is a severe failing, but I wonder if it is really due to the physical-science background of the quants or if it is more wishful thinking, one of those human factors that intrudes on economics.

Recent Nobel Prizes in Economics have rewarded practitioners in the field of behavioral economics, which tries to account for these human factors. Some practitioners in that field have called for major reconsiderations of how economics does its work.

I've been thinking about economics lately and wondering how it might be improved. I'm moving in a different direction from behavioral economics, toward more rigor along the lines of the physical sciences. If nothing else, such rigor might help to show the limitations of an economic approach, whether traditional or behavioral.

I have two questions, which may simply illustrate my ignorance of economics.

More About Iran's Uranium

by Cheryl Rofer

One of WhirledView's readers sent me a link to Ivan Oelrich's analysis of those misleading claims about Iran's uranium, which I looked at recently.

I haven't done all the arithmetic. If you're interested in that, look at the comments as well as the blog post itself.

A Question Answered at Last

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I never understood why the National Rifle Association supported easy access to AK-47s and other ugly weapons that have absolutely no use for hunting or for winning medals in sharp shooting.  Clearly, someone was out to make money.  But who was buying all those weapons?   Not deer hunters in Pennsylvania.  Not elk hunters in New Mexico.

And why, if American gun owners were so harmless (except to animals) and legal in their use of guns, all the hooha over registration?  We register the great big lethal weapons called automobiles, don’t we?   As symbols of the American character surely cars are more significant than guns, at least for most of us.

Steamrolling Congress

And yet the N.R.A. always has enough money to keep Congress from sensibly regulating the sale, possession and use of fire arms.

Yes, there are some nutty (and dangerous) anarchists in the remoter areas of Idaho.  And  there are some Second Amendment fanatics who hate gun control on principal.  (All of us have our own powerful Constitutional hobbyhorses.   Mine are—well, another time.)  But the very thought of legalizing concealed weapons in national parks is enough to put me off hiking forever (which would not be good for my physical or mental health) and I’m not alone in this.  Moreover, most Americans are not hoarding heavy duty weapons against the day when they’ll have to charge into Washington to bring down a despot.

Home Sweet Hazard

The gun lobby regularly trots out other reasons for opposing gun control laws.  Consider arguments like those which resulted in having an anti-gun control amendment attached to the recent vote in favor of giving the District of Columbia an honest-to-god voting seat in the House of Representatives.  Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, accused D.C. officials of making it “more and more difficult for district residents to own a gun to be able to protect themselves in their own homes.”  He forgot to mention that firearms in the home kill more children (accidentally) than interlopers (intentionally). They also make domestic quarrels lethal (although knives are also useful here).

Such falsifications notwithstanding, the gun lobby has used fear very effectively to gain support for its rabid rejection of gun control legislation.  Why have they taken such a hard line?  Why have they lobbied so hard?   Why have they worked so hard to bamboozle the American public with specious arguments? 

Now my puzzlement is over.  We now know where huge numbers of truly lethal weapons are going: to support the drug wars in Mexico.  Mexico, you see, has tough gun laws.  You can’t saunter into a gun store and walk out with a gruesome arsenal in Mexico.  The baddies have to buy the guns in the U.S. and smuggle them into Mexico, which is pretty close to a narco-state these days.  In fact, it’s said that the criminals are better armed than the police and the army.  Muchas gracias, America!

Once upon a time, I believe, weapons from the U.S. were smuggled into Ireland to support the I.R.A.  This trade was semi-countenanced by U.S. officials, thanks to the Irish lobby.  Meanwhile, American Tamils have been supporting with U.S. dollars, if not necessarily U.S.-bought weapons, one of the most vicious groups in the business, the Tamil Tigers, whose ignoble final act is to hide behind unarmed civilians to blackmail the Sri Lankan army into letting up the pressure.

I wonder what  terrorist organizations, aside from Mexican narcotrafficantes, are currently being supported by guns got for cash and a hearty back slap in the U.S.?   (Aside from the ones that the Army has so stupidly lost track of in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course.)  And who is profiting?  As in names of buyers and sellers, not generalities.

Follow the Money

So here’s my demand of U.S. legal authorities in the U.S.  Get on the money trail!  Start examining the financial records of the NRA (and any other anti-gun control groups) and all their contributors down to the last vague detail that needs elucidating.  From what sources are they getting the huge sums  they need to so completely control the debate on an issue of U.S. domestic safety? Get authorization to examine the books of gun merchants, too, by which I mean those who deal in weapons of war. 

No, guns don’t kill people by themselves, but people with guns kill people, and some people want to make it incredibly easy to get weapons of all sorts, including those that are useful only for war, not for legitimate hunting or even for rational self-protection.  Those who lobby against gun control are, purposely or negligently, corrupting and subverting government north as well as south of the border. Once the American people learn what such weapons are really for, they may be less complacent about the way their representatives vote. 

Electrolyzed Water and George Will

by Cheryl Rofer

One of the blogosphere's current dustups is George Will's citing of global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 as being "'near or slightly lower than' those of 1979." To Will, this is a disproof of global warming. I won't get into whether this particular claim is correct or what it means to the bigger picture. I'll stay with the bigger picture so that you can read this post in one sitting.

The evidence for global warming extends over the entire world and includes such things as rainfall frequency, nighttime temperatures, bird migrations, glacial ice and sea ice, soil temperatures, sea temperatures, first freeze dates, and many other things. The central way of analyzing this evidence is through complex computer models which take many of these variables as inputs to reproduce others. Some of the models describe limited parts of the system, like the movement of glaciers on land or the formation of clouds, and others are global. There are many models, coming at the problem with different approaches, and they are tested against each other.

All the results indicate that as the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase, some areas of the earth will warm up and some will cool; some will have more rainfall and some will have less.

Will (and others) approach global warming like a geometry proof: one counterexample undoes the proof. That is not the nature of global warming. Any one observation needs to be woven into the complex of evidence and models to see what it means.

So, under Will's criteria, I can cite my sister's observation that vultures have arrived in Oregon, two weeks earlier than usual, or the unusually warm winter in Santa Fe as evidence for global warming. Take that, George Will!

Will simply doesn't understand how the science of global warming is done. But there's worse out there.

Back to Diplomacy

by Cheryl Rofer

There has been a fair bit of commentary over the last week or so on what Russia’s recent actions may mean. I’ve found most of it shallow. I won’t link to all of it, because it’s not worth reading. Here’s one example, not particularly better or worse than most of the rest.

The past eight years have provided what appeared to be an easy playing-field for foreign policy commentary. There were bad guys like North Korea and good guys like us, and sometimes a waffley crew that should be ignored, like Europe, the Old Europe in particular. It wasn’t necessary to leave behind whatever attitudes one may have developed toward the Soviet Union just because it got pared down to Russia; there was that strangely democratic period during the nineties, but we could be comforted that Vladimir Putin was moving back toward autocracy. We can put them in the “bad guys” category, whew! Unfortunately, this was also the way the previous administration played its foreign policy.

Russia has been active on many fronts lately, which can seem distressing to those who would prefer that the rest of the world simply follow the leader and do what we tell them. That’s another part of the last eight years that we’re leaving behind.

But Russia has always been more complex than that, as has been the rest of the world. Russia can also play a mean great-power game when its tendency toward too-obvious propaganda doesn’t get in the way. And Russia is different in many, many ways from the Soviet Union. Fortunately, it appears that we now have a President and Secretary of State who are capable of understanding complexity and are hiring intelligent people. So let me take a serious look at the complex games Russia is playing.

Dispatches from Afghanistan - The First Month

by Todd Greentree

Having just concluded my first month in Afghanistan, passing time is sure to disprove much premature wisdom. The one truth I am confident will remain in place here is that a foreign organization always comes to reflect the nature of its host.

The proof is everywhere. A half-hour’s drive from where I sit at TF Warrior HQ on Bagram Air Field, is a literal empire’s graveyard of Soviet tanks, BMP’s, trucks, guns, and other dead armor that stretches for miles across the skirt of the Shomali Plain. BAF itself is a zoo, filled with an infinite complexity of tribes and subspecies, all of them connected with our current Afghan enterprise: soldiers and airmen, marines and even sailors of all branches and badges; special ops types of multiple flavors, each behind their own wire within the wire; spooks and spookettes, svelte in their blue windbreakers and Walther PPKs in leather shoulder holsters with matching ammo clips. I’ve learned more flags here than I have in years, tacked to the uniforms of French Chasseurs Alpins, Romanian Special Forces, Kiwi Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Singaporean (!) medics, and so many others in this counterinsurgency by coalition that even Gulf Storm seems like simple addition. Then there are the special subclasses of contractors, where KBR reigns by virtue of quantity, but others hold their own, like the Green Beans Coffee concession, the hairdressers from Kyrgyzstan, or the Northrop-Grumman folks who skulk about on the far edges of the flight line. Of course, the second you roll to the other side of the perimeter – a Force Protection feat in itself – it becomes unavoidably pre-biblical, with camel caravans, and mud brick fortresses, and shapeless women in their light blue burqas, except for the cell phones everywhere and the need to watch for VBIEDS (Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Devices).

Todd Greentree - Our Man in Afghanistan

We welcome a new contributor to WhirledView.

Todd Greentree will be posting from Afghanistan, where he is serving as State Department Political Advisor at Task Force Warrior. As a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, much of his career, both in Washington and overseas, has involved the political-military dimension of irregular warfare. His prior experience covers the U.S. counterinsurgency in El Salvador, the Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Bougainville Rebellion in Papua New Guinea, the People Power Revolution and origins of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, and the conclusion of the 27-year civil war in Angola. Todd has also been a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, recently authored Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America, and taught Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College and the University of New Mexico.