Monday, February 17, 2003

Don't shoot, we're Republicans!. Fifty years ago today, the Willie D as the Porter was nicknamed, accidentally fired a live torpedo at the battleship Iowa during a practice exercise. As if this wern't bad enough, the Iowa was carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time, along with Secretary of State, Cordell Hull and all of the country's WWII military brass. They were headed for the Big Three Conference in Tehran, where Roosevelt was to meet Stalin and Churchill. Had the Porter's torpedo struck the Iowa at the aiming pointy, the last 50 years of world history might have been quite different. Via Jerry Pournelle, Don't shoot, we're Republicans! Nothing much to add here, other than it's an amusing story and I'm finding it fun to think about what would have happened had the torpedo actually struck the Iowa. I don't think much would have happened in the long run—FDR would have most likely survived, been transported to another ship and still made Tehran, but still, there was that slight chance he would have been killed. Even so, I don't think the outcome of the war would have been that much different; Truman still had to take over from FDR before the war was over. [The Boston Diaries] 6:42:00 PM    comment []

CNN doctors the news. Dan Hon has done an excellent analysis of CNN's doctoring of the transcript of Hans Blix' report to the U.N. Friday. After grabbing the text from the two transcripts, correcting for where the BBC inserted a whole bunch of whitespace, there it was. A count in Word says that there's 866 words in one version that aren't in the other. At all. And they're, variously, about Iraqi moves towards compliance and partial refutation of the evidence presented by Powell to the UNSC. Get that. CNN deliberately left out the things Blix said about Iraq complying with the UN resolution, and the parts where he refutes Colin Powell's evidence from the week before. Look for yourself. BBC's full version is here and CNN's fake version is here. [Ming the Mechanic] 5:33:37 PM    comment []

An amazing technology breakthrough - Dan Gillmor reports on a major milestone: storage costs for electronic files has dropped to $1 per Gigabyte.  Dan's article reflects on the significance of low cost storage, and uses a lot of great examples.  For lawyers, who deal with reams of paper, here is another metric: 1 GB of data is equivalent to about 6 bankers boxes of scanned paper.  Here in our law firm it costs us $13.52 to send a box of records to storage, and then it's .23 per month for each box.  So if we sent 6 boxes to storage, it would cost us $79.50 for the first month, and then $1.38 per month for the next 11 months.  So the total yearly cost of storing 6 boxes would be $94.68. Since it only costs $1 to store that data in electronic form, as compared to about $100 to store it in paper form, that means that the cost of storing paper is 100 times the cost of storing electronic documents.  Oh, and the cost of retrieving paper is not cheap.  For our firm it would be $21.96 to retrieve a box from storage and return it.  Or $13.39 to retrieve it permanently.  Or $6.76 to have the storage company destroy the box.  Obviously, there is no cost for retrieval or destruction of electronic files. [Ernie the Attorney] 5:13:06 PM    comment []

Ahh, just when I thought UserLand wasn't innovating, they announce a major new feature for Radio UserLand users: "How to backup and restore your Radio weblog." This is much needed, thanks guys! [The Scobleizer Weblog] 4:22:28 PM    comment []

CNET NEWS.COM By Declan McCullagh - Perspective: Closer to a national ID plan? A little-known company called EagleCheck is hoping to provide a standardized identity check technique that governments and corporations will use to verify that you are who you claim to be. EagleCheck, a privately held firm in Cleveland proposes that whenever someone uses a driver's license or a passport for identity verification, the ID's authenticity will be checked through EagleCheck's network that is tied to state motor vehicle and federal databases. The databases will respond by saying whether the ID is valid. I ran into David Akers, EagleCheck's president, last week in a Senate office building where he was hawking his system to a crowd of politicians understandably nervous about Threat Level Orange, Osama bin Laden, and possible terrorist attacks sparked by a loominginvasion of Iraq. Stacked on a table were brochures warning in stark crimson letters that "EagleCheck could have flagged" 14 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, because some had used expired visas and stolen passports. Akers has had some success so far. In December, the Transportation Security Administration gave permission for EagleCheck to link its systems "to government databases" in a pair of test projects at the Cleveland and Akron, Ohio airports. >But EagleCheck isn't limiting its marketing plan to airport security. "We are certainly looking at a variety of other applications other than airports," said Akers, listing bars, banks, government buildings--in short, wherever ID is required--as possible customers. If EagleCheck or a similar system succeeds, it raises the specter of something akin to a national identity card, a concept that Americans have shunned in the past but could return in a more high-tech form. (In a column last summer, I wrote about how the White House was pressuring state governments to move in this direction by standardizing on driver's licenses.) [ ... ] It's true that many of us already use our driver's license as a general form of identification. But a true national ID would be different in two important ways: First, it would be tied to a back-end database so all verifications would be logged with the time, date and location. Second, you likely would be required to show it on demand to police, shrinking our sphere of anonymity even more. One problem with such a system is that it would not thwart terrorists who--if you believe the FBI--are already living in the United States and likely could obtain a valid identity card either legally or illegally. Administering such a database would require a massive bureaucracy, and the inevitable errors or glitches would eliminate an innocent person's freedom to travel from one place to another until they were corrected. If EagleCheck or a system like it succeeds, it becomes eerily possible to imagine a future in which identity card readers are omnipresent, girding us in a constant mesh of surveillance. Want to pick up your car from the parking garage? Insert your identity card and forefinger in the reader first. Going to work at the office or coming home to an apartment building? Better make sure you have that microchipped card with you. Have any unpaid parking tickets anywhere in the United States? Better just stay at home. Needless to say, this massive database would end up bursting with detailed records of all our life's activities. It would be incredibly valuable to police and create an irresistible temptation for misuse, either through corrupt officials or through electronic intrusions. I'm not saying that such a scenario is happening today. It isn't. But it's possible, and if there's another terrorist attack on the United States, all bets are off. [Privacy Digest] 4:20:49 PM    comment []