Shiver Me Timbers

No, it’s not International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s just that I’ve seen another indicator that we as a planet are taking great strides backwards into history. I happened upon a story on Intermanager, a site for ship owners, about a plan to deploy a fleet of private ships to protect cargo vessels from the Somali pirates.

Somalia, the long term East African basket case, is home to enterprising individuals who are making money kidnapping and ransoming ships' crews. They have invested in ever larger boats and are roaming farther offshore in pursuit of commercial vessels. Five years ago the pirates hadn’t ventured more than 200 miles off the coast, but this year they have attacked ships over 1,000 miles out. The naval forces of several countries are patrolling the region, but they can’t quite put a lid on the piracy. Short of some kind of massive long term intervention in Somalia I doubt they will ever be able to eliminate it.

The insurance companies seem to realize this, and so it’s back to the swashbuckling days of old. The Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) insurance-brokerage firm is organizing what it calls the Convoy Escort Program (CEP). It will start out with patrol boats manned by private security forces escorting vessels through the Gulf of Aden. They will be heavily armed, but with no “fixed machine gun positions.” How long the Somali pirates will tolerate this before they escalate to heavy weapons is uncertain. They already carry rocket propelled grenades. I can see this developing into an arms race, with shoulder launched rockets being met by small bore artillery, and so on, to the limits of the international arms market.

I take special note of this development because so much of our economic life is dependent upon globalization. Globalization, in turn, is dependent upon a number of assumptions, among which are cheap bunker fuel and safe passage across the oceans. Neither of these assumptions is solid these days. Oil has definitively passed the $90 mark and could head past $100 without too much provocation. Safe passage for cargo ships is a realistic assumption across most of the globe, but it is shredding around the edges.

The South China Sea is home to a swarm of pirates. Some of them are simple waterborne muggers, while others hijack fuel tankers and sell the fuel in ports where they have bribed local customs officials. The South China Sea is important because it carries much of the China trade to and from the Indian Ocean, plus 80% of cargo destined for Japan, plus about 15% of the world oil supply. As mentioned above, a swath of the Indian Ocean from the west coast of Africa to the Persian Gulf is under threat, including the coastlines of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman.

Anti-piracy efforts are hampered by pirate safe havens such as Somalia. There are gaps and conflicts in maritime law concerning piracy, overlapping claims to territorial waters, and extraneous political maneuvering that interferes with international cooperation. No straightforward solution seems to be forthcoming. Our period of unrestricted global shipping may be slowly drawing to a close. I can’t imagine global shipping shutting down, but security and fuel issues could make it much more expensive, slower, and less sure.

Letting my imagination run a bit, but only a little bit, I can foresee a time when cargo ships rely on wind once more and when cargo is only as safe as a set of well trained gun crews can make it. Perhaps it’s time to for shipping companies to start reading Patrick O’Brian on the vagaries of privateering and the management of armed cargo vessels.



TSA Follies

 Q: How do you smuggle a knife past the TSA onto an airplane?

A: Disguise it as a handgun.

Here’s the latest from our alert, skilled operatives at the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). Farid Saif, a Texas businessman, forgot that he had a loaded 40 caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol in the pocket of his computer bag. It went through security at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, including an x-ray machine, unnoticed. When he got to his destination he realized what had happened and notified the TSA. According to the linked article in The Consumerist, the TSA agents involved were given “retraining.”

So here’s what a Glock 23 looks like:

 

It looks much the same in an x-ray, being made of metal. I’d say that these TSA agents need retraining in resume writing and job hunting, as in “Don’t let the security door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, the TSA should figure out how many hours somebody can stare into an x-ray machine before their eyes cross and a handgun can slide by them.

The same article notes a 70% failure rate when the TSA tested itself by sending fake bomb parts, knives and firearms through the system. At some airports the failure rate was 100%.

In other airport security news, a pilot is in trouble for publicizing video footage of an ongoing security failure at San Francisco International Airport. While elsewhere people were getting the full scope and grope, SFIO employees were entering the secure area through an unmanned doorway with a single card swipe. Apparently this weak spot has been in place for a decade. The pilot got an unfriendly visit from air marshals and local sheriffs’ deputies after going public. That’s what we call the “whistleblower thank-you.”

Let us face facts: the present hassle and humiliation you endure as an appetizer to air travel amounts to little more than theater. Other countries do not make you take off your shoes or put your shampoo and such in little bottles. The backscatter radiation pornoscope is an American innovation. And yet those Europeans, hell, even the Israelis manage to avoid inflight mayhem as well as we do, or better.

The fundamental problem of airport security, real airport security, is that it takes time. Getting from the road leading to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv to your seat in the plane takes hours. The Israelis use trained interviewers who patiently and persistently question each passenger. The checkpoints start outside the airport with a vehicle search and repeat at the entrance to the terminal and multiple points leading up to the final gate. The cost and delay of real security procedures would collapse our system. The necessary slowdown of traffic volume might very well bankrupt a number of marginal air carriers.

A number of observers of the air security fiasco have recommended a more front-loaded approach. This would involve more emphasis on intelligence work and identifying possible problem passengers at the time that they buy a ticket.

By analogy, we all benefit from email filters that identify clusters of characteristics that increase the probability that a message is spam. The filters use keywords, link characteristics, IP origin, and other factors to separate legitimate messages from ads for fake Rolexes and “enlargement.” The filters are designed to learn and change as the spammers try different approaches. The aforementioned Israeli security agents tease out details of a passenger’s story and look for elements that raise alarm bells. Some security firms are developing self-service kiosks that start asking such questions of passengers as they check in and then direct a passenger into a more stringent process if it seems necessary.

What we need is a process that starts with a real, vetted, continuously updated and purged do-not-fly list. The present list, which included the late Senator Ted Kennedy and countless other random citizens, is a Kafkaesque joke and needs to be scrapped. Then we need to start asking questions at the time of ticket purchase and track the responses and behavior of potential passengers as they go through their approach to the gate. By the time they reach the actual security line, each passenger should have a probability assigned to them that determines whether they are subjected to a higher level of scrutiny. The process of determining this probability should be constantly updated as new information comes in. Spam filters update on an hourly basis as they collect data, so why not passenger filters?

As I have written about previously, security is ultimately about motivation. Terrorism is a politically motivated crime that requires a political solution. In the meantime, airport security could take a lesson from internet security.

If I’ve Lost Philip

In February of 1968, Walter Cronkite went to Viet Nam to cover the aftermath of the Tet offensive. After he returned, on February 27, 1968, Cronkite delivered an editorial commentary on national television suggesting that the war was not winnable in any conventional sense. He recommended peace negotiations.

Legend has it that President Johnson, hearing of this editorial, said something along the lines of “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

We have now experienced our own Cronkite moment here in Vermont, but concerning a different subject. Philip Baruth has declared that he “is now officially off the bus.” The bus in question is the Barack Obama campaign bus.

Let me explain. Philip Baruth is a University of Vermont professor, blogger, recently elected Vermont State Senator, and former Obama delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He wasn’t just a delegate, he was a slavering, raw-meat-eating, both-fists-in-the-air Obama delegate. He campaigned harder for that delegate spot than most candidates for elected office. Philip came out early for Obama and all through the 2008 campaign he was active and vocal in his support.

And now, this: “It’s not just that Obama hasn’t differentiated himself substantially from George W. Bush. On domestic spying and increased drone attacks and Gitmo and now extending the Bush-era tax cuts, Obama is choosing to govern more or less like a first-term President Lieberman.”

Senator Joe Lieberman? That’s Baruth-speak for dog puke. After the dog has eaten feces.

President Obama is too busy to notice us small-fry Vermont bloggers. Still, if he only knew. He’d be saying, “If I’ve lost Baruth, I’ve lost the core of the Democratic Party.”

Conservative Mythology

I often visit Snopes, the Urban Legends Reference site. Snopes deals with those legends that circulate (mostly by email these days) about freakish fatalities, hidden smut in Disney films, food contamination scares, computer viruses, and of course, politics.

I was just looking at the Snopes Top 25, a list of the most active and widely circulated urban legends on the net. Out of 25, 17 had no noticeable political content. There were a handful of telephone scam and virus rumors, a couple of bits about prepared carrots and onions, the Microsoft email giveaway, and that old one about Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) fighting on Iwo Jima. The other 8 all had significant political content and a decided slant. They were all items that would raise the blood pressure of conservatives. They were all false, or else a bit of truth twisted to extract the opposite conclusion from it.

There are two items about bills that were introduced by individual congressmen with no cosponsors and no hope of getting out of committee, one about handgun registration and another about a transaction tax. Both were misrepresented in the email tsunami as promoted by the Democratic leadership and moments from passing.

There was one about President Obama supposedly exempting Muslims from the mandatory insurance provision of the health care reform law. The law doesn’t exempt any religion by name, and follows existing Social Security Administration guidelines on exempting conscientious religious objectors who have shown an ongoing practice of taking care of their own. The Amish make the cut, Muslims, not so much. Myth again.

There is one conservative leaning commentary correctly attributed to writer and actor Ben Stein (with phony additions), and a rabid xenophobic rant falsely attributed to Bill Cosby.

There’s an old joke about someone thinking that cattle guards (metal rails set in the ground) are uniformed human beings. It is presented as fact, with (you guessed it) the Obama administration as the butt. President Obama is also falsely accused of inviting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to immigrate to the U.S.

There was also a piece that twisted a tax provision of the health care legislation. The tax would only kick in on the portion of yearly capital gains that exceeded $250,000 per person, but the email made it seem as if every home sale would get taxed. Myth again.

Check out the Snopes page covering those uber-forwarded emails about Barack Obama. Notice that the vast majority of them are both critical of him and false, and that the few true ones are either benign or irrelevant.

I won’t say that all the political urban myths I’ve seen are slanted to the right. George Bush and Sarah Palin take their lumps. However, a reasonably close observation of the genre tells me that the current runs hard in that direction. There is a saying, on the left, of course, that reality has a liberal bias. From reviewing urban legends I’d have to propose the corollary; that contemporary mythology has a conservative bias.



Two Crimes

This is old news, but I’d like to call your attention to two men who committed crimes and were sentenced back at the beginning of 2009.

The first is Roy Brown, a homeless man from Shreveport Louisiana. He walked into a local bank, put his hand under his coat to mimic a gun, and demanded money. He rejected the pile of cash the teller offered him and took one $100 bill, saying that he was hungry and needed money for a place to sleep. He then turned himself in the next day, saying that his mother didn’t raise him that way. He was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The second is Christian Milton, an executive at American International Group, the international insurance firm that we bailed out with our tax money. Mr. Milton engaged in a back-room scheme that defrauded AIG stockholders out of $500 million. Milton, a company vice president, committed securities fraud when he cut a secret deal with General Re Corp. to falsely inflate the asset value of AIG. He then lied about it to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The judge agreed with the prosecutor that Milton had known that the deal was a scam and had shown no remorse. Milton was sentenced to…wait for it…4 years in prison.

Homeless, hungry, ashamed, and honest: $100 gets you 15 years

Rich, sleazy, brazen, and dishonest: $500 million gets you 4 years

For many bank executives, fraud to the tune of $500 billion gets you a pat on the back and a million dollar bonus. Roy Brown’s story is enough to make me weep all by itself, but set next to the crimes of the financial elite it makes me smoldering angry.

One of the themes of the financial crisis has been accountability. One entity after another fobbed off the risk of bad mortgages to the next buyer down the line. Once it all went crash, the banks responsible got bailed out by their former employees in the Bush administration. The bankers responsible kept their jobs, received bonuses, and avoided prosecution in all but a handful of cases. Like those periodic harsh buzzing noises on the radio that herald a test of the emergency broadcast system, this is a test of the American justice system. So far, it is failing.

“Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing fall into them they hold it fast; while if it were something weightier it would break through them and be off”

Solon (Athenian Statesman, 636?-558? BCE), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius