WebSecure Blog
Posum Mutiny
Many newspaper headlines irritate me. It seems journalists have an unspoken game going on to try and turn every story headline into something ‘clever’. If Mr Black goes bankrupt we need a quip like “Black no longer in the black”. Consequently, only the occasional headline draws my attention anymore. One that did today was on page two of the Sydney Morning Herald, where buried in the short news articles at the bottom I read:
What Terrorist Risk?
Being someone who fundamentally disagrees that strip searching everyone at an airport increases my security, this was of interest.
Apparently a new study has been done pointing out that in the eleven years since the bombing in New York, no terror attack had taken place on Australian soil. This ground breaking discovery coming on the back of the previous eleven years - which as curious circumstance would have it were also terror attack free. Come to think of it so were the eleven years before that.
We know this is politically sensitive topic because instead of simply stating the blindingly obvious we had to have a study done, so the results could be quietly slipped into the press without too much fanfare or embarrassment to those who spent all that money making us warm and secure. I mean those full body porno scanners for the airport are probably already ordered and if word got out the threat they were supposed to protect us from does not exist, well. It wouldn’t be good.
If we’re very lucky someone will run what I call the ‘Posum Mutiny’ argument up the public flagpole in an effort to counter this disturbing move towards publishing the obvious. They might suggest the fact that terror attacks didn’t happen is only because we spent all that money to stop it. And the absence of terror goes to prove what a jolly good job we did.
Of course, if we’d spent the same amount of money on stopping the imminent Posum Mutiny we would have been just as jolly effective because that hasn’t happened either. And that’s a more important objective I would argue, because the posum threat is so much closer to home!
Real World Security
Another pointed reminder of how security goes wrong in the real world.
The Chief engineer on the gulf Deepwater Horizon drilling rig testifying to a US Federal panel investigating the disaster made two important comments on failures in the IT systems aboard the rig before it exploded.
1. The alarm system was turned off.
Apparently this is some what normal, there is a long history of enforcement penalties on rig operator who have done this in the past. So normal they had a name for it “… operating with the gas alarm system in ‘inhibited’ mode for a year to prevent false alarms from disturbing the crew”.
This is what we call the problem of false negatives, or crying wolf. A system is so poorly designed or implemented, it produces so many alarms that in the end nobody believes anything it says. Another example is airport scanners, where hundreds of people trigger alarms because the system is so poorly designed it doesn’t know the difference between a gun or a belt to hold your trousers up. In the end people turn it off or ignore it.
2. The computer monitoring and drilling suffered a Blue Screen of Death.
I guess there are two ways to view this. On the one hand the shoddy engineering principles and practices software is built with finally caught up with us and contributed to a massive ecological disaster. On the other hand this is a one time deal and given the number of critical systems being controlled by computers was bound to happen. That’s why we need failover and human intervention in control systems.
We should try to remember this lesson every time idiots try to tell us how their system can’t or will never failure. Banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, airlines, manufacturers, councils and government agencies are packed with systems that can and do suffer failures just like these ones.
This business of security is always about what happens when things fail, not when they work perfectly.
The whole sordid story at The Washington Post
End of the golden years
I’ve had this stupid flu virus that’s going around, during which I had some truly terrible thoughts. Not all of them ice cream related. One specifically comes to mind, because it can be posted on the internet without having anyone in a white coat come to my door.
It was one of those moments where you suddenly think, what if this is as good as it gets? You know, like Jack Nicholson, only taller.
I was reading a story of Microsoft’s latest attempt to control the release of bug discovery. Moving from ‘responsible disclosure’ (which I personally thought was a quite a brilliant piece of propaganda speak, anyone who didn’t follow our responsible suggestions became automatically irresponsible) to a new regime they are calling ‘coordinated vulnerability disclosure’. It could just be me, but it seems a lot more limp and not nearly as punchy. My immediate thought was ‘design by committee’. Anyway, as I was reading this, a thought crossed my mind - you know we never had these problems in the olden days. They tell me memory has it’s own rose colored glasses, but I don’t remember the Eighties as a time where we sat around wringing our anxious hands about how best to manage the disclosure of how crappy the engineering of software products was.
What changed?
Maybe it’s like the moment when the public twigs to how the magician does the trick. In the flash of a moment the penny drops and what was cool and clever becomes neither. It’s just been there, seen that - I know how he does it. The magic is gone. It’s a horrible thought and it’s a huge deal for our industry.
I’ll tell you why.
It means we’ve lost the attention of our audience. You know, those daily users of all this technology that suppliers patronizingly call ‘punters’. Suddenly describing how literally millions of electrons are zooming around inside, being converted from magnetic charge to electrical signal to LCD light draws nothing more than a yawn. And without that easy distraction the wonder is gone. Without that wonder they don’t feel special just to have one on their desk.
I know I’m right when I see the consumer avalanche that is Apple computer. When I look around for who stole the wonder - it’s those boys. Apple have become the kings of wonder.
Without the warm glow of wonder to bask in all that’s left is the cold light of day. In the cold light of day what were exciting new frontiers fade to become badly designed menu systems and annoying administration hassles. We become like a bad movie that doesn’t quite achieve the suspension of disbelief. I tell you, it’s no coincidence that Captain Kirk finished the series still charging into the final frontier because what follows the frontier is deeply depressing to those of us inside the starship IT Industry.
If you believed the press articles you’d think Cloud Computing was a hero on a white horse coming to reinvent the industry and deliver us from evil. However maybe the horse analogy is closer to the horsemen of the apocalypse. Cloud computing and outsourcing are just fancy ways of saying ‘get someone else to do it’ but let’s look beyond how pretty that new frock is and think about what it really means.
Now don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely a place in life for getting other people to do stuff for you. Some stuff is made so complex you couldn’t possibly do it yourself - like tax for example. Other stuff you don’t want to do yourself under any circumstances, like unblocking the sewer. But getting other people to do everything doesn’t make any sense. I’d love a chauffeur to drive me everywhere right up until I get the bill because it’s eye wateringly expensive. Even getting someone else to mow the lawn costs more than if you do it myself.
Ultimately, the limit to getting other people to do things is always about the money. Once you outsource something that I am paid to do you aren’t outsourcing administrative problems - you’re outsourcing me. An old but clever way to say - you’re out of a job. Either that or the job has changed; which always means you’re worth less.
So the slippery slope could look something like this; anything that is slightly complex or politically embarrassing or hard is a hassle. Anything that is a hassle get’s sent out for someone else to do. The list of things IT does gets sliced away like a salami until all that’s left is a glorified helpdesk for users who, twenty years after the PC revolution, still haven’t worked out how to print.
On the supply side, the expected savings never materialize, because getting other people to do something by definition costs more. So delivery costs and service levels are driven into the ground causing industry consolidation until Google and Microsoft own everything. Even if companies wake up, it’s all too late because nobody in their IT department has any experience or skills to run anything other than a helpdesk.
And all those clever boys and girls who changed the world end up having to get jobs unblocking other peoples sewers.
We could be living through the end of the golden years of our industry. I hope I’m wrong.
Evolution of the species
Way back in the olden days of January 1999 WebSecure teamed up with a small New Zealand software firm called Designer Technologies to launch a new type of product into the Australian market. It would check and filter your email and was called MailMarshal. The tech heads amongst us might get a good laugh out of the fact the ruleset was just an INI file.
Back then people weren’t being facetious when they said “yeah, but what’s it for?”, they honestly couldn’t figure out why anyone would filter their own email. Some people were even sure they’d be buying into this email fad anyway. By the end of 2001 MailMarshal, and products like it, had become a fact of life for Corporate Australia.
What changed everything was the computer virus.
What we didn’t know in 1999 was that the Happy99 and Melissa viruses weren’t just one off aberrations. They were, rather, the writing on the wall. In May 2000 the ILOVEYOU worm exploded on the internet like Mr Creosote in a tissue factory. By the end of 2001 we’d seen Anna Kournikova, Sircam, Code Red, Nimda and Klez. This brief eighteen month period rocketed companies like Norton and McAfee to the revenue moon and erased any doubt as to whether companies needed products like MailMarshal. Into 2004 we saw such things as MyDoom, Netsky, Witty, Sasser, Vundio and BiFrost.
All ancient history now buried in just a few Wikipedia pages. Memories to be laughed at after one too many beers.
But they are memories and it’s interesting how things have changed. Viruses listed as ‘notable’ for 2008 were Mocmex, Torpig and Conflicker. I hardly remember a customer who had real problems with either Mocmex or Torpig, only Conflicker stands out in the memory. 2009 gets even more obscure, with something called the Daprosy worm – I’ve never heard of it.
Where did all the viruses go?
As a half answer I read this article today in the New Scientist where Dell warns that some of its’ server motherboards might have been delivered to customers with a hardware trojan installed on them. And this isn’t an isolated instance. As examples IBM gave away USB keys at Auscert with viruses on them and Google’s Android App store has had a problem with malware apps being posted on a semi-regular basis. These are well equipped large companies who you’d think would know better.
What’s changed here is that customers don’t often ring WebSecure anymore asking how to stop an avalanche of viruses through their email pipe. They tell me stories of home users sending them in via the VPN; of USB sticks being plugged at work and at home with all sorts of rubbish on them. The tell me their virus scanner picked up a virus on a video camera when they plugged it in.
So the little sods haven’t gone away, they’ve just moved.
It’s on the notebook wandering around the planet with your CEO. It’s on the computer your son’s friend brought over for a games night last Saturday. It’s on the USB giveaways at trade shows, the camera memory cards people are using and it’s being downloaded for free through the App store.
Like a real virus that we stomped on with antibiotics, it’s back.
It’s evolved.
And it’s quietly building up a host of back doors into your network.
I don’t know what happens next. But if there is a second coming of the virus I know it won’ t be quite as easy to stomp on a second time and it will be bloody annoying.
Copyright Infringement
Kudos to Judge Nancy Gertner, who shocked the RIAA on Friday by reducing the damages awarded to five record companies in their case against Joel Tenenbaum from $675,000 to $67,500. For a young man it’s still a stupid amount of money that he probably doesn’t have, but then again he did the crime.
This case is interesting because he admitted his guilt to sharing 30 songs, so the main issue for the original jury was simply about what kind and to what extent damages should be awarded. Other important facts were that he did it willfully but made no money or other gain.
There are two ways damages can be awarded, either the actual damages, or what they call statutory damages. These statutory damages are specifically authorised by the american congress so that remedy may be obtained when the cost of actual damage is hard to establish or calculate.
In the original court case it was the RIAA who specifically decided they would like statutory damages.
Using this statutory damages legislation, designed to give guidelines to corporations as to what reasonable damages might be, the jury awarded the $675,000, being $22,500 for each of the 30 songs Tenenbaum shared.
Tenenbaum appealed on the basis that $675,000 far exceeded any plausible estimate of the harm suffered by the record company plaintiffs.
Judge Nancy Gerner basically agreed with that assessment, stating;
‘This award is far greater than necessary to serve the government’s legitimate interests in compensating copyright owners and deterring infringement. In fact, it bears no meaningful relationship to these objectives … the award here is simply “unprecedented and oppressive”’
In it’s statement to the Boston Globe, in response, the RIAA said the court has ‘substituted it’s judgement for that of the 10 jurors as well as Congress [and ignored the] profound economic and artistic harm to the recording industry that occurs when people illegally share songs online’.
It’s this response I want to comment on.
RIAA complaint one.
The court substituted it’s judgement…
But this is not new, it is the normal daily business of judges. Jurors are given no guidelines and no experience in what are accepted norms in the situation. They are only given the Congress guidelines, which are a quite huge range; 22,500 to 4,500,000. Those same laws allow this review, called Due Process Clause to protect proportionality. And it’s worth remembering these guidelines were primarily designed for corporate damages. All that is being done here is make sure it’s reasonable and proportional.
RIAA complaint two.
Ignored the profound economic and artistic harm…
But if the harm was profound, why didn’t take actual damages instead of choosing statutory damages? In the light of the judge’s statement that the damages were excessive it makes the RIAA seem unreasonable and strident. What reasonable person or group would deny the need for a fair and proportional response?
RIAA complaint three.
People illegally shared songs online…
The way this is stated, it becomes plain that the RIAA are not focused on this individual but on the wider issues. Sadly for the RIAA, ‘people’ in general are not being sentenced here, just one person for 30 songs they illegally shared with others.
So much can be said about the on going saga of the recording industry suing it’s customer base, but very little of it useful. The weight of this lobby is causing distortions in law and impacting the wider community in negative and long reaching ways. It’s not healthy. Their business model has changed, their product have become worth less in the marketplace, but they are proud, rich and bitter so the road ahead looks bleak.
One can only hope some common sense transpires and we can all be spared from their ritual suicide.
The judgement can be read in full here: LINK
Identity Theft
I find this proposition of so called ‘Identity Theft’, that my identity can be ‘stolen’ to be hysterical, alarmist rubbish. As if your whole self, soul, spirit and DNA are simply like shoes, golf clubs or a camera bag that can be lifted from your car when you look the other way.
It’s simply ridiculous.
What we’re really talking about here is someone discovering some details about yourself, date of birth, credit card details and so forth, then using those details to fraudulently pretend to be you. To deceive others and misrepresent themselves as you. But this is a description of fraud - not theft. The fact that it happens with digital data doesn’t change the nature of the beast. And it is worth remembering there is a massive difference between theft and fraud.
It annoys me that the press buys into calling what is fraud ‘theft’, when it so obviously isn’t, because it recasts the wider debate in what is a false light.
On the one hand, if I was careless enough to let someone steal something from me, then what I’ll call the burden of stupidity falls largely on me.
On the other hand, it the bank was fooled by someone claiming to be me, clearly the burden of stupidity falls on them. How can I be held culpable for the lack of ability at the bank to recognise me?
Obviously banks have a strong vested interest to make it out to be all your fault and you don’t have to be too cynical to see why personal banking contracts blame you for anything and everything that might go wrong. So when they cry theft it isn’t much to do with the truth of what happened, but rather the banks desire to evade legal responsibility for it’s own incompetence in being taken in by the deception. And in the absence of corporate morals, this seems understandable if not particularly honest or right.
But what I do wonder is why the media take the same position?
Is it that banks spend enough advertising dollars to dictate what the press will say - or - are they just stupid?
Real World Security
Another great quote from the spy story to end the week. This one even has a real world poignancy to it.
Ricci said the steganographic program was activated by pressing control-alt-E and then typing in a 27-character password, which the FBI found written down on a piece of paper during one of its searches.
So there we have it.
Read all the theoretical bullshit you want, but in the real world major drug rings operate inside secure international airports, governments struggle to keep guns and drugs out of prison, the army leaves its operational plans on a notebook in the back of the taxi, no body uses the $17 million dollar verification system and the super secret password to the carefully engineered security system is written down next to the computer.
Quote of the day!
This from the NY Post about our high tech spy friends… Read more
When one couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were arrested in their home in Montclair, N.J., neighbors expressed astonishment that the pair, who they described as “suburbia personified,” were accused of spying.
“They couldn’t have been spies,” said one neighbor. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”
Security comedy at CNET
I know we shouldn’t take the press too seriously and that most headlines these days are about exciting an audience bored into stupefaction. So I’m not taking this story very seriously, but hey it’s quoted by CNET as the actual words used.
Ten men and women arrested on charges of being secret Russian agents used high-tech spy-craft, including steganography, private Wi-Fi networks, and flash memory sticks, prosecutors claim.
Are you grinning yet?
Or what about A clandestine network of Russian spies.. Make you feel sorry for those poor saps who are in publicly advertised networks of spies?
Death of Democracy
In amongst the local news of the moment I read this headline and story from the Sydney Morning Herald
The gist of it being the mining industry ousted Mr Rudd because of his attempt to increase the share of tax they pay in Australia. Now, even mature adults are prone to exaggeration in moments of prideful gloating, so I wouldn’t know whether the claims made by the mining industry are true or not. But to the extent their claims are true they are disturbing.
It seems to me the very purpose of organized government is to protect the weak from the strong. The assumption being the strong can take care of themselves. What we have here is the strong redirecting the government by replacing a key piece of it because it does not suit them. You could be forgiven for thinking it was a script from a Sopranos episode, or if you like a little more comedy, Fat Tony from the Simpsons. Humour aside, it’s a dangerous precedent.
If mining bosses, or any big business(es) for that matter, can replace a prime minister, who is democracy for?
I acknowledge that Mr Rudd was not popular in the polls and the voting public may have ejected him at the next election anyway. But that’s a separate issue and at no time did the voting public give away it’s rights to business executives.
Aside from this death of democracy, there are at least two large problems that stem from this event. Firstly, the debt issue and secondly the equity issue.
Firstly the debt issue.
Western governments are all in a huge debt hole, owing to the untimely demise of their entire banking system. As discussed in my post ‘Story of a three legged chair’ this has created government frenzy on a scale not seen in a long time, as they struggle to find more money.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the search for more tax was going to lead the Australian government to an industry in the middle of the largest commodities boom in decades. And if the fastest growing, booming industry in the country isn’t interested in picking up more of the tax burden created by the global financial meltdown, does this mean the poor old tax payer is in the gun? Again.
I guess they have the right to ask government why, if they were prepared to cover the debts of the banking industry, are you targeting the mining industry? It’s a slightly infantile, but tough question. Maybe government is a club to rape tax payers and miners simply miffed they turned out not to be in it.
Secondly the equity issue.
The chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, Belinda Robinson, said any new tax must ‘not disadvantage existing projects and those currently considering major investment decisions”, and it must deliver ”competitive neutrality in tax treatment for those competing in the same market’.
The argument can be leveled, that export earning industries like mining have a special place in the economy. Particularly in countries, like Australia, who like to spend more than they earn on the world stage. It’s a vital service to the country so they shouldn’t be penalized in any way, to do so is to weaken the country as a whole.
However, there are counters to this argument. Has this industry ever received tax help in the bad times, and if so why shouldn’t it swing the other way in the good times? Who exactly in the country does it benefit to pass the tax burden back from industry to general tax payers? Are not multinational companies already the most tax advantaged legal entities in existence today?
And here’s another look at the equity of it. If governments had not thrown in 2.8 trillion dollars of tax payers money to pay off the debts of the western banking system, what would the mining industries commodities boom look like today? In the sober light of that, doesn’t the moral burden shift from the export earner to the industry savior - the humble tax payer?
In the end, whilst governments insist on spending the simply enormous amounts of money they do, it has to come from somewhere. Perhaps if they spent less tax payers hard earned dollars to begin with we wouldn’t have large business focusing it’s power in undermining democracy.
In any case, the whole sequence of events has exposed the Australian democratic process as a farce. An emperor with no clothes. Maybe it’s only at moments like these the thin veil is lifted. When we glimpse the ugly nakedness, the mean, greedy, grasping spirit that is selfish ambition.
Why vote in a system that the strong simply pervert when it turns to it’s primary purpose, to protect the weak?
NBN & Telstra
Yesterdays press has the news that Telstra has agreed, in principle, to migrate it’s copper and cable data networks to the government owned NBN Co. Assets to be transferred were valued at $9 billion dollars and another $2 billion for .. I’m honestly not sure, for a total settlement of $11 billion dollars. Under the proposal, government will pay $9 billion progressively as the copper and cable data network is decommissioned, NBN paying Telstra a fee for every customer migrated to the brand new, shiny NBN fibre network.
At a quick glance you could be excused to being thrilled at the idea of being moved from copper to fibre.
But there is something screwy and circular about this whole deal.
For a long time government policy has been based on the idea that public involvement in private enterprise was inefficient and wasteful. Look at any news article about the Sydney public transport system in the last ten years or more. Its very reflective of a school of thought, dating from the Reagan years, that government is philosophically wrong to be in commercial ventures and useless at it to boot.
I’ll side step the argument as to whether privatizing Telstra speeded up data, reduced phones bills and increased service levels as the philosophy suggested it would.
But what’s at the core of this proposal?
Having sold off Telstra, according to the grand privatization plan, the government is now proposing to pay Telstra $11 billion dollars to get out of the wholesale business. So the government can run it. Not only that, the $11 billion dollars isn’t going to actually buy any asset for the government, they’re going to shut down the copper and cable ‘assets’ as they go. Tax payers actually receive nothing for their $11 billion.
It’s not an investment, it’s a redundancy package.
Additional to this, tax payers will also get the huge bill for building the national fibre network. According to the FAQ’s on the NBN web site the government is so far committed to spending $43 billion. It’s worth remembering that the sales of Telstra netted something like $12 billion and $15 billion each, for a total of about $27 billion. That was for both the retail and wholesale networks and business. Now the government can’t build the wholesale network alone for less than $43 billion plus an $11 billion redundancy payout.
What this proves is when they sold the Telstra network for $27 billion it was miles below the asset replacement value. If the new NBN fibre network costs $43 billion to build, but Telstra was sold at $27 billion, that’s a 37% discount. Oh, but wait - if we add in the $11 billion redundancy they only paid a net $16 billion, at which point we see the discount was 63%. Sold for close to one third of it’s wholesale asset value. If we add in the retail network, the retail business, future earnings and goodwill the discount was obviously bugger. Sorry, freudian typing there!
To state it another way, tax payers were ripped off by at least $27 billion dollars in the sale of Telstra, plus whatever the entire retail network and business was actually worth. I would never suggest any kind of fraud. I tend towards the simplest explanation, which appears to be that the government of the day was commercially incompetent.
If you’re a pessimist, remember this when you drive through a pothole on the way to sit in line at an under resourced hospital.
If you’re an optimist, remember this when the government decides it doesn’t want to own the NBN anymore and starts offering 63% discounts.
Story of a three legged chair
It was only the end of the year before last, the entire banking system of Europe and the USA effectively went bankrupt.
This in turn could have caused a vast amount of financial damage to institutions, persons or governments who held shares of, loans to or were counter party with, the entire banking system. Even the actual flow on losses were impressive including major housing slumps of 20% and share index falls of up to 45% in many countries.
Academics will probable argue for decades about the ‘true’ causes of this crash, but I suspect outrageous and systemic fraud on a monumental scale was a key ingredient. Not to say this will ever see the light of day.
As we all know, western governments decided, on balance, the best thing was to bail out their banking systems. That is to say, pay their debts for them. Wikipedia quotes the direct cost to do so as $2.8 Trillion dollars. Of course, disasters of this nature are like weeping wounds and the blood loss is on going, so who knows what that cost is now. And what do we call direct costs or secondary costs? And who has any enthusiasm to keep track?
What is now of concern is the answer to this important question – where did governments get the money they used to pay out the bankrupt bankers?
Governments, contrary to the belief of some, are not wealth creating entities. Although, nominally, they control the money supply they cannot simply print all the money they need whenever they want. If they could, then general taxation of a nations workforce would be a pointless affair. Companies could enjoy a tax free existence and governments would magically pay their bills with that modern version of the printing press, the computer. Sadly, the grand real life experiment in Zimbabwe highlighted some severe down side effects in doing so and thus proved the theory bunk.
So if they can’t create it, where did they get it from?
Without getting bogged in technical jargon seemingly designed to blur the truth, they seem to have three avenues. They can take it from someone, borrow it from someone, print the money or a combination of all three. Of course, how this is done is the where the rubber meets the road. The nitty gritty. The rub. You can take in plain view, you can take in hidden view. You can borrow in plain view of the marketplace, or do it quietly under the table. You can report on the state of things with a spirit of truth, you can hide dealings behind clever accounting or statistical practice. Strange things happen when people police their own performance with someone else’s money.
Given the size of the losses bankers made, it’s almost certain they did all three.
But of course, tax is made by tax payers. Interest bills for government loans are paid by future tax payers, your children and your children’s children. And the consequent inflation from money printing slowly but surely dissolves wealth and savings in real terms. So regardless of the exact combination of what was done we could boil it all down like this. They used money they took from tax payers. They borrowed money tax payers have to pay the interest on. They devalued the remaining wealth and savings of tax payers.
All well and good if you don’t pay tax, other wise a triple whammy.
If we pause to think for a moment it brings into stark relief the drive in the western world for governments to ‘tighten their belts’. Even if they were spending a little more than they should before - now it’s a magnitude worse. The bankruptcy of the bankers is threatening to become the bankruptcy of the governments. Or at least the crippling interest costs.
Casting my eye about me, I don’t see any obvious doubling in personal or company taxation. Unsurprisingly we do see the idea of a new mining tax and discussion about changes to tax regulations. I’m willing to venture those changes will not be designed to reduce the governments net income. There seems enough machinations to suggest they’re trying to increase their tax take any place they can get away with it.
For obvious reasons governments are not keen to advertise how much money they create, so a it’s a difficult line of enquiry. What we can see is interest rates on the uphill path in the middle of the biggest world recession since the great depression. Interest rates often go up in high inflation environments, which occur when governments get carried away with money creation. Also, have you noticed the price of anything used for daily life dropping lately?
One thought I did have is this idea of compulsory superannuation was a wonderful windfall for the government. Imagine how enticing a shoebox of cash that big must look to a government in this situation. If I was cynical I would wonder about the timing of regulatory changes to superannuation to stop it from being paid out to you in one lump sum on retirement. I wonder how much will be left 20 years from now that hasn’t been tied to some kind of government debt program or other.
But c’est la vie, what is really happening seems to be kept under wraps, far from inquiring minds.
Overall one can’t help but feel sorry for the poor old tax payer. She had to bail out the banks for trillions, has to now live through regulation changes designed to make her pay more tax and though the cost of living keeps going up there’s not a wage rise in sight. To rub salt in the wound, banks worldwide are back to record profits. Welcome to the brave new world of post bailout blues.
You know, Henry Ford once stated this piece of wisdom; ‘There is one rule for the industrialist, this: make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible’. At this juncture, I can’t help but think we’ve forgotten the wages leg of his three legged chair.
US Military to destroy Wikileaks
Since the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001 the western world, on the back of wonderful new computer technologies, has witnessed a grand march of the state surveillance system on a scale not seen before. Literally millions of security cameras deployed in public areas, voluntary and involuntary biometric searches, data mining and sharing of your tax and other government records, warrantless taping of your phone calls and detention without trial laws are all examples. Still more measures are mooted like compulsory and/or mass DNA testing and national identity cards.
A boringly long line of worthless politicians have filled the hot air with the strident cry that if you’ve nothing to hide you shouldn’t be afraid of any of this. Apparently the British government actually used the following slogan in an advertising campaign, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’.
If you don’t think about it, this appears like a decent argument. Those in fear strike a balance, thinking their privacy can’t be more important than their security.
But to throw the cat amongst the pigeons, in 1755 Benjamin Franklin said ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. I’d have to say todays politicians appear to have missed what he was driving at. Not only did he say trading away liberty was undeserving, he called liberty essential.
To add weight to his side of the argument, we have Henry Kissinger who, quoting Lord Acton said, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. If this is true, it raises many vexing questions about our current headlong drive to centralise information and control.
And so we would be clear as to who we should defend our liberty against, Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last restart to protect themselves against tyranny in government’.
I’ll add a chilling warning from Martin Luther King, ‘Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal’.
I’ll remind you that even if governments were pure, and history screams they are not, terrible and brutal things still happen. An extreme and high profile example is Khalid El-Masri, the german national who was kidnapped, flown to Afghanistan, tortured and then released because it was a case of mistaken identity. He lost his liberty in the name of someone else’s security.
With all that in mind, the press are reporting the US Military is pursuing Wikileaks with vengeance. For what? Well, Wikileaks made a confidential military video public. It showed a helicopter crew machine gunning down two Reuters reporters in Iraq, whilst also making it more than obvious the official record of what happened was a big fat porky. Minor details, like they weren’t obviously insurgents and they didn’t have any guns.
Now, in this case things are more complicated. The Military have an additional point on their side, that is the sad old argument for the risk to national security. Sad because any lie, untruth, error of judgement or crime can, and has, been hidden behind it. Like Harry Potters invisibility cloak, governments of every kind, age and creed have used this as an argument to obstruct justice and hide their crimes in the dark.
So there is a more stark balance of interest, but I would summarize that balance like this. On the one hand people actually did die. On the other hand people might be put at unquantified risk. One is an argument and one is a reality. I am distrustful of those who believe their actual and real crimes should be hidden because of the risk to national security or other unsubstantiated claim. I agree with Benjamin Franklin that liberty is more valuable than security, especially when that which is given to me in the name of security is not security at all. I agree with Henry Kissinger that power corrupts, and therefore having Wikileaks exposing lies to the light is, on balance, a good thing. I am one with Thomas Jefferson, that my own government is such a great risk to liberty that carrying arms can be a good thing. And I hear Martin Luther King, and remember that it was people in a government who made genocide legal.
So now we have the full weight of histories largest military complex coming down on Wikileaks because they exposed dirty laundry to the light.
Sadly for you and I, liberty and privacy are not entirely different beasts, they are absolutely connected. You cannot have true liberty without privacy and privacy does not substantially exist without liberty. Anything less is a party trick, a slight of hand with the intention to deceive. And if governments successfully silence people who drag lies into the light our liberty is dragged with them.
Finally, for the sake of irony and hypocrisy one has to ask the question of the US Military. If you’ve nothing to hide then what are you afraid of?
Death by Aeroplane
As I was browsing the Australian Bureau of Statistics this afternoon, as you do, I found the following statistics on causes of death in Australia. I know, it’s a little morbid, but with all these vampire programs people seem pretty interested in death these days.
In the last posted year of 2008, 8804 people died from what they describe as “external causes”, that is where the underlying cause is external to the body. Overall that accounts for only 6.1% of all deaths. What that means in round terms is there’s a 94% chance that if you die in the next 12 months it will more than likely be from regular causes, like your heart giving up or your cancer getting out of hand.
When I look at some of the less likely causes of death things make sense to me.
All types of drowning - 159 people - or - .01%
Exposure to smoke, fire and flames - 72 people - or - 0.1%
Exposure to inanimate mechanic force - 85 people - or - 0.1%
A 99.7% chance I won’t die of drowning, or in a fire in my bed, or be crushed under my car while fixing an oil leak this year. All of which seems reasonably well accepted when I look around and see how much effort is being put in to preventing fires, water and mechanical evils. A few OSH posters and the yearly fund raising effort for surf life saving.
But the one I was really interested in was the chance of dying in any kind of transport accident or mishap. Because I’m assuming it includes all the people who died in terrorist attacks on planes.
All transport accidents - 1402 people - or - 1.0%
As it turns out that’s pretty close to the same number of us who will die from - falling over. I kid you not. Clearly the daily news papers are not giving the risk of falling over the equal press inches it deserves. But this figure includes all transport deaths, including road deaths, which turn out to be somewhat more prevalent than plane deaths. Luckily they break plane deaths out for us.
Guess how many air related deaths scourged the nation in 2008?
44.
They don’t say how many of these 44 were terrorist related.
Now I’ve been known to take the odd international plane flight in the last 12 months. And what is hard to miss is the elaborate pantomime going on in the name of security at airports. Cameras filming your every move. Notices warning you not to make jokes with customs or immigration staff. Whole banks of X-Ray machines and people taking their clothes off everywhere. At times you could be excused for thinking there are more security staff than passengers in the room.
I can tell you all this activity is costing somebody a whole lot of money. A quick google search led me to the autoClear 200220 extremely heavy duty X-Ray machine suitable for warehouses, correctional facilities and airports. Just a 6 foot roller table for the end of it is US$8500. In one article it quoted US$150,000 for one of those new full body scanners. Now add the cost of installation, maintenance, training and staff to run them.
Yet the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells me the chances of dying on a plane for any reason is so low they don’t assign a percentage to it.
So if it’s not a pantomime, what is it?
Apparently it’s the price of keeping me safe from terrorism.
All I can only think that they must be spending somebody elses money, because if every passenger had to hand over cold hard cash that reflected the true cost of this ‘service’ of being made ‘safe’ by pantomime I cant help but think the vast bulk of travelers would tell them to get stuffed.
MailMarshal 6.8.3.9471 Released
Now is a good time to upgrade to 6.8, with the patched version released on June 3rd.
The previous database upgrade issue is put to bed and it seems a good stable version. If you check out the release notes from 6.7 to 6.8 you’ll find a large bug fix listing.
If you’re running 6.4 and 6.5 - you know who you are - then this is the version for you.
