Tag Archives: public

“America’s Covert Government Lending”

1
Posted by m3t00 on 09-01-15 – 02:35:am
under economics, finance, government, international

Bingo: Steve Clemons gives it a name.

The rationale for the secrecy—that disclosure would precipitate lack-of-faith events that could be disastrous—is entirely valid; but the proposed solutions are not.

The popular “debate” so far has oscillated around whether recent crises involve liquidity or solvency issues; in fact, the underlying issue is whether the problems are prudential or fiduciary. Secrecy doesn’t just fail to solve either problem: it exacerbates both.

The solution isn’t how best to prop up an empire of debt; rather, it is how best to forgive debt.

Tories in waiting

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-12-02 – 05:21:pm
under government, security, urban

The US as parliamentary democracy meme insight is catching on (WaMo, Hullabaloo).

But whatever happened to this (8 Aug ’08)?

SUMMARY: The National Park Service (NPS) is proposing to amend regulations governing viewing of the Inaugural parade by the public, demonstrators, and the Presidential Inaugural Committee. The proposed rule would extend the duration and extent of demonstrations and special events in Washington, DC, including the Inaugural, the Lighting of the National Christmas Tree and Christmas Pathway of Peace, the Cherry Blossom Festival, the Fourth of July Celebration, and the Festival of American Folklife.

The GOP, after all, are famously big fans of demonstrations and dedicated to shaping policies in ways that will benefit the incoming administration.

NSA conducts informal poll

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-08-26 – 09:43:am
under military, network, security

The NSA has declassified Technical Journal articles ’56–’73. Of the 29 articles they’ve listed, only 7 are working links—the other 22 are 404s.

NSA error page

Working: “About NSA,” “Antipodal Propagation,” “Did Aleksandr Popov Invent Radio?”, “Book Review: Lost Languages,” “Book Review: Lincos, Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1,” “Aristocrat—An Intelligence Test for Computers,” and “Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

Broken: “Emergency Destruction of Documents,” “Development of Automatic Telegraph Swithing Systems,” “Chatter Patterns: A Last Resort,” “Introduction to Traffic Analysis,” “Signals from Outer Space,” “Science and Cryptology,” “A New Concept in Computing,” “Data Transmission Over Telephone Circuits,” “Soviet Science and Technology: Present Levels and Future Prospects,” “A Program for Correcting Spelling Errors,” “The Borders of Cryptology,” “A Cryptologic Fairy Tale,” “Why Analog Computation?”, “Book Review: Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” “Soviet Communications Journals as Sources of Intelligence,” “Something May Rub Off!”, “Time Is,” “Communications with Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” “The Library and the User,” “Mokusatsu: One Word, Two Lessons,” “Key to The Extraterrestrial Messages,” and “Earliest Applications of the Computer at NSA.”

So what does this reveal?

(Cryptome)

What comes before prior restraint?

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-07-31 – 11:48:pm
under government, law, military

Lederman at Balkinization pulls this quote from US District Judge John Bates’s 93-page opinion in what he calls the “Miers/Bolton contempt case”:

There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress’s legitimate interest in inquiry could be easily thwarted. . . . [I]f the Executive’s absolute immunity argument were to prevail, Congress could be left with no recourse to obtain information that is plainly not subject to any colorable claim of executive privilege. For instance, surely at least some of the questions that the Committee intends to ask Ms. Miers would not elicit a response subject to an assertion of privilege; so, too, for responsive documents, many of which may even have been produced already. The Executive’s proposed absolute immunity would thus deprive Congress of even non-privileged information. That is an unacceptable result. [emphasis changed]

We’ve been here before:

Read More »

National energy stragety

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-07-30 – 02:12:pm
under energy, finance, government

Wald, “Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund,” NYT (29 July ’08):

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday. The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

TiReD: President of the American Public Transportation Association, William W. Millar, says the obvious: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the way to go.” WiReD: Visa cash advance pays Mastercard bill!

Priceful.

(Streetsblog)

Information architecture: Cal PSC dox online

2
Posted by m3t00 on 08-07-08 – 12:07:am
under government, law, standards

Citing the Veeck decision (7 June ’02), Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org have posted the building, fire, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical Public Safety Codes for the state of California. In itself, this may excite a handful of people, but the following statement makes its importance clear:

The courts have long held that the law is public domain and must be available to all for use without restriction. While numerous organizations have attempted to assert copyright over judicial branch opinions, legislative branch statutes, and executive branch regulations, the courts have not looked kindly on these efforts to place a private wrapper around a public package. If we are to be a nation of laws, those laws must be accessible to all.

The Cal PSC documents are available “in bulk” here.

Ongoing and archived projects include gao.gov (now the “Government Accountability Office,” courtesy of 43, for whom the term implies guilt), house.gov, justice.gov, si.edu (a/k/a the Smithsonian Institution), uscourts.gov, copyright.gov, itu.int, oregon.gov, sec.gov, and uspto.gov.

Public.Resource.Org’s “paper trail” of selected correspondence:

As a de facto standard, the decision to publish pdfs of the correspondence makes sense—but “Scribd”? About which one observer has written:

I call bullshit. ... If anything they are locking things up by placing it in their own jackass format. Please, scribd, tell us all what exactly was wrong with text? Or PDFs? Why exactly are we supposed to embrace your closed-source, proprietary standard? One, because it is so jacked up, makes it invisible to all search engines, including Google? Now please stop pissing off the Internet and go bankrupt already.

There is no c*b*l, version 376: the Porvoo Group

1
Posted by m3t00 on 08-06-16 – 01:54:am
under government

Stuart Hill, an older gent who lives in the Shetland Isles, says he’s stumbled onto “a scheme that threatens our fundamental freedoms”: “the new ‘National Entitlement Card’ that provides access to free travel for the elderly and disabled, in fact marks the introduction of ID Cards by the back door.” He’s written up his research here. The person who submitted his writeup to RISKS noted (and the RISKS moderator, Peter G. Neumann, apparently agreed) that Hill “has done his research, and this should not be dismissed as just another paranoid conspiracy theory.”

Hill mentions the “Poorvoo Group,” more correctly (it seems) the “Porvoo Group.” They don’t seem to have ‘their own’ website (which is notable in its own right), but the (Finnish) Population Registry Centre, which serves as PG’s “permanent secretariat,” describes them as

an international cooperative network whose primary goal is to promote a trans-national, interoperable electronic identity based on PKI technology (Public Key Infrastructure) and smart cards and chip ID cards, in order to help ensure secure public and private sector e-transactions in Europe. The Group also promotes the introduction of interoperable certificates and technical specifications, the mutual, cross-border acceptance of identification and authentication mechanisms, as well as cross-border, online access to administrative services.

The site also notes that, “[a]t present, some 30 countries from Europe, the United States, Canada and Asia have representatives in the Group” (emphasis added). Along these lines, note their most recent list of links to relevant non-PG documents:

European Health Insurance Card (EHIC): towards simplification for healthcare professionals, Article by Marc Lange 
Common Specifications for eIDM Interoperability (draft) 
Summary of existing authentication schemes (draft) 
Proposal for a multi-level authentication mechanism and a mapping of existing authentication mechanisms (draft) 
Privacy Enhancement for eIDs (draft of a discussion paper)
TLS-Federation (rough draft of a paper)
Rough writeup of a more concrete eID Interoperability Scenario
Review and Analysis of Current and Future European e-ID Schemes, by Siddhartha Arora, M.Sc. thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London 
Thomas Myhr's report: Regulating a European eID
NIST Special Publication

(Another, partial version of the PG secretariat site is here.)

To date, PG has held thirteen meetings:

Porvoo 1 (Porvoo, Finland, 4-5 Apr 02): link

Porvoo 2 (Dublin, 20-21 Nov 02): link

Porvoo 3 (Oslo, 20-21 May 03): link

Porvoo 4 (Issy-les-Moulineaux, 24 Sep 03, “in connection with the 4th Worldwide Forum on e-Democracy”; e-ID workshop and "eEpoch"): link

Porvoo 5 (Tallinn, Estonia, 13-14 May 04): link, dedicated site—sponsors listed as Valimo Wireless, Setec, Trüb Baltic

Porvoo 6 (Rome, 9-10 Nov 04): link, dedicated site—participants

Porvoo 7 (Reykjavik, 26-27 May 05): link, dedicated site—sponsor listed as Verisign

Porvoo 8 (Brussels, 13-14 Oct 05): link, dedicated site—participants

Porvoo 9 (Ljubljana, 11-12 May 06): link, dedicated site—participants

Porvoo 10 (Porvoo, 2-3 Nov 06): dedicated site—commercial sponsors ("organised in co-operation with") listed as Fujitsu, Gemalto, TietoEnator

Porvoo 11 (Coimbra, Portugal, 24-25 May 07): link, dedicated site—commercial sponsors ("main partners") listed as Gemalto, Cisco, Accenture, Microsoft, Siemens, IBM

Porvoo 12 (Grosseto, Italy, 18-19 Oct 07): link, dedicated site—commercial sponsors listed as Microsoft, Cisco, Athena Smartcard Solutions, Elsag Datamat, Rama, Alberese

Porvoo 13 (Hurtigruten, Norway, 9-10 Apr 08): link, dedicated site—commercial sponsors listed as BBS, BankID, Det Norske Veritas, Microsoft, Telenor

Porvoo 14 is scheduled for Cardiff, 23-24 October 2008.

A quick scan of PG’s agendas over the last six years suggests that they've made a lot of progress.

This is the kind of public-private body that needs to be watched very, very closely. To date, it has operated fairly openly (including publishing pictures of meetings); its operations may close very quickly, though.

Sex in the city in context

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-06-03 – 11:27:pm
under sex

Times square in 1970; a Spartacus sex swingers’ club ad (n.d.); Plato's Retreat ad (n.d.); “Leisure Spa” ads (Taj Mahal, the Retreat, etc; n.d.); Channel J excerpts (n.d.); Al Goldstein; Ugly George.

Foreclosure, expulsion

0
Posted by m3t00 on 08-05-22 – 12:01:am
under education, finance, neighborhood

WSJ, "School Districts Get Tough as Home Foreclosures Rise":

Districts from Florida to California are hiring private investigators, creating anonymous tip lines and imposing penalties when they believe people have registered at false addresses. [...] One reason for the crackdown is the rise in home foreclosures, which may prod parents into faking addresses to keep their children at their current schools, some in the field say.

The rest of the article is a shop of horrors: a private dick who does “blitz runs” and claims he’ll “save districts a total of $12.2 million next year through removing students,” and Palm Beach County officials who “say they have heard of families illegally sharing homes in upscale areas that are zoned for single-family homes.” One advocacy organization estimates that “two million children are likely to be affected by the wave of foreclosures on subprime mortgages, mostly this year and next.”

According to the article, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act etc.—signed into law by Reagan—“says school districts can't deny enrollment to children who are homeless because of foreclosure or other economic hardship.” Not so, says the unavoidable source: it’s a “conditional funding act” to which states are subject only if they accept optional federal funding.

Where’s the school-voucher crowd when we need them?