Yesterday, in a major victory for open government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a federal judge ruled against the Bush Administration latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared the White House illegally deleted Secret Service computer records.
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At the direction of the White House, the Secret Service was deleting visitor records from the beginning of the Bush Administration until October 2004, when the deletions were discovered when open government activists attempted to get access to them.
Apparently the administration’s tactic was to drag the lawsuit out until Bush could leave office. Bush’s actions made it very tricky to tell companies to follow the law, since he had a record of doing the opposite. He was never clearly breaking them, but very very adept at finding loopholes and getting out of town before the prosecutors could catch up to him.
Identity management discussions are so much fun as they bring up all the various ways people can alter their appearances. Now these discussions can be even more fun, laced with images from Sleeveface:
I was wondering what to do with that lightsaber I was recently given as a gift…just need the Bonnie Tyler album and I’m ready for Halloween. Well, that’s assuming I don’t proceed with plans for my Davy Crockett “King of the Wild Frontier” costume.
The woman also was quoted as saying that the broker gave her the special tape with someone else’s fingerprints on, and that she slipped past the biometric recognition system by holding her taped index fingers over the scanner.
According to an analysis by the bureau, regular adhesive tape does not work, as the scanner fails to read any prints. The results have led the immigration bureau to suspect that the woman might have used a special tape bearing someone else’s fingerprints.
Although the bureau detained the woman at an immigration facility for further questioning, she did not provide information that pinpointed what the tape is made of or the South Korean broker before she was deported again in mid-September.
The bureau has compiled a report based on her statements and submitted it to the Justice Ministry. The report says it is conceivable such tape exists and that the South Korean broker might have helped a considerable number of foreigners enter Japan using it.
According to the ministry, the immigration section at Aomori Airport kept images of the woman’s fingerprints, but they were imperfect and did not match the genuine fingerprints of the woman.
This is a little confusing. Was the print database incomplete and therefore her real prints would have allowed her through anyway, or was a fake set of prints on tape the key to getting through immigration? I suspect the latter is more important since tape has to have provided a valid set of prints or she would have failed entry. Although, this assumes she really had tape on her fingers when she went through immigration. Is that a certainty? The story says her testimony is what led police to believe this tape exists. Since she was not caught in the act and is a known liar perhaps she made the whole thing up. More details hopefully will emerge when/if she tries again.
I had to bite my tongue as I read about “a stunning rise in pirate assaults” in a new AP article about a New US-led naval force to battle Somali pirates. The rise in piracy was not only tracked and I would argue predictable (as I argued back in January of 2006!), but it also followed the intentional disintegration of the situation in Somalia by US and Ethiopian intervention. Correlation? I think there is ample reason to see causation. Notice how the AP article concludes:
The flagship, the USS San Antonio, is an amphibious ship capable of bringing hundreds of Marines ashore.
This is the type of action needed to truly rattle the pirates, said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center.
“Right now there is no major deterrent,” he said. “The military maybe chases away the pirates, but they regroup and come back for another attack on another ship. Piracy will continue until their networks and bases are hit.”
In other words, they found a convenient place to build networks and bases — a set of vulnerabilities they could exploit. It is hard not to get into hindsight mode, but the suggestion that stability and security in Somalia will cut down the piracy is surely a way of questioning the tactics that undermined the formation of a popular government. I guess the question is whether the cost of piracy and related activity, such as the Mumbai attacks, is higher or lower than if the US had allowed a hostile but potentially stable Islamic state to form?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
