Category Archives: Security

Food, Security

The Brown Jug Law — Confiscating Fake IDs for Cash

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Several years ago a para-legal, who also happened to be vice-president of the Brown Jug liquor store in Anchorage, initiated a new Fake ID law for Alaska. He promoted the notion that the market for fake IDs could be better regulated, based on the following logic:

When a minor uses a false identification or misuses a valid ID to attempt to circumvent the law, a crime has been committed, and that’s the case in almost every jurisdiction.

But too often the business that has been hoodwinked gets charged with the crime when it is in reality the business that is the victim.

In Alaska, they take a different tack: a business that is the victim or attempted victim of such fraud can confiscate the ID, then sue the perpetrator for $1,000 in civil damages.

After the law passed the Brown Jug started to alert parents of teens caught with fake IDs that they had the option of fighting a civil action or paying a $300 fine and sending the accused to alcohol awareness classes. Seems to me that someone using a fake ID to get alcohol is already plenty aware of the stuff, but I digress.

Has this approach been successful?

According to [Brown Jug’s] O’Neill, bouncers at the club spot a lot of false IDs and earn enough in resulting bonuses that these jobs have become very sought after and are considered to be high paying.

At Chilkoot Charlies, O’Neill said, one-third of the $1,000 penalty goes to the bouncer, one-third is kept by the company for administration (they pay a lawyer to process the letters and claims) and one-third is donated to a charity called People First.

As of the end of November, Brown Jug stores had confiscated almost 200 misused IDs. Last year the company nabbed 284, so word might be out that you do not attempt to use a phoney ID at Brown Jug—just the result the company was hoping for. “Kids spread the word,” O’Neill said.

“We confiscate more false IDs than all the other licensees in the state combined,” O’Neill said, not by way of bragging, but to illustrate how much more effective the law could be with more diligence from fellow licensees.

That last note caught my attention, especially as earlier in the article O’Neill admits

“Not enough licensees do it,” he said, “and no one at the police department has the time or desire to do it.”

Why not increase the fees until the police think it is worth their time or they have “desire”? Setting a bounty for accusations has its risks (aside from opportunity cost — police investigating other more serious offenses). For example, I wonder if they have run into a situation yet where unscrupulous bouncers or checkout clerks are generating the fake IDs themselves and then framing kids in order to blackmail parents? Taking that thought a little further, I wonder if Alaska will soon promote legislation that allows the people to sue companies responsible for security breaches involving IDs? That might help prevent fake IDs from reaching the market and thus be a powerful counterpart to the Brown Jug Law (incentive to detect fake IDs). Or, in a more specific sense, it would help decrease the incentive to steal an ID from one customer to blackmail another.

I found the Brown Jug Law article on the Montana Gaming Group website.

History, Security

Rabbi ben Ezra

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The Wikipedia has a nice entry on this famous Robert Browning poem:

It is not a biography of Abraham ibn Ezra; like all of Browning’s historical poems, it is a free interpretation of the idea that Ezra’s life and work suggests to Browning, but the poem is Robert Browning using Ezra as a mouthpiece, not the other way around. At the center of the poem is a theistic paradox, that good might lie in the inevitability of its absence:

    For thence,—a paradox
    Which comforts while it mocks,—
    Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
    What I aspired to be,
    And was not, comforts me:
    brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.

Reminds me of the saying that the best security is the stuff that is rarely or never seen.

Amazing how good Wikipedia can be sometimes.

Security

False economy of trust

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The Guardian has a short report on emerging factors influencing Internet fraud:

In some cases gangs offer to finance undergraduates’ studies and plant them as sleepers within target businesses, according to a report on cybercrime which draws on intelligence from the FBI and British and European hi-tech crime units.

This has been known for some time, actually. Years ago I remember reading reports about post-graduate computer science students in countries with struggling economies who were lured into organized crime. The article says the popularity of sites like MySpace is “fueling” scams and crime, but that kind of description plays down the opportunity presented by weak trust model implementations. You might therefore say the rise in popularity of the sites like MySpace are based on an intentionally weak authentication process that is more “fun” and “easy” for potential users. In other words, you should not blame the popularity of a campsite for the fact that bears break into people’s cars and eat all their food.

The report warns: “There is a false economy of trust. People don’t present personal information to strangers on the street, but building profiles online means that internet criminals can instantly access a mine of details – names and interests, pets and life stories.”

No, the problem is not in building profiles online (hundreds of millions of profiles were online before MySpace ever existed) but pushing users to default-expose themselves for the benefit of the software/hosting company without giving any clue to the users of the associated risks. It’s like creating a shop where people will rush to get the hot new look for themselves, until they start to realize that they actually have no clothes and are presenting all kinds of personal information to strangers…is the popularity of the look to blame, or the company that sold invisible clothing?

I often hear that MySpace is yet another proof of how something can be made from nothing (as in the Stone Soup story), but I would not yet rule out the opposite (as in the Emperor’s New Clothes story), at least in terms of the economics of information security.

History, Security

vague, aimless, and endless deployments

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From September 23, 1999:

Bush proposed restoring trust by increasing military pay and benefits and by clarifying the mission of U.S. forces to “deter…and win wars,” not to undertake “vague, aimless, and endless deployments.” [emphasis added] Candidate Bush gave few specifics on his second promise but indicated that as president he would make substantial new investments in anti-terrorism efforts and “deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses, both theater and national,” at the earliest possible date.

Anti-ballistic missle defenses? How about anti-small arms (e.g. kaytusha rockets and stinger missles) defenses (not to mention anti-IED) for Americans stuck in vague, aimless and endless deployments? I guess I could have left it at that, but then I started to wonder whether the President ever reflected back on his campaign promises. Sure enough, not too long after…

From December 11, 2001:

I have come to talk about the future security of our country, in a place where I took up this subject two years ago when I was candidate for President. In September 1999, I said here at the Citadel that America was entering a period of consequences that would be defined by the threat of terror, and that we faced a challenge of military transformation. That threat has now revealed itself, and that challenge is now the military and moral necessity of our time.

[…]

The first priority is to speed the transformation of our military.

When the Cold War ended, some predicted that the era of direct threats to our nation was over. Some thought our military would be used overseas — not to win wars, but mainly to police and pacify, to control crowds and contain ethnic conflict. They were wrong. [emphasis added]

Who now says American forces must be maintained overseas mainly to police and pacify, to control crowds and contain ethnic conflict? Uh huh. Anything else “some” people might have been wrong about?

America’s next priority to prevent mass terror is to protect against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. I wish I could report to the American people that this threat does not exist — that our enemy is content with car bombs and box cutters — but I cannot.

[…]

And almost every state that actively sponsors terror is known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them at longer and longer ranges.

I see the logic. Pull troops back from those expensive overseas peace-keeping and diplomatic efforts in order to free up the budget for defense industry spending on technology (e.g. the military-industrial-congress complex Eisenhower warned the US not to pursue); this prepares America for the almost non-existant threat of long-range missles laden with weapons of mass destruction. Strange how things turned out, given these plans. Anything else “some” people might have been wrong about?

Our third and final priority in the fight against mass terror is to strengthen the advantage that good intelligence gives our country.

[…]

There have been times here in America when our intelligence services were held in suspicion, and even contempt. Now, when we face this new war, we know how much we need them.

Wait, I thought we had good intelligence before 9/11 but the real problem identified by the Commission was mis-management of that information. How does that get translated into someone saying we don’t “need” intelligence services? President Bush used a false dilemma fallacy, it seems to me, to say you either know how much we need intelligence services or you are suspicious of them. Have you ever needed something but remained suspicious of it?

Historians will have a good deal of material, I think, to display the dark contradictions and logical fallacies of this administration.