A GAO study reported by the AFP suggests that the US Department of Defense could be leaking equipment secrets and weapons like a sieve:

The report said that GAO undercover investigators entered two warehouses where surplus military gear was stored and obtained about 1.1 million dollars in sensitive military equipment.

They included launcher mounts for shoulder fired missiles, body armor, a digital converter used in naval surveillance, an all-band antenna used to track aircraft, and circuit cards used in navy computers.

“At no point during GAO’s warehouse security penetration were its investigators challenged on their identity or authority to obtain DoD (Department of Defense) military property,” the report said.

I know, it’s easy to say “one man’s garbage”, especially with Rumsfeld’s plans to adopt disruptive and untested new technology, but GAO reports show that the DoD has a bad habit of throwing away equipment that they actually need and end up buying again:

Of $33 billion in excess commodity disposals in fiscal years 2002 through 2004, $4 billion
were reported to be in new, unused, and excellent condition. DOD units reutilized only $495 million (12 percent) of these items. The remaining $3.5 billion (88 percent) includes significant waste and inefficiency because new, unused, and excellent condition items were transferred and donated outside of DOD, sold for pennies on the dollar, or destroyed. DOD units continued to buy many of these same items. GAO identified at least $400 million of fiscal year 2002 and 2003 commodity purchases when identical new, unused, and excellent condition items were available for reutilization. GAO also identified hundreds of millions of dollars in reported lost, damaged, or stolen excess property, including sensitive military technology items, which contributed to reutilization program
waste and inefficiency.

[…]

Weaknesses in accountability leave DOD vulnerable to the risk of theft, and fraud, waste, and abuse with little risk of detection.

This is certainly not the first time that the military disposal system has been under scrutiny. According to the GCN, the GAO cited the DoD for classification issues in 1998:

The Defense Department is unwittingly selling to the public surplus parts containing sensitive military technology, the General Accounting Office said recently.

When DOD buys spare parts for aircraft, ships, vehicles and weapons, the department assigns a code to the parts to indicate whether they contain sensitive military technology. But Defense has a history of assigning the wrong demilitarization codes to the parts and selling them anyway, a GAO report said.

And yet things seem to have worsened since 2000, according to the latest audit papers. It gets really scary when you consider how Rumsfeld ignored the danger of surplus weapons in Iraq and that Hizbullah is bragging about a supply of American-made weapons:

[Deputy chief of the Hezbollah’s political arm, Mahmoud] Komati said Hezbollah has weapons made in various countries, including the United States, France, China and Russia.

“Some of our fighters carry M16s. So you think we buy them from America?” he asked.

No need, obviously, if you can just walk into the DoD warehouse unchallenged and pick up what you want.

Actually, they point to an independent report that says they are doing a reasonable job stopping click fraud. Does that mean any click fraud that they allow is reasonable too? Here‘s the scoop, right off the Google blog:

As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case Lane’s Gifts v. Google, we agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine our detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not we had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of our advertisers. The result of that is a 47-page report, written by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. The report was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, this morning.

The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of our inspection systems and notes their constant improvement. It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don’t fully agree. But overall it is a validation of what we have said for some time about our work against invalid clicks.

The BBC mentions a fight over the criteria to ban books in Miami schools:

Judge Gold gave the school until the end of the day to put the books it had removed from the shelves back in the library.

Juan Amador Rodriguez, the parent who had complained about the book, said he was surprised and disappointed at the judge’s decision.

“The book has errors. It has errors of omission, omission about the reality of the country,” Mr Amador said.

Ok, forget about the subject for a second. Let’s not say whether it is a bible, a cookbook or a book about horses they’re fighting over. Is “errors of omission” the standard by which books should be banned? That seems to me to be the weakest claim of all, since omission can easily be remedied by more reading or even discussion, unless those materials are also banned under the same principle. Ridiculed or criticized, perhaps, but banned?

Ok, we’re talking about a children’s book (in a school library), right? This isn’t an encyclopedia, an official record, or some other important account of events and reality of a country. Is the content harmful? Unlikely. I mean can you imagine if childrens books couldn’t be published with any omissions. What would “Cat in the Hat” look like?

Three cheers to the judge for barring the ban on books. Here‘s more detail from the American Libraries site:

The complainant is “himself an immigrant from Cuba,� [Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesperson Joseph] Garcia told the AP, “and doesn’t feel the book is a fair and accurate representation of life in Cuba under the current regime.� A Visit to Cuba remains unchallenged in 32 other school libraries in the district.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that there does exist a line that should be monitored to block truly harmful or offensive material, but as far as I can tell this is a case about a book that has an incorrect depiction. Facts could be presented to support that in the classroom, not the courts. Perhaps changes could be suggested to the publisher. That means to me that a case might be made for a replacement or a supplement to offset the errors, and there is no need for an outright ban on the material.

Thus, it is sad that a school board did not stand up for the hallmarks of free society when challenged! The trial is still to be heard. I wonder if there is a real danger is that a lobby group could try to oust the judge from his seat and find a replacement that will no longer support freedom of speech (e.g. pressure for an appointment of a puppet to strike down the notion that they or their children should allow other perspectives to be heard). This would be a horrible state of affairs as intelligent dialogue and balance would be lost in the schools…

The book can be found here, in case you want to review for yourself and figure out why someone would be offended by the content.

How do some people in Cuba get from place to place? What kinds of fruits grow in Cuba? Which spiky plant do some Cubans eat as a vegetable? Learn the answers to these questions and more when you read ‘A Visit to: Cuba.’ See the famous sites. Travel over the land. Join in the celebrations. Find out what Cuban children learn in school and what they might do when they are older. Se[e] if they play the same sports as you or wear the same kind of clothes. Learn some words in Spanish!

I couldn’t help but notice they omitted an “e” from “See”. That’s it, ban it!