Do you read the fine print in your license agreements?

From the EULA for iTunes.  Found at Reddit.

"Security theater" at airport documented by pilot

Attorney Don Werno, who represents the pilot, says he believes the TSA was sending a message that "you've angered us by telling the truth and by showing America that there are major security problems despite the fact that we've spent billions of dollars allegedly to improve airline safety."

Via BoingBoing.

Body scanners coming to trains... subways... boats... ??

Brace yourselves, commuters — body scanners may be coming to trains, subways and boats, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on “Charlie Rose.” She said as aviation security tightens, “we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime.”

To be fair, she didn't specify that scanners would be the method of security for those modes of transportation.  But it's all security theater, and it's ridiculously impractical, frankly ineffective, and ludicrously expensive.

When will someone in charge have the balls to stand up and say "stop this nonsense?"

Independent agencies of the United States government

Independent agencies of the United States federal government are those agencies that exist outside of the federal executive departments (those headed by a Cabinet secretary). However, most independent agencies are part of the executive branch, with only a few being part of the legislative or judicial branches.

Established through separate statutes passed by the Congress, each respective statutory grant of authority defines the goals the agency must work towards, as well as what substantive areas, if any, over which it may have the power of rulemaking. These agency rules (or regulations), while in force, have the power of federal law.

Examples:
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The Federal Election Commission (FEC)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC)

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

The General Services Administration (GSA)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

The National Science Foundation (NSF)

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

The Peace Corps

The Small Business Administration (SBA)

The Selective Service System (SSS)

The Social Security Administration (SSA)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

The United States International Trade Commission (USITC)

The United States Postal Service

An independent Postal Regulatory Commission

The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Further information at Wikipedia.  (A hat tip to Z. Constantine for providing the link)

Yet another TSA horror story

At what point does an airport search step over the line?

How about when they start going through your checks, and the police call your husband, suspicious you were clearing out the bank account?

That's the complaint leveled by Kathy Parker, a 43-year-old Elkton, Md., woman, who was flying out of Philadelphia International Airport on Aug. 8...

That same screener started emptying her wallet. "He was taking out the receipts and looking at them," she said...

In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000...

She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. "That's my money," she remembers saying. The officer's reply? "It's not your money."

When she got home, her husband of 20 years, John Parker, a self-employed plastics broker, said the police had called and told him that they'd suspected "a divorce situation" and that Kathy Parker was trying to empty their bank account. He set them straight.

"I was so humiliated," she said...

Further details in Daniel Rubin's column at the Philadelphia Inquirer.  The TSA apparently does not deny any of the details; they claim they were justified in their actions because she looked nervous.

Tombs of the Unknown Soldiers

A sad, bureaucratic mess, poignantly summed up by editorial cartoonist John Sherffius for the Boulder Camera.

Via The Frustrated Teacher.  (context here)

Totally bogus products receive "Energy Star" certification

This story was reported by Popular Mechanics several months ago.  The EPA gave their seal of approval to 15 out of 20 bogus products.

To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it "used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership." All four qualified.

The Feather-Duster Fly-Strip Air Freshener

Ostensibly an indoor air purifier, this item is actually a standard space heater spangled in strips of flypaper, with a feather duster perched up top.

The product was submitted without a standard safety file number from the Underwriters' Laboratories. Plus, the product's website did not include a disclaimer required for Energy Star certification. Last but not least, the garish photo submitted with the product's application portrays what is clearly a feather duster rigged to space heater. Nevertheless, these obstacles proved surmountable—the product was approved in 11 days and became listed on the Energy Star website.

More at the link, including the "gasoline-powered alarm clock"

The massive growth of U.S. intelligence operations

The Washington Post has just published an extensive investigation of American intelligence operations, and how they have changed in the last decade.  There is an introductory video, reports, maps, and interactive features at this link.  Here are some excerpts, via the StarTribune -

The top secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work...

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in some 10,000 locations across the United States...

• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space...

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled, "Stop!" in frustration...

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists...

The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, which is 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs...

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against Al-Qaida. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009...

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, librarians, carpenters, construction workers, mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances...

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which has enough analysts and translators for all this work...

More at the StarTribune link, and much more at WaPo.