MORE FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EQUAL CITIZENSHIP TO BE ELIMINATED AT WASHINGTON AIRPORTS
WASHINGTON POST - Frequent fliers in the Washington area could soon get a new perk at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. The airports have joined a group that seeks to expand the federal government's Registered Traveler program, which speeds passengers to the front of the security checkpoint lines in exchange for divulging personal information and passing background checks.
So far, the program is available by invitation only at six airports, most of which have only one airline participating. Carter Morris, senior vice president at the American Association of Airport Executives, said many airports and airlines are tired of waiting for the Transportation Security Administration to expand the program, so they are trying to do it themselves. "There has been no path forward. People say, 'That's great, but when do I get to sign up?' " he said. "The goal is to get this going now and move it at the speed the public wants it."
The group of airports, including Dulles and National, has formed the Registered Traveler Interoperability Consortium to develop standards that would allow each airport to sign up travelers and give passengers the same security privileges at different locations. Now participants can skip to the front of security lines and are exempt from secondary screening that includes pat-downs. Under the group's plan, each airport might be able to offer its own perks, such as allowing passengers to earn additional frequent-flier miles or exempting them from having to take off their shoes or remove laptops from cases.
To become a member, passengers would need to provide personal information, such as dates of birth, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, and have their fingerprints and irises digitally scanned. Airports would then submit the information to the Transportation Security Administration. If travelers pass background checks, they would receive Registered Traveler cards containing data chips with their information.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/14/AR2005071401776.html?sub=AR
BRUCE SCHNEIER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 2004 - Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that's just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.
Let's debunk the myths:
First, verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure. All the Sept. 11 terrorists had photo IDs. Some of the IDs were real. Some were fake. Some were real IDs in fake names, bought from a crooked DMV employee in Virginia for $1,000 each. Fake driver's licenses for all 50 states, good enough to fool anyone who isn't paying close attention, are available on the Internet. Or if you don't want to buy IDs online, just ask any teenager where to get a fake ID.
Harder-to-forge IDs only help marginally, because the problem is not making sure the ID is valid. This is the second myth of ID checks: that identification combined with profiling can be an indicator of intention.
Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that says "evildoer" and everyone else to carry a card that said "honest person who won't try to hijack or blow up anything." Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn't let them on the airplane or into the building. This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. . .
Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully. But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. . .
There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. . .
http://www.schneier.com/essay-008.html
UNBORN BABIES CARRY POLLUTANTS
BOSTON GLOBE - Unborn U.S. babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides, according to a report released. Although the effects on the babies are not clear, the survey prompted several members of Congress to press for legislation that would strengthen controls on chemicals in the environment.
The report by the Environmental Working Group is based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical-cord blood taken by the American Red Cross. They found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and the Teflon chemical PFOA. "These 10 newborn babies ... were born polluted," said New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, who spoke a news conference about the findings on Thursday.
"If ever we had proof that our nation's pollution laws aren't working, it's reading the list of industrial chemicals in the bodies of babies who have not yet lived outside the womb," Slaughter, a Democrat, said. . . "Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical-cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests," the report said.
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/children/articles/2005/07/14/
unborn_babies_carry_pollutants_study_finds/
MORE THAN A QUARTER OF AMERICAN WOMEN FORGO TREATMENT BECAUSE OF COST
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL - More than a quarter of US women delayed or went without care that they believed they needed in the past year because they could not afford it. That is an increase of 3% from 2001. This central finding came from a survey of 2766 women aged 18 and older by the Kaiser Family Foundation and released as part of a panel discussion on 7 July at their conference centre in Washington, DC.
Much of the focus in the United States has been on people who do not have any health insurance. But the problem goes beyond that to one of co-payments, where the patient has to contribute a proportion of the costs, for prescriptions or doctors' visits, said Diane Rowland, a Kaiser vice president who was responsible for the survey. "Even small costs serve as a barrier to care," she said.
"Given that women are, on the whole, lower income than men, this is a very important women's health issue," said Dr Paula Johnson, director of the Connors Center for Women's Health and Biology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.
Women are more likely than men to report a chronic condition that needs ongoing medical attention (38% v 30%), and they are more likely than men to use a prescription medicine on a regular basis (56% v 42%).
They are more than twice as likely as men to have been diagnosed as having depression or anxiety (23% v 11%). How much of this reflects a cultural bias of diagnosis and how much reflects the impact of an often lower economic status or social burdens, such as being the principal care giver within a family, is unclear.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7509/130-e?ecoll
RELIGION & ITS ALTERNATIVES
STUDY: PRAYER DOESN'T HELP HEART TREATMENT
BBC - Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests. A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for. The Duke University Medical Center study of 700 patients, in the Lancet, said music, image and touch therapy did appear to reduce patients' distress. . .
Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist prayer groups were assigned to pray for 371 of the patients. The rest had no prayer group. In addition, 374 of the patients were assigned MIT therapy and the rest none. MIT involved teaching the patients relaxed breathing techniques and playing them easy listening, classical, or country music during their procedure.
The researchers found that neither therapy alone, or combined, showed any measurable treatment effect on serious cardiovascular events, hospital readmission or death.
But those given music, imagery and touch therapy had less emotional distress and had a lower death rate after six months, though this was not seen as statistically significant.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4681771.stm
CIVIL LIBERTIES & JUSTICE
FLORIDA ATTORNEY GENERAL REJECTS RED-LIGHT CAMERAS
AMY SHERMAN, MIAMI HERALD - Cities can't use cameras to issue citations to drivers who run red lights, Florida's Attorney General Charlie Crist has ruled. The state legislature would have to amend the law to allow cities to issue tickets based on information provided from surveillance cameras, Crist wrote in an opinion issued this week. It is unlikely that will happen since the legislature has rejected such proposed laws for several years.
Cities can install the devices to "advise a car owner that his or her license tag number has been recorded in a violation of the traffic laws" but they can't issue citations, Crist wrote in an opinion that essentially sends a message to cities and counties that they shouldn't bother installing red light cameras. It is unlikely that any city would spend money to install the cameras if they can't recoup the investment. . .
Cameras have been used for years in more than 20 states to catch drivers who plow through red lights, according to the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running, funded by camera contractors. . . Critics say the cameras smack of Big Brother and the real motivation behind the cameras is to serve as cash cows for cities and camera contractors.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12136108.htm
WHY DO WE LET JUDGES SAY ANYTHING ABOUT HISTORY WHEN WE KNOW THEY'LL GET IT WRONG?
[That was the title of the 2003 keynote address by Armand Derfner at the National Council on History that is reprinted in the Winter 2005 edition of The Public Historian. It's something that has gotten far too little attention: judges tend to have a detailed knowledge of legal precedent but often shallow knowledge of the history that accompanied it.]
ARMAND DERFNER, PUBLIC HISTORIAN - One of George Orwell's keen insights in the book 1984 was "Who controls the past controls the future, but who controls the present controls the past." Orwell's formula is a good description of the legal system, where a trial is a contest in the present to see whose version of events in the past will control the future - i.e., determine the verdict. . .
When judges look at the past, they are not only looking to legal precedent but at a more general picture of history. Judges like to use history, lean on history, sometimes wrap themselves in it. Because they are judges, we give them and their decisions an unusual degree of respect. That may be warranted for judges' legal analysis, but their opinions on other fields of knowledge typically get similar respect, without similar justification.
A noted scholar, Judge John Noonan, in a recent book called Narrowing the Nation's Power says judges are sometimes like hitchhikers, who hitch a ride with history, but whose destination may not be where the history should take them. . .
The Reconstruction era, when we passed constitutional amendments and laws to end slavery and protect the newly freed slaves, lasted only a decade. It was succeeded by a regime of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation that were still in full swing by the 1940s. Also in full swing was a view of Reconstruction held by most white Americans nationwide - not simply in the South - as a dark age of misrule by blacks and carpetbaggers. The academic historians were no better; only the Communist historians, like W.E.B. Dubois and Herbert Aptheker, perceived a different past. . .
[In two major cases] the key to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law was its dismal view of the Reconstruction era. In the Screws case, an opinion said, "It is familiar history that much of this legislation was born of that vengeful spirit which to no small degree envenomed the Reconstruction era. . .
History has been kinder to Reconstruction in the past half century, and the Supreme Court has reinterpreted and revived somewhat both of the laws it eviscerated in these cases. But it has never retracted the bad history. . .
If there is a lesson we have learned from this, it is that the judges don't own the history they recite. You and I do.
PUBLIC HISTORIAN
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/tph/
FIELD NOTES
COMMERCIAL ALERT has revised its website and now features recent news stories dealing with corporate trespassing on the rest of American life.
[The above is a self-serving conflict of interest as your editor sits on the board of Commercial Alert. He isn't particularly useful, however, so it's probably okay]
http://www.commercialalert.org/
WASHINGTON POST - Frequent fliers in the Washington area could soon get a new perk at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. The airports have joined a group that seeks to expand the federal government's Registered Traveler program, which speeds passengers to the front of the security checkpoint lines in exchange for divulging personal information and passing background checks.
So far, the program is available by invitation only at six airports, most of which have only one airline participating. Carter Morris, senior vice president at the American Association of Airport Executives, said many airports and airlines are tired of waiting for the Transportation Security Administration to expand the program, so they are trying to do it themselves. "There has been no path forward. People say, 'That's great, but when do I get to sign up?' " he said. "The goal is to get this going now and move it at the speed the public wants it."
The group of airports, including Dulles and National, has formed the Registered Traveler Interoperability Consortium to develop standards that would allow each airport to sign up travelers and give passengers the same security privileges at different locations. Now participants can skip to the front of security lines and are exempt from secondary screening that includes pat-downs. Under the group's plan, each airport might be able to offer its own perks, such as allowing passengers to earn additional frequent-flier miles or exempting them from having to take off their shoes or remove laptops from cases.
To become a member, passengers would need to provide personal information, such as dates of birth, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, and have their fingerprints and irises digitally scanned. Airports would then submit the information to the Transportation Security Administration. If travelers pass background checks, they would receive Registered Traveler cards containing data chips with their information.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/14/AR2005071401776.html?sub=AR
BRUCE SCHNEIER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 2004 - Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that's just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.
Let's debunk the myths:
First, verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure. All the Sept. 11 terrorists had photo IDs. Some of the IDs were real. Some were fake. Some were real IDs in fake names, bought from a crooked DMV employee in Virginia for $1,000 each. Fake driver's licenses for all 50 states, good enough to fool anyone who isn't paying close attention, are available on the Internet. Or if you don't want to buy IDs online, just ask any teenager where to get a fake ID.
Harder-to-forge IDs only help marginally, because the problem is not making sure the ID is valid. This is the second myth of ID checks: that identification combined with profiling can be an indicator of intention.
Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that says "evildoer" and everyone else to carry a card that said "honest person who won't try to hijack or blow up anything." Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn't let them on the airplane or into the building. This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. . .
Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully. But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. . .
There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. . .
http://www.schneier.com/essay-008.html
UNBORN BABIES CARRY POLLUTANTS
BOSTON GLOBE - Unborn U.S. babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides, according to a report released. Although the effects on the babies are not clear, the survey prompted several members of Congress to press for legislation that would strengthen controls on chemicals in the environment.
The report by the Environmental Working Group is based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical-cord blood taken by the American Red Cross. They found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and the Teflon chemical PFOA. "These 10 newborn babies ... were born polluted," said New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, who spoke a news conference about the findings on Thursday.
"If ever we had proof that our nation's pollution laws aren't working, it's reading the list of industrial chemicals in the bodies of babies who have not yet lived outside the womb," Slaughter, a Democrat, said. . . "Of the 287 chemicals we detected in umbilical-cord blood, we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests," the report said.
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/children/articles/2005/07/14/
unborn_babies_carry_pollutants_study_finds/
MORE THAN A QUARTER OF AMERICAN WOMEN FORGO TREATMENT BECAUSE OF COST
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL - More than a quarter of US women delayed or went without care that they believed they needed in the past year because they could not afford it. That is an increase of 3% from 2001. This central finding came from a survey of 2766 women aged 18 and older by the Kaiser Family Foundation and released as part of a panel discussion on 7 July at their conference centre in Washington, DC.
Much of the focus in the United States has been on people who do not have any health insurance. But the problem goes beyond that to one of co-payments, where the patient has to contribute a proportion of the costs, for prescriptions or doctors' visits, said Diane Rowland, a Kaiser vice president who was responsible for the survey. "Even small costs serve as a barrier to care," she said.
"Given that women are, on the whole, lower income than men, this is a very important women's health issue," said Dr Paula Johnson, director of the Connors Center for Women's Health and Biology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.
Women are more likely than men to report a chronic condition that needs ongoing medical attention (38% v 30%), and they are more likely than men to use a prescription medicine on a regular basis (56% v 42%).
They are more than twice as likely as men to have been diagnosed as having depression or anxiety (23% v 11%). How much of this reflects a cultural bias of diagnosis and how much reflects the impact of an often lower economic status or social burdens, such as being the principal care giver within a family, is unclear.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7509/130-e?ecoll
RELIGION & ITS ALTERNATIVES
STUDY: PRAYER DOESN'T HELP HEART TREATMENT
BBC - Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests. A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for. The Duke University Medical Center study of 700 patients, in the Lancet, said music, image and touch therapy did appear to reduce patients' distress. . .
Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist prayer groups were assigned to pray for 371 of the patients. The rest had no prayer group. In addition, 374 of the patients were assigned MIT therapy and the rest none. MIT involved teaching the patients relaxed breathing techniques and playing them easy listening, classical, or country music during their procedure.
The researchers found that neither therapy alone, or combined, showed any measurable treatment effect on serious cardiovascular events, hospital readmission or death.
But those given music, imagery and touch therapy had less emotional distress and had a lower death rate after six months, though this was not seen as statistically significant.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4681771.stm
CIVIL LIBERTIES & JUSTICE
FLORIDA ATTORNEY GENERAL REJECTS RED-LIGHT CAMERAS
AMY SHERMAN, MIAMI HERALD - Cities can't use cameras to issue citations to drivers who run red lights, Florida's Attorney General Charlie Crist has ruled. The state legislature would have to amend the law to allow cities to issue tickets based on information provided from surveillance cameras, Crist wrote in an opinion issued this week. It is unlikely that will happen since the legislature has rejected such proposed laws for several years.
Cities can install the devices to "advise a car owner that his or her license tag number has been recorded in a violation of the traffic laws" but they can't issue citations, Crist wrote in an opinion that essentially sends a message to cities and counties that they shouldn't bother installing red light cameras. It is unlikely that any city would spend money to install the cameras if they can't recoup the investment. . .
Cameras have been used for years in more than 20 states to catch drivers who plow through red lights, according to the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running, funded by camera contractors. . . Critics say the cameras smack of Big Brother and the real motivation behind the cameras is to serve as cash cows for cities and camera contractors.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12136108.htm
WHY DO WE LET JUDGES SAY ANYTHING ABOUT HISTORY WHEN WE KNOW THEY'LL GET IT WRONG?
[That was the title of the 2003 keynote address by Armand Derfner at the National Council on History that is reprinted in the Winter 2005 edition of The Public Historian. It's something that has gotten far too little attention: judges tend to have a detailed knowledge of legal precedent but often shallow knowledge of the history that accompanied it.]
ARMAND DERFNER, PUBLIC HISTORIAN - One of George Orwell's keen insights in the book 1984 was "Who controls the past controls the future, but who controls the present controls the past." Orwell's formula is a good description of the legal system, where a trial is a contest in the present to see whose version of events in the past will control the future - i.e., determine the verdict. . .
When judges look at the past, they are not only looking to legal precedent but at a more general picture of history. Judges like to use history, lean on history, sometimes wrap themselves in it. Because they are judges, we give them and their decisions an unusual degree of respect. That may be warranted for judges' legal analysis, but their opinions on other fields of knowledge typically get similar respect, without similar justification.
A noted scholar, Judge John Noonan, in a recent book called Narrowing the Nation's Power says judges are sometimes like hitchhikers, who hitch a ride with history, but whose destination may not be where the history should take them. . .
The Reconstruction era, when we passed constitutional amendments and laws to end slavery and protect the newly freed slaves, lasted only a decade. It was succeeded by a regime of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation that were still in full swing by the 1940s. Also in full swing was a view of Reconstruction held by most white Americans nationwide - not simply in the South - as a dark age of misrule by blacks and carpetbaggers. The academic historians were no better; only the Communist historians, like W.E.B. Dubois and Herbert Aptheker, perceived a different past. . .
[In two major cases] the key to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law was its dismal view of the Reconstruction era. In the Screws case, an opinion said, "It is familiar history that much of this legislation was born of that vengeful spirit which to no small degree envenomed the Reconstruction era. . .
History has been kinder to Reconstruction in the past half century, and the Supreme Court has reinterpreted and revived somewhat both of the laws it eviscerated in these cases. But it has never retracted the bad history. . .
If there is a lesson we have learned from this, it is that the judges don't own the history they recite. You and I do.
PUBLIC HISTORIAN
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/tph/
FIELD NOTES
COMMERCIAL ALERT has revised its website and now features recent news stories dealing with corporate trespassing on the rest of American life.
[The above is a self-serving conflict of interest as your editor sits on the board of Commercial Alert. He isn't particularly useful, however, so it's probably okay]
http://www.commercialalert.org/
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 7:06 AM
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