A well-known and respected computer-security researcher was detained for several hours Wednesday night by border agents who searched his laptop and cellphones before returning them to him.

The researcher, who goes by the hacker handle Moxie Marlinspike, was met by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the door of his plane when he arrived at JFK airport on a Jet Blue flight from the Dominican Republic.

The border search comes on the heels of two similar incidents targeting other white hat hackers.

Marlinspike first began experiencing increased scrutiny about two months ago during domestic flights...

He found he was unable to print out a boarding pass either from his computer or from airline kiosks at airports. And when he approached ticket agents, they were blocked from producing a boarding pass for him without first calling a Secure Flight number at the Department of Homeland Security. Secure Flight is a program that requires airlines to submit passenger names and birthdates to DHS in advance of a flight, to be checked against watchlists. Marlinspike said ticket agents told him he was on a federal watchlist.

The harassment took a more ominous tone last Saturday, when Marlinspike was on his way home to the San Francisco Bay Area from Abu Dhabi, where he’d given a presentation at the Black Hat security conference. He was snoozing on an airport chair during an extended layover at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, when he was awakened.

“Some dude shows up with a picture of me on his cellphone,” Marlinspike said. “He’s going around looking at everyone and finally he finds me asleep with drool coming down my chin and he wakes me up.”

The agent said he was from the U.S. Consulate and told Marlinspike he’d have to answer a number of important questions.

This case basically confirms all of the worst case scenarios that civil libertarians have raised regarding post 9/11 security measures.

It appears that Moxie was placed on a secure flight watchlist. Whatever they want with Moxie, it obviously has nothing to do with terrorism or threats to aviation security. Therefore, clearly the secure flight watchlists are being used as a general purpose dragnet for monitoring the travel citizens suspected of any wrongdoing.

Furthermore, the level of suspicion required before one is subjected to this kind of monitoring is obviously very low. They obviously do not have enough evidence regarding whatever it is that they suspect Moxie of to establish probable cause and obtain a legal warrant to search his belongings. They therefore took advantage of the border search loophole in the 4th Amendment to perform a warrantless search. It seems unlikely that this border search has some legitimate connection with border security or smuggling. Its merely an opportunistic abuse of the 4th amendment loophole.

Obama Administration continues to abuse 4th amendment loophole - hackers targetted by anti-terrorism watchlists

COICA is back on the Senate Judiciary Committee schedule for markup this Thursday and could pass out of committee during the "lame duck" session of Congress.

To recap, COICA gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be “central” to the purpose of the site. Rather than just targeting files that actually infringe copyright law, COICA's "nuclear-option" design has the government blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system — a reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech.

The Case Against COICA | Electronic Frontier Foundation

More doublespeak:

The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?

Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class.

Go team Obama!

The Hijacked Commission

This rant takes a few weak swings but there are also many damning blows.

The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...

Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election....

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation?

Read the whole thing...

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich? - NYTimes.com

The idea that baby boomers weren't paying enough taxes to cover their social security benefits has been well understood for 20 years or more. Nothing has been done about it yet. Now, of course, it is too late to ask them to pay their share because they are too old to pay and too close to retirement to adjust to changes in their plans. Now that we're close enough to seal the deal for the boomers, we're going to "fix" the problem by cutting benefits for the next generation.

Folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren't going to get Social Security at 65 or 67.

They are also going to cut the mortgage interest deduction, pouring gasoline on top of the housing market debacle that is crushing the middle class, and they are going to cut income taxes for the super wealthy.

After not doing anything at all about the civil liberties issues that prompted many young people to vote for him, Obama is going to turn around fuck our economic future. Go team Obama!

You are getting fucked because you are not a large enough demographic group to matter politically.

Debt Commissioners: Baby Boomers Will Crush Social Security, Medicare - FoxNews.com

I'm not sure how hiding academic research behind paywalls helps the progress of human knowledge. I might subscribe to this journal if it was available at a reasonable price. Its not clear to me how to get a price quote. I get the impression that if you are the sort of entity that Springer wants to sell a subscription to you don't really care what it costs because you are spending an endowment. Its $34 just to download an individual paper. $34. I know the scientists aren't getting that money. Where does it go?

There is no reason why this stuff can't be hosted for free on the web.

Political Behavior publishes original research in the general fields of political behavior, institutions, processes, and policies. Coverage focuses on conventional and unconventional political behavior of individuals or small groups, and of large organizations that participate in the political process such as parties, interest groups, political action committees, governmental agencies, and mass media.

As an interdisciplinary journal, Political Behavior integrates a variety of analytical approaches across different levels of theoretical abstraction and empirical domain. The exploration includes economic perspectives in preference structuring and bargaining; psychological aspects of attitude, motivations and perceptions; sociological orientation of roles, group or class; or political stance in decision making, coalitions and influence.

Journal of Political Behavior

It's one of the underpinnings of democracy: Informed citizens make better voters and better decisions. If you're wrong, all it takes is the facts and you change your mind. That's the popular belief, anyway.

The problem, as we've been hearing, is that's not always the case, especially when it comes to very partisan issues....

Brendan Nyhan, a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan... recently published a study called "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions."

...

These misperceptions, you know, we haven't studied them. And they are important because people are changing their minds in some cases based on the -you know, it's influencing their vote, it's influencing their opinion. And, you know, they're not just holding these misperceptions. They're holding them actually, in some cases, more confidently than people who have the correct view.

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR

...

16 seconds of Family Guy

Just six weeks after Google and five other technology firms agreed to scrap secret no-poaching agreements to avoid a Justice Department antitrust suit, the company has given all its employees a 10% pay rise to stop them from jumping ship.

On Google’s 10 Percent Pay Hike . . . And Antitrust Law - Law Blog - WSJ

andom Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is all about using technology to make the world a better place by building a community of innovation. RHoK brings software engineers together with disaster relief experts to identify critical global challenges, and develop software to respond to them. A RHoK Hackathon event brings together the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to solve real-world problems.

So, how does it work?
RHoK organizes hackathons — marathon hacking events with multiple global locations bringing together developers from all over to hack on real-world problems.

What is Random Hacks of Kindness? « RHoK