Sex sells.

"It's a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource."

"Every waking minute he’s on that computer," said his mother.

"I have a low opinion of men in general," he said.

The group's collaboration with “Dateline” has been lucrative. ... NBC [is] paying the group roughly $70,000 for each hour of television produced. Six new episodes are planned for the first half of 2007.

I am reminded of this quote:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Cha-ching!

We are a mere step away from live-televised, ad-supported street-level drug busts, filmed Candid Camera style, with a goofy sidekick popping out of nowhere to exclaim, with hands on cheeks in mock shock, "Oops!" as the sucker is handcuffed and deposited into the back of the police cruiser. The show could be called "Live Raid", or simply "Busted". Think of it as Room Raiders meets Cops meets Deal or No Deal.

You could also do a riff on Elimidate, wherein four women are paired with a convicted offender, then simply let the cameras roll! (With a uniformed bust crew in tow, of course. Can't be too cautious ...) The twist here is that three of the women are confederates, and paid professional actors; the fourth woman is in the dark, and so she is the real contestant on the show. The viewer's challenge is to identify the contestant among the women before she learns the true identity of her 'date' and ruins the party. The actors' challenge is for each to be eliminated in turn, so that in the last stage, the contestant "wins"; but in doing so, they should not prematurely reveal themselves to the audience as confederates.

You could also do a "suspense" version where the viewers are "in" on the conspiracy, and the question is whether the contestant will learn the truth before the date is done.

For safety and insurance reasons, of course, you might want to just use an actor for the male role, too.

Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along

"This is a major step forward to keep these predators off the Internet," McDonnell said. "We want to be a leader with legislation to protect kids."

Here's how the plan would work: After the state obtained a predator's e-mail addresses, officials would turn them over to MySpace. The company, using new software, would then block anyone using that e-mail address from entering the site.

Did somebody say new software? It's Sarb-Ox all over again.

"We are certainly going to put public safety ahead of these civil liberties concerns," said McDonnell.

"Public safety" is code for "business opportunity" and political "self preservation".

Dare anyone ask why there is suddenly such urgency?

Shouldn't we have a registry for terrorist e-mail addresses? I mean, no one wants a child talking to a predator, but EVERYONE is at risk when terrorists go Friending.

Virginia Proposal Aims to Keep Sex Offenders Off Networking Sites

ChoicePoint, the massive data broker made infamous for selling 163,000 customer records to identity theft fraudsters, is on a comeback tour. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a 3,400 word piece extolling the company's new found embrace of privacy practices and its courting of longtime critics of its data practices. It's the best press the company's gotten since the Federal Trade Commission fined the company $10 million and required it to set aside an additional $5 million for victims of its negligence.

Just this week, ChoicePoint president Douglas Curling presented ChoicePoint's new image to law students at Stanford and Berkeley and met with lawyers at the online civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

More on what's changed and the long history that ChoicePoint wants you to forgive after the jump...

Read this entire post..

Update: Read this too.

27B Stroke 6 | ChoicePoint's Comeback Tour

The Washington Post has a good op-ed on the new Secretary of Defense nominee. There is much discussion about how Gates represents a shift in thinking from Bush-43 back to Bush-41 style. This article seems to do the best job of addressing that..

Gates is being characterized as a "realist," but his record is more complex than that, too. He was an ardent Cold War hawk who did not shrink from moral judgments. "The Soviet Union was an evil empire," Gates wrote in the concluding chapter of his 1996 memoir, "From the Shadows." Gates believed he was simply being skeptical when he insisted that Gorbachev was just another Soviet leader. But others in Washington saw this stand as ideological in nature. Former secretary of state George P. Shultz complained that Gates and the CIA had repeatedly tailored intelligence to fit the policy interests they favored. "You deal out intelligence as you deem appropriate," Shultz complained to Gates in one icy confrontation he recounted in his own memoir. "I feel an effort is made to manipulate me by the selection of materials you send my way."

On America's role in the world and the use of military force, it is hard to detect in Gates's record many far-reaching, principled differences with the present administration. He was deputy national security adviser when the Bush 41 administration dispatched American troops to Panama to overthrow Manuel Noriega. That intervention was, at the time, the largest U.S. military action since Vietnam, and in its essentials -- that is, the use of force to replace a dictator -- it was the closest single precedent one can find for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On the defense budget, it was the Bush 41 administration that decided there should be no significant "peace dividend" after the Cold War.

James Mann - Understanding Gates

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, architect of an unpopular war in Iraq, intends to resign after six stormy years at the Pentagon, Republican officials said Wednesday.

Officials said Robert Gates, former head of the CIA, would replace Rumsfeld.

Wow. Things have certainly changed in the past 24 hours..

Rumsfeld stepping down

As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.

The full article is due to come out in the December issue of Vanity Fair. Read the quotes on page 2 & 3 of this article...

Update: A number of people quoted are unhappy about it. Apparently, they were promised nothing having to do with this article was going to be released ahead of the mid-term election.

Neo Culpa: Politics & Power

Update: Ed Markey put out a press release today taking a more reasonable stance on this.

Congressman Markey,

While I'm not one of your constituents, your statements and actions often have an impact that reaches beyond your district. Yesterday you were quoted in several news media outlets as having called for the arrest of Christopher Soghoian, a PHD candidate at the University of Indiana Bloomington, because he created a web page that generates phoney airline boarding passes. As you are likely aware, your call was answered by the FBI who reportedly broke into Soghoian's house last night and seized all of his computer equipment.

I am a professional computer security researcher. I work for one of the worlds largest IT companies. My job involves finding vulnerabilities in software systems and getting them fixed. Responsible vendors are usually very responsive and willing to work with my team when we contact them with information about problems with their products. Through this process we are able to locate and repair vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure before the bad guys can find them and exploit them. However, there are always a few unsophisticated people who seek to shoot the messenger instead of dealing with the flaw.

Christopher Soghoian is one of the good guys. He is not a criminal and he is not enabling criminals. He did not create the vulnerability in the boarding pass screening process. This problem has existed for years, and it has been noted in other quarters, most recently by Sen. Chuck Schumer. However, the problem hasn't been fixed. Soghoian's website was intended to demonstrate how simple this is, and he has clearly and repeatedly stated that his intent in creating the site was to raise awareness about the problem so that it will be fixed. His website does not make this much easier than standard desktop publishing software available on anyone's personal computer.

Your call for his arrest, and the subsiquent events that have unfolded over the past 24 hours, have done serious harm to the national security of the United States. You could have simply contacted him, informed him of the legal problems that one could face for operating such a website, and discussed shutting it down. By choosing instead to prosecute him you are sending a message to security professionals in this country that if you observe a problem with national security policies or practices and make people aware of those problems in good faith so that they might be fixed, the government will treat you as an enemy and will prosecute you if possible. The inevitable result will be that people will hold their tongues, and problems will persist until they are discovered by someone who has malicious intent.

I strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this matter. The current course of action is not in the best interests of this country.

Respectfully,
Tom Cross

Tom Cross's Letter to Ed Markey

"The Bush Administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane."

Shoot the messenger! Shoot the messenger! For the love of god won't somebody PLEASE shoot that messenger!?

Update: This story is developing fast. According to a security researcher (who is maintaining their anonymity), Christopher Soghoian has been approached by the FBI. He has not been heard from since claiming that the FBI was at his door during a conversation with the unnamed researcher. The FBI is denying that he is under arrest, however the page with the boarding pass generator went down shortly thereafter. The rest of his website is still up and his IM account are both still online.

More information can be found on the Wired blog and BoingBoing.

Update2: Here is another quote from the Wired article linked:

In reality, the "loophole" is nothing new. Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote about it in 2003, and the online magazine Slate covered it as major news in 2005. Soghoian points out that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) publicized the same security hole in April 2006. "Perhaps Sen. Schumer will end up being my cellmate," Soghoian said.

Update3: Chris has been raided by the FBI and many of his possessions have been seized.

Ed Markey advocates shooting the messenger

We The Creators of this site, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish Fantasy Congress for the United States of America.

In this game, we give you the power to draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. Enjoy our gift to you, o great nation: the power to play politics!™

Interesting. Great idea!

As a side note, I think the "Broken Government" series that CNN is doing is excellent journalism.

Fantasy Congress - Where People Play Politics!

The dude gets points for putting his web server on port 2006. The dude does not get points for using a light blue tint to indicate "no senate race."

Election 2006: Senate and House Races Updated Daily