This is my second predictions column for 2010 with more to come. This column is about homeland security, which is something our government isn’t very good at and I predict won’t get any better at this year because of a systemic inability to do correctly even the most basic things to protect our society, our privacy, and our way of life.
President Obama this week proposed some changes in how homeland security is managed following that Christmas Eve attempt to explode an airliner as it was landing in Detroit. These changes are minimal but I doubt they’ll even be implemented because this is a system that inevitably reverts to little fiefdoms run by idiots.
Can you tell I’m pissed-off?
I saw this coming. Here’s something I wrote in this space on September 13th, 2001, two days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks:
“…. The most important reaction to terrorism that a free society can show is to not give in to it. But not giving in takes many forms, and I fear that some of the official reactions to the events of this week will take the form of effectively giving in if they also mean that we give up our freedom. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation’s enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren’t thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things whether they are warranted or useful or not…. ”
That was more than eight years ago, yet not much has changed since then except the names of the agencies and the length of the queues. The current crisis is one that should have been foreseen, officials from the President on down admit, and the fact that it wasn’t worse comes down to terrorist incompetence, citizen bravery, and nothing else. The government had all along the information to stop this guy but they didn’t do it.
Instead of just complaining, let’s take a look at the issue from another angle. Contrast these three situations: 1) you are sitting in a hotel bar in Mongolia and want to use your Visa card to buy a round of drinks for your friends, and; 2) your Mom is at the check-out counter at a Sears store when the clerk asks her if she wants to apply for a Sears credit card and save 10 percent on her order, and 3) a possible terrorist with a dubious travel record and suspected al-Qaeda connections is standing in line at a European airport waiting to board a flight to the U.S. that leaves in an hour. What happens in each of these cases?
In Mongolia the bartender takes your card and authorizes it in seconds across a 12,000-mile round-trip. At the Sears store the transaction is not only authorized in less than a minute, but a new account is created and both your Mom’s identity and her creditworthiness are established and calculated on the spot, along with her discount. Meanwhile the airline, airport, local security, European police, Interpol, Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Customs Service, FBI, CIA, and NSA can’t between them figure out in an hour whether this guy standing in line in Holland should be allowed on the plane or not.
How is it that we can run our credit card operations so well and our national security so poorly?
I’ll answer that in a moment but first another anecdote from my files.
I wrote a column awhile back in which I explained that while the U. S. Government has little to no idea how many illegal aliens there are in America, the big credit reporting agencies know exactly how many:
“… The credit reporting agencies have a handle on total numbers and have a lot of information on specific individuals. So members of the gray economy are, for the most part, not invisible at all, just difficult to identify as individuals. But thanks to data mining down at the credit bureau, it is getting harder and harder to hide. A lot of this sleuthing comes down to a surprising artifact, the Social Security number. One would think that surprising for an economic class of people best known for not having Social Security numbers. Ah, but they do have Social Security numbers, just not their own. You need a Social Security number to sign up for utility services, for example. No Social Security number, no electricity, gas, phone, or satellite TV. So what’s a poor alien to do? They go down to some local hangout and buy a Social Security number to give to the utility. This has to be a legitimate number or it won’t fly with utility computer systems, but does it have to be the customer’s own number? Good question. Here’s where we have an interesting business ethics issue. Say you are the electric company and someone tries to set up service using a Social Security number that already exists in your database and is clearly borrowed, bought, or stolen. What do you do? Most utilities go ahead and set up the account, because to them what counts is whether the new customer will actually pay that bill and it turns out that people operating on such borrowed numbers are more reliable bill payers than the rest of us. They can’t afford to get in trouble with the electric company because that would draw attention to them. So there is a tacit agreement between the parties that a Social Security number must be provided because that’s the rule, but if it happens to be someone else’s Social Security number, well that’s okay. The funny thing about this is the impact it has to have on the person who was originally assigned that Social Security number by the U. S. government. Rather than hurt their credit it actually helps because there is so much evidence that they are good at paying their bills! Of course the credit bureau notices something and that’s why they are so able to estimate numbers in the first place. They know what Social Security numbers are being overused and can probably even trace the genealogy of that number as it makes its way across the country. Here’s an amazing fact: some individual Social Security numbers are in use right now by up to 3,000 people and it isn’t at all unusual for a borrowed number to be used by 200-1,000 people at the same time… ”
Okay, that’s interesting and weird, but let me tell you about the phone call I got later about it from the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.
“The credit bureaus can really do that? ” Mr. Homeland Security asked. “Do they really have that kind of data? Who can tell us more about this? ”
I am not making this up.
That was in 2007 — six years after 9/11 and the people who had already spent billions of dollars making us safer by gathering information had no idea at all what kind of information was already being gathered.
I don’t know what happened after that but I can make a good guess. My guess is that the folks at Homeland Security if they actually bothered to follow-up on the contacts I gave them probably decided they needed to spend more billions and build a similar information system for their own use — yet another fiefdom — and that system will be operational sometime this decade.
I have a better idea. Why not outsource the whole screening process to the credit agencies? Don’t build a new system, just throw a few extra fields in the existing records — fields like “terrorist associations” or “U. S. citizen” — fields that can be populated only by that long list of agencies I mentioned up the page. If there are security or privacy concerns then encrypt these new fields and limit access.
Of course credit agencies make mistakes, too. But it is a generally functional system, which is more than I can say for the way we’ve been running Homeland Security so far.
Sadly I can predict, too, that what I suggest here will never happen.
How is it that we can run our credit card operations so well and our national security so poorly?
I disagree with the assertion that credit card operations are well run. Fraud is pretty rampant within the industry. Large lists of valid numbers go out to thieves every few months. I’ve personally had to have two cards shut down as many years. I have to do the footwork sometimes to track down the illegitimate charges. Stories of this sort are almost universal.
And yet we’ve only had two bombers actually make it to planes since September 11th, and neither of them were successful. Who’s doing the better job again?
Yes, there’s fraud – but it’s almost always at the end-user level, or at some department store, or by some fraudulent web site. I can’t recall, off the top of my head, a case of fraud with the agencies themselves.
Which is completely besides the point. No one is asserting that the government agencies are committing fraud.
User level fraud is exactly the problem we would have to worry most about should we try to go with Bob’s proposal, and credit card companies ARE LOUSY at that. In fact, the only thing credit card companies are good at authenticating are cards, and even there, they ain’t doing so hot. Bob, this is a LOUSY idea.
The IRS knows all about duplicate SSNs, but they have said they only care about collecting taxes.
Get the IRS involved…
Similar thing with railroads — with an unbroken conduit between cities that is regularly travelled and maintained, you would think the big railroads should become fiber optic communications giants, but for some reason they aren’t allowed to do that.
Sprint might disagree. Sprint grew out of the Southern Pacific Railway. It started out life as Southern Pacific Communications Company (SPC).
and the Union Pacific railway gave birth to many, many Worldcom fiber ducts, in Worldcom’s midlife about the time of the MCI merger, with each duct having two fibers reserved for UPCC. which evolved after a few years into Qwest.
I would really have to argue with that statement, out here in the Rockie and Blue Mountain west, the railroads only run direct paths of least resistance to get to the destination. Nevermind not having passenger services available.
“No Social Security number, no electricity, gas, phone, or satellite TV.”
That’s simply not true. None of those companies have ever asked me for a SS#.
It certainly is true for customers in metro Detroit.
Which shows how easy it is to get fake credentials.
where I live the electric, gas phone and cable have all required a ssn#.
Truthfully I don’t believe that they’re /allowed/ to require it. They do ask but just give them static, get a supervisor and they’ll let you give just ordinary info and a deposit (which you wouldn’t have had to with an SSN).
According to the help desk at the Social Security Administration, the way the law works is you cannot be obligated to give them your SSN – HOWEVER, they are not required to give the service if you do not. (For example, the IRS can obligate you to give the SSN, as can a bank).
He said it a case where Congress never adjusted the laws. With all the money in Credit – I doubt they ever will.
However they will allow you to give them a random number or generate a random number for you. Just ask.
The railroads do own/rent right of way for fiber – much of it still dark.
Good points Bob, thanks.
Where is Nerd TV Season 2?
Yeah, Bob! Do you need your minions (or sycophants) to write a petition? Make some calls to potential sponsors? What are we going to have to do to get Nerd TV Season 2?
Season 2 was finished long ago but I don’t own it outright, can’t afford to buy the half I don’t own from my former partner, and don’t have a deal anywhere to show it that would make any money to pay for the above. Fortunately it is historical stuff and will always be of interest. Eventually I’ll find a way to get it on the web.
~:-O
That’s the saddest news all day.
Bob – Don’t some bands take pre-orders to finance new albums (Marillion?). Why not pre-sell NerdTV 2.0 and use that capital to buy out your partner? It’s a no lose: If you get enough cash, you own 100% rights and can release it, and it you don’t get enough cash, you can point to that the next time someone whines that NerdTV isn’t availiable
I grant that there are problems, even serious problems. But I disagree whole heartedly that it is because the people involved have the label “GS” in their job title or are part of a government agency in some capacity.
As has been pointed out earlier, the idea that credit card companies are efficient at this is untrue – fraud is terrible. The reason this is not stamped out by the credit card companies is because they can keep jacking up the rates of interest so that the rest of us end up paying for the fraud – much easier to do that than to actually track it and fix it. I submit that the credit card companies *could* become extremely good at this, because they have much of the data you speak of, if the government came in and mandated something extremely low as a cap for interest rates. If the max interest rate could only be 10% instead of 30%, fraud would go down immensely.
As for why I think the idea of just blankly blaming people in the government is because (a) it is easy to gripe at the government, and (b) we have a mistaken notion that companies, being profit driven, operate efficiently. Anybody who has ever worked in a large corporation knows that fiefdoms are set up all the time. The more profitable a company is, the more fiefdoms get set up, and the less sharing of information there is. I used to work for a 80k employee company, and the duplication of effort, refusal to talk or share information, etc. was ridiculous. Many times in meetings I would have to say “will everybody look at their badge? We all have the same color badge with the same company name on it, right? Why are we fighting about this?” But to no avail.
However, it isn’t just large companies that have this problem. I currently work in a 300+ person company now, one that is break even from a profit standpoint, and fiefdoms exist here, too. People came who were friends of friends, and they have a “clique”, and then there is another group that has its “clique”, and “software” doesn’t share stuff with “hardware”, and “design” doesn’t always cooperate with “verification”, etc.
Fiefdoms are inevitable. You have to work hard to stamp them out, but you can’t completely. We are, by nature, a tribal species, and so it is inevitable we gravitate to protecting our tribe and distrusting some other tribe, regardless of the larger “tribe” we might both be a part of.
So, let’s get off the government bashing bandwagon, and deal with actual problems. Over the last few days, what looks like is becoming clear here is that we have a data mining problem. The data was there, but it wasn’t mined very well. That’s a solvable problem, regardless of tribalism. The way I’ve been describing it to people is to put two folks in front of a computer, one who is pretty experienced with using Google, and one who isn’t, and ask them to search for things. 99% of the time the person who is more experienced at using Google will come up with the answer to what is being looked for vs. the one who isn’t, because they are better at constructing a query which will mine the needed data. In other words, the data is there, but you have to figure out how to mine it properly.
We have some tool problems in this case – the person who entered the name of the attempted terrorist misspelled his name when entering it, and thus a connection wasn’t made. Clearly, then, the tools that search for connections aren’t very robust as they didn’t check for alternate spellings, or using the Google metaphor, there wasn’t a link that said “do you mean ” as the spelling. That’s solvable without going into a rant about government inefficiency.
Note: I have never worked for the government, nor do I have family in the government. I do have friends who work for city and county governments (so no connection to hunting down or tracking terrorist), and they are good people who try hard, but you can see in their eyes sometimes low morale because people continuously denigrate their chosen job. Can we please just stop that? If you want good people in government to help protect us, quit telling them they are stupid and they suck at their job!
Did I blindly bash government? No, I said the government called me up and admitted it was clueless at a time when that should not have been the case. I expect at least competence from the people who work for me, don’t you? Otherwise they should be fired. I know I would be.
Hi Bob,
Well, actually the ‘government’ didn’t call you up – a person who works for us called you up. There is no ‘government’ – there are people who work for us in many capacities. I would guess that there were others and are others who work for us who knew that information.
JimA
Sorry, Bob… I didn’t mean to imply that you were “bashing” the government. But you certainly wrote an article on here that opened the door for people to bash folks in the government. You started with a premise that credit card companies, utility companies, and others who work for profit are efficient bodies where everybody wants to improve the bottom line, and government agencies are inefficient, run by people who do things for their own selfish ends and not the greater good.
You didn’t yell fire in the crowded theatre, but you looked around and wondered out loud what would happen if somebody did.
My larger point is that we shouldn’t be looking at this problem as “government trying to solve something” vs. “private industry trying to solve something”. As much as many (mostly conservatives, definitely libertarians) want to treat the public sector and private sector as two wholly different things employing individuals with different behavior characteristics and who operate under different motives, there is nothing to suggest that is the case. I’ve seen too many profit making enterprise squashed over corporate politics and have seen too many good people doing good things in government to paint with so broad a brush.
Rather than assume that the DHS will inevitably fail and yelling “ah ha!” when a failure happens, and then proposing something completely bizarre (have credit card companies track down illegal aliens) why don’t we look at what is working, and improve what isn’t? I certainly didn’t expect DHS to be 100% successful, you have to make adjustments all the time. It’s called continuous improvement.
When you have a culture that says government sucks and everyone who works for it is not nearly competent (after all if they were any good they’d be working in the private sector) and then don’t pay decently, is it any wonder you get the results you have?
Well, the point is that the stakes are a bit high, isn’t it? This isn’t even a difficult data-mining problem – Soundex routines have been around for at least 15 years. If Homeland Security was created to bridge the respective agencies who oversee this stuff – then surely there should have been enough IT consolidation over 9 years to solve *this* problem. There are marketing companies out there who probably know what you used your debit card to charge at Wal-mart last Friday. Aggregating information is not rocket-science.
I agree TimB, it isn’t a spectacularly difficult data mining problem. But there are probably as many data mining algorithms in existence as there are databases. DHS (or whomever) chose the wrong one. Does that mean we should punt and give this job to credit card companies (as Bob implies)? Citibank would have had the “right” data mining algorith? Excuse me if I say I don’t think so.
And as awful as this situation could have become if not for the stupidity of the underpants bomber and the bravery of the other passengers, let’s put this in some perspective. A man’s father went to an embassy in Nigeria to report that his son may have been radicalized. That information got into the database (incorrectly) yet it still came up that this person should be on the no-fly list in the US, but unfortunately it happened after he was already in the air heading to the US. I don’t want to absolve anybody of blame nor assume the system was perfect, but it seems to me that this is light years ahead of where we were on September 10, 2001, when we had multiple upon multiple warnings over several months from several agencies about the hijackers and yet weren’t able to stop the attack. I think we’ve come quite a long way.
Congratulation bobo – I think that’s probably the most intelligent and well structured comment I’ve read on a forum for years.
How refreshing.
Amen, Bobo et.al. I’m don’t love the government, or work for it, but rational discussion and realization that there are many parts to a problem are defintely the way forward to real working solutions. Bob… thanks for one part of the story.
Robert hits a very important point, even if he doesn’t come out and connect the giant dots.
The fiefdoms within the public sector will continue, and there will be no privatization of security, because Andy Stern and SEIU won’t allow that to happen. It would be the most audacious affront to their existence, and would get squashed instantly.
DHS has messed up, Bob thinks much of what they do should be outsourced to private businesses.
So does that mean Bob is in favor of government intrusion in health care?
Not at all.
The government is already intruding in health care, and there is ample evidence the private sector screws it up less.
There is also evidence that private firms doing the screening catch a lot more of the real threats with less of the bogus politically-correct intrusion and hassle.
Sorry, the last line of my original post was meant to be ironic because Bob usually takes umbrage when someone slags liberal ideas.
Welcome to the TYRANNY-FIRST Century!
At least for this ObamaNation administration, you have it. But don’t forget the otrher deviants
At least for this ObamaNation administration, you have it. But don’t forget the other deviant approaches that this set of Marxist groupies have been experimenting with in running this country. Remember: Change! Cringe hopes for sensible change. But the voters gave us far more than more-of-the-same *pedestrian* foolery.
I thought the department of Homeland Security was established as a direct response to 9/11
Wikipedia says
The mission of the DHS will be to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks. The Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.
That appears on the surface to give DHS for at the very least the design of ant-terrorist strategy and a fair part of overseeing its implementation. Every strategy involves people, process and technology.
I would have thought at the very least the government would imbed or colocate DHS staff within other agencies to ensure there is good coordination and oversight. I would assume that the DHS may decide to place some of the systems critical to its strategy under centralised control to ensure that data can be collected and utilised in the most expeditious, efficient and effective way possible.
All of this stuff is common sense. Does the DHS provide annual reports to Congress?
A number of other blogs have been talking about the what Bayesian analysis tells us about credit, and I think it applies well to your criticism. From which I conclude, credit card companies aren’t doing a better job, they just have an easier job.
How many terrorists are there in the world that might try to blow up a US plane in the next year? 10? 20? Nate Silver calculates that there is one terrorist per 16,553,385 departures.
https://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html
That means the prior is seriously TINY. Even if we have a method of detection that is 99.999% effective at detecting terrorists we’re still going to have thousands of false positives for every true terrorist detected. So okay, the job of homeland security is impossibly hard and they probably shouldn’t even try until they can get their accuracy up to 1-1×10^-8.
So what is the goal of all this credit tracking? I would argue that it is to detect credit fraud. If this is the case,
#1 The prior is much larger. Credit fraud is one of the most popular and fastest growing types of crimes. The fact that it is often identified will largely reflect the fact that it is much more common, unless you condition your statistics with the prior probability before comparison.
#2 It is virtually never prevented, only punished. To be an apples to apples comparison with terrorism we would have to look at how often credit card companies identify credit fraud before attempted and prevent it. The government is arguably quite good at tracking down terrorists after they commit their acts, it is the prevention that is most tricky, but prevention is paramount when it comes to dealing with terrorism.
With all that said, can we really say that credit card companies have an error rate in the ballpark of 1 error in 1×10^8 transactions? I’d find that *very* hard to believe.
Err excuse me typo. “What Bayesian analysis tells us about terrorism”
Yes, but does Congress know what to look for or what questions to ask? I don’t think so. That credit bureau SSN number thing I came across is news to everyone who has read it, yet it came straight from one of the national credit bureaus and they. too, were surprised they’d never heard from DHS.
Congress, as represented by either your Congresscritter or the body in general, is an institution of reaction, not knowledge. Congress knows diddly. you might have a Congresscritter from business who knows how to buy and arrange for the population of business intelligence systems. but probably would never consider the possibility that the business of security could use BI to rank and control risks.
Try reading this well informed piece https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/08/pants_bomber/
I checked and wikipedia says that credit card fraud costs 7 basis points, which gives an error rate of 1 in $1428.57 dollars. Or about 11,000 times too small to detect terrorism.
Its not just that Congress doesn’t know, no one knows. To get a false positive rate of 1 in 1e8 would probably require downloading the contents of people’s brains and GREPping their memories with profligacy.
The fundamental thing to realize is that terrorism is not a problem that occurs with sufficient frequency that it is possible to prevent with our level of technology. The problem is that “serious people” think that terrorist detection is a problem we can and should focus on. Really the best/only thing that can be done is exactly the type of political theater that everyone complains about. Make terrorists think that terrorism is hard enough to accomplish with showy security measures such that we can reduce the prior to the point where detection is a non-issue.
In an abstract probabilistic viewpoint, you may be right – but the specifics of the Abdulmutalla case show that even facts that should have had an overwhelming bias towards caution were not acted upon. (i.e. how does Mom’s credit application at Sears turn out when Dad has previously called Sears Financial with concern about her spending habits and she has a purse full of phony ids?).
You are conflating identification and explanation.
What you’ve provided in an explanation.
But identifying the one valid tip when digging through the thousands of tips the government receives every day is a completely different problem. I guarantee you that any criterion for identifying terrorists from data mining that you can come up with will either #1 Produces thousands of results, or #2 Produce no results.
Remember too that every one of the 11,000 innocent people you accuse of being terrorists to find your one true terrorist are gonna be mega-pissed at you for accusing them of being terrorists.
This problem is probabilistically intractable both in general, but also in this specific case.
Your credit card example is bad, credit card companies don’t get 1000s of tips a day, the government does. A better example would be a company that cancels a credit card every time it is used outside the country of the card owner’s residence. This event happens frequently, but it is also often found in conjunction with card fraud. On the other hand, it is more often found in conjunction with vacation ie the heuristic generates many false positives.
This isn’t really even hypothetical, I’ve had my cards canceled by companies while on international travel because they suspected someone had stolen my card and started using it in the other country.
I thought of an example to explain this conflation.
Let’s say I’m at the county fair square dance and I drop my needle in the haystack. Eventually I find the needle on the right side of the haystack. I immediately, think “Of course I should have looked on the right side of the haystack because that’s where spun my partner round and round!” But that explanation didn’t and couldn’t have helped me find the needle. During the event I danced all around the haystack. I had found the needle on the left side of the haystack I would have said “Of course I should have looked on the left side of the haystack because that’s where I bowed to my partner!”
I can provide these explanations indicating that I “should” have found the needle, but they couldn’t have made me any better at finding my needle in the haystack.
How about this to demonstrate the point:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/tom-toles#id=/comics/uclickcomics/20100107/cx_tt_uc/tt20100107
which I happened to stumble upon over in a comment on the Democracy In America blog:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01/conspiracy_so_vast
We are being inconvenienced and our leaders and law-makers have caved in. And i am sick and tired of being pushed around by nim-wits all in the name of security. Security from what? There is always threats. The way to deal with it is via intelligence gathering. And if i hear another mindless traveller state ” Oh I don’t mind all these security checks and inconveniences.. anything to make us more secure….” Numnuts.. In the meantime our rights are being eroded as we are marched like cows through pens … Rise up and demand your rights. Live like an lion for one day rather as sheep for any other number of days.
Bob,
Where are your predictions from last year and scores based on their accuracy?
He answered that question is the previous column. That was a PBS thing only and he doesn’t intend to continue with it
Just so I am straight, today’s big prediction is that a secret intelligence database modeled on credit agency gray-market customer tracking will be launched this decade?
Let’s go bold and call for citizenpedia by 2020 — all humans will be reduced to wiki entries in a single distributed database that all agencies can access only tiny fractions of. Credit agencies will migrate to their own private extensions of this database.
> today’s big prediction is that a secret intelligence database modeled on credit agency gray-market customer tracking will be launched this decade?
ROFL!!! Steko, right on the money.
Bob, what *is* your prediction!?
the database is there. it just isn’t indexed. which is to say, the feds have everything they need at this moment, more than they need, to create a common single database of information that can reliably predict most of the terrorist type threats. it’s all over town, however, and nobody is in charge.
it won’t cover any teenagers living in a cash economy down in an ethnic enclave that have been getting radicalized on the web, not unless the “we haven’t been doing that” stuff from the NSA screen-scraping gets in there.
the question is, will Americans stomach going any further down the road of “state uber alles” in domestic security that runs somewhere between Britain and Russia.
This is a great article that doesn’t pull any punches. I wish there was more like this in the mainstream media.
I’m also glad that Bobo presented the case for it not being entirely a government issue. Yes, indeed, even small organizations, particularly family owned businesses can have their own little fiefdoms. BUT…
At least with small private companies a significant inefficiency in the way they operate can and often does lead to them going out of business. Private enterprise, especially at the small scale end of things can and does benefit from Darwinian principles.
I HAVE worked for government, and private industry, and for companies small, large, and in-between. Size DOES matter in an organizations ability to focus on what’s important. But funding matters too. You COULD argue that to fix government’s problems all you have to do is break the work up into smaller fiefdoms. But they’ve already done that. Each group within the federal government gets more money to spend every year than they did the year before. Performance doesn’t enter into the equation. They don’t even have ways to measure performance in place. Oh, they send people to ISO 9000 or CMM training on a regular basis, and they often DO try and hold vendors to these standards, but with the possible exception of government sponsored building of aircraft, tanks or ships, where mistakes can lead to death pretty quickly, there is little respect for “process” let alone “process improvement”.
By the way a lot of the criticisms of government do not apply nearly so much at the local level. In these environments you often know by their first name the people responsible for your water mains, road repair, and so on. It’s in large cities, county, state and especially federal system that you not only don’t know who is responsible, you are in fact blocked at every attempt to find out.
Until (or if) the American people realize that the problems we see in big government are not only hard to fix, but probably impossible to fix without a radical change in the way things are done are we likely to see any improvement.
So, why Bob, do so many mainstream journalists who SHOULD be are of these issues, always support, openly or secretly, the candidate that promise more big government solutions to things? Granted, our choices lately have been between more and WAY more, but I’ve yet to hear a good excuse for full speed ahead other than the hope that such growth will make the system collapse sooner so we can start over. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to work out that way. But I’m at a loss as to why those who should know better vote the way they do and encourage their readers to do likewise.
In the mean time I have my “told you sos” ready for the FCCs foray into packet sniffing, government doctors making no-charge house calls and all the other pie in the sky things we have been promised. My main hope is that I die of old age before my savings account gets confiscated (formally or otherwise). I’m not too confident about that one.
Typo:
SHOULD be are of these issues -> SHOULD be aware of these issues
“Oh, they send people to ISO 9000 or CMM training on a regular basis”.
ISO 9000 is total bullshit. Its nothing but a paper chase that does absolutely nothing to improve either the company’s probity, to make better products or to improve their documentation.
All it does is to provide jobs for a bunch of bureaucrats.
I would like to take aim at your comment “At least with small private companies a significant inefficiency in the way they operate can and often does lead to them going out of business”
Yes, in a mom and pop business that is true. It is not true of any organization that would be of adequate size to do the kind of job that Bob is asking them to do – namely, scan all records for false SSNs, etc. to weed out potential terrorists. We the people would want, I think, some assurances that that company will not go *poof* overnight. That would be pretty bad for our security.
And thus, outsourcing something like this to the private sector really just steals money from Peter (government agency) to give to Paul (private agency), and all the problems of fiefdoms remain. In addition, you get two additional problems:
1) there are very few companies that would be considered “qualified” to run such an operation, so the usual rules competition don’t apply or apply to a much lesser degree, and
2) the outsourced company, being private, doesn’t have the same level of accountability.
A perfect example of this, in my opinion, is the case of showers electrocuting our soldiers at bases in Afghanistan. There are only a few companies considered “qualified” to do this (your mom and pop plumber is not flying to a war zone to install plumbing!) so they are probably going to get a contract just by the fact that they are who they are, regardless of quality, and when they electrocute the soldier, there isn’t much we can do about it. (Are you going to fire one of the two or three companies that can do this work?)
Now, if the plumbing would have been installed by some army division (something akin to the Seabees where my dad served during Vietnam), that’s one less soldier who will sling a rifle, but if they mess up, they are going to the stockade, or if they are grossly derelict, to Ft. Leavenworth for the better part of their life. Or at the very least, they are no longer on “plumbing duty” and are out in the field getting shot at. In other words, lots of reasons they aren’t going to mess up.
This whole idea of getting the government “out of the way” just makes no sense. The private company becomes, in effect, “captured” by the government, and all the problems you were hoping to avoid you still end up with, with the added benefit of it costing more money since you can’t really control what the outsourcer does with your funds and you had to pay them a lot (you have to entice them with a carrot, and you can’t punish them with a stick).
So, again, the theme I have common to every post I’ve made – quit focusing on the “structure” of who is running what, and focus on the problem. You won’t change the problem by changing the structure.
Isn’t our security principal based on “allow all, deny some[after the fact]”. I thought Microsoft had proven that that is a lousy principal.
If we don’t want to give up a lot of rights and implement deny all, allow only a few. We have to design a principal which allows all but checks before the fact.
They also follow the principal:
Data = Information
while for Humans:
Information = Data in Context
Any system based on the assumption that it has to be programmed and can not do it’s own decomposition will always be after after the fact. Therefor we will slowly but surely give up freedom and rights until we reach deny all, but will have spend a few billions in system development for a system which could never keep up. Or the illusion that more data equals better security.
In a more sensible vein, this article reveals how the “successful” do it (in part):
_ In Israel, racial profiling doesn’t warrant debate, or apologies _
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1141297.html
Of course, I didn’t know that Arabs constituted a separate race, but I learn new and amazing things every day from Ha’Aretz.
These rants against big government nearly always ignore the central issue with government provided services:
Companies provide services for money to a selected sub-section of society.
Government provides services to everyone without selection bias.
For example, just imagine the difficulty in maintaining that database of social security numbers for everyone in the country, along with all the rules about who should and shouldn’t have one. Sure, utility providers also have to track large numbers of customers, but they also have a constant money supply coming from them, can cut them off if this stops, and also it is generally in the customer’s interest to tell them when their situation changes.
You live in a society where you have basic services (fuel, heat, food, schools, health care (ok, maybe not healthcare, but you’ll get there eventually), etc) and can generally expect to not get killed if you step outside your home.
You can thank your working goverment for that.
exactly, the private sector exists to maximize the benefits for a few who pay for them to do so. the public sector exists to balance the equation and provide for things that are essential to the core of a nation’s operation, and many of them are too high risk for insurance.
the conduct of war, for example, is not in a business’ best interest. they would stay in until the arcs cross on the graph, they get maximum benefit, and then duck and run as soon as they could.
the conduct of welfare is completely off the map for a businessmen hoping to commoditize things and sell tranches at a profit, letting somebody else bet on the final outcome. “got mine, hope you get yours.”
the ugly and dirty and routine and break-even at best stuff like sewers and police and education of everybody who shows at the door is not going to attract investors to an IPO.
and the price for those services is… yes… taxes. if business would perform these tasks reliably, government would be smaller, and taxes would be lower.
if you think you’re so darn much better at the job, incorporate and compete.
national security… all the spying and snooping off the books, clerks entering and verifying data, techs flying about like rabid bats keeping radar and nitrate sniffers and x-ray machines alive, prosletyzing, taking a bullet for the team… that is core to The State, and is not oursourced. that’s like oursourcing the Presidency because we can get somebody from some island above water once a month for ten bucks a day, and they passed the basic English test.
On the topic of terrorism – a heads up I think :
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/08/mutallab_comment/
Having said that though – the routine harassment and bullying of travellers by see-cure-itty staff and the seemingly never ending list of additional perversely proscribed cabin articles is one of the major headaches moving around these days.
Yeah, they’ve got the data but they seem to be like a bunch of baboons touching up a space rocket to see if it’s edible when it comes to actually using it
Grow up America.
It is time we teach Americans some reality. Unfortunately we suffer daily for the most ignorant getting the most attention. That is why we search 3 year-olds in line at the airport – or limit ourselves to 3 oz of liquid based only on an unproven suspicion.
After the “liquid bomber” threat emerged, “experts” disappeared quickly from TV because they kept saying the odds of someone successfully mixing ingredients on an airplane were so astronomical as to be nearly impossible. The chances your pilot is on something is far greater (and that number ain’t that great)
Well – that’s not TV worthy. We want to see that any kit with $5 can buy everything at the drug store.
America – your government cannot protect you from life. We cannot find America’s most wanted or stop drug dealers in the US. Do you really believe that we can find a student or doctor from a foreign country in less than 60 minutes?
I suggest we stop strip searching six year olds, so that Grandma who travels from Hoboken once every three years feels safer. Those of us who spend our lives on travel are now losing half of it to security processes that do not work.
We suffer through it because the same people who decide we must – never have to go through it. A recent trip through LAX was hosed by the airlines. In an effort to make it up, they bumped me to first class. Well, let me tell you what Senator X experiences. He goes through the first class screening line where there is no line. Three lines are open for a dozen people. Someone from the Airline/TSA carries your bags through – you leave your shoes on, no pat downs. What are you travelers whining about they wonder.
Senator X or Congressman Y never stands in that line while someone tries to put their stroller through the x-ray machine or carry skis through the metal detector. Or waits while some TSA agent argues with a mother about the need to “pat down” a three year old.
If you want to make flying safer – stop catering to the stupid. If you don’t like the risks don’t fly. But give me the 8 hours I now waste to each trip back. The cost is too high. But to Bob’s point the government never does a cost/benefit analysis because the cost is always free. 3000 people died on 9/11 and that is terrible. 50,000 died in car accidents last year. That means since 2001 400,000 have been killed – yet I just get into my car and drive.
Those who would give up a little freedom for security deserve neither and eventually will lose both.
Interesting.
Whenever I am asked for a SSN by someone to whom I am not required to provide it to, I just make one up. On the spot.
Trivial given that SSNs have no check-digits.
My favorite response for askers who don’t matter is, “one-twenty-three, forty-five, sixty-seven-eighty-nine.” Monkey motion that it is for them, I’ve never been questioned.
Strange, no one ever asks me for my ssn. Even the so-called security questions on web sites or over the phone want to ask me dumb things I don’t know the answer to like my favorite place to vist. Please ask me my ssn or at least the last four digits because I know it and won’t forget it.
From an Occam’s Razor point of view, I’d say reduce the emphasis on the databases, algorithms and security theater and pay more attention to the ‘human factor’ as the Israelis have done for the last forty or so years. It works! Yeah, this requires intelligent, well trained Profilers at danger points (at the front door, not the check-in line) but think of all the money we could save on x-ray machines and other unnecessary tech. Big business being so entrenched in our government I’m sure ideas like this aren’t considered because they don’t generate enough revenue.
I think it’s absurd that anyone could use the English transcription of a name from Arabic as a basis of identifying a person — especially when there is no standardized way to transcribe Arabic into English. I’ve seen the underwear bomber’s name transcribed as Abdulmutallab, Abdulmutallib, Abdulmutalla. Jeez, how many different transliterations are there of Muammar Gaddafi / Moammar Gadhaf /Mu’ammar Qaddafi /Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi /Muammar Khaddafi /etc.? Of course, Visa applicants to the US have to submit their application in English, no doubt helpfully transcribed by consulate personnel. Somebody keys in the name “Abdulmutallab” as a potential threat, but the his paperwork shows “Abdulmutalla” — well, it will never ring a bell. Seems to me, that with UNICODE, we should at least be able to handle data searches of non-Latin scripts.
Bob,
Your “fiefdom” argument is close, but no cigar. The crux of the problem is congress is owned by special interests. So, yes, a new system will be built when it’s not needed. But that’s because it’s the only way some large defense contractor can profit. No billions for a new system, no progress in 8 years.
The credit bureaus sitting and waiting for a phone call from homeland security is laughable. What they need to do is start donating campaign funding to key congressmen. That opens doors. Then they need to hire a lobbyist and go pitch their data mining as a new service the government should buy. That is how things get done in Washington. Expecting someone to ditch their fief and come calling is pure innocence.
I’ve been thinking about this proposal a bit more, and it occurs to me that there is a real problem with this proposed solution. It fixes the wrong problem.
Suppose Bob is right, and the credit bureaus could help us find all the illegal aliens. This wouldn’t have prevented 9/11, the shoe bomber, or the undie-bomber. Bob’s solution solves the problem of identifying illegal immigrants. It has nothing to do with preventing terror attacks. I think you will find that in general terrorists will come in three flavors in the US:
1) American citizens: Pedilla, McVeigh, etc.
2) Travellers on tourist Visas: Undie bomber.
3) People on student or work visas.
Honestly, (1) and (2) are probably the greatest cause of possible concern. McVeigh had a higher kill rate than the 9/11 attackers (168 vs 156.6 per attacker), though 2 of the 9/11 hijackers were on student visas, the rest were on tourist visas (the easiest to get).
The underlying point is that you don’t solve the problem by solving a completely different problem. Terrorists are not, in general, illegal immigrants.
Correctly flagging (and correcting flags) individuals as potential terrorists isn’t the same problem as identifying fraud. The paper trails for these activities are completely different. Why should we think that algorithms established to detect credit card fraud or misuse of SSN are going to be any good at analyzing data of a completely different type (i.e., text streams vs. number streams)? The more I think about Bob’s proposal, the clearer it becomes why DHS hasn’t acted on this proposal, but that does leave the question of why INS hasn’t done more to leverage this data…
You’re confusing an example of data-mining capabilities that the credit agencies have with the actual queries that would be used for homeland security. Bob’s point (valid or not) is that with the information the credit companies have, it ought to be possible to set up filters to identify suspicious characters. Not necessarily simplistic filters like overused SSNs.
Apart from the constitutional issues of mass fishing expeditions of government authorities through commercial data, I also have doubts about what will turn up. Cash transactions won’t appear, so a terrorist can structure their financial activity so that their trackable expenditures appear “normal” while their other activity can be done as cash-only using the same money-laundering techniques the drug cartels use.
Anyone who thinks we can “win” the war on terror by data mining, interdiction and military adventurism should take a long, hard look at our success rate in the war on drugs. Sure, there are successes, but it’s been 30 years or so and the war still goes on. A war on terror with no mechanism for rehabilitation and reconciliation (assuming such things are possible) is simply a recipe for government contractors to loot the treasury for generations to come, whether they are weapons manufacturers, explosive detection manufacturers or credit agencies with huge transaction databases. More Americans die on our roadways each year than have died in the combined total of all terrorist attacks in the 21st century (including 9/11). Where is the budget for the “war for highway safety”?
If you really wanted to stymie the Islamist terrorists it’s simple: ban air travel in and out of the US. All travel into the country would have to occur by ship, and no individual terrorist can carry enough explosive to sink a ship yet still remain undetected. Of course such a proposal is impractical from an economic perspective, but that just means that EVERYONE is willing to take a calculated risk of a successful terrorist attack in order to avoid the true costs of preventing them all. To paraphrase Churchill: “We’ve already determined WHAT you are madame, now all we’re doing is negotiating your price…”
So what is the acceptable cost/risk ratio? We’re paying an awful lot of money for quite a bit of security theater, and a half-assed multi-billion dollar datamining contract isn’t about to improve that ratio very much.
Yea, what Bruce said.
[…] in News, Rants by Darrell Brogdon on January 9, 2010 “…the fact that it wasn’t worse comes down to terrorist incompetence, citizen bravery, and no…” In one brief sentence Bob Cringely summarizes whats wrong with the TSA and our general […]
[…] Is Up To You And Me Posted in News, Rants by Darrell Brogdon on January 9, 2010 “…the fact that it wasn’t worse comes down to terrorist incompetence, citizen bravery, and no…” In one brief sentence Bob Cringely summarizes whats wrong with the TSA and our general […]
Wait one minute. Isn’t there a law that keeps the government from collecting private information from companies like banks?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/02/0247236/Using-Fourth-Party-Data-Brokers-To-Bypass-the-Fourth-Amendment?from=rss
Come on Bob, this was on Slashdot!
That does sound like our government in action. They can not actually get to the useful information because they passed a law.
[…] Shared Predict Me, I’m from the Government. […]
Bob,
Have you ever tried to get a writing spot on “The Daily Show with John Stewart”.
I know comedy is not your thing, but I would think your insight on certain topics would be a great source of ideas and perspectives for them.
You might even see airtime and they would add to the brainpower that makes the show so great.
Hopefully you could also make a few bucks on it. 🙂
I hope you take this as a compliment as it was intended.
What was the prediction again?
“Sadly I can predict, too, that what I suggest here will never happen.”
“too” refers to the fact that he was right about government’s response to any crisis:”I saw this coming. Here’s something I wrote in this space on September 13th, 2001, two days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks”.
[…] Cringely looks ahead. This column is about homeland security, which is something our government isn’t very good at and I predict won’t get any better at this year because of a systemic inability to do correctly even the most basic things to protect our society, our privacy, and our way of life. […]
“How is it that we can run our credit card operations so well and our national security so poorly?”
The credit bureau I worked for had been in business for *decades*, selling a product that had been made by some *very* smart people. Thats why.
“I have a better idea. Why not outsource the whole screening process to the credit agencies? ”
This could easily happen if a pertinent government agency would release a request for a competitve bid for such a system. Who knows, one may have already been requested in the past nine years and none of the credit bureaus’ people could adapt their thinking in such a way as to make a bid, much less been aware of such a request. Somebody should get on the phone to Experion, Equifax (you would have to get all the cos involved) and the Department of Homeland Security and be a match maker.
I nominate Bob.
Am I missing something? Is there some reason w’ere not focussing on the fact that there are 200-1,000 people using the same SSN#s across the country, and tracking down these people? Using a SSN# that is already in use should be a VERY easily detectable red flag. Not enough man power for this? What?
Hi Bob.
I agree that our govt could do much better than the no fly list.
We got a demo of the vanilla Seisent system. It was pretty awesome. Everyone is uniquely identified and their entire life history is recorded. These systems have probably been extended to other countries.
I was told the NSA bought a cluster from Seisent, before Lexis/Nexus bought them. I have no idea if the NSA and DHS people talk to each other. Seems unlikely.
The real security comes from doing social network analysis, keeping track of who talks to who. Just watched a video YouTube/Google by a private investigator at a 2600 conference. Everything he said jibbed with I’ve read elsewhere. (Sorry, no link.)
I wouldn’t have much of a problem with the loss of privacy if we knew who was watching us. David Brin’s “Transparent Society”.
Adopting EU’s privacy protections, enabled by something like Real ID, seems unrealistic at this point. (With a unique identifier, our records could be encrypted. Right now, the records must be kept plaintext for the demographic matching algorithms to work.)
Cheers, Jason
[…] X. Cringely argues that the three credit bureaus may do a better job than the Department of Heartland Security (aka […]
Well, this is disappointing.
The credit card example is inapposite. Credit card companies are solving a different problem, they face a different risk profile, and they have different objectives. In particular, they don’t have to prevent every instance of fraud, they only have to prevent enough to stay profitable.
The social dynamics of sharing SSNs are interesting, but not clearly relevant to stopping terrorists, which may be why bureaucrats at DHS are unacquainted with it. (If you think that credentials are the solution, remember that some of the 9/11 attackers had legitimate, US government-issued IDs.)
The statement that “Government has little to no idea how many illegal aliens there are in America” is inflammatory, while the claim that “the big credit reporting agencies know exactly how many” is simply false. As it happens, no one knows how many illegal aliens there are in America; estimates range from 7 to 20 million.
I can tell that you’re “pissed-off”, but I’m not sure why. The Christmas eve attack failed. The plane didn’t crash, no one was killed, and the only injury was the attacker, who managed to set fire to his pants.
The attack failed because PETN is safe without a detonator, airport security keeps reliable detonators (e.g. blasting caps) off of planes, and alert passengers grabbed the attacker’s unreliable detonator before he could deploy it. You may not like it, but that’s the security system that we have, and it worked. Janet Napolitano should stand by her statement.
If you’re going to write about security, you should read Bruce Schneier first. (https://www.schneier.com/)
[…] Predict Me, I’m from the GovernmentJanuary 8, 2010 […]
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Predict Me, I’m from the Government – Cringely on technology. ‹Previous Post Cutting Costs Is Real Issue in Health Care Overhaul. […]
[…] I, Cringely » Predict Me, I’m from the Government. Too true. […]
Slightly off subject, but in response to a fact stated.
If stolen / borrowed SSNs are being used by many people, does the original owner of the SSN benefit in retirement Social Security benefits by all of the extra income reported by the other users of that SSN?
Unfortunately the idea that Homeland Security is here to protect the United States Citizens is absolutely false. Homeland Security is in place to protect the establishment, monger fear and to quash dissent. Ultimately, the goal is to create a society where the establishment has circumvented the constitution and bill of rights with draconian terror laws. In fact, we are already well on the way there. You can also read the very similar rhetoric of Nazi Germany and Homeland security, it’s actually quite horrifying. This war on terror is designed for multiple purposes – on the top of the list is to destroy what America actually stands for – Liberty.
It’s already come out that the “Underwear bomber” was an organized and staged event. Just like The burning of the Reishtag in Germany, Golf of Tonken, Bombing of OKC building, The Iraqi’s taking babies out of their incubators and throwing them on the floor in Kuwait and 911. If you don’t believe these were staged events, feel free to read the admitted history in Germany, Vietnam and Iraq. This is standard operating procedure for all Governments.
Making us safer is not the goal. Nor is making our information more secure.
Our government runs from a simple equation. It’s called Problem Reaction Solution. They either create a problem or let one happen, The people react “something must be done!” and there they are with the solution which invariably leads to them grabbing more power over us.
Don’t you ever get the inclination
that these problems aren’t meant to be solved by the establishment? Can you not see the benefit to the establishment by letting these problems continue?
In summary – We are going into a world wide scientific dictatorship that does not care about your petty problems of information security. These problems aren’t meant to be solved and in fact, the banking families who control central banks despise the United States and what it stands for and would very much like to see the United States become like China which it is well on it’s way to becoming. All throughout history the people who control empires despise the middle class and don’t kid yourself – that’s who this war is against. If you can’t see this yet, I suggest you read more history and investigate some of these issues with an open mind.
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