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Banned
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1st Phone Call From Our Son, Deployed By Military To GWOT Frontline
I want to tell you about my weekend, and ask you to post about who you will be voting for.....and why?
Last night, my stepson, who is serving in his first tour of his US military duty in a combat zone....in a predominately islamic country that our government describes as featuring a "jihadist" front in the GWOT....managed to telephone us for the first time. Unfortunately, my wife....his mother, was not at home, and missed the call. Owing to the sensitive nature of his "specialty", he asked us, when he received his deployment orders, not to mention where he is or what he does.
With that in mind, I carefully limited my questions to details of his well being and living conditions, I relayed news to him about other family members, reminded him that we were very proud of him and of his service, how much we miss him, and that we were praying for him.
Other parts of my weekend were devoted to posting on Paq's <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=109790">Can't we all just get along?</a> thread....and to reading obscenities like these:
Quote:
http://wvgazette.com/section/News/2006101937
October 20, 2006
Bush names Stickler mine chief
By Ken Ward Jr.
Staff writer
President Bush on Thursday went around the U.S. Senate to put a longtime coal industry official in charge of the federal agency that regulates mine safety.
<b>Bush waited until the Senate had recessed for next month’s election</b>, and re-nominated West Virginia native Richard Stickler to be assistant secretary of labor in charge of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Twice this year, the Senate sent Stickler’s nomination back to the White House without a vote, citing opposition from the United Mine Workers and other safety advocates, along with this year’s spike in coal-mining deaths.
“It’s certainly been a long process for me,” Stickler said in a phone call with reporters. “And at this time, I’m just happy to have the opportunity.”
Senate Democrats were furious.
Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said, “The sad reality of the Bush administration’s actions is that the person who will now lead MSHA lacks the trust of the miners he’s charged to protect and has a skewed view of what the safety priorities should be.
“We need a bulldog agency that will place miner safety over all other priorities, and not an agency that will continue to place a higher priority on mine production than on miner protection,” Byrd said.
Under the recess appointment, Stickler would likely be able to remain in the MSHA post — without Senate approval — until the end of 2007.
But in June, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on the Senate floor that if Bush planned a recess appointment of Stickler, Republicans would schedule a Senate vote on the nomination first.
“If there were to be such a recess appointment, then this vote could come back, would come back at that time,” Frist, R-Tenn., told Kennedy......
Quote:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06167/698764-357.stm
Mining Safety
Bush signs mine safety law
Critics say legislation doesn't go far enough in protecting miners
Friday, June 16, 2006
.......However MSHA chooses to interpret the new law, it will do so, at least for a while, without a permanent leader. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., yesterday canceled a vote on the confirmation of Richard Stickler as head of MSHA. Mr. Stickler has been criticized by congressional Democrats and UMW officials for being too sympathetic to the coal companies he would be asked to regulate.
Mr. Bush put in a strong plug for Mr. Stickler at yesterday's signing ceremony.
"He's got experience. He served for six years as the director of Pennsylvania's Bureau of Deep Mine Safety. He was a miner, mine shift foreman, a superintendent and a manager, and the Senate needs to confirm Richard Stickler to this key position," Mr. Bush said.
<b>Debbie Hamner and Sara Bailey, the wife and the daughter of the late Sago miner George Junior Hamner, sent a letter to Mr. Bush yesterday thanking him for signing the MINER Act but strongly urging him to withdraw Mr. Stickler's nomination.
Noting Mr. Stickler's long experience in coal mine management, they wrote: "We are concerned that his primary objective may be 'compliance assistance' and production, rather than on miners' health and safety."
They said Mr. Stickler "declined to endorse new mine safety rules" at his nomination hearing</b>, including ones that would have required improved emergency oxygen equipment. Mr. McCloy, the Sago survivor, has said that four of his crew's oxygen packs did not work.
"Our nation's miners deserve an agency staffed with leaders who will aggressively advocate miners' health and safety," wrote Mrs. Hamner and Ms. Bailey. "We assert that Mr. Stickler is not the right person for the job and urge you to withdraw his nomination."
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Quote:
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njw...06/1020nj3.htm
Terrorist Profiling, Version 2.0
By Shane Harris, National Journal
Friday, Oct. 20, 2006
The government's top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.
It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals' private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.
The details of the program, called Tangram, are contained in an unclassified document that National Journal obtained from a government contracting Web site. The document, called a "proposer's information packet," is a technical description of Tangram written for potential contractors who would help design and test the system. The document was written by officials in the research-and-development section of the national intelligence office. A tangram is an old Chinese puzzle that takes seven geometric shapes -- five triangles, a square, and a parallelogram -- and rearranges them into different pictures.
In addition to descriptions of Tangram, the document offers a rare and surprisingly candid analysis of intelligence agencies' fits and starts -- and failures -- in other efforts to profile terrorists through data mining: Researchers, for example, haven't moved beyond "guilt-by-association models" that link suspected terrorists to other, potentially innocent people, and then rank the suspects by level of suspicion.
"To date, the predominant approaches have used a guilt-by-association model to derive suspicion scores," the Tangram document states. "In the cases where we have knowledge of a seed entity [a known person] in an unknown group, we have been very successful at detecting the entire group. However, in the absence of a known seed entity, how do we score a person if nothing is known about their associates? In such an instance, guilt-by-association fails."
Intelligence and privacy experts who reviewed the document said that it reaffirms their long-held belief that many computerized terrorist-profiling methods are largely ineffective. It also raises significant privacy concerns, because to distinguish terrorists from innocent people, a system that's as broad as Tangram purports to be would require access to many databases that contain private information about Americans, the experts said, including credit card transactions, communications records, and even Internet purchases.
"There is no other way that they could do this," said David Holtzman, former chief technology officer of Network Solutions, the company that runs the Internet's domain-naming system, and author of the book Privacy Lost. "They want to investigate real-time ways of spotting patterns" that might indicate terrorist activity, he said. "Telephone calls, for instance, would be an obvious thing you'd feed into this." .....
.......Tangram drew skeptical reviews from technology and privacy experts because of its links to Total Information Awareness, a controversial research program started by the Pentagon in 2002. TIA also aimed to detect patterns of terrorist behavior. Congress ended all public funding for the program in 2003, but allowed research to continue through the classified intelligence budget. In February, <a href="http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm">National Journal</a> revealed that names of component TIA programs were simply changed and transferred to a research-and-development unit principally overseen by the National Security Agency. The unit, now under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also runs Tangram.
The Tangram document cites several TIA programs -- by their new names -- as forming the latest phase of research upon which Tangram will build. In a prepared statement, the intelligence director's office said, "Tangram is addressing the problem that the intelligence community receives vast amounts of data a day and there are a wide variety of algorithms -- mathematical procedures -- for figuring out what is relevant. Different algorithms serve different purposes, but we believe that combining them will provide us new insights in detecting terrorist plans and activities. The project will allow analysts to mix and match various methods to connect the dots."
TIA was similarly envisioned as a vast combination of detection methods. In Tangram, "I see the system of systems that is essentially TIA about to be born," said Tim Sparapani, the legislative counsel on privacy issues for the American Civil Liberties Union. "TIA was designed to be one unified system," he said. "This is the vision, I think, made practical."
Robert Popp, who was the TIA program's deputy director, also saw parallels to Tangram. "They seem to be doing something very similar in concept," Popp said. "Taking data, doing all the sense-making and path-finding, and turning it into a form which a decision maker can act upon." ........
....Last month, the government awarded three contracts for Tangram research and design totaling almost $12 million. Total funding for the program is approximately $49 million. Two of the firms receiving awards -- Booz Allen Hamilton and 21st Century Technologies -- were principal contractors on the TIA program. The third company, SRI International, worked on one of TIA's predecessors, the Genoa program. Spokeswomen for Booz Allen Hamilton and SRI declined to comment for this article. Repeated calls and e-mails to the Austin offices of 21st Century Technologies went unanswered.
The apparent lack of privacy protections in Tangram dismayed some experts. "Given the history of TIA and other programs, one would expect the proponents of a system like this would at least pay lip service to privacy issues," said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. "The absence of that is a bit surprising."
The TIA program devoted more than $4 million to research aimed at ways to protect privacy while it was sifting databases, and former officials have said that although it was admittedly controversial, TIA was being designed all along with privacy protection and auditable logs to track those who used it. The privacy research, however, was abandoned when the program moved into the classified budget in the NSA.
Administration officials have singled out the importance of new technologies in the war on terrorism. President Bush said that the NSA's warrantless surveillance and analysis of phone calls and e-mails protects Americans from attack. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director, said that were such a system in place before the September 11 attacks, "we would have detected some of the 9/11 Al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such."
But the Tangram document presents a more pessimistic assessment of the state of terrorist detection. For instance, researchers want to find ways to distinguish individuals' innocuous activity from that which might appear normal but is really indicative of terrorist plotting. However, the document states that, in large measure, terrorism researchers "cannot readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal behaviors" either for innocent people or for terrorists.
The ACLU's Sparapani called that admission "a bombshell," because the government is acknowledging that current detection systems aren't sophisticated enough to separate terrorists from everyday people. Other outside experts were troubled that such shortcomings also mean that individuals intent on doing harm could be mistaken for innocent people.
Popp said that attempts to separate terrorists' activities from those of normal people are perilous. "When you try to capture what is normal behavior, and then determine non-normal, that's highly intractable," he said.
Several times, Popp said, TIA researchers discussed how to characterize nonterrorist behavior. "We avoided it. It was too hard. We had no idea how on God's earth you would characterize and capture normal behavior. We wouldn't know where to start." Instead, TIA researchers proposed looking for specific indicators of terrorist planning -- people purchasing airline tickets at the last minute with cash, for instance, or other transactions that fit the narrative of an attack.
Current detection techniques have raised the specter of what the Tangram document calls "runaway false detections." If analysts tie a terrorist suspect to five other individuals, say through phone calls, how can they be certain that these five people constitute a terrorist network and aren't simply people with whom the suspect has had innocuous, everyday interactions? The document says that research has been conducted on "the sensitivities of guilt-by-association models to runaway false detections."
Researchers have made other attempts to move beyond the guilt-by-association model, the document states. One technique, an obscure methodology known as "collective inferencing," in which the suspicion score of an entire network of people is computed at once, has apparently garnered some interest. But "existing techniques are far too simple" for real-world problems, the document acknowledges.
The Tangram document states that gaps in current detection techniques also owe to the difficulty of tracking terrorist behaviors, which are constantly changing. "The underlying assumption of existing approaches is that behaviors are constant," the authors write. "Yet, behaviors are not constant.... How can we profile dynamic behavior well enough to be able to identify, with more-or-less confidence, entities who want to remain anonymous?" The answer to that question apparently eludes the researchers, who hope that Tangram might provide it.
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....I haven't felt as sincere as I would like to be when I've praised my stepson for his service. I know that he is wrong about what he thinks that he is fighting for. He buys into the same line of shit....hook, line, and sinker, that many of you here have posted your support for. He trusts Mr. Bush and his policy pronouncements, and the government.
To me, any POTUS who would appoint a Richard Stickler to administer the safety regs of mine workers, or a John Negroponte to the "Intelligence Czar" job.....to "keep us all safe", a POTUS who oversees agencies that rebrand and rename the same ole, unconsitutional "TIPS"....seems more of enemy of the American people, than a "leader" of them.
I'm feeling sick to my stomach, and I'm wishing that my stepson didn't call, this weekend....that I didn't reflexively recite what are becoming empty platitudes to him. We've had the conversations where I've showed him my posts at TFP politics. He politely listened, at times....and at times we both yelled back and forth. I couldn't reach him, and I can't reach many of you.
Can any of you who still support republican politicians, please post some information that will reliably inform the rest of us as to why you keep your support for that party and those politicians? Are they more honest, less hypocritical, more constructive, more accomplished, more open, less intrusive, more representative of working class concerns, and of our constitional rights, than I am thinking, this weekend...that they are?
Tell me what principles and rights, my stepson is fighting for....if republicans maintain total control of the government, after this coming election. Post about why you trust republicans over democrats. Is it their fiscal discipline, or their ethics and openness?
I'm not asking you to "win me over" to all things republican. I'm just asking for reasons why I should be proud of my stepson's service, and of his commander in chief........why I should overlook what I see and what I post about on these threads. What is the "higher calling" that you, as republican supporters must see....to continue your support and defense of the status quo....that I don't see? What would Nancy Pelosi do....if she became House Speaker, that would be worse than what Dennis Hastert has done..... he fired the ethics committee when it found against the ethics of Tom Delay.... |