VISA and "See ID"

Back when we were moving, I bought some boxes from vendor and charged it. The guy looked at my credit card and scoffed at the "See ID" I'd written there.

"That violates the agreement. You're not supposed to do that."

He still took my money - but I'd believed him. Having repeated that story to a number of people, it occurred to me that I'd never bothered to look this up.

Well, according to VISA, we're not supposed to do that.

From their instructions to merchants:

If the card has a “See ID” in place of a signature…

   1. Request a signature. Ask the cardholder to sign the card and provide current government identification, such as a driver's license or passport (if local law permits).
   2. Check the signature. Be sure that the signature on the card matches the one on the transaction receipt and the additional identification.

If the signatures appear reasonably the same and the authorization request is approved, go ahead and complete the transaction.

 If a merchant followed these guidelines for a "See ID" card, your card would actually be less secure - since they would ask whoever has the card to sign it right there.

There's still a case for a person to sign their card AND put "See ID," but not signing it isn't doesn't seem to be an option.

Thank heavens FARC doesn't know what a whois search is

(H/t DangerRoom)

On July 2nd, the Colombian military staged a stunning dupe, convincing FARC to hand over 15 hostages, including three Americans and Ingrid Betancourt, to a helicopter belonging to a fake humanitarian NGO.

[snip]

It appears the Colombian military even went so far as to setup a website for the fictional NGO just in case FARC leaders googled it. However, luckily the FARC did not have even basic knowledge of domain names.

[snip]

If FARC did a whois search, something your son or daughter probably already knows how to do, the cover story of the NGO and perhaps the entire operation could have been blown.

Dude, if you're going to fake a website for a Spanish NGO, don't host it on local servers.

Full story on War and Health.

Single sourced social networking

(via lifehacker)

More connections = more work.

I don't facebook, or flickr - but if I did I would have the problem of having to manage multiple channels of content.

Someone's come up with a way to syndicate your networking content so that a single input can post to many outputs.

It's called switchAbit - and it's in beta. Until there is an "all-my-stuff fugue" app - this looks to be a good step up.

A run on IndyMac

(Via CJR's Ryan Chittum)

When IndyMac imploded, depositors did what anyone would do: they went to take their money out.

FDIC will save you below $100,000, but some had their life savings there - and they got bit.

70-year-old Charles Tengeri, a retired teacher from Pasadena, who arrived at IndyMac’s headquarters at 4 a.m. and grabbed one of the first spots in line.
Tengeri had more than $200,000 in five certificate of deposit accounts— his life savings, he said. After waiting five hours, he left with a check for $171,000.

This man is atypical - but it's jarring to think that we now live in an age where a bank will just go belly up and take part of your CDs with it. The image of a mob surging into a bank to demand their savings is something that's hard to juxtapose with the happy talk coming out of the likes of Dana Perino.

The NYT quote Ryan pulls at the end is the best. The FDIC had a list of 90 banks that were looking shaky in the first quarter of this year.

IndyMac wasn't on that list.

As in, they got more than 90 to worry about.

Fighting the right fight

(via TPM)
Obama on Iraq:

So let's be clear. Senator McCain would have our troops continue to fight tour after tour of duty, and our taxpayers keep spending $10 billion a month indefinitely; I want Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future, and to reach the political accommodation necessary for long-term stability. That's victory. That's success. That's what's best for Iraq, that's what's best for America, and that's why I will end this war as President.

[snip]

Senator McCain said - just months ago - that "Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq." I could not disagree more. Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That's what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that's why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.

Even read off a computer screen - that's some pretty good stuff. Take your position and box in your opponent.

McCain wishes he had a winning position like this one.

Read the whole speech.

Nothing is written

(H/t to CJR)

The New Yorker adds some context for the meteoric rise of Sen. Obama in their mammoth article Making It. It goes to show that this man was not anointed by anyone. He fought his way up - because that's what you do.

Ryan Lizza interviews former political allies (some bitter, some not) who are not shy about telling tales. He also reveals a rather key role played by [former Weathermen] Alan Dobry & Lois Friedberg-Dobry.

When Obama was running for a state senate seat vacated by his mentor, Alice Palmer - who had left to run for Congress. Palmer had gotten thumped, and was returning to run for her old seat. She expected Obama to back out of the race. He did not, and Palmer entered the primary to oppose Obama.

The Dobrys were surprised that Palmer had so quickly gathered the signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot. They went to the Chicago board of elections and reviewed her petitions; as they suspected, they were filled with irregularities. One skill that the Independents had mastered in the years of fighting the first Mayor Daley was the machine’s tactic of challenging ballot petitions, and the Dobrys were experts at this Chicago ritual. Publicly, Obama was conciliatory about the awkward political situation, telling the Hyde Park Herald that he understood that some people were upset about the “conflict between old loyalties and new enthusiasms.” Privately, however, he unleashed his operators. With the help of the Dobrys, he was able to remove not just Palmer’s name from the ballot but the name of every other opponent as well. “He ran unopposed, which is a good way to win,” Mikva said, laughing at the recollection.

 Partisans have attacked Sen. Obama for his association with the Dobrys - but I have to say - I'm not seeing much more than the usual story of politics making strange bedfellows. The article makes clear the Dobrys are part of the established political landscape in Chicago, and have been for years. It's enlightening to see what a dramatic part they played in him winning the state senate primary, but I'm not sure there's a lot of hay there.

Something that will surely get talked up is the account of then state senator Obama squabbling with another senator named Hendon.

Lizza quotes an exchange where Hendon is hazing the new arrival about his bill that would make a directory of graduates available to local employers:

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I’m having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill’s still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn’t paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn’t pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Not—not—basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don’t know what you’re doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won’t be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

 The article goes on to say that Obama and Hendon got into a screaming match on another occasion. By Hendon's account, Obama threatened to kick his ass. Whether he did or didn't say that - it seems to me that Hendon would have deserved it.

CJR's Katia Bachko seems to think there are damming implications to this story, she cites criticism in the blogosphere that focuses on the Hendon dustup, and Obama's reaction to 9/11.

Obviously, I have my own bias - but Hendon story is rather endearing. It's nice to hear that Obama can get pissed off, just like the rest of us. Anyone who is surprised by this fact is naive or trying hard to be surprised.

Criticism of Obama's 9/11 column in the blog Bachko links to (to my mind) rings hollow. Lizzo is writing to show that on September 12 the bulk of Illinois legislators were ignoring the national tragedy in favor of their own redistricting scrum. Barack Obama did something else. He wrote a lengthy column about 9/11 and about an angry nation's duty to be responsible when it exacted retribution. That's hardly a moral failure in my book - although I am certain that any position that deviates from the hawkish "kill 'em all" mentality will look weak to some. The idea that we should be terrible in war, but should not kill innocents should is a scandal only to people who willfully avoid common sense.

It's a good article - read the whole thing.

Fundraising myths

Politico's Ken Vogel has an article attacking some of the enduring talking points on the presidential campaign fundraising.

On his chopping block are:

1. 527s are a major factor 
2. McCain is running a publicly financed general election campaign 
3. McCain broke campaign finance law in the primary
4. Lobbyists and PACs are big players in presidential politics
5. Hillary Clinton’s debt is a pressing concern
   

I don't know enough of the FEC rules to call this an authoritative debunking - but it certainly adds to the discussion.

Who moved my milk jug?

WalMart is changing the ubiquitous milk jug.

What could possibly go wrong?

Down goes Steve & Barry

(via CJR's Ryan Chittum)

Retailer's Collapse Hits Mall Owners 

By Jeffrey McCracken, Peter Lattman and Kris Hudson

Steve & Barry's, the discount-clothing chain that collapsed last week, depended heavily on bargain-hunting shoppers and attention-getting celebrity endorsers. But its biggest boosters were the nation's struggling mall owners.

Desperate to fill empty department-store spaces, mall owners courted the retailer with fat payments to outfit its cavernous stores. Those checks, not clothing profits, fueled the company's runaway growth, according to people familiar with the company's finances. When the payments slowed, Steve & Barry's collapsed.

The 276-store chain, regarded just weeks ago as one of America's fastest-growing retailers, now qualifies as one of the industry's most unusual blowups. Its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on Wednesday is likely to lead to its liquidation, people involved in the case say.

Two observations:

1) Time to go to the store and feast on the carcass.

2) Malls pay anchor stores to move in. This is probably news only to me - and makes sense to a certain degree - but here's the fun bit: this was the business model that kept Steve & Barry afloat.

Mall owners have always viewed anchor stores as loss leaders -- owners offer favorable deals to big stores in exchange for bringing traffic to the malls. Financial inducements often come in the form of tenant-improvement allowances, which are upfront payments that retailers use to outfit the interiors of their stores. Landlords seldom monitor how the money is spent.

The mall owners welcomed Steve & Barry's with open wallets. One former Steve & Barry's executive recalls company co-founder Barry Prevor jumping up on his credenza with joy at company headquarters after negotiating the first multimillion-dollar payment in 2003.

[snip]

Because Steve & Barry's was often the only retailer willing to occupy large, vacant stores, it didn't often budge on its demands. "They go into a market and say, 'This is what we're going to pay,' " says Mr. Natanek. "There's not a lot of negotiation."

One mall owner says he talked to Steve & Barry's about leasing space, but the terms they demanded were absurd. "Leasing to them would have been like bringing prostitutes to a party to look popular," he says. "They might look good, but you're paying for it."

So - they're gambling that the mall payments and celeb deals will keep them in the chips until they turn a profit.

Plenty of business take awhile to establish profitiability (e.g. US airlines have lost a collective 13 billion dollars since deregulation) but you have to wonder about a business climate where corporations are free to gamble so big.

Not only that, but they used creative accounting to hide their losses as long as possible - something they are going to have to explain in bankruptcy court.

Huge risks, creditors kept in the dark until the music stops.

Now, where have I heard this story before? Oh yeah, on Wall Street.

Fed's plan for Freddie Mac: Rogers Holdings not lovin it

Bloomberg quoting Jim Rogers on the Fed plan to shore up the mortgage market:

"They're ruining what has been one of the greatest economies in the world," Rogers said. [Fed. Chairman] Bernanke and [US Treasury Sec.] Paulson "are bailing out their friends on Wall Street but there are 300 million Americans that are going to have to pay for this."

South American paranoia...

...apparently just can't keep pace with current events.

DangerRoom has a story that would get laughed out of any publisher's office.

Megalomaniac dictators ordering their pet evil scientist to come up with untraceable poisons: It's the stuff of bad movies.

And, apparently Chilean history as well.

A dead president. Poison perfume and a mad scientist who may or may not have faked his own death.

Freaky. For starters.

Best summation of American political coverage I've heard yet

....comes from Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson:

In a campaign consumed by tactics, it doesn’t matter where you stand on any issue so much as whether you’ve stood there all along.

(H/t CJR)

IndyMac = toast

(Via TPM and the NYT)

Regulators Seize Mortgage Lender

Federal regulators seized IndyMac Bancorp on Friday evening, marking one of the largest bank failures in American history.

[snip]

For all the write-downs and bad news on Wall Street over the last year, only five local and regional banks have shut their doors. The handful that have failed have been a fraction of the size of IndyMac. IndyMac held $32 billion in assets as of late March, according to the government release.

“It’s the biggest failure in 24 years,” said Chip MacDonald, a banking lawyer at Jones Day in Atlanta. “You haven’t had a lot of failures of that size, yet.”

It has been 15 years since any bank larger than $10 billion in assets collapsed. 

Wonder if Lehman is next.

Thou shalt not covet thy son's toy…

Since college, I have felt secure in the adult-ness of my chosen hobbies. I read, I cook, I game, and I document stupefyingly complicated plotlines for stories that will never get turned into novels.

And I blog. Perfectly grown-up pursuits.

My son's recent birthday has put a real dent in this worldview.

Put another way: He got some seriously righteous bling – and it's all I can do to not monopolize it.

The chief offender is his new spaceship.

Specifically, it's the Eta-2 Actis-class light interceptor – sometimes called the Jedi Starfighter (although that label can also apply to the earlier, Delta-7 Aethersprite).

---
Okay stop right there. I am NOT a Star Wars geek.

Just want to get that out there. I had to look those names up on Wookiepedia.

Yes, I actually did look them up, but that was for this post – alright?
---

Where was I?

Okay – the idea of having a few plane models in the house has always been something that appealed to me. I was a military brat, and have always been hooked on military hardware. (I have back issues of Soviet Military Power and World Air Power Journal to prove it.)

Two problems with this:

First – I am not a pilot and have no connection to one. Were I to realize the dream of having a fully articulated F-14 model sitting on a shelf in my study – it would only provoke the question "were you a pilot?" – and I'd have to say no, I just like toy planes.

Second – all the toy planes out there just plain suck.

Admittedly, my standards are pretty high. Any plane I'd deem worthy would meet the following criteria:

• It should accurately represent the real thing. The intakes and engines should be deep, the markings should appear genuine. Working running lights and dashboard would be a nice plus
• It should have working bits. Gear should deploy, swing wings should swing, canopies should open. If nothing moves, it's just a statue. Statues aren't fun.
• It should be durable. I don't mean just plastic or metal. I mean plastic and metal that take into account that some might pick this up and zoom around the house with it (strictly for educational purposes – some visitor might say "how does the pilot get in?" and I'd show them. You know.)

What?

• It should have heft. This is one that disqualifies all models and virtually every toy plane on the market.

What do I mean by this? Allow me to illustrate:

Here's a toy whale:

If you dropped it on your foot – you'd break the whale. No heft.

Here's a toy whale from Schleich:

This whale weighs almost a full pound. Drop this on your foot – you'll hurt your foot. (Schleich understands heft).

A good toy plane should feel like its carrying a belt of 30mm and a full tank of gas.

More toy manufacturers need to understand heft as a buying motivation.

*steps off soapbox*

So there we are: Can't justify having a model plane in the house; wouldn't buy most of what's out there anyway.

But then there's the boy's new toy – the aforementioned Eta-2:

Let's review:

Accurately represents the real thing?
There is no real thing, so it pretty much gets a pass. If you compare it to the visuals in the movie:

– I think you'd say it's holding up its end:

It even has stickers for the dashboard, wing insignias and smoke stains trailing from the cannons. Rock. On.

Working bits?
Hell yeah – the cockpit opens, the gear folds down, the wings pop open with a satisfying clatter. It even has missiles.

Durable?
Squat body, not a lot of pointy bits – and the nose is made out of rubberized plastic in case it hits the ground nose-first. Nice.

Heft? 
Yes! Feels like it's carrying a to-scale load of whatever they use in Star Wars for gas.

Home run.

I had to go out and buy a pilot for it (for the boy, I mean. He did ask for one). Soon as I find a good R2 figure, I might replace the replica that the ship came with…

What?!

Oh, don't you judge me.

Down goes Freddie

Via the NYT:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares plummeted again on Friday morning — and the broader stock market followed suit — as concern mounted that the government will be forced to take over the beleaguered mortgage finance companies, which some investors fear are at risk of default. 

[snip] 

Freddie Mac stock has lost nearly 70 of its value in the last week alone. Fannie Mae shares have fallen 55 percent during that period.

Hold onto your seats, folks. This one could hurt.

FISA: By way of counterpoint

Marty Lederman has an interesting post, riffing off some FISA analysis over at the Volokoh Conspiracy:

I'm no legal scholar, so I can't vouch for Orin's analysis - but if his assertions are true, there are some good things happening in title I of the new FISA bill:

• For the first time ever, surveillance of Americans abroad will require a court finding of probable cause to believe that the person is an agent of a foreign power
• There is to be more congressional oversight. 
• And, the new law requires the executive to adopt "minimization" procedures that comply with the traditional FISA minimization rules.
• The law clarifies that "targeting" of foreign persons cannot be a pretext for obtaining information about U.S. persons. 
• The FISA court can only approve the NSA's surveillance plan if it finds that the plan is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. 
• it appears the FISA Court is suppose to conduct a de novo, rather than deferential, review of whether the NSA is complying with the statutory standards.

I'd take issue with the minimization measures, unless there there is verification of these procedures by someone outside of the executive, and some kind of enforcement clause.

If the FISA Court is truly going to adopt a new standard of review when it reviews warrant requests (something I am inferring from the last item) that would be encouraging - but something that I'll believe when I see the number of rejections spike.

Title II is still a total loss, as far as I'm concerned. I don't see any reason why Congress should rush to immunize conduct that has not been disclosed.


They've abandoned the (hopelessly dated) geographical requirement of FISA - and I don't think anyone would have a problem with this. The example of a foreign-to-foreign phone call that gets routed through a phone switch in NYC is something that doesn't need to fall under FISA. Under the old FISA, it would - and that was a big mistake. They've now fixed that, but  the other areas now under FISA are more troubling:


Like email.


Change that foreign-to-foreign communication to email and things get ugly in a hurry.

A phone call exists in real time - you hang up, it's gone. When the NSA eavesdrops on it, there are three locations: Person A, Person B, and the location of the wiretap.

Under old FISA, you need a warrant if the target, or the wiretap is in the US. If there is no target (or all the targets are outside the US) and the intercept takes place outside of the US - you don't need a FISA warrant.

Lots of flaws there - but they are all related to tracking both ends of a conversation, and the intercept.

Email makes the geographical requirement of FISA much worse.

Email persists, and is stored on many different computers. In other words, the conversation has its own geography.

Now you're tracking Person A, Person B, the intercept, and the physical location of the message.

So, two guys are in Pakistan emailing each other - the email gets routed and stored on a server in Oregon. Old FISA requires that they get a warrant for a targeted intercept, since the intercept is happening in the US.

During a phone call, the goverment can have a reasonable idea of where the parties are when they make the call. Email frees the participants from having a stable "end" of the conversation. They could access their email from a café, from their buddy's computer, while they're on a trip to Japan - whatever. At the point when you are reading their email on that server in Oregon, there's no way to know where the author or recipient are located.

It's a mess - and the single best reason for FISA getting an overhaul.

The beef I have is how this will apply to drift net intelligence. For thirty years, the NSA has been able to monitor all domestic-to-foreign communications in aggregate. Their computers scan for hot button words like "I'm going to hijack a plane" and flag conversations that the NSA finds interesting.

Again, this has its own problems - but email makes it worse. If the NSA wants to run drift net monitoring of foreign-to-foreign email on our hypothetical server in Oregon - they have virtually no way to distinguish between what's foreign, and what's not.

Under new FISA (as near as I can tell) they can drift net everything on the server, without a warrant. They cannot target a US citizen without a FISA warrant - but they can listen to everything in aggregate and retain copies. Assuming there is no outside body holding their feet to the fire on minimization, what's to say that some of those keywords can't be things like "Feingold" "Kennedy" and "Dodd"?

Not a hell of a lot.

Back to pre-surge levels

This, from Nukes and Spooks (emphasis mine):

...the last of the five surge brigades has left, the U.S. military announced today. Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, left their base just southeast of Baghdad. They are scheduled to land back to Fort Stewart, Ga., later this month. So that means roughly 140,000 troops are left in Iraq, or 8,000 more than when the surge plan began in February 2007.

Surge, drawdown, pause - rotate out, redeploy and here we are - more heavily committed than last year.

I wish someone could explain this crap to me.

Has anyone seen the fourth amendment...?

I seem to have lost it somewhere....

U.S. defends laptop searches at the border

By Alexandra Marks | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor  \ 

For the past 18 months, immigration officials at border entries have been searching and seizing some citizens’ laptops, cellphones, and BlackBerry devices when they return from international trips.

In some cases, the officers go through the files while the traveler is standing there. In others, they take the device for several hours and download the hard drive’s content. After that, it’s unclear what happens to the data.

[snip]

In recent court challenges, lower courts have ruled that laptop searches at the border are reasonable, just like searches of a person’s baggage or other physical property.

[snip]

Advocates of the current practice say that the contents of a laptop are like the contents of a suitcase, and as such, customs officials have every right to go through them. They also argue that requiring probable cause for laptop searches would create huge delays at the border and give criminals and terrorists an easy way to bring dangerous things into the country.

[snip]

In an e-mail, DHS says its officers “have the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public.”

(H/t E)

Phill Gramm: a glass half-full kinda guy

(H/t to Sadly, No!)

Mortgage crisis got you down? Feeling blue about your 401k taking it in the chops? Phill Gramm's got some words for you:

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,”

You heard him.

Here's Bloomberg talking about some other factors besides 1% growth:

One in every 501 U.S. households either lost the home to foreclosure, received a default notice or was warned of a pending auction, RealtyTrac, an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Bank seizures rose 171 percent.

``The foreclosure problem is getting worse and will stay with us well into the next decade,'' Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ``The job market is eroding and homeowners have less equity. Lenders are much less willing to work with you if you've got negative equity, and you're more likely to give up your house if you're deeply underwater.''

In Nevada, one out of every 122 households is "in some stage of foreclosure, more than four times the national average."

It's probably all in their heads, though.

You'd hate to think what kind of scenario makes Gramm notice the empty half of the glass.

Ashamed of the cost of war

(via E&P)

I imagine most people have heard about government regulations barring coverage of American war dead. This is not new, and something that was done even in the Clinton administration.

Restricting media access sounds pretty bad - but I can see the protection of an individual right under that policy. If I had a family member returning on one of those planes - I might not want them to be greeted by journalists snapping pictures and writing stories using their name.

Yes, the government has its own agenda in squelching this kind of coverage - but at least while the bodies are in their care, I think they can be permitted to deny public access. The information does get out, just without visuals.

What genuinely bothers me is that the government apparently assumes that they can muzzle the press even when the dead are in the custody of their families - during the funeral

Citing WaPo's Dana Milbank, E&P explains:

The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial -- a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones' sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine's burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.

If you think that's unreasonable, you're not alone. The public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery took issue with this approach:

When Gina Gray took over as the public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery about three months ago, she discovered that cemetery officials were attempting to impose new limits on media coverage of funerals of the Iraq war dead -- even after the fallen warriors' families granted permission for the coverage. She said that the new restrictions were wrong and that Army regulations didn't call for such limitations.

Six weeks after The Washington Post reported her efforts to restore media coverage of funerals, Gray was demoted. Twelve days ago, the Army fired her.

Read the full story on WaPo