JEFF JARVIS says that Soledad O’Brien rules the newsbabe roost. I won’t argue, since Jeff has famously given this subject a lot of thought.

I went to law school with one of her sisters; she used to come visit sometimes. She was 16 and cute. But all the O’Brien women are stunners, as well as being really smart and nice. Their brothers (it’s a big family) are smart and good-looking too, though I confess I never paid as much attention to them. Hybrid vigor, Maria (the sister) used to say.

SONIA ARRISON is taking on Rep. Howard Berman’s (D-Calif.) hack-your-computer bill today. I love the by-now-standard link to OpenSecrets.org, disclosing how much money Berman is being paid to shill for Big Entertainment. Her piece contains a lot of other useful links as well.

It occurs to me that the Web makes it much, much easier to tell stories of intertwined political/financial sleaze by providing important background information via links. Traditional journalism finds it much harder to do this. Perhaps this is yet another reason why Big Media, and the politicians it employs, hate the Web and want to bring it under control.

DAHLIA LITHWICK argues in favor of the TIPS program. But the example she uses of a successful “snitch” strategy is the mandatory-reporting requirement for suspected child abuse. Lithwick says this has been a success, and that it has produced few false accusations. This surprises me: my wife, a forensic psychologist who deals with violent juveniles, holds a very different opinion.

Reader James Daniels shares these doubts, and writes:

It strikes me that comparing the repeated observation of children’s behavior and injuries by trained teachers and doctors isn’t similar at all to the untrained opinion developed by the plumber fixing your sink. Even worse, the mandatory reporting acts generate 3 million tips per year, of which about 2 million turn out to be false (according to [this report]). This is a 66% false positive rate by trained professionals. Given that terrorism has a much lower rate of occurance in the population than child abuse, can you imagine how quickly the FBI would begin to ignore the millions of tips generated by TIPS? Even with 3000 terrorists at large, 3 million annual calls would give a false positive rate of 99.9%. Further, if the FBI were to actually follow up on these helpful clues (on the order of thousands per day), the several million disgruntled voters smeared by the program would shut it down before the next election.

Given the low base rate of terrorism, any unselective test is going to generate disproportionate quantities of false positives. Worse, the real terrorists might start using TIPS against us, by filling it with chaff. Alternatively, they might hide their wares behind a false wall when the cable guy comes over. Basically, even if the problem were a lack of information at the top (rather than gross analytical incompetence), TIPS would prove to be a wasted effort.

I think this is right. As cases like the Al Qaeda webhacking incident illustrate, the system can’t deal with the information it gets now. Who’s going to analyze those tips, nearly all of which will be useless, to extract the good ones?

A MOTTO FOR THE BLOGOSPHERE: “What doesn’t crash my server, makes me stronger.”

SUSANNA CORNETT has a long, cautionary post about privacy and supermarket customer cards.

Using supermarket customer cards to look for terrorists strikes me as futile, but not terribly intrusive — but, of course, no matter what people say they’ll soon be using that information for lots of other purposes, most of them less benign.

Of course, anyone with any sense fills out those cards with names like Henry Wadsworth Blogfellow and reports that he’s a 64-year-old Inuit woman who makes over $250,000 per year, thus protecting his/her privacy while corrupting the database in a fashion that — if enough people do it — will render the whole customer-card enterprise useless. (A few people will object that this is somehow immoral, to which I reply: No, it’s not.)

On a slightly different note, I’d like to see an FTC investigation of these customer-card programs for fraud. I do the grocery shopping for the InstaPundit household, and I’ve noticed that every time a store introduces these, they just mark things up, then “discount” some of them back down to the price they were before the discount card. Kroger, for example, had vermicelli for 69 cents a box forever. Then, the week they introduced the card, it was marked up to $1.39 a box, but “discounted” to $0.69 as a “Kroger Plus Card Savings!” special. I reamed the manager about it, but it was just to make me feel better; I know it didn’t do any good. Perhaps some enterprising plaintiffs’ lawyer will file a RICO action or something.

SLEAZE: A former aide to the President of the U.N. General Assembly has been arrested for trying to murder a journalist.

I’M 31.25% owned by my weblog, according to the latest quiz craze. That seems about right to me.

EVERYONE KILLED in the University bomb attack was a non-Israeli, but thousands of Palestinians still celebrated. This combination of bloodthirstiness and ineptitude is characteristic.

OVER A HALF MILLION UNIQUE VISITORS to the main page in July, according to Extreme Tracker. I’m glad everyone’s here. But where are you coming from?

BIG-MEDIA REPORTING ON THE ECONOMY: Christopher Pellerito analyzes recent coverage and says the low quality of economic and business reporting is partly to blame for the run-up (and run-down) in stock prices.

THIS SCOTTISH ALQAEDA SUPPORTER (who “describes himself as a ‘political green’ with Hindu religious beliefs”) says he expects “an aggressive response” when he hands out pro-bin-Laden leaflets to American tourists. Was it David Carr who wrote that all the idiocies of the world are converging into a single undifferentiated mass?

IT’S GOOD TO SEE AN AMERICAN ICON get the recognition he deserves.

READER CHUCK HERRICK accuses me of “conditional patriotism” in light of my various posts criticizing homeland security. He says if I were a real patriot, I’d be happy to surrender my civil liberties in the name of war, and that I shouldn’t set preconditions of governmental competence before I am willing to do so:

I was there during Vietnam. I watched when the war came to a close in the ’70’s and all the long-hairs promptly cut their hair, quit demonstrating, and went out and got corporate jobs and started collecting material possessions. When the draft ended, it was like a light switch was thrown. What I’m stating is that today’s version of that convenient lack of patriotism is alive and well in today’s Libertarianism. And, you’re not even being asked to carry a weapon and go into battle. All you’re being asked to do is to give up a few, “cherished” liberties in order to beat our enemies. Frankly, it’s rather pathetic.

You signed on for the former? No, you did not. I’ve made my case that in WWII, the ineptness in the government and in the military was just as egregious. You’ve a capacity for research. Use it to do some historical research on just how inept the government could be during WWII. My bet is that what you’ll find will stagger you.

I’m not that easily staggered. But Herrick misunderstands. I’m not talking about competence (everyone makes mistakes), but good faith. By refusing to deal seriously with the problems of homeland security, and by substituting bureaucratic wish lists and appearance-oriented political solutions for real action, the powers-that-be have made clear that they’re not serious about the war, at least on the home front. Ashcroft won’t fire the people who screwed up before 9/11 — when even FBI agents were speculating that Osama bin Laden had a mole in FBI headquarters because the incompetence seemed so spectacular — and yet I’m supposed to pretend that searching old ladies at airports and confiscating tweezers proves they’re serious? You want me to sacrifice civil liberties for a war, you’ve got to show me a war. Then we’ll talk.

The Vietnam analogy, it seems to me, cuts the other way. That was another war that was waged with more of an eye toward the wellbeing of the bureaucrats waging it than toward actually winning. (Herrick, whose email indicates that he works for the federal government, may take that the wrong way, but there you are). The Drug War is another example. Both of those failed, miserably. Homeland Security is looking more like those conflicts than like, say, World War Two. That’s my beef.

Herrick apparently confuses me with those protesters who felt that it was immoral to wage war in Vietnam. My own view is that it was immoral to wage war halfheartedly.

Reader Kenneth Summers says this:

What bothers me far more is restrictions on liberties in the absence of war, precisely because there is no distinct “end to hostilities”. This is why, in the “WOT”, I think we need to be extremely careful about what we allow. Ditto for the War on Crime. Big fat Double Ditto for the War on Drugs. Our liberties will be safer if we actively take out Iraq and Soddy Arabia [spelling intentional – more so after I looked up the derivation] in a hot war than if we pussyfoot around and keep accepting incremental restrictions.

An example is the FDR presidency – the programs, rights infringements, and restrictions which remained after his presidency (works programs, gun restrictions, ridiculous tax policies) were primarily those implemented for fighting the depression and Prohibition crime. Those that were lifted (censorship, military tribunals, travel restrictions, rationing – I even include the draft here because it would have ended, as it did after WWI, were it not for the cold war) were those for fighting the war. Unlike a war, there is no “return to normalcy” for crime and economic downturns.

I think that — as the post that somehow set off Mr. Herrick noted — restrictions on civil liberties so far haven’t been very onerous. But I also think that Homeland Security has been a joke, from the airline tweezer-ban right on down the line. I think that it’s allowed to be a joke because people in the government don’t think it’s very important. And if they don’t think it’s very important, why should I?

UPDATE: Reader Chris Mosely emails:

Unfortunately, it’s worse than you thought. The *very day* the feds announced the arrest of the skating kingpin, a man living in NJ, who was known to have sold fake ID to at least one Sept 11 hijacker, eluded police and FBI by fleeing to Egypt:

link

In other words, the long arm of the law can reach into Italy to find a guy who bribed skating judges, but can’t arrest someone in New Jersey who aided the Sept 11 attackers.

BTW, if you read the AP article it also says that this guy wired money to Saudi Arabia. Surprise!

I’ve been giving the feds the benefit of the doubt on “homeland security” but this tears it for me.

Well, nobody’s perfect, and I’m prepared to forgive (almost) any number of honest mistakes. I’m less forgiving when it appears that people aren’t taking the issue seriously.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that it was the British, not any part of the Homeland Security apparatus, that found this al Qaeda training camp in Alabama. Another reader sends this quotation from Petronius Arbiter: “We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing and a wonderful method it can be for creating an illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.” I’ve seen this quote before, and I don’t think it’s really Petronius. But it’s apt, nonetheless.

ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: Lynxx Pherrett says I’m wrong about the Alabama Al Qaeda training camp. Uh, okay. But I wasn’t “disingenuous” — I was writing what I thought to be true.

FROM THE FRONT LINES: Here’s an email I got from law-school classmate Yehudah Mirsky:

Please forgive these random thoughts. Today’s bombing at Hebrew U., just over an hour ago, really hits home. The building it happened in is named “Frank Sinatra” which just makes it more surreal. Hamas, doing it their way. When I heard yesterday’s bomb I was standing in a used bookstore about half a mile away.

That explosion was up the block from the Rav Kook archive where I have done a good bit of my work, but, hey, it seemed like not much of anything with only a few injured, and this morning’s papers called it a “miracle,” which of course is a pretty odd reading of divine providence, but there are no atheists in foxholes, and fewer postmodernists.

When I walk around Hebrew U I have always been glad to see Palestinian students there because deep down I do believe that a university is a different kind of place, or can be when it wants to. I’d assume Hamas doesn’t care that they think that any Palestinians they kill should be happy to be collateral martyrs. In a way, all the victims are collateral martyrs offered up on the altar of the mad cult of violence gripping the Muslim Arab world.

As it turns out I was reading Nietzsche today, and I wonder how much of this he is responsible for too, these crazy notions of self-actualization through violence that he spat into the culture and take on a life of their own, all over. I’m lucky, I have an American passport and in theory could head for the airport anytime I want. Where is everybody else supposed to go? And one more thing that makes me tired and angry, that like a nice Jewish boy I go on praying for peace not only for the Jews but for the Arabs too, while they keep praying to my God to kill me. Yours, without answers, but still praying for peace like a river Yehudah

UPDATE: Yes, that’s the Yehudah Mirsky who used to work for the State Department and who sometimes writes for The New Republic. Reader Yonaton Aronoff weighs in to defend Nietzsche:

Although I totally sympathize with Yehuda, as a fan of Nietzsche, I must interject. Nietzsche would be horrified at radical Islam’s construction of a cultural identity out of what is essentially a “sour grapes” reaction to the West: realizing itself incapable of attaining Western wealth and power (but wanting it fiercely), radical Islam professes hatred of everything that is Western – such as wealth and power – in order to avoid hating ITSELF for not having what it wants. At the same time, its secret desire to attain wealth and power is manifested as the vigor with which it seeks to destroy that which it cannot have. While Nietzsche DID at times profess “self-actualization through violence,” he was also a bitter opponent of the use of religious power as a repressive force. His assault on the internally-inconsistent “values” of bourgeois Christianity (“Geneology of

Morals,” “Beyond Good and Evil”) is actually quite applicable to the way in which radical Muslims have hijacked Muslim cultural identity.

Perhaps we need more Arabic translations of Nietzsche.

LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES: Let’s try to put a positive spin on this one: It shows that the War on Terrorism hasn’t prevented the feds from pursuing other malefactors.

NOW THAT THE CORNER has gone crazy over gay sex, I suppose the next step will be ads like these. Well, it’s better than those damn subscribe-or-we-kill-Jonah’s-dog popups, anyway.

N.Z. BEAR has some interesting information on Saudi web filtering. The Sauds, who currently control much of the Arabian peninsula, appear to be trying to keep the inhabitants from finding out uncongenial facts about the rest of the world, or the Saud family.

UPDATE: Link was to the wrong item before; it’s fixed now.

TOO FUNNY — from Best of the Web today:

“I’m not in the habit of hanging out with white trash.”–John

R. Bradley, news editor, Arab News, LittleGreenFootballs.com, July 29

“Monster Truck Show Proves a Big Draw”–headline, Arab

News, July 30

TERRY EASTLAND quotes an article by Cass Sunstein and Jack Goldsmith of the University of Chicago Law School in support of the argument that we’re worrying too much, not too little, about civil liberties in this war. Eastland give the URL, but not a link. Here is the link, if you want to go straight there.

It’s certainly true, as Eastland, Sunstein, and Goldsmith all argue, that the Bush Administration has been far more sensitive to civil liberties concerns than other wartime presidencies. It’s also true, though, that Americans have little confidence in Homeland Security. People might be willing to endure restrictions on liberty more if they weren’t faced, on a daily basis, with evidence that the Homeland Security team is playing, at best, double-A ball.

WOW. Between them, the two law review articles on originalism and conservatism that I put up on the server have been downloaded nearly 600 times. That’s not a lot for a weblog entry, but it’s an awful lot for decade-old articles on constitutional law. I’m moving to put a lot more stuff up — on a UT server, not mine, to save bandwidth — and I’ll provide links when it’s available.

SKBUBBA weighs in with another tale of Homeland Security ineptitude.

IT SEEMS AWFULLY HYPOCRITICAL for all those Senators to be talking about “getting tough” on corruption in the financial markets, when Sen. Robert Torricelli is getting off with an admonishment at their hands.

I think some mischievous soul should add a rider to financial reform legislation requiring candidates for office to sign a statement swearing that no illegal contributions were accepted, on pain of criminal sanction if that turns out to be wrong.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: They may have missed terrorists, and their list of suspected terrorists may have leaked out and been posted on the Internet, but the FBI in my area is hell on asian-prostitution rings. Of course, everyone around here has known what these were all about for years, as they advertise quite blatantly on billboards, in newspapers, etc.; in fact, I know a lot of legitimate massage therapists who were happy that the “Asian Massage” fronts were so common and well-known, because it helped keep the distinction between that kind of stuff and what they do clear in everyone’s mind.

But is this the best use of resources when we’re supposed to be at war?

UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford writes:

Asian massage parlors are unlikely to harbor anthrax. You probably won’t find them trying to poison the water supply, or build dirty bombs, or fly airplanes into buildings.

And, since they advertise on billboards, they’re easy and quick (and safe!) sources of press releases.

I’ve just about given up. I can’t imagine what the government thinks it’s doing — it’s like we’re watching people from the Bizarro Universe. Everything they do seems to be the opposite of what’s needed, especially the focus on “Homeland Security” instead of taking on the terrorists and their supporters.

Yep. I think this sentiment is hitting critical mass, too.

UPDATE: A couple of readers have emailed to note that asian-prostitution setups are often little more than slavery, with illegally imported women being kept in isolation. That would certainly put a different complexion on it, but you’d think if that were the case here the press release would mention it.

WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY: My TechCentralStation column is up.

I FINISHED READING Joyce Malcolm’s book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience last night. (That’s the Amazon link; here is the Harvard University Press page, though it has less information). Very interesting book; I may make it the subject of next week’s Fox column. Very short summary:

Crime in England declined for 500 years, from the 15th century to the early 20th, even as gun ownership became more common. Beginning in the 20th Century, England began a program of strict gun controls (primarily intended to disarm labor activists and suspected bolsheviks). By mid-century, this was in place, and coupled with very strict rules limiting self-defense that, in practice and public perception, meant that criminals got an easier shake than honest people who defended themselves. Crime rates — including gun crime rates — then started to rise, and have been rising ever since despite ever-stricter gun controls.

No surprise there, to those familiar with the work of criminologists like John Lott and Gary Kleck. But it’s interesting to see that Britain is, ever so slowly, beginning to recognize the issue, and the English experience belies the standard low-crime/low gun availability stereotype. In fact, when crime in England was at its lowest, guns were as readily available as in the United States . And it’s certainly a blow to stereotypes of lefty bias that Harvard University Press has published this book, as well as its predecessor, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994). Or at least proof that such bias doesn’t always stand in the way of good work.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a review of Malcolm’s book by Clayton Cramer that appeared in Books and Culture. The review is more critical than one might expect, given Cramer’s strong pro-gun-rights position, but serves as proof that Cramer doesn’t let politics drive his scholarly positions. (Cramer was the first, and for a long time the loudest, to point out Michael Bellesiles’ misconduct). While I agree with Cramer that this book isn’t the tour de force that Malcolm’s previous work was, I think that most of his criticisms (for example, that she relies on secondary sources rather than recently declassified documents that say the same thing) are of little interest to the general reader.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dipnut from IsntaPundit emails this link and suggests that I mention it as evidence of why Americans should care about this stuff. He’s right.