Monday, 4 January 2010

U.S. Intensifies Screening for Travelers From 14 Nations

Citizens of 14 nations including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through these nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full-range of intensified security that had been imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, official said.

For American travelers, the change represents an easing of the response to the attempting bombing of the Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. But it further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking immediate protests from civil rights groups Sunday.

Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, which are considered “state sponsors of terrorism” as well as citizens from “countries of interest” that consist of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen, will also face the special scrutiny, officials said.

For people holding passports from these nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of these countries, they will be required to undergo a full-body pat down and have special attention to their carry on bags before they can board a plane to the United States.

In certain countries that have more advanced equipment, they also will be required to pass through so-called whole body scanners that can look underneath clothing for hidden explosives or weapons, or checked with a device that can find tiny traces of explosives.

All other passengers coming to the United States may face similar measures, but it will be on a more random basis, or if there is some reason to believe that a particular passenger might present a threat, officials said.

The changes should speed up boarding of international flights bound for the United States, while still increasing security beyond the standard x-ray of carry on bags and a metal detector check of all passengers.

The changes will mean any citizen of Pakistani or Saudi Arabia, for the first time, will automatically be patted down before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Great Britain for decades—and there are thousands of them—they would now be subject to these extra security checks.

Nawar Shora, legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the rule wrongly implies that all citizens of certain nations are suspect.

“I understand there needs to be additional security in light of what was attempted on Christmas Day,” Mr. Shora said, adding that he intended to file a formal protest Monday. “But this is extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people labeled as related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”

In the United States, requirement for so-called “second screening” has already been in effect for a dozen countries, a fact that is not widely known, including by civil rights activists like Mr. Shora.

But it often does not have much of an impact, as most passengers traveling domestically in the United States use driver’s licenses -- not passports -- when approaching checkpoints, so officials do not know what their nationality is, meaning they would likely pass without getting extra attention.

Also, with the new rule, for the first time citizens of Nigeria and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are being added to this “country of interest” list that will be subject to automatic additional screening for flights to the United States.

Nigerian-born American Charles Oy, 28, of Chicago, said he detected heightened security this weekend -- not in Nigeria, but upon his arrival Sunday at O’Hare Airport. He was one of a few passengers taken aside for an individual interview, where his bags and passport were examined.

Even though suspected terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was Nigerian, the added scrutiny did not leave him discouraged. “I feel it is very isolated, and is something not characteristic of Nigeria,” he said. “I had no particular feelings of unpleasantness. I understand it is part of the world we live in. I factor all that into my traveling. If it happens, I roll with it.”

One Homeland Security official said the Obama administration did not consider this move a step in the direction of racial profiling, which the Transportation Security Administration has said it has long attempted to avoid.

“Out of abundance of caution and based on the latest intelligence in this evolving threat environment, additional screening measures are necessary to keep transportation safe,” the official said, asking that she not be identified by name, as she was not authorized to address the question on the record.

@'NY Times'

Hmmm, THIS article from 'The New Yorker' back in October 2001 is perhaps worth a re-read!.

Treating everyone as suspect is absurd

Not a Leeds fan but...

...I love seeing ManU getting beaten!

Can anyone tell me what Ferguson whinged about after the game?
Been told that he complained that not enough extra time was given LOL!

POST # 3,501

Massive Attack - Paradise Circus (NSFW)

Massive Attack recently released their new video for “Paradise Circus” (ft. Hope Sandoval) off Heligoland. In what runs more like a documentary than a music video, the Toby Dye directed piece features former porn star, Georgina Spelvin, and her candid look on filming the infamous adult film, 'The Devil in Miss Jones'. Original shots of the ‘73 hit are interlaced with Spelvin’s honest take on her physical and emotional state during the production of the film nearly forty years ago. An interesting and entertaining concept, but definitely (NSFW)

A look back... (US edition)

(Click to enlarge)

A World of Megabeats and Megabytes

My 21st century started in 1998, when I got a new toy. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300, a flimsy plastic gadget the size of a cigarette pack. PMP stood for Portable Music Player. It had a headphone jack, and it played a recently invented digital file format: MPEG-1 Audio Layer Three, or MP3.

The Rio’s 32 megabytes of storage held a dozen songs at passable fidelity. Its sound was clearly inferior to a portable CD player; its capacity was comparable to a cassette or two. But the beauty of it was that it didn’t need any CD or cassette inserted, just digital files — copies of songs — loaded from a computer, to be changed at whim. They might come from albums people owned or borrowed; they might come, even back then, from strangers online. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to have the PMP300 taken off the market and failed — the prelude to a decade of lawsuits trying to corral online music.

It was already too late. For those who were willing to be geeky — learning new software, slowly downloading via dial-up — music had forever escaped its plastic containers to travel the Web. The old distribution system was on its way to becoming irrelevant. “You really think you’re in control? Well, I think you’re crazy,” Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley sang in 2006.

Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine, presaging what would happen to other art forms as Internet connections spread and sped up. For the old recording business everything went wrong. Sales of CDs have dropped by nearly half since 2000, while digital sales of individual songs haven’t come close to compensating. Movies and television (and journalism too) are now scrambling not to become the next victims of an omnivorous but tight-fisted Internet.

By now, in 2010, we’re all geeks, conversant with file formats and software players. Our cellphone/camera/music player/Web browser gadgets fit in a pocket, with their little LCD screens beckoning. Their tiny memory chips hold collections of music equivalent to backpacks full of CDs. The 2000s were the broadband decade, the disintermediation decade, the file-sharing decade, the digital recording (and image) decade, the iPod decade, the long-tail decade, the blog decade, the user-generated decade, the on-demand decade, the all-access decade. Inaugurating the new millennium, the Internet swallowed culture whole and delivered it back — cheaper, faster and smaller — to everyone who can get online...

Continue reading

@'NY Times'

Otis Ferry: What I think of anti-hunting ‘idiots’

Otis Ferry with his hounds near Shrewsbury He is the son of rock star Bryan Ferry and works as an amateur whipper-in for the Middleton hunt in Yorkshire.

Eddie & The Hot Rods

Get Out Of Denver

Do Anything You Wanna Do

The sound of speed indeed!

'Remember Naught' by Devilstower

I was nice about it. I didn't make any demands on 2000. I didn't fuss that we were nowhere near launching that manned mission to Jupiter's moons, that we hadn't broken regolith on the lunar base, or that Pan Am's service to the orbital hotel was very far behind schedule. I did not even demand that most basic right of every American -- my own flying car.

Now that it's 2010, I don't think I can be quite so generous. After all, I went into the decade a relatively young man with parents, grandparents, a series of novels on the shelves, and even a television show about to appear on (not then quite so ubiquitous) basic cable. I came out the other side with a cubicle job, an AARP card, and a lot of "out of print" citations on Amazon. Not exactly a tragedy, but it does leave me feeling that I'm entitled to a least a Nexus 3 to help out around the house. So be warned, 21st century teen decade, I have high expectations for you.

Now that the decade we still don't know how to name is in rear view (even if the "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Seem" label is still very visible), there's been something of a movement to forget the last ten years. There are web sites, pundits, and television shows pushing the idea that we should just put the decade of zeros out of our minds, write it off as a lost period, and move on.

Of course, many people remember nothing about the naughts but moments of unmatched horror. To understand why, here's a simple experiment (animal lovers turn away now) involving rats and a tank of water. Rats can swim, but that doesn't mean they like it and a rat in the water is generally a rat in panic. Scientists tossed rats into a small tank of water in which a block of clear plastic had been suspended. Everywhere else in the tank it was so deep that the rat had to keep on paddling, but if the rat reached the plastic block it could climb up, rest, and shiver in relief. The scientists let the rats catch their breath, took them out... then tossed them back in again. It may seem cruel, but there's a point to it. On repeat visits into the tub, rats remembered where the plastic platform was and scrambled over to it much more quickly. But here's the kicker: rats given a compound that blocked the action of adrenalin on their first visit had a much harder time locating the platform on their return trips. In other words, they remembered better when they were terrified.

The same rules apply to us. If you think you remember the worst days more clearly, it's because you do. There's a good reason for this. For a primate making it's living back in the savanna, every moment of every day wasn't worth recording in the big book of memories. But the time you went down to the water hole and a leopard nearly jumped you? That one gets a page all it's own -- one with flashy stickers and a bright red border.

As tempting as it is to forget the bad times, the reason there's a whole friggin' biological system built around the idea of burning these events irrevocably into your cerebellum in 18pt type is so you don't do it again.

Here's the thing about the naughts: there was nothing magic about the numbers. It wasn't because of a double-zero in the middle of the dates that we launched an invasion that's cost the lives of thousands of Americans, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a trillion dollars plus out of the pocketbooks of taxpayers. We launched into that still unresolved idiocy because of bad policy based on the conservative philosophy of smash things first, think never. We went there because of a extreme version of American exceptionalism, one that views America as above the the rules of law and exempt from questions of morality. A view that says not only if the president does it, it's not a crime, but that if America does it, it can't be wrong.

It wasn't the decade that caused the economy to come down in tatters. It was a conservative approach to the marketplace that views government as the enemy, greed as the only acceptable motivation, and the only solution for disasters brought on by a lack of regulation as still less regulation.

It wasn't the calendar that brought down the banks, or American manufacturing, or American's influence around the world. It wasn't the date that did in our reputation or erased the budget surplus.

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past
, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Because they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.

Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.

The point of remembering bad events is to stop them from repeating. So remember, and remind others if they start to forget. Because really, this is one trip to the water hole we can't afford to repeat.

@'Daly Kos'