on YouTube hits.
That, ladies and gents, is today’s front page headline the Washington Times.
I’m not sure who that makes more pathetic – McCain or the Washington Times.
Month: August 2008 Page 8 of 9
The Olympics are already on my nerves, so we’re going to take a brief detour from the weekly makeover. What happened? Well, some silly cyclists wore some silly masks when they got off the plane in Beijing, which made everyone act silly (I’m trying to be nice here). The national coverage and local conversations that followed were not . . . encouraging. And while all us chickens are pecking at our own little circles, without ever looking up, I’m reminded:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Her2M_zZDEI[/youtube]
Yes, that’s Jarvis Cocker’s Running the World. Listen to it. Understand it. Remember it. Probably not kid safe, but they’ll learn it soon enough.
You might have noticed a company called Clear, when you last passed through an airport. They’re a private operation that will sell you a fast pass through the security lines, provided that you give them lots of personal information in advance so they can perform a background check on you (if that sounds like a cheap way for terrorists to sort out whether they’re on any lists, well . . . we’ll get to that another time). This, then, is a “security” company that someone at TSA is apparently thinks competent enough to delegates security decisions to, as well as collect and store lots of personal information.
You know the punch line already, don’t you?
Clear lost a laptop with the personal information of 33,000 members on it. None of it encrypted. Oh, but don’t worry, they found it! Where? In the same office from which it was reported lost.
So many of these “security” programs strike me as much like the bridge trolls we used to find in children’s stories. Bridge trolls are, of course, just extortionists. The put themselves between where you are and where you need to go, and demand a price to let you pass. Many people paid, because the bridge trolls were dangerous enough to do damage to you. But all of them ultimately turn out to be not that bright and are eventually shown for the dumb brutes that they are, usually by some enterprising kid who just doesn’t buy into the fear. Clear is just another bridge troll.
This has nothing to do with anything I regularly write about, but it’s just so cool that you’re reading it anyway:
Scientists have dramatically revised population estimates for gorillas after massive numbers of the animals were found in an area of central Africa the size of Switzerland.
More than 125,000 western lowland gorillas – one of four sub-species – are estimated to be living in two swampland areas in the north of the Republic of Congo, according to a census by the Wildlife Conservation Society published yesterday.
Scientists had previously estimated that the entire population of western lowland gorillas was between 50,000 and 100,000, but the discovery points towards a figure of about 200,000.
On a local cycling listserv, someone just asked – why haven’t we heard more about this?
A 13-year-old boy was hit by a car and killed yesterday evening while riding his bicycle in Prince William County, police said.
The boy was identified as Prabhdeep Ranahawa of the 13000 block of Thrift Lane in Dale City [Virginia].
The boy was crossing Hoadly Road near Olivewood Drive, less than half a mile from his home, about 6:45 p.m., when the crash occurred, according to Officer Erika M. Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the county police.
She said the boy was hit by a 2003 BMW driven by a 61-year-old Manassas woman.
He was pronounced dead at the scene, the spokeswoman said.
This happened last Wednesday, and yesterday was the first I’d heard about it. As best I can tell, there were only three brief notices about it (at WashingtonPost.com, WTOP.com, and InsideNova.com), all rewrites of the same few sentences. Why did I hear about Alice Swanson within hours, and Prabhdeep just now?  There are many reasons, I’m guessing. Some understandable, some outrageous. I don’t know why we don’t know more about what happened. I’m not sure if we ever will. But I didn’t want to let his death go without mention.
Times must be hard for the SCLC:
At the end of June, as the subprime mortgage crisis was driving the economy into a tailspin, Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to decry the devastating effect the meltdown was having on minority homeowners. But rather than support currently pending measures to better regulate the credit markets, the leader of one of the nation’s oldest civil rights groups instead attacked them. Steele was particularly upset about a Federal Reserve proposal that would crack down on subprime credit cards—high-interest cards marketed to people with bad credit.
Steele rose to the card issuers’ defense, invoking his group’s founder, Martin Luther King Jr., and claiming that any move to regulate the cards would deny minorities access to much-needed credit. [ . . .] The argument was an odd one coming from a civil rights group. Most consumer groups believe that the subprime industry is largely predatory, and rife with abuses that disproportionately affect minorities. But Steele’s op-ed makes a lot more sense when you consider a detail the Post at first left out: In August 2007, the SCLC formed a partnership with CompuCredit, a subprime credit card issuer and payday lending company.
[ . . . ]
While the civil rights group has been lauding its corporate partner, the federal government has taken a slightly different view of CompuCredit’s contributions to economic empowerment. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company for unfair and deceptive trade practices, as well as violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The FTC alleged that CompuCredit bilked consumers out of at least $217 million through a scheme in which consumers paid so much in fees that they rarely had any credit available on the company’s Visa cards. The CompuCredit cards are better known as “fee harvesting” cards—that is, credit cards sold to people in dire financial straits that have high interest rates, low credit balances, and lots and lots of fees for people who generally can’t afford them.
Nice job, Mr. Steele.
Vivian Paige has the details of this silly mess.
Disquieting Rasmussen numbers this morning–McCain’s crying racism worked. 53% of Americans, including the same % of whites and half of all Democrats, thing that Obama’s “dollar bill” remark was “racist.” Only 22% think the Paris Hilton ad was racist–most of those being black people, of course (only 18% of white people took this view).
This NYTimes is carrying an interesting essay about a new site called CriminalSearches.com (you’re welcome to cut and paste it to see it – I’m just not giving it the benefit of a link).  The author explains:
Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.
Go ahead, you can search me. You’ll find both an incomplete (I must admit that I have received more than two speeding tickets in my lifetime) and an incorrect result. As much as I do regret getting those two tickets, I’m not particularly embarrassed by them. But I am bothered by the incorrect component – one lists me as “guilty in absentia” (for a ticket I got in Front Royal, doing 44 in a 30, I believe). Now *this* bothers me greatly. I may be morally corrupt enough to drive 44 in a 30, but I certainly do understand and meet my obligations to answer any resulting traffic summons. And yet we’ve now got a publicly accessible resource which certainly makes it look as if I didn’t. The NYT essay notes this problem of accuracy (and context):
A quick check of the database confirms that it is indeed imperfect. Some records are incomplete, and there is often no way to distinguish between people with the same names if you don’t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).
To further test the site, I vetted some of my colleagues at The New York Times. One, who shall remain nameless, had a recent tangle with the law that the site labeled a “criminal offense,†while adding no other information. Curious, I called my colleague with the date and city of the now very public ignominy. The person was stunned to know that the infraction — a speeding ticket — was easily accessible and described as criminal.
“I went to traffic school so this wouldn’t appear on my record. I’m in shock. This blows me away,†my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. “I don’t necessarily want you all knowing that I’m a fast driver.â€
The site’s owners remain unfazed:
PeopleFinders’ response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.
So maybe the source of my particular problem is with the Virginia records themselves, and not CriminalSearches. But it’s CriminalSearches that made it matter, because *anyone* can now pop my (rather uncommon) name in and see what comes up, without any contact with me.  The implications – legal, political, social – are worth considering.  Some of these concerns *were* considered, fairly recently:
In the past, Congress carefully considered how the public should use criminal records. Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1997 required that employers who hire investigators to obtain criminal records from consumer reporting agencies advise prospective employees of the search in advance, and disregard some types of convictions that are older than seven years.
“I don’t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,†says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “Understanding Privacy.†“Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn’t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.â€
So, legally, some of the information you can find on individuals via CriminalSearches.com is off the table for certain uses. But with such easy access, observance of these restrictions is doubtful:
Jurors can and almost certainly will be tempted to look up criminal pasts of defendants in their cases. And employers can conduct searches themselves without hiring investigators. Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders says that employers cannot legally use the database in making hiring decisions — but there is nothing to stop them.
And speaking of hiring decisions, let’s remember that even the Department of Justice – which we should expect to be as scrupulous an observer of the law as ever there was – used information it wasn’t legally entitled to use:
A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.
The traditional walls that have kept information like political contributions, traffic offensive, and long-past criminal convictions from the casually curious have all but crumbled. Maybe we should talk about privacy while we still remember it.
There are, against all standards of decency, occasionally reasons that one has to attend events in the Times Square neighborhood of New York.  There also are, sadly, a dearth of decent hotels in the area.  The W there sucks, and I hope you wouldn’t even consider the Marriott. The best option, if you must be near, is the Bryant Park Hotel. And this might be your soundtrack:
Thievery Corporation’s Le Monde, in the lobby:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb8lPWvVMBk[/youtube]
Alizee’s Youpidou, on the dance floor:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeycewNFrtE[/youtube]
And a good late night cover of My Funny Valentine at last call:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fhp9r1B–U[/youtube]