Belgium

The Belgians, of all people, now want to indict Tommy Franks for war crimes. Den Beste castigates them sufficiently that I need not belabor the merits of the issue here. The protagonist of this farce is a Belgian lawyer named Jan Fermon. (Looks like a big doof, that’s what he looks like. And all that stuff written around the picture in French makes me like him even less.)

That steamed me. I got to thinking: “Yes, I know Belgium does not really merit anyone’s attention. But this time they are yanking the Big Dog’s chain pretty hard. They are pushing it.” Then, I concluded: “Enough from Belgium. My patience is exhausted. Level the place.”

But I decided that so major a step required a little further research. Is there anything about Belgium which should cause it to be stricken from the Axis of Evil B list, and hence de-slated for eventual armed conquest by Dubya? I know about their decent beer, that did not strike me as sufficient grounds to spare them. My wrath subsided somewhat upon contemplating the visage of Miss Belgium 2003, Julie Taton. (Who looks kinda like a prettier version of Jan from the old Brady Bunch TV show.) (That shows how old Lex is.) (In fact, this whole preposterous post shows how old Lex is.) (And, Jan resemblance or not, Miss Taton is certainly cuter than that yucky lawyer, Fermon.) For purposes of this analysis, I charitably assume Miss Taton to be a fairer representative of Belgium to the world community than Fermon, at least intellectually.

OK. In light of this new information, my initial policy proposal is withdrawn.

We won’t destroy Belgium.

But that doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. They better tread lightly.

Hear that? Watch it, you guys. Yeah, you guys over there in the corner, you Belgians. Keep it down!

The TSA Makes It Harder To Detect Terrorists

This article in Tuesday’s WSJ (requires subscription) discusses the trials and tribulations of innocent air travelers whose names, or even parts of whose names, resemble those of people on the government’s “No Fly List.” The unfortunate false-positives are greatly inconvenienced, and at a rate that far exceeds the number of bad guys caught. (The article delicately points out the obvious: the No Fly List has contributed to the capture of “very few” suspected terrorists.)

So what’s driving this aggressive flagging of harmless individuals (some of whom have been cleared repeatedly for earlier flights)? Part of the answer lies in airlines’ use of antiquated name-matching systems that were originally designed to ferret out multiple bookings, and to make it easy for ticket agents to look up passenger records without knowing the exact spellings of names. These systems intentionally cast a wide net. That’s helpful for common travel snafus but makes the systems ridiculously inefficient for finding the one terrorist among millions of legitimate travelers.

One name-matching technique that airlines have used, called Soundex, dates back more than 100 years, to when it was invented to analyze names from the 1890 census. In its simplest form, it takes a name, strips out vowels and assigns codes to somewhat-similar-sounding consonants, such as “c” and “z.”

The result can be bizarre. Hencke and Hamza, for example, have the same code, H520. If there’s a Hamza on the No Fly List, a traveler named Hencke could be pulled aside for a background check before being allowed to board.

Why not match names precisely? The article points out that it’s difficult to do, because spellings vary (William and Bill), transcription of foreign names is unreliable (Haj and Hag), titles may become confounded with names, and (surprise) some people use one of more aliases.

Another problem is that airlines are hesitant to spend money on anti-terror measures they think the government should pay for.

Moreover, the TSA’s institutional incentives encourage maximizing the number of passengers scrutinized: it’s unlikely that anyone will be fired for screening too zealously, but failure to detect a terrorist could lead to disaster (including career disaster for the officials on whose watch it occurred). A significant number of false positives may be a reasonable tradeoff for an increased probability of catching real terrorists. However, because there will always be vastly more non-terrorists than terrorists in our traveling population, and because the screening databases are likely to contain errors, any increase in the scrutiny given the traveling public is likely to increase the number of false positives by much more than it increments the number of terrorists apprehended. The result can be a level of noise so high that it overwhelms many signals. We can end up with both a high rate of false positives and a screening system that is suboptimal at detecting real risks.

The TSA bureaucracy, like other bureaucracies, will define its job in ways that tend to bring increased authority and funding. If you frame the TSA’s role as the screening of passengers, you end up with lots of screeners and lots of screening. Does that make terrorism less likely? It probably does some good, but it’s difficult to know because of the low base rate of terror attacks. Whatever the real level of risk, the TSA’s incentive is generally to throw money and employees at perceived problems, even if this is not the best response.

Finally, there is political correctness. Targeted screening of people who fit likely-terrorist profiles works well (Israel), and is generally a much more effective use of resources than is trying to screen every single passenger at a level of intrusiveness sufficient to determine whether he is a security risk. The problem with targeted screening is that it’s taboo here because some voters might be offended. So instead the government is going to try to expand its current flawed program. The false premise of the government’s implicit argument is that we can trade freedom for safety. The reality is that we are giving up freedom for nothing and are still not serious about security.

What are the prospects for intelligent reform of our passenger-screening system? Not good. Political and bureaucratic incentives are driving attempts to extend some of the system’s most abusive features. Here’s the kicker from the end of the article:

The TSA has been trying to get the message to airlines that they should focus on matches of full names, not just the last name, says James R. Owen, a TSA official in Juneau. Longer term, the agency is working on an advanced passenger pre-screening system known by the acronym of CAPPS II.

It will scour not only watch lists such as No Fly but also criminal records, credit-card transactions and identifiers such as address and date of birth to detect suspicious patterns. The TSA envisions it as “dramatically reducing” the number of people flagged. Privacy and civil-liberties advocates fear just the opposite — that the increased ways to attract suspicion will result in even more passengers being wrongly tagged.

So the TSA claims to want to deal with false positives caused by bad data and sloppy procedures, and says that it will do so. . . by expanding the bad-data set. This is absurd. Since inaccurate databases are a big part of the system’s problem, the main result of incorporating additional inaccurate databases into the system is likely to be an increased rate of false positives. It looks as if the civil libertarians are right and this data-mining scheme is a power grab pure and simple. The author of this article, by not seriously addressing these issues, seems to have been at best gullible, at worst complicit in the administration’s PR campaign for Orwellian measures that cannot deliver the level of security they promise.

(Instapundit has related comments and links.)

The View from Uranus

Edward Said phones in from an alternate universe to set us straight about the war in Iraq:

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons not found, the Stalingrads that didn’t occur, the artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him, his family, and his money leave in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn’t risk the same in Baghdad. On 6 April, a Russian convoy leaving Iraq was bombed; Condi Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April; Baghdad fell 9 April.

Nevertheless, Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly and Bush looks like a cowboy. On matters of the gravest importance, constitutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to. We are the ones who must have our democracy back.

That’s our Eddie! Such an agile mind.

I truly hope . . .

I truly hope that our Treasury Department is fully involved, hard at work on the lookout for counterfeit U.S. currency in Iraq. Seems as if there is an awful lot of cash just laying around that country, and what better way to make a full scale assault on the world’s most envied power, than to surreptitiously devalue their currency? I guess we should be thankful that those most menacing threats to our way of life are apparently not creative enough to successfully carry out such an attack. Think of this, instead of spending 100 billion to acquire nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional weapons, spending 50 million to set up a sophisticated counterfeiting operation, complete with foreign banking alliances, to hollow out the dollar. It is beautiful in its relative simplicity, and would have been far easier to do pre- September 11th.

Julie Burchill

The latest Julie Burchill has already gotten the usual overpraise from Stateside pro-war bloggers. It’s OK — up to a point. She seems to endorse the swipes at the US forces (civilian deaths, friendly fire incidents) rather than simply describe the British mindset about American military professionalism. Well, permit me to disagree. As the major power on the ground, the US was bound to commit more of both, and given the awesome potential firepower, were there really a lot? I consider our troops no less professional than the Brits. But the main problem with this article is that I don’t think Burchill sufficiently drove home the illogicality of supporting volunteer troops while trashing the cause they volunteered to fight for. This never convinced anyone not because it was an out-and-out lie (did that ever stop an ideologue?) but because it made no internal sense. If they were saying that the war was immoral, how can they support troops who volunteered to carry it out? Answer: They can’t. The antiwar movement supported the troops like I’m a Saudi kleptomaniac princess. BTW, don’t you think that in this picture she eerily resembles Christopher Hitchens?