Chicago Boyz

Some big news organizations are forbidding journalists from blogging on their own time. Here’s a quote from a relevant article (via Instapundit):

His boss, Courant editor Brian Toolan, explained the shuttering [of reporter Denis Horgan’s blog] to E&P Online thusly: “Denis Horgan’s entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to the Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he’ll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant.” [. . .]

Yeah, the editor doesn’t get it. But more than that, I don’t think he cares. His attitude, ironically, reminds me of hiring practices in the technology industry. It’s the attitude of second-rate managers who believe that you get people to be productive by putting them in a position where they have no alternative but to do what you want. From this point of view, employees are interchangeable and their value derives mainly from their association with their employer, and if the employer doesn’t lock them in with restrictive work and noncompete agreements they’ll escape and become competitors.

Perhaps this view was valid on the factory assembly-line, but it’s counterproductive now. Technology – blogging software is a good example – allows able people to increase their productivity, sometimes dramatically. Good managers know this and treat employees as valuable resources, individuals who have alternatives. Reporters who blog are probably on the ball for the most part. The way to get the most out of such people, who do innovative work for personal satisfaction on their own time, is not to tell them that they owe everything to the company and must henceforth stop doing things that aren’t in their job descriptions. That is the way of the incompetent pointy-haired Dilbert boss. It tells the best workers that the company feels threatened by their creativity. It is a statement of contempt for their enterprise and an invitation to look for a better job.

What the Hartford Courant editor should do is figure out a way to exploit his reporter’s blog for general benefit. It wouldn’t be hard. All they have to do is link the blog to the Courant’s home page and promote it a bit. They could publish a roster of employee blogs. They could link to outside blogs. They could encourage blogging reporters to explore new themes as a way of attracting readers – attracting them both to the blogs and to the otherwise unremarkable home page of a regional daily that they might otherwise never look at. Regular Courant readers would have something new and interesting to read. The blogging reporters would produce more product for the same pay. It would be fun. Maybe on margin some good reporters would continue to work at the Courant who might otherwise move on.

But it probably won’t happen, because managements at places like the Hartford Courant have too much invested in the current way of doing things. Like the pointy-haired bosses at badly run technology companies, they obstruct progress because progress means giving creative people the freedom to be creative. The managers, being second-rate, won’t do that, because it means giving up some control, and control is all they’ve got. In the long run they’ll lose their best employees, who will go to work for more foresighted managements or start their own competing shops with fresh business models. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, and you can’t keep the best employees indefinitely locked into work arrangements they don’t like. In a free and dynamic society, the best way to keep people is to align their incentives with those of their employers. Encouraging reporters to blog is a very inexpensive way to do that.

Juan Paxety is taking action against the lefty pest who is trying to drag Tommy Franks into court.

But lest we forget, there have been some admirable Belgians. . .

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!

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.)

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.