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Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 13:58:43 -0400
From: Dave Farber 
Subject: Walter Cronkite: The New Inquisition

  [The last sentence is right on. djf]

From: CMESSALL 

  Walter Cronkite: "...Unfortunately, security and liberty form a zero-sum
  equation. The inevitable trade-off: to increase security is to decrease
  liberty and vice versa.  In the past, such trade-offs have been temporary
  -- for the duration of the crisis of the moment.  But today, we cannot see
  an end to the War on Terrorism, and that forces us to decide how secure we
  have to be and how free we want to be."

Wow, have we already forgotten Ben Franklin's statement: "People who are
willing to trade security for freedom soon find out that they have
neither."?  In all fairness to Walter (who, I would have thought, might have
actually *heard* Ben say those magic words ;-)), the trade-off might be
correct at any given point in time, for the technology that applies at that
instant.  The secret of course is to change the rules (i.e., the technology)
so that we can have more security AND retain our liberty. - Chuck Messall

IP Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/



Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 06:31:25 -0700
From: "NewsScan" 
Subject: California spammin'

California's new anti-spam law may face the same fate as a similar law in
Utah earlier this year.  Kevin Johnson of the e-mail marketing company
Digital Impact warns: "Hard-core spam will still come through, but
legitimate companies will be more hesitant to send e-mail"; he also warns
that when companies try to determine whether e-mail recipients live in
California, spammers and advertisers may be forced to learn more about
consumers, thereby reducing privacy.  E-mail marketer Trevor Hughes suggests
that the only answer is national legislation to harmonize spam laws in more
than 30 states.  [*USA Today*, 24 Sep 2003; NewsScan Daily, 25 Sep 2003]
  http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-09-24-spam_x.htm



Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 01:51:39 -0400
From: Monty Solomon 
Subject: Jury convicts man in DMCA case (Paul Festa)

Paul Festa, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, 23 Sep 2003

A federal jury has convicted a Florida man of violating the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, in the first jury-trial conviction under the
controversial law, according to a U.S. attorney's office.  The Los Angeles
jury found 38-year-old Thomas Michael Whitehead guilty on Friday of selling
hardware that could access DirecTV satellite broadcasts without paying for
them, according to the U.S.  attorney's office in Los Angeles.  Whitehead,
who was also known by his computer name "JungleMike," was convicted on one
count of conspiracy, two counts of selling hardware that unlawfully
decrypted the broadcasts, and three counts of violating the DMCA.  With the
six felony convictions, Whitehead faces up to 30 years in federal prison and
fines of as much as $2.75 million. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 26,
2004.  ...
  http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5080807.html

--

Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 08:39:48 -0700
From: Kim Alexander 
Subject: Broward considers dumping $17 million in touch voting machines

Here's some good news out of Florida.  Broward County is lobbying for
approval of printers for touchscreens, and one of their election officials
expresses regret for purchasing them in the first place.  Here's an excerpt:

The touch-screen machinery accounted for part of the problems in the 2002
elections in Broward.

During the September primary, election workers found more than 1,000 votes
that had not been reported in initial tallies to the state because machines
had not been shut down properly.  And then in the November election,
officials botched the numbers by not including in the tallies ballots cast
by English-speaking early voters.

"Hindsight is 20/20, but I wish we had stayed with optical scan,"
Commissioner Kristin Jacobs said.

  Source: Broward considers dumping $17 million in touch voting machines,
  Scott Wyman, 24 Sep 2003, *South Florida Sun-Sentinel* 

Kim Alexander, President, California Voter Foundation
kimalex{at}calvoter.org, 916-441-2494, http://www.calvoter.org

--

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 09:57:44 -0400
From: "Brent M.P. Beleskey" 
Subject: Diebold voting machines in Volusia County FL

ELECTION THEFT 2000! A NEW BOMBSHELL!: A Diebold Voting Machines in Volusia
County, Florida, Tallied a Vote-Count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022:
When will this all-important story break out in the US mainstream press?
When will the Democrats confront the issue? What is at stake here is the
future of democracy.

Diebold Internal Support Memos

[The original article to which this post refers was originally published on
29 Nov 2000 in *USA Today* by Philip Meyer. When I did a search for the
article on the www.usatoday.com website I came up with this page which
clearly provides the details of the article and even offers a link to a free
preview of the article. However, when you click on the link, it gives you a
page void of the article. What happened to it? One can only speculate.
Nevertheless, I have obtained the original article.  BMPB]

  [Contact Brent Beleskey  for the article,  PGN]

A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia
County, Florida: On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections
official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count
of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022 -- which just happens also to have been
the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party
candidates who also ran.  (It was the largest number of such votes cast in
Volusia County's history.)

Pay close attention to the final entry, from "Tab" (Talbot) Iredale,
Vice President of Research & Development at Global/Diebold:

  ...The error could only occur in one of four ways:

  1.Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explanation for the problem
  but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have no ability
  to confirm the probability of this.

  2.Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the
  candidates['] results for the race are not all read at the same time and
  the corruption was limited to a single race.  There is a possib[ili]ty
  that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything
  more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.

  3.Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote.  Again this is
  unlikely due to the localization of the problem to a single race.

  4.Invalid memory card (i.e., one that should not have been uploaded).
  There is always the possib[i]lity that the 'second memory card' or 'second
  upload' came from an unauthorised source.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

--

Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 11:17:22 +0800
From: Roger Clarke 
Subject: Identity Denial really exists

[Admittedly this is a story from mainlaind China, and stories from there are
often mistranslated linguistically and culturally when they reach English-
language papers.  But it appeared in the quality Hong Kong daily.  It would
seem reasonable to assume that their staff can read the original, and not
make too many mistakes in the translation.]

Woman wins case against in-law for ID cancellation

A 98-year-old woman will be paid damages for psychological injury inflicted
by her daughter-in-law, a Beijing court has ruled.  The *Beijing Daily*
reports that the elderly woman discovered her relative cancelled her
identity registration card seven years ago.  The defendant claims she
cancelled the card to ensure her mother-in-law would not be cremated after
she died.  Cancelling the card made the woman non-existent in the eyes of
the law.

Source: *South China Morning Post*, dateline Beijing, 26 Sep 2003 
[They have a closed web-site, so I can't find the URL]

Roger Clarke  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/  +61 2 6288 1472
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA

--

Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 14:46:24 -0400
From: George Mannes 
Subject: Difficulties with Census Bureau income data among wealthiest

The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week
By George Mannes, Senior Writer, 3 Oct 2003
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/dumbestgm/10117038.html

  [George sent RISKS an excerpt, namely, the FIRST of five dumbest things.  
  I had difficulty trying to abridge it for RISKS, and decided to include
  it in its entirety.  See the URL for the other four.  PGN]

1. I Dream of the Gini Index

We at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab hate to go all anti-academic on
you, but here's a little advice: The next time you see a statistic in the
newspaper, don't believe it. It's wrong.  OK, OK. That's overstating our
case a little. It's not necessarily wrong.  But it's not right, either.

Exhibit A: The 2002 household income figures released last Friday by the
U.S. Census Bureau.

The takeaway from the report, as you may have read in *The Wall Street
Journal*'s Monday account, was that the poverty level rose, but income
inequality didn't, because rich folk's income took a beating, too.

But something further down in the write-up caught our eye. "Difficulties in
recording seven-figure incomes," reported the Journal, might have resulted
in underreported income among the wealthiest Americans.

In other words, the rich may be richer.

That's odd, we thought. People pay a lot of attention to these annual
income-disparity figures. How come no one's getting worked up about
inaccurate data from such a key segment of the surveyed population? This
can't be true.

We called up Edward Welniak, chief of the Census Bureau's income survey, to
check.

Indeed, there are difficulties with high-income data, Welniak told us.

Here's why: Starting with the 1993 numbers, the bureau's staff -- which
interviews a sample of 78,000 households for the income survey either in
person or over the phone -- has been entering people's responses directly
into portable or desktop PCs. As part of the survey, respondents are asked
to report how much money they made the previous year from numerous sources
-- stuff like the job held the longest, interest and dividends.

And here's the catch: In each category, the highest dollar amount one can
enter is $999,999.

So let's say a Census employee had dropped by the $15,000-umbrella-stand-
festooned apartment of ousted Tyco Chairman Dennis Kozlowski in 2001. And
let's say the then-executive wanted to report the $50 million or so in
undisclosed compensation the Securities and Exchange Commission says he
received in 2000.

Well, Kozlowski couldn't have done it. The Census would have recorded his
salary at a mere million bucks.

"The fact that we're not recording the full dollar value is going to
understate the share of income controlled by households at the highest
levels," says Welniak.

But, says Welniak, there's a good reason for capping monetary entries at six
digits: It limits the potential for error. One extra digit at the high end,
and you're talking about, say, a $9 million paycheck instead of a $900,000
payout. Errors at the high end of the income scale have a much larger impact
than errors at the bottom. The increased accuracy introduced by more
possible digits, says Welniak, would be more than offset by the decreased
accuracy from newly enabled errors.

Welniak has even investigated the exact effect of rounding all
multimillion-dollar income sources down to a megabuck. According to his
analysis of numbers from 1999 -- a year for which 26 respondents reported
employment compensation of at least $1 million in at least one category --
data-entry limitations effectively understated income inequality by 1%,
using a standard measure of income distribution known as the Gini Index.

But, given that the error appears to be constant year after year, says
Welniak, "Measuring changes in income inequality from one year to the next
is not going to be affected." In other words, ignore the absolute number and
look at the trend.

Mindful of that, we point out that over the past decade, the Census Bureau's
Gini Index has been creeping upward -- implying increased income
inequality. Starting at 45.4 in 1993, it peaked at 46.6 in 2001 but
retreated to 46.2 last year. (For purposes of comparison, the United Nations
Development Program -- which puts the U.S. at 40.8 -- says Japan is a 24.9
and Brazil is a 60.7.)

In fact, someone has gotten worked up about the low-balled high incomes: the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a D.C.-based research group.  The
CBPP has been complaining about the Census data for years, griping not only
about the $999,999 cap but also about the Bureau's exclusion of capital
gains from household income.

"The census data has useful information," says Isaac Shapiro, a CBPP senior
fellow. "But at the high end, it's not useful."

Based on Congressional Budget Office data, the CBPP says the average
household after-tax income in the top 1% of the population tripled from
$286,000 in 1979 to $863,000 in 2000, while the lowest fifth of the
population saw household income rise a mere $1,100 to $13,700 over the same
time period.

Put that in your Gini Index and smoke it.

George Mannes, 14 Wall Street - 15th Floor / New York, NY  10005
phone: 212-321-5208 / mobile: 646-641-2093
http://find.thestreet.com/cgi-bin/texis/author/?au=A0000332



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