Afternoon roundup

The worthies on the closing of the browser tabs:

• Australian water rats have figured out that the hearts and livers of poisonous cane toads are fine to eat. I would love to know how rats figured this out, and how the practice spread. 


• Australia's poisonous legislators have passed a piece of anti-terrorism legislation every 6.7 weeks since September 11, 2001. The water rats may not help in getting rid of this nuisance.


• A perhaps-unintended consequence of anti-Uber activism in California making it harder for people to work as contractors: dancers at strip clubs become employees when many didn't want to.


• Merivale NIMBYs.


• Another for the "I guess we just can't have nice things" file. The Police Minister wants to allow pill testing at events; it's an excellent harm-reduction strategy. New Zealand First has blocked it, reckoning it would increase drug use. And while I'd be pretty confident that Labour and the Greens could find enough supporters for pill-testing in the National/ACT caucuses than would be needed to get it over the line, the usual politics stuff means we can't have nice things. 

Harden up, Auckland Uni

Ok. So an Auckland University security expert, Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor, thinks we need bag checks at shopping malls and basically wants to import to New Zealand every dumb knee-jerk bit of the security state I moved here to avoid. She writes:

So how might this affect New Zealand consumers? Hardening or toughening soft targets could mean that if you are going to the mall, you might have your bag checked at the entrances, and there might be restrictions on how long you can stay in the carpark. Employees might require security passes, and purchases might be checked on leaving the mall.

If you're going to the cinema, there could be more security screening, including bag-checking machines. You might see more CCTV or facial recognition software being used inside the mall and in carparks that are watching all your movements. Security or police staff might ask for proof of identification, carparks might be occasionally restricted directly under or on top of the mall, and we might see more information in the media informing customers about raised security threats at particular locations.

I have a proposal.

The real soft underbelly in New Zealand isn't the shopping mall, it's Auckland University itself.

Think about it. Universities have been targeted by extremists in Africa, and American universities keep being targets for shooters. You have tons of people walking around with backpacks all the time, many of whom seem to make a point of looking suspicious just for the sake of it. It would be really easy for a terrorist to blend in, plant backpack bombs all over campus, then watch the mayhem. Plus, there's all those risky international students from suspicious places.

And so I propose that we completely lock-down Auckland University. Every person going into or out of the campus should pass through a metal detector, those "see you naked" scanners, the TSA air-puff sniffer things, and have thorough backpack checks. If it takes an hour to clear security to go to class, that's not really that big a deal as compared to the huge losses we'd suffer without that kind of security, in some folks' fevered imaginings. Lots of cameras too, everywhere, on the Auckland Uni campus. And every car parking on campus should have to have extra checks to make sure it isn't a bomb too.

Plus, the Auckland Uni chemistry building should have extra hardened security in case anybody decides it's easier to build a bomb on campus using standard chem kit than to bring one in.

Everything that Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor wants to impose on Auckland shoppers should be imposed on Auckland University staff and students, double-hard.

I further propose that we only do this at the University of Auckland as a test. If we find that there are then terrorist attacks at the other universities, that will be evidence that we need to roll out protections more broadly to the other universities. Why roll it out everywhere until we know?

Disclosure: I maintain an adjunct senior fellowship with the University of Canterbury. That Canterbury's Economics department would potentially benefit from any exodus of students from Auckland has not affected my analysis here. Surely, if security is as important as Bridgette Sullivan-Taylor thinks, students would be running from dangerous Canterbury to Auckland anyway, so this really probably hurts my quasi-interests. Right?

Kreskin Cosh

Well, Colby Cosh called this one before it happened, didn't he?

Cosh from last week:

The point is not that Bismarck [subject of many assassination attempts] was particularly hated, although he was. The point is that this period of European (and American) history was crawling with young, often solitary male terrorists, most of whom showed signs of mental disorder when caught and tried, and most of whom were attached to some prevailing utopian cause. They tended to be anarchists, nationalists or socialists, but the distinctions are not always clear, and were not thought particularly important. The 19th-century mind identified these young men as congenital conspirators. It emphasized what they had in common: social maladjustment, mania, an overwhelming sense of mission and, usually, a prior record of minor crimes.

From the Sydney Morning Herald on yesterday's hostage incident:

Manny Conditsis, a Sydney lawyer who represented Monis last year when he was charged with being accessory to the murder of ex-wife Noleen Hayson Pal, told ABC News that Monis was an isolated figure and "damaged goods".

"His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness," Mr Conditsis said.

...
"Knowing he was on bail for very serious offences, knowing that while he was in custody some terrible things happened to him, I thought he may consider that he's got nothing to lose," he said.

"Hence participating in something as desperate and outrageous as this."

Monis had an extensive criminal history, which included being charged with 50 allegations of indecent and sexual assault. He had also been engaged in a protracted battle to overturn his conviction for sending offensive letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers between 2007 and 2009. 

BK Drinkwater also claims, ex post, to have gotten it right:

I don't like tweeting about crises as they're happening, so here's what I held back yesterday: "This sounds all Attica Attica to me".
— BK Drinkwater (@BKDrinkwater) December 15, 2014

One potential lesson from the whole thing?

Our mental health services r chronically under funded & offer more value for money than the GCSB or SIS, as well as helping ppl b free
— Paul McMahon (@McMahon4SH) December 15, 2014

I could support shifting funds from spying over to mental health support. I doubt it would have helped in this case, as Monis looks to be somebody who really should have stayed in prison for a very long time. But it does seem a better general-purpose technology. This image sticks with me:

The trouble with urgency

The Key government is rushing some counter-terrorism legislation through Parliament under urgency. There's one day to make submissions on legislation too complicated (for me) to understand in one day.

And the CAPTCHA is broken on the Parliamentary website, preventing online submissions. Note the input-error line at the bottom of the clip below, HT: Farrar.

Remember Helengrad? What should we call this?

GCSB Redux

I really wish that the Law Society's submission on the GCSB bill had been available prior to the submissions deadline. I suspect that I'm not the only one who failed to submit on the Bill because the precise changes from the status quo ex ante, and whether the changes were from the de facto or the de jure status quo, were, to a non-lawyer, sufficiently impenetrable to require several days' effort to decipher.

The Law Society instead makes it all nicely explicit for us. We are transforming a foreign intelligence agency into a domestic intelligence agency with minimal effective supervision. That's what it had looked like, but I sure wasn't qualified to say so. And so I didn't submit.

The Law Society notes that the Telecommunications Interception Capability and Security Bill violates basic rights to natural justice at common law because too low a threshold is established for the Courts to be able to prevent defendants from hearing evidence against them.

Their statement on the GCSB Bill is blunter than I'd expected. A few excerpts:

The Bill is intrusive. It would empower the GCSB to spy on New Zealand citizens and residents, and to provide intelligence to other government agencies in respect of those persons. It is inconsistent with the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from unreasonable search or seizure under NZBORA and with privacy interests recognised by New Zealand law.
...

Given the intrusive nature of the reforms and the fact that they prima facie conflict with established rights, they should be demonstrably justifiable, and be accompanied by appropriate safeguards. The Law Society has sought to undertake a proportionality analysis of the legislation to ascertain whether the intrusion on rights protected by NZBORA as a result of these measures is justified, and whether there are sufficient checks and balances on the powers the Bill proposes.

It is difficult to identify the pressing and substantial concerns that the Bill purports to remedy or address. It is not possible to identify any tangible or meaningful concerns from the Explanatory Note to the Bill and the accompanying ministerial press release, beyond an allusion to helping the GCSB “get on with the job of helping New Zealand public and private sector entities deal with the growing threat of cyber-attack”

David Farrar suggests that, if the GCSB legislation fails, we'll just have the Police enhancing their wiretapping capabilities when it has a warrant to engage in such things. But the Law Society notes:

Furthermore, it would appear that if the GCSB is called upon to assist another specified agency (such as the Police) by performing activities instead of that other agency, the activities performed by the GCSB in that capacity will receive the imprimatur and secrecy and immunity protections of the GCSB Act, when the same activities engaged in by the specified other agency itself would not do so in terms of the other agency’s empowering legislation. In that way, enlistment of GCSB “co-operation” may confer on the activities undertaken a protected legal status which they would not otherwise receive. Indeed, the very fact of GCSB involvement may mean that the activity in question is never disclosed to those affected. This outcome is unacceptable and inconsistent with the rule of law.

I far prefer the Police doing this kind of job under warrant. I like warrants. Again, here's the Law Society:

Indeed, the section 16 power to intercept without warrant or authorisation can no longer be
justified, given the greatly expanded scope of this warrantless power (having regard to the expansive definition of “information infrastructure” and the expanded scope of operations beyond “foreign intelligence”, canvassed above so that domestic as well as foreign intelligence is to be targeted by the GCSB). This power must now be considered as overly invasive of NZBORA rights, and/or as a disproportionate conferral of power, given the available alternatives (including the range of powers of interception already possessed by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and others).

Had this analysis been publicly available earlier on, and it likely would have been but for the Government's incomprehensible desire to push this through under urgency and thereby prevent public debate, I would have submitted in opposition to the Bill. I wouldn't have done it with my economist hat on, because I can't quantify any of this. It would be my Mont Pelerin Civil Rights Libertarian hat instead, though informed by the economist side.

I would have taken the Law Society's analysis as baseline, then noted that New Zealand's main apparent economic comparative advantage is in having a robust policy environment that weighs heavily the civil rights of its citizens and residents. That we're a bastion of sanity where policy doesn't over-react to perceived security threats. That we're the place that very sensibly adopted the only realistically effective airport security precaution subsequent to an attempted hijacking by a deranged woman: harden the cockpit doors against entry. We haven't gone for American airport security theatre. We haven't started having roadside checkpoints where people are commanded to present their papers and prove that they're not in the country illegally. And that this comparative advantage matters all the more as America and the UK get worse: the Outside of the Asylum is more attractive when the Inside of the Asylum gets that much nuttier.

Imagine an alternative world where, as America started seeing just what the NSA has been doing to them, we were instead implementing the kind of digital rights amendment suggested by Fab Rojas for the States:

The right of the people to be secure in their transactions made through electronic media and other forms of communication,  and in the data generated by such transactions, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The people will retain the right to review such warrants and challenge them in the courts.

The US and OECD have been cracking down on so-called tax-havens; would that New Zealand could be excoriated by the Surveillance States as a rights-haven: a little dark blot on their surveillance maps where you have to get a real warrant from a real judge to be able to wiretap people, and to prove that there's a damned good reason for it. And be a place of refuge for those few who care enough about those kinds of freedoms to vote with their feet.

I wonder what the tech scene here could look like, in a decade's time, if some of the folks in Silicon Valley who do care about these things saw New Zealand as safe haven.

Peter Cresswell points to what we need to do to start protecting ourselves, if we're to be inside the asylum.

New Zealand Airports (continued)

On the flight back from Wellington last night, and as usual on any New Zealand domestic flight where the plane isn't capable of reaching Australia, there was no security at all. For those flights, only domestic regs apply. I walked into Wellington airport and interacted with precisely zero airport, airline, or security people until I reached the gate agent who took the boarding pass that I'd printed back in Christchurch at the terminal. No ID. Bruce, in comments yesterday, noted that I could have saved precious seconds by just waving my phone at the gate; my mPass would serve as boarding pass with no need to print boarding passes. Excellent.

When a mentally ill woman a couple years back attempted to hijack one of these no-security flights, she was restrained by crew and put on normal trial. Even though she was a Muslim and Somali immigrant, I never heard anybody argue that she shouldn't have the same right to a fair trial as someone NZ born. She was sentenced to nine years in prison after a perfectly normal trial.

The utterly sane New Zealand airline security response? Reinforce cockpit doors. That's it. Even though the hijacking was in an election year.

In case you're wondering why I continue to love living in New Zealand despite earthquakes and have little intention of moving back to the US, add this to the list.

Hypothesis Three it is

Like I said, Hypothesis Three:

There's nothing the TSA can really do, but idiots demand they do something and the only something that passengers can observe is how much they're being inconvenienced?

Reports Scott Beaulier today:

I travel a lot, and that's been true since well before 09/11. In that time, I've never seen or experienced anything close to the invasion Anemone and I experienced trying to get home yesterday at Heathrow and then again in Atlanta. 3.5 hours of additional screening were added onto our trip (i.e., normal harassment would have got us out of Heathrow two hours sooner and through Atlanta 1.5 hours sooner).

Far more disgusting than the TSA invasion and complete waste of time was the nonsense we heard from people around us all afternoon, such as, "Well, whatever it takes to keep anything bad from happening," and "It's really not that big a deal." Best of all, at the end of our trip, people in front of us were eager to jump into the "whole body imaging technology" machine when we arrived in Atlanta!

Who would have thought kissing your civil liberties good-bye could be so much fun, would be something people would literally run for, and would occur for many without even a momentary pause to consider the inconvenience and immorality of it all???

Ira turns two in February; his sister is on the way end-April. Fortunately, security lines basically don't exist in New Zealand and Australia, unless you're flying to the US. The biggest hassle is that customs in Melbourne always pulls me up for secondary inspection and interrogation, but that only adds 20 minutes. Unfortunately, Sue wants to go back Stateside for a visit sometime this year. I'm dreading having Ira in one of those lines. Absolutely dreading. It will be awful. If Ira were older, it could be an object lesson in the merits of voters and government. But there won't even be that upside.

Calculated risks

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight runs the kind of back-of-the-envelope calculation on the risks of being in a hijacked aircraft that you might expect as part of a McKinsey interview.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

What's the most you'd pay for insurance against a 1 in 10.4 million event? Since the value of a statistical life, backed out of these kinds of calculations, is $7 million, our best guess is that folks would be unwilling to spend more than a dollar to insure against this risk. I get the feeling that the TSA's budget is considerably more than that.

Ok, class: Assume that if you reduce TSA spending by an order of magnitude the risk of a terrorist incident also rises by an order of magnitude. By how many orders of magnitude ought the TSA budget be reduced to get spending to a level commensurate with the estimated risks?

Terrorists' objectives

Can we reject the null hypothesis that Osama's crew have agents inside the TSA and that their whole objective is to give these agents reasons to make travelers' lives hell?

Radley Balko:

Seems to me that what this, Flight 93, and the Richard Reid incident have shown us is that the best line of defense against airplane-based terrorism is us. Alert, aware, informed passengers.

TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.

Andrew Leigh:

Huh? Are attempts to bring down planes more serious in the last hour of flight than the first? And has anyone who writes these rules ever travelled with a baby or a child?

This of course follows the US TSA’s decision to waste thousands of passenger hours in requiring shoes to be removed for baggage screening, despite the fact that there is nothing you can hide in your shoes that you could not also hide in your underwear.

And, of course, Bruce Schneier, who, in a sane world, would have immediately been appointed head of the TSA DHS on Obama's inauguration:

And what sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won't think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight?
For years I've been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

So, is it then:

1. The TSA are in it with the terrorists to create maximum inconvenience for travelers and augment the TSA budget
2. The TSA are complete idiots
3. There's nothing the TSA can really do, but idiots demand they do something and the only something that passengers can observe is how much they're being inconvenienced?

I lean towards the last one, with a slim chance of the first one.

Blogging continues to be very light over Christmas. On the plus side, the (unheated) pool is now cleaned and ready for the two months of service we can expect from it, given the weather here. Ira's been greatly enjoying runs into the ocean as well - he especially likes it when waves almost splash his face. We really need to learn to carry swim gear whenever we leave the house with him; odds are he'll lead us to the beach, and if Ira gets to the beach, chances are he'll want to get into the water. Last time, my shirt served as his towel....

Beyond Security Theatre

Schneier on "Beyond Security Theater"

Refuse to Be Terrorized

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Supporting real security even though it's invisible, and demonstrating indomitability even though fear is more politically expedient, requires real courage. Demagoguery is easy. What we need is leaders willing both to do what's right and to speak the truth.
...
Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.

Things I like about NZ

Another for the list: when some nutjob firebombs the Prime Minister's electorate office, the police probe it as a normal arson attack. No terror alert level to raise from hysteria to hyper-hysteria, no machine-gun humvees flitting around.

Are you a terrorist?

The libertarian blogosphere is rightly annoyed that the Department of Homeland Security views as an important branch of right-wing extremist and potentially terrorist groups "those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely." Reason has developed a nice little quiz based on the DHS report (quoted above, footnote page 2). Based on my answers to the quiz, I just might be a terrorist too.

Everyone seems to have forgotten (or not noticed) that DHS similarly put out a report on potential left-wing extremist terrorism.

DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines leftwing extremists as groups or individuals who embrace radical elements of the anarchist, animal rights, or environmental movements and are often willing to violate the law to achieve their objectives.

DHS worries that the lefties will engage in cyber attacks. Presumably the left are smarter and understand that internet thing while the right are too busy building shelters in the middle of Wyoming. They also worry a bit about real-world attacks by the animal rights folks - perhaps sensibly so.

Aren't we all potential threats?

Update: Roissy provides a wonderful satire on Reuters reporting on the DHS report. Follow the first link with caution, as Tyler warns that Roissy is evil.