Stupid Security Cocktails

So Hachette was having a cocktail reception this afternoon for literary agents to show off their beautiful new open plan offices.

To which I RSVPed on December 15.

Now, I'm curious as I walk up what kind of security thing they'll have, because having dozens or hundreds of agents waiting in line for their building passes would be kind of silly.

So they have this check-in desk with a little Hachette sign and people holding scads of pre-printed bar-coded building passes.  And we're told that these are under the agency names, and I say I'm there from JABberwocky, and like half the people on line, I'm told "we don't have your badge; you'll have to check in with the main desk" where you need to get a nice individual photo guest barcoded badge.

And I just didn't feel like it.

Did they have the badge under my name even though I was told twice it should be under the agency's name?  The email signature on my RSVP did just have my name on it and not the company name, though in theory if they're checking the RSVPs the database list would have both, and if they aren't certain, maybe somebody could check both my name and the agency's name, but Person A might have one letter of the alphabet and Person B might have the other letter, and do I really want to spend my time asking them "are you sure, do you want to check under name name as well as the agency name" when they're all so sure the badge is under the agency name?

What's the point of the security charade anyway, because pretty much anyone can say they're here for the Hachette reception and get a badge regardless of whether they're on the list or not.  So just walk over to 1290 Avenue of the Americas right this instant, wait on the first line, then have them tell you to go on the second line, and you're golden.  You can do whatever you want.  Shit, tell them you're Joshua Bilmes.

It's just bullshit, and I've got better things to do with my time than deal with bullshit in order to get a glass of wine or champagne from Hachette Book Group.

Like write a quick blog post to call Vornado, the landlord of Hachette's building, and Hachette, on their bullshit.  This is stupid security theatre.  It's scores or hundreds of agents each having to wait on line, or on multiple lines, for three or five minutes.  It's five hours of productive time on this Earth that's lost for no reason at all.

Surprise!

So the US Open has announced that the gates are going to open a half hour earlier.

Why?

Because, per my last post, their useless extra security procedures are almost certainly leading to much more than the "slight delays" predicted in the press release.

So much wasted money, so much wasted time, so much waste and stupidity in order to add absolutely nothing other than wasted money and wasted time to a procedure in which every bag was already opened and inspected on the way in to the tennis center.

The Never-Ending War

So New For 2013, as the main draw of the US Open tennis begins Monday, they have announced that this year everyone will get to be wanded and go through a magnetometer.

Why?

For the past ten years, you've only been able to bring in one small bag, and that one small bag has been hand-inspected as you go in.  There's no way that the Boston Marathon scenario could repeat at the US Open as it has been run, security wise, for the past decade.

Adding a magnetometer adds no additional security.

None.

Nada.

Zilch.

Of course, it is a nice make-work program, because now the company that provides the security forces for the US Open gets to hire more people!  Most of these people are temps of some or another sort, and I am sure the contractor that provides this service for the Open makes a nice additional profit.

Of course, it is a nice make-work program for the people who make wands and magnetometers.

Of course it makes everyone feel so much more secure.  Even though it doesn't add any actual security.

It does add nicely to the time people will spend queuing to get into the Open.  Let's be very conservative and say that it's just an extra two minutes.  That's very very conservative.  But there are 40,000 people a day going to the open, so that's 80,000 minutes, for 14 days.  That's over two years of lost time.

Just dandy.

And of course, there's no going backward on any of this.  The day will never come when the polie or anyone else will say that the world has gotten safer and we can go back and do less, spend less money and lose less time and less productivity and still be reasonably safe.  It will only get worse.  Because no matter what we do, we will never be 100% safe.  There is risk to everything we do every day, and some day some other bad thing will happen that will require us to come up with some other layer of security.

Happy happy joy joy.

Securely Ranting -- For the World to See

Just to get on my high horse again about the ludicrousness of our allowing our government to waste so much money spying on us, bringing it back a little to the business of JABberwocky...

We at JABberwocky believe in information.  We rigorously spreadsheet pretty much every piece of royalty statement paperwork that comes our way, in varying detail.

Just like the NSA wants to vacuum up information because it may not know until after the fact which e-mails or which phone call metadata it may need at some future point, we can't predict exactly which information we might need at some future point.  Since modern spreadsheets allow information to flow upwards very easily, it just seems better to start out having everything in a nice spreadsheet that can flow up.  The first statement for your hardcover will flow upwards into a summary for the hardcover.  The paperback and e-book will flow upward.  They will merge with the hardcover information to give you the total sales for your book, and from there to your series, and from there to your work with a particular publisher and then a particular territory. We do that in all major territories for your work, we try and have basic information in smaller territories in spreadsheets.  If your career takes off after your fifth book, or Hollywood decides to take an option on your eighth book and some hotshot writer needs information on your sales to help get financing for the movie, we have your global sales information ready at hand.  If we need to gather that information after your eighth book is published when that call from Hollywood calls, it is a lot harder to gather all the information retrospectively.

Sounds great, doesn't it!

Who wouldn't want the government to do just that, so if in two years or four years some evildoer is involved in some terrorist plot, we've got all the data to find him, and find his co-conspirators, and save us all!!

However, we face real world constraints which apparently our government doesn't feel it needs to confront on our behalf.

Simply put, as our business grows and we have more clients selling more books in more places in more formats, the information we have to process keeps growing and growing.

We must make compromises.

We sold 200 books to Audible last year and are starting to get audio royalty statements for some of those.  Some of those books are titles that haven't been in print since ten years ago or more.  Suffice to say the spreadsheets we put together for those titles cannot and should not be as detailed as when we had only 30 books with Audible to keep track of.

As more information floods in, we have a harder time prioritizing it.  Do we do the big pile of Audible statements first because those still come in on paper and make a visible dent on the desk, while we delay processing Random House royalty statements for major agency clients like Peter Brett and Elizabeth Moon that have come in as PDFs?  Well, it is tempting to deal with the visible pile of paper first.

We also have a harder time doing all of it correctly.  Who is going to look over the person who does the basic entry work as we have more and more clients taking up more and more of our time?  Two years ago I could do that and it wasn't too big a hassle, but now it's kind of impossible for me to give the same quality time to absolutely everything.

I am running a business.  I have to justify expenses.  I can't just hire more and more and more people to deal with every last bit of data that can theoretically be processed.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

The NSA isn't worried about money.  It isn't worried about cost-benefit analysis.  Its budget is secret.  We don't debate it.  If we did, we'd be told that we should never for a moment think that our security can be valued that way.

Which is balderdash.

The NSA is no different from JABberwocky.  The more information it decides it must have, the less good it can be at dealing with all of that information, even with the ability to hire infinitely, and build office space and server farms and everything else infinitely.  And when it makes mistakes, those have serious consequences, way more than if JABberwocky screws something up.

It's not just wrong constitutionally and morally for the government to collect all of this information on us, but it's a bad investment for our country.

And just to make clear:

Yes, your information is being collected.

If you write "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an email and the government is interested in Bad Guy X, it will start digging deeper in what you say and do just because you put the words "Bad Guy X" into your e-mail.

Oh, sure, there are procedures in place to be sure that they don't go too far, that they dig just deep enough to determine that you are a US citizen, or that you didn't actually conspire with Bad Guy X but really did just say "hey, what about Bad Guy X" in an innocent way in an e-mail.

But of course those procedures don't work perfectly.  The government admits to thousands of times when its procedures don't work.

No, thank you!  I'd rather you not be spending my money on this.

The Surveillance State

A week back, Thomas Friedman, the distinguished author and columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column approving of the NSA's surveillance and monitoring of metadata of email and phone calls for pretty much everyone.

His argument:  I like civil liberties, civil liberties will take it on the chin even more than they are now if we have another 9-11 style attack.  So the government should do all that is can to prevent another such attack, and if that's what the surveillance is doing, I'm in favor of it.  Also, that this has been going on for two American presidencies now.

What an idiot!

OK, I mean, Thomas Friedman isn't an idiot, and there's a certain soothing logic to his column which reflects an opinion that's apparently shared by a lot of my fellow Americans.

But it's wrong, it's misguided, and quite obviously so.

It took me several days of mulling over Thomas Friedman's soothing article to zone in on the basic fallacy, but once you do, it's really quite simple.

And that fallacy is this:  There is no guarantee that any of the NSA programs will stop another 9-11 type attack.  The fact that the Boston Marathon bombings could take place is kind of proof positive that we cannot be 100% protected from terrorist activity.  Since neither Thomas Friedman nor President Obama nor the head of the CIA or NSA or Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) or Speaker John Bonier (R-OH) or any of the other many people defending this surveillance cannot guarantee that their efforts will not protect us 100% from another 9-11, I would respectfully ask that my 4th Amendment rights be protected and that the government not go vacuuming up information on every single phone call I make. And that the government not go vacuuming up information on pretty much every e-mail I send.

Of course, the head of the NSA has come out and said how these wonderful surveillance efforts have lead to the stopping of 50 plots against us.  Of course, he won't give much detailed information about any of these because it's a secret.  I have no secrets, he gets to keep all of his?  That's not the way to have a debate or discussion.

If we could look at the details, we would probably discover that many of these plots could have been discovered in ways other than vacuuming up metadata on every phone call and e-mail.  We might discover that there would have been plenty of time to get warrants for the specific individuals vs. invading the privacy of all of us.  But we won't get a lot of these details.

Several editorial cartoonists have been quite succinct in pointing out the ludicrousness of many of the same Senators who filibustered reasonable background check legislation for gun sales now turning around to say it's perfectly fine for the government to get the metadata for every single phone call I make.  I guess it could be argued that I am inconsistent for wanting my metadata to be protected while thinking background checks for guns are a good idea, but isn't there a common sense difference between placing a phone call and buying a weapon used to kill people?

I don't buy the idea that my e-mails aren't being looked at because that program is limited to getting data for people overseas.  I happen to email people overseas almost all the time, and I have this hunch that the computer that vacuums up the emails of those people will vacuum mine up along with it.  Have you ever sent an e-mail where the chain includes ten other e-mails?  Even, on occasion, the computer might fold in some e-mail from a completely different conversation because you started a new conversation in a reply or had the same subject line.

My blog is supposed to be about publishing, so I want to make this conversation a little bit relevant.

Government power:  A lot of us think the Department of Justice had a pretty weak case against Apple and the major publishers on e-book price fixing.  The publishers changed to a model that reduced the power of Amazon, which had 90% of the e-book business and was selling e-books as loss leaders.  Amazon provided a lot of the information and a lot of the impetus behind the lawsuit.  Yet the publishers all ended up settling.  Why?  Well, it's pretty simple.  The government has a lot of power and a lot of tools and a lot of resources, and when it decides to use those against you, it's awfully hard to resist. Why do you want to give the government such benefit of the doubt that it will vacuum up all of this information and never use it foolishly or bullyingly or in a bad way?

Asymmetric information:  The next time you are negotiating a new contract with a publisher, ask the publisher to show you their P&L (profit & loss) statement for the proposed acquisition.  See how far you'll get!  For all the increased amounts of information some publishers are providing, like real-time information to hard sales numbers, they are never going to negotiate where you have equal access to information with them.  They will never tell you what their actual excess of revenue over expenses is, and let you see exactly how much of that money they are willing to give to you and how much they intend to keep for themselves.  And if I come up with my own best guesses... you can trust me on this, that the publisher will always say I'm wrong but never come up with a specific beyond that.  It's similar here.  The government isn't engaged in an open exchange with any of us.  The information we need to know is a secret, and all of our information is there for them to look at.  And you don't have an agent in this negotiation.

Every Move You Make I'll Be Watching You

The British newspaper The Guardian found out that the US has very likely been receiving details  of every phone call most of us make -- who we called, when we called them, how long we spoke.

Where are all of those constitution lovers who are so fond of my 2nd amendment rights to start using those guns to fight against this colossal infringement of our 4th amendment rights?

I'm bothered not just by the blatant violation of privacy rights but by the idiocy of this and of everyone who defends this.

Let's take a specific scenario, where the government knows that some particular person is a terrorist.  Well, the government has always had the ability to go to a judge and get a warrant and find out who is calling this person and who this person calls, and even to listen in on the phone calls. Some of these abilities are impaired by the switch from land lines to cell phones.  The calls no longer go through particular switching stations for particular phone lines in particular places where the government can attach a tap.  However, solving that problem doesn't require getting detailed reporting on who every person in the country speaks to for how long.  So the government isn't, in this instance, adding anything helpful for people whom we know are terrorists.

Let's say the government doesn't know someone is a terrorist until they do something bad.  In such an instance, yes, the government might be able to review records retrospectively and find out who called this phone number.  Emphasis on retrospectively.  This is closing the barn door after cows left, after bad guy does his bad thing.

If you want to say that this is a good thing because we can catch this bad person and keep him from doing another bad thing -- well, I can't argue with that.  But what I can say is that this isn't what the United States is all about, or at least not that the US is supposed to be about.  We're not East Germany in the 1970s, where everyone was spying on everyone else.  We don't keep everyone in prison because we suspect all of us might commit a crime someday.  Or at least we're not supposed to do these things.

And once you start saying that all these little things are perfectly fine because we can't risk anything bad ever happening to us -- again, that's an argument we had 230 years ago which led to our having a Bill of Rights, and those rights are supposed to protect us from exactly this kind of thing.

So again, where are all the second amendment defenders now, when the fourth amendment is once again under attack?

There's also a practical problem here.  For all the computers in the world that make our lives easier, there are real costs to our government to collect all of this data, to organize all of this data, and then the government is either just putting the data off in some dark corner just in case or it's taking time to have people look at all of those phone records for everyone.  That's a lot of infrastructure, a lot of people, a lot of lots of things, all to go looking at data which is 99.9999% useless, records of calls that don't mean anything.  But which are there.

So if you don't want the government collecting gun records for newspapers to find so that everyone knows where the guns are, do you want the government to have all this information on all the people you've called, how long you spoke to them, information which could somehow get out into the world and into the newspapers?

It gets worse.  The government's also been collecting gobs of data from everyone who surfs the web from outside the US, around $20M worth a year for that expense according to The Guardian.

A quick rant

I don't agree with Rand Paul on much, but I'd be remiss not to thank him for doing a little battle against the never-ending war against "Al Qaeda" we are fighting with drones.  I put "Al Qaeda" in quotes because it deserves to be.  The entity that attacked us on 9/11 is pretty much out of business.  The other organizations that call themselves Al Qaeda this or that are not Al Qaeda, no more than someone else can call themselves a Bilmes or a Joshua or a Joshua Bilmes and not be me.  And even though I am not in favor of any of these organizations attacking us or for that matter attacking other people, including other Muslims, which they do as or more often as attacking us, I am in favor of the rule of law.  Targeted assassinations against targets determined behind closed doors under a program with no oversight, no accountability, no nothing, with the administration not even willing to entirely preclude carrying out attacks like this as opposed to arrest and trial even when they can do so -- those aren't the rule of law.  And as people who read this blog know, I wish that libertarians and especially gun nut libertarians would stop fixating all their attention on the 2nd amendment when we are doing far worse violence against multiple other amendments that are as or more important in the name of some undefinable never-ending impossible-to-ever-have-an-ending war on terrorism that has been going strong for almost 11.5 years.

So, yes, please, let's get on John Brennan and Eric Holder and the Obama administration just a wee bit on all of this.

The After Sandy

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!

For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.

I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled.  Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles.  Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur.  Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is.  One of the world's richest cities should do better.  I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis.  Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be.  When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.

On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6.  Five wins in a week against top 20 players.  The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one.  Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention.  Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.

Comic books.  DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes.  The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good.  This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid.  Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant.  First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest.  I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.

And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.

I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.

Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.

The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events.  But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.

So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event.  Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain.  "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside.  All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security.  And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.

As to extreme climate events?

Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much.  Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done.  It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening.  We're not talking about that at all.  We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs.  It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.

What gives?

For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly.  It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt.  Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out.   Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs.  We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses.  And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago.  It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.

Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods.  An example:  you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit.  It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps).  Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money.  The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time.  If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline.  There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.

And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.

Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them.  There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly.  And since government is us, all joined together...

So what do we have?

The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding.  I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots.  And all that money might better have been spent on something else.

I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much.  The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past.  And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.

9/11 plus 10

There is an adage that says "just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.". For most of the past ten years my general belief is that this is something that Osama bin Laden should have heeded.

I think Al Qaeda could've done serious damage to the US military and to US interests, the death of a thousand cuts with dozens of operations like the USS Cole or the Dar es Salaam embassy bombing, and people in the US just wouldn't have cared very much or for very long.  Militarily, 9/11 was a mistake. Bin Laden became a marked man. His organization was tossed from it's safe haven in Afghanistan. Countless leaders of the organization have been killed. Neither 9/11 nor 7/7 nor 3/11 have led to the death of NYC or London or Madrid. People still work in tall buildings and ride the Tube and commute to work.

However, part of bin Laden's calculus was different, and while I believe 9/11 was a military mistake NY Al Qaeda, the organization has had immense success.

Many of you may not believe this, but there was a time not too long ago when you could just walk into an office building without having to wait on line, show ID, pose for a picture, wait for your visitor pass to print out. There was a time when you could comfortably get to the airport 45 minutes or even a half hour before your flight. There was a time when you could breeze in to a baseball game without wondering why the Mets allow an iPad but the Yankees do not, why the Yankees allow a factory sealed one liter water bottle but the Mets only 20 oz, and why some teams won't allow your completely empty bottle in for filling at a water fountain when it is exactly the same as the 20 oz factory sealed bottle that is emptied out just the other side of the turnstile.  And in all of those instances we are giving up our liberty and hours of our lives, little bits and little infringements at a time.

There was a time when torture was torture.

And all of these things cost not only time but money. The TSA costs money, the guards that check your bags at the ballpark and your IDs in the office lobby cost money.

And that is just in the private sector. The government has spent a huge amount of money building a counterterrorism security infrastructure.

And getting us to do all of this was part of the bin Laden calculus.

So in one sense, the terrorists have won, they've gotten us to spend so much of our treasure taxing ourselves in time and dollars to attempt to win a war that can never entirely be run.

And still, 9/11 was a mistake.

If the western world collapses as a result of the erosion of our values and bank accounts since 9/11, it isn't a caliphate that will come next to pick up the pieces.  China, maybe; caliphate, no.

And a lot of what's happened might have happened with a stream of Dar es Salaams. US embassies would have become fortified and closed to the world, and other damage done to our standing and reputation. Was the extra damage from the sheer enormity of 9/11 worth that so few of its planners might be around to enjoy when the Chinese can finally conquer a depleted and degraded American empire?

Oh -- we manage to be so resilient in the face of every gun massacre of which the US had many. Why have we been so unresilient to the Richard Reids of the world?

And a confession -- deep down I am kind of happy circumstances have me away from NYC for most of 9-11-11.

taking it personally

Oh, the nuclear power industry. We tried scrubbing, we tried soaking, and still we have ring around the collar. The interesting thing from a risk management standpoint is that the old-fangled coal and gas plants kill people bit by bit from their emissions and the costs of getting the coal or the gas out of the ground. Over the course of 20 years, do we lose more people 22 in this coal mine disaster and another 6 there vs. how many might die from radiation exposure as a result of the Japanese disasters? It's impossible to tally all that up, especially when you add in the externalities of emissions, etc. But we do know that these occasional nuclear power disasters are very big and very noticeable and very disastrous. Hence, there is a perfectly good argument to make that nuclear is still an important and necessary part of our energy portfolio moving forward. I don't want to be the person who tries to make that argument with a straight face, even though it is there and legitimately made.

Libya. Idealistically yes please let's get rid of Qadaffi. However, the US doesn't have a good national security interest to make that happen. He does a perfectly good job of pumping the oil. In recent years (recent, we can't forget things like Lockerbie which are hardly ancient history but also not yesterday) he hasn't been an active exporter of violence that we know of. One of the only nuclear-trending regimes to give it up, in fact. No guarantee that the people who replace him will be better than he is, we've seen that tribal enmities in Africa don't die easily and that yesterday's savior (Mugabe) is tomorrow's disaster. It may not seem like the right thing to do, but as much as the US can sit this one right out we're likely better off to do so. Situation in Egypt was very different, in no small part because Egypt is essentially a 51st state, hugely dependent on the billions of dollars we give in aid. And it was also a little more abundantly clear there that Mubarak was going to go one way or the other in the near future, so getting it done better was in many more ways than in Libya a genuine need for American policy makers. It's very nice that the Arab League would support us in getting rid of Qadaffi, and I'm still not convinced we should rush to take them up on that invitation.

China. They're keeping the lid on the unrest, but they still run the risk of repeating the Soviet path. Why? Because they have to spend so much time, money, energy on protecting the regime that can be used for other things, and over time it gets to be very difficult to absorb those costs.

TSA. Which we don't seem to learn in the United States. We happily spend countless millions of dollars and lose enormous amounts of human time and energy and effort in order to fight -- well, who? what? Yes, the US will be victimized by another successful terrorist attack, sure as the sun will rise. But how many lives have been lost in the US due to terrorist attacks in the past nine years now and counting? Yet we give up our rights and our privacy and our freedom to guard against, and if the TSA has its way as it almost certainly will they want to make it less enjoyable to travel by train or by highway as well in the name of fighting this threat. On my most recent flight, I had a suspicious banana in my backpack, so I had to stand around for a few minutes and watch while my tax dollars paid for man to delicately paw through all the pockets on my backpack to retrieve a banana and then put the bag back thru the magnetometer. It's almost funny, except that it's really very very sad.

Liberty. But the right wing libertarians are more concerned about the government encroaching on their right to burn wasteful incandescent light bulbs. Why can't more of these people join me in the fight against unreasonable search and seizure, making the US more like the communist states we spent 50 years necessarily fighting where you had to have your papers to move about the country? Please. The incandescent light bulb is an ancient technology that turns electricity into more heat than light. Try and feel up one of those bulbs with your bare hands. There should be reasonable limits to the kind of nannying the state will indulge on our behalf, I think the argument that the health care mandate will lead to mandatory consumption of broccoli is, as straw man slippery slope arguments go, one of the more intriguing ones to puzzle over as a thought exercise. But I cannot see the defense of the incandescent light bulb as the last bastion of liberty. This is the exact kind of area where government regulation serves a powerful public good, keeping us from doing something that is cheaper to the individual and costlier to society. We are surrounded by examples of such. Flammable PJs might be cheaper to manufacture, but we aren't given that option. We survived the banning of CFCs in refrigerators. Please, pretty please, will you attack the TSA monstrosity instead of the compact fluorescent light bulb?

Building Codes. In fact these are a very good example of an area where good government regulation keeps us from things we might like to do or would find cheaper to do but which in the long term aren't such a good idea. Just like banning incandescent light bulbs!

risk vs. reward

Here's a Washington Post article from this Saturday where Attorney General Eric Holder is defending the legality of sting operations that are finding terrorist plots emanating from radicalized Muslims in the United States.

It's a difficult question. My client Tobias Buckell mentioned another Washington Post article describing how one informant the FBI was using so upset a lot of the people in a mosque that they called the FBI to report him. You read enough of these stories, and it's very clear that the people the FBI is arresting are radicalized, do have intentions on harming us. And at the same time, a lot of their particular plots might not have advanced if the FBI didn't find and encourage and help them. From the legal definition of entrapment, I don't think the entrapment defense works because the intention is there with or without the FBI.

At the same time, I don't know if we're doing ourselves a service by having the FBI informers essentially run the bad guys in their missions. Another approach is to try and surveil and monitor the suspects and see whom they might come across if we let them play out the string a little bit. Now, there's a real risk to this. The guy in Portland, maybe he'd have ended up with real explosives in his car instead of fake explosives supplied by the FBI. But there's a gain to this as well. Two, actually. From the FBI perspective, there's less room for debate. And at least for some people, maybe we're better off if it doesn't keep looking like the FBI is arresting people for plots that, entrapment or not, wouldn't look like they exist only because the FBI was enabling. Bigger gain, if the plot advances with somebody else's help, maybe we're going to end up catching a bigger fish, kind of like the same thing where you have to try and balance jailing the foot soldiers in the drug war against jailing the kingpins.

Alas, our government has no interest in trying to talk us through real risk scenarios. Our government prefers for us all to pretend that there's no airplane security risk because we all get body scans and patdowns. Better that we give up our 4th amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. So that's not a government that's going to take any risk that they'd let some plot advance too far before making the arrests, because it would require having an adult discussion about the risk/reward of the chosen course if things go wrong.

In law enforcement and in life, like with your IRA, there's always that balance between risk and reward.

Links, no sausage

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST.

The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny.

In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here.

Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and sing songs together and join a book group together and make a perfect world as the company starts to realize sales first of the Nook Color itself and then from all of the ebooks that people will buy for their Nook Color. As initial evidence that this will indeed come to pass, they say after-quarter-end sales for the Fri/Sat/Sun after Thanksgiving doubled at bn.com and increased by an impressive 17.2% at stores.

Two articles I really enjoyed in the weekend newspapers.

The first is an article from the Sunday NY Times Business section about an etailer who thinks the more you can get your customers to complain about you, the more you can attract the love of the Google search algorithms.

And the second is from the A section of Sunday's Washington Post, which describes the efforts made to treat patients wounded in Afghanistan as they are moved from the front to Germany.

And also in the Sunday Times, Ariel Kaminer subjected herself to multiple patdowns over the course of her day. Her conclusion: "It’s amazing how quickly the pat-down evolves from shocking indignity to banal hassle, just like padding around barefoot while your pants fall down and your toothpaste tube gets the third degree, something airline travelers have been experiencing for years now. The inconvenience is worth it, of course, if it works — if it uncovers potential dangers before they board a plane. That’s what a spokesman for the T.S.A. informed me, afterward, the officers’ job was: to assess whether I posed a threat to aviation. He would not comment on whether that should have included checking out the objects hidden in my pocket. All I know is I went through the line eight times, and not a single inspector noticed them."

And last but certainly not least, The Washington Post has an ode to The Settlers of Catan, which is one of those board games I really would like to have somebody to play with someday. Boskone? Next Balticon??

my favorite rant, for after the holidays

My client Jim C. Hines has a new post on TSA policies and procedures here

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/11/responding-to-the-tsa/

which I highly recommend.

It has links to an ACLU petition, to the e-mail address to contact the TSA with your thoughts, links to a round-up of approving "shut up and take your body scan" editorials, and much, much more.

I'm getting more involved with this than with just about anything else. I've dashed off letters to the NY Times, which suggested in an editorial last week that profiling was a civil liberties issue that was to be avoided by subjecting all of us to full body screening. Um, isn't that a civil liberties issue as well? I've been very clear that I don't consider profiling to be a solution because terrorists are adaptive. Please see the film The Battle for Algiers, if you want to advocate profiling.

I've dashed off an e-mail to Ruth Marcus, who suggested in a Washington Post op-ed column that it was immature of people to not just happily get patted down. I pointed out one clear factual error, that she seems to think if you agree to the full-body scanner you can't also get a patdown, while in fact the TSA can still select you randomly or on account of an anomaly. More important, I thought I was immature when I was two years old or six years old and had to do things my parents wanted to "because I said so." I think there's nothing at all immature about saying that the 4th amendment entitles us to be secure both in our homes and against unreasonable search and seizure.

And an e-mail to Dana Milbank at the Post, who suggests that Republicans are now making noises about TSA procedures out of the same general obstructionism that motives their anti-START message. I usually like Republicans much less than Dana Milbank, but not here. Libertarianism has deep roots in the Republican party. Full body scans of everyone buying an airplane ticket are not so deeply rooted in American history, while Republican presidents and cabinet secretaries have supported treaties with Russia for several decades.

I find myself contemplating civil disobedience more strongly than ever before in my life.

I lived through 9/11. I woke up on the morning of 9/11 with plans to cut out of work maybe an hour early and stroll down over the Williamsburg Bridge to visit the Borders at the World Trade Center. I am more frightened by what the government and private sector ask me to do now, on a day-in day-out basis to protect my security, than I was taking the subway back on the 12th from a memorial service at my synagogue. I was antsy, I'm human after all. I was antsy for three or four weeks to the point where the puckish side of my sense of humor was nowhere to be found. But now I get to spend the rest of my life being antsy about patdowns at the airport, patdowns at the ballgame, Rudin Management scanning my drivers license entering an office building (what is a real estate company doing with thousands of scanned photo IDs?).

Youthful exuberance

OK, so to set the record on this straight, the TSA Director said at a senate hearing on Wednesday 17 November that they haven't done a good job of communicating that children under 12 are exempt from the "enhanced patdown."

So aren't we all happy and comfortable now. To know that our young children can only be subjected to the regular patdown! And, really, who doesn't mind having their 14 year old daughter felt up the thighs and buttocks.

If this is the security regime we have, then we do have to give people of all ages an equal opportunity to be subjected to it.

The problem is that we have a security regime that routinely subjects people of any age to this.

Benjamin Franklin may not actually have said “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security” but whomever said it, says it right.

homeland humor

So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says "Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag.

I find this funny. I don't find much to laugh about at airport security, but I find this funny.

And then tonight I audited the first 15 or 20 minutes of Due Date. Where Robert Downey Jr. has his carry-on switched with one of Zach Galifianakis' that has marijuana paraphernalia and such, and Downey has a dialogue with the TSA guard that's full of the two talking past one another. And then he's on the plane and he starts lecturing Galifianakis on how he shouldn't use words like terrorist and bomb and ends up being shot at by an air marshal with a rubber bullet, tossed off the plane, put on the no fly list. And after not really laughing once, or smiling, or even grinning even the teeny-tiniest bit, even beseeching the gods of comedy to explain why anyone thinks the "driver pulling away when someone tries to open door of car" gag is supposed to be remotely funny, I decided I'd rather get to Whole Foods and buy some dinner before they closed and get home than stay around in the theatre to midnight or so watching a not very funny movie.

So why is this? Why am I willing to enjoy one comic look at the insanity we call airport security while the other leaves me absolutely cold? Is it because I like Lindor truffle balls more than Zach Galifianakis? Because the one is so clearly unreal and exaggerated that I can view it from a distance while the other seems all too real? Because Roger Federer is a better comic actor than Zach Galifianakis?

My favorite rant

one man's adventures with TSA...

http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html

here the NY Times travel writer Joe Sharkey talks about his fun-filled pat-down experience...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/business/02road.html?

and the Washington Post tells us there is starting to be some backlash against the patdown regime...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111206580.html

I'm getting genuinely frightened about this. I'm not sure I want to fly anywhere any more. I got a token patdown coming back through SFO in September for no particular reason, it looked like they were just having some fun where every second or third passenger at this checkpoint was getting one for one or another reason, in my case it was because I had cargo pants with extra pockets. It's a demeaning and degrading thing. The TSA isn't the SS, but it's still worrisome that the US is now proving that you can pay people to spend their day patting down and frisking people and having them touch their private and personal parts.

And it's wrong.

We will never have absolute security flying on an airplane, no more than we do driving a car or walking down the street or riding an escalator. Our cargo can never be entirely secure. The fact that we now can't ship toner cartridges in airplanes points to the ludicrousness of our approach to security, because tomorrow terrorists can put bombs into teddy bears and the day after that into hollowed out books and the day after that into power adapters.

What will it take for this to stop? Do we need to find some way that every Senator and Representative heading to DC for the lame duck session can be given a nice brisk patdown?

when your doctor runs the Waystone Inn

You know from some of my other posts on these subjects that I have very passionate feelings about the direction our country is taking on matters of so-called security. These manifest themselves with particular, and sometimes and unfortunately ill-advised and untimely and misdirected passion, when a hotel in the US demands a photo ID at check-in.

We don't, or at least so I thought until I was reading the NY Times about the Lake Shore Limited, need papers to travel in the country.  If we need papers to check in at a hotel, then we need papers.

Beyond that...   the reasons a hotel will give for this are basically the same, that the person checking in with my credit card isn't actually me, so I am being protected by the hotel from credit card fraud and/or identity theft.

I would reasonably guess that fraud is most likely to occur for a spur of the moment booking.  But certainly in my circle, most -- not all but most -- people book well in advance  And the hotel knows things about you or your reservation. As an example, you are a member of the hotel's reward program and are paying with the card that was used to guarantee the reservation or a card that is in your profile with the hotel chain or staying at a hotel or a region where you often stay or staying in conjunction with a conference or other group event.

For almost all of my own bookings, the chances of either credit card or identity fraud would be along the lines of "I lose my bag at the airport, someone steals bag, notices a printout of my hotel reservation, decides it's a good rate, and would be nice to pretend to be me and stay at hotel under my name." The odds of this happening are not good. If it did happen, the odds that the credit card company would be informed of the theft, could notice at the card was authorized at the hotel after it was stolen, could inform the local police and arrest the miscreant while he is in "my" room at the hotel -- the odds the crime would result in somebody being arrested are better than the odds of the crime ever happening in the first place.

If anyone wants to provide me with the percentage of credit card fraud that takes place in hotels vs gas stations or retail or as fraudulent telecommunications charges or the like that shows my analysis to be wrong, please do let me know.  When someone did ring up charges on my card, it was at gas stations, Walmart, etc., not two nights at a hotel.  If someone has facts to show the percent of fraud on advance vs newish reservations, I'll happily correct.

More than one hotel tells me if a charge is contested they need to have checked photo ID to avoid having a chargeback, and I don't know if that can be confirmed.  In my experience the credit card industry wants to encourage you to use your card for more things in more places. It isn't so long ago I had to sign for small purchases under $25 at one merchant I frequent.  Not any more.  Not so long ago you couldn't use your credit card at McDonalds or the local movie theatre but the credit card companies worked with these places to get the cards working.  The card companies feel they have much better ways of detecting fraudulent use than some clerk at the Four Points by Sheraton in Times Square detecting a fake Idaho drivers license.

Oh -- if a hotel refuses to let you check in for a night without a photo ID, try and eat at that same hotel's fancy restaurant and pay with that exact same credit card on that exact same day and see if they'll ask for a photo ID at the end of your nice expensive dinner. This happened to me recently at a Manhattan hotel. I wasn't even staying there but wanted just to put the incidentals for a third party on my card.  The same meal I couldn't pay for one way, they were perfectly happy to have me pay for the other way. Could someone please give me the logic for that which wouldn't start to totally collapse in and twist on itself?

I was watching at a hotel recently while an entire water polo team was being checked in merrily giving their photo IDs. Did they have a ringer?  Someone snuck in to the team bus who wasn't on the team?  They were actually a ring of credit card thieves? This isn't airport security where for all my rants I don't go along with the argument that you never check grandma. Because then, yes, the bad guys will recruit grandma.  This is just stupid. This is stupid like proofing grandma and grampa before selling them beer at a ballpark. I hate being next to drunken louts at a ballpark, but that's stupid.  And having a water polo team all show photo IDs to get their keys is stupid. If one of them later contests the credit card charge, the manager at the hotel can call the coach and the school and have words with them. I strongly doubt that's a conversation he'll have to have.

And this stuff isn't without a cost. You don't pay all the costs of your driving because there's the gas fumes people breathe in or the hidden subsidies of the road system. Here, everyone spends more time checking in at the hotel. Maybe you don't notice that but think of every checkout line you are on and then think on that line if every single credit card purchase requires a photo ID.  It's not like two $89 nights at a hotel is more costly than a lot of trips we have to Target to do the back to school.

No, I'm sorry, but no hotel should require a photo ID as a condition of check-in. It's an insult to the guest, it makes visiting a hotel like visiting a doctor where first thing you must do is show your insurance. It protects against a not so existent threat. It's an infringement on our liberty. And if everyone started to complain about this instead of acting like it's perfectly reasonable maybe they would stop.

Plenty of hotels don't ask for ID and seem to survive. Those that do should clearly inform at the reservation process.  I will choose hotels that have honest guests, that don't require me to show my papers, instead of hotels that host criminals.

lost liberty

The NY Times reports in an article by Nina Bernstein that the federal government is now asking people for their papers on the Lake Shore Limited, an Amtrak train that doesn't actually cross or really go particularly near the Canadian border. The questioning is strictly "voluntary" because the government doesn't actually have the right to ask an entire trainful of people for their papers. Though of course not many people are going to refuse to answer questions from an ICE/border patrol officer shining a flashlight in their face, and the officers don't tell you that you've no obligation to answer.  The officers doing this are assigned to a customs station originally set up to handle a ferry across Lake Ontario that hasn't run for some time, yet the station just kept growing and growing. Such authority to do this as can be mustered comes from rules that allow the US to enforce immigration rules within a "reasonable distance" of the border, which is set at 100 miles.

I started asking myself as I read along "now isn't the entire coastline of the US an international border?". And the article then gets around to this very point. The answer is yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Under the authority the government is claiming here, the vast majority of people in the United States, anyone standing within 100 miles of the Atlantic or Pacific or Gulf coasts, in all of Florida or Alaska or Hawaii, could have a border patrol officer ask "voluntarily" about their citizenship.

And all you need to do is plant your feet within 100 miles of our borders. You think this doesn't effect you because you're from Kansas?  Guess again.  If you visit the Space Needle or the Liberty Bell, you too can be "voluntarily" questioned.

You go to Times Square on New Year's Eve, the NYPD carefully pens everyone in for crowd control, and then as you leave your pen at 12:15 AM, you are asked whether or not you happen to be an American citizen. Can you prove it?  Do you have your papers?  Do you want to leave the pen where the government is holding you?  Do you ever want to see your family or friends again?  How "voluntary" does that feel to you??

When I grew up we were fighting a war, a long cold war, against a tyrannical enemy. And one of the things that enemy did, the Reds, the Communists, that were the bane of our existence and our mortal enemy for 40 years, one of the things we were supposed to abhor, was it made people keep their papers with them at all times.  Not the USA. Not Americans.  We were free. We had the right to go and do as we pleased.

If we become more and more like the Soviet Union, surround ourselves with an Iron Curtain of fear, we have much bigger problems than Mexican illegals cleaning our hotel rooms or even -- or even -- a terrorist successfully bombing Times Square or the subway system.

When I left my apartment on September 12, 2001 to walk into a very empty and very shaken Manhattan with literally and sadly an odor of death wafting over, for a memorial service at my synagogue, I did so in part because I needed to go into Manhattan that evening, to show that I could and that we were going to outlast the enemies that had attacked the day before.

And now, in order to defeat our enemies we allow ourselves bit-by-bit and step-by-step to become what we once struggled to defeat.

I feel less secure reading an article like this one in the NY Times than I did journeying into Manhattan on 9/12.  

security!

You know how much I love our airport security regime, so here's a nice article sent my way courtesy of a tweet from Elizabeth Moon

http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/08/06/airport_security/index.html

And of course it isn't just at the airport. Still have fond memories of the Washington Nationals, who let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not the same bottle empty. For all the TSA lunacy, at least they let me bring an empty bottle in to fill up at water fountain and take on to plane.

Why do we put up with this, people? Why do we put up with it??

Restrepo

Restrepo is a documentary about a US Army base in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. It is the effort of noted writer Sebastian Junger, whose book The Perfect Storm was the source material for George Clooney movie of same name, and British photographer and documentarian Tin Hetherington. The two embedded with the 2nd platoon of the Army's 173rd Airborne, who are assigned to the Korengal in Summer 2007. Taking daily fire from Taliban forces, the commander decides to essentially leapfrog his opponents by building a smaller outpost that can put Army eyes on some of the attack routes. That outpost is named Restrepo, after one of the soldiers killed by the Taliban, and that in turn the name of the movie.

Cinematically, the film is certainly to be recommended. The filmmakers were embedded for an extended period. When the bullets were flying, when the firefights were raging, when the unit was out on a dangerous patrol in areas ceded to the Taliban, the filmmakers were there. So they earned the right to film up close and personal, and we are there. In that regard the film is a lot like the often powerful work of documentarian Frederic Wiseman, whose Titticut Follies or Basic Training are pioneeering works of cinema. One major difference: after their tour the soldiers in the unit were interviewed in Italy on their way back home. This adds perspective, but at the cost of adding an element straight out of modern reality TV to the formal verite lines of the film.

Alas, there's one thing that seriously detracts from the film's claims to the cinema verite label. We are embedded with a unit that is fighting and dying, and we see no blood. Soldier dies, the film pans delicately to his boot. I can blame the filmmakers a little for this, but not a lot. Their film reflects an American mores in which blood in war is supposed to hide out only in fiction. If the NY Times or Washington Post puts too graphic a picture on its front page there are howls of outrage at the idea that innocent children might be exposed. Sticky wicket here because you are embedded and close to the men and arguably should have some respect for their privacy, but when the bloodlessness calls attention to itself that's a mistake too. There's a lot of build-up in the movie for Operation Rock Avalanche, when the Army forces decide to build on their success erecting Restrepo by going on actual patrol in a part of the terrain that the Army hasn't given the boots-on-ground treatment to, which is certain to and does result in combat with the Taliban who are happy to wage war on their own turf. But almost all the bad stuff that happens in Rock Avalanche, we get described by the soldiers during their well after-the-fact interviews in Italy. Even though the embedded journalists are out on patrol, with their cameras, almost certainly taking footage that could better depict what's happening -- and maybe even without being the most graphic parts of that footage.

Because of its verite elements this is very really what it's like to be a GI in the middle of nowhere on Afghanistan. The isolation, the band of brothers, the day-to-day, the professionalism, the challenge of winning hearts ands minds of the people you're fighting. There's a lot to learn by sitting and watching.

One on level, the movie's a kind of success story. Army lives are lost, but Restrepo does succeed in blocking the Taliban paths to the main outpost, considerably reducing the level of attacks.

But there's also a pointlessness to the whole affair, on two levels.

First, we can learn a lot and still learn nothing, by which I mean that you're unlikely to leave Restropo thinking any differently about the war than you did before the coming attractions. It's grunt's eye POV makes it very easy to take from the movie whatever lessons you most feel like takng.

Which to me is the second poiintlessness. We as a country cannot afford to fight them over there so they don't attack us here when the over there means the Korengal Valley, backwards people clinging to a bare sustenance existence in ramshackle houses clinging to the sides of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. If we can't take the best shot these people have to offer and bounce back from whatever blow that might be, then Western civilization is as hollow and doomed as the Soviet Union in 1985. This isn't to say that these people can't do us harm; I woke up on September 11, 2001 planning to visit the Borders at the World Trade Center after work. I was in London a month after the 7/7 subway bombings. I know what can happen. But we cannot win that battle posting troops on the Korengal.

And in fact the Korengal was abandoned by the US Army subsequent to the events seen here. 50 soldiers lost their lives in the Valley. That doesn't account for the opportunity cost of what else we could have done with the resources we poured into the Korengal.

How much would it cost to have a propaganda machine that tries to point out all the Muslim-on-Muslim suicide bombings that take place on a weekly if not daily basis vs how much we spent in the Korengal? If we don't have the ability to wage a war like that, we can pour all the resources we want into Afghanistan, Somalia, Kenya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, anywhere, and we aren't going to accomplish anything except bankrupting ourselves well before exposing the bankrupt ideology of our opponents. We probably should invest in schools in Afghanistan because literate people are more likely to make good Afghan policeman and less likely to buy what the Taliban are selling. But we can also invest in things like high-speed rail in the US, streets in NYC that aren't riddled with potholes and pavement seams, a National Mall in DC that doesn't look like the dust bowl. Only, we can't do that so well when we're pouring money into the Korengal.

In any event, this is a film worth seeing, very well worth seeing. We've seen a lot of documentaries or realistic enough fiction films about the Baghdad or Iraqi desert side of our wars on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the POV we get in Restrepo we've seen hardly at all. This would be an excellent way of broadening perspective even were it not just about the only way of doing it.