Source.

The downside: You have to pay $150 to check your luggage.

The upside: You get a free physical.

Previously:
A frustrating glimpse inside Homeland Security
Winning the war on liquids

Screenshot from Mashable:

I doubt the majority of Americans will be impacted by this change. After all, the people likely to visit a website whose URL is in Arabic or Cyrillic or Chinese probably already speak the language. And in terms of national security, I don’t think it will be an issue since people in the intelligence community who monitor Arabic websites will be able to make sense of the URLs.

Where it could be an issue, though, is for the average user who doesn’t speak a non-Latin language. As Gizmodo and others have already pointed out, they pose a greater phishing threat. But even for legitimate sites, will there be a way to translate the URLs into Latin characters for non-native-speaking users, similar to Google’s “translate this page” feature?

I guess the rule of thumb for such sites is that unless you can speak (or at least read) the language, don’t go there.

(Also interesting to note how many Arab commenters on Mashable say that Arabic domains are unnecessary and will only cause confusion. Therefore it makes me wonder how many of these we’ll actually see other than from official government sites and extremist groups.)

I showed up for work a little before 8:00 AM, and the office was still pretty quiet. I walked down the row of cubicles to say hi to my friend Larry, and I found him staring at his monitor. “Did you hear about this?” he asked. Of course I hadn’t. “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.” Oh my God! How awful!

I got back to my desk and pulled up any news website I could get, trying to find out what happened. Normally, there were TVs at the end of the rows permanently tuned to MSNBC, but none of them had been working for a week or so. And now I couldn’t reach any of the major news sites (msnbc.com, cnn.com, etc.) as they were all flooded with traffic. I was able to get some information on the Dallas Morning News site, though, and kept reloading it over and over to try and get the latest updates. This was a terrible accident!

Then came the news that another plane had hit the other tower, and we understood that it was no accident.

Within the hour, a third plane hit the Pentagon, and it was clear we were under attack. By that time the TVs had been turned back on, and we split our attention between them and any other news we could get online. Everything seemed to be pretty chaotic.

And then the south tower collapsed.

I couldn’t believe it. It was all so surreal. For a few moments I sat there thinking how there would only be a single World Trade Center building now and how strange that would be. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Then came reports of a fourth plane down, this time in rural Pennsylvania, possibly the result of a hijacking that had been thwarted. But when would it end? How many more planes were still in the air, and what else could happen? And then shortly after that, the north tower of the World Trade Center gave way.

Throughout the rest of the morning, we could only watch helplessly as we tried to grasp what had occurred in such a short amount of time. The phones, which were typically pretty busy at that time of the day, were quiet, but there were a few calls coming in here and there. We handled them the best we could, but our minds were clearly not on our work. At lunch, everyone gathered in the cafeteria, where the company had agreed to buy everyone’s meal. Everyone around me was angry and could only talk about getting revenge on the people who had carried out the attacks. But I was silent, barely able to hold myself together. After I was done eating, I went to my car and broke down in tears, and then I prayed; it was the only thing I could do.

I got home that evening and hugged and kissed my wife. At that time we usually didn’t eat dinner at the table, but we did that night, turning the TV off in order to have a break from the news for a few minutes. And I prayed again, for our nation, for the families of the victims, and for my daughter Megan, who was only 5 months old at the time.

It’s been 8 years since the attacks on September 11th, and I can still feel the gut-wrenching fear, confusion, and overwhelming sadness that I experienced on that day. And that’s a good thing. We should never forget.

God Bless America.

As Wired points out, S-773 has been revised significantly since then, removing much of the controversial language and replacing it with more sensible (albeit general) guidelines for dealing with with cyber attacks on the U.S.:

(2) [I]n the event of an immediate threat to strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network—
(A) [the President] may declare a cybersecurity emergency; and
(B) may, if the President finds it necessary for the national defense and security, and in coordination with relevant industry sectors, direct the national response to the cyber threat and the timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network;
(3) shall, in coordination with various critical infrastructure industry sectors, develop detailed cyber emergency response and restoration plans for each critical infrastructure industry sector;

(Full text of the bill here.)

Further, the revised bill seems to negate S-778, which called for the creation of an Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor. Instead, S-773 calls for a Cybersecurity Advisory Panel, which would be comprised of “representatives of industry, academic, non-profit organizations, interest groups and advocacy organizations, and State and local governments who are qualified to provide advice and information on cybersecurity research, development, demonstrations, education, personnel, technology transfer, commercial application, or societal and civil liberty concerns”.

All in all, it’s a vast improvement over the original bill. It gives the President the ability to quickly respond to critical threats to the nation’s information infrastructure, and in emergencies such as those of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, such a response is absolutely vital. And when you consider how vulnerable we are to a targeted cyber attack, it’s obvious we must be prepared to deal with those crises.

That said, the bill is certainly not ideal. First, it still gives the White House authority over private-sector networks and information systems in the event of an emergency without specifically limiting that authority. In other words, the definition of what constitutes a “cybersecurity emergency” is still at the sole discretion of the White House, opening the door to potential abuse. And as I pointed out in April, President Obama has proven time and again that he is more than willing to seize control of private corporations if given the chance.

Second, the inclusion of “interest groups” on the Advisory Panel should raise an immediate red flag. Think ACORN, the ACLU, RIAA lobbyists, and other groups. How much influence groups like that would have is unclear, but do we really want to find out?

The revision of S-773 has definitely eased some concerns, but there is still more room for improvement.

Previously:
Bill would give government unrestricted control over the Internet

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

The bill does not only add to the power of the president. It also grants the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” This means he or she can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws. …

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that granting such power to the Commerce secretary could actually cause networks to be less safe. When one person can access all information on a network, “it makes it more vulnerable to intruders,” Granick says. “You’ve basically established a path for the bad guys to skip down.”

The bill’s scope, she says, is “contrary to what the Constitution promises us.”

I’m all in favor of increasing cybersecurity but clearly not at this cost. The Obama administration already has proved it has no qualms about removing executives from private sector companies, despite having absolutely no constitutional authority to do so. If this bill were to pass as-is, what’s to stop the White House from seizing control of AT&T, Verizon, and other ISPs and dictating what information is allowed and not allowed to pass over their networks? As it stands now, nothing.

And you thought the Bush-era NSA wiretapping was bad.

Previously:
Privacy and free speech in an online world
‘Great Firewall’ coming to Australia. Is the U.S. next?
Stimulus bill includes medical databases for ‘biosurveillance’

With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the “war on terror,” as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless. …

Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, points out:

The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots.

Nice. While we’re busy digging a nice, big hole in the sand to stick our heads back in, Osama bin Laden is laughing his off in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

You know, I seem to recall something Obama said in his inauguration speech:

[F]or those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us….

Oops. Guess he was wrong.

Previously:
How history will judge the Iraq War

The series follows agents from border control, customs, and the TSA as they hunt down illegal immigrants, inspect imported products, and attempt to secure the border against drugs and terrorists. And it’s that “attempt” part that’s so maddening.

The show plays out like an infomercial for the DHS: no illegal aliens evade capture, no drugs or weapons get through the border, every agent gets their man.

But it’s not that simple in real life, is it? For every illegal alien that gets arrested and deported, there are dozens of others who aren’t caught. For every kilo of cocaine found inside a spare tire (bundled in diapers to throw off the dogs!), there’s more that isn’t. For every emotional TSA agent vowing to protect the little children who fly our airlines, there are others who frankly don’t care. For every Swiss belly-dancer trying to enter the country illegally… um… well, OK, that might be a unique case.

Anyway, the point is that while we absolutely need ICE and the TSA and the DHS, it seems like a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. You catch someone trying to cross the border illegally and deport them, but they’ll almost certainly be back again and again until they succeed. How can that not be demoralizing to the agents that have to deal with it day in and day out?

Like most other people, I don’t really have any definitive answers. I don’t know how you can effectively secure the borders by building a huge fence or passing some new legislation. The drugs, the illegal immigration, it’s all fueled by supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for cheap, unskilled, undocumented labor in the U.S., there will be a ready supply. As long as there is a demand for drugs, there will be someone willing to risk their lives to provide them. As long as there is a demand for inexpensive products from other countries, there will be companies willing to cut corners at any cost in order to put them into consumers’ hands.

If anything, I suppose, the point of the show is to remind viewers that there are thousands of men and women out there fighting these battles daily. Believe me, I’m thankful for the all the ones they win. It’s the ones they don’t that we should be concerned about.

“I think realistically in one year we, the TSA and foreign colleagues, will be a position to relax liquids restrictions,” Hawley told the Middle Seat Thursday. “We are within a year of having the ability to differentiate threat liquids through the screening process.”

Wait. One year? You mean we have to keep stuffing our 3-ounce toilettries into a ziploc bag and having them scrutinized by bitter, minimum wage TSA screeners for a whole other year? What?! C’mon!

Well, at least we’re close to winning the war on deadly footwear and belts. Right?