Dowbrigade

Cards
that can be read from your pocket, without having to be swiped? Incredible
convienience, or an invitation to electronic pocket-picking? How long
til your student ID chip is implanted under your skin during your freshman
physical? Thank goodness this is at MIT, where no student
would dare to actually hack into an official network. No, I did NOT
order 6
cannisters
of
nitros oxide from Acme Welding Company!

MIT has begun to switch faculty and students from magnetic swipe identification
cards to "proximity" cards readable from a distance, but has yet to
address the security concerns with both the new system and the old
system as a whole.

Like the replacement of the student services card with the original,
multipurpose, magnetic-stripe MIT Card in the spring of 1994, the shift
to a new technology raises concerns over security and privacy.The possibility
of covertly reading and copying the cards, even as they rest in other
students’ pockets, remains a concern. Nobody has demonstrated
this, but nobody is prepared to say it is impossible or even particularly
difficult for MIT’s electrical engineering majors.

"Since [proximity cards] can be read at a distance, someone could set
up a bogus ID reader in Lobby 7 to scan ID’s as people pass," said Chris
T. Lesniewski-Laas G, who proposed a replacement for the MIT Card in
1999.

from the
MIT student newspaper

People
considering a tandem skydive would trust cartoon character Homer Simpson
over US President George Bush, according to research.

The public voted the
daft dad of hit TV show "The Simpsons" as their number one choice if
they were participating in the daredevil stunt.

More than 1,000 adults were asked to rank personalities in order of who
they felt was most trustworthy. Homer got 20% of the overall vote in the
survey,
while President Bush got just 8%.

from Ananova

The Globe’s political coverage takes a turn for the lyrical, as
Peter Canellos whips up some wacky images in a review of the convoluted
rhetoric concerning
foreign policy flying around the campaign, and the difficulty in parsing
political pronouncements and off-the-cuff remarks:

Foreign policy has been hidden, twisted, and reduced to slogans in
American presidential campaigns for so long that it makes the discussion
of
domestic issues seem, in contrast, a model of truth in packaging.
Like a chess player dressed in football gear, Bush seems to be preparing
for both a high-minded discussion and a low-minded scrimmage.

from the
Boston Globe

James
Caroll, in a
Boston Globe op-ed piece, mentions some alarming statistics concerning
the US criminal justice system. He makes the argument
that racism has been so effectively and insideously institutionalized
under the guise of the "War on Drugs" that we have liquidated an entire
generation of our minority population. The Dowbrigade assumes that
had he been born a member of a more obvious minority he would have
been
put away long ago…..

In late October, in a speech in Fall River, Robert A. Mulligan, chief
administrative judge of Massachusetts, noted current characteristics
of US criminal justice. The American prison population recently went
over 2 million for the first time, putting the United States ahead of
Russia as the world capital of incarceration. Add to that number those
on parole or probation and the total under "correctional" control
grows to 7 million. Thirty years ago, one in 1,000 Americans was locked
up; today, almost five are. In famously liberal Massachusetts, the prison
population has grown, since 1980, from under 6,000 to almost 23,000.
In 2003, for the first time, the amount of money Massachusetts spent
on prisons was more than what it spent on higher education.

These statistics accumulate a punishing weight falling more on African-American
males than anyone else, and from that springs the year’s fundamental
epiphany. Justice? Democracy? In the United States, according to Judge
Mulligan, one in three African-American males between the ages of 20
and 30 is "under correctional control." In places like Baltimore
and Washington, more than half are. The number of African-American men
in college is less than the number of those under supervision of the
courts.

from the
Boston Globe

December 30, 2003 – Washington — The FBI is warning police nationwide
to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular
annual reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather
trends could be used for terrorist planning.

In a bulletin sent to about 18,000 police organizations,
the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection
and pre-operational planning." It urged officers to watch during searches,
traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially
if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.

from the Associated press