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Ed Felten raises some very interesting points about the recent terrorist threat against planes and our response: Just as interesting as the attackers’ plans is the government response of beefing up airport security. The immediate security changes made sense in the short run, on the theory that the situation was uncertain and the arrests might trigger immediate attacks by unarrested co-conspirators. But it seems likely that at least some of the new restrictions will continue indefinitely, even though they’re mostly just security theater. ...

Paul Pechonis was arrested at his home for allegedly threatening the life of a police officer on his website. This was a police officer who allegedly threatened to hold a gun to the head of his son. That arrest was videotaped with the consent of all parties except the police, by a camera in Pechonis’ home. The video was placed online by Mary Jean, who has been threatened with felony charges for posting it. A federal judge issued an injunction supporting Jean, which the Attorney General has appealed. Jean has the support of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the lawfirm of Choate, Hall & Stewart. Jean is the webmaster of conte2006.com, a website critical of Worcester County district attorney John Conte, which is where the video is hosted. You can also find the video on YouTube. Although the video has been described by some as showing an “invasive search” without a warrant, the officers say they are just checking the home to see if anyone else is present. They are not shown moving or opening anything on camera, and the search is very brief (just a few minutes)–I don’t see any evidence of an “invasive search." Now prosecutors have threatened Pechonis, issuing a cease and desist order for merely linking to the video of his arrest from his own website. Good job, prosecutors–you’ve just ensured that there will be much more attention to this video and Pechonis’ case. (Hat tip to The Agitator.)

Gadi Evron has now suggested, following Paul Vixie, that it’s a waste of time to fight botnets by shutting down botnet controllers. Here’s what I wrote to some colleagues when I read Vixie’s statement that stomping out botnets is not only a waste of time, but counter-productive because it causes botherders to change their behavior and find new malicious techniques: 1. If you don’t stomp them they are still going to develop new ways of doing things as a result of internal competition. It may happen more slowly, but it will still happen. There’s no getting around an arms race. Even taking his analogy seriously, he wouldn’t recommend that we stop using antibiotics. 2. Waiting on law enforcement to start effectively prosecuting will take a long time, and I don’t think I’ll be happy with what it will take for them to do it (I’m already unhappy with the new CALEA draft bill that’s circulating). Criminal prosecution will likely never target more than a minority of offenders–mostly the high-profile cases. 3. Taking action raises their costs, which applies more broadly the same economic effect as prosecution does in a narrower and stronger manner. Again, if we take the antibiotic analogy seriously, a diversity of approaches is better than relying on a single approach. 4. Our experience seems to indicate a drop in botnet controller activity when we hit them consistently. If the bulk of miscreants follow the path of least resistance, putting up a fight will tend to push them to environs where people aren’t putting up a fight.Shutting down botnet controllers does have positive effects–and it’s much quicker and reliable than law enforcement prosecution. I think a diversity of defensive actions is important, and we need to continue developing more of them–as I said above, it is a continuing arms race. Richard Bejtlich has also commented on this subject at his TaoSecurity blog, and there’s some good discussion in the comments. David Bianco has offered a suggestion at the InfoSecPotpourri blog. Bianco’s suggestion is to modify the botnet C&C traffic, which in order to be most effective would have to occur at either large consumer ISPs (where 99+% of the bots are located) or at a small number of high-volume, low-cost webhosting companies (where 75+% of the botnet controllers are located). There are a number of approaches that are being developed, which I won’t describe in any detail here, but I agree that new approaches need to go more strongly after the bots themselves rather than just the botnet controllers. Those approaches need to use Netflow, and they need to use DNS. We also need to provide incentives for consumers with old, unpatched, vulnerable systems to protect themselves and to be protected by their ISPs–that’s where the biggest bang for the buck will occur.

Yesterday there were numerous news reports about a woman’s water bottle testing positive, twice, for explosive residue and being identified as problematic by a bomb-sniffing dog. She was allegedly taken for questioning by the FBI. Today, there seems to be little followup about the fact that it was actually makeup that triggered false positives.

Nick Carr writes of the blogosphere: What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.What’s the fraud? Carr claims that the top-ranked blogs have established a hierarchy of control over the entire blogosphere: The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.But Carr is not only ignoring the facts of a comparison between the blogosphere and the mass media (the point of his initial comparison), he’s ignoring mobility of rank and the specifics of the audiences of lower-ranked blogs. I’ve seen my blog get visits from all sorts of interesting places, by people I would not ordinarily be able to speak to. John Koetsier at bizhack (who I’ve only come across because of this topic) says it very well when he points out the role of luck in getting a mass audience: ...

The 41st Skeptic’s Circle is now out at Interverbal, in the form of an Awards Night presentation.

Although the ACLU’s lawsuit against AT&T in Illinois was thrown out, a separate case in Michigan filed on January 17 of this year against the NSA for warrantless wiretapping without approval of the FISA Court has resulted in a ruling by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that the practice is unconstitutional and must stop immediately. This is not the final decision in the case, but the granting of an injunction for the plaintiff. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T also continues.

Phoenix cracked the top ten for the first time in Forbes magazine’s best metropolitan areas for business (at #6); Arizona is down at #15 in the list of best states for business. Tucson ranks #77. Phoenix scored high for colleges, cost of doing business, culture and leisure, job growth, and net migration; it scored poorly for cost of living, and crime rate, and was somewhere in the middle on educational attainment, cost of doing business, and income growth. Tucson scores better than Phoenix on educational attainment and income growth, but is worse on every other measure. Arizona was ranked highly for labor costs (#7), economic climate (#1), and growth prospects (#13), poorly for regulatory environment (#36) and quality of life (#43), and in the middle for business costs (#24). Arizona has four billionaires–John Sperling and his son Peter of the Apollo Group (and University of Phoenix and Kronos Group), Campbell Soup heir Bennett Dorrance, and Arturo Moreno of Outdoor Systems. An interesting point in the summary is that the United States now has the highest corporate taxes of any OECD nation. UPDATE (March 9, 2007): Forbes has updated its billionaire list for 2007, and there are no changes for Arizona–the same four Arizonans are billionaires, with none dropping off the list and no new ones showing up. Bennett Dorrance is at #432, Arturo Moreno, John Sperling, and Peter Sperling are all tied at #799. Last year the list was much smaller–Bennett Dorrance was at #153, John and Peter Sperling were tied at #297, and Arturo Moreno was at #354. ...

Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray raises some questions about the UK liquid bomb plot. Bruce Schneier points to a similarly critical discussion by Perry Metzger on Dave Farber’s interesting people list.

The Sunlight Foundation (along with Porkbusters, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, and the Examiner Newspapers) is attempting to identify the sources of over 1,800 earmarks in the 2007 appropriations bill for the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. They’ve got a Google Map showing the locations of each recipient. There are a number of them in Arizona; a cursory look suggests that most of them are in the districts of Arizona’s Democratic Representatives, Grijalva and Pastor.