Russ McBee

Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, announced another in a long line of stupid security policies today: The United States said Tuesday that visitors from closely allied countries like Britain and Japan will soon have to register personal details online at least three days before arrival. Homeland Security Secretary Michael ...

Matt Blaze accidentally discovered some arguably sensitive information in a US Justice Department audit of wiretapping expenditures. Blaze is a security wizard, so it should come as no surprise that he is well-versed in the art of breaking secure systems. His technique in this case, however, relied on nothing more than copy-and-paste (via ...

I missed a couple of stories this week on the shoddy, ineffective, and inaccurate compilation of federal ''terrorism'' watch lists, and the consequences of unfettered government surveillance without appropriate oversight. First, this story details two reports by the inspectors general of the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the ...

In 2004, the Department of Homeland ''Security'' passed a regulation which would have required anyone entering the US from Canada to provide proof of identity and citizenship: either a passport or a drivers' license plus a birth certificate. Congress enacted a law which prohibited DHS from implementing this rule until 2009. In arrogant defiance ...

Two (mostly) unrelated stories caught my eye today; both have to do with protecting the wrong interests. First, President Bush has refused to sign a defense spending bill; his reasons were curious: And then Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Bush announced he will veto a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that ...

Earlier this week, it was reported that hackers had compromised a database inside Oak Ridge National Laboratory; this database contained personal data on all visitors to ORNL from 1990 through 2004. The names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and addresses of all those visitors had been stolen by thieves. I was one of those visitors. The ...

In 1999, Scott McNealy, the notoriously arrogant and self-absorbed chairman of Sun Microsystems, said, ''You have no privacy. Get over it.'' His profits come first. Your privacy is a remotely distant second. His greed trumps your rights; after all, he does represent a corporation, and we all know that corporate rights trump individual ...

People are stupid: Intruders, apparently drunk, broke into the Orsay Museum in Paris early today and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, Le Pont d'Argenteuil. Here's the wound: In addition to the obvious stupidity of the people who carried out this act of vandalism, the security people at the Musee ...

Two members of a running club face felony charges in Connecticut after using flour to outline a running path. No, really: Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge. The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an ...

The TSA has finally realized that confiscating lighters is a waste of resources and doesn't improve security: Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded. [...] Kip Hawley, ...