Day: October 8, 2001

Until a few years ago, I never really watched the National Football League. But lately I’ve really been fascinated by the whole spectacle of it all. I’ve always been an extremely competitive person, and I really like the hyper-competitive nature of professional sports.

So, as far as I’m concerned, yesterdays Baltimore Ravens/Tennessee Titans game was my idea of the ultimate football contest. Part of that is because both teams are filled with the sort of people who don’t simply memorize and repeat the same stupid cliches over and over.

For example, I think the finest moment I’ve seen in football was actually in an ESPN interview before the game. I can’t remember if it was an interview or a commentator repeating what someone had told him off camera, but when asked what their goal for the game was, one of the Baltimore Ravens said that the goal was to end the Tennessee Titans’ season (the Titans were 0-2, and going 0-3, as the Titans did, pretty much means no chance of making the playoffs).

And the, of course, they went out and made good on all that trash talking.

The dedication to the sport — bordering on obssession sometimes — is also gratifying to watch. As some of the prominents busts, such as Ryan Leaf, demonstrate, simply having the physical skills is not enough to transform one into a world class athlete. Watching someone who has the physical gifts and the mental discipline to achieve such extremely high levels of performance is inspiring.

Well, after falling in the standings to fourth place overall in my Fantasy Baseball league, my superior pitching at the end of the season got me all the way into the playoffs where a boneheaded mistake cost me the championship in a very close contest, 6-4.

Everything was tied up 5-5 going into this weekend, but my devestating pitching core meant I couldn’t lose. I should say, I couldn’t lose unless I looked at the wrong pitching rotation update for the New York Mets, and ended up sitting Kevin Appier on Saturday, thereby allowing my opponent to barely beat me out in the strikeouts category. Ugh.

Still, this is three years of fantasy baseball, and three straight championship games. I guess even I can’t win them all.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, politicians and companies are lining up to bring Orwellian invasions of privacy in order to give the illusion of safety. One technology, already famously used earlier this year at the Super Bowl, is computerized face recognition technology. But when you dig into the details of how this works not only is it an unwarranted invasion of privacy, but the technology doesn’t even work as claimed.

Take, for example, the system being sold by FaceKey which has been evaluated by several government agencies. The system works great in artificially controlled conditions created by the company, but when deployed in the real world, it has a false positive rate that will render it almost useless.

Deploying it in normal lighting conditions and comparing a quick scan of individuals with prior photographs of the test subjects, the best success rate was a 33 percent false positive with a 10 percent false negative. In other words, at best 1 in 3 people who weren’t listed as terrorists were nonetheless flagged as such, while 10 percent of the people designated as terrorists were cleared and allowed to continue on their way.

Consider what this would mean in a real world situation like the rather small Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan. About 2.4 million people pass through Ford International airport. Using this system, assuming that 100 terrorists pass through the airport and the system manages to catch every one, another 660,000 people would be wrongly flagged as terrorists and require some sort of investigation with security officials.

Assume that each such investigation takes only 15 minutes to clear up and the security folks are being paid $9/hour. That amounts to $1.5 million each year just to identify people who are not terrorists.

This system would quickly be ignored by security officials (“there goes the damn face recognition software again. What a piece of crap.”) as it would be completely unworkable.

Source:

Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance. Thomas C Greene, The Register, September 27, 2001.

The BBC’s David Shukman recently visited the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan and wrote a compelling report of the hunger he observed in the Asian country. Hunger which has largely been ignored with the recent emphasis on Afghanistan’s humanitarian disaster.

As Shukman notes, even he found it hard to believe that Tajikistan could go so quickly from part of one of the biggest superpowers in world history to abject poverty and famine. Agricultural conditions in Tajikistan are so bad, that some are experiencing what Shukman calls a negative harvest — the grain they are getting out of the land is actually less than what they originally planted in the form of seeds.

On the other hand, part of the problem is those former Soviet patterns of agriculture. the people Shukman visits are still living on one a giant collective farm — a method of organizing agriculture that caused a couple major famines and numerous smaller food shortages during more than 70 years of Communist rule.

Unfortunately, Tajikistan’s problems have yet to generate much worldwide interest. According to Shukman, “The Red Cross never receives anything like the money it asks for. Donors don’t seem interested. It doesn’t fit the stereotype of a starving country.”

Source:

Fear and famine in Tajikistan. The BBC, October 6, 2001.

In the last few years there have been a couple of lawsuits filed under the |Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization| statutes against animal rights activists and groups. Long before these lawsuits, however, abortion rights groups were testing the limits of the RICO statutes by suing anti-abortion protesters charging that even if the protesters didn’t directly engage in violent acts, they were nonetheless part of a criminal conspiracy designed to shut down a legitimate enterprise. In the first week of October, developments in two such cases emerged.

In the first case, NOW v. Scheidler, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected an appeal by anti-abortion activist Joseph Scheidler that a court order against him violated his First Amendment rights.

Scheidler and several other people who were members of an anti-abortion group repeatedly engaged in acts of civil disobedience at abortion clinics (which occurred prior to the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act). Among other things, Scheidler and others obstructed access to abortion clinics, damaged clinic property, and on occasion threatened people try to enter the clinic. Pretty much the same tactics often used by animal rights activists.

NOW argued in court that the pattern of actions by Scheidler and his associates constituted evidence of a criminal conspiracy designed to illegally interfere with the operation of a legitimate enterprise. Scheidler, for his part, argued that individuals in his organization were acting on their own ethical principles, and that in fact some members had acted in ways that he disapproved of. The Court rejected that argument, essentially arguing that because the defendants were board members of the same group, had written letters in support of illegal acts, and participated in the planning of illegal acts, that the organization itself had a criminal purpose.

The second case, Planned Parenthood of Columbia/Williamette, et al. v. American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA), et al. revolves around a web site known as the “Nuremberg Files.” The Nuremberg Files site posted pictures and personal information of abortion providers in the form of Wanted Posters.

The anti-abortion activists argued that the web site content was a legitimate form of free speech, but a jury ruled against the activists in a RICO lawsuit and awarded abortion providers a $107.5 million judgment. The Ninth Circuit Court had originally ruled in 1999 that at the Wanted Posters constituted “true threats,” allowing the lawsuit to proceed. But after the jury’s verdict, a three-judge panel reversed the judgment saying that the Wanted Posters were protected by the First Amendment.

Now, the Ninth Circuit Court has agreed to review that decision, and is very likely to restate its original thinking about the wanted posters and reinstate the jury’s verdict. Either way, this lawsuit is definitely headed to the Supreme Court.

If these lawsuits ultimately are successful, they will provide ample tools that will inevitably be used to pursue legal action against animal rights activists. For example, under most circumstances it would be difficult to pursue legal action against an organization such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but under RICO a lawsuit arguing that PETA’s pattern of actions constitute a criminal conspiracy might be successful. And PETA’s pretty careful about putting some distance between itself and those who commit acts of violence — many other groups would be sitting ducks for such lawsuits.

At the very least, as they did with the anti-abortion movement, such lawsuits would cripple many of the more extremist parts of the animal rights movement by tying them up in court for years and forcing them to try to keep up with very expensive legal bills.

Sources:

“Nuremberg Files” Case Will Be Reconsidered. Feminist Daily News Wire, October 4, 2001.

Anti-abortion extremists suffer major court defeat. Feminist Daily News Wire, October 2, 2001.