Day: June 3, 2002

They Said She Couldn’t Strip — They Didn’t Say Anything about Posing for Playboy

Christina Silvas’ 5-year-old daughter was expelled from kindergarten at Capital Christian School in Rancho Cordova, California, after the church that runs the school discovered that Silvas was supporting herself by stripping at a local bar.

Christina and the church reached an agreement that the child could finish the last three weeks of school if Silvas gave up stripping during that time. But the agreement didn’t say she couldn’t pose for Playboy (link features interview with some PG-13 pix), so that’s what she did.

Ego-Surfing in the Google Twilight Zone

Somebody e-mailed me out of the blue today with a bizarre complaint and request.

This person, lets just call him George, was someone that my wife and I knew very briefly about 5 years ago. Lisa had written a column about rape for the college newspaper, and people from the campus feminist group were outraged and showed up outside the newspaper to protest.

So George was assigned by the student newspaper to write a story about that protest. This happened back in September 1997, and I made a web page with links to all sorts of articles, including Lisa’s column, and included a link to the story that George wrote about the controversy.

And I hadn’t thought about that particular episode in a long time until George wrote me out of the blue. You see, I put all of the rape-related stuff on a page just titled “Rape.” So now, if you do a Google search on George’s name, the second link that comes up is this “Rape” page. As George put it,

When my name is typed in to a search engine, the word “Rape” is very noticeable near the top. . . . I would appreciate it kindly if you could help [rectify that].

The really weird thing is that the link Google returns isn’t even a real page — it’s a redirect. In fact if you look at the Google cache, it is clearly a cached redirect (the link on the results page is different than the URL from which the cache content is taken from). Why Google returns the redirect but not the actual page as a result is really mystifying.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Google comes up with odd results when it only finds a handful of hits on a search term, and in this case a search on his name only returns 11 links.

Hopefully adding this redirect page to the robots.txt file will fix the problem.

Self-Parody from Scripting News

Dave Winer’s latest missive had me laughing out loud this morning,

A pet peeve keeps coming up, a reminder why I don’t like working with the most vocal people on the syndication mail lists. They write UserLand out of the story. This isn’t fair, or productive, or honorable. I’ve been watching as some people cover the work of the last few days. They’re not pointing to us. OK. I guess they must be scared, but guys, this isn’t how you do evangelism.

Yeah, that certainly would suck to be a small company and have your efforts ignored by people who do not know how to act fair or honorably just because they are scared.

Orin Judd on the Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t FBI

The other day I complained that the second-guessing of the FBI’s decisions prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was somewhat unfair because of the mixed messages that the FBI receives from the press and American public. Orin Judd digs up the sort of thing I was talking about by examining a couple of columns by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

In a November 2001 column, after an attack that killed a few thousand people, Dowd warned the public to be skeptical of Ashcroft’s edicts,

But even as we cut the guy some slack, we have to be really skeptical about his assertions of power. It was telling that the first resistance to his edict to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men came from police chiefs objecting to racial profiling. We’re trying to trust someone whose instincts once did not inspire universal trust to rethink the way civil liberties will be treated for a generation.

But then, this weekend, Dowd had this to say about the Coleen Rowley memo (emphasis added),

Now we know the truth: The 9/11 terrorists could have been stopped, if everyone in the F.B.I. had been as hard-working and quick-witted as Special Agent Rowley. Or if the law enforcement agencies had not been so inept, obstructionist, arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious — and timid about racial profiling. As The Economist notes, “There is a big difference between policemen picking on speeding black drivers and spies targeting Arabs who might harbor plans to set off nuclear bombs.”

Huh? If the FBI had acted on that Phoenix agent’s memo and began interviewing all Arab immigrants taking flight training, does anybody really think the New York Times and Maureen Dowd would have done anything but scream to the heavens about the evils of racial profiling?

The reaction of civil libertarians about the recent revelations has been very disappointing. Such people commonly throw around Ben Franklin’s adage that “Those that would sacrifice their freedom for safety will find they inherit neither,” and yet the second a few terrorists manage to exploit surveillance holes to carry off a major terrorist attack, suddenly everybody’s running around wondering why the FBI wasn’t doing more intensive monitoring and racial profiling. (And, of course, then they turn around and freak out when Ashcroft says the FBI can do a Google search.)

Personally, I think people like Dowd are vastly overestimating the odds that the FBI would have been able to prevent 9/11 or some version of it. Even if the FBI searches Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and devotes the necessary agents to search flight schools, would they have been able to stop the 9/11 plot? I doubt it, and even if they had, it is simply impossible to protect an open society such as ours from this sort of terrorist attack. Resources would be better devoted to finding and killing terrorists abroad as well as cutting off the lifeblood of money and supplies that the terrorists need (which, at the moment, still is too politically touchy to do since it would mean isolating a number of states which are officially U.S. allies).