Security

Privacy for Pets

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Trusty old rover, man’s best friend, now can be tracked, recorded, monitored, and analyzed.

So much for trust and friendship. Love of pets apparently will soon include a feature-rich surveillance system.

A company called SNIF is leading the charge, according to the NYT:

The tags contain computer chips to detect a dog’s motion inside and outside the house. “When the dog is out,” said Noah Paessel, chief executive, “the computer on the tag is running and collecting information on walking and trotting, and storing it in memory on the dog’s tag.”

When the dog returns home, the data stored on its collar are beamed by radio to a nearby receiver connected to a home computer and then to the company Web site for analysis and display.

The tags can also be used for networking. (The company’s name, by the way, stands for Social Networking in Fur.) If dogs wearing the tags meet, the chips on their collars exchange identifying signals, Mr. Paessel said, and a record of the meeting can be kept on the server. If they wish, the owners can then contact one another, too.

Nearby receiver, eh? Sounds like someone could easily track their entire pet-owning neighborhood. On a positive note, if the system has non-repudiation and data integrity controls your dog can be proven innocent more easily.

Security

A Stones-throw

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The East Bay news points out that things can differ significantly only a few blocks apart:

When an eighteen-year-old wielding a Mac-10 submachine gun shot into a passing car from where he stood on California near Parker Street in Berkeley at 9:30 a.m. on July 13, residents speed-dialed the police, who arrived rapidly and, following their descriptions and directions, arrested the shooter. Residents also pointed out a house into which his fifteen-year-old associate had run with the gun. He was nabbed too. “Without the citizen involvement,” says Officer Wesley Hester, “we wouldn’t have caught these people.”

Detection systems are critical to security. Especially when prevention has been neutered by the NRA and a submachine gun in residential neighborhood is a reality. Nearby, a neighborhood faced a different problem:

Just after midnight on July 12, Walnut Creek cops were summoned by a resident who described a blond woman standing in front of a house on Los Altos Avenue, staring. “When the reporting party approached her,” reads the report, “she mumbled about Democrats.”

No word on whether police were able to catch this dangerous mumbler. Incidentally, what are the chances that Walnut Creek residents are against banning submachine guns? There are certainly a fair number of NRA contributions and Bush-Cheney sponsors according to the political contribution records.

History, Poetry, Security

Eritrea Accused of Proxy War Through Somalia

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This is one of those moments when I feel the urge to say “I told you so” or scream in frustration, or something similar.

The UN is trying to point out to those who will listen that Eritrea is believed to be funneling arms into Somalia.

No kidding. That was my main concern last December when the US foolishly pushed Ethiopia back into direct confrontation in the Ogaden region and crushed the Somali peace.

Anyone familiar with the history of conflict in the region could predict that the most recent Ethiopian-led US-backed operation of whacking the bees nest known as the Horn of Africa with a big stick would undermine the nascent government in Somalia and return the region to a hotbed of militarized destablization and bloody terrorism.

Eritrea, of course, denies any involvement in the proliferation of arms:

Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu told Associated Press news agency his country had not provided any assistance to the Shabab.

“It is a total fabrication and the intention of the report is to depict it as if there is a proxy war between Eritrea and Ethiopia,” Mr Abdu said.

The Bush administration has been caught lying under oath now so many times, that I imagine it would be hard for them to try and point a finger at any other country and demand accountability. I doubt they could even bring up the term corruption without losing all credibility. But I digress…

It does seem plausable that Eritrea has continued their historic fight with Ethiopia by arming former allies in Somalia. In fact, I was having a hard time understanding why they did not resist the Ethiopian incursion. Now, in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that they waited for the conventional forces to move in and get bogged down before initiating a protracted resistance movement. That is what they are most famous for and how they defeated Mengistu’s giant Soviet/Chinese/Cuban-backed army over 30 years — the largest standing force in the world at the time.

I think people forget that a tank has become a sign of former security (control) capability, not present or future.

My best guess as to why the Bush administration has been so unbelievably counter-productive in foreign policy in the Horn is that they are still stuck in a fantasy of the Cold War mentality. They think that Reagan won, when in fact it was the other side unilaterally attempting to take a path of greater accountability for a failed and corrupt economic system, as I’ve mentioned before too.

The idea under Reagan was to stop the Communists at any cost. Destablizing a region meant potentially bringing down a group that could fall, or already was, into the “hands of the Reds”. Unfortunately, this strategy in today’s world brings about the opposite effect, leading regions into a harsh anti-establishment highly-distributed position as the discontent of rubble is a power-vacuum more easly filled by “the Fundies” (religious fundamentalists and other extremists) than blue-jeans and Coca Cola.

Saying that the US can send in their heavy forces to reconnect with the outliers once they have had their network plugs pulled is like saying IBM will convince iPhone users that they want to connect to their mainframe. Sadly, the current big-blue thinkers in the White House just don’t get it.