Robin Wright has an interesting story in the Washington Post about the shrinking perimeter that journalists have experienced when travelling in Iraq with the US Secretary of State over the past two years. From a two night stay in a hotel in downtown Baghdad and idle strolls down the streets in mid-2003 to an extremely brief look at the desolate barricades and then a same-day extraction complete with “blackout” to avoid enemy fire; the article makes it sound as though security has deteriorated by nature of the fact that mobility is restricted, information leaks are a major concern and the exchange of goods in public is now impossible.

Have you ever wanted a phone that has a pedometer? How about a music player that you can shake to skip to the next song (yes, as a feature — perhaps it came as a side-effect to the non-skip technology rush of the 90s). Leave it to Samsung to bundle these exciting capabilities into a cell phone and then announce “gesture recognition with health management and leisure features”. MobileKorea.TV has more information:

The handset is also loaded with “Bobsleigh�, “Shooting�, and other games, which are activated by the user gesture.

Loaded with Shooting? I can think of a few gestures that might be really bad for one’s health. But I digress…

Next up, phones that recognize you by your gait and can automatically dial numbers based on the steps you take. Two steps to the left, three forward, one step back, you shake it all about and…that’s how you dial “Voicemail”

Her website says it all:

One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.

On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show “papers” whenever a cop demands them.

What would a policeman do with her ID? Was he collecting them, writing them down, or adding them to his database? Was he looking for a specific profile or just “taking names”? What if you did not have an ID? Would he have been able to detect a fake ID if it was from another state or even country? What was the threat? A spy? An imposter? A bomber? The description of the actual event sounds more like bandits in the Wild West staging a hold-up than any kind of federal security mandate:

The second cop said everyone had to show ID any time they were asked by the police, adding that if she were in a Wal-Mart and was asked by the police for ID, that she would have to show it there, too. She explained that she didn’t have to show him or any other policeman my ID on a public bus or in a Wal-Mart. She told him she was simply trying to go to work. Suddenly, the second policeman shouted “Grab her!” and he grabbed the cell phone from her and threw it to the back of the bus. With each of the policemen wrenching one of her arms behind her back, she was jerked out of her seat, the contents of her purse and book bag flying everywhere. The cops shoved her out of the bus, handcuffed her, threw her into the back seat of a police cruiser, and drove her to a police station inside the confines of the Denver Federal Center.

And one of the other passengers was heard yelling “she’s a witch, just look at her nose!” But seriously, what on earth possessed these policemen to do something so rediculously self-defeating? At the very best they created fear among bus passengers, perhaps leading them to sound an alert about the current federal government’s search for an identity, false or otherwise.