Monthly Archives: May 2007

Security

Stallone’s hormones

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Rhymes, eh?

Apparently the famous American movie star was unaware that his vials of muscle enhancing drugs are a controlled substance in Australia. He thus had an unpleasant surprise when he disembarked from his private jet and was found carrying 48 vials of Chinese GeneScience pharmaceuticals.

Nothing terribly surprising about a US movie star unfamiliar with a foreign country, I suppose, but the part of story that caught my attention was his lawyer’s defense:

Boulten said Stallone was taking both substances under medical supervision.

“This is not some back-alley body builder dealing covertly with some banned substance in some sort of secret way,” he said. “This was a legitimate medical condition being treated by doctors of the top ranking order in the west coast of the United States.”

Oh the irony. Not only was Stallone carrying a Chinese drug, but the US is hardly considered a pinnacle of scientific research or engineering in the world worthy of respect. Here is how Australian medical literature often refers to American practices:

The pharmaceutical industry reacted vigorously to the threat posed by the NIH advice to their $8 billion a year antacid market by making a swift deal with the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to allow their antiulcer drugs to be sold without a prescription. With this master stroke the drug companies freed medical doctors from the ethical burden of prescribing ineffective, costly drugs while at the same time maintaining or perhaps even expanding their market among the broad segment of the population who had never heard of H. pylori much less the 1994 NIH advice. Not surprisingly, the drug company executive who negotiated the deal with the FDA was later named one of the 25 most successful business men in a 1995 survey by Business Week.

Success from freedom from ethics? Stallone has played the big dumb violent guy so well in the popular media that he is actually a caricature of America’s new place in the world — rich dumb violent guys who want things their way with little/no respect for laws. Shoot first (pun intended) ask questions later. It seems customs officials were not impressed:

“You have not been validly prescribed the goods by a medical practitioner for any medical condition suffered by you and for which the goods are recognised medical treatment,” Stallone was told in a customs document submitted to the court.

They seem to have a higher standard for prescriptions down under. Back to the lawyer’s comment, who in their right mind would demand Australians of all people must pay homage to pharmaceuticals prescribed in the US when Australians have uncovered so much of the corrupt underpinnings of US medicine?

Also, what does Stallone’s lawyer mean by “some sort of secret way”? The AP gives some key details:

Three days later, Stallone threw four vials of the male hormone testosterone from his Sydney hotel room when customs officials arrived to search it, prosecutor David Agius told the court. […] Agius said Stallone had demonstrated a “consciousness of guilt” by throwing the testosterone from the hotel.

I can just see Stallone’s reaction: “What, you don’t throw your trash off the balcony in Australia either? Who can live with all these rules?” At some point the ignorance stops being funny, usually when it starts to threaten the welfare of others, even if the perpetrator is making good money (or avoiding cleanup/maintenance costs) from their violations.

The so called “top ranking order” the lawyer tries to reference appears to be in grave danger as indignant fools who profit from folly and corruption threaten to become become America’s dominant image abroad.

Stallone’s stupidity will probably have less impact than Wolfowitz’s, but you never know:

Wolfowitz, who has the morals and dignity of a feral dog, finally put out a memo today taking “full responsibility� (he’s not quitting) for brazenly stealing money from the world’s poor to pay for his adulteress. The World Bank’s board will fire him later this week.

Poetry, Security

The City and Its Own

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by Irving Feldman

Among the absolute graffiti which
—stenciled, stark, ambiguous-command
from empty walls and vacant lots,
POST NO BILLS, NO TRESPASSING HERE:
age and youth-Diogenes, say,
and Alexander, dog-philosophy
and half-divine, too-human imperium-”
colliding, linger to exchange ideas
about proprietorship of the turf.
Hey, mister, you don't own the sidewalk!
Oh yeah?
Yeah! the city owns the sidewalk—mister!
Oh yeah! says who?
Thus power's rude ad hominem walks all over
the civil reasoner, the civic reason.


Everyone has something.
Everything is someone's.

The city is the realm of selves in rut
and delirium of ownership, is property,
objects made marvelous by prohibition
whereby mere things of earth become ideas,
thinkable beings in a thought-of world
possessed by men themselves possessed by gods.

        . . .

So I understood at twelve and thirteen,
among the throngs of Manhattan,
that I dodged within a crowd of gods
on the streets of what might be heaven.
And streets, stores, stairs, squares, all
that glory of forbidden goods, pantheon
of properties open to the air,
gave poor boys lots to think about!
And then splendor of tall walkers
striding wide ways, aloof and thoughtful
in their nimbuses of occupation,
advancing with bright assurance as if
setting foot to say, This is mine, I
am it-and passing on to add,
Now yield it to you, it is there.
Powers in self-possession, their thinking
themselves was a whirling as they went,
progressing beyond my vista to possess
unthought-of worlds, the wilderness.

These definitions, too, have meant to draw
a line around, to post and so prohibit,
and make our vacant lot a sacred ground.
Here then I civilize an empty page
with lines and letters, streets and citizens,
making its space a place of marvels now
seized and possessed in thought alone.
You may gaze in, you must walk around.
—Aha (you say), conceit stakes out its clay!
—That is a cynic's interpretation,
pulling the ground out from under my feet;
I fall, I fear, within your definition
which, rising and dusting off my knees,
civilly I here proclaim our real estate,
ours in common, the common ground
of self, a mud maddened to marvel
and mingle, generously, in generation.

Nice interpretation of infrastructure and controls.

History, Security

Stasi files to be reassembled

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A good deal of money and effort is being spent by German researchers to reverse the document destruction used by the East German secret police group called Stasi. Although this seems noble for the causes of computer science, history and perhaps even justice, it starts to beg the question whether this will raise the bar for those who want to safely destroy their documents. Nature reports:

Bertram Nickolay, head of security technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK) in Berlin, says that the heart of the reconstruction software that his team has spent years developing is powered by algorithms designed to recognize and process digital patterns and images.

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface, Nickolay says. Just like a person doing a jigsaw, the computer then groups the images into clusters with similar features, and finally fits pieces in each cluster together. The software should get better with time, Nickolay notes. “It learns as it processes.”

Sounds impressive. But “torn” documents? That doesn’t sound like secret police security.

“It was a mountain of files,” says Bormann. The Stasi lacked enough paper-shredding machines to do the job right, and began tearing documents by hand and stuffing them into bags.

The plan had been to transport bags bulging with documents by trucks to locations where they could be burned, but by January 1990 East German citizens had taken control of Stasi offices and the plan could not be carried out. West German authorities eventually seized still-intact Stasi documents and more than 16,000 bags of ripped documents.

Sounds like someone in Stasi under-prepared and over-engineered the document destruction process and thus left a giant gaping hole, which led to recovery of the files. Did they stuff all the related pages together into nicely labeled bags? Makes me wonder what was really going on in the final days — from incompetence to intentional internal subterfuge to facilitate reconstruction of files.

Project leader Jan Schneider says the algorithms used for the software could also be used to reconstruct documents shredded into much more uniform pieces by machines. “It wouldn’t be too complicated,” he says.

Ha. Neither is organizing and burning paper, but look where that ended.

History, Poetry, Sailing, Security

Man Sails the Deep Awhile

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by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

Man sails the deep awhile;
Loud runs the roaring tide;
The seas are wild and wide;
O’er many a salt, o’er many a desert mile,
The unchained breakers ride,
The quivering stars beguile.

Hope bears the sole command;
Hope, with unshaken eyes,
Sees flaw and storm arise;
Hope, the good steersman, with unwearying hand,
Steers, under changing skies,
Unchanged toward the land.

O wind that bravely blows!
O hope that sails with all
Where stars and voices call!
O ship undaunted that forever goes
Where God, her admiral,
His battle signal shows!

What though the seas and wind
Far on the deep should whelm
Colours and sails and helm?
There, too, you touch that port that you designed –
There, in the mid-seas’ realm,
Shall you that haven find.

Some interesting commentary on Stevenson can be found on the website by RCAHMS (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), in reference to Barra Head Lighthouse:

Barra Lighthouse

Although Robert Louis Stevenson had to fight hard to be allowed to express his literary talent instead of following in the footsteps of his grandfather, uncles and father, he appreciated their achievements. In 1880 he wrote:

‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vore for my Uncle Alan and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn brightly for the genius of my father.’