Neither portal nor destination be

This is a set of musings on the nature of blogging brought on via a post at Stacy McCain's site Where Were You in 2002? (h/t: Insty).

Seeing Overlawyered moving over to Cato spurred on the question about 'making the big time' and 'are you a portal or destination?' in Stacy McCain's post.

In 2002 I was healthy, working, and helping to get the last of the Afghan materials out the door in the Agency I worked in before moving over to my R&D slot which I had requested a temporary re-assignment after 9/11/01.  This did not mean I was not interested in blogging, far from it, I was an avid reader of a number of early blogs and attended conferences featuring both Old and New Media (like the old Seybold Seminars or Print '97).  Part of my work was to scour the early web for material and avenues of presenting and using data that were new or novel, that would help move information to the warfighter.  That meant learning all I could about everything from blogging to 3D interfaces to the coming transition to the post-32 bit world and IPv6.  The methodology is straight out of James Burke's Connections series: let the pinball effect give you information and insights from multiple realms and see if the ideas cross into the realm you inhabit so as to allow it to adapt and change.

It is from that perspective that I took in the idea that the Internet is not about portals and destinations, hubs and spokes, nor even about connected clouds of users and information.  I can't tell you who put it like this, there are numerous possible authors, but I picked up on the idea that the Internet, blogs, media sites... the entire thing from static repositories of information like the reference work sites I link to all the way to Big Old Media sites... are something called a hyperlinked conversation.  Hyperlinks are generic in type, they are an unbiased connectivity form for the electronic New Media.  Hyperlinks are also that most powerful of things that mankind invented in the Old Media: an indexing tool.

That comes from James Burke and the power of an index of a book, that list of ideas and pages where they appear, is that they allow you to cross-index.  You can take an idea word, go to a page, find another idea word, go to its index, and find things that it links to via the index.  Hyperlinks do this exact, same function, but a far faster than you can with a static, read-only memory system with a hand/finger interface with leafs to flip through known as a book.  What a hyperlink allows, however, is the ability to show source of an idea via that link, and you can find other ideas that are linked to in the article/video/etc. and follow those links to see how ideas connect.  Everything, even the person who is a minimal utility node in a Metcalfe's Law network offers utility because you can use a search engine (of your choice) to then find out all the other people who link to an article/video/etc. and follow those links back to their sources.  Even the most dead-end of sites, those that studiously don't link to other bloggers, is still connected to them via the link to the source material and your ability to check other incoming links and go back to those sites to find out what ideas are there.  The hyperlink is thus an indexing tool for ideas.

From this there is no such thing as a 'portal' nor 'destination', no 'hub' nor 'spoke', nor even 'communities' of blogs and sites.  What there are is conversations that link to ideas forming their own interconnected set of sites, pathways, and journeys. Following James Burke this means that no site that requires human thought to construct sentences that purvey ideas, that have a logic connecting them, is alone unless it links to no one, and accepts no links and is an isolated node.

That is what I thought in 2002.

People can move around, become highlights or disappear, as I am largely doing, and yet the conversation continues within and amongst humanity.  It is a huge, extended conversation that now includes mini-thoughts via Twitter, picture thoughts and video thoughts (not necessarily stories but just thoughts and ideas) and it is all connected by the generic thing we call the hyperlink.  It is one of the most powerful tools deployed by mankind, and yet its actual invention starts with indexing.  It is the simple but powerful things that move minds, spirits and humanity.  That also has a precursor description in the Noosphere and the Internet can just be seen as a crude, physical form of Noosphere, not the thing, itself.  The next simple tool will not supplant the hyperlink nor index, but will move that conception one more step and then everything changes. 

And yet where it comes from will be obvious. 

What it will enable is beyond imagining. 

Just like the hyperlink and Internet before the invention of the hyperlink.

I can remember where I was in 2002... and with difficulty back to 1992 when there was only the first hint of html via sgml.  Yes, I can do that.  Can you remember the world without the Internet?

The top 5 current threats to the United States

Over my years of blogging... damn, I never thought I would be able to say that as I never intended to blog for years... a few weeks or a month or two, maybe... I have covered a wide array of threat types to the United States.  Be it terrorism, organized crime or geophysics, I've gotten a good look at some of the nastier things that can be unleashed at a moment's notice that will leave you next to no time to prepare.  The fact that my top 5 geophysics disasters that will happen to the North American continent, sooner or later, are not being prepared for tells me much about how we, as a society, prepare to deal with just about anything.  I like geophysics as it is reliable, cyclic and gives warning via the periodicity of events over time.  If you don't heed the warnings then it is you who will pay the price.  The planet will go on its stately way with or without us, which is why I am always advocating that the best place for industry is not in a biosphere but in the clean vacuum of space.  Once we get off this rock and into our solar system with a sustainable population base that doesn't rely on Earth, then we will be very, very hard to extinguish as a species.

We aren't there, yet.

Outside of those 'known unknowns' of geophysics there are the other 'known unknowns' of terrorism, socialism/communism/fascism/anarchism, and pure old asinine political meddling in culture and economics.  These latter are all inter-related, however, as old revolutionaries tend to hide who they are and become sanctified by their cronies and enter the system. When a guy like the terrorist Bill Ayers can be blessed by the MFM without any hint at repentance for his past misdeeds, indeed he said he hadn't done enough as a terrorist, gets into the position of helping to draft the very history books that is used in school districts, and no one raises a fuss, then one can say that the 'elite' structure is in bed with the radicals.  This has a corrosive and corrupting influence on society, as a whole and as individuals, as actual history gets slanted towards viewpoints that remain unexpressed until they fester long enough to pop up like zits in OWS.  These people don't need to breathe together to share the same hookah, and if their ideas have spread globally it is because those who would normally defend the standard culture of various Nations have been complacent or asleep at the wheel.  This is the wet dream of Progressives: to dictate to society what individuals should think, eat, breathe and how they should live and die at the behest of government.

It is the dream of despotism and tyranny.

So for this remix I'm going to shuffle in the other sociological problems that these nefarious actors have put in place while we have all been hitting the snooze button.  A fun treat it isn't because I will also be mixing in military threats of the 'known unknown' variety, which ought to scare the pants off just about anyone.  Some of these I see as near-dead certainties.  You can still search this blog under the DIY category and get some ideas of what it means to prepare, now, before they happen.

So here we go.

#5 - Good-bye to the EU - After WWII the US extended its nuclear umbrella and troops into Western Europe to defend it.  The various leftists and social do-gooders realized that they didn't have to spend more than a paltry 1% or thereabouts on defense and the US expanded its defense budget to 6-8%+ to cover for that.  With all that lovely non-spending doing on did the European Nations of the West: 1) cut back on all other forms of government to get thriving, world beating economies, 2) pay off all government debt to make their currencies sound and stabilize the world, 3) decide that after two world wars that they really, and for true, weren't going to solve their problems either militarily or via diplomacy (causes for both world wars) and settle into a generally neutral stance towards each other and attempt to keep the lid on both military and diplomatic adventurism or, 4) the opposite of all that.

If you chose #4 for the expansive welfare state, increasing regulations, attempts to 'integrate' highly different populations that didn't have a great history with each other, spend like drunken sailors who can't pass out, get perennial unemployment over 8%, go into debt that none of them or all of them could repay, see a declining demography because of the growth of the state into all areas of life, have to invite in foreigners who made it a point not to assimilate, and the only real economy left was then asked to support all the ne'er-do-well spendthrifts, all the while finding out that being weak militarily at home meant no real feeling of patriotism or even a need to continue the culture, then you have a Weiner!  Ah... sorry... Winner!

Given a great protective umbrella the entire continent went towards socialism even before the commies disappeared and started calling themselves socialists, too.  Now Europe is in a permanent demographic slide unlike any other seen since the Roman Empire hit the skids, has a debt problem about to sink all the Nations in Europe separately and collectively, has foreign populations now starting to not see themselves as Europeans and wanting to change the Nations into something different... and an elite class who feels that the general public is too stupid to recognize this as a good thing!  Can Europe pull out of this tailspin?

No.

Parts of it might abandon ship in the next few months and then the jig is up.  All of the 'social safety nets' will fall and all the 'collective' help will go away as it can't be paid for as the increasing debt load year on year should have clued them into.  In giving a large umbrella over Europe the US, apparently, removed the cluebats.  The answer by the Euro-Elites (be they Kings, Emperors, Princes, Dukes, Ministers, Members of Parliament, or the local Mayor and city council) in such circumstances is clear: war.  With unrest in Europe comes war.  The French Revolution was cleared up by a Corporal, a 'whiff of grapeshot' and then the great economy booster of foreign war.  When the anarchists had been shooting down political leaders the world over for a few decades it was to get only one Arch-Duke that would trigger a global conflict.  The rise of communists in Russia and the expansion of the prior socialist parties in Europe to deal with problems, particularly in Italy and Germany, grew out of the unrest of the post-war era and turned it into the inter-war era by yet another great war building spree that led to, yes, war.  The nasty Cold War stalemate was won by the West when everyone who had red stars on in Russia changed their philosophy from communism to socialism.  The red stars were kept around to adorn party functions, however.  Needless to say getting in bed with organized crime is a mixed blessing in Russia.  Western Europe spending itself into oblivion will lead to great numbers of unemployed and the state, having only one major way to help, will authorize military spending to 'boost' the economy.  China, too, is facing this by propping up the price of copper by building vast, uninhabited cities and seeing its industrial cost rise to the point that people are being automated out of jobs or they are going, with delicious irony, to the next low wage destination of Vietnam.  Needless to say the US was wise enough to see this folly and stopped going down that road...

Oh, wait.

We didn't.

The Collapse of the EU is the symbolic collapse of Western Socialism (socialism, communism, leftism, progressivism, and big government anarchists which are a delicious stab in the back to traditional anarchists) and it isn't going to be pretty.

 

#4 - The Next World War- I can now name some major governments undergoing economic decline from which military spending may be the only hope of keeping people employed: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, China, Japan, Mexico (more on that later) and the UK. Even better is that a few of them have historical militarism that their elites can fall back on and resurrect.  Greece has the Spartans, Italy has the Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal were once world colonial powers, France had Napoleon, Russia had Stalin, China had a slew of guys from the Yellow Emperor on to Mao, Japan had the military class and god emperor, the UK has a great history to work with like that Nelson fella, and even Mexico has patriots in their history of various stripes.

Pick three of those and say they take that path, even the worst off and most minor.  Throw in a bit of 'expansionism for resources' to help get economies going again.  Now put a large power into that mix doing that.  Within 5 years that will be about the only option left as it will be the ONLY way to get out of collectivism as NO ELITE will say that it is a FAILURE.  Internationalism just isn't a rallying point, and all the lovely bankers with their manipulation of world currencies will face a hard problem when a few enterprising countries realize that they can go it alone with just a few more resources under their belt.  They will shear off debt, see their currencies disappear, put in a scrip, open military based systems using scrip and have no need for a social safety net.

The first Nation to clear out its 'social safety net' will be the new 'leader'.

And it doesn't matter how small your population is, either, as modern technology will allow the leveraging of some very elite tactical units to perform deeds that entire armies couldn't accomplish just 60 years ago.  Technology is becoming a deadly equalizer between the large and small, and while quantity has a quality all its own, if you are stuck a couple of cycles back on the technology parade, you aren't going to make it.

No matter how chaotic and moribund economies and societies appear now, the simple solution for the worst off of cutting out the old currency, making a new scrip, torching the social safety net, killing off the radicals (always a crowd pleaser, that) and putting a military style order in place is a demonstrable winner throughout history.  And it always, without fail, ends badly.

This is the know nothing Elites we are talking about doing this and their failure to understand history and become entranced with power always allows this to happen.

We gotta get off that merry-go-round.

 

#3 - EMP the Great Equalizer - One EMP burst from a low yield nuclear device over Kansas will destroy the electronics of nearly 80% of the US that aren't hardened or shielded.  No modern commerce, no trucks, no planes, no cars (unless you got a pre-electronic one available... if you got points and plugs you have something that might survive), no industry, no farming,  no hospitals, pharmaceuticals left to what is on hand...

Remember that technology is a great equalizer against even the US.

We haven't hardened our power generation infrastructure nor our consumer commodity infrastructure.

And you may not even need a nuke to do this, but you will need a missile.

Or very high floating balloons.

Who could do this the old fashioned way with a nuke and a primitive missile?  There is a short list of supsects: the US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, UK, Israel, North Korea, and Iran.  If you throw in a small technical group working with a different way to generate the pulse and balloons, then you can expand that list down to any Nation with factories producing electronics.  Gotta love that, huh?

Mind you this can also be done to China and Russia (probably requiring two devices each), all of Europe, Africa (about two devices), South America (two devices), all of North America (two devices), India, Australia, Japan if you have to get them separately, and maybe another six devices to cover all of the Pacific and three more for the Atlantic.  And one more to get all of North America.  That is N. Am. - 2, S. Am. - 2, Eurasia - 3,  India - 1, Australia - 1, Africa - 2, Pacific - 6, Atlantic -3.  Call it 25 total devices.  If they are high tech and balloon delivered you can use GPS to make them go off (isn't that sweet?) as they are shielded by not being in the EMP zones.  Missiles with AQ Khan style bombs might be a bit harder to do, but 25 is still a pretty magic number.

Hardened military equipment would survive, yes, but without a production system to produce more you are in a 'come as you are' war.

And if an eco-terrorist group did this with a bit of savvy on their part, or a death cult like the old AUM Shinrikyo?  In one year the global population would be about 1 billion people.

Now replace all the EMP devices with a major solar storm putting out highly energetic particles just in front of the Earth as it passes through it for, say, 3 days.  Same effect.

Bad enough the US and the fact that if we disappeared from the world economy most of the rest of the world would go into chaos once the big food supplier went away.  Those asshats bemoaning hunger in Africa should be wanting a hardened electronics system in the US so that if a major solar storm did hit the planet there would be SOMEONE left to still grow food on a scale large enough to supply 2-3 billion people.  That would require forethought, seeing how nasty a place the Earth and our fellow man can get, and then saying: 'You know it doesn't do us much good to have a social safety net if it all collapses due to one bad act'.

Damn I'm not even to #2 yet!

Wasn't the Cold War so nice?  All you had to deal with was vaporization due to nukes!

Even better: you can prepare for these!  Build some Faraday Cages for equipment (basically wrapping them in conductive mesh or foil that isn't in contact with the electronics, and ground the mesh/foil) and once the EMP is done, you can haul out your generator and equipment and get to the business of rebuilding society.  Everything with a transistor and a lot of stuff with vacuum tubes are toast if they aren't protected.  That laptop you tucked into the microwave will ride it out (it does have a mesh to protect stuff outside form the internal microwave effects) but that lovely desktop system is gone.  Got batteries stored away?  How about an inverter and solar panel array? Means to get clean water?  Sanitary considerations need to be given top priority.  Yup this is full, 'no grid exists' living.  No medical supplies coming around, either, so what you got is what you got.  Ditto groceries.

Global Nuclear War never looked so good!

 

#2 - La Palma landslide and tsunami - I'm not going to reprise my geophysics article, but this one remains at #2.  Why?  Here is the idea: name every city that is within 25 miles of the Atlantic coast or half of that in the Gulf of Mexico, all north of the equator.  And that 25 miles is a pure, wild-ass guess.

Now make them go away with only 6-12 hours of warning time.

Simple, huh?

Entire islands will be washed over.  Florida might not be around as we know it.  London might survive, maybe.  Paris will.  The Netherlands, not so much.  Nice knowing you, Denmark.  Ireland's coast along the south just gone.  Boston, Hartford, NYC, all of Long Island, Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore, DC, Miami...  New Orleans, Galveston... maybe the highlands of Cuba left... I shudder to think about coastal Africa and some of the waves will get to the South Atlantic, too.  Maybe dislodge some polar material north and south, perhaps shift the northern polar ice cap a bit, or just break it up for a year.

Wouldn't that be fun?

There is zip you can do about it.  No diplomacy will stop it.  Nukes might trigger it.  All the concrete on the planet would make it worse, not better.  There is no 'bedrock' to stabilize, just a trillion tons and more of waterlogged dirt and weathered volcanic rock.  It is waiting for one earthquake or volcanic event on an island with an active volcano.  And most likely the other half of the island goes with it, too, due to subsidence, and the inrushing seawater once the mass slides in.

Would the current 'global community' pull together?

Or fall apart?

This will remove some of the largest transport hubs on the planet from the map, as well as killing hundreds of thousands to millions (or more) directly, and then the collapse of systems afterwards will ripple out economically.

And there will be no escaping this tsunami by going up as it will go over the top of the Empire State Building.  Hell it will get channeled all the way up to Albany by the Hudson River at the Palisades. Places that normally couldn't be reached by any tsunami will feel the wrath of this one in the Atlantic.  Gibraltar might go on wave one (the other side of the island going) and then a larger mass move into the Med to give the entire place a nice 20-30' tsunami like in Japan.  Wonder what will happen to the Panama and Suez canals when they are over-topped and washed out?

You can prepare for this one, too.  And while it doesn't, necessarily, take out things in the way a solar flare or committed global EMP attack would, it is more likely to happen.

 

#1 - Yellowstone - Megavolcano.  Overdue.  Last time its cousin went, the human race got put down to a few tens of thousands of individuals from diverse populations in the millions.  Toba is smaller than Yellowstone.  Yellowstone has been rising, steadily, for decades.  It might not erupt for 100,000 years.  Or a something might touch it off so soon that nothing could be done to even analyze it, much less prepare for it.  The dust cloud will encircle the planet and while not every place will be uninhabitable, the growing seasons for the next decade might not be what one would call, uh, there.

Even if you don't get caught in the major dust cloud and have your lungs shredded by fine particulates, you will get a massive global cooling effect due to the reflected sunlight caused by the high floating particulates.  They will come down via Stokes Law, and the finest will be last.  Great for pretty sunrises and sunsets, horrible for storms and growing seasons.

Due to size and severity, and being that we are now in the zone for cyclic repetition, this tops it all as threats to the US.

There are lots of other things that can happen to us, here on Rock 3 from the star Sol, even such things as a gamma ray burst from a star that is likely to have one that is pointed like a search beacon in our direction, soft of like a gun barrel deal.  A major boloid could come sailing in from out of nowhere and make a bad time for life here, too, as the dinosaurs found out.  Really, that would suck worse than Yellowstone.  Ditto the gamma ray burst, although you wind up dead within a few minutes for that, as compared to a few hours for a boloid and up to a couple of years for Yellowstone outside of its blast radius.  These are 'known unknowns' but with a non-cyclic or non-determinative factor to them, which makes them drop far down the list.

Of those things that can be done by man, a few do raise up to the major threat level region, with the collapse of the Western Way of Life coming in at #5, and that only for the socialist, not capitalist variant of it.  Capitalism actually works, it is this 'social control of capital' deal that doesn't no matter which way you cut it.  The folks who are grey are not those pushing forward individual liberty and reward for same, no it is those pushing 'everyone gets a prize' folks.  These are grey as they show no love of human ingenuity, fortitude and the rewards due the blessings of liberty.  They prefer the despotism of reduced choices to impoverish all mankind, rather than achievement to enrich mankind.  Those grey folks in various forms of red, green and black are about to go.

And it won't be pretty.

Lets try to keep things down to #5, and make some preparations for #2-4 and get off this planet so #1 won't get us.

I'm the optimistic guy in the long run.

The short run is always pessimistic, as I can only be pleasantly surprised.

It's cell phones vs guns

That from GuamGuy at Twitter and I've been using Twitterfall to keep track of the events in Iran at #iraneclection, Tehran and Mousavi.  I am not a regular Twitter user, needless to say, and only got cellphones a couple of days ago as emergency use supplies.  And I do have some criticism of the technology, but that is not important.

These last five days have been monumental in breaking the way news is reported and does point to the change that technology is bringing on a global basis.  This technology is the use of networking via cell phones and the advent of that system as a complement to standard TCP/IP technology.  To refresh how we get to the point where you get news from other people who are on the spot and seeing it, and not via a 'gatekeeper' we need only step back a decade ago to the period just before rapid cellphone distribution and the first wave of information distribution that is not under the one to many paradigm.

Broadcast media (TV, Cinema, etc.) is 1:Many.  It has a single broadcast point but multiple people can pick it up.  It is also unidirectional from the broadcaster to the receiver.  This technology existed along side newspapers which were an early version of 1:Many, but only to subscribers and those who held public copies of the information.  Newspapers had limited bandwidth and low refresh rate.  Television improved both bandwidth for communication (amount of information that can be delivered per unit time) and refresh rate.  Voice and motion image delivery is a high bandwidth and high refresh rate affair for an event that can be covered.  Unfortunately the infrastructure for broadcast, like newspapers, is expensive and requires a large technical staff, and feed back is limited to those already in studios.  Television surpassed film reels for complex information delivery and made the reception cost cheap by allowing a high cost receiver to constantly receive new information, thus making it a cheap acquisition over time.

That era of news starting with the single penny 'broadsheets' all the way up to the proliferation of cable channels took 500 years to do.  Newspapers made using moveable type supplanted the previous 1:Many form of communication by bards, troubadours and town criers.  Many of those gave stories to papers for pay and invented 'reporters'.  We do not cry about the lack of Monks creating hand illuminated script, the absence of a town crier and only bards still fill an emotional need that no other media has ever supplanted... if you are ever lucky enough to find and listen to one, that is.  So we have come not to miss bards, either.

Newspapers melded over to television, but the two competed on a different basis, with television being faster and glib, as airtime that was empty was wasted time, while newspapers could do longer pieces with more research.  If the reporter ever bothered to do that, and the lack of research was always evident in both media by the method of taking something you know and see how it is reported, then remember that level of sophistication is in ALL of the paper or television media.  They looked to have a dominating stranglehold on information even into the late 1970's when television was beginning to shift reading habits to viewing habits and papers started to get into financial trouble.  Thus television became the dominant factor in 'news' 'reporting'.

A little technology developed in the 1960's to interconnect mainframe computers used a point to point messaging protocol to route messages via a non-proprietary schema.  Anyone who understood how that worked could make adapters for their systems and connect to it and exchange information.  It was developed to share processing time across computers, but found its 'killer application' in e-mail for the scientific and technical communities.  E-mail started as host system only (only the system you are on) but the networking schema allowed for e-mail to be exchanged between systems and a non-proprietary protocol was developed for it.  The Advanced Research Projects Agency had asked for the protocol to be developed not to survive nuclear war, but to share expensive processing time amongst those who owned mainframes and did government work.  The exchange of ideas, though, proved a huge boon to the scientific and technical community and spurred the growth of the internetworking schema outwards to non-government backed institutions.  It is from there we get the modern internetworked computer systems: the internet is a network of networks.

What this internet technology allowed, however, was a messaging system that could be run by institutions that allowed for common posting of thoughts and ideas on topics.  Those text-based message boards of subscriber based feedback is, essentially, what Twitter is today, just spruced up for the modern era just 40 years later.  E-mail and message boards proliferated and allowed the first new form of communication that was not single point broadcast:  Many:Many.

Many to Many systems are a distribution system between all users of the system, and allow feedback and input of those users to each other.  No longer is it One to Many, with only one individual or point being the broadcaster, but Many to Many where all can look at and respond to messages.  When that was all done by technical and scientific groups the level of noise in the system was low: everyone agreed to stay on topics of common interest.  By the 1970's and early 1980's so many universities had this type of system that the non-technical message boards started to proliferate and larger numbers of individuals refused to stay 'on topic'.  Those became known as 'trolls'.  Trolls incited passions and got into heated discussions via these means and those attacks on personal integrity that would ensue were known as 'flame wars'.  By the early 1980's there was no longer a 'clean signal' of information on the message boards and any user soon learned to block posts from certain posters and 'clean up the signal'.

Some message areas became so badly over-run with trolls that download time for messages (which cost you money) soon meant seeking out a few responsible people to start NEW message boards and moderate the commentary.  Strange to say, those would stagnate as the editorial decisions of moderators would, itself, inflame passions... no one likes an editor it appears...and things continued apace.  Technology got cheaper, proliferated into businesses, into the home and use of the internet by the 1980's was growing outside of traditional government and academia circles.  Other messaging systems for telephones from MCI and AT&T appeared and some of those were crossed with internet technology in the early 1990's.  Limited network organizations, like AOL, formed for home users to communicate with other subscribers, but the use of internet communication and adoption would force each of those smaller concerns to open up their network to the internet.

The handwriting was already on the wall for newspapers in the early 1980's, and by the 1990's it was apparent to those inside the industry that something was making newspapers obsolete.  Television viewership was reaching a peak and most blamed TV for the ills of newspapers, and no one took the unmoderated, troll-infest, flame-war prone internet seriously, save at the technical conferences I attended in the 1994-99 era.  There the 'New Media' was being talked about by early adopters and the ability to have single owner message systems, where that individual could put up a post and get feedback soon became known as the web-based log.  Web technology is an add-on to TCP/IP and rides on it, using look-up tables for names to translate them into IP addresses to route through TCP/IP networks.  Any single gateway to such a network can host its OWN network of TCP/IP addresses... and by putting a 'user friendly' software interface that was graphical (developed by scientists in Switzerland at CERN for displaying numerical data in visual format across networks) soon became a 'killer application' for the web.  Web-based logs (Blogs) were a start-up phenomena of 1:Bi-directional Many as commentary areas could be opened up for topics started by an author.  Instead of just sending out a personal rant, you could now insult everyone on a single topic at one go!  That said 1:Bi-directional Many had and still has a useful function in starting discussions on topics and while trolls still proliferate, the profusion of topics makes individual trollers either have to slow down (and thus think, which should make them less troll like) or devolve into simple name-callers, foul mouthed spewers of ideology, and generally act in a manner closer to grade school or kindergarten.

Blogs then have more signal to less noise, by and large, due to topicality of discussion and the ability of other bloggers to continue conversations or add ideas on at their own sites.  E-mail was the killer app for the early internet, and web-based browsing became the killer app for the internet of the 1990's, allowing everyone from stores to banks to your lone cat blogger, to put together a relatively simple site to post whatever they wanted.  Television viewership (as a percentage of Americans) was already declining: viewing hours were dropping and more people just weren't watching TV.  This was going on pre-web-based internet, and sped up during the era of 1999-2001.

Message boards still existed, and blogs co-existed and then eclipsed them, yet on some boards the dedicated messaging of small news stories held by large companies had already started.  I have, more than once, found myself on an interface to a message board archive finding obscure articles that are held nowhere else on the net.  The era of copyright, that the music industry was complaining about as their recordings were cheaply being copied, had already come into steep erosion.  In venues outside of traditional channels of information these articles were in clear violation of copyright, but had almost no value that could ever be rendered from them and would be lost without public copying.  The music industry would stagger at this as their business model was made obsolete the moment they published anything in digital format as the home computer was now able to break simple encryption schema or, alternatively, just copy an entire disc at a digital level.  Nothing can stop that.

Today the information coming from Twitter is the updated message boards of the early internet: they are open, generally unmoderated, depend on user input entirely, have trolls, and have the compelling interface of being updated by each and every message from each and every user displayed almost immediately.  This application is restricted compared to those message boards due to length of message that can be sent via cellphones.  Cellphones use a different networking system, but that can interface with the network neutral TCP/IP system at the router level, and some companies may just use TCP/IP and go through local hosting.  This still requires cell phone towers, central distribution points and can still be taken down by regimes.

The cell phones, themselves, are beneficiaries of Moore's Law, however, starting out with the Motorola Startac 'Brick Phone' of the 1980's, then going to smaller and smaller formats thereafter.  As the cost of integration of new features at the silicon level gets cheaper (via Moore's Law) new functions are cheaply added on to handsets while the price continues to decrease over time.  Today handsets are miniature network interface devices allowing voice, still imagery, video, and text to be input and transmitted.  Text messaging, like e-mail, is a 'killer application' that arose because it is cheaper to send digital text than analog to digital voice calls.  Some systems supported this at the magic 'free level' and that made each and every cell phone owner a free ranging reporter.  Individuals are outside the bounds of the older print and television media: people communicate about what interests them and don't give a damn about 'gatekeepers'.

Messaging via text, voice, still imagery and video is a complement to blogs, just as blogs were an early complement to message boards, and this can be seen as returning the favor to blogs to allow for dedicated end-user, live, Many:Many communications to take place.  Watching an active Twitter feed is engrossing because it is ongoing, live and the information is given by those who are actively seeking to promulgate messages.  There are STILL trolls, but they now inflame fewer passions given limited text space, and are easy to ignore.  People with fanatical belief that they are always right on all topics will ALWAYS exist, just they used to be put into attics and were the Aunt/Uncle no one talked about... they now have cell phones.

There is, with modern cell phones, more than one network available, however, and this is not talking about the network provider for phone, but the phone itself.  Today cell phones can have Bluetooth technology, which is a short range capability to move information between Bluetooth devices that have accepted each other's 'handshake'.  These form on-the-fly networks that are created by all devices that share handshakes digitally.  They are relatively low bandwidth, but amble enough for images and video to be moved between individuals on a timely basis.  These networks are 'ad hoc' and not centralized: there are no servers, per se, nor IP look up tables, just a list of devices held by each device, that they have shook hands with.  While these are small networks, they move, adapt and change configuration on a continual basis.  And as it is easy to erase handshakes, they form a set of devices that can easily be repurposed if a sub-network amongst agreed-upon devices is breached, although that takes some time to do.

These are then characterized as 'piconets' or as a Personal Area Network (as opposed to Local Area Network or Wide Area Network technologies which need centralized numbering and addressing systems).  In conception, every device on a piconet can be a server, router and be a network communication device passing information across the trusted network at a LAN/WAN or TCP/IP level... right up to the moment a trusted, connected device to the internet is found, which then allows for ALL stored data to be copied out into the internet.

Although that technology has not been used, to date, in that fashion, it points to the final breaking of authoritarian regimes having control over information.  Indeed, as such regimes border Nations that do NOT have restrictions on comms, LAN and WAN technology can be used to bypass firewalls and communicate with the larger internet world.  Satellite phones add into that, as trusted network devices, but are rare and high cost to use/maintain.  With Moore's Law the ability of piconets to reach outwards, morph, and never be fixed by location or even device, means the next threshold of personal technology to communicate with the world is nearly here.

It will not make obsolete the older, network neutral, systems as they have a great purpose in coordinating all comms via neutral protocols.

What does this mean for older technologies?

For newspapers it is not a death-knell, but a bottomless pothole.  Newspapers and other print media have hidden behind a mask of 'objectivity' while not providing 'objective' coverage of news.  That is 'Just the Facts Ma'am' or 'Joe Friday' news.  The moment you hear a reporter say 'human interest' or 'human side' of the story, you know that is no longer objective reporting.  Whenever a reporter or editorial board does not come clean with their ideological bias in how they operate, they are not being 'objective'.  One can still HAVE bias in reporting, and it is, indeed, insane to think otherwise: you think, are alive and are human, therefore you are biased.  The mask of 'objective' reporting can and indeed must be dropped to survive.  Magazines that have done so still have a committed readership and that indicates a market for biased covering of news and topics so long as the publication is absolutely clear on its position.  Individuals can and do weed out bias to get to news... watching a Twitter feed indicates that, alone.  There is no need for a 'gatekeeper' once the fence is taken down, and the fence is not that high any more and it is gone in some areas.  Those that continue on with the charade of 'objectivity' will step into a bottomless pothole, those that avoid that will not... most are stepping into the pothole.

Television has tried 'interactive TV' and failed, multiple times.  As the ethos of news presentation followed that of newspapers, the remedy for TV news is the same: identify the bias of the editorial board and reporters, and just report the damned news.  Save 'human interest' for 'entertainment' venues outside of news reporting.  Again, the gate has no fence and the gatekeeper is an antiquated figure, like the coachman holding a lantern.  Great for a lawn ornament, but not so hot for your Ford.  Television news also faces the 'bottomless pothole' dilemma in ratings, and very few news organizations are adapting to this new future.  They will go the way of bards, troubadours and Monks hand illuminating manuscripts along with their friends in the print media.

Blogs are adaptive media: bloggers have wide interests in various areas and with various forms of presentation, and the web-based log will only become more personalized to the interest of the presenter.  Because it is a highly representative form of presentation, those that come to them will adapt to those that present information in a way they like.  Bloggers are far more open about bias than their print and TV counterparts, when they have counterparts, which many do NOT as there is no way to do on 1:Many what 1:Many bi-directional with add-ons does.  There is no equivalent to Many:Many unmoderated anywhere in print or TV, due to restrictions of the medium used.  Many:Many can and most likely will serve as the basis for future 'news' as multiple individual witnesses recount information and cross-confirm events.  'Fact checking' for ongoing events goes from months, weeks, days or hours, to hours, minutes and seconds.  That is the derived Feiler Faster Thesis at work, for information uptake and understanding of information.

Twitter has brevity on its side, which forces personal editing and getting to facts quickly.  Noise can be reduced, and will be by individual... and it might be hell for those seeking to be rabble-rousers to know that they are putting out their words but that no one is picking them up any more... so sock puppets will appear and suffer the exact, same thing.  The ability of individuals to censor what they take in is a great Liberty, and learning that you are speaking only to yourself is a great goad to civility.  I am sure that text comms will open up, but here form factor of device means that actually getting a coherent long message out can't be done quickly, like on a laptop or PC: editing yourself takes space and time, and there is little screen space currently available and that is driven by form factor (it must fit in your hand) and NOT technology.  You can only see so much, and the form factor becomes the medium, thus driving messaging type.  Small videos and still images will be primary, text simple and limited until a major form factor change takes place or we replace our visual input system with something else.

To sum up: the Iranian revolt/uprising is now being communicated by multiple means (those helping to get secure gateways up and keep them up have been a godsend to Iran, plus those getting out information on how to anonymously report) is pointing to the true future of news.  It will be self-reported.

And the revolution will be self-organized.

The terror take down in Iraq

Google, in its ever finer attempt to take over all things of interest in computing, has introduced the Google Notebook. What it is, is a nice way to deposit pieces of information, images and such into nice little documents that one can collaborate with others on or just share with the whole-wide world. In theory the resident part of it on one's computer, basically a link to let a web page get captured to the notebook, should work, but doesn't on my set-up. Still, it has the basic copy and past sort of deal and I am sure that, somehow, if I used a more or less normal arrangement of software, it would work a bit better. That said the thing does have an RSS feed in it, so one can update notebooks on the fly with interesting material and others can feed those right to their web page. Not something of great interest, but fun, nonetheless.

Thus, the first chance to use that is with the Kazali Network notebook I have up on my sidebar. One can click on a piece, bring up the notebook web page and go from there! A DIY clipping service! So handy....

As seen from the MNF-I briefing, a major take down of high level individuals in the Kazali terror network in Iraq happened a couple of months ago, and has netted a very high level individual: Ali Musa Daqduq. Now, what is interesting so far, is not Mr. Daqduq, but his compatriots the Kazali brothers, Kais and Laith. Like all things from the Middle East the variant spellings are numerous, so one needs to do a wide search to pick up all the variants on names.

These two boys worked their way into a high position in Sadr's Mahdi Army way back in 2003, and have been instrumental in working together a cross-Iraq supply network from Syria and Iran. Together, these two have been in what appears to be the 'insurgent supply' concept, for keeping insurgents well supplied with goods and material. There is a bit of evidence of their working with al Qaeda for awhile, to ensure that various terror cells from the have been kept well supplied with those huge weapons caches that have been found since the Riverine Campaign of 2005-6.

The connection to a high level Hezbollah operative is further demonstration of how much Iran is now concentrating on Iraq, and that they are running out of trustworthy personnel locally. If they had good Iraqis to train other Iraqis, you would not need Mr. Daqduq from Lebanon, now, would you? Yes, put together a few clippings, see how the Kazali boys have been keeping the terror going from their perspective, and catch a nice high level operative and the underlying nature of the supply system starts to fall out. Early, pre-surge, work in places like Ramadi started to yield up this sort of thing a couple of months ago, and now we finally get to see *why* the surge is going like it does: follow the supplies to the people using them.

Still, months away from ferreting out the entire extent of the Kazali network, and there are, to be sure, some indigenous networks amongst the Kurds (an interesting market for used cars, of all things, but not late model ones as al Qaeda prefers, so no luck on hooking that into the US car theft rings), and your standard, everyday, criminal operations for gray and black market goods. Those *also* need to be addressed as a truck full of video recorders, one day, yields just about the same as a truck load of AK-47s the next. Put them in boxes and crates and they look the same from the outside, too!

As to how I am going to use the Notebook... well, mostly it will be for extensive background material. Some of my articles have yielded far and away more than I can easily cite or put into a normal article, but the material, itself, is interesting for understanding the context of how Transnational Terrorism works. Now all I need is the time.... *sigh*.

Theoretical security and the more, unpleasant, reality

Well, with the inanity of the Illegal Alien Amnesty Bill comes those who do put forth that it would actually *help* find and stop terrorists! A h/t to Curt at Flopping Aces for pointing out this post at Big Lizards by Dafydd ab Hugh responding to Hugh Hewitt's worries about terrorists getting a parole Z-Visa and being here legally in: Where's Walid? In this exercise we will posit that the bill actually passes! From there we will pass into the theoretical projection and see where it leads us. So lets take it from the mid-way point:

Suppose the bill passes, and a bunch of illegal immigrants apply for Parole Cards (the provisional Z visas -- at least, that's what Sen. Jon Kyl, R-AZ, 92%, calls them). Hugh's worry is that among all the Gonzaleses and Ramirezes and Garcias will be hidden a few Mohammeds and Zarqawis... or even a Padilla or two.

Hugh is terrified that these terrorists could also apply for Parole Cards, and then be able to move around the country, get work, and even exit and reenter the United States at will. Of course, they can do that today... but Hugh seems to believe that they're more likely to be caught and deported today, with no bill, than they would be next year with a bill and Z visas and Parole Cards. (I have no idea what current mechanism for capturing and deporting them Hugh sees; it certainly eludes my sight.)

Let's carefully break down what it means to exit and reenter the country and to work: The border-crosser must show a passport and a SmartVisa. Specifically, he must swipe the card through a reader; this necessarily creates a record of leaving and reentering. Too, moving from place to place within the U.S. and working also creates a phosphor trail. But so what? How does that help capture terrorists?

Enter the CIA's old computer connection-tracking program, Total Information Awareness. Congress got hysterical in 2003, defunding it -- or so they thought; but it's widely believed still to be in existence, just shifted under the umbrella of black-ops programs and funded by secret accounts.

Ah, such a lovely trust of the Federal procurement system and the ability of the CIA and other organizations to create an interconnect database system that will do its very own dot connections and spew out the leads and such as it goes.

Now, here is the deal with this bill: it requires scanty evidence to apply for a Z-Visa and the automatic grant of such. Let us see about this in section 601 of the online markup page at NZ Bear's site. For once I will try and spare the dear reader of large amounts of quoted text and cite important page and refernces! I am sure there will still be lots of quoted text, however.

Starting with Section 601 on p. 260 we get who, being here illegally, can apply. Now far be it from me to point out the conundrum of being here illegally being a violation of not only National Law but any number of Treaties as I already did that with this post and this post. Yes someone applying must now demonstrate that they were here illegally for at *least* 180 days prior to 01 JAN 2007 or for 90 continuous days before that date! And what do they need to get in? Here is 601 (2)(g)(2)(A):

(A) In General.--The application form shall request such information as the Secretary deems necessary and appropriate, including but not limited to, information concerning the alien's physical and mental health; complete criminal history, including all arrests and dispositions; gang membership, renunciation of gang affiliation; immigration history; employment history; and claims to United States citizenship.

And in (3) is fingerprints added to that. All of this fully documented and cross-checked! And in 601(2)(h)(1):

(1) IN GENERAL- An alien who files an application for Z nonimmigrant status shall, upon submission of any evidence required under paragraphs (f) and (g) and after the Secretary has conducted appropriate background checks, to include name and fingerprint checks, that have not by the end of the next business day produced information rendering the applicant ineligible -

(A) be granted probationary benefits in the form of employment authorization pending final adjudication of the alien's application;

(B) may in the Secretary's discretion receive advance permission to re-enter the United States pursuant to existing regulations governing advance parole;

(C) may not be detained for immigration purposes, determined inadmissible or deportable, or removed pending final adjudication of the alien's application, unless the alien is determined to be ineligible for Z nonimmigrant status; and

(D) may not be considered an unauthorized alien (as defined in section 274A(h)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1324a(h)(3))) unless employment authorization under subparagraph (A) is denied.

(2) Timing of Probationary Benefits."No probationary benefits shall be issued to an alien until the alien has passed all appropriate background checks or the end of the next business day, whichever is sooner.

Yes, you have read that right in 24 hours! In just one business day you have the full and complete backing of the ACLU and, no doubt, various lawyers working for such notables as the American Muslim Union, on your side!

Mind you, even if your papers don't pan out in the long run, the burden of proof is upon the government to 'show cause' why you should be deported, and as you have all the legal rights under the Constitution, you can then tie up the system for months or years in getting any prosecutions done. Show up at 5 pm one day, and 5 pm the next and every Local, State and Federal criminal database, plus database of known terrorists, plus checking out your actual documents to see if you actually are who you say you are, and the fingerprint database (has that finally been reconciled with the rest of the FBI's databases? I mean those folks spent 10 years trying to get a few databases to all operate together and billions of dollars and failed to do so. Twice.), verified your background fully and completely as can be done for someone coming from, most likely, a Nation with scanty computer resources, personnel and other capabilities....

The idea of background checks is that they are: lengthy, thorough and act as a screen BEFORE you give someone goodies to make sure they are who they say they are and are deserving of same. This system is based upon the supposition that they DO DESERVE THEM and that little effort can be put into actually *checking them out*. One is now in the exact position which Dafydd has posited: we cannot screen out bad actors because of the limitations of time placed upon such verification. And since so much falls upon the documentary evidence here, a bit later on, is the sweetened, condensed listing of what is acceptable: anything that establishes their presence, employment, or study, bank records, business records, employment records, labor union or day labor center, remittance records, sworn affidavits from nonrelatives who have direct knowledge of the alien's work, that contain (name, address, phone number, nature of relationship), or anything else the Secretary finds acceptable.

I call this aspect of it: the forger's full employment act.

If memory serves DHS and State had to weed out over 6 million incomplete, invalid, false or forged documents and try to verify a good number of them when looking at Visa applicants. That was *only* for Visa applicants, as Citizenship takes some time to go through the processing and weeds out its own bad papers. If the 7 million number for illegal aliens is correct, the absolute minimum number of pieces of bad paperwork to be checked out will be astronomical.

When I looked at the person-to-person banking and business systems that operate for money laundering, the number of connections to organized crime and terrorism are readily apparent. It is now possible wherever any of these informal systems operate to get bank, business, presence, employment, or, indeed, any of the records listed via the person-to-person contact system and have them delivered to you for a cash payment in your Nation of origin. Dafydd does believe that the TIA concept can actually *cover this*:

The reason it was so effective is that it was simply an object-oriented database data-matching application. It was not programmed with any pre-existing biases for one type of connection above the others; it noted and kept track of any and all connections between datapoints -- between Walid the terrorist and Guido the Mafioso, for example. Then it allowed for queries at any level of complexity.

The operators looked for connections where they would not expect to find any. Of course you could find a connection between the Secretary of State and various unsavory political leaders; that's the secretary's job. Nobody thinks Condoleezza Rice is in league with Bashar Assad simply because she met with him during a trip to Syria.

But suppose some dentist in Minneapolis calls Zarqawi in Iraq, then is called by a known terrorist in Pakistan, then is spotted by the FBI having lunch with an arms dealer in Minneapolis, then shows up as a co-signer on a loan to buy an airplane, when the other co-signer is a radical imam operating at a mosque out of Idaho.

Those connections are completely unexpected; why would one lousy dentist know all these people? In fact, that pattern is so suspicious that we should initiate surveillance to see what our "dentist" is up to.

But without TIA, the authorities would never have stumbled across the connections because they cross jurisdictional boundaries: The CIA identifies the terrorists abroad; the NSA records the calls; the FBI is tracking the arms dealer; and nobody is paying any attention to the imam. Without a single, unified database to bring all these observations together, nobody would notice the previously unknown dentist at the center of the web.

Now we take the TIA database... and we add to it the Parole Card and Z visa. Suppose we're looking for Walid Achmed Mohammed, a suspected jihadist who is thought to have sneaked into the United States in 2006 under an unknown alias. Today, we would have no idea where Walid could be found; because he is underground, he could be anywhere, under any name, working for anyone.

We make some educated guesses; let's suppose, just as Hugh fears, that Walid gets himself a Parole Card so he can move about and in and out.

CIA informants report that Walid was spotted at a "terrorism convention" in Pakistan in January of 2008; then another source believes Walid was at a training and planning session at a safehouse somewhere in Madrid in July. But that's all we know.

Under today's rules, that doesn't help us at all. But under the rules established by this bill, the very first thing we should do is query the TIA database to see which holders of Z visas traveled to Pakistan in January 2008 and to Madrid in July of 2008... I'd bet there were not that many. (Check not only direct routes but the roundabout routes that terrorists tend to use; the CIA is actually pretty good at that nowadays.)

Then you take that list of Social-Security numbers, winnow out the obvious non-targets, and plug that into the Z-visa employment database. This will tell you where the eight or nine potential "Walids" have worked in the past year. Since the real Walid has no reason to believe he has been outed, he will probably follow the same pattern... criss-crossing the country carrying messages and money and working for the same set of employers along the way.

By staking out each of those employers around the times he usually shows up, we suddenly have a very good plan for grabbing Walid Achmed Mohammed and hustling him off to Gitmo. And the best part is, neither he nor anybody in his cell would have the slightest idea how we did it!

I have some bad news for this lovely, object oriented system: when things are done at a distance with no record of intermediaries, you will, indeed start to stumble upon irregularities and you will have no idea what they mean. There is this lovely conception that data falls neatly together when it is properly tagged, entered and categorized. I have some bad news for anyone believing this on the Federal side: to cross the number of databases and their networks and security classification levels to do this is impossible.

The DoD, to get some better connectivity, spent 3 years to try and get from 7 different networks, each with their own classification and security constraints down to 5. The number of organizations involved included: NSA, CIA, DoD (Pentagon level), NRO, NGA, DISA, Dept. of State. When I last saw that project it was 2 years behind schedule, over budget and not working to segregate data streams like it should. That was some years back, but points to the Turf War problem and the inability of these actors to all play in the same sandbox.

To get this splendiferous TIA working, which was never Total in any way, shape or form nor designed to receive such large amounts of data but utilize clean data sets that had relatively rigorous metadata standards applied to them. To do *that* to this immigration bill will require all of the following to cooperate closely: DHS (including ICE, Border Patrol, and various other offices), FBI, Justice (Hoover building level, and no it isn't ALL FBI), IRS, HHS, CIA, NSA, DoD, DISA, State, Treasury, All of the State Criminal Databases, various international databases that the US has entree to via Treaty (like that Canadian one that put out bad information on an individual and the Canadian system was so CF'd that they could not even figure out if he was a citizen). Each of these groups comes with multiple databases, with multiple different and often non-agreeing metadata standards, each with their own sign-offs on who can and cannot use the system and at least 3 or 4 different and incompatible security classifications. Excuse me while I apply my background to this and state, definitively, that if you want this system up and working in less than 10 years, you are pipe dreaming.

We will have Quantum Computing before this massive database project gets *started*. People love to wave the magic wand of CIA around and make it out to be some splendid Agency that can work absolute miracles. They cannot even stop National Security leaks from their own Agency and the volume of those and number of operations and agents put at risk from those leaks makes a number of folks wonder exactly *who* they are working for. I would set the funding for this massive computer system in at around $3-5 billion, because of the amount of work and standardization that needs to go on up front before it can even be tested. This will require cross-working database standards, metadata standards, coming up with agreed upon internetworking capability, figuring out what the classification standards will be for the inflowing and outflowing data, finding out which networks need to get some inter-connectivity to them and working *those* issues, and that is before you even decide who can be allowed to have access to the actual, resultant data. That is the glory of object oriented databases: they like to know what the objects actually ARE and have good and clean definitions of them before you start. Meanwhile, for the next decade, you are stuck with multiple, incompatible databases, differing security standards, different computer networks and limited access to the resulting work product and all numbers of Agencies throwing hissy-fits that their turf is being invaded.

Mind you, a decade and $3-5 billion is OPTIMISTIC. I have personally seen more reported on other projects with higher amounts for less result in the recent past in the Federal Government because the lovely folks trying to put a neat and spiffy capability together do not understand the very basics of what it takes to actually get all of those lovely different parts of the government to work together. For something this size the Technical Working Group meeting will be at least 5-15 individuals from each of those groups I mentioned, including separate entourages for the sub-groups as they all are 'stakeholders' in the various systems and will have their work impacted by anything that fiddles with them. To get one relatively minor project going in one Agency, I have held working group meetings that consisted of over 30 individuals. And that was for a project that had high level blessing, which only means the back room knife fights are kept to a minimum.

We will get this splendid system that Dafydd posits the exact same day the HAL 9000 is put online.

Remember: each of those lovely documents needs some sort of tie-back, cross-check and such. These person-to-person banking and transaction systems have wide reach and scope, so the ability to find the disparate datapoints is damned difficult when someone from Syria contacts a peso exchange operator via a local hawala to get documents from, say, Denver, to show that someone has *lived there* and all you need are some relatively minor and obscure residency and employment records. These people are not *fools* who have been outwitting the FBI, CIA and other Federal Agencies for decades: they know how to leave a damned near impossible to find trail that leaves everyone looking legitimate and yet transacts and launders funds on a global basis.

This is before we even factor in the problem that Dafydd's 'Walid' can walk over to Mexico, jet out to Pakistan for a month, be spotted, come back, and have documents that PROVE he has been in the US all this time because he did not go through the border controls and picked up a different passport and visa for Pakistan from a contact on the other side of the border. By circumventing those lovely inputs, the CIA would *prove* that he was in Pakistan but have nowhere else to go because he had used the Transnational Terrorist and International Organized Crime internetworks to his advantage for cash advances, spending, visas, passports and such. And because he is utilizing the criminal side of things and getting false employment records for 'day labor' work that is minimal income it would be extremely difficult to demonstrate that he had *not* been here.

In this, even if the system works, the structural deficiencies of the actual, physical border and transport across it makes the entire concept irrelevent. In point of fact without physical barriers that are impassible and some way of checking for things like light aircraft and ultralights, there is *no way* to make individuals go through the actual ports of entry. And, because of Moore's Law, I will believe in a 'virtual wall' the exact same time that we get a 'virtual bathroom'. No real toilet paper allowed.

I place an actual, real, physical wall *with* sensors at around $5 billion and it would go up a damned sight faster than any data warehouse interconnection concept inside the Federal Government and have the great and good benefit of being armed, stopping illegal flights and having deep pilings to stop tunneling. If we had one of THOSE we could then have good, controlled ports of entry and actually consider this lovely data scheme, or just make enforceable and trackable Z-visas via it. But then if we had an actual, real, physical wall with deterrents of the lethal sort on them we would not have this problem in the first place now, would we?