money & guns

A guide by the “Chaos Computer Club” in Germany (who just published the latest edition of their magazine with plastic versions of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble’s fingerprint inside) explains how to produce a usable physical copy of anyone’s fingerprint left carelessly on a glass, door handle, or magazine.  It looks ridiculously easy.  In fact, the use of forged fingerprints to defeat biometric security systems has already been demonstrated.

This makes a fingerprint potentially the easiest form of identification to forge, in turn making fingerprint-based access controls nearly useless.  Though some biometrics technology companies claim that forged fingerprints can be “weeded out with use of the PIN”, something as easily forgable as a fingerprint doesn’t seem to add much to the security of a PIN alone.  In fact, it seems like it would only serve as a benefit in the case where a non-technical attacker happens to find the PIN written down somewhere or obtains it from the potential victim directly—highlighting the fact that security is just as much a people problem as one solvable by the continual purchase of newer, more “advanced” technologies.

While the infallibility of the use of fingerprints to identify criminals has already been called into question, for most of their past 100+ years in court, fingerprint evidence alone has been enough to sustain a conviction.  In addition to the errors noted in the UC Irvine study, I wonder how many convictions might have been based entirely on prints forged outright (I find it hard to believe that the primitive technology needed to forge prints was just discovered in the past few years).

Edit: Here’s another article from The Register with pics.

If you already read “Gold, Silver, and Copper-jacketed Lead“, and doubted what I or Rick Falkvinge had to say, check out this article: “Squanderville versus Thriftyville” by the the richest man in the world.

The subject of this post is an article, originally from The Nation, on asset forfeiture and conflict of interest in the drug war.  Except, saying it that way is glibly misleading.  The article really illuminates, whether the authors know it or not, one of the primary underlying motives of the War on Drugs—namely an additional legalized channel of funds for government agencies.  The drug war is funded partially through taxes and partially with funds extorted from the populace in the name of the Drug War.  The article was written 10 years ago, but the situation remains the same or worse today.

George Mason, co-father of the Bill of Rights and Paris Hilton’s 8th great-grandfather still weary of such British practices that lead to the American Revolution, said at the Constitutional Convention in 1787:

“…the purse and the sword ought never to get into the same hands, whether legislative or executive…”

In 1984 Congress gave police control over both the sword and the purse when they set up the rules of civil forfeiture used today.  The rules give police the power to seize assets (money, cars, homes, boats, whatever) and keep them for their own benefit—it gives police the power to rob citizens at gunpoint in their own homes, in their cars, or on the street whether or not they are ever even accused of committing a crime, and then use the money for their own purposes.  This is not hyperbole or misrepresentation.

In 2005, the DEA seized [DEA.gov] $1.9billion in “drug proceeds”.  The operating budget [DEA.gov] (money given to the DEA by taxpayers) of the DEA in the same year was $2.1billion.  Let me state that a different way: the DEA stole half of it’s total funding for 2005.  In addition, through the law’s “equitable sharing” provisions,

“Some small-town police forces have enhanced their annual budgets by a factor of five or more through such drug-enforcement activities.”

Police agencies are definitely aware of what a cash cow the War on Drugs has become for them:

“At the Justice Department, a steady stream of memos exhort its attorneys to redirect their efforts toward “forfeiture production” so as to avoid budget shortfalls. One warns that “funding of initiatives important to your components will be in jeopardy if we fail to reach the projected level of forfeiture deposits.” Several urge increasing forfeitures “between now and the end of the fiscal year.” The department’s task force study bluntly suggests that multi-jurisdictional drug task forces select their targets in part according to the funding they can produce.”

Even if you operate under the presumption that it’s OK for the police to take the property in the first place, there is no way to justify allowing the police to fund themselves with it rather than putting it in direct control of the city/state/country to which they are servants of.

Some more select quotes from the article:

“In Louisiana, police illegally stopped and searched massive numbers of drivers, seizing money that was then diverted to police department ski trips.”

“Despite several unsuccessful efforts to corroborate the informant’s claim, and despite advice that Scott posed little threat of violence, the L.A. Sheriffs Department dispatched a multi-jurisdictional team to conduct a military-style raid. On October 2, 1992, at 8:30 A.M., thirty officers descended upon the Scott ranch with high-powered weapons, flak jackets, dogs, a battering ram and what purported to be a lawful search warrant. After knocking and announcing their presence, they kicked in the door and rushed through the house. There they saw Scott, armed with a gun in response to his wife’s screams. With Scott’s wife watching in horror, agents fired two bullets into Scott’s chest and killed him.
…
The investigation found that as they invaded the property, the officers—with two asset forfeiture specialists in tow–were armed with a property appraisal of Scott’s ranch, a parcel map of the ranch marked with the sale price of a nearby property and instructions to seize the ranch if at least fourteen marijuana plants
were found.”

Recently, Finland sentenced their largest drug ring ever.  As part of the sentence €7million were extracted from the group.  I’d like to know how this relatively straight-laced nation deals with such funds.

Expect to hear much more from me on the subject of the Drug War and the ways it’s used as a cover for the institutionalization of otherwise ethically unjustifiable acts.

As is fitting, my first post here will relate to both money AND guns.  But first some administrative notes.

I chose the domain moneyandguns.com because it was available and not lame and didn’t really care whether anything I ever wrote here had anything to do with either.  Everything else I’d thought of in the preceding weeks was either parked on or stupid.  In the time since, however, I realized that everything can be connected to either money or guns anyway–and usually both (though this isn’t very surprising)–so I won’t even have to worry about that in the future when retrospection kicks in.  (Incidentally, the idea for the domain name came to me with no pretext in the half-dreaming interphase between sleep and waking up one morning.  I have no idea where it came from.)

Read the about page if you have no idea who I am.

Just about the time I registered this domain, the Colombian military bombed a FARC encampment in Ecuador nearly sparking a continental war, Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in a DEA sting on charges of conspiring to aid a terrorist organization (nothing to do with drugs), the price of diesel skyrocketed, and I thought of something really profound that I’ve since forgotten.  I’ll write about these things some day, but Rick Falkvinge of Sweden’s Pirate Party posted an article on his blog today (actually yesterday at this point) called ‘Why the US is collapsing’ which I thought worthy of highlighting here.

For those of you who’ve spent the last year out of radio contact with the rest of the world, the US dollar has been plummeting in value for the past several months (years) and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.   Compare the value of the US dollar against gold, euros, pounds, or german cars for example.  Falkvinge believes this is the beginning of the end of the US as a global superpower and the artificially inflated standards of living that we enjoy.  Interesting facts brought to light are that the EU’s economy has been larger than the US economy since at least as far back as 2005, and that some small exchanges in Europe are no longer accepting US Dollars.  The US Dollar is no longer a universal international trade medium.  Its place might have been taken by the Euro for now, or perhaps the Pound, but there is no reason to suspect that in 20 years it might not be the RMB.  Your grandkids will speak Mandarin.  (As one commenter put it: “I look forward to an marked improvement in the quality of Chinese food around here.”)

Another eye opener (for me at least since I have been in partial radio isolation from the world recently) is that:

Oil is currently – mostly – traded in dollars per barrel, which creates a defacto dollar-based economy. A few years back, one prominent oil producer switched to trading in euros per barrel.

This threatened the entire stability of the dollar as a world currency, and by extension, the US’ economic bubble. After some chaos and turmoil involving the bubble-funded US military, that particular country is now exporting oil by the dollar again, thus once again contributing to the dollar bubble.

That country was Iraq.

Iran and Venezuela have also begun selling their oil in Euros.

As foreign holders of US currency continue selling it off in search of greener pastures, fueling the cycle of devaluation, its plummeting value won’t level off any time soon.  Falkvinge relates the (probably apocryphal) advice from a US economist that we all stock up on precious metals such as, “gold, silver, and copper-jacketed lead.”  I’m on it.

As part of the Coalition of Anarchists for Bush, at the 2000 Republican National Convention (if you click that link, take a moment to reflect on what the web looked like 8 years ago) in Philidelphia, I and a group of about 10 other scraggly kids shouted the following slogan at Ben Stein as he walked into the studio where they were filming a special episode of The Daily Show:

Society’s crumbling, let’s give it a push, why not vote for George Bush?

Ben Stein raised his fist to us in solidarity.  I hope Ben Stein had the foresight to invest some of his money in foreign markets and is still on my side when society takes the big crunch.

Update (3/28/2008):  Warren Buffet agrees.