Reference:
As a candidate, Bush promised to build an anti-missile shield, and earlier this year he pulled out of an anti-ballistic missile treaty to advance the plan. Tuesday, he cited the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America as evidence that the country faces ``unprecedented threats'' and needs the anti-missile shield.

``When I came to office, I made a commitment to transform America's national security strategy and defense capabilities to meet the threats of the 21st century,'' Bush said in a prepared statement. ``Today I am pleased to announce we will take another important step in countering these threats by beginning to field missile defense capabilities to protect the United States as well as our friends and allies.''

He called the initial stage ``modest,'' but said, ``These capabilities will add to America's security and serve as a starting point for improved and expanded capabilities later as further progress is made in researching and developing missile defense technologies and in light of changes in the threat.''

The plan calls for 10 ground-based interceptor missiles at Fort Greely, Alaska, by 2004 and an additional 10 interceptors by 2005 or 2006, defense officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Bush said the ``initial capabilities'' will also include sea-based interceptors and sensors based on land, at sea and in space.

NYTimes

Notes:
On the surface, seems to be a defense of the past and has nothing to do with terrorist tactics.

1. Support of his natural constiuency -- oil and defense.
2. What else can the system monitor?

Reference:
As a matter of principle, President Bush declared at a conference on retirement savings earlier this year, "What's fair on the top floor should be fair on the shop floor." But an array of rules and customs have put a distance between the retirement benefits of average workers and those of top executives.

Most rank-and-file workers with traditional pensions receive one year of credit for each year of service, and only their salary counts in determining benefits. Many executives, including Mr. Snow, can also count their annual bonuses.
...
Under the traditional plans, pension benefits are primarily based on a worker's final, and often highest-paid, years of employment. The new plans, by contrast, build benefits evenly over the course of a worker's career. Cash balance plans are a boon to younger workers, but critics say older workers could lose as much a third of their benefits.
NYTimes

Notes:
And then we change the rules so that the younger workers' plans, as they get older, cost the corporations less.

Reference:
With Republicans in control of Congress and the Presidency, this may be the last chance to change course in this country. If we continue on the path of socialized medicine, there is every reason to fear that the United States will fall into the debilitating, low-growth, over-taxed trap that has Europe and Japan in its grip.

If the Bush Administration is looking for a bold economic agenda, then the best choice would be to take steps to return health care to the private sector. The most effective way to do this would be to raise the Medicare eligibility age for everyone under the age of 50.

As large as Social Security looms when the Baby Boom retires, it will be smaller as a proportion of GDP than Medicare. An analysis for the Concord Coalition reports that starting from a current ratio of 2.2 percent of GDP and making some conservative assumptions "just the increase in Medicare spending over the next forty years - 4.5 percent of GDP - would be greater than everything we spend today on Social Security."

These projections for Medicare and Medicaid costs may be optimistic. Speaking as part of a broad-ranging round table discussion, economic historian Robert Fogel says that the health care sector of the economy is undergoing a secular increase, which he believes could take it from 14 percent of GDP today to 21 percent of GDP later in this century. My guess is that if he is correct, then Medicare spending alone will be more than 10 percent of GDP.

TCS - Kling

Notes:
Seems there needs to be a broader consideration of cost here. Focusing only on government cost seems to miss part of the picture.

1. Is there a cost associated with those people who can not afford health care other than public assistance?
2. Is there a cost in reduced productivity, both in terms of performance and sick time because preventative care is prohibitive?
3. Are the "low-growth" measurements of the economies of Europe the result of honest, full-cycle accounting?
4. What is the truth behind the statement that the US has the worst health care system of the industrialized world?

Reference:
From: Nomen Nescio
But in the mean time, three cheers for TIA. It's too bad that it's the government doing it rather than a shadowy offshore agency with virtual tentacles into the net, but the point is being made all the same. Now more than ever, people need privacy technology. Government is not the answer. It's time to start protecting ourselves, because nobody else is going to do it for us.

From: "Singleton, Norman"
good analysis except he misses how this system will be used to further the use of the SSN as a uniform identifier and further the war on cash, begin in the freedom-loving Regan administration as part of the war on drugs, in order to more efficiently identify terrorists.

From: Lizard
>Who knows if the John Poindexter in one database is
>the same as Jon Pointdexter in another?

Ever see 'Brazil'?
Tuttle, Buttle, what's the difference?

From: "Carrick Mundell"
If the probability of finding a terrorist using TIA is practically nil, then the system must be going to be used for other purposes, namely, domestic spying. By increasing the size of the target (e.g. libertarians, liberals, privacy hawks, greens, pro choicers, Democratic Party donors, persons-we-hate, and, oh yeah, terrorists) maybe TIA will prove more useful. What's so bad about Total Information Awareness? Everything.

***
What Mr. Brunk doesn't make explicit, but probably knows, is that TIA is simply an excuse to get their hands on every database in the world. The people who control the operation will simply look up what they want about whoever they have predetermined is suspect, according to their political agenda.

From: "J.D. Abolins"
In real life, however, I believe that likely government response to the occaisional rousting of innocent people, perhaps with soem rough treatment, is "They should thank us for being so diligent in following up possible terrorism leads instead of grumbling about the SWAT fellow's boot on the back of their necks."
Politech mailing list

Notes:

Reference:
Ronald Bailey:
Elliott and Lamm's first misstep is accepting Hardin's conclusion that the only solution to the tragedy of the commons is "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected." Like Hardin, they take this conclusion to require a regime of centralized regulations limiting people's access to the commons. What both Hardin and they overlook is that there's a decentralized way of limiting access to the commons: through the assignment of private property rights to resources. This approach is "coercive" in the sense that the state will step in to defend a person's property against the thievery or negligence of others. But it allows individuals greater scope in deciding how to manage resources.
reason.com

Notes:

What Bailey skips over so blithely is the coercion that transforms the commons into private property. And this is one of the core failing of "free market" theory. There is the presumption that private property is a priori, which is not the case.

This kind of thinking is also pervasive in the copyright debates, again as if intellectual and property are two terms that go together, a priori. Again, they don't. Intellectual property is definitely a modern invention.

Reference:
Human population growth rates have been declining steeply for decades, falling from six children per woman in the 1960s to 2.7 today. If current trends continue, human population likely will level off at 8 billion to 9 billion by 2050 and begin falling. It turns out that human beings, unlike animals, do not inexorably turn more food into more offspring.

...human ingenuity as expressed in our evolving social institutions (such as democratic governance, free speech, private property, and peer-reviewed science) and our growing technological prowess are already restoring ecosystems and providing margins of safety in developed countries. They will do so in poorer countries as they continue to draw ever more deeply on the knowledge commons and become wealthier. Judging from history, it's a good bet that humanity's growing knowledge commons, including the moral progress humanity has made over the millennia, will ameliorate and solve any problems that arise in the environmental commons.
reason.com

Notes:

1. One could argue that population is leveling off exactly because we have met the "carrying capacity" for our species -- in short, we are just like other animals.

2. The knowledge economy we talk about these days is extinguishing the knowledge commons, just as private property extinguished the physical commons.

Reference:
The broader technology sector has been lagging for close to three years, but one small niche remains hot -- the government IT and defense contracting market. A testament to the growth in the sector are the mega-mergers involving some of the giants of the military-industrial complex as they seek to capitalize on an expected ramp-up in defense and information technology spending by the federal government in 2003. The Iraq war talk certainly hasn't hurt the industry either, as the Pentagon looks to boost its arsenal of sophisticated weapon systems and combat gear.
www.washingtonpost.com

Notes:

Reference:
As a domestic political bargaining chip, $34 million is more important symbolically than financially -- it's not considered a lot of money in foreign-aid terms. But overseas, the opposite is true: $34 million is enough, according to the UNFPA, to prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 infant and child deaths.
Salon

Notes:
There is something in here about relative affluence and the amount of resource use.

Reference:
From: "Danny Yavuzkurt"
To:
Subject: The other shoe drops: White House now proposing centralized
Internet monitoring
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 05:03:53 -0500

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/technology/20MONI.html
White House to Propose System for Wide Monitoring of Internet

Aha.. so, we wondered what good TIA will be without good databases, and with the commercial databases so lacking in accuracy and realtime data?.. well, according to a report recently finalized by the Critical Infrastructure
Protection Board, called, naturally, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," the solution isn't to use just 'existing databases' as IAO was claiming, but creating new, larger databases out of all the network traffic in the country (along with the building of a huge national 'network operations center,' presumably to store the petabytes of data such a system might conceivably accumulate.. that is, if they're actually going to be archiving net traffic and datamining it, which I would assume is their goal..)

The article doesn't specifically mention IAO or TIA, but it's transparently obvious to me that the Bush administration knows exactly what's going on with DARPA and IAO, are probably actively sponsoring them, and intends to make it easier than ever for them to monitor and store surveillance data on everyone who uses the internet, in addition to all the other databases they'd have centralized archives of.. I'm betting that unless there's a large-scale public outcry against this kind of large-scale government intrusion, we'll see *all* ISPs (except possibly for BBSes, etc, which would of course still be monitored through the phone companies..) forced to register, keep records, and install government surveillance equipment - so, in effect, there could soon be no privacy from the government's prying eyes for any unencrypted data on the net, warrant or not..

Politech list

Notes:

Reference:
Peter Wayner, author of _Translucent Databases_

If the FBI was infiltrated by a Russian spy and the Pentagon was penetrated by a Cuban spy, perhaps we have to worry about a terrorist sneaking into the TIA databases. The cypherpunks always get these things first, but I'm hoping that their enthusiasm won't scare away the people who cleave to the aegis of government.

There are also practical reasons why businesses may want to choose such a solution. Subpoenas are also a tax on people who keep good records. The shipping companies like FedEx have entire divisions devoted to answering calls from law enforcement and the courts. It's not just spies defending the realm either-- divorce lawyers love
to poke around for evidence. A business that keeps the records must also spend the costs to answer questions.

aegis:
1. Protection: a child whose welfare is now under the aegis of the courts.
2. Sponsorship: patronage: a concert held under the aegis of the parents' association.
3. Guidance, direction, or control: a music program developed under the aegis of the conductor.
4. Greek Mythology. The goatskin shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena. Athena's shield carried at its center the head of Medusa.
Politech

Notes:
Good point about the malevolent possibilities of cracking an universal database. Privacy as a security tool.