Month: February 2007

Border agents shoot Mexican drug runner, face jail time – but should they?

This news is a few weeks old, but I’ve been so busy with some other projects that I’m behind in a lot of postings that I’d like to get out. As the healine indicates, the basic bit of this story is that two border patrol agents shot Osvaldo Aldrete Davila, a Mexican drug runner, in the back, and are now serving time for violating Davila’s civil rights. There is apparently quite a bit of grassroots support for freeing the agents, typically with some variant of a “They should not be imprisoned for doing their job/defending our borders” as the reason. I will admit that I don’t see why these men should be imprisoned for doing their jobs, but there is a bit of murkiness to the affair that makes it not so clear cut.

Compean and Ramos were found guilty in a jury trial of violating the civil rights of Osvaldo Aldrete Davila when they shot him in Fabens, Texas, about 30 miles east of El Paso, then tampering with evidence by picking up shell casings from the shooting.

The ex-agents say Davila had a gun, and that’s why they fired at him, but a gun was never found.

In exchange for his testimony against the two agents, Davila was granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. government for attempting to smuggle nearly 750 pounds of marijuana – which had a street value of over $1 million – into the United States on the day he was shot.

. . .

“They also had received arms training the day before; that said, if you have an incident like this, you must preserve the evidence and you must report it promptly. Instead, according to court documents, they went around and picked up the shell casings. Furthermore, they asked one of their colleagues also to help pick up shell casings. They disposed of them.”

Ramos and Compean were convicted on 11 of 12 counts.

“The facts of this case are such that I would invite everybody to take a full look at the documented record,” Snow said. “This is not the case of the United States saying, ‘We are not going to support people who go after drug dealers.’ Of course, we are. We think it’s incumbent to go after drug dealers, and we also think that it’s vitally important to make sure that we provide border security so our people are secure.

“We also believe that the people who are working to secure that border themselves obey the law.”

He added: “I do think that there’s been a characterization that somehow the government is turning a blind eye toward the law in enforcing the law.”

I’m not big on granting Davila immunity from prosecution, but there is the smell of some kind of cover-up by the agents, and thosebehind the investigation and decision to prosecute may have just been looking for a way to get more information on what happened. Picking up shell casings and not reporting the shooting sounds fishy, even if it is totally innocuous. Without a lot more information on what happened, what is known, what was found in the investigation, and so on, this seems too hard to judge by outside observers. Maybe I’m wrong on that, though. Should these men be serving prison time? There has been an appeal to President Bush to pardon the two men. Should that be done?

If you want to find out more to help form an opinion, naturally Google news is a good source. From Google, I found a good source of extra information at NewsMax, as well as some good recent updates from Fox News. The basic information I’m seeing certainly makes the shooting in self-defense claims of the agents believable, but the clean-up and delayed reporting still muddies things up.

[tags]Border agents jailed for shooting drug runner, Should the border patrol agents be released after suspicious shooting?[/tags]

CNN’s 101 dumbest business moments

I love these worst of kinds of lists. Although there are a lot of things that are just the results of plans not going as expected, there are always a few really amazing blunders. So to see what bad business moves have been made by others, check out CNN’s 101 dumbest moments in business (here’s the obligatory shorter link as well).

#9) A computer glitch in the tax rolls of Porter County, Ind., causes the valuation of a house in the city of Valparaiso to shoot up from $122,000 to $400 million – boosting its annual property taxes from $1,500 to $8 million. Though the county’s IT director spots the mistake and alerts the auditor’s office, the wrong number nonetheless ends up being used in budget calculations, resulting in a $900,000 shortfall for the city and a $200,000 gap for its schools.

#11) In August, Starbucks directs baristas in the southeastern United States to e-mail a coupon for a free iced coffee to friends and family members. But e-mail knows no geographic boundaries and, worse, can be printed repeatedly.

After the e-mail spreads to every corner of the country and is reproduced en masse, Starbucks yanks the offer, leading disgruntled customer Kelly Coakley to file a $114 million class-action lawsuit.

#24) In April, just nine months after a Business 2.0 cover story trumpets the wisdom of Raytheon CEO William Swanson and his folksy hit book, Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, a San Diego engineer makes a shocking discovery: 17 of Swanson’s 33 rules are similar – and in some cases identical – to those in The Unwritten Rules of Engineering, a 1944 text by UCLA professor W.J. King.

While conceding that he failed to give proper credit, Swanson insists he didn’t intend to plagiarize, suggesting that old photocopied material may have wound up in his “scraps.”

By way of punishment, Raytheon’s board freezes Swanson’s salary at its 2005 level of $1.1 million and cuts his restricted stock grant by 20 percent.

And 98 others. Well worth reading at least a few, but I know reading them all can be a bit time consuming. (via Bill at DQ).

[tags]Dumbest moments in business[/tags]

An easy way to steal identities online

Catching up with my online reading a bit tonight, I found a link to a site which will check if your social security number is in their database of known stolen SSNs. I’ll not link to the site directly, because I want to save any of the less intelligent web users who accidentally find me site from doing something not-very-bright (I know both the regular readers of my site are so astonishingly above average intellect that not only would they not fall for this, they can actually read the mind of criminals attempting to steal their SSNs). All you have to do to see if you are in this stolen SSN database is enter your SSN into the handy-dandy search field. This news is a couple of days old already from the DownloadSquad folks, and thankfully there are a number of commenters there who have already pointed out the problem with this service.

So where did they get their data from? Well from the FAQ on their site, here is their response. “The information that powers StolenID Search is found online, by looking in places where fraudsters typically trade or store this kind of information. All information behind StolenID search is publicly available, but not in places where search engines such as Yahoo and Google would look. TrustedID abides by all state and federal laws in the collection and provision of this compromised information. The information behind StolenID Search comes from collection efforts led by TrustedID directly and also from other reputable companies that assist us in finding this information on our behalf. One of those companies is Cyvellience.”

Note that I am not saying StolenID Search is a web site operated by evil ub3r hackers. I am not saying you can’t trust the folks holding this information to protect the information you enter or the information they already have. I’m not even saying you will be exposed to any actual risk of identity theft if you use the site. I’m pointing this site out and warning against using it because giving out this information online just isn’t something you should ever do when you can avoid it. If you ever see something like this, please think carefully about what risk you are taking sending this information to people unknown. The site seems to have the recommendation of some seemingly trustworthy security and privacy resources. The site may be run by the most trustworthy people in the universe, and a chorus of angels may accompany everyone associated with the site to protect them from ever suffering ill. That still doesn’t make me feel I should send them my SSN.

[tags]Brilliant way to steal identities online, How to dupe trusting people[/tags]

A (loooong) analysis of the cost of DRM in Windows Vista

I’ll admit to posting this before I’ve finished reading it, but if I don’t, I’ll have forgotten it all by the time my readers get through it. I am still working through this massive Cost Analysis of Windows Content Protection by Peter Gutmann (and a shorter link for extra goodness). As the title suggests, it is a deep look at the cost of content protection and user rights restrictions in Windows Vista. There is also a response at the end to a rebuttal Microsoft made of the analysis (shorter link for linebreak protection).

Here is the executive summary. If you are going to read this (I will, and I hope others do as well), be prepared to invest some time so you really understand it and the rebuttal.

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Do you think rights restrictions are a good idea? Does this analysis change your view of digital rights mangling (DRM) controls?

[tags]A cost analysis of Windows contect protection, Analysis of Vista DRM costs with MS rebuttal and author’s reply to that[/tags]