ABCNEWS.com : Justice Dept. Lifts FBI Database Limits The Justice Department lifted a requirement � that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country's most comprehensive law enforcement database. The system, run by the FBI's National Crime Information Center, includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats. Records are queried increasingly by the nation's law enforcement agencies to help decide whether to monitor, detain or arrest someone. The records are inaccessible to the public, and police have been prosecuted in U.S. courts for misusing the system to find, for example, personal information about girlfriends or former spouses. Officials said the change, which immediately drew criticism from civil-liberties advocates, is necessary to ensure investigators have access to information that can't be confirmed but could take on new significance later, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. The change to the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was disclosed with an announcement published in the Federal Register. The Privacy Act previously required the FBI to ensure information was "accurate, relevant, timely and complete" before it could be added to the system.� Critics urged Congress to review the change, arguing that information in the computer files was especially important because it can affect many aspects of a person's life. "This is information that has always been stigmatizing, the type of data that can prevent someone from getting a job," said Marc Rotenberg of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When you remove the accuracy obligations, you open the door to the use of unreliable information." Critics have noted complaints for years about wrong information in the computer files that disrupted the lives of innocent citizens, and the FBI has acknowledged problems. In one case, a Phoenix resident was arrested for minor traffic violations that had been quashed weeks earlier; in another, a civilian was misidentified as a Navy deserter. The system "is replete with inaccurate, untimely information, but everybody does their best to keep it up to date," said Beryl Howell, former general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "That's a goal we shouldn't just throw out." In the change, the Justice Department said earlier restrictions on information "would limit the ability of trained investigators and intelligence analysts to exercise their judgment in reporting on investigations and impede the development of criminal intelligence necessary for effective law enforcement." http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030324_2121.html

Counterpane: Crypto-Gram: April 15, 2003 National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Database Accuracy Last month the U.S. Justice Department administratively discharged the FBI of its statutory duty to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. This database is enormous. It contains over 39 million criminal records. It contains information on wanted persons, missing persons, and gang members, as well as information about stolen cars, boats, and other information. Over 80,000 law enforcement agencies have access to this database. On average, there are 2.8 million transactions processed each day. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires the FBI to make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the records in this database. Last month, the Justice Department exempted the system from the law's accuracy requirements. This isn't just bad social practice, it's bad security. A database with more errors is much less useful than a database with fewer errors, and an error-filled security database is much more likely to target innocents than it is to let the guilty go free. To see this, let's walk through an example. Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty." Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly. Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million. Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100. The differences between examples 2 and 3 are striking. In example 2, one person is erroneously arrested for every 100 people correctly arrested. In example 3, one person is correctly arrested for every 100 people erroneously arrested. The increase in error rate makes the database all but useless as a system for figuring out how to arrest. And this is despite the fact that, in both cases, almost no guilty people get away because of a database error. The reason for this phenomenon is that the number of guilty people is a very small percentage of the population. If one in ten people were guilty, then a 0.0001% error rate would mistakenly arrest one innocent for every 100,000 guilty, and a 1% error rate would arrest approximately one innocent for every guilty. And if the number of guilty people is even less than one in ten thousand, then the problem of arresting innocents magnifies even more as the database has more errors. Now this is a simple example, and the NCIC database has far more complex data and tries to make more complex correlations. And I am assuming that the error rate for false positives are the same as the error rate for false negatives, and there aren't any data dependencies that complicate the analysis. But even with these complications, the problems are still the same. Because there are so few terrorists (for example) amongst the general population, a error-filled database is far more likely to identify innocent people as terrorists than it is to catch actual terrorists. This kind of thing is already happening. There are 13 million people on the FBI's terrorist watch list. That's ridiculous, it's simply inconceivable that a number of people equal to 4.5% of the population of the United States are terrorists. There are far more innocents on that list than there are guilty people not on that list. And these innocents are regularly harassed by police trying to do their job. And in any case, any watch list with 13 million people is basically useless. How many resources can anyone afford to spend watching about one-twentieth of the population, anyway? That 13-million-person list feels a whole like CYA on the part of the FBI. Adding someone to the list probably has no cost and, in fact, may be one criterion for how your performance is evaluated at the FBI. Removing someone from the list probably takes considerable courage, since someone is going to have to take the fall when "the warnings were ignored" and "they failed to connect the dots." Best to leave that risky stuff to other people, and to keep innocent people on the list forever.� http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0304.html#7

Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution The Bush team's vision for a postwar Iraq was founded on the dreams of exiles and defectors, who promised that Iraqis would shower American troops with flowers. Now, with the crowds shouting, "No to America; no to Saddam," and most Iraqis already referring to the American "occupation," the Bush administration seems puzzled. The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. In particular, the dogged nationalism of the Iraqis that forced imperial Britain's departure in 1932; and, more recently, the events in 1979 after the downfall of the secular regime of the shah of Iran. A big argument among American officials had been over the future of the secular Baath Party, with the pragmatists advocating a mere "head transplant" of the top leadership while keeping the body intact, and the ideologues proposing outright destruction. Events, however, ignored the debate in Washington, and the Baath disappeared altogether. So too have the military and most of the police. This vacuum is reminiscent of what happened in Iran in February 1979. The 440,000-strong military of the pro-American shah disintegrated quickly, as did the police force and the Savak, the notorious secret police. Into that vacuum stepped the Islamic Revolutionary Komitehs, run by Shiite clerics operating from the local mosques. The Komitehs took over not only law enforcement but also such essential chores as distributing heating oil to households in wintry Tehran. Many groups took part in toppling the shah; but it was the nationwide religious network and the unified actions of the mullahs that enabled them to to become his successor. A similar pattern has emerged in Iraq, particularly in the Shiite-majority south and the Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. Over the centuries, as members of a community that was discriminated against and repressed, the Shiites learned to find comfort in religion and piety to a much greater extent than the ruling Sunnis. In recent decades, Shiite clerics devised clandestine networks of communication that even Saddam Hussein's spies failed to infiltrate. Eschewing written messages or telephones, they used personal envoys who spoke in code. In the wake of Iraq's collapse, this messenger system has proved remarkably efficient. The Shiites, however, are not uniform in their outlook. Religious loyalties are divided between Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, an Iranian-born cleric living in Najaf, and the Tehran-based Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, leader of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Yet they are united in their demand, endorsed by predominantly Shiite Iran, that the Americans leave soon. The supreme council has a 10,000-man army, armed by Iran, and controls many Iraqi towns near the Iranian border. By contrast, the Free Iraqi Forces loyal to Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the American-sponsored Iraqi National Congress, has only about 600 men at arms. The Pentagon made a show of airlifting Mr. Chalabi's men into the April 15 assembly of Iraqi politicians convened by the American pro-consul, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. But the attendance of a mere 80 delegates (the supreme council, previously part of the American-sponsored official Iraqi opposition, boycotted), along with a noisy anti-American protest by 20,000 demonstrators, showed the weakness of Washington's hand.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/opinion/23HIRO.html

Roads Not Taken Richard Gephardt's new proposal � to scrap the 2001 tax cut and use the reclaimed revenue to provide health benefits to the uninsured � has been widely dismissed as unrealistic. And in political terms that's probably true. After all, these days it's considered "moderate" to support an irresponsible tax cut that is merely large, as opposed to gigantic. But today I'd like to take a holiday from political realism, and ask a na�ve question: Why shouldn't the American people favor a proposal like Mr. Gephardt's? Never mind the details; why shouldn't the typical citizen, faced with a choice between Bush-style tax cuts and a plan to provide health insurance to most of the uninsured, choose the latter? Of course, originally tax cuts weren't supposed to require sacrificing something else. In the 2000 campaign, and up through the passage of the 2001 tax cut, George Bush insisted that there was plenty of money for everything. But there wasn't � and now, having returned to an era of deficits, we are told that social programs must be shrunk even as taxes are cut further. Why not choose a different road? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/opinion/25KRUG.html

I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits The Internal Revenue Service is planning to ask more than four million of the working poor who now claim a special tax credit to provide the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers. The I.R.S., trying to prevent errors and cheating, says it needs greater proof of eligibility months before people claim the credit on their tax returns because its efforts to find errors through audits after the fact have not worked. Treasury officials estimate that $6.5 billion to $10 billion is lost to improper payments each year. But some tax experts criticize the higher burden of proof as unfair and a wasteful allocation of scarce I.R.S. enforcement dollars. They say that corporations, business owners, investors and partnerships deprive the government of many times what the working poor ever could � through both illegal means and legal shelters � yet these taxpayers face no demands to prove the validity of their claims in advance with certified records and sworn affidavits. Others warn that the proposed I.R.S. rules will set a standard of proof so high that it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, for honest taxpayers to meet it. As a result, some people entitled to the tax credit will no longer receive it. And those who do manage to file successful claims will almost certainly have to pay commercial tax preparers more for helping them with the extra paperwork. "There is this double standard," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research group in Washington financed mainly by large foundations. "The losses are larger in other areas of the tax code, but somehow a different standard gets applied to this." Instead of conventional welfare benefits, the earned-income tax credit provides an offset for the Social Security taxes low-income workers have already paid, along with a credit based on their earnings that is intended to give them an incentive to work. The credits vary according to income and family size, but no household with earned income above $34,692 is eligible. The average tax credit, paid by the government by check, was $1,976 for households with children in 2001. That is less than the average food stamp benefit for households with children that year, $2,904. But the I.R.S.'s proposed rules would make it much harder to qualify for the tax credit than for food stamps. Republicans and Democrats have both supported expanding the tax credit, but as the cost of the program has risen, many Republicans have been vehement in saying that the program is riddled with errors and fraud. President Bush has praised the tax credit. But his administration has also complained about fraud, and the president has asked Congress for $100 million and 650 new employees to identify potentially erroneous claims before any money is paid out. There is a similar effort with federally subsidized school lunches. Eric Bost, the under secretary of agriculture for food and nutrition, has increased efforts to weed out students who officials say are ineligible for free or subsidized school meals. A Treasury official who insisted on not being identified said it was unfair to judge the size of the overpayment problem on the basis of just one year's tax credit, because the overpayments can continue year after year until each minor child listed on a false claim turns 18. "It's a permanent thing," she said. "The I.R.S. tends to take things that are permanent very seriously, and put a lot of resources into them." She added that screening out false claimants in advance could be characterized as a benefit to the poor, because such taxpayers would no longer have to have their claims audited, or scrounge for a way to pay back the money with interest if their claims are denied. The new measures, which are expected to be published for public comment shortly, are scheduled to begin in July, when the first 45,000 taxpayers who fit into a "high-error category" will be asked to submit proof of their eligibility within six months. The program will accelerate to two million taxpayers in 2004. Eventually some four million "high error" claimants � a fifth of the 19 million who now claim the tax credit � will be required to submit advance proof of their eligibility. The high-error category encompasses all claimants except married taxpayers filing joint returns and single mothers; it includes fathers with sole custody of children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, foster parents and others. They will have to provide papers proving that the relationship with the children claimed is as claimed, and that the children lived with them for at least six months of the year. Only a few types of evidence will be acceptable to the I.R.S., and some are documents that will be difficult or impossible for people to get within the six-month deadline. To prove their relationships to children, for example, they are expected to produce marriage certificates, in some cases for other people's marriages; for marriages that took place abroad; and in a few cases for marriages of great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Even American weddings may be hard to document adequately in less than six months. The State of California, for example, warns on its Web site that it may take "up to two to three years" to issue copies of marriage certificates, "due to budgetary constraints." The State of Ohio does not even issue copies of marriage certificates, only "marriage abstracts," which are not certified documents and take six months to obtain in any case. New York State will not issue certificates to people who were married in New York City. New York City will not issue the certificates to anyone but the husband and wife, "or someone with written authorization from them." The I.R.S. plan does not offer any guidelines for the children of couples in common-law marriages. To prove where a child lived, the I.R.S. will require claimants to produce school records, medical records, leases or similar documents that show both the filer's and the child's names and address, and state specifically the range of dates when they lived there together. Filers who have no such documents will be allowed to produce instead a sworn affidavit from a school official, employer, member of the clergy or other person in a quasi-official capacity, specifically stating under penalty of perjury that he or she has "personal knowledge" that the taxpayer and child lived together during the dates cited. An affidavit from a landlord, who may live far away, would be accepted, but not one from a building superintendent who lives on the premises. An I.R.S. briefing paper on the new rules states that in 1999 the Treasury lost $8.5 billion to $9.9 billion by paying earned-income tax credits to filers who should not have received them. A separate analysis, by two Treasury Department specialists, says subsequent measures may have reduced these erroneous payments by $2 billion. By comparison, corporations managed to sidestep as much as $54 billion in 1998, by hiding about $155 billion in profits in tax shelters, according to a study by a Harvard economist, Mihir A. Desai. The I.R.S.'s most recent attempt to measure tax cheating � based on 1988 data and published in 1992 � showed that the biggest tax dodgers by far were people running their own businesses. They cost the Treasury about $38 billion in lost 1992 taxes by failing to report all their income. The same I.R.S. study found that people who wrongly took tax credits of all types � including earned-income tax credits � cost the Treasury less than $6 billion in 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/business/25TAX.html?pagewanted=all&position=

A Flashback to the 60's for an Antiwar Protester At the time, Brett A. Bursey says, he seemed to be having a 60's flashback. There he was at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport with his antiwar sign. There were the thousands of Republicans gathering to welcome a president. There were the police officers arresting him for trespassing. The first time this happened was in May 1969, before a visit by Richard M. Nixon. The charges against Mr. Bursey were dropped after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that if protesters were on public property � as the antiwar demonstrators were � they could not be charged with trespassing. Last Oct. 24, 33 years later and about 100 yards away, the now graying Mr. Bursey was again arrested for trespassing, this time before a visit by President Bush. The charge was soon dropped. But last month, the local United States attorney, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., brought federal charges against Mr. Bursey under a seldom-used statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president is visiting. He faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. This being South Carolina, Mr. Bursey's story includes lots of colorful history, old grudges and improbable plot twists, not to mention the Confederate battle flag. But to some legal experts it is also part of a growing pattern of repression against protesters, demonstrators and dissenters. The American Civil Liberties Union says it has found many examples, like increased arrests and interrogations of protesters and the shunning of celebrities who have opposed the war in Iraq. "When you connect the dots, you see very clearly a climate of chilled dissent and debate," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the civil liberties group. In particular, Mr. Romero said, there is a growing practice of corralling protesters in "free-speech zones," which are often so far from the object of the protest as to be invisible. "It's an effort to mitigate the effectiveness of free speech," he said. And he does not buy the argument that such zones are necessary to protect the president and other officials. "John Hinckley wasn't carrying an anti-Reagan sign when he shot him," Mr. Romero said. It was just such a "protest zone" that got Mr. Bursey in trouble last fall. A spokeswoman for the airport said officials there had established a protest area on the verge of a highway, a good half mile from the hangar where the president would be speaking. (Airport police are not sure if anyone actually protested at the official zone, she said.) Mr. Bursey hoped he and some friends could protest somewhere closer, maybe across the road from the hangar, he said. The police in Charleston and Greenville had been accommodating, he said, when he had asked to avoid the protest zones, which he described as being "out there behind the coliseum by the Dumpsters." It did not work this time. "We attempted to dialogue for a while, them telling me to go to the free-speech zone, me saying I was in it: the United States of America," Mr. Bursey said. Finally, he said, an airport policeman told him he had to put down his sign ("No War for Oil") or leave. " `You mean, it's the content of my sign?' I asked him," Mr. Bursey said. "He said, `Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign.' " Mr. Bursey kept the sign and was arrested; he said he watched Air Force One land from the back of a patrol wagon and spent the night in the county jail. A Secret Service agent was present at the arrest, Mr. Bursey said, but he added that no one could have seen him and his companions as a security threat. "There was no one under 50 in that crowd," said Mr. Bursey, who is 54. "In my mind, at that time, we didn't pose a security threat; we posed a political threat." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial2/27PROT.html