bill:politics

I’ve been a reasonably happy customer of Wells Fargo for this entire century (damn, doesn’t that sound impressive!) and I suppose they’re more or less as good as any of the other big national banks. Your experience may be different, of course, as the collision of individuals dealt with and company policies create an individual track record so I’m not asserting anything other than my own.

This morning I’m beginning to wonder. Wells Fargo sent me the latest installment of their monthly customer newsletter email and I clicked a link labeled Detect Credit Fraud Early: ID Theft Protection because, hey, who isn’t interested in bank security. The page beings okay, with a headline of “Protect Your Good Credit with Identity Theft Protection” and is short too, covering the program with six bullet points, all less than two narrow lines.

And then I my eyes reached the closer: “Enjoy peace of mind for just $12.99 a month.” That’s right, Wells Fargo expects you, me and Dupree to pay $156 per year for keeping safe what I–and you may feel differently–expect ought to be the normal course of business! Not necessarily by a bank, maybe by the major credit bureaus, but if I had to guess I’d say that Wells Fargo is doing this in some sort of partnership with them.

Credit card companies and banks, here’s a competitive advantage you can offer customers: do this service, maybe minus the personal credit analysis, for free. Make a big deal about it in your advertising and marketing. Most other things being equal I’d sign up and blog you very positively, just drop me a note.

So tonight the Big Guy and I hauled over to SAP Labs’ very nicely appointed offices for this month’s Future Salon meeting, Security Future Salon, featuring Global Guerillas author John Robb. For most of the audience (40-50 people, clearly more than expected), people who don’t subscribe to Robb’s RSS feeds, this was probably a big, unpleasant revelation.

Having paid attention to his writings on 4GW and the limitations of the national security model, this wasn’t particularly new material for me. No less unpleasant. I wish he’d have spent more time on showing how terrorist lessons learned in Iraq are being exported to Nigeria (which he did at least touch on), Pakistan, Somalia, Chechnya and Colombia but hopefully he’ll blog this stuff in more detail soon.

For someone with his military ties I was pleased to see him explicitly criticize Bush, Rumsfeld and the Administration’s work on pretty much all levels.

Driving home tonight from work I notied something odd on a pickup truck in the other lane on San Antonio Rd. Though wearing commercial license plates, the identifying/marketing text included prominently the phrase “Anti-Terrorism Unit.” I should have been quicker to think of taking a picture with my phone camera. I did write down the phone number and some other details and googling 800-690-7707 turned up Viable Alternatives Corp. / San Mateo Security.

Nothing on the company website mentions this ‘unit’, and this could be an overreaction, but in these times I don’t think too highly of marking up a truck with a decal that is probably just this side of the line in looking like a governmental insignia, a lightbar across the roof and prominently displaying those words. True, the truck did also show San Mateo Security but the positioning was such that one could easily miss the commercial nature.

What is a private company in the Bay Area doing with an anti-terrorism unit anyway?

When Bill Lind says “Beware the ides of March” it’s time to find a deep hole. And the whole mishegas over the Danish editorial cartoons isn’t making me feel any less quesy either. [via JRobb]

For the second week I, Cringely covers the NSA wiretapping issue with the help of an anonymous ex-insider to suggest that the most likely scenario is that the agency is tracking the connections between phone numbers, a sort of six degrees game on known terrorist phones, to decide which lines should be specifically targeted for legal taps.

The whole analysis seems logical until you bring one fact to the table that Cringely skips: these guys almost certainly change cell phones like you and I change underwear. So rather than, say, weekly calls from Al Qaeda #14 to #22 there’s probably no more than two or three interesting calls before the phone is abandoned. Even worse, these cretins could use two other strategies to render pen/traps monitoring useless: randomly make one or two calls from the legitimate phone of a non-member or turn the cell phones over to non-members after short period of use.

Cringely often gets off into wild blue speculation or assertions that read logicially but are so far from reality that they might as well be fantasy. This column and last week’s, though, are a different form of weird techno-cover for bad politics.

I tend to agree with John Robb as he’s far closer to intelligence matters than am I but when he simply highlights and confirms the words of Bruce Schneier ( as he does today in Accelerating the Decline and Fall) then there really can be no doubt. So let me give you John’s warning:

Talking, of course, about Bush’s assertion that his executive order allowing warrantless spying on American soil is within the scope of authority granted by Congress in the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq.

The sheer arrogance of Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of them is barely believable but that many of their supporters would call me a defeatist, traitor or worse for writing this post demonstrates that if you stay on message, and the message is scary yet filled with bravado, then many people will check their thinking caps at the door.

Just want to make a note of all the troubling situations emanating from the White House and environs at the moment.

Taken together and despite a continuing attempt to sprinkle magic 9/11 dust on events, GWB sinks lower and lower in approval ratings. 29 percent give him a thumbs up in a New York State poll while an amazing 67% say no. In a broader sign of weakness, potentially strong Republican candidates are backing away from 2006 campaigns despite Administration attempts at recruiting them.

Reading Wireless devices could foil hijack attempts gives me one of those ’smack me in the face’ moments. How obvious is this idea and yet it’s just now being proposed? I’m not talking about 9/11 obvious, though one wonders why this concept didn’t get pushed from the after-analysis, but even going back to the initial hijacking troubles in the ’70s. TVs, for example, had wireless remotes by then and an airplane security scenario needs a much simpler device than even that.