A few days later, it was still pissing me off, so I decided to take bitching about things to a new level and actually write letters to my Congresscritters. The basic format was the same for all three:

Dear [CONGRESSPERSON],

I just received the renewal materials for my Illinois Driver’s License, and there’s a whole separate page detailing the procedures for applying for a REAL ID, with a warning that I’ll need a REAL ID to (among other things) fly on a domestic flight.

Isn’t it time we put an end to this? States such as ours have been struggling with implementing REAL ID for years, and it imposes a tedious burden on millions of drivers.

With my regular Illinois Driver’s License I can rent a car, buy a car, open a bank account, trade stocks, buy a gun, get prescription controlled substances from a pharmacy, get married, and buy a house with a mortgage. (I can do many more important or even risky things with no ID at all.) Surely if my regular ID is good enough for all those other purposes, isn’t it good enough for air travel?

In an era when passengers are thoroughly screened for weapons before boarding a plane, is there any additional benefit to knowing the identity of each passenger? Isn’t it enough that we know they aren’t bringing anything dangerous on board?

Please also note that it’s been more than 15 years since the Real ID Act passed, and it still is not fully implemented as a requirement for flying. Clearly, we’re doing fine without this law. We don’t need it, and we never have.

Please work to roll back this ridiculous and unnecessary law as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Mark Draughn

I sent that basic letter to my congressional representative, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and to both of my senators, Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin.

Senator Durbin never bothered to reply to my message. (To be fair, I didn’t ask him to.) Sadly, that makes his response the best one, because both my other members of Congress support REAL ID.

Senator Duckworth’s office replied with a message that included an explanation of what REAL ID is, what ID I need to get it, and her declaration of support for the law:

As your Senator, I am dedicated to protecting the safety of all Americans and promoting our national security. That includes successfully implementing the REAL ID Act so that it is completed in an efficient, effective and timely manner. Please be assured that I will continue to monitor DHS’s coordination with affected entities, including commercial air travel, during the final phase of REAL ID’s implementation.

Coming in last was Representative Krishnamoorthi’s office, which responded with some similar boilerplate about what REAL ID is and how to apply for it, and then declared his support for it:

As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I am committed to protecting all Americans from threats of terrorism at home and abroad. I appreciate you bringing your concerns with the REAL ID Act to my attention, and I will keep your thoughts in mind should similar legislation come to the House floor for a vote.

On the one hand, this is technically better than Duckworth’s response, because at least he says he’ll keep my thoughts in mind. On the other hand, Krishnamoorthi used my message as an excuse to add me to his mailing list so now I get crap from him all the time.

I have the feeling that REAL ID is not going to go away. On the other hand, they did just extend the deadline for complying, yet again. So there’s that.

Update: On September 21, 2021, Senator Durbin’s office got back to me with a completely generic form email that thanks me for contacting him but doesn’t even mention REAL ID.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Congress Disappoints Me: REAL ID edition

The bad news is that in March of 2014 the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management got hacked. The OPM cybersecurity team didn’t detect the hacking until April of the following year, by which time the hackers had stolen the records of 21 million people.

I’ve never been a government employee, but in the 1990s I had a national security clearance, and the stolen data includes records of people who applied for a clearance. I didn’t have to fill out the gigantic SF-86 form (the country was between the Cold War and the War on Terror, so security procedures were very relaxed) but I still had to provide a lot of information, all of it tied to my Social Security number. And apparently the OPM thinks the stolen data includes my information.

Which is why the government is now spending $133 million of taxpayer money to buy ID theft detection service for me and everyone else who got hit.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at In Which the U.S. Government Gives Me Free Stuff

Then over at The Big Questions economist Steve Landsburg posted what he called “The Ashley Madison Test of College Faculty Cluelessness” in which he ranked 33 top colleges according to how many of their faculty used their work email addresses to register at Ashley Madison.

…feel free to use these rankings as a measure of your college faculty’s average cluelessness, at least when it comes to maintaining anonymity over the Internet.

I thought that was an amusing way to poke fun at academia, and since I occasionally cover legal issues, I figured that I could do the same for law big. So here’s a list of email domains from Vault’s list of 100 most prestigious law firms to work for in 2016, ranked in order by the number of times email addresses with that domain appear in the Ashley Madison data dump:

Since this post mentions 100 freakin’ law firms, I should probably include a few clarifications:

There are reasons unrelated to adultery for having an account at Ashley Madison. Journalists, for example, have created Ashley Madison accounts while writing stories about the service. (Since I’ve considered writing posts about Ashley Madison in the past, I thought I might have created an account. It turns out I didn’t.) Similarly, employees of law firms could have created accounts as part of the investigation of a legal matter. Or they may just have been curious.

It’s also important to note that Ashley Madison does not verify email addresses, so these accounts need not have been created by any real person at those law firms. They don’t even have to be real email addresses. The email addresses in the Ashley Madison database could have been put there by literally anyone on the internet. (This is why I’m not posting individual addresses.) Some lawfirms have purchased short high-prestige domains, and people entering random letters for a made-up email address could easily hit on them by accident.

Furthermore, there’s a chance that this is not the real data from Ashley Madison. It’s possible I found another fake data dump. This post is based on data listed at The Pirate Bay, and this time I was more careful, so I think it’s the Thursday dump everyone’s been talking about, but I could be wrong. And even if it is the dump everybody’s talking about, there’s no guarantee that it’s really from the Impact Team hacking group, and even if it is, there’s no guarantee that this data actually came from Ashley Madison. As I write this, they have not confirmed its authenticity. However, the lack of vigorous denials makes me think this is probably the real thing.

[Update: A PR representative for one of the law firms pointed out that many of the email addresses are obviously fake, and some of them are duplicates. I had already explained that Ashley Madison does not verify email addresses, but in case the implications of unverified email were not getting across to readers, I have changed this post to put greater emphasis on implications of unverified email. Furthermore, I have replaced the names of the firms with the domain names from the data dump to make it clear that the email addresses are not necessarily valid email addresses at those firms. I also re-wrote the database query to crush out duplicate email addresses, which changes some of the counts and rankings. Finally, I changed the tone to more clearly indicate that this post is intended for amusement.]

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Biglaw According to Ashley Madison

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at My Thoughts on Last Night’s Debate

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Next They’ll Ban Turning ‘Round and ‘Round Until You Get Dizzy

Update: Liar.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Thrilling Suspense of Maury

From today, anyone taking a photograph of a police officer could be deemed to have committed a criminal offence.

That is because of a new law – Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act – which has come into force.

It permits the arrest of anyone found “eliciting, publishing or communicating information” relating to members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers, which is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.

You might think that last part about terrorism is a safeguard against abuse, but it’s not. It won’t prevent the cops from arresting you. The only place it does any good is at your trial, and by then it’s too late. Even if the charges are dropped and you are released later the same day, the cops will already have confiscated your camera and had a chance to delete your photos.

Why would they do that?

Check out this story Simple Justice found about how one Schenectady cop spends his shift:

Dwayne Johnson, who was the city’s highest paid officer last year with earnings of $168,921, spends most Tuesday early mornings in an apartment at the corner of Queen Philomena Boulevard and Sir Benjamin Way, near Kings Road. Although Johnson is typically scheduled to patrol the city until 8 a.m., he parks his marked police car on Sir Benjamin Way just before 4 a.m. and remains indoors for several hours.

The eight-year veteran of the department was observed by a Daily Gazette reporter and other witnesses as he entered and stayed in the apartment on five Tuesdays in a row this year.

The reporter has photographs.

If British cops are anything like Schenectady cops, it’s no wonder they don’t want their picture taken.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Unrelated Stories: Photographing Cops

Most of my friends are libertarians, and hence tend to assume that this sort of quid pro quo is in fact how people get appointments.  But we thought it was done with some subtlety, a nudge and a wink, not full frontal demands for payola… There’s something really sad about having gone so far that your indelicacy actually amazes the folks who want to legalize prostitution and open air drug markets.

(Source)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Best Line About Blagojevich

The word “jagoff”…gets thrown around a lot in today’s society…

and I just knew we were the story.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at It’s Official: We Rule the News Cycle

I haven’t even checked the Illinois Review site for fear of a fatal dose of glee.

The first part of this AP wire story is classic Chicago politics (yes, he’s the state governor, but he started here in Chicago, where he was my Congressman):

A 76-page FBI affidavit said the 51-year-old Democratic governor was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps over the last month conspiring to sell or trade the vacant Senate seat for personal benefits for himself and his wife, Patti.

Otherwise, Blagojevich considered appointing himself. The affidavit said that as late as Nov. 3, he told his deputy governor that if “they’re not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it.”

“I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain,” Blagojevich allegedly said later that day, according to the affidavit, which also quoted him as saying in a remark punctuated by profanity that the seat was “a valuable thing — you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

I’m always appalled by the raw opportunism in our politicians. It’s pretty obvious that he never considered what would be good for the state, let alone the country.

What’s really amazing is just how much of a loony-tune our governor was:

He also allegedly discussed getting campaign funds for himself or possibly a post in the president’s cabinet or an ambassadorship once he left the governor’s office. He noted becoming a U.S. senator might remake his image for a possible presidential run in 2016, according to the affidavit.

Oh my God! The fool thought he could run for president? Everyone else in Illinois has just been waiting for the indictments to come down.

Update: Apparently, Blagojevich has not officially been indicted yet, merely arrested and charged. The distinction isn’t entirely clear to me, but this post has been modified to reflect the lack of indictment.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Governor Rod Blagojevich Arrested…Finally

VPILF.com

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Interweb is Truly a Marvel to Behold

I was just now skimming through the blog feeds I read when I noticed that Illinois Reason had a post up entitled “Obama assassination plot foiled in Colorado.” The main guy at that blog, Rob Nesvacil, is a rabid anti-conservative who really has it in for the right-wing blogosphere, so as I clicked through to his post, I thought “Wouldn’t it be funny if he was crazy enought to try to blame right-wing pundits for the assassination attempt?”

It turns out he does.

What happens when the one side constantly smears the other as unpatriotic, treacherous and disloyal simply because they disagree with that side’s ideas, no matter how valid they may be…

when they constantly promote six degrees of separation to anyone even remotely considered “bad” (no matter how thin the connection) even though the candidate was never involved in any wrongdoing and has routinely repudiated those others’ despicable acts…

when lie after lie after lie is promulgated to falsely insinuate a candidate either sympathizes with terrorists or is one himself…

when the elitist billionaires of one political side use their money not to do charitable good for society but to tear down any with whom they disagree as if such acidic poison were what our Founding Fathers had always hoped for when fighting a war to launch our independent democracy…

when the most vile of heretical and blasphemous rhetoric is used to lie about a candidate and portray him as not just evil, but perhaps even the Anti-Christ and harbinger of the End Times…

…What happens when one side of the political spectrum, through fetid ranting over the course of a great many years, foments rage and anger and promotes and even glorifies violence in order to ‘pump up their base of voters’?

Idiots try to assassinate a presidential candidate, that’s what happens.

It doesn’t matter if they are alleged white supremacists or hopped up on meth. Something clearly pushed these people over the edge to think murder was somehow acceptable. Rational and sane folks do not simply load up a high-powered rifle and work on an assassination plot; something or someone prods them toward that disastrous destination.

This is the same sort of dubious “reasoning” that caused some liberal pundits to blame conservative pundits for the bombing in Oklahoma City because conservatives were against big government and, you know, the bombers blew up a government building.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Because There’s No Difference Between Right-Wing Pundits and White Supremacist Thugs…

According to the New York Times, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer has just been—as they say—“linked” to a prostitution ring…which I assume means he was fucking a bunch of hookers.

Normally, I wouldn’t care at all. I don’t normally give a damn care what consenting adults do with their time and money.

However, Elliot Spitzer does care what consenting adults do. As New York Attorney General, he prosecuted a couple of prostitution rings. He’s also gone on a number of grandstanding crusades, often stretching the interpretation of New York law to prosecute people for business practices that had been considered legal for decades. He’s also threatened to go after people who criticize him. Even by politician standards, he’s kind of a scumbag.

So I’m torn. I don’t believe hiring prostitutes makes him a bad guy, but I don’t like him, but the reasons I don’t like him aren’t illegal, but hiring prostitutes is. So I’d like to see him take a big hit for this. But I’ll feel guilty for enjoying it.

Update: And I feel really guilty for mentioning that according to court files, Client-9 (the FBI code for Spitzer in the affidavit) was described by the Emperors Club booker as someone who “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe…” I gotta admit, I’m hoping for embarassing details. Let’s just say I’m kind of hoping to see Elliot Spitzer’s name in the same sentence with words like “scat”, “golden shower,” and “she-male.”

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Schadenfreude for Spitzer

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Three former Drug Enforcement Administration agents filed a $55 million defamation lawsuit against the movie studio that made “American Gangster” on Wednesday, claiming it tarnished hundreds of reputations.

…

The movie hurt the agents’ reputations by falsely claiming in text at the end that a collaboration between Lucas and Roberts “led to the convictions of three-quarters of New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency” agents between 1973 and 1985, according to the suit, which seeks class action status.

…

The lawsuit said the public believed the film’s text referred to federal DEA agents, not police officers, and regardless, no New York police officers were convicted as a result of Lucas’ cooperation.

The DEA agents’ demands are about what you’d expect from drug warriors who confiscate people’s cars when they find drug residue in the ash tray:

The suit seeks to stop the film’s distribution or change the text at the end of the film and turn over all of its profits to a fund for federal DEA agents.

Once a legal gangster, always a legal gangster.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at American Gangsters

I didn’t start out by doing research. First I had to take some classes. A lot of classes. In the meantime, I helped out a bit around the Information Retrieval lab, managing servers and other non-research stuff. One of the Ph.D. students using the lab was a fellow named Abdur, who was much farther along in his research.

Abdur and I, well, we didn’t exactly get along. He clearly didn’t have a lot of respect for my skills or my intellect. I figure he thought I didn’t have what it takes to do science research.

He was probably right about that, because I eventually drifted out of the Ph.D. program before ever doing any actual research or even completing all my classes. I had lost interest in the subject of Information Retrieval and the idea of doing scientific research. Software development is fun and rewarding. Software research just seemed like a lot of hard work that would bore me to death.

Abdur finished his degree and did a lot of research. According to his online CV he has over 20 patents, 8 publications in refereed journals, and over a hundred contributions to conferences. He’s been on various conference committees and is on the editorial board for a major journal in the field.

I guess if I had finished my Ph.D., I could have done all that too. In every way, Abdur was and no doubt still is a far better computer science researcher than I ever was or will be.

Then again, Abdur Chowdhury has quite recently made search engine history in a way that I would not want to share. He was the AOL Chief Architect for Research who published the search queries of over half a million AOL users, setting off a firestorm of controversy over the release of private search data.

Update: Samples of the leaked data here and here. No pictures, but might not be seriously not safe for work.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at I Knew Abdur When…

So now he’s gone and killed himself. Self-inflicted gunshot wound, right in the head. Anybody shocked by this turn of events?

Well, I guess his son must have been pretty shocked. He’s the one who had the misfortune of finding the body. Way to go, Hunter.

What a jackass.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.