Yemen again

After the latest attempt to take down an airplane: two immediate conclusions present themselves. First, after 9/11 it is increasingly unlikely that an attack on an airplane will succeed, simply because passengers will not remain docile if an aggressive move is made on the plane.

The attitude learned from the seventies that highjackers just want to fly to Cuba or Libya, and so if you stay quiet, everything will work out, this attitude, which did not even last through the day of September 11^th, is now once again shown to be over. Passengers will jump anyone who makes a hostile move. Once it has been shown that any able bodied passenger will leap into the chest of a highjacker regardless of how much smoke is rising from his torso or what manner cutting implement he is holding.

The second conclusion has to be that there is some strong reason why the US does not invade Yemen, presumably because the Saudi's are opposed to it. Not that one would advocate such a move, but based on previous US excursions into small countries, Yemen would seem to be a prime target. It cannot be that the desert terrain has kept the US in check. That was hardly considered a reason for restraint before the US went into Afghanistan. It must be simply that some foreign policy concern is holding the US back from jumping on Yemen, a positive development for we hardly need a third messy invasion. There are surely elaborate plans on how to invade Yemen which have been simply shelved because some larger factor, i.e. Saudi Arabia or the general sense that US troops should stay very far way from Mecca, keeps us away from yet another crazy invasion.

Secure Reading

As high school kids we hung out in libraries all the time. Only two places in New York City would screen who got to use the reading rooms. The New York Public on 42^nd St had a rule that you had to be over 18 to enter, but no one really stopped us from ordering books there so long as we approached the librarian's desk earnestly with a hushed demeanor. Columbia University started checking ID cards in the late 70s probably from fear of crime. So as high school kids we shied away from Butler library. But once in a while we would sneak into the law school library where they had not yet placed any guards, probably because the stacks were modern and bright as opposed to Butler's gothic dungeon. By and large though, there were no restrictions on getting into the libraries of New York, and that a cluster of geeks would stop at nothing to find a back issue of the New England Journal of Medicine never entered the minds of library administrators.

Today institutional libraries require users to demonstrate that they have the proper credentials, but their motives are totally different. They are not trying to keep the place quiet or prevent muggings. It's not even the fear of terrorism. The real motive is financial.

The spread of security passwords has the effect of creating barriers that protect property, not unlike enclosures around common fields at the end of the eighteenth century when capitalist agriculture restructured the English countryside. Today, the more security barriers are strictly enforced, the more certain publishers are that their on-line services will not be accessed by those, who are not part of the fee structure.

After 9/11 there came a wave of security password protection on libraries. The occasional suggestion was made that terrorists would use free public computers to plot attacks, and librarians protested at the requirement that libraries track the books users check out. Once that requirement was dropped, the pass words still remained, and they exist now, one suspects, so as to allow libraries to buy and publishers to sell online journals, books, reference databases and the like.

The ease with which academics can research online is of course made possible by the passwords that protect the property of the publishers who sell their content to the library. Now admittedly there has been little file sharing of academic databases. How often does one download a pdf from a journal in order to spread it around the internet? Never. Passwords are the hedge around the academic field. Few wish to poach there these days. High school kids may sneak in, but they do so from their computers, not on foot past a hung over security guard.

So the next time you type in your user ID along with an eight symbol figure, know that you are entering a financial deal built upon the hysteria of terrorism.