Circuit Rider
Version 4.3
By Jim Scheef

Uncle DACS needs you This club—us, me and you—we need someone to edit DACS.Doc. Director Emeritus Marc Cohen has already agreed to do the layout and formatting. What we need is someone to do the “blue pencil” part. While you work on each issue, Marc will teach you the desktop publishing part of the process, if you want to learn. So if you know a complete sentence when you see one, then Uncle DACS wants to hear from you. You can reach Uncle DACS thru any board member.

Come to the next general meeting for my take on Firefox. It will be fun. Next month I promise more “lite” topics. In the meantime, there are issues worthy of your attention.

Will Your Vote Count?
It’s really too late to ask this question for the coming mid-term elections. However, this might be a good time to learn about the various voting machines that have been approved for use in Connecticut, so you won’t be surprised on election day. On March 26th of this year, the Department Of Administrative Services issued an RFP (Request for Proposals) for The Office of the Secretary of State. The RFP is amendment #2 to the RFP on electronic voting machines. In 144 pages, including a few pages of legal requirements, the RPF asks for electronic voting machines that can, among other things, be used by handicapped voters and produces a VVPAT. What, you ask, is a VVPAT? Why a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail, of course (government never ceases to amaze me). Thank God for the thousands of people who called their Congresspeople and state legislators and made them understand that verifiable elections, the very cornerstone of democracy, are important to the voters who elected them.

After 9-11
It’s been five years since the tragic events of September Eleventh. I’ve never found anyone who doesn’t know where they were when they first heard about the attacks. One reason for this is because as soon as the extent of the attacks became apparent, the talking heads on every channel began burning the “you will remember” message into our heads. The other reason is that, just like Tom Brokaw said the moment the second plane hit, “…this changes everything.” And of course, everything has changed—or has it? Before 9/11, who thought boarding an airplane could ever be so complicated? Before 9/11, did you ever think your library records, Internet searches, phone records, or even your home would be subject to search without your knowledge? Before 9/11, did you ever think that an American citizen could be held indefinitely without charge by our government? Law enforcement is more pervasive than ever—except, perhaps, within the branch of government charged with law enforcement. Yet emergency first responders—the police, fire and other emergency agencies in most major cities, including New York—still can’t talk to each other on the radio. Instead cities are putting up surveillance cameras all over the place. Are we safer than we were five years ago? Has the emphasis on security come at the expense of preparedness for other emergencies like hurricanes? You tell me.

On the evenings of September 10 and 11, two television networks aired fascinating programs. ABC, the network that fired Ted Koppel, aired a docudrama movie, “The Path to 9/11”, while on The Discovery Channel, Ted Koppel produced “The Price of Security” - an investigative report and town meeting on the trade-offs between civil liberties and security. Since these programs aired simultaneously, you had to record one or the other to see both. It took me some time to clear out enough space in the DVR to record all eight hours of programming. I found both interesting. The docudrama movie was certainly not worth all the hoopla that led up to the broadcast. If it was intended to paint the Democrats as weak on security, it failed, and the Bush administration looked just as confused in the movie as they did in the hours following the attacks. It did show how the CIA and FBI fight their turf wars. Judging from news reports on the “successful merging” of our intelligence agencies, I doubt this has changed. The movie was produced by the entertainment division of ABC, and it was entertainment, not news coverage.

I need to watch the Ted Koppel program again, as it was three hours and covered a lot of territory. At the end of the town meeting segment, I was wishing Ted Koppel was still the host of Nightline (actually I do that every time I watch the current Nightline program). His show was about the balance between the measures needed to ensure that our government can collect the information about possible terrorist threats, and then “connect the dots” to know when a threat is imminent and stop it before it occurs, and undermine the civil liberties that have made this country the greatest nation on Earth. Certainly, we could give up even more civil liberties in the name of security. As someone on the show pointed out, there is one nation that is probably “totally secure” from terrorism, and that is North Korea. If we were to achieve that level of “security,” then surely, the terrorists will have won.