Jerry Brito

Archives for July 2003

Not so wrong after all

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After the quick toppling of Saddam Hussein, I thought many of my predictions about the war had been wrong. But the National Intelligence Estimate document that the White House released on Friday as another lame excuse for its State of the Union speech debacle, might prove some of us right and backfire on Bush.

My sliver of the antiwar camp made, inter alia, three assertions: 1) That Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the United States. 2) That he wouldn’t just turn over the WMD he had spent so much time and money to acquire to the nutjobs at Al Qaeda. For one thing, AQ and Hussein didn’t like each other. For another, the offensive use of Iraqi WMD against the U.S. would surely mean annihilation for Hussein, and people with cults of personality like him don’t usually have deathwishes. 3) That what would make him want to use his WMD, or give it to AQ, would be putting him in a position were he knew he was a goner anyway.

So, The Washington Post reports today that while the President was making speeches saying Iraq might give AQ WMD,

the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

“Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct,” one key judgment of the estimate said.

That the administration had this assessment and chose to go in anyway, putting American lives on the line, rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Plus, the threat isn’t gone. As the Post piece hints, we can’t find Hussein, we can’t find the WMD. Hmmm. Makes you think.

Sadly, the antiwar folks may not have been wrong and we may yet see an attack with Iraqi WMD. If it happens, let’s hope the hawks don’t say, “I told you so.”

Jul 21, 2003 | Comment

Wired News should stick to tech

Man my job sucks! I have a love-hate relationship with Wired magazine and their independent sister site, Wired News. I love their coverage of bleeding-edge tech issues, which is often imbued with a sense of optimistic “dynamism“. They also usually cover tech’s effects on society pretty fairly. But when they get into politics, they forget that they are, after all, a news organization.

I’m a realist and I don’t expect journalists not to have biases. We all have them and reporters are no exception; they are not robots. Nor do I mind if a media outlet has a certain, obvious editorial line that spills into its news pages. You can recognize it and filter it out. But like lawyers and doctors have codes of ethics, so do journalists. If they’re writing what purports to be an objective news piece, they need to present both sides, even if they favor one.

So that’s a long preamble to point out today’s top story in Wired News, headlined “Outsourcing Hurts Indians, Too“. Where do I even begin?

How about the headline? I know writers almost never come up with their stories’ titles, but give me a break! Who exactly is implied by the “too”? Who is “also” getting “hurt” and how? Presumably it is American workers whose call-center jobs are being moved to English-speaking India. But there’s only a one-sentence mention of this in the article, and nothing to substantiate the claim that Americans are “hurt.”

The article itself is a laundry list of complaints of work-related ailments (familiar to anyone in any country who has worked a graveyard shift) that the poor oppressed masses of India are subjected to by American corporations who greedily offer them jobs and then expect them to work. A sampling:

“I don’t feel fresh even after eight to 10 hours of sleep in the day. It makes you some kind of recluse at times, creating issues in relationships. You are never awake when others are, so no one can talk to you.” [said Nirupama Hukku]

Laxmikant Purohit, a 34-year-old services manager at SoftTel Information Services who works from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., says he suffers from constipation and acid stomach. In the past eight months he has put on 29 pounds, he said.

And that’s the story. One sentence alluding to how cheap labor overseas is somehow hurting Americans, and then quotes from Indian workers noting that their jobs suck. And it’s the top story of the day. No one pointing out concepts like comparative advantage: outsourcing means savings for companies that are passed on to consumers, and the American labor force is put to work on more productive endeavors. No one to point out that the call-center jobs in India are, after all, well-paying jobs that weren’t there before, and that Indians don’t have to take them if they don’t want to.

I think the article’s last lines are meant to make some sort of sarcastic point, but instead they reveal the story’s fallacious premises:

Not surprisingly, the attrition rate is high in the call center business. Thirty to 40 percent of the workers quit in a year. But they are quickly replaced because there are enough English-speaking youngsters in India available for jobs that pay $160 to $300 per month.

They will learn not to call it easy money.

Not like me. As an American, all the money I’ve ever made has been easy, right?

Jul 11, 2003 | 2 Comments

This post should be classified

You have got to read this great article from today’s Washington Post on a grad student at George Mason whose dissertation is making a stir. He has mapped out all the communications lines in the country, where they go, and what businesses are connected to them–all with publicly available information.

He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: “If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?” In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.

Every “official” who has looked at the thing has had the same reaction: classify it! Here’s a very sad statement from former White House cyberterrorism chief Richard Clarke: “He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it.”

Maps don’t kill people, terrorists kill people. Right?

Jul 8, 2003 | 1 Comment