Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening

Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida and a critic of the Obama administration?s new screening methods, says the Transportation Security Administration should look at Israel, which uses early detection techniques at airports. An editorial in The Washington Times last week praised El Al, the Israeli national airline, as employing the ?smarter approach? of using ?sophisticated intelligence analysis which allows them to predict which travelers constitute a possible threat and which do not.?

As it turns out, the security methods employed by Israel?s famous Shin Bet security service at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv are frequently stricter and more intrusive than the full-body scanners and pat-downs American officials put into place Nov. 1, said security analysts and the travelers who regularly show up at Ben-Gurion four hours before their flights for screening.

At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes.

The Israeli approach highlights the difficult balance faced by the Obama administration as it tries to address terror threats without unduly alienating the people it is trying to protect. The Israeli system relies on steps that would be likely to provoke opposition in the United States on civil liberties grounds: collecting detailed information about passengers before they fly. Besides, Israel has only two airports and 50 flights a day, compared with 450 airports and thousands of daily flights in the United States.

The administration argues that by focusing at airports on the search for weapons ? in contrast to the Israelis, who focus in airports on finding terrorists ? the United States is mounting a valuable and necessary last line of defense without undermining civil liberties. The multiethnic population of the United States makes it more difficult here than in Israel to profile possible terrorists, experts say, leaving officials with little choice but to screen passengers carefully for illicit items.

?If you say at the highest level of generality that the American system is looking for weapons and the Israelis are looking for terrorists, obviously we would be better off looking for terrorists, because then we would spare ourselves the silly indignities we imposed on ourselves because of our civil liberties laws,? said Stewart Baker, the author of ?Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren?t Stopping Tomorrow?s Terrorism? and a former official with the Department of Homeland Security. ?But we tried that, tried doing security checks on passengers, and a left-right coalition said, ?You can?t trust the government with this.? ?

Mr. Baker was referring to several proposals for advanced screening that were scrapped during the Bush administration after travel industry and civil liberties groups objected. One plan would have involved checking credit records and criminal histories, along with checking whether passengers were on terrorism watch lists. Based on results, each traveler would have been assigned a risk level. Those deemed dangerous would have been barred from flights.

Critics contended it was an invasion of privacy. The T.S.A. eventually found its way to the screening system it is using now, which searches for weapons instead of relying primarily on profiling people.

On Monday, administration officials said that they would try to iron out the kinks in the system in response to public concerns, but they maintained that the new system would be around as long as there were people seeking to blow up planes. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the government was ?desperately? trying to balance privacy and security.

The T.S.A. administrator, John S. Pistole, released a public service announcement and video describing the new procedures in advance of the Thanksgiving travel week. Administration officials say that fewer than 3 percent of passengers are receiving pat-downs; people get them if their screening raises an alarm, or if they refuse the body scan.

Representative Mica said that the Israeli model worked because Israeli agents ?try to detect behavior or people?s patterns? by asking them questions. Israeli officials say that any passenger trying to board El Al is subject to questions from security agents.

?Everybody gets asked, who you are, where are you traveling to,? one Israeli official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity because he did not want to speak publicly about the security measures. The agents asking the questions, he said, ?are very well trained.?

?Depending on what you say,? he said, ?they will put you through an additional screening.?

Mr. Baker, the security expert, said: ?Israeli agents focus on the travelers? country of origin, their profession, visas that are stamped in their passports, places they have visited, people they know and the color of their skin. If you say you?re a Renaissance art scholar, they?ll ask you if you know who Titian is.?

Mr. Mica maintained that the Israeli system was not profiling. ?Someone is trained to do it with people who warrant further scrutiny,? he said.

But some travelers say they would rather go through a full body scan than the system at Ben-Gurion airport.

?My experience leaving Tel Aviv was by far and away the most unpleasant encounter I?ve ever had with airport security officials in the decade,? said Matthew Yglesias, a blogger with the Center for American Progress who said it took three hours last month for him to get from the initial security check at Ben-Gurion to the food court. ?As best I could tell, things went pretty smoothly as long as you were Israeli, traveling with an Israeli, or traveling with some kind of well-established tour group.?

Mr. Yglesias was traveling with a group of journalists.

?The African-American woman in our group was taken off to be questioned. A bunch of us were told we couldn?t bring iPads on the plane,? he said. The Jewish member of his group ?had the easiest time,? he said. ?The black woman had the hardest time.?

J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.

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This Land: At Checkpoint, Looking for Threats and, Now, at Testy Travelers

Behind an unmarked door, in a cluttered break room of half-eaten lunches and morale-boosting posters, a dozen Transportation Security Administration officers listened to their airport supervisor deliver another much-needed pep talk that contained the reminder: ?I get paid to be paranoid, and so do you.?

The supervisor, Philip Burdette, the federal security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, quickly addressed the recent criticism that the agency?s stepped-up security measures had gone too far; that passing through a checkpoint for a routine flight to Newark was now like entering a maximum-security prison for a protracted stay.

?Pat-downs have changed because of what?? he asked, searching for answers that might then be shared with inquisitive, even annoyed, passengers.

?Threat?? someone softly volunteered.

?Threat,? Mr. Burdette agreed. ?Especially after Abdulmutallab.? That is, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian whose alleged attempt last Christmas to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane with plastic explosives hidden in his underwear has transformed air travel in the United States.

The supervisor moved on to discuss reports of an organized opt-out day on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, one of the year?s busiest for travelers. Some protesters ? who seem to be grossly overestimating the patience of their fellow passengers ? plan to disrupt the flow at checkpoints by choosing the slower, more deliberate pat-downs instead of passing through the full-body scanners, which critics consider to be too invasive.

?That?s their right,? Mr. Burdette said. ?I don?t know if it?s 10 people or 10,000 people. Just be professional. Assume you?re being videotaped.?

With that, Mr. Burdette reminded everyone to remain vigilant, wished them a ?good shift? and opened the unmarked door to a pre-holiday flow of travelers oblivious to the many worries for their safety.

It can be argued that the T.S.A. has failed in customer relations, that in its zeal to anticipate every conceivable threat, it has forgotten to take a deep breath and calmly explain why it does what it does to us ? for us.

For example, the agency recently intensified its pat-down procedures, but, for what it says are security reasons, has declined to answer basic questions that might allay concerns that the new pat-downs are glorified grope sessions. How are these different from the old pat-down procedure? No comment. How are the officers trained to conduct these pat-downs? No comment.

The void created by the unanswered questions is filled, then, by libertarian complaints about privacy and ?Saturday Night Live? skits that mock front-line transportation security officers for following government orders, while administrators far removed from checkpoints in Baltimore and Seattle, Miami and Green Bay, Wis., struggle to make the right moves in a high-stakes game of Risk.

Patrick Smith, who writes the ?Ask the Pilot? column for Salon.com, is among many who argue against treating people as potential terrorists ? ?bullying people,? he says ? simply because they want to fly. He said the T.S.A. should streamline its checkpoint operations and reallocate officers to conduct more thorough scanning of luggage for bombs and explosives.

?We can?t protect ourselves from every conceivable threat, and we need to acknowledge that,? Mr. Smith said. ?There?s always going to be a way for a resourceful enough perpetrator to skirt whatever measures we put in place.?

But Mr. Burdette said this type of thinking reflected post-Sept. 11 amnesia. He said each security measure, from the new pat-down procedures to the increased use of body scanners, was driven by intelligence, not by a desire to create busywork.

Mr. Burdette, 41, is a former Marine and counterterrorism investigator who keeps his hair short and his dark-blue suits crisp. As the supervisor of the 700 or so officers at B.W.I. who screen as many as 40,000 travelers a day ? of whom fewer than 3 percent request pat-downs ? he takes the morale of his troops seriously, and resents any smirking dismissal of them as burger-flippers in toy-cop uniforms.

This perception was once so pervasive, and the officers were feeling so beleaguered, that two years ago the T.S.A. changed their uniform shirts to blue from white, and issued gold badges to replace their badge-shaped patches. The agency also began an internal campaign called I.G.Y.B. ? for ?I?ve Got Your Back.?

For government benefits and a salary that starts at $12.85 an hour, these unarmed officers swallow the irritation of others, apply security methods that intensify by the day, stifle the awkwardness they might have about touching other people ? oh, and be on alert for bombs, liquid containers holding more than 3.4 ounces, sharp objects, explosive ingredients and the next Abdulmutallab.

?I want them to think Abdulmutallab with every pat-down,? Mr. Burdette said.

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Foursquare?s Dennis Crowley Makes The Cover of Entrepreneur [TNW Shareables]

Foursquare Co-founder Dennis Crowley made this month?s cover of Entrepreneur Magazine. The magazine details Crowley?s advocacy for geo-location since 2000, before Twitter and Facebook stormed the scene.

The article tells Crowley?s background from his time working as an analyst at JupiterResearch in New York and working on Dodgeball, his thesis project at NYU?s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Enough buzz caused Google to acquire the in 2005 but it never went anywhere and Crowley left Google in 2007.

Flash forward to March 2009, when Crowley meets software developer Naveen Selvadurai and Foursquare was born. Now, Foursquare, an admittedly addictive platform, has nearly 4 million users, with over 20,000 new users checking in every day. ?Foursquare is about improving relationships, making cities easier and more fascinating to experience,? Crowley says in the article, ?and making the world a more interesting place to explore.?

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Defenders of Earmarks Point to Urgent Needs That Would Not Be Met

In doing so, Republicans are hoping to tap into growing public concern about federal spending, and stand up to the kind of projects that have become reliable late-night punch lines over the years, like bridges to nowhere, teapot museums and studies of pig odor.

But at a local level, there remain many supporters of earmarks, who argue that they play an important role ? solving basic and urgent infrastructure needs in communities ? that is often lost in their cartoonish portrayals.

?I don?t really care what it?s called ? I?m mostly concerned about what the money is going to be used for,? said Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, whose deteriorating flood-control system along the banks of the Mississippi went unaddressed for years until Senator Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, accelerated the slow-moving project with help from an earmark.

?How can anyone vilify one of our representatives,? Mr. Slay added, ?who has gone out and basically forced the federal government to fund a project that is essential to our ability to protect the property and the people of St. Louis from major flooding??

Money can take many different routes from budgets in Washington to projects in communities. The vast majority is allocated through the decisions of federal bureaucracy, which often uses formulas to rank priorities, or by the states themselves, where critics say the money is often distributed as pork anyway, only by governors and state lawmakers instead of members of Congress.

Earmarks, which for all their controversy account for less than half of 1 percent of total federal spending, allow lawmakers to specify how money is used in their home states. If they were eliminated, Congress would cede more authority over spending decisions to the executive branch.

The fate of earmarks remains unclear because the Republican ban is, at present, voluntary, and Democrats have not yet responded to a proposed moratorium.

Critics of earmarks contend that even the most legitimate projects ought not be financed through a process that rewards influence and sidesteps normal procedures. But in some towns and cities, supporters say these earmarks provide the shortest and most direct route to paying for road, water and sewer projects. The flood-control walls in St. Louis are cited as an example of an earmark that solved an urgent problem.

During the Midwestern floods of 1993, the Mississippi here reached to the steps of the Gateway Arch, peaking just two feet from the top of the flood walls.

Though the decades-old walls held, unlike the barriers in many surrounding communities, the flood caused substantial damage and exposed systemic problems. In one area, the river channeled beneath the wall, forcing emergency repairs. Calls came from all sides to prepare for the next flood.

Like many other projects involving highways and bridges ? so long as they go somewhere ? spending to repair the St. Louis flood-control system has not been controversial. But getting the money for the work has taken years.

The $20 million project, which is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2012, has been praised by fans and foes of earmarks as a straightforward and cost-efficient effort to patch up an aging series of levies, flood walls and floodgates. The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that a breach could cause more than $1.2 billion in damages.

?I can?t say I?m in favor of earmarks, because I always thought they were someone?s favorite little pet projects,? said Greg Piel, a vice president at the Commercial Plating Company here, whose family business had to be ringed with makeshift levies in 1993 after the river channeled under the man-made barrier into his parking lot. ?I wouldn?t call the repair of a flood wall for a city a pet project. That?s an absolute must.?

Mr. Piel paused and added, ?It?s really easy to cross the line between needs and wants.?

Even if the projects themselves are deemed worthy, debates arise over whether they should be financed through Congressional earmarks. Last week, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican who leads the Congressional Tea Party caucus and has been strongly critical of earmarks, made an exception for them. She was quoted as saying that she did not consider infrastructure projects like roads and bridges to be earmarks because of their importance. The comments immediately drew challenges.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York, and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from Chicago.

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Small Businesses: the easiest and surest way to becoming really big [TNW Entrepreneur]

When I do a talk about entrepreneurship for students I regularly bring some money and hand it out. Not a lot, but more than enough to get them well on their way to launching their first business and becoming insanely rich. I also announce this at the beginning of my talk and usually they get pretty excited about the prospect of going some with some money. By the end of my talk I remind them of the money, I call it funding, I promised at the beginning of my talk. Then I hand out envelopes to the first 20 or 30 students that make it to the stage first. The envelope contains 1 euro or dollar, and my business card.

The proposition I make is simple; take my 1 euro or dollar and take 1 week to double it. Then use the two dollar and multiply that by two in the second week. After 21 weeks you?ve got your first million and after 28 weeks you are at 100 million. By week 31 you are a billionaire and after 7 week you are the richest person in the world. After 45 weeks you will own all the money in the world, and some change.

Part of the deal, and why my business card is in the envelope is that they have to agree to give me 1% of whatever they made after a year. I?m eagerly awaiting my first few billion from the first student to do well.

Of course I don?t expect any of those students to keep doubling their money week over week. What I do hope is that they will start thinking differently about making money. Most people dream big, and that is fine, unless those dreams stand in the way of actually making money. And making money can be very simple. So simple that you can get started on it right now. In fact, leave your email-address in the comment field and I will fund you your first euro, or dollar, to get started. All I ask in return is 1% of your newly gained wealth after a year.

If you can turn a dollar into 2 dollars you are successful in business. Now all you have to do is scale that.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2010/11/23/small-businesses-the-easiest-and-surest-way-to-becoming-really-big/

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New Trade Group?s Focus Will Be Marijuana Industry

Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.

Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.

?This is an industry that is emerging ? from the dispensaries to the ancillary businesses that are now coming out of the shadows,? said Aaron Smith, a medical marijuana advocate in Phoenix and the group?s executive director. ?While there is good work being done, there isn?t anyone out there representing the industry?s interests directly.?

The group?s board members, which include some of the more prominent names in the medical marijuana industry, say the need for a national association has become increasingly apparent with the explosion of the legal marijuana business. Such businesses include dispensaries, growing facilities and equipment suppliers.

J. B. Woods, a former insurance agent for Allstate who now sells property and product-liability insurance to medical marijuana businesses in Colorado and other states, is one of the 23 board members. Mr. Woods said the industry had grown so quickly and laws had changed so rapidly that it can be difficult for medical marijuana businesses ? and the property owners and banks they deal with ? to know if they are operating legally.

?A lot of times these dispensaries can make a huge capital investment only to find out that the local municipality changed its rules, and they have to close down,? he said. ?You are in an industry that is very complicated, and ultimately it?s about having a source of credible information.?

The group will officially begin at a national convention in Denver next month.

?This is an industry in its infancy,? said Bob Selan, a board member and chief executive of Kush magazine, a medical marijuana lifestyle publication. ?But it is an industry now.?

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Spotify saw 16.66 million loss in 2009, ahead of US launch

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Spotify, a DRM-based music service that allows unlimited streaming of content from a multitude of major and independent record labels, is struggling to make ends meet. Spotify Limited, the UK-based branch of Spotify that runs its music-streaming service throughout Europe, has reported its financial accounts for 2009, and things don't...

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Nsyght refocuses to search your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more [TNW Apps]

We?ve followed London-based Nsyght for over two years and all the time that they were building a Seesmic-style social dashboard we were most impressed by one feature ? being able to search your friends? social media output across multiple services all from one app. Now the service has relaunched, stripping out everything except that search facility, and the result is impressive.

Supporting Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Last.fm and Myspace, you simply have to hook up your accounts on those services and you?re ready to go. Just enter a search query and you get back results for all the services you?ve connected, split into ?Friends? and ?Everyone?. This split is incredibly important. If you?ve built up a network of friends you trust, being able to only search them across multiple social services can be really useful.

Of course, Google offers search results from your social network, but it?s not quite as intuitive as this and some of the controls offered by Nsyght give it the edge. Firstly, you can filter results by individual services. If I search for ?London? for example, I can quickly switch between friends listening to Future Sound of London on Last.fm and friends discussing the city itself on Twitter.

Media filters allow you to switch between news, images, audio, video and general discussion. There?s support for Twitter Lists too, meaning that if you?ve already curated a specific group of people to search, you can do that from Nsyght too.

Nsyght founder Geoffrey McCaleb tells me that the the London-based startup made the decision to switch entirely to search as it was proving the most popular feature with users. ?We handled over half a million search queries last month, this metric really is what drove our pivot?, he says.

Social search is a competitive market but McCaleb is upbeat. ?In terms of completeness, Topsy beats us hands down for pure archive searching, but they don?t segment your friends so it?s another firehose. But in all honesty even if we had their millions in funding I don?t think we would try and compete on their level because Google and Bing will eventually win that battle.?

?Friends filtering is pretty awesome, but our future is all about building cool products (think mobile, iPad) that leverage your graph?, he says. Nsyght?s new search-focused site is up and running to try now.

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New Rules Tell Insurers: Spend More On Care

The rules, intended to benefit consumers, vastly expand federal authority to direct the use of premiums collected by companies like Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint. While some states have had such requirements, Monday?s announcement is the first such mandate by the federal government and grows out of the new national health care law.

?Millions of Americans will get better value for their health insurance premium dollar,? Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in issuing the rules.

Ms. Sebelius said the rules would protect nearly 75 million people: 10.6 million with individual policies, 24.2 million with small-group coverage and 40 million covered by large employers.

Starting next year, she said, insurers in the individual and small-group markets must spend at least 80 percent of their premium revenues on medical care and activities to improve the quality of care. Insurers in the large-group market must spend at least 85 percent of premium dollars for those purposes.

Insurers that do not meet the standards next year will have to pay rebates to consumers, starting in 2012. Ms. Sebelius estimated that up to nine million people could get rebates worth up to $1.4 billion. About 45 percent of people with individually purchased insurance are in health plans that do not meet the new standards, known as medical loss ratios, federal officials said.

At a news conference on Monday, administration officials repeatedly refused to respond to Republican attacks on the health care law. Nor would they discuss Republican calls to repeal the law, a centerpiece of President Obama?s domestic agenda.

?We are just trying to implement this regulation,? said Jay Angoff, the rules? chief author. He is director of the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

He said most insurers should be able to meet the standards because ?their profitability and reserves are at an all-time high.?

However, state officials said the standards could destabilize insurance markets in some states. Specifically, they said they feared that some carriers would withdraw from the market in some states, resulting in fewer choices and less competition.

Under the rules, federal officials can lower the standard for up to three years in states where ?there is a reasonable likelihood that market destabilization, and thus harm to consumers, will occur.?

Mr. Angoff said that Georgia, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina had asked for such adjustments.

Joshua R. Raskin, a senior analyst at Barclays Capital, an investment bank, said, ?With these rules, the federal government will, for the first time, hold health insurance companies accountable for putting a minimum amount of premiums toward medical expenses.?

The rules allow special treatment for health plans that provide limited benefits at a more affordable price. At least 1.4 million people are enrolled in such ?mini-med? plans, which may cap coverage for one or more benefits at $5,000 or $10,000 a year ? or perhaps $25,000.

Employers offering such coverage had said they might end it because they could not meet the 80 percent standard next year.

Premiums are usually lower for mini-med plans than for regular insurance, and administrative costs may be high because these plans often cover employees with high turnover rates. As a result, administrative costs account for a higher share of premium revenues.

In addition, some consumer groups said mini-med plans had higher profit margins than traditional insurance.

?The administration has made a wise accommodation that will temporarily preserve this coverage, which is very important to many employees in the retail and restaurant industries,? said E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation.

The dispensation for mini-med plans is for one year. The government will collect data on these plans next year and decide how to proceed in 2012 and 2013. ?In 2014, we anticipate that these mini-med policies will disappear and be replaced by more comprehensive health plans,? said Steven B. Larsen, a federal insurance regulator.

The rules generally follow recommendations from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state regulators.

However, ?we have a difference of opinion? on one point, said Jane L. Cline, the insurance commissioner of West Virginia and president of the association.

State officials said Mr. Obama should allow states to phase in the requirements over several years, to avoid disruption of the individual or small-group insurance market. The White House said, ?The law allows adjustments of the medical loss ratio for the individual market in a state and does not apply to the small-group market.?

Consumers Union, the American Heart Association and Democratic members of Congress praised the rules.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said the rules showed the folly of efforts to repeal the health care law.

?If Republicans succeed,? Mr. Miller said, ?they will be taking money right out of the pockets of millions of average Americans.?

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