This video is beautiful, and really must be shared.

H/T Brenda.

…. is funny!

The author links to PETA’s anti-KFC website, at which I found the following {exerpted from an article called The Hidden Lives Of Chickens}:

Chickens understand sophisticated intellectual concepts, learn from watching each other, demonstrate self-control, worry about the future, and even have cultural knowledge that is passed from generation to generation

Excuse me while I move away from my keyboard to take a sip of coffee, so as not to spew the java all over it during my next convulsion of laughter….

I had never read anything by Dave Weinbaum before, then I bumped into an OpEd of his at Jewish World Review a few minutes ago. Based on the column of his I just read, I’d love to buy him a beer.

The following comes from an email from Move America Forward

Unfortunately, it arrived in my G-mail with a zillion mile long Google-mail address, so linking it would be a major PITA.

It is an on-point message from Master Sergeant John Ubaldi:

On Tuesday, Americans across the nation will celebrate the 230th birthday of the United States of America. Everyone will be enjoying picnics, backyard barbeques, and the traditional fireworks display viewed throughout the country. Today, the armed forces of this republic are engaged in the monumental undertaking that determines if the democratic experiment begun on July 4th, 1776 will begin to sprout in the turbulent lands of the Middle East.
It’s easy to forget the noble undertaking begun so long ago, easy to forget the auspicious beginning that gave hope to a world that a government can be ruled by its citizens. President George Washington warned Americans that they had a new responsibility when he stated in his first inaugural address, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
From the birth of this Republic, the foundation of this country was the proposition that all men are created equal. As President Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, “That this nation under God, Shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln envisioned that the guiding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the rights conveyed in the United States Constitution would be the foundation that humanity rests on, eloquently written in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It’s instructive that many of our brave military men & women understand they are serving the cause of freedom enumerated in that cherished document, sacrificing and establishing the basic foundation of democracy in the unstable often volatile region of the Middle East.
To the families of the fallen brings a special solemn meaning of sacrifice, as Margaret Johnson, mother of fallen Army Captain Christopher Johnson, stated in the Washington Times, “He knew the cost of freedom and that it was not free, and he volunteered to go to Iraq anyway.”
The many Gold Star Families who lost a loved one in the war against terrorism have the courage and satisfaction that their loved ones sacrificed all in freedom’s cause. President Kennedy wrote in “Profiles in Courage” that, “In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy. And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.”
As we celebrate the birth of this nation and the freedoms that we enjoy, we must remember the country’s most treasured wealth; the youth who are engaged in the eternal fight against the adversary of darkness. Freedom cannot survive here if neighboring nations have lost theirs.
The contemplation of the meaning of freedom is too often a vernacular of popular expression that easily reverberates in our dialogue as we discuss the rights embodied in the Constitution. Over time a tilt toward the direction of evil has contaminated the moral compass that we enjoy. Too often we have failed to realize that many regions and nations of the world still live under the cloud of totalitarianism, unable to enjoy the basic rights of man.
Freedom and democracy include the participation of all, but too often many nations of the world are left in dark blanket of oppression that enslaves them to an endless abyss of misery. For freedom to be sowed, nations and individuals must be willing to stand up to the forces of evil or forever sentence future generations to a world without freedom.
As the debate intensifies surrounding The War on Terror, many people throughout the vast expanse of the Middle East live as President Vaclav Havel lived under the banner of communism in Czechoslovakia. As the first President of his nation, after the fall of communism, stating in 1990, “That we live in a contaminated moral climate. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”
It seems many of us view July 4th as having little meaning beyond a day of watching fire works, and planning the backyard barbeque, but we fail as a nation to remember the history that is personified and articulated in the Declaration of Independence with the embodiment of individual liberty enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Individual freedoms have been the hallmark and legacy that America brought to the world, not for the benefit of America, but for the benefit of humanity. We celebrate these rights, and cherish the fundamental rights of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of religion, but we fail to remember that millions around the world are denied these basic rights.
Today in the spirit of that revolution that forever changed mankind, we are again building the fundamental foundation of democracy in a region that has only known terror and oppression. Americans too easily take for granted these basic rights, when we have been blessed with an overabundance of freedom that millions living under the yoke of oppression yearn for.
Abraham Lincoln stated in a letter to Henry Pierce on April 6, 1859 that, “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
We often only look at our own circumstance without looking at the broader ramifications of our public discourse in regard to our intervention in Iraq. Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in a Harvard Address in June 1978, “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, and in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”
Opponents of the War on Terror, often speak of love of the basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution, that they are defending what we hold sacred. These same individuals hide behind the very foundations on what this nation was founded on, secure in the beliefs that they have nothing to fear from a tyrannical government. Those who protest against our troops and the missions they are serving in do not offer a practical solution to help those suffering under the suffocating burden of a despotic regime.
It’s easy to speak cavalierly about freedom if you are someone who has never fought for that freedom, when you live in the freest nation in the history of mankind. I note that those people seldom if ever mention the enslaved individuals behind the walls of tyranny in North Korea, Iran, and would have kept millions of Iraqi’s under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
President Theodore Roosevelt said it best in Paris, France on April 23rd, 1910, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Having served in Operation Enduring Freeom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq), I witnessed first-hand the progress of people who are beginning to break the yoke of bondage that has enslaved them for generations. Many have stated that the people of the Arab and Muslim world do not want democracy imposed on them; we aren’t imposing democracy, but establishing the foundations of democracy, that only they can choose to implement and embrace.
Last year Iraq witnessed three monumental elections that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. I was moved as I stood there, looking into the faces of these eager pioneers who for the first time were controlling their own destiny. The elections in December 2005 witnessed over 70% of the Iraqi people voting in the first free election in the Middle East. Contrast that 70% turnout with our own election last month when we could barley get over 30% of eligible voters to participate in a primary election. I believe our founding fathers would have been embarrassed that so few Americans took part in the electoral process. What’s our excuse?
Nobody including those who serve want conflict! Ask those who served during World War II if they wanted to serve, they didn’t of course, but they all knew that freedom is a cause worth defending. Those who find nothing important enough to them to be willing to defend and fight for, seem to me to be the sort of miserable creatures that John Stuart Mills wrote about. These people stand back and allow the forces of evil to gain a foothold in the hearts and minds of mankind.
As Mills stated, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
On this Fourth of July lets celebrate the principles of what this nation stands for: that freedom belongs to all mankind, and lets help lift the weight of tyranny so all mankind may enjoy the fruits of freedom. The revolution that started on July 4th 1776 sparked a desire in the hearts of men that man is destined to be free as our creator intended not to be enslaved, but free! Lets spread that same freedom to others or some day our own freedom will be in jeopardy! Lets stand for freedom for all!

Well,

One of the nation’s largest unions has dispatched more than 100 organizers and members from around the country to Los Angeles as part of a full-scale two-week push to sign up thousands of licensed security guards for a new union local.

By “licensed security guards”, they mean people who have a “guard card”, meaning that they took a 40 hour course in “security” and passed the simpleton-level “exam” the state collected a fee on. It’s like watching the PSTN (Professional Security Television Network)’s most rudimentary security officer courses, passing the super-easy quizzes that accompany them and then being issued “credentials” as a “professional” security officer. This is one way a state can collect lots of money off practitioners of a mostly unskilled job while contract security lobbyists gain a liability defense: “We hired our co-defendant based on his certification by the state as a licensed security officer.”

Meanwhile, most of these “licensed” personnel don’t have a clue where Security is concerned, they wear a uniform to earn their sawbuck an hour for whatever reason, nothing more, a tiny percentage even knowing about, let alone earning, even the very basic but effective CPO (Certified Protective Officer) certification.

Now here’s the Service Employees’ International Union, an organization representing waiters, bartenders, hotel employees and so forth, wanting to include “rent-a-cops” in their membership. Of course, they do: There are a whole lot of ‘security’ guards out there, certainly more than enough to make those potential union dues, collectively, a veritable pot of gold.

And they can negotiate on behalf of the security employee. Instead of standing around, doing nothing and knowing little for eight, ten or twelve bucks an hour, perhaps the union would be able to get them significantly more money and up their benefits for the same around-standing and total lack of real security skills.

The Service Employees International Union is expected to announce the public phase of the campaign, called Five Days for Freedom, today. Some organizers and union members — many from New York, Chicago, Oakland and Seattle — have been in Southern California since early last week, working with local union members and clergy who have been slipping in and out of office buildings and urging security officers to sign union cards.

The goal of the drive, say union and religious leaders, is to secure signatures from more than half of the approximately 6,000 licensed security guards who are employed by five large security contractors in office buildings around the county.

If they can collect about 3,500 cards, union officials said, they would be in a strong position to pressure security companies and building owners to quickly recognize a security officers’ union. The service employees union and other unions prefer this strategy to the often costly and time-consuming step of holding a formal election.

When the feces finds the fan, most of these people will be utterly useless, probably among the fleeing rather than among those innate and deserving professionals protecting, restoring order and documenting events – after all, they only took the job because they were desperate for work.

And now the SEIU wants to unionize these folks? Fine, but only those who have taken it upon themselves to at least earn a CPO, thereby demonstrating that they are serious about doing security work rather than simply “making a living”.

If my business were big enough that I owned an office building, you can bet your life that the security personnel therein would be well trained, well compensated and experienced, and nothing a union could offer them would either equal or exceed what they they already had.

Instead, these L.A. unionistas want to make companies assume more responsibility for their unskilled proprietary security employees, or for the contract security personnel that work on their premises.

I’ve always been utterly contemptuous of the “guard card” laws that states like California employ because they’re geared more toward gaining employment for the unemployable {and collecting a fee, to boot}than they are towards ensuring that security people are in a job where they actually belong.

Hmmm, I wonder, out of sheer idle curiosity, if there are any liberals involved in this….

Extra, extra, read all about it here (free membership may be required)….

Re this kerfuffle:

A recent leak to The New York Times and some other newspapers revealed a previously secret program by the Bush administration to examine foreign banking transactions in its pursuit of terrorists with ties to al-Qaida. The banking transactions mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas. This isn’t about examining our canceled checks for items that might embarrass us before prying eyes.

As they have with previous secrets of the President’s prosecution of the Global War On Terror, the only thing that stands between the safety of Americans in America and encores to the likes of 9/11, the New York Times has again aided and abetted our enemy by publishing classified information leaked to them by treasonous elements of past or present federal employees.

Yes, I say treasonous — the people who are in a position to possess the sort of information, deemed “need to know” that Bill Keller and the rest of those leftists over at NYT take such pleasure in publishing are betraying not only any oaths of confidentiality they might have taken on accepting the jobs they occupy; worse, they are betraying the American people, those of us whose taxes pay their salaries and will be supporting them through their pensions when they retire.

In my honest opinion, I believe that what the NYT has once again done, despite Keller’s lofty protests that his paper was adhering to their 1st Amendment rights and that he had done all kinds of soul searching and moral deliberation before, has been to use information leaked to them by above mentioned traitors to commit treason themselves. What else can you call it when a newspaper prints stories they have to know will alert our enemy, in time of war, to secret methods by which we are fighting that war?

Cal Thomas has it completely right:

This isn’t about the privileges guaranteed by the First Amendment. It is about the agenda practiced by the Times and some other newspapers and media outlets that clearly want the administration to fail in Iraq — and in everything else — so that Democrats will retake the reigns of government. The Times’ editorial board fears what one more Republican term could do to the left’s judicially imposed cultural realignment and wants to blunt the Bush administration’s counteroffensive.

Yes, completely right.

Read his entire column here.

A cost-of-living raise for Congress?

Congress is quietly moving to give itself a 2% cost-of-living raise next year, prompting complaints that lawmakers are trying to hide their wage boost.

A provision that would give cost-of-living adjustments to various federal officials — raising lawmakers’ pay to $168,500 next year — is tucked into a bill the House of Representatives passed this month to fund the Department of Transportation and other agencies.

Well, I suppose I can see where the cost of living has increased to the point that $168k and change might be a little tough to survive on, those lunches at the Watergate and Sans Souci and trysts at the Hay Adams can add up, and I doubt that the likes of Teddy K imbibe anything less than the best, but… I’ve always believed that some sort of merit should be attached to a pay hike, and I’m having a really tough time thinking of any reason to give Congress a raise based on merit, or based on anything else for that matter.

Of late, they’ve been behaving as though they work for themselves rather than functioning as employees of the electorate and their output has been questionable as such. Instead of giving them a raise, why not just give the money to some of the criminal aliens they want to give amnesty to, so they can send it home to help bail Vicente Fox out of some of his myriad economic failures? Or use the money for their next pork barrel “earmark”?

If it were up to me, all proposals for federal pay increases on all levels would appear on the ballot on the relevant election day and we, the voters, would be the yea’ers or nayers. We are, after all, their employers. How often do we see employees anyplace else getting to sit down and vote on their pay raises?

The legislation now moves to the Senate, where Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts are making the raise an issue.

Feingold said last week that he’ll try to stop the pay increase; Clinton has authored a bill that would tie increases in congressional pay to increases in the minimum wage. Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage — $5.15 an hour, or $10,700 a year — since 1997. During the same period, annual congressional pay has increased by $31,000.

Tom Schatz, president of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, would prefer to see congressional pay hikes tied to the federal deficit, now projected at $300 billion or more. “If we have a balanced budget, maybe then they deserve a pay raise,” he says.

It’s got to be a cold day in hell, because on this I agree with the liberals in Congress who plan to fight the raise. I don’t agree with Hillary’s proposal, her plan is merely a shrewd carrot and stick approach to giving Congress an incentive to raise the minimum wage, but as far as Feingold and Kennedy(spit!) are concerned, well….

I think Tom Schatz has the right idea: Tie congressional pay raises into their performance, their spending habits being a great place to start, since whenever they spend money, it’s our money they’re spending.

On the supposed other side of the coin:

Congressional pay has long been a sensitive matter, in part because it’s substantial. At $165,200 this year, members of Congress earn roughly four times the salary of the average American. On the other hand, they earn the same as federal district judges, deputy Cabinet secretaries, heads of major agencies and some senior federal bureaucrats. Supreme Court justices, top congressional leaders and Cabinet secretaries make more; President Bush earns $400,000 a year.

Some outside experts argue that lawmakers aren’t nearly as affluent as their six-figure incomes might lead constituents to believe. “They do have some unusual expenses,” says Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies Congress. Chief among them: the need to maintain homes in two places, one of which is in one of the most expensive areas in the country. According to the National Association of Realtors, Washington, D.C., was the 11th priciest housing market in the nation last year.

“When you take into consideration the cost of living in two cities, the salary is average at best,” says Jim Chapman, a former congressman who now works as a lobbyist.

Sure, but how many members of Congress live in middle class neighborhoods and anywhere near as modestly as most of their constituents?

I own a seven room home(not counting the laundry room, kitchen and two full baths) in a residential area in Charlotte, NC, and it costs me about $600.00 a month, give or take, to keep the bills paid, maybe another $600.00 to buy food and other necessities, and I eat well. Too well, in fact. Not counting entertainment and social issues, my annual living expenses, including homeowner’s insurance and property taxes, come in at around $25,000.00 a year, and that’s only because of a few ongoing luxuries. Unless you live in Georgetown or some other expensive area, you can live comfortably enough in DC on an income of $50,000.00 a year. So if I were a senator or representative, my annual cost of living might average, between living in both places, about $85,000.00 a year plus recreation. If I had a wife and a child or two who still lived at home, maybe 25k or so a year more.

On $168,500.00, that would leave me, after taxes, a good $70,000.00 plus for enjoyment, not to mention my unspent campaign money and the perks that come with being a member of Congress. Hmmm… Members of Congress aren’t superstars or gods, they’re merely citizens like the rest of us whom we send to DC to represent us in the running of our government. The great majority of their constituents have to budget themselves to various degrees, in fact many have little or nothing left over after taking care of “the inescapable”. Perhaps that’s what our politicians should have to do as well. It might give them a better perspective of the living situations of those they “govern”.

Further, in the private sector, most of us get paid what we’re worth to our employer, not what our personal expenses dictate. We have to adjust our lifestyles to our incomes, not the other way around. If Senator Livingston Hamilton Shmoe, lll wants to live in a fifteen room house in an upscale neighborhood back in his home state and a $5,000.00 a month apartment in DC, that’s not our lookout. We don’t pay Senator Shmoe to live like a baron, we pay him to do a job that he and most of his colleagues aren’t doing very well at the moment.

If they aren’t happy with what they’re being paid for the piss poor job they’re doing, let the bums go back into the private sector and practice Law, or whatever they were doing before they became politicians. Congress was never intended to be a career field, anyway — it was supposed to be a place to which one went for one or two terms, then returned to private life to reap what they’d sewn.

For much of Congress’ history, pay raises were enacted late at night, without roll call votes. To free lawmakers from the political embarrassment of having to vote on their own pay raises, Congress made itself eligible for the same cost-of-living adjustments as other federal employees in 1989.

Lately, including last year, the pay hikes have gone into effect quietly. During the 1990s, though, members voted five times to forgo the automatic pay hike. Some members say now’s the time to do so again, given the costs of the war in Iraq and Katrina relief. “Maybe Congress should tighten its own belt first,” Matheson says. “It would be an important symbol.”

Bravo!

Mark Steyn’s kicking some serious butt this week, and making me laugh my touchas off at the same time, with this column.

You gotta hand it to these guys: “Redeployment” is ingenious. I’ll bet the focus-group consultants were delirious: “surrender,” “lose,”,”scram,” “scuttle ignominiously,” “head for the hills” all polled poorly, but “redeploy” surveyed well with all parts of the base, except the base in Okinawa, where they preferred “sayonara” — that’s “redeploy” in any language. The Defeaticrats have a clear message for the American people. Read da ploy: No new quagmires.

Read the column and see if you don’t — heh heh — laugh your ass off at the way Steyn presents a too-true state of affairs.

Don’t drink your coffee while you read the column, or you might spew it all over your keyboard.

Way back when I was a kid {and I mean way} we weren’t “overprotected”. We did all the stuff you do at playgrounds over a concrete or pebble filled asphalt ground, monkey bars, swings, see-saws and all. No built-in rubber mats underlining whatever venue we were playing on. No bicycle helmets, knee pads and so forth. In the winter, we went flying down long hills of snow and ice laying prone on low slung, narrow wooden sleds on steel runners. We climbed trees, we built tree houses, we played with solid hardballs in Little League baseball, bashed the hell out of each other in Pop Warner football and bombarded each other with projectiles that were big rubber balls in games of dodge ball. We went to the local pizza shop and gorged large slices of thick, doughy Sicilian pizza and loved the heck out of enormous ice cream sundaes that housed every kind of fattening agent known to man. We dove off of high diving boards. We weren’t mollycoddled by society, we were permitted to be kids.

Now, all is liability.

Liberal trial lawyers have managed to instill terror in the hearts of cities, states and business concerns — the mishap that results from someone’s clumsiness has become the fault of whoever owns the property on which an accident occurs. In many ways, similarly to the denutritionalisation of bread, they are bleaching a lot of the fun out of growing up….

Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal sums it all up rather well, using as his vehicle the veritable extinction of… the diving board.

I’ll leave you to it….

One of the downsides of our technological age is the large inventory of security vulnerabilities it has brought with it. Like all advances in technology from the primitive to modern day, the new invariably phases out the old so that it eventually becomes a necessity, especially in business and government.

Electronic data storage isn’t new, but as it has evolved, so have the computer skills of criminals who know how to make use of data they steal. This has created a collosal and still blossoming branch of the Protection Industry called Information Security that attracts many of the best and the brightest in the computer field.

Unfortunately, even in these days of heightened security awareness, many companies that possess confidential information fail, for any of a number of reasons, to adequately address security concerns and as a result, a lot of confidential data, much of it criminally usable personal information on people who have no affiliation with the companies in question and therefore no “say” in how their information is secured, is stolen.

Here’s one government contractor that practically offers up its proprietary information to anyone who steals any of five thousand laptops from employees’ homes.

A laptop containing personal data — including Social Security numbers — of 13,000 District workers and retirees was stolen Monday from the Southeast Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, the company said yesterday.

ING, which administers the District’s retirement plan, known as DCPlus, notified the city about the theft late Friday.

The company is mailing a letter to all affected account holders to alert them to the risk of someone using the information to commit identity theft, spokeswoman Caroline Campbell said. The company is also telling customers that it will set up and pay for a year of credit monitoring and identity fraud protection.

The laptop was not protected by a password or encryption, Campbell said. Encryption safeguards information by scrambling it into indecipherable codes.

The letter should open something like this:

Dear Fragonard and Elise Boosprinhoffer;

Some time ago, your city government entrusted us with a quantity of your vital personal information, for whose security we automatically assumed responsibility. This letter is to inform you that we’ve screwed the pooch, and that your information is now in the hands of person or persons unknown.We are very sorry we didn’t even bother using security encryption in the 5,000 laptops containing your confidential data, scattered to hell and gone among employees nationwide….

A Social Security number can be used by thieves to open new lines of credit in the victim’s name. In the past 15 months, more than 85 million U.S. consumers have been told that their personal or financial data might have been compromised because of data breaches, disgruntled employees or incompetence.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced that the personal information of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel was endangered after a laptop and external hard drive were stolen from an employee’s home in Montgomery County.

I must say, laptops with peoples’ confidential information on them are a hot item these days.

There is no reason in the universe for this kind of stupidity, and it really does demonstrate how seriously many firms don’t take security, especially yours and mine. A competent security director, unless he was constrained from so doing by the fine folks in the executive suite, which happens more often than many people realize, would centralize all the confidential data in one place, where it could be safeguarded much more easily, and according to their work needs, employees could access it via a password protection system, each with his or her own password. Further, access could be both monitored and restricted to individual employees’ specific need-to-know datum. All of that is within the range of modern security technology.

A lot of security people are in working environments in which, if permitted to do their jobs properly, they would have to “inconvenience” employees like “ladeedah” Larry the Latte Man, who wants to take home some confidential documents, breaching security policy, because it’s oh so much easier to work in his office at home, an employee who “accidentally” left his or her company ID at home, but is almost late and has to run. “Sorry, ma’am, I see you every day, but for all I know, you might have quit or been terminated yesterday, and policy requires that I check. Please be patient while I confirm that you still work here, and then I can issue you a one day pass.” Unfortunately, companies often require their security personnel to “look the other way once in a while” without actually documenting these requirements, all part of “promoting an employee friendly work environment”. Then there’s the PC factor that’s forced on people whose job is often anything but PC friendly. Protectors cannot protect if they are not given both the needed resources and the authority to do what they have to do to protect their principals.

However, in not taking security as seriously as it is needed — as in ING U.S. Financial Services, taking the path of least resistance, as it were, companies invite infinitely more costly problems down the road.

Isn’t it nice that thousands of people can take your confidential information home with them? What are the odds that ING and the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs {one a city government contractor, the other a federal agency} are the only two such entities in the entire country that observe this practice? Not very good, I’m afraid.

I love this part:

ING executives say that they believe that their computer was stolen for its value as hardware and that thieves may not have been aware of the data it contained. ING said it is working with District police and has hired a private investigative firm.

How silly is that?

What they are really saying is, “We haven’t a clue, this incident has thoroughly embarrassed us and the lack of confidence it has no doubt inspired will cost us a lot of new business and very possibly a number of our present clients, so in an effort to circumvent any kind of uproar at our incompetent security measures, we’re feeding you this line of transparent bullcrap.”

ING executives say that they believe that their computer was stolen for its value as hardware and that thieves may not have been aware of the data it contained.

A. What evidence do they have to support that “belief”? How do they know it wasn’t stolen for the data within? It could as easily have been a dishonest friend or an ex with an axe to grind who knew what the employee brought home with him, because he had told them.

B. Even if the thief had stolen the laptop for its ‘value as hardware’, um, chances are that he or someone he fenced it to (there are computer savvy people in all walks of life, from flophouses to mansions) might discover the data and, both obviously possessing a criminal turn of mind, might either use it themselves or, if they weren’t that expert, bring it to someone who knows how. Maybe some computer wiz kid from the suburbs who occasionally buys crack from one of them, someone’s brother or someone’s aunt, for that matter. Or a nine year old who lives down the street and spends all his free time in front of his computer, hacking into places he doesn’t belong. This is a new age, friends, a real world remake of Alice In Wonderland, only rated R (and in some places, XXX).

C. Efficient crooks work just as hard at their respective trades as the rest of us do. Some use burglaries as camouflage for other crimes. To momentarily digress, I’ll relate an example from my casino security days when I lived in Nevada:

One of the charges we made a lot of arrests for was called “Uttering A Forged Instrument” and dealt, among other things, with cashing or attempting to cash checks that weren’t… well, weren’t made out to the casher by the party or company whose name appeared on the checks. Casino cages cash payroll checks all the time, knowing that at least some of the money will find its way into their slots, across their tables or into the cashiers’ windows in Race & Sports.

That said, there was a group of criminals in the city who bought up found or stolen IDs, passports and driver’s licences from street people, pickpockets, etc. Their “gig” was burglarizing small businesses — they would steal a couple of computers, whatever cash they found…. and then go into the business owner’s book of blank payroll checks, removing a few pages of checks from the bottom where nobody would discover they were gone for possibly months. The owner would call the police, they would take a report and the stolen office hardware would disappear into a lake or someplace.

Next, they would draw from the pool of street people(in Las Vegas or Reno, the only way a homeless person can live with even minimal “dignity” is by staying clean and respectable looking, and they find ways to do it) local druggies and other petty crooks, matching faces to IDs as closely as possible and making out stolen pay checks in the names on the IDs. The checks averaged $800.00 to $1200.00 in amounts, and the deal was that the casher got to keep half of the amount. This was very well organized, the only flaw being the inevitable one when a lot of people are involved — we were able to persuade a few of the cashers we caught to roll over on the people giving them the “work”.

My point being, if ING doesn’t know who pulled off the theft, how can they know the motive behind it? The employee from whom the lap top was allegedly stolen could, himself, have committed the “theft” in partnership with an identity thief who knows what he’s doing.

Monday’s burglary has prodded ING to analyze whether any of its other 5,000 laptops in circulation across the country lack adequate protection, Campbell said. Steve Van Wyk, the company’s chief information officer, said he did not know how many of its computers lacked security measures but believed it was a small number.

“For us, this is very unfortunate,” Campbell said. “But we’re moving forward, we’re very focused and committed to find any other laptops that don’t have encryption software and to fix that. This incident revealed a gap.”

It wasn’t the first time, however. Two ING laptops that carried sensitive data affecting 8,500 Florida hospital workers were stolen in December, and neither was encrypted, said Chuck Eudy, an ING spokesman.

Emboldening mine.

So it happened to two (count ‘em, 2) of their other unencrypted laptops about six months ago, and they didn’t fully(assuming they are telling the truth about most of their laptops being encrypted) address the problem then. There are still a few Lone Rangers out there with the laptops from hell.

To my thinking, this is a double whammy. Not only didn’t ING have competent information security policies in place before the first hit, but they didn’t correct the vulnerability that the incident had flung right in their face.

I believe, also, that some blame goes to the DC city administrators that placed this data in the hands of ING without first having competent, experienced Protection professionals do a security survey on the firm and see that such vulnerabilities were addressed adequately. This was, after all, citizens’ personal information their agency was sharing with a private sector company.

One thing about the Post article that shows someone, somewhere is thinking — just in case it was merely a “hardware theft”, they were smart enough not to release the employee’s name and address. The DC cops are also totally right in not releasing any information on their investigation.