Dirty bank, dirty deals

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Now here's a state with a Attorney General worth his salt! Richard Blumenthal is suing Countrywide and Bank of America for deceptive lending and is looking for some serious monetary damages to be paid out to the victims. This single move could save thousands of people from forclosures and distress. That's some serious protecting of the innocent. Way to go!

Why do we need to hold people accountable for abuse?

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I found this online petition to remove Pelosi for failing to do her job and being a political hack. Even if Congress couldn't pull an actual impeachment (which I believe they could for trying to block investigations of the White House staff alone), then they could still do something.

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Of course, I believe some of the blame should go to the Ohio elections people, but I can't fault them for being pulled in by slick salesguys (if that's what actually happened). Either way, at least they're fessing up and making sure to hold Diebold accountable for their flop.

The touch-screen voting setup used in half of Ohio's 88 counties doesn't work properly, and the former Diebold Election Systems should pay as a result, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a court filing yesterday.

Well duh. Better yet, they should scrap the system and get something that actually works.

Wireless passports. Who could have guessed they'd have security problems.

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So much for "Fakeproof". Of course, anyone who knows about RFID and the way they work could see this coming.

Whoops.

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The TSA's CLEAR program where people can spend $100 to be "pre-screened" at airports and bypass security had a security hit recently when a laptop (doesn't this get old) with customer data was stolen.

Well gosh, how could they ever have seen that coming?

Anyway, Schneier covers the story and links to the TSA's response as well as taking a moment to denounce the program again along with most of what the TSA is doing for airport security. Since I've met the privacy officer for the TSA and know he knows what he's doing, the only reason I can come up with for this is that they're not listening to him when he's telling them not to put this kind of data on laptops unencrypted.