I've been thinking about security recently, as a result of the foiled London terrorist plots. Many techie websites have been making fun of Britain's and the United States' stringent regulations prohibiting certain types of liquids in carry-on luggage and on your person. Security expert Bruce Schneier says that the only effective way to prevent terrorism is to practice what he calls "anti-terrorism"; that is, don't give in to the terrorists' desire to create chaos and paranoia, ultimately leading to citizens lobbying their government for a change in policy so as to eliminate the terrorist threat. The terrorist's goal is to inspire fear in his or her victims.

This is Schneier's argument, and I've been thinking about it. I like Bruce Schneier; he says a lot of intelligent things about security. But while has considered terrorism as an attempt to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt (what online types call "FUD"), I don't think he's considered another part of the picture: terror as a publicity stunt.

Mark Jurgensmeyer calls this "theater of terror." In addition to attempting to instill fear in their victims, terrorists will engage in acts that will garner a lot of media attention, focusing the public eye on their cause. Osama bin Laden is considered a master of "theater of terror," as he expertly crafts his own media image so as to portray himself as a single-minded religious militant (have you ever noticed how all of his self-released videos show him brandishing or sitting hear a Kalashnikov assault rifle? Or wearing a camoflauge-colored vest?)

Why do terrorists kidnap high-profile people? Why did terrorists kidnap and behead Americans in Iraq? The only fear it instilled was on the part of family members of the victims; everyone else just avoided traveling to Iraq and the problem was solved. Inspiring FUD requires terrorists to plant in their victims' minds that they could be attacked at any second, no matter where they live. Beheadings were a publicity stunt -- a high-profile action designed to get some demands met. (When terrorists kidnapped journalist Jill Caroll, they wanted something in return for her. Kidnappings aren't just for funsies; there's a pragmatic purpose behind them.)

Schneier has routinely failed to come up with pragmatic security responses to terrorism. In his article, linked above, he says, "[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches." This is a wonderful idealistic goal for the future -- and one that we should continue to work toward -- but it doesn't speak to what can be done right now. This is not policy, which demands a tangible response -- not a politicized response or one designed to take away our rights (for Schneier seems to believe that any pragmatic response must a priori be designed to take away our rights and instill fear in us so that politicians can gain more control). Imagine that you are the police chief in a city where there has been a rash of burglaries. What if your response to the burglaries were, "Well, we need to enact better social welfare programs in order to create less of an incentive for people to burglarize." Yes, indeed that's a wonderful idea, but, concurrently, there are other things you can do to catch burglars who are, after all, breaking the law. If your only response to this situation were to call for the beginning of a long-term solution, your constituents -- who live in the short-term and don't want to continue to be robbed in the mean time -- would vote you out of office or call for your impeachment.

If heightened security is a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism, then scoffing at heightened security is a knee-jerk reaction to heightened security. This situation plays out day after day on the Internet, at techie websites where contributors and their commenters laugh at the silliness of security.

But is it really silly? What is the other option? If you scoff, then you must believe that there is a better way to go about security. If so, what is your plan?

Today, I read this horror story about an iPod stuck in an airplane toilet that caused the plane to be diverted to Canada due to terrorist threat. Commenters scoffed at the outlandishness of the response to an iPod stuck in a toilet. And, indeed, it's a pretty ridiculous situation. But what if it weren't merely an iPod? What if it were really a bomb? Schneier knows enough about social engineering that he should be leery of scoffing immediately. A good terrorist would play off the iPod as though he accidentally dropped it in the toilet, and then -- kaboom! It's a "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. On the one hand, when security is too tight, we condemn it as such. On the other hand, if security were too lax, and the iPod-in-the-toilet really were a bomb, we would lambast security officials for not working hard enough, or not taking the situation seriously enough. Schneier calls this story "[o]verreaction at its worst." An iPod full of C4 might not destroy the entire plane, but it would certainly do a good job of seriously damaging it, causing it to crash, or, at the very least, getting attention with its carnage.

What is the alternative? This is the problem with terrorism: it does create paranoia, such that every situation that is potentially a terrorist threat must be treated as though it were a terrorist threat. And why not? What was wrong with the security officials' reaction to this incident? Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20; it's quite easy for us to deride their responses as silly and overblown, now that we know that the iPod was not a bomb. But imagine being a security official, or a pilot, or a stewardess, charged with the safety of the people on board that plane, as well as your own life. Would you really take the risk that it's not a bomb? Would you believe a person who claims that it's just an iPod that he dropped in the toilet? How would you know that person isn't just using social engineering to get you to drop your defenses?

I submit that, in order for us to have a serious talk about security, we need to stop automatically deriding security. We need to talk about what we can do in the long-term, yes, but more importantly, we need to talk about what measures we can take right now to ensure that people aren't killed or injured while our long-term measures are taking effect.

Posted by Mark at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The San Francisco Chronicle today writes about a German company called Infineon that received a U.S. government contract to put RFID chips in US passports.

The RFID chip embedded in the back cover of the passport will, according to the State Department, "securely store the same data visually displayed on the photo page of the passport, and will additionally include a digital photograph." Additionally, "[t]he inclusion of the digital photograph will enable biometric comparison, through the use of facial recognition technology at international borders." This is why applicants are being asked not to smile in passport photographs: smiling confuses facial recognition software.

Contrary to what we've heard before, the Chronicle reports, the State Department will be using foil-lined covers to prevent unauthorized remote reading of the RFID chips. At least they're doing that.

But does this make us safer? "In a post-9/11 world," the institution of any security measures must cause us to ask, "Does this make us safer than we were before these new security measures?" Vis-a-vis RFID passports, the State Department seems to think so. "The idea is to make sure the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom the passport was issued,'' State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus told the Chronicle.

But is that really a problem? The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 caused the State Department to re-think passports. Consider the following: all of the Sept. 11 hijackers had valid passports, issued to them by their government. They also had valid U.S. visas, issued legitimately by the U.S. government to them. Fake IDs were not the problem. Had we instituted an RFID passport system prior to Sept. 11, the attacks still would have happened, since the security failure was not the legitimacy of the hijackers' IDs.

Are we safer now that we have RFID passports? Definitely not. RFID passports are a boon for two groups of people: (1) people who want government contracts and (2) people who enjoy surveillance. For the first group, the motive is money. Infineon is certainly going to be paid a lot of money to manufacture RFID chips for passports. For the second group, the motive is access control. Imagine: the U.S. government takes photographs of a peaceful anti-Israel demonstration in London. The government picks up some faces and puts them into a database. When Johnny Protester from England tries to come into the United States, the digital copy of his face is compared with the database of undesirables, some of them legitimately terrorists, others just rabblerousers, others guilty of espousing opinions the government doesn't like. And guess what? Johnny Protester, demonstrating against something that the U.S. government is in favor of, isn't allowed entry into the country. He is never told why; indeed, he isn't allowed to know why. All he knows is that he is on a blacklist that he didn't know about, with no way of getting off the list, and is denied entry into the country.

It could even be that a picture of Johnny Protester at the rally was sent anonymously to the State Department by someone that doesn't like Johnny Protester, perhaps someone who espouses the opposite opinion as him. The State Department receives the picture, puts it in the database, and Johnny Protester is blacklisted from the United States by his enemies. (If you think this scenario is one of those crazy make-'em-ups, read this and skip to page 4.)

Hmmm. You know what? RFID passports are bad for security, but they're great for spying on people!

Posted by Mark at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

DETROIT -- Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor layed the smackdown on the Bush administration's illegal, warrantless, poorly-justified wiretapping program. In her 44-page opinion in the case ACLU, et al. v. NSA, et al., Judge Taylor granted the government's request for dismissal of certain "state secrets" evidence, but nevertheless said that the program itself was unconstitutional.

Judge Taylor also laid to rest the bogus "unitary executive" theory, which holds that the president has the last word in federal government matters -- above and beyond the objections of the legislative branch (and while, theoretically, the "unitary executive" would also be superior to the judicial branch, we have yet to see that in action). The "unitary executive" is in direct conflict with the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine, established in the delegation of different powers to each branch of government in three different articles. The unitary executive theory holds that the president is at once enforcer, author, and interpreter of the law: he acts as all three branches -- in total disregard of the Constitution.

The government's primary case in arguing for the unitary executive -- as it has with ACLU v. NSA -- has been Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), in which President Truman attempted to nationalize a striking metal-working company on national security grounds. The Supreme Court had a good laugh at that and totally rebuked Truman for attempting to exercise a power that was not his to exercise. Out of this case comes Justice Jackson's concurring opinion, the one that the government has used to justify encroachments of presidential power into other branches of government. Jackson laid out a model for instances in which presidential power might conflict with Congressional power, and in each instance, he theorized who should win each fight, and why:

1. When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty. If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government as an undivided whole lacks power. A seizure executed by the President pursuant to an Act of Congress would be supported by the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation, and the burden of persuasion would rest heavily upon any who might attack it.

2. When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain. Therefore, congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter, enable, if not invite, measures on independent presidential responsibility. In this area, any actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law.

3. When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. Courts can sustain exclusive presidential control in such a case only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.

The government has repeatedly argued that the president's authority to engage in warrantless wiretapping comes directly from the post-September 11 "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" (AUMF). The AUMF, argues the government, through its "all necessary and appropriate force" clause, gives the president the authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping because he feels it to be "necessary and appropriate" for fighting terrorism. However, the government assumes that it is not in question that Congress authorized such a thing in its AUMF; indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken steps to limit the scope of the president's power under the AUMF. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 05-184, the Court ruled that ad hoc military tribunals were illegal because "[t]he military commission at issue is not expressly authorized by any congressional Act." In this sentence, the court dismissed a Bush argument that the AUMF implicitly granted him a power by requiring that the action in question by explicitly authorized. Judge Taylor agrees, observing that "this court must note that the AUMF says nothing whatsoever of intelligence or surveillance."

And, so, there is some issue as to where the president's powers currently lie within Justice Jackson's model. The government argues that the president has been acting pursuant to situation one, where the president has the authorization of Congress. The Supreme Court, and other federal courts, disagree. Judge Taylor believes that the president is currently living his life in situation three, as "[i]n this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids [by failing to get a warrant or meet certain emergency surveillance requirements]. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained."

Also note that, to sustain its case that the president has supreme control of the world, the government is using a concurring opinion in a case in which the court decided that the president did not have the supreme authority to control the world. Yes, in Youngstown, the court ruled that President Truman lacked the authority to nationalize the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. They're really reaching, aren't they?

Judge Taylor is nobody's fool, and she gives the theory of the "unitary executive" the sound beating it deserves. This is as sexy as federal court opinions get:

Article II of the United States Constitution provides that any citizen of appropriate birth, age and residency may be elected to the Office of President of the United States and be vested with the executive power of this nation.

The duties and powers of the Chief Executive are carefully listed, including the duty to be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and the Presidential Oath of Office is set forth in the Constitution and requires him to swear or affirm that he “will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

We have seen in Hamdi that the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution is fully applicable to the Executive branch’s actions and therefore it can only follow that the First and Fourth Amendments must be applicable as well. In the Youngstown case the same “inherent powers” argument was raised and the Court noted that the President had been created Commander in Chief of only the military, and not of all the people, even in time of war. Indeed, since Ex Parte Milligan, we have been taught that the “Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace. ...” Again, in Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, we were taught that no emergency can create power.

Finally, although the Defendants have suggested the unconstitutionality of FISA, it appears to this court that that question is here irrelevant. Not only FISA, but the Constitution itself has been violated by the Executive’s TSP [the surveillance program]. As the court states in Falvey, even where statutes are not explicit, the requirements of the Fourth Amendment must still be met. And of course, the Zweibon opinion of Judge Skelly Wright plainly states that although many cases hold that the President’s power to obtain foreign intelligence information is vast, none suggest that he is immune from Constitutional requirements.

The argument that inherent powers justify the program here in litigation must fail.

And, so, Judge Taylor issued an injunction enjoining the government from engaging in its surveillance program. She ended her opinion with a beautiful afterword by Justice Earl Warren:

Implicit in the term "national defense" is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. ... It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of ... those liberties ... which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.

The government's reaction to the opinion was predictably bad. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that the opinion was a wrong one, and that the government would appeal the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati (which has jurisidiction over federal court appeals in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee).

They should make bubble gum cards for federal court justices. "I'll trade you two James Whittemores for a Sandra Day O'Connor!"

Posted by Mark at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nick Gillespie isn't just the husband of one of my Miami University English professors. He's also the Editor-in-Chief of the Libertarian magazine Reason. One of Reason's online offerings this month is a conglomertation of articles called "Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever: Reason's Guide to Reality-Based Reform." It's a very good source of information for people who think current immigration restrictions are stupid -- for economic reasons.

And security ones. As Gillespie points out in "Bush's Border Bravado," there are freedom concerns in play. Bush, in a May 15 speech, touted identification cards as one method of making sure that workers are legal. This is where liberals and Libertarians agree: government surveillance is bad, and identification cards are bad. They take away privacy while not replacing that void with an equal amount of security. It's not like The Bad Guys are going out and getting fake IDs; they're not college frat-boys, and they're not that stupid. If an identification system is implemented, they will go out of their way to game the system until the system issues them a legitimate ID card with fake information. (ID-based security systems -- in the form of passports and visas -- didn't stop the September 11 hijackers from entering the country; they had legitimate identification.)

Criticizing Bush's call for a "tamper-resistant identification card," Gillespie correctly notes that "there ain't no such thing as a tamper-resistant anything." Also, an identification card separating guest workers from regular workers would mean "that all workers -- regardless of country of origin or citizenship -- will have to show a 'tamper-resistant identification card.'"

Want another reason to allow more immigrants? More tax money! Immigration opponents say that immigrants are leaches who get government services without paying for them; however, Gillespie notes that "[a]bout two-thirds of illegals pay Medicare, Social Security, and income taxes. All pay sales tax and property taxes." Gillespie says that the best way to address concerns about illegals taking government services "is by making it easier for illegals to function in the light of day, where they would have every reason to pay all the taxes the rest of us do."

Posted by Mark at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

RINCÓN DE GUAYABITOS, Mexico -- Elizabeth and I went on vacation to Mexico for a week, and it was fantastic. Neither of us had been to Mexico before, but we both spoke Spanish, so we figured it would be okay. We arranged to stay at a bed and breakfast operated by Bob Howell, a retired US Marine who lives in the small, seaside town of Rincón de Guayabitos, about an hour north of the tourist destination Puerto Vallarta. Bob doesn't charge very much: $50 per day to stay in a nice room with a king-sized bed, private bathroom, and balcony. Breakfast is also provided every day at 9 AM, prepared by his bed-and-breakfast business associate, Vicky, who really is indigenous Mexican.

We got into the airport in Puerto Vallarta at about 6 PM on Saturday, July 29, after getting up at 4 AM to catch a 6 AM flight out of Oakland. We learned from the website that Bob and Vicky also do humanitarian work down there. The $350 we paid last week didn't merely pay for the upkeep of the house; it also went into allowing them to distribute medical supplies down there.

We pretty much relaxed and walked on the beach Saturday night. We enjoyed some of Bob's margaritas, which are singularly amazing, and for which he has won several margarita-making contests. It rained in the evening, which is something we were dreading, but since it's about 90 degrees -- with humidity -- at dusk, the rain was actually cooling. We stayed in Mexico during the rainy season, and during the rainy season, it will pour for a few hours every day, and then stop. There are tremendous thunderstorms at night, too.

Sunday morning, Bob and Vicky drove us around the area and showed us what there was to see and do. Also, there was history. You see, after the Mexican Revolution, the old hacienda system -- with its thousands of acres and peasants -- was tossed out. The peasants became farmers who lived and worked in commune-style communities. While this was great for the farmers, it was bad for progress. The Mexican government bought the area of Guayabitos from the farmers about thirty years ago and developed it into a vacation destination. The beach is lined with "resorts" and hotels which contain bungalows, which are hotel rooms with kitchenettes inside. By and large, Guayabitos is where Mexicans go to vacation. Cancún, Alcapulco, Cabo San Lucas, and Puerto Vallarta are largely for gringos (white non-Spanish speakers, most frequently Americans, but also a hefty share of Canadians). Most Mexicans can't afford the American prices of resorts in those other towns, so they come to places like Guayabitos, where a swank bungalow at a nice hotel costs 500 pesos (a little less than $50) per night. As a result, we didn't encounter a single person who spoke actual English, other than the other Americans and Canadians who have moved to Guayabitos and now call it home.

And there are lots of them! One restaurant where we ate, Ricardo's, is located on Highway 200 and is the only place in town to get pizza. It's operated by Americans. Another place, whose name escapes me, is on Highway 200 and scarcely a quarter-mile from Ricardo's. It's actually a German restaurant operated by an actual German woman who now lives in Guayabitos. Still another non-Mexican restaurant is J&M's Place, located on the beach, which is operated by an American couple (and while the woman sounds like she's from Minnesota, her husband is from Transylvania). Eating at J&M's Place one night, we actually met all the other American restaurant owners we had seen during the week and had a very long conversation with the German woman about owning and operating a business in Mexico.

On Sunday, we began our many trips to the beach. The water on the beach at Guayabitos is about eighty degrees; it's like swimming in the bathtub. We spent hours down there with our boogie boards, soaking in the tropical sun, and getting sand everywhere.

Monday, we visited Tepic, the capital city of Nayarit, the state in which Guayabitos is located. Mexico is divided into thirty-some states, just like the United States, and each state has its own capital (in fact, Mexico's official name is Estados unidos de Mexico, the United States of Mexico). Public transporation in Mexico is much more advanced than in the United States, mostly because it has to be. Most Mexicans can't afford cars, so they have to take public transportation. As a result, Mexican transportation -- as in Europe -- is frequent and cheap. A 3-hour ride from Guayabitos to Tepic in an air-conditioned coach cost 200 pesos (about $20) each. Once we got to Tepic, taking the bus around the city cost 4 pesos (40 cents) each.

I've got an idea for a theme park ride. Picture the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland, which is a dangerous "off-road" ride in a Jeep-style vehicle through an abandoned South American temple filled with spears, bats, fire, and rickety bridges over huge chasms. Now picture the same ride, but instead of a South American temple, you're in Tepic. I call this ride "Mexican Bus." City buses in Tepic come about every five minutes, which is good. The problem is stopping them once you're on them. The bus drivers go very fast and stop at stop signs only when other vehicles won't stop for them. Stop signs are more of a recommendation than a requirement. "If there's cross-traffic, stop. If not, go right on through without slowing down." And when the bus does stop, it stops immediately, decelerating in a heartbeat and causing your heart to skip a few beats.

Tepic has probably around 50,000 people, and about six of them are American. I have never been stared at as much in my life as when I was in Tepic. People would walk by us and then turn around and look again. One girl looked at us out of a window, then turned around, tugged on her brother's shirt, and brought him to the window to stare, too. Elizabeth and I were a novelty in a sea of mostly indigenous people. The Spanish never really conquered the Guayabitos area, and as a result, there are few mestizos here. Many of the people are full-blooded Indian, and they rarely, if ever, see white people. A girl and her two friends -- all about ten years old -- kept running by us as we sat in the plaza, giggling the whole time, and then running back.

While in Tepic, we went to a few museums and learned about the native populations in the area: the Huicholes, the Copas, and the Mexicaneros. Most of the people in the area are Huichole Indians. We also learned about los niños heroes, military academy cadets who attempted to fight off U.S. forces in The War of Northern Invasion (Mexico's name for what the U.S. calls The Mexican War). We also learned about Amado Nervo, a very famous Mexican poet who we had never heard of before, who hails from Tepic. His museum is located in his childhood home, which is pretty cool.

On Tuesday, we rested by the beach.

On Wednesday, we went horseback riding. For 200 pesos each ($20), we could ride horses up into the hills around Guayabitos, and then ride them back down. The whole trip took two hours, and was infinitely cheaper than anything to be had in the United States. Pretty much all Mexicans have heard of San Francisco, even if they've never been there. Our horse guide, making small talk with us at the top of the hill while the horses rested, told us that he had visited Los Baños, which is sort of near San Francisco (about two hours south).

Wednesday started interestingly when Vicky got an emergency request from Maria Eugenia, their domestic employee. (Everyone in Mexico who can afford them have paid servants, whether maids, gardners, or whatever. Labor is cheap, so a lot of Mexicans pay people to clean up the house or garden.) Maria Eugenia lives in a small town just down Highway 200 called Puerta de la lima. Right near her house, a woman gave birth to another baby two days ago. Bob and Vicky give $40 care packages to new mothers, which include things like cradles, bottles, diapers, and other things that people in the very, very poor village of Puerta de la lima couldn't afford or wouldn't spend money on. Maria Eugenia's husband makes 120 pesos a day -- that's $12 -- and that's considered adequate to live in this village with dirt roads and one-room brick cottages with corrugated tin roofs.

On Thursday, we went to the island in the middle of Jaltemba Bay, called la isla de Maria. The island is made of coral, so there was a lot of neat coral stuff to be had. Vicky told us that there was a restaurant on the island, which is sort of true. There used to be a full-service restaurant on the top of the island, but it has since closed. The kitchen and tables and chairs remain up there, like a sort of ghost restaurant. The only "restaurant" on the island is a small palapa that serves ceviche. You encounter a lot of palapas on the beach. "Palapa" is the Spanish word for a thatched-roof cottage (though, thankfully, none of the ones in Guayabitos had been burninated), and many of these beachside restaurants are constructed in the fashion of an open-air thatched-roof style. "Ceviche" is a sort of salsa made with onions, tomatoes, cilantro, peppers, and your choice of either shrimp or fish. It's put on a tostada, a small, flat corn tortilla that has been fried until it's hard, kind of like a big, round tortilla chip.

One of the great things about Mexico is the salsa. American salsa is tomato-based, with an actual-factual tomato paste base along with big pieces of seasoned tomato. Some other vegetables are added, but it's largely a tomato production. This results in a very watery salsa that's heavy on tomatoes. Mexican salsa, by contrast, contains no liquid. It's made entirely of diced vegetables, and equal weight is given to all vegetables; tomatoes aren't the star. Mexican salsa cotnains onions, tomatoes, peppers, as well as cilantro, cucumbers, and avocadoes.

For dinner on Thursday, we ate at J&M's Place, where, as I said, we met the other American restaurant owners we saw during the week. The German woman -- whose restaurant I highly, highly recommend, as it's delicious -- is named Beatra. She told us all about Mexico, and how it is to run a business down there. Apparently, many Americans get a Mexican business partner to help them, since until recently it was fairly difficult for foreigners to own businesses. The problem with this was that, once the business was profitable, the Mexican owner could fire the American partner and take the whole business for himself. Beatra said that she took the time to start a business the "right" way -- which was to file a lot of paperwork, but in the end, she is the full owner of the business.

Friday, we spent our last day in Mexico -- well, our last non-airport-day -- by the beach. That evening, we went to Vista Guayabitos, the swankiest restaurant in town. (Keep in mind that the swankiest restaurant in town costs you $30 for a dinner for two.) Elizabeth ordered some shrimp dish, and I saw red snapper on the menu and thought, "Ooh! That looks good!" When they brought out the food, they didn't bring me just a filet of red snapper -- they brought me the whole damn fish! There it was, a red snapper -- the whole red snapper -- seasoned, grilled, and tossed onto a plate, fins, skin, and all, staring at me with eyes that had been reduced to jelly by the grill. I stared at it for a second, wondering what I should do, and then I decided to eat it. And it was pretty good, but it was also pretty unnerving, watching your food as it watches you.

The next morning, Bob gave me about two pounds of Mexican coffee beans that he got from the people up in the mountains who actually grow the coffee. In San Francisco's climate, he said, the beans would stay fresh for up to ten years. The problem with commercial coffee is that it is already bad when you buy it. Once you roast the coffee beans, they're fresh for days. Once you grind the beans, they're fresh for minutes! Thus, the true coffee fanatic will purchase raw beans, roast them a day before grinding them, and then grind them just before making coffee. If any of you are interested in getting your own beans when you go to Mexico, you can take up to fifty pounds of beans with you without an import license.

And so ended our week in Mexico. And what of Mexico? The wealthy are pretty wealthy, the poor are truely impoverished. In some places, like Puerta de la lima, it's true poverty -- these people don't make nearly enough money to survive, and chances are slim that they will get out of there. In Guayabitos, there's a lot of garbage in the streets and the roads aren't very good, but that's a problem of government services. Mexico has no long tradition of the government providing infastructure services. In the United States, we feel entitled to infastructure provided by the local and state governments, and to some extent, the federal government, as well. There is no entitlement in Mexico. Except for Tepic, which is the capital city of the state, the other cities are pretty much on their own. Individual cities -- and even individual neighborhoods -- are left to fend for themselves. Bob is a member of a homeowners association in Guayabitos that gets work done for themselves because no one else will do it. They purchased a bulldozer and had volunteers clean garbage off the streets. They took some of their own money and built a bridge over the large creek separating Guayabitos and La peñita de Jaltemba, the next closest town. Prior to the building of the bridge, people had to use the highway to get to La Peñita, and it resulted in fifty deaths in five years. So, the homeowners association had to take up the charge themselves to do something about it. The Mexican government is getting better; it's providing more services, and the major highways between cities are in excellent condition.

The way Vicky describes Mexico in the past, it sounds like the Soviet Union. You had to know someone in the government if you wanted something done; taking official channels was inefficient and usually led to dead ends. As one Mexican travel book notes, money "can open up a lot of doors that were previously closed." In the past, public officials demanded morditas (literally, "little bites") if you wanted them to do anything. Sometimes, customs and immigration officials would demand a bribe if you wanted to enter the country. It's gotten better in the last several years, partly because Vincente Fox wanted to be a friend to the United States, and one of the good things that came of that was an attempt to crack down on corruption. Still, though, everyone agrees that Mexico is, socially and technologically, where the United States was fifty years ago, but it's getting better. And if you have the chance, you should visit to see for yourself.

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