The CS Monitor reported today that Osama bin Laden is still in Afghanistan according to the Taliban’s chief of intelligence, who’s hiding out in Pakistan.

CNN: the faces of bin Laden. His years as a terrorist have not treated him kindly.

The Economist has a survey of America’s “homeland security“.

A Secret Service agent working in President Bush’s security detail was removed from a flight because the flight’s pilot doubted his security credentials. It won’t shock you to learn that this man happens to be of Arab descent.

OK, here’s something that’s really baffling. A guy hides some sort of ineffective bomb in his shoe and seemingly tries to use it to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight. We know the following things about this person:

• He was travelling with a suspicious passport.
• He travelled using a one-way ticket.
• He checked no luggage.
• He had a bomb in his shoe.

If you could choose to focus your investigation on finding people who met any of those criteria, where would you start? With people who have strange passports, people who check no luggage on long flights, people who travel on one-way tickets, or people wearing shoes? Unfortunately, airport security officials seem to have opted to focus on people wearing shoes.

I’m no Bruce Schneier, but it seems to me that the smart choice would be focusing on people who fall into the other categories. Indeed, not only would doing so have caught the dolt who smuggled the bomb onto the plane in his shoe, but it also would have turned up the terrorists who executed the September 11 attacks. Not to mention the fact that we already have computer hard drives that have a list of all of the people with one way tickets and no luggage, and we don’t know the contents of everyone’s shoes, or carry on bags, or pantlegs, or wherever else someone might hide an explosive device. I find this all very exasperating.

The most troubling news going into the new year has to be the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan. Pakistan seems to be trying to cool things down with India, but India is rightfully pissed that terrorists backed by Pakistan’s spy agency decided to try to gun down India’s parliament. Needless to say, the spectre of war between two countries with massive armies and nuclear arsenals is incredibly chilling.

I’m back from my brief Christmas trip. On Saturday, I had a connecting flight through Laguardia in New York, and even though I didn’t see the former site of the World Trade Center, just travelling through the city felt somewhat surreal. It brought the depth of the tragedy back to me and I actually felt ill. The terrorists really took a lot away from us as a society.

I’m going to be travelling for a few days. Updates will resume after Christmas.

Mozilla 0.9.7 is out, just in time for Christmas.

Palm is going to appeal the ruling that their Graffiti input system violates a Xerox patent. In the meantime, Dave Sims wonders when Xerox started caring about people stealing from PARC.