Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Randomly checking journalists' passports




























Today Baudelio Medrano, head of ONIDEX, the institution in charge of identification in Venezuela, declared the extra security checks some regime critical journalists have to do through when they arrive in Venezuela are completely "random".

When I was studying the basics of computer science, I got another definition of randomness. For us, a random process meant it did not show predictability, that could not be described in a deterministic way.

Mr Medrano said the extra checks where journalists' passports were taken away to be photopied were "a randomly done security measure carried out only for verifying some details in the passport that we cannot check out at the moment because if we did, we would take two hours".

I wonder what details Chavez-critical journalists have in their passports that merit that. I wonder why some people in Venezuela are more randomly searched than others.


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