Source: Associated Press

Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev landed in California recently hoping to lure talent and money from the high-tech capital to help his oil-dependent country move further toward the establishment of its own high tech corridor.

Two years into his presidency, the 44-year-old, tech-savvy Kremlin chief still lives in the shadow of his predecessor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, but that hasn’t stopped him from strenuously pursuing pet projects, the most grandiose of which is the creation of Russia’s own Silicon Valley outside Moscow.

But to succeed, Medvedev knows he needs to attract some of the best minds and investors in the United States to a project that many Russian businessmen are already skeptical about.

“The future of our country, and its competitiveness on international markets, to a large degree depends upon the results of cooperating with foreign companies and universities,” the Russian president told an international business forum in St. Petersburg last week.

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On Tuesday, Medvedev touched down in San Francisco where he was greeted by California first lady Maria Shriver and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. They were scheduled to attend a reception along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Tuesday night at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.

Besides exchanging pleasantries, both Schwarzenegger and Medvedev expressed a mutual desire to improve their respective economies through trade missions and delegations.

“I think this will be very, very beneficial for the State of California and also for Russia,” Schwarzenegger said.

Medvedev, through a translator, added, “The idea that you mentioned about the creation of a special team that would be able to establish and maintain constant contact is also very important.”

While in California, Medvedev will also meet with Twitter’s founders, and give a speech at Stanford University. He will then fly to Washington to meet President Barack Obama, and from there the two will go to Toronto for the G-8 and G-20 summits.

But it is the front leg of the trip that has deep personal significance for Medvedev, who wants to refashion Russia from a raw materials supplier into a high-tech, intellectual oasis where innovation thrives.

Since the Soviet Union dissolved nearly two decades ago, thousands of Russia’s brightest minds emigrated to work in scientific centers in the U.S., Britain and Israel. Now Russia’s leadership wants to entice them back and keep ambitious minds at home.

In four months the Kremlin has lavished an “innograd” — or innovation city — project with budget allocations of hundreds of millions of dollars, attracted entrepreneurs and scientists, and last week in St. Petersburg secured a promise from Silicon Valley’s own Cisco Systems Inc. to participate in the ambitious venture.

However, despite numerous tax breaks — companies are expected to enjoy an unprecedented 10-year grace period — potential investors are likely to share the same concerns as many Russian businessmen: that the project will be nothing more than a huge real estate project.

“I’m sure they will build everything that’s needed, but I doubt there will be any innovations or ideas there because the government glosses over the details,” said Yaroslav Petrichkovsky, director of Elvees, a microchip producer and safety systems designer. “Like in other cases, they decided everything by themselves.”

The promise of immense state investments — $500 million alone has been budgeted next year — and unprecedented tax benefits have prompted many to dub Skolkovo an enormous black hole, considering that special tax zones in Russia often have been a magnet for murky capital while producing little value.

High-tech businesses have long asked for financing for research and tax breaks, but they have tended to encounter risk-adverse bureaucrats wary of venture capital and failure. Analysts warn that without genuine reform of Russia’s tremendous state machine, a mega-project like Skolkovo will be doomed before it ever gets off the ground.

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My Take: I’d like to see the country get more technologically advanced, whether that’s working closely with CD duplication service or manufacturing service carts for the tech sector. It doesn’t matter. The further the country does move away from the oil industry for income the better. If they have to focus on CD duplication or software downloading tools for iPads and iPhones, I don’t care. They can make the next big rolling tool cart for computer manufacturers in China and it would still put them on the path to change.

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Cited: AP

Many believe the tougher penalties are needed for those do not follow security regulations and airports. In fact, one senator wants to make these offenses federal offenses. There are several examples of these security breaches, such as command dashing through a checkpoint at the Atlanta airport that got 10 days in jail. Then there is the British gentleman that was in a hurry to bypass security in Philadelphia and got a $500 fine. And of course we do not want to forget the gentleman who had too much to drink and stumbled onto a Chicago airfield that got 18 months supervision. Each of these caused major air travel delays that cost millions of dollars. Many believe that these people only got a slap on the hand for what they did.

The recent shutdown of the Newark, New Jersey, airport after a similar breach is drawing calls for harsher penalties and highlights concerns about punishments not much worse than what someone would get for tossing a hamburger wrapper out the car window on the highway.

At least one senator wants to make such trespasses a federal offense. Other ideas include six-figure fines and flying bans, though security experts and traveler advocates doubt whether harsher punishments will deter anybody from breaking the rules. They suggest a better way to prevent breaches is by improving training of airport security staffs — and perhaps using new technology to help them.

“In most cases, it’s a stupid mistake,” said Douglas Laird, who runs an airport security consulting business in Reno, Nevada. “Most people don’t say: ‘I’m going to breach.’”

Bill would call for tougher penalties

The bill proposed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey will call for the tougher penalties, but he has not offered specifics other than calling for allowing the federal government to charge people who create scares — even those who are just absent-minded or wrongheaded. Such offenses are now regulated by local law and often fall far down the scale of criminal offenses.

The man charged in the Jan. 3 New Jersey case, 28-year-old Rutgers University graduate student Haisong Jiang, faces only a $500 fine — the same as a first offense for littering in New Jersey — if he’s convicted in municipal court. Friends have said he walked through a terminal exit to say goodbye to his girlfriend before she flew to Los Angeles.

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A video shows a guard leaving his post right before Jiang slips under the ropes. The guard, an employee of the federal Transportation Security Administration, has been suspended.

The violation delayed or canceled about 200 flights around the world, affected an estimated 16,000 travelers and may have cost airlines millions as a terminal was emptied and passengers were rescreened.

The TSA now says it’s evaluating its security practices.

There have been several other costly situations over the past decade in which the perpetrators have gotten off light:

* A Georgia man was sentenced to 10 days in jail and 500 hours of community service — and barred from attending University of Georgia football games — for passing through a checkpoint at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, causing major problems just two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

* A British hairdresser whose sprint to catch a flight led to the shutdown of Philadelphia International Airport in 2002 was fined $500, plus $148 in court costs. A possible one-year jail sentence was suspended.

* A man who walked onto the airfield at Chicago Midway Airport in 2006 was sentenced to 18 months of supervision.

Focus misplaced?

Laird, a former security director at Northwest Airlines, said the focus on wanderers is misplaced. The vast majority people of who nearly breach, he said, don’t know they’re about to go astray and get turned back before there’s any kind of problem.

He also pointed out that there’s no record in the U.S. of a terrorist attack at the hands of someone entering a secure zone through an exit.

Security guards had more incentives to catch scofflaws before the TSA was created as a response to the 9/11 attacks, he said. Back then, airlines had a bigger role in security, and they could be fined for each breach.

“With TSA now in the position of guarding the door, they don’t fine themselves for their mistakes,” Laird said.

Unruly passenger prompts flight diversion

Greater penalties for offending passengers wouldn’t hurt, but unless officials impose fines that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, they wouldn’t pay for the damages they do, Laird said.

John Galasso, president of Empire Security Consultants Corp., a New York City-based company that works with airports, said that Jiang deserves to be punished — he suggested banning him from flying for a few years — but that he doesn’t think that would deter this kind of breach.

“There’s always one” person who doesn’t realize the seriousness of airport rules, he said.

Restricting access even more

Hiring people with law-enforcement background to work for the TSA could help, he said, as would portals that could further limit access to restricted areas.

Rafi Ron, a private security consultant and the former security director at Israel’s famously secure Ben Gurion International Airport, said the issues exposed by the Newark breach go beyond something that could be solved by better technology or procedures.

“It’s a failure to understand the meaning of information in security terms, and this is a very strong indication we have a problem with our analytic capacity, and we need much more understanding of security in the intelligence community,” he said.

Michael Cintron, director of consumer and traveler affairs for the International Airline Passenger Association, said his group doesn’t object to stiffer penalties for travelers responsible for breaches — as long as those penalties are clearly posted in the airport.

“The onus in that case is on those in charge of security for that location,” he said. Blaming travelers were problems with security guards do not do their jobs is not a fair piece of justice.

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My Take: I agree on one point, the security officers should be a little bit more on their toes and complete their job properly. I could see putting something similar to the three strikes law in concerning security breaches at an airport by travelers. For example, the third time that they do breach security because they are in hurry, drunk or even not paying attention, then I could see making it a federal offense because it seems to be a habit with those particular travelers.

What I don’t understand is how anybody can slip through one of those walk through metal detectors at an airport. Most airports have state-of-the-art metal detection equipment and security guards all around them. So how does one slip past? Those security guards must really be dense or blind! I just hope that their air cargo security guards aren’t as bad.

If you let your imagination go, airline cargo could carry just about anything, anywhere in the world including atomic bomb. So I, for one, definitely would like to know what the security guards are doing when someone slips past them. Are they twiddling their thumbs or what?

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