Moronathon

it should be the Bomb

2011-05-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

I have much to say, but I also have much to do. Since nobody actually reads this, I am not under considerable social pressure to put anything up.

Still, we get mail here at Work. Enjoy.

We write to congratulate your feat in developing   the super computer, and wish o request for collaboration with your company in pursing the frontier of technology and opening the GATES. It can control all that is in HEAVEN, it could also begin the process of communicating with other planets 
We are involve in application of new technological formula in Research and  production of computer that should  not just serve as  complimentary tool but an independent entity that can initiate action, reaction e tc, the way humans could  do. Instead of controlling aero plane or Electric Train It should be the flight or Transport. Instead of controlling Nuclear Bomb, it should be the Bomb. Instead of forecasting the weather, it should create the weather e t c .it should be super, but not necessarily big. 
We have already established the path and opened the GATES in the software side. We created software's that can identify a terrorist, loan default, identify the rise and fall in stock, indentify a criminal from a list of suspects, etc.

Eat My Fuck Mitt Romney

2011-05-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

Just in case you think that Mitt Romney is not just a dick for a bunch of cross burning motherfuckers:

“You remember during the Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter debates that Ronald Reagan came up with this great thing about the misery index, and he hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter losing. Well we’re going to hang the Obama misery index around his neck.”
He continued, “ The fact that you’ve got people in this country really squeezed…We’re going to hang him with that, so to speak, metaphorically, with uh, you have to be careful these days.”

uh, maybe you might if anybody in the news saw this as anything more than a 'gaff'. So while I am here, eat my fuck Corporate News Bitches.

Rule of what? So Ordered.

2011-04-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

Two posts in one day! Trying to clear the docket of stuff I have to rant about...

This one revolves around a decision yesterday by a DC Appeals Court for Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, detainee, Camp Delta. As I am not well versed in reading a typical court decision, it is not my normal reading material. Went and looked over this one though since it was referred to in a rather unhappy post on The Guantánamo Blog. If you have never seen it, this is a very good read.

In looking over this opinion, I am struck by how arbitrary it all seems to be. In a country where such notions as innocent until proven guilty, chain of evidence and differentiating between hearsay and verifiable evidence it is a little shocking to read. In reading it over I hear the courts saying something like "we really don't give a shit that we tortured you, tried you on uncorroboratable hearsay, we think that there is a strong enough chance that you could have been part of al Qadea and that lets us violate all legal precedent and tradition."

I can not make this up, from the source:

Opinion for the Court filed PER CURIAM. Concurring opinion filed by Senior Circuit Judge SILBERMAN.

PER CURIAM: Appellant, Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, a detainee at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was captured by Northern Alliance forces in December 2001 and transferred to American custody in January of the following year. In 2004, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The district court denied the petition, and Esmail now appeals. Because we agree with the district court’s ultimate determination that Esmail was more likely than not “part of” al Qaeda at the time of his capture in December of 2001, we affirm.

Esmail challenges the district court’s decision on a number of grounds. In particular, he argues that the district court erred in finding that statements he made to American interrogators in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay were voluntary. He also argues that the district court erred in relying on those statements despite the government’s failure to provide sufficient evidence corroborating their content. But we have no need to consider either of those issues because the record contains sufficient facts—affected neither by the alleged coercion nor by the lack of corroboration—to support the district court’s conclusion that Esmail was “part of” al Qaeda at the time of his capture. See Bensayah v. Obama, 610 F.3d 718, 724–25 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (“[T]he [Authorization for Use of Military Force] authorizes the Executive to detain, at the least, any individual who is functionally part of al Qaeda.”); see also Barhoumi v. Obama, 609 F.3d 416, 423 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (clarifying that in habeas appeals involving Guantanamo Bay detainees we review district court fact findings for clear error, and we review the ultimate issue of whether the detainee was “part of” al Qaeda de novo).

Was more likely than not "part of" al Qadea. Perhaps I am a bit old fashioned, but that seems a little less like a burden of proof than I would like to have applied to me.

Think about what is going on here. What sucks even more is the opinion statement in the last two pages. It is here in part:

My second point, not unrelated to the first, goes to the unusual incentives and disincentives that bear on judges on the D.C. Circuit courts – particularly the Court of Appeals – charged with deciding these detainee habeas cases. In the typical criminal case, a good judge will vote to overturn a conviction if the prosecutor lacked sufficient evidence, even when the judge is virtually certain that the defendant committed the crime. That can mean that a thoroughly bad person is released onto our streets, but I need not explain why our criminal justice system treats that risk as one we all believe, or should believe, is justified.

When we are dealing with detainees, candor obliges me to admit that one can not help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism. One does not have to be a “Posnerian” – a believer that virtually all law and regulation should be judged in accordance with a cost/benefit analysis – to recognize this uncomfortable fact.

That means that there are powerful reasons for the government to rely on our opinion in Al-Adahi v. Obama, 613 F.3d 1102 (D.C. Cir. 2010), which persuasively explains that in a habeas corpus proceeding the preponderance of evidence standard that the government assumes binds it, is unnecessary – and moreover, unrealistic. Id. at 1104-05. I doubt any of my colleagues will vote to grant a petition if he or she believes that it is somewhat likely that the petitioner is an al Qaeda adherent or an active supporter. Unless, of course, the Supreme Court were to adopt the preponderance of the evidence standard (which it is unlikely to do – taking a case might obligate it to assume direct responsibility for the consequences of Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008)). But I, like my colleagues, certainly would release a petitioner against whom the government could not muster even “some evidence.”

So the (sic) Justice Department just has to come up with some evidence to detain a person - be that hearsay, or that derived by torture - to hold someone because that person was "more likely than not part of al Qadea". And this determination is left up to a judge based on a burden that they think it is "somewhat likely" that they are even a supporter of al Qaeda? What the fuck?

I have another post about madness at the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) - which you may know from it's fine tradition of telling the executive branch (often post-facto) that silly things like laws and constitutionality no longer apply to them which then just seems to magically become law. WTF?!?!

More later. The last sentence in the decision says it all:

So Ordered.

The widespread pattern of discrimination

2011-04-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

So scratch another state of the list of places I will ever live. In an act of anti science dumbfuckery, the state of Tennessee has passed a bill which encourages "science" teachers to "explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal."

The bills text says that teachers will be protected if they:

"help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."

So remember this folks, Evidence Based Analysis is just a non-religious doctrine.

I hate this fucking place some times.

Are there no work houses?

2011-03-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

In a effort to get those lazy driftless children off the public dole and out into productive society, free market hero Jane Cunningham sponsored a bill in the Missouri congress which proposes the following:

SB 222 – This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

This is not a joke. The text of the bill has clearly been taken over since the pdf available at the above link tracks changes made in the bill text. Don't really know what to say about this. It took decades of determined effort to get rid of child labor in this country when business claimed that they needed child labor to be competitive.

I have nothing to add, but to ask Jane Cunningham what it is like to live as a person without shame.

One small step for non-crazypants wearin' people

2011-03-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

I share with you a profoundly amusing clip of a so called representative of the Westboro Baptist Church being interviewed at the same time as a member of the Anonymous group (of which I have a soft spot in my heart for).

The representative has done the belt and suspenders thing with her crazy pants and would really not be all that much fun to spend time with in, say, a 20 hour greyhound ride. In retrospect she is a profoundly good representative of this so called church.

I can do nothing more than ask you to watch this entire episode unfold before your eyes. You might note that the page posted on the upload site shows a complete and total owning of the internal network of these fuckweasels and that group showed more restraint than I would have in not salting the (virtual) earth or tossing the entirety of their internal correspondence out into the sun.

War on XX, redux redux

2011-02-27T07:08:00.000-08:00

Just in case the outstandingly (good and bad) events in WI have taken your eyes off the criminals in Washington, a quick overview courtesy of the New York Times might be in order.

Besides the gobsmackng stupidity at a variety of state levels, we have the budget bill pushed through the the House last saturday which contained:

Defunding of Planned Parenthood
The elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Slash support for international Family Planning, reimposing the odious global “gag” rule, which forbids giving federal money to any group that even talks about abortions.
Cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.
The G.O.P. bill also slices $50 million from the block grant supporting programs providing prenatal health care to 2.5 million low-income women and health care to 31 million children annually.
$50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
$1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.

Additional bills include:

Two bills in the Republican House would go even further than the current Democrat agreement to stop insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortions in denying coverage to the 30 percent or so of women who have an abortion during child-bearing years.
A bill, offered by Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, has a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even when necessary to save a woman’s life.

In the opinion section there is a somewhat more strongly worded article (hooray!) which states:

It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?

...

Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.

While I am a little anxious about graphs than mix a large number of things up on the same axis wo/ units, this still tells the tell tale story:

This is a fucking mess. If one of these cowards who voted for this ever contends than they think of women as less than secondary citizens, call them out for the lying shitbags that they are. Cutting access to health care to the majority of all women will require a whole lot more spine than the "firm leadership" called for in the same NYT article. I am pleased that they printed the article, but the democrats can not be counted on to do anything but throwing women's health and equal rights issues under the bus to placate their theocrat wingnut opponents.

s.e.

Koch Whore: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker answers his master’s call

2011-02-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

This is just too cool...

Social engineering at it's finest - call up Her Walker and pretend to be David Koch.

http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=5045

I have had some problems getting through since the site is getting kinda popular at the moment..

and

Just a quick taste:

Koch: Well, they’re probably putting hobos in suits.

Walker: Yeah.

Koch: That’s what we do. Sometimes.

Walker: I mean paying for the senators to be put up. I know they’re paying for these guy—I mean, people can pay for protesters to come in and that’s not an ethics code, but, I mean, literally if the unions are paying the 14 senators—their food, their lodging, anything like that…[*** Important regarding his later acceptance of a Koch offer to “show him a good time.” ***]

[I was stunned. I am stunned. In the interest of expediting the release of this story, here are the juiciest bits:]

Walker: …I’ve got layoff notices ready…

Koch: Beautiful; beautiful. Gotta crush that union.

Walker: [bragging about how he doesn't budge]…I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly…legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum…so we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capital with all 14 of them…

Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.

Walker: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.

Koch: Beautiful.

Remainder of transcript and utube links are at:

http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=5045

s.e.

Mephistopheles dental floss, or Toe Jam

2011-02-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

I am at a loss for the bolts falling off our so called society, so I counter the irrational fervor with a good serving of word salad. You try putting "Mephistopheles dental floss" into google image search and see what you get.

All sorts of shit is going on now and it is getting a little weird. What troubles me is not that I think that all of these things will pass, but what sort of world would exist if they did, and what sociopath would push for such a dream? Quick bullet point list:

Defunding Planned Parenthood
Defunding PBS (ok, I get defunding Elmo...)
Defunding NPR
Whatever the fuck is going on in WI: War on unions (rather, those who did not suck Scott Douchbag Walkers ass), teachers, universities and other non-trolls
Tearing down Social Security
Significant Defunding of many state schools
Authorizing the assassination of medical providers (see prev post)
And So Much More!

On the other hand, the same federal congressional brain trust voted to continue having the US Army spend more than $7 million a year to sponsor NASCAR Sprint Cup driver Ryan Newman and several million more as part of a partnership with NASCAR. Since I lack many of the essential social boundaries that lubricate our "normal" interactions, I will indeed ask: what did Ryan have to do to who to get such an excellent contract???

This is life in new america folks.

If you are not in, you are out in the cold of some sort of Dicken's novel. Except without any hope of a good ending. Just a cold angry fearful place. Just in case I am planning on re-reading The Handmaiden's Tale for homework.

As an antidote to the bile that I have been choking down, I offer you this:

For the first time in a while I am actually proud of the people who live here. Tens of thousands of people have gone down to the capitol building for days now to protest the absurdity of our current state governor. The mighty Mrs. set.element and I are dragging thing1 and thing2 down there to provide a little demonstration of participatory democracy. Now that makes me happy.

s.e.

HB1171: codifying abortion provider killing

2011-02-16T08:26:00.000-08:00

I have blovated at length about the world spinning down and the continuing war against Reason and decency. I have scooped up a big stinking pile of shit and waited for the mushrooms to grow. And still I wait. So here in this happy place I discovered a new low. Go figure.

HB1171 is a bill currently in play in South Dakota which redefines justifiable homicide in such a way as to make it legal to shoot abortion providers in cold blood. No doubt it will not make it out of committee, but that kinda misses the point.

FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:

Section 1. That § 22-16-34 be amended to read as follows:

22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.

Section 2. That § 22-16-35 be amended to read as follows:

22-16-35. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished.

If you have the stomach, read more in a Mother Jones about this. I am going to lose my shit for a moment.

This bill is sponsored by Rep. Phil Jensen a "committed" foe of abortion rights. He is just another chickenshit doushbag from the religious right. He lacks the fucking stones to actually say what he means - he says "This simply is to bring consistency to South Dakota statute as it relates to justifiable homicide" which is bullshit. What a bastard. Every one of these people acts like this - a fucking refusal to step up and actually own the consequences of their actions. These fans of "personal responsibility", these baby jebus loven' freedom hating spoiled shits get the wingnuttery all riled up then sit around and have the gall to stare blankly into a camera and say they had NO IDEA that thirty years of increasingly violent hate speech would somehow be a problem after people start being killed.

I am not better now, but if I do not stop I might write something that is ALL IN CAPS and FULL OF THINGS THAT MIGHT GET ME IN TROUBLE.

Looks like the bill made it out of committee and will be on the floor of the state house.

By the way if you see the beautiful Mrs set.element today, please give her a hug cause today is a hard one. Also I apologize to Spiros for the terrible violence I have committed against the english language.

Peace

quick amendment - the delightful Mrs set.element just pointed out the creepy master/mistress/servant language. WTF? These people are so many damned layers of creepy I just want to take a shower after reading this.

Another day where my head slowly spins...

2011-01-30T12:41:00.002-08:00

In order to keep everyone as informed (and depressed) as possible, I am going to post quite a bit more for a while. Pointless I assure you.

So todays irritant involves the collective activities of google (you know them?) as well as the Connecticut AG in a change of attitude about some activities involving privacy and data collection.

A moment about google - I acknowledge (and even embrace) the irony of using a "free" public blog hosted under google services while I call them names. I know (as do you) that if you are not purchasing a product from a company that in fact you are the product. And yes, Soylant Green is made of people.

A moment about what google did. Short version - in order to have a better idea about who is exactly where when they use the google location services. As part of the street view program (where they drive around and take pictures of streets, houses and whatnot) they hoovered up wireless data from unsecured wireless installations instead of just the id of the transmitter. After denying that they did this (a profoundly dicky thing), they acknowledged the act and threw the programmers under the bus since that it what management does.

So who really gives a shit?

Former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal last December in response to Google's 'accidental' collection of payload data from WiFi networks had the following to say:

“Verifying Google’s data snare is crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat. Consumers and businesses expect and deserve a full explanation, as well as measures shielding them from future spying. We will scrupulously safeguard the confidentiality of information we review.

“We will fight to compel Google to come clean–granting my office access to improperly collected materials and protecting confidentiality, as the company has done in Canada and elsewhere.”

I like this for many reasons including the simple fact that it is the right thing to do.

Enter new Attorney General George Jepsen, who is now saying:

Jepsen said Friday that his office will enter into settlement negotiations with the company without reviewing the pilfered data, which Google has steadfastly refused to share with it. Under the terms of the deal between the two, Connecticut will drop the civil investigative demand it was using to force Google to produce the data at issue here, and Google will stipulate to collecting and storing it. It will also stipulate that the data collected included confidential and private information like “partial or complete e-mail communications.”

Note that google does not have to get rid of the data that it has.

So why, good readers am I so pissed off? We are living after all in a Business Friendly universe now. There is a second press release which says in part:

For Immediate Release FRIDAY JAN. 28, 2011

HARTFORD – In recognition of Data Privacy Day, Attorney General George Jepsen Friday advised Connecticut residents to protect their personal and communications data by encrypting their own wireless Internet networks.

The recommendation stemmed from Connecticut’s investigation into Google Inc.’s collection of payload data being transmitted over unsecured business and consumer networks. That investigation led to a stipulation with Google that will avoid the need to go to court as settlement negotiations continue.

“Google’s collection of payload data demonstrates that others may be watching your Internet activity without your knowledge,” Jepsen said. “Consumers should know that the wireless routers they purchase from the store are not automatically encrypted, and they need to activate the encryption feature to ensure better protection,” Jepsen said.

So it is the users fault. So think of it like this. Google goes around the neighborhood and tries all the doors. If it is unlocked they write down your address, take a picture of your house and walk in and copy any sort of mail or paperwork that happens to be sitting around by the door. Then they leave. They are asked about it, and deny it. A month later they say that they were actually doing this and sorry, we were only planning on trying the doors and writing down the addresses! The AG asks to see what sort of personal correspondence was copied and is told to go fuck himself. Later a new AG says that the correspondence is more or less irrelevant and that people need to have done a better job of locking their doors and keeping their bills in order.

This is why I am slowly going mad.

Another day where my head slowly spins...

2011-01-30T12:41:00.000-08:00

In order to keep everyone as informed (and depressed) as possible, I am going to post quite a bit more for a while. Pointless I assure you.

So todays irritant involves the collective activities of google (you know them?) as well as the Connecticut AG in a change of attitude about the activities.

A moment about google - I acknowledge (and even embrace) the irony of using a "free" public blog hosted under google services while I call them names. I know (as do you) that if you are not purchasing a product from a company that in fact you are the product. And yes, Soylant Green is made of people.

A moment about the offense (since there seems to be no real suggestion that they did not in fact do this I remove the usual 'alleged' qualifier). Short version - in order to have a better idea about who is exactly where when they use the google location services. As part of the street view program (where they drive around and take pictures of streets, houses and whatnot) they hoovered up wireless data from unsecured wireless installations instead of just the id of the transmitter. After denying that they did this (a profoundly dicky thing), they acknowledged the act and threw the programmers under the bus since that it what management does.

So who really gives a shit?

Former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal last December in response to Google's 'accidental' collection of payload data from WiFi networks had the following to say:

“Verifying Google’s data snare is crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat. Consumers and businesses expect and deserve a full explanation, as well as measures shielding them from future spying. We will scrupulously safeguard the confidentiality of information we review.

“We will fight to compel Google to come clean–granting my office access to improperly collected materials and protecting confidentiality, as the company has done in Canada and elsewhere.”

I like this for many reasons including the simple fact that it is the right thing to do.

Enter new Attorney General George Jepsen, who is now saying:

Jepsen said Friday that his office will enter into settlement negotiations with the company without reviewing the pilfered data, which Google has steadfastly refused to share with it. Under the terms of the deal between the two, Connecticut will drop the civil investigative demand it was using to force Google to produce the data at issue here, and Google will stipulate to collecting and storing it. It will also stipulate that the data collected included confidential and private information like “partial or complete e-mail communications.”

Note that google does not have to get rid of the data that it has.

So why, good readers am I so pissed off? We are living after all in a Business Friendly universe now. There is a second press release which says in part:

For Immediate Release FRIDAY JAN. 28, 2011

HARTFORD – In recognition of Data Privacy Day, Attorney General George Jepsen Friday advised Connecticut residents to protect their personal and communications data by encrypting their own wireless Internet networks.

The recommendation stemmed from Connecticut’s investigation into Google Inc.’s collection of payload data being transmitted over unsecured business and consumer networks. That investigation led to a stipulation with Google that will avoid the need to go to court as settlement negotiations continue.

“Google’s collection of payload data demonstrates that others may be watching your Internet activity without your knowledge,” Jepsen said. “Consumers should know that the wireless routers they purchase from the store are not automatically encrypted, and they need to activate the encryption feature to ensure better protection,” Jepsen said.

The Grey

2011-01-28T21:05:00.000-08:00

It has been approximately a year since I felt like there was time to sit and write out my frustrations to the world. Well, there is even less time than before, but I am tired and need to get a few things off my chest.

I am sitting in my office overlooking a city composed from this perspective completely of muted grey, browns and white. A single red pipe sticking up from the new construction across the way composes the only primary color in view. The two things, the Grey and the Tired, are probably not unrelated and in part seem to be kept in check by the miracle of Modern Pharmaceuticals for which I am happy.

In reading the interwebs the other day I run across this little gem -

DOJ seeks mandatory data retention requirement for ISPs ; Joins police chief organization in calling for law to bolster enforcement efforts to fight child porn, other online crime

John Douglas, chief of police in Overland Park, Kansas and a representative of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, echoed similar concerns (PDF). "Clearly, preserving digital evidence is crucial in any modern-day criminal investigation," Douglas said in his prepared testimony for the House subcommittee. On occasion, law enforcement has been able to use existing legal processes to get ISPs to preserve data in connection with specific investigations, he said.

However, because of widely varying data retention policies, sometimes law enforcement requests for protecting data are made too late. "There are cases where we are not able to work quickly enough -- mostly because a 'lead' is discovered after the logs have expired or we are unaware of the specific service provider's protocols concerning data retention time periods," Douglas said.

What is being asked for is that ISP's retain data about online activity for a period of two years. The form of the data that is being asked for has not been fully described but any form of this retention represents a significant erosion of the notion of privacy. In the more full bodied version, providers would be required to keep full session information (think of this in terms of all your "web traffic"). Two years is a long time.

Now this strikes me as a little stinky. There is almost no discussion of privacy concerns except perhaps:

A discussion about data retention is also not about whether the government should have the ability to obtain retained data. Retained data is held by the provider, not the government. Federal law controls when providers can disclose information related to communications, and it requires investigators to obtain legal process, such as a subpoena or court order and in some cases with a search warrant, in order to compel providers to disclose it.

Any way, the same DOJ jokers who currently break the law and abuse the system will just get another tiny speed bump put in place to see whatever you have been doing on line for the past couple of years.

This is by no means a suggestion that it will be used by unethical folks for illegal actions, but really people give me a fucking break.

In a larger perspective we can look back on the NSA coercing telecommunication companies into allowing them to engage in warentless surveillance. I have gone on and one about this in the past so, this will be short and to the point. From one of my favorite sites:

Senator Barack Obama, desperate for some traction against Hillary Clinton in the fight for the Democratic nomination for president announced (via) he would support a filibuster if it contained retroactive immunity, but in the end he supported it. The phone companies were off the hook (har) and no one had to find out anything.

Why dredge up this ancient history? Because it sent the message to the business community that if the government comes calling it is best to go along. There is no downside to cooperating, apart perhaps from some anxiety while the pretty theater in the capitol plays out. There is a definite downside to pushing back, though.

This scenario appears to be repeating, this time with Internet companies. Twitter just received a subpoena for user data along with a gag order preventing it from telling the targets. To its enormous credit, it fought back, challenging and quashing the gag order. WikiLeaks - the target of the investigation - raised the entirely reasonable question of whether, say, Facebook and Google have received similar orders. What assurance can anyone have that their data is being protected from US government surveillance?

Honestly compared to this, the NSA buildout in various telcos is totally kids stuff.

Just another day in The Grey.

Compelling Necessity

2010-09-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

I have been digesting this for a few days now. Since no amount of "digestion" seems to help, I will just get it off my chest in the usual way.

On 8, Sept the 9th Circuit ruled that the state secrets doctrine bars a court action for torture. That means that you (yes you, citizen!) can be dragged away in secret, held for years without charges, tortured etc etc and if the government wants to call their own law breaking a secret (meaning that there are "state secrets" involved) there is not fuck all that you can do. Full stop.

This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security. Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them. On those rare occasions, we are bound to follow the Supreme Court’s admonition that “even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that [state] secrets are at stake.” United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1, 11 (1953). After much deliberation, we reluctantly conclude this is such a case, and the plaintiffs’ action must be dismissed. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

From the Jeppesen Dataplan suit.

This is a big deal in that the same branch of the government that is breaking all these international laws, is the same one that defines what should be kept secret in the name of national security. You do the math.

You can not tell me that the current administration is somehow innocent of this as well - they have pushed for a growth of executive privilege and pledged to ignore the self admitted crimes against humanity from the previous administration.

The ACLU’s Ben Wizner on the decision:

This is a sad day not only for the torture victims whose attempt to seek justice has been extinguished, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation’s reputation in the world. To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court. If today’s decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers. The torture architects and their enablers may have escaped the judgment of this court, but they will not escape the judgment of history.

I need a fucking drink.

The tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic.

2010-09-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

In reading (whatever the hell I manage to read in my spare time), ran across this. More to say about it, but want to get it down now.

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity, and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that, apart from the matter involved here, he is not law-abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived.
Even more unusual is the series of military orders which made this conduct a crime. They forbid such a one to remain, and they also forbid him to leave. They were so drawn that the only way Korematsu could avoid violation was to give himself up to the military authority. This meant submission to custody, examination, and transportation out of the territory, to be followed by indeterminate confinement in detention camps. . . .
A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period, a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need. Every repetition imbeds that principle more deeply in our law and thinking and expands it to new purposes. All who observe the work of courts are familiar with what Judge Cardozo described as “the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic.” * A military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that passing incident becomes the doctrine of the Constitution. There it has a generative power of its own, and all that it creates will be in its own image. Nothing better illustrates this danger than does the Court’s opinion in this case.

Justice Jackson, wrote this in his dissent from Korematsu v US (starting on page 322 US 243).

Impunity

2010-09-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

So I have been on hiatus for the past six months or so, trying to catch up on work and home and all the other things that people do besides complain to the great indifferent internets.

I have read many things in that time which have caused my blood to boil, yet one small comment from some ignorant fuckwit has pushed me over the edge. As part of my non-pseudo-anonymous life I keep up with a number of computer security related things which is all good and fun. Just a few days ago there was some shenanigans about some software put out by some big company - the details are really not all that important. Looking over the comments I see:

It appears this flaw was irresponsibly disclosed, that is, the vendor was not consulted for producing a hotfix before dumping the details on the web. I think sw vendors should refuse to fix irresponsibly disclosed bugs or exploits and direct users to do whatever they want to the hackers in retaliation. Maybe corporates should even have a policy of hunting down vxers and hackers, who publish zero days. I can't see why a big company, richer than many small countries, shouldn't have the authority to dispose of their enemies with impunity, in the same way any small country can, if they have a secret service.

Huh?

Anybody here see why big companies (or governments!) should not be able to dispose of their enemies with impunity? Even if this is a contemporary Modest Proposal, I have had the misfortune of people share this very same notion after a drink or two.

Not sure exactly why this set me off, but with a little luck I might get a few things written in spite of myself.

FIN|ACK

Nuke Oklahoma, or the sancity of baby jebus

2010-04-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Not much time, but this is such vile bullshit.

Tuesday the Oklahoma legislature voted on two anti-abortion measures. The first mandates that the women undergoing the procedure have to watch a detailed ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus. The second protects doctors from being sued if they withhold information about birth defects when the fetus is in the womb.

There are no exceptions for cases or rape or incest.

The Democratic governor attempted to veto the two measures based on the rape/incest problem, the unconstitutional intrusion into a woman's privacy and the idea that: "It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient."

Both houses voted to override the vetos.

I was profoundly pissed off before I got to the last paragraph of the article. I make the quote the color of chickenshit, because that is what it is:

“The goal of this legislation is just to make a statement for the sanctity of human life,” State Senator Todd Lamb, the majority floor leader, said in an interview after the vote. “Maybe someday these babies will grow up to be police officers and arrest bad people, or will find a cure for cancer.”

I would like to know when this becomes a civil and human rights issue for women in that they are defacto being denied medical care because it violates the delicate religious notions of a bunch of hypocritical douches.

"Useless" Air Marshal Service too busy aiding human-trafficking ring to stop underware bomber

2010-04-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

Catchy title, yes?

Well what can I say? Homeland Security appropriates $860 Million for this agency who have had more air marshals arrested than actual suspects.

We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 employees.

Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four arrests each year by the entire agency. In other words, we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest. Let me repeat that: we are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.

From here. Based on what I see on the web site I might have a few issues with Congressman Duncan, but this message is spot on.

If you don't click on the link, the following is a painfully true statement about the nature of almost any response to government RFPs:

Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania wrote last year about the money feeding frenzy of the war on terror. And he wrote this: “Nearly 7 years after September 11, 2001,'' he wrote this last year, “what accounts for the vast discrepancy between the terrorist threat facing America and the scale of our response? Why, absent any evidence of a serious terror threat, is a war to on terror so enormous, so all-encompassing, and still expanding? The fundamental answer is that al Qaeda's most important accomplishment was not to hijack our planes but to hijack our political system.”

“For a multitude of politicians, interest groups and professional associations, corporations, media organizations, universities, local and State governments and Federal agency officials, the war on terror is now a major profit center, a funding bonanza, and a set of slogans and sound bites to be inserted into budget, grant, and contract proposals.''

Back to our regularly scheduled madness...

Where I rant pointlessly about religion and injustice

2010-04-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

A few things have come over my computer in the past weeks, all relating to the repugnance of organized religion. Odd how when you spell check 'repugnance' you get 'Republican' in the list of options. Coincidence?

The first I am sure everybody has heard about by now. It is old news about some stupid inbred church in the stupid inbred backwoods of the cold dark state of Wisconsin. In this place, we have a less broken priest named John Hartwig who had the indecency of suggesting that within the Lutheran church, perhaps the fundamental belief that "women should not have authority over men" might not be ok. In response, the men men men in Authority at this particular church held a meeting to fire this ~~infidel evildoer~~ priest at which women were not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to speak at the meeting either.

"While congregational leaders acknowledge Mr. Hartwig's fine administrative skills and recognize the personal admiration many parents have for him, our overriding concern is for maintaining sound biblical doctrine and practice," Fricke's said in a written statement.
Women who wanted to ask questions at the meeting were told to write them on a piece of paper and have a man read them aloud. But some, including Hartwig's own daughter, said their questions were never read.

So fuck these people in their little dark age church. I feel no desire for constructive criticism at this point...

Speaking of the Dark Ages, our friends at the Catholic church have risen to the challenge and provide us with two examples of just how craven and corrupt they are as an institution.

First we start with a favorite subject of the church - child abuse. More specifically the problems that the church seems to have with priests having sex with children, and the establishment covering up the acts. In an act of uncontrollable blovating, so brazen that even I was taken aback, the Bishop of Tenerife has taken to blaming the victims of this abuse. From Pharyngula:

His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.

"There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what's more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you", he said.

This callus, disgusting attitude provoked a response from our friends at Pharyngula which I reproduce whole cloth since I can not do better myself:

Oh, it is so hard to be a noble heterosexual man in this society, with every woman, every gay man, every child, every moist orifice, every knothole, every small animal burrow on the ground, every lemon meringue pie, every velvety wrinkle in the Pope's cassock, all just taunting and teasing and tantalizing you, begging you to stick your penis in them. And then when you finally give in and let them have what they want, despite all your insistence that you're doing it for their benefit, not yours, what do they do? They cry rape, or lock you up for child abuse, or the Vatican dry cleaning service sends you an extravagant bill.

If only they would lock these bastards up, but somehow that never gets done.

Finally we move to Baltimore where the Catholic church is suing the city claiming oppression because the city is forcing organizations providing services to pregnant women to be overt about the services they (do not) provide:

The ordinance requires that a "limited-service pregnancy center" post an easily readable sign, written in English and Spanish, stating that the center does not provide or make referrals for abortion or birth-control services. A center failing to comply within 10 days of being cited could be fined up to $150 a day.

We are talking about the sort of "services" providers who traditionally post "Pregnant, call us" signs then browbeat or delay services till carrying to term is the only option. I say screw the church for claiming oppression about not being able to lie to people about what is (not) being provided.

As a last tiny taste, here in WI (again!) there is a sheriff threatening jail time to any sex ed teacher who talks about condoms:

The new law "promotes the sexualization - and sexual assault - of our children," Southworth wrote in a March 24 letter to officials in five school districts. He urged the districts to suspend their sex education programs and transfer their curriculum on anatomy to a science course.
"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote. "It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks."

The sheriff Southworth, it typical spineless neocon jackoff gobldygook bullshit states:

He disputed claims by Roys and Grigsby that he was inciting fear in teachers or trying to promote his political views, saying he had an ethical obligation to tell districts his interpretation of the law.
"If I'd wanted to be ideological, I would have said in the letter you shouldn't have sex before marriage because that's the Christian perspective. I'm an evangelical," Southworth said.

What is wrong with these fucking people? Even after it has been proven that the sort of bullhsit abstinence only education increases pregnancy and the instance of STDs, we still have $250 Million in the upcoming 5 year budget for this program.

I can take this no longer.

I get mail

2010-03-24T20:32:00.001-07:00

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Death from Above?

2010-03-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

One of the excellent legacy policies inherited by the Obama administration was the public assertion of the right of the US Government to hunt down and kill, you know, evildoers. In the excellent tradition of using technology to distance ourselves from messy problems, the US has been (for the better part of a decade) been using unmanned drones to hunt and kill said evildoers. Or people who look like them. Or people near them. Or other folks who happen to be there. Or folks targeted by accident. Or accidents, lies or misrepresentations. But I digress.

Don't think that being a US citizen will help you either, since the US government is an equal opportunity killer.

Well, the ACLU got it in their heads that we as citizenry have the right to be informed about the actions of the military due to that whole "civilian control" thing, and filed a FOI in January asking about the pesky legal basis for such killings.

In particular, the lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.

"The public has a right to know whether the targeted killings being carried out in its name are consistent with international law and with the country's interests and values," said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project.

"The Obama administration should disclose basic information about the program, including its legal basis and limits, and the civilian casualty toll thus far."

The Defense Department has ignored the FOI request and hence won the right to be sued by the ACLU.

I am dumbfounded that we are even having this discussion, but in a time and place where torture is not denied, but redefined and used on non-persons held outside of legal captivity, it should not really surprise me. That is a topic for a much longer rant.

But the way, the quote above is from the "myfoxdc.com" web site which titled it U.S. Civil Liberties Group Questions 'Legal Basis' Of Using Drones To Kill and filed it under International News. That pesky 'Legal Basis'.

Feh.

MySpace takes your lunch money

2010-03-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

Just a data point to keep in mind as we plug away in our web-bound semi-anonymous persona's: MySpace has jumped into "bulk user data sales". This means that if you happened to post any of the following: user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes for the sales period, it will be available to anybody.

For what it is worth, this does not include friend lists...

In case those Facebook and Twitter users are feeling smug abut now think again. There is absolutely no reason why they will not do the same since anything you have ever posted - every letter and image - is owned whole cloth by the respective service provider. It is not like something as quaint as morality has ever gotten in the way of the bottom line.

Free Lunch

2010-02-13T20:00:00.000-08:00

There are so many other importaint things to write about than what I am about to partake in, but my willingness to dig deep is curtailed by my tiredness. I have work to do as well but it involves something called eigenspaces which might give you some idea as to why I am strolling along complaining to the internets...

So my Esteemed Employer, like so many other establishments, will be moving it's email infrastructure to Google. This is not unusual and represents a growing trend for IT departments within buisness, education and government who are facing huge budget cuts and growing expectations for service and features.

All I ask for people is to think for a moment - what will Google really get from this? Ultimately they are a corporation driven by their shareholders desire of maximizing stock value and profitability. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" a grumpy old Econ teacher used to say and I am wondering where this will ultimately come to rest.

Mrs. set.element has completed another day of study so perhaps we might enjoy a spot of wine.

Yumm

2010-02-11T00:08:00.000-08:00

I have a brief respite from the snow and cold. Back "home"...

Stopping for a beer every time my feet became tired. One pint of "Death and Taxes" at ACME, then two pints of Red Spot at Jupiter. Yummm.

Back home tomorrow.

One small step...

2010-02-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

The one major study typically touted by anti vaccination groupies has been officially retracted by The Lancet who stated that they should never have published it in the first place.

"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield ... are incorrect,” the internationally renowned scientific journal said in a statement Tuesday. “We fully retract this paper from the published record.”

About time.

hyperbola

2010-01-29T20:32:00.000-08:00

In my actual adult like existence, I have a job which might be delecately described as belonging in the technology sector. This should come as no real surprise for all two of my readers...

Anyway with this (somebody) stealing google's lunch money drama, the whole dick swinging kabuki nonsense is starting to get on my nerves. Then the other day this absurd email drops into my inbox:

Operation Aurora: Prepare for Cyber War!

China had a plan to attack and steal Google intellectual property
and compromise Gmail. Two weeks ago when Google announced they were the target
of sophisticated attacks from China, we were notified a war had begun. The
attacks, known now as "Operation Aurora" took advantage of a Microsoft Internet
Explorer vulnerability. Fighting cyber war without sufficient weaponry is like
entering Iraq with just knives. You cannot win by doing so - after all, who
brings a knife to a gunfight?

Feh. While there is limited evidence that China may have been involved, people need to take a gods damned break about needlessly accusational language being thrown around.

Just remember that any asshole can start a gun fight.

Goodnight Moon

2010-01-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

While getting PAK2 to bed this evening, I (as usual) was reciting Goodnight Moon. PAK1 is too old for this sort of thing you know...

While this story is really quite dark and existential. In particular the lines:

Goodnight nobody,
Goodnight mush.

Less the mush part but the acknowledgment of nothingness is kinda heavy for such a book. I mean we say 'goodnight' to the air later in the book so ths is not just some elemental nothingness that we are talking about. You know what Nietzsche sad about looking into the void:

If you look long enough into the void,
the void begins looking back through you

Reeling myself, however reluctantly, back from this nonsense, there has been something going on which sees fit to coment on.

Earlier this week, the Supreme court in Citizens United vs. FEC ruled 5-4 providing corporations the same rights to influence the electoral process as human beings. From The Huffington Post

Today, in a radical act of judicial activism, five Supreme Court Justices overthrew 103 years of American statutory and judicial law going back to the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt by ruling that corporations have the Constitutional right to make unlimited campaign contributions.

This is in effect a bloodless judicial coup which turns the American government over to the biggest corporate interests, to the degree that hadn't happened already.

This is a two-part coup. In 2000, in the judicially unconscionable Bush v. Gore ruling, the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to George W. Bush. Bush, in turn, appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, who, in their confirmation hearings, disingenuously promised the Senate and American people to be judicial moderates and avoid judicial activism. Now, in 2010, in perhaps the greatest act of judicial activism in American history, they overthrew 103 years of precedent to turn the US government over to the largest corporations.

Did not manage to hear much about this decision on the news, but I have mostly given up on that sort of thing. An interesting (IMHO) take on this was made by Ian Welsh here:

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government - after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.

I have been thinking about this for a few days and am not really sure exactly how one goes about responding to such a thing. Those of you who have had the misfortune of reading this blog for the years that I have been whining about the state of affairs know that I have a pathological fascination with boiling frogs (in metaphor ok!).

Only time will tell if this will really change the sickening state of real-politiks. A real problem I have regarding this is the real precedent setting situation where corporations have (yet again) been provided rights that have been provided to people. A corporation is a buisness abstracton and should not be given any additional freedoms. I mean really who are these privlidges being granted to? Board members? They already have full rights (given citizenship etc).

I need a drink...

Monetize this...

2010-01-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

So there is this new tab in the post editor at Moronathon - "Monetize" . WTF? When the hell did that word even become real? Ghastly bullshit.

The New Expectation of Privacy

2010-01-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

Facebook zygote and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that people no longer have an expectation of privacy based on the current buisness performance. Nice to see that the best and brightest minds of our (?) generation are looking out for what really counts.

From eWeekEurope:

Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg commenting on the rise of social networking

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook has said that people no longer have an expectation of privacy thanks to increasing uptake of social networking.

Speaking at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25 year-old web entrepreneur said: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”

besides saying a big Fuck You out to Mr. Zuckerberg for having such a swarmy little attitude toward our fundamental rights, I would like to remind everybody (oh Vast Readership!) that everything you write and upload becomes the property of Facebook, to do with what wish.

To remind everybody what that really means, need I remind you that the rules for Government acquisition of personal information (assuming that rules are adhered to) are almost non-existent when applied to so called "fourth party" holders.

From an abstract from "Buying You: The Government's Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about 'The People'" :

Abstract:
Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defense Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible.

Fourth-parties, such as ChoicePoint or LexisNexis, are private companies that aggregate data for the government, and they comprise the private security-industrial complex that arose after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They are in the business of acquiring information, not from the information’s originator (the first-party), nor from the information’s anticipated recipient (the second-party), but from the unavoidable digital intermediaries that transmit and store the information (third-parties). These fourth-party companies act with impunity as they gather information that the government wants but would be unable to collect on its own due to Fourth Amendment or statutory prohibitions. This paper argues that when fourth-parties disclose to law enforcement information generated as a result of searches that would be violations had the government conducted the searches itself, those fourth-parties’ actions should be considered searches by agents of the government, and the data should retain privacy protections.

The entire paper can be found at the link above and I am in in position now to comment on it (have PAK1 and PAK2 to watch), but just wanted to get a few things out there since the number of posts I have skipped is much larger than I would like it to be.

For the record I know that many of the same rules of IP ownership are also in play with the blogger.com site, but I don't have the time or motivation to set up my own site to complain from.

The New Colossus

2010-01-17T10:09:00.000-08:00

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus

The Further Breaking of the World

2010-01-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

In previous posts I have discussed the heightened tension between the world of the rational and the mainstream left and right. Nothing has happened over the past years which has done anything but heighten my skeptical feelings on the issue.

Recently an interaction between Mrs. set.element and an old friend of mine made me more aware of the vast gulf between people with an understanding of Science, and those who do not. The topic was Global Warming and involved an otherwise educated person who just didn't feel right about some of what she was reading about based on the criticism of a social scientist.

I can go on and on about my feelings on just how useful an analysis by a social theorist on complicated data analysis but the discussion was moved to the meta-analysis of the process thereby avoiding the messy process of actually understanding what you are talking about.

What bothered me even more than this was that the whole notion of framing the "debate". Looking at the arguments there was no hard criticism of the process, just a casting of doubt on some vague points in the exact same way that our Corporate Overlords made thinking that smoking was bad was just a bunch of tree hugging nonsense. Real Science does not tolerate much in the way of this bullshit. I have discussed this again and again so will not bore anybody with that noise.

And where does the liberal media stand on this? Our friends at NPR, who might at best be covered on the absurd notion of equivalence - that is for every bit of information which might be set forward brought to you by actual working scientists, it is necessary to allow some screwball flat earth advocate to blather there dubious nonsence.

From the NPR Check blog:

"This [link to the Tuesday morning story] may help explain my antipathy towards Kestenbaum this AM. Of all the stories one could file from Copenhagen, he gives credence to hack skeptic Lomborg who has been thoroughly discredited. [link to a point by point refutation of Lomborg's "science."] What a doofus and a tool is the Kestenbum."

There is so much more to say on this topic, but there is so much work to do as well. By the way, during the writing of this droning nonsense I hear the following on a commercial for some sort of exercise equipment:

...whose friction free track using the momentum of gravity...

I need a drink.

Necessitous men are not free men.

2009-12-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

Ran across this today. Something to think about was that FDR was soundly criticized by the left for being a pawn of the buisness Powers That Be for not tearing down the whole mess and leaving the bones and scraps of a Failed capitalist system in the dustbin of history.

The entire speech from the 1936 Democratic National Convention can be found here, but the section which peaked my interest was from a discussion about Obama's transfer of finance and power to the rich making him a Royalist.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in. ...

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.-- FDR, 1936

We are in a state of political and social impotence.

Department of Shitty Weather

2009-10-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am registering a complaint. It is Oct 10th and it is snowing out.

Crap.

Hell 0.1

2009-10-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

I am trapped in an airport listening to a Muzac version of The Way We Were. To whoever or whatever I have offended in the universe today, I apologize.

s.e

Welcome to the Family

2009-10-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

Mrs. set.element went and was presented with the official white coat signifying the oath taking and acceptance into the bigger Doctor Community. Now I suppose they can begin treating her like crap since she is family...

Anyway I am damn proud of here and want her to go kick ass.

shoes

2009-09-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

We (Mrs set.element and I) are, for the moment, being ground into dust by responsibility and work so there has not been much posting. I am trying to change that.

Just read this whole thing, it made me proud that there are human beings like this in the world who know that there are more powerful things than guns. I tip my virtual hat to Muntazer al-Zaidi. Lifted word for word from the Guardian.

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

Questions in my House

2009-07-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

My three year old has been asking as of late "Do you have questions in your house?", to which I always answer "Yes, there are always questions in my house."

Sometimes he tells me what color the questions are as well, but that is grist for another entry.

Many things have changed here at Moronathon. We have moved a vast distance to a place filled with muggles (smuggle, juggle, snuggle, muggers - no muggles in the spell check). We have another child - PAK2 - who is quite a nice bundle of baby stuff. Mrs. set.element is getting ready for medical school and is freaking out. I am counting on my medication to carry me through the next few winters...

I have not been posting at all over the past half year or so and it has bothered me to no end. I have, in short, debited to return to my soap box and join all the other crazy people yelling out into the ether.

Just finished "Five Years of My Life, an Innocent Man in Guantanamo" by Murat Kurnaz. Perhaps somebody out there thinks that the official position Human Rights abuses over the past eight years or so has some sort of attachment to reality. I have been somewhat skeptical. This is a well written first person account which contradicts everything in the sack of 'common knowledge' about US (and allied) complacence in the mockery of Human Rights in Kandahar, Guantanamo and dozens of other so called Dark Facilities across the globe.

Thinking back on my time in Kandahaar, I can't cry, and when I talk to someone who was in Guantanamo, we laugh about it. We laugh a lot - about how we were beaten and how we used to listen to one another screaming. What else are we supposed to do? Sit down and cry? It happened, and not it's over. Either I talk about it seriously, or I feel like I have to laugh. So I laugh. But I haven't forgotten a thing.

So let us talk seriously for a moment.

Remember for a moment the dream that the Obama administration would bring an enlightened notion of Justice to the Human Rights abuses brought on by the last eight years and close Guantanamo Bay? That there would be Change? From The Nation

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations. Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

Presidential Authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely.

Think long and hard about that one.

I have questions in MY house Mr. Obama. Who the fuck are you - someone who ran on a platform of Change, directly highlighting the need to restore a balance of power between the three corners of government, who directly stated the need to close Guantanamo not just from inconvertible Moral grounds but from legal grounds as well - who the fuck are you to allow this mockery of Justice to stand.

The Law does not incarcerate suspects indefinitely. Common Law has provided at least kabuli Justice over the centuries which would be an enlightened change from the crap that we are being fed here.

I do not want to hear that the republicans will throw a hissy fit if they don't get their way. Fuck them too. We are illegally holding human beings and torturing them. Period. If they don't like the Constitution and the legal system that has been built around it, perhaps they can go find some other place that has more plastic notions of human rights? Take the entire group of people responsible for the architecture of this mess - Republican and Democrat alike - and throw them at the World Court. Releasing the population that we are currently holding is only the beginning of Justice. We need to see impartial juries and Rule of Law for the creators of this mess as well.

Any way I have a great deal of work to get done so it is time to go. Good to be back.

Numbers bake off

2009-02-10T15:02:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in a room that would give the cast of Revenge of the Nerds a run for their money. We sit and watch "A Robust and invisible Non-Blind Watermark for Network Flows". I am enjoying myself.

Dork Dork Dork.

Rock Star

2009-02-07T14:27:00.000-08:00

Mrs set.element, M.D.

Kick Ass.

Deep Breath

2009-01-20T21:23:00.001-08:00

Just a quick stop here.

Like so many, I watched today as the adults moved in to clean up the mess left by the warring thieves who have taken control of government for the last eight years.

Like so many, I watched today as the new president stood up and asked us to dare to look forward rather than back.

Like so many, I watched millions of normal people brave the cold and to stand in line for hours to be part of something which was much bigger than themselves.

I do not know what will happen in the coming months and years. Change and heartbreak. Hard work. A grudging hope.

Today for the first time in years I took a deep breath and was happy for the country that I live in. Brought home some flowers for Mrs set.element just to make her happy.

A Ponderous Chain

2008-12-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

I think that this made it up here last year at this time, but not nearly enough has changed in the world since then so back it returns. We start with a delightful tidbit of reading, then finish with the much loved feel good retort.

To begin, take a look at Frozen Scandal a New York Review of Books discussion on Scandal in America. Quick snippet:

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

Weigh this against the constant stream of nonsense on television.

Now comes our man Marley:

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"
[...]
"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"
Scrooge trembled more and more.
"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"
[...]
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Perhaps next year at this time it will be somewhat less applicable? I suspect not.

Punch Drunk

2008-12-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

Things have been, as usual, a little busy here at the set.element household. Life in the body politic has been quite busy as well. Not everything happening is bad for a change so I am still trying to get my head around it.

I will take a moment of Peace while I think of an actual Scientist being places in the position of Secretary of Energy. I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with Dr. Chu in the past and am thrilled that he will be in a position to influence policy and create the possibility of change.

Moment of Peace complete.

That out of the way, I have a couple of things on my mind. The first is something that has received considerable press - and quite reasonably so. There is little original to add to this, but still a little complaint seems to be in order. Rick Warren is a smirking pinhead used car salesman (again, my apologies to that profession). He is a graven homophobic shit who deserves nothing but spite but will get the sort of recognition that will improve his Dr. Phil like book sales tremendously. I do not know what the real rational is for the Obama administration to provide a nod of acceptance, but Warren is the shiny face of false centrism. I am not an Obama Fan Boy and feel quite comfortable complaining about this - lord knows the right has been whining like a bunch of little kids for months now. If we do not complain about this and any other decisions that are made, the left will not get a place at the table.

By the way, that fucktard Warren demonstrated yet again why I dislike him so. From this:

All of the great questions of the 21st century will be religious questions.

Feh.

This thought being tempered by the inclusion of a number of actual adult like people in the administration.

The second thing is the drect confession of the Vice President in war crimes and the continuing whitewashing of the (still) current administrations wrongdoings. In yesterdays Boston Globe a column by Derric Jackson said the following:

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney said this week that he directly approved waterboarding to torture terror suspects. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney told "ABC News." Asked if he believes the simulating of drowning is an appropriate technique, he said, "I do." ...

...Cheney told us after 9/11 that the administration would protect us by working on "the dark side . . . in the shadows in the intelligence world." Cheney, Rumsfeld, and President Bush turned the dark side into a blind eye, the shadows into a shroud, and obliterated intelligent discourse on terrorism with raw fear. That was only the warm-up for twisting intelligence to invade Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

Currently there are no serious plans for repercussions for the wholesale violation of international, constitutional and local violations of the law. Crimes against humanity, theft of trillions of dollars, countless infractions of individual rights will go punished by lucrative positions in NGOs and Boards of Directors.

At the same time there is a great deal of 'aw shucks' going on by the press and the series of players. They know that nobody is going to do anything about this and honestly do not seem to give a shit.

I have been saying this for years now. With the dissolution of Rule of Law, comes the dissolution of Constitutional Democracy. We have come to a period of hard choices and if we do not make them, they will be made for us.

Must go. BAB will be waking shortly and I have to get some graphs done on a research paper.

Social Networking

2008-12-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

Tired of being mocked as a grumpy old fart, I have established a Facebook presence. This will probably get to be as ignored as my blog here in light of the frantic state of work and life, but the style of dialog seems to be driven less by the essay and more by the blurby stream of conscience. I am doomed.

Termites

2008-10-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking for the past few days about the fundamental changes that have taken place in government. Not just the gross (haha) effects, but larger world view changes that will not necessarily ever return.

While the flashy 'good vs. evil' dialog absorbs our attention (and quite reasonably so), I can not help but to feel that there are more subtle things going on which are not receiving press or dialog.

We as a country (or at least me as a person) are so exhausted at the thought of freaking out yet again, or even trying to keep track of the latest indignity heaped on our plate that it is difficult to give a shit. But it is more than that. The infection that has torn into the financial system - not just rampant deregulation which is bad enough - but the will to cause such global suffering to make yourself more rich is one part aspect of it. A lesser advertised, but more dangerous part is the dark cynicism which blinds the politicians to the will and desire of the people in order to pay these same fools to fix what they already broke.

Corruption and cronyism are hardly some shiny new thing, but I wonder if this time we are standing just past the brink of fundamental social change with regard to the relationship between the government and the governed. Transcending the usual tactic of the signing statement, we have the executive branch taking the position that a bill signed into law will not be enforced because it is a constitutional infringement on his executive powers. From the New York Times:

The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But newly disclosed documents show that the Justice Department issued a legal opinion last January questioning the basis for that restriction, and that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, later advised Congress that the administration would not “apply this provision strictly” because it infringed on the president’s powers. [Emphasis added]

This was discussed at some length at the fine blog Cab Drollery. The title of the post is "Return of the Unitard". Who the fuck are these people? They are a Lame Duck Administration with some of the lowest polling numbers Ever Seen for a living president. You explain to me because I am out of ideas - except for the conclusion that the Democracy that we know and love is no longer a living organism.

Quick question

2008-10-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

Who the heck keeps landing on my post using a search term of "what does fedishism"? Not that I really care about your personal browsing habits, but you might want to tighten up your search terms a bit...

Ok, I just ran the query on google and land as the first search result of five. For the record I was using a phrase coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer which I think was "Nihalistic Technofedishists". Go figure. Now I really have to hurry since PAB is having friends over and the kitchen looks like a bad science experiment.

Short sharp shock.

2008-10-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

I have little time so will have to just cut and paste my way through this. At times people say things that are so spot on that there is nothing that can be added to them.

Sarah Palin gave a policy speech yesterday which had a section which went something like:

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

The entire thing can be found here - as a disclaimer I have not watched it in it's entirety.

Mr. PZ Myers ( a somewhat well known Atheist and professor of Biology ) made this comment which I shall print in it's entirety. The post can be found here at his most excellent blog.

I am appalled.

This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all respected participants in these efforts.

Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation. Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important.

This is where the Republican party has ended up: supporting an ignorant buffoon who believes in the End Times and speaking in tongues while deriding some of the best and most successful strategies for scientific research. In this next election, we've got to choose between the 21^st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice.

Thank you Dr. Myers. Perhaps one day I will have the pleasure of meeting you in person. That will kinda blow this whole pseudo-anonymity thing though...

balloons

2008-10-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Sinclair Lewis.

Quick game of opposites. One thing creepy, and another thing creepy-funny.

Evil creepy:
No comment needed...

Funny creepy. WTF? Who picked the balloons?

Empire of Dirt

2008-10-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

Hurt

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

This is going to be a short and angry post. Like the previous there is nothing here that you don't already suspect. We (errr, the people that is) no longer are a meaningful component in our government. I dare you to prove otherwise.

Two thinks are pissing me off.

One:

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

The link goes to a site which is ripe with tedious "Obama is a bad bad man" left on left ratfucking action. I have ranted on this before and hold strong and largely inflexible opinions on the subject. Since the internets are a largly anonymous and full of people who take advantage of said anonynimity to act less than adult like, this sort of think must be put up with. Sorry.

I digress.

The second is simple. A quote and a picture.

When the Treasury Department's bailout czar provided an update this week on the government's $700 billion plan to rescue troubled financial institutions, he vowed that it would be an "open and transparent program with appropriate oversight.''

The article is quite interesting and worth a moment of your time. Better than coffee.

Moving on to filed documentation, we see:

Click on the image to read the print. Transparency.

Honestly at time I wonder what is the point of this ride.

Every breath you take.

2008-10-19T21:12:00.000-07:00

I have been spending too may hours reading papers that somehow missed one of the ideas in the introduction of "A Brief History of Time" - that you will lose approximately 50% of your readers for each of the formula included in the writing. I have always been a little suspicious of that claim, but can not really seem to escape that nagging feeling that the number of folks that have dug through this work is a little thin...

In trying to escape my actual work, a number of interesting factoids have wandered into my limited attention span and stuck there. You, gentle reader, can decide for your self if there is any real connection.

We are on the last weeks of the administration run by the Worst President Ever. While they are busy doing last minute run-arounds on consumer rights and trying to hide the most egregious of their deeds, the world as a whole trundles on toward the situation where any notion of your privacy is disappearing. Once it goes away you will never get it back.

Off to the land down under, where in order to help police people against themselves the government will be filtering All internet content:

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government's $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether.

The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Department spokesman Tim Marshall said the filters will be mandatory for all Australians.

"Labor's plan for cyber-safety will require ISPs to offer a clean feed Internet service to all homes, schools and public Internet points accessible by children," Marshall said.

This plan is so breathtakingly stupid that I am not really sure just how to add to it. The least offensive of the options still provides the "shucks, illegal is illegal" second grade gutless rational.

Pausing for a moment, we head back to the US where ISP's are being pressured to directly monitor users traffic under recently passed legislation which will - you will never guess this one - protect the children.

As reported in msnbc:

But such monitoring just became easier with a law approved unanimously by the Congress and signed on Monday by President Bush. A section of that law written by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain gives Internet service providers access to lists of child porn files, which previously had been closely held by law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Although the law says it doesn't require any monitoring, it doesn't forbid it either. And the law ratchets up the pressure, making it a felony for ISPs to fail to report any "actual knowledge" of child pornography.

Short version: the ISP looks at the signature of every file that is passed to and from your computer. This signature is created by a third party (or law enforcement) and the ISP has no actual notion of what is in the file. The ISP then blocks the transmission of the file, and reports the IP address and local account information to law enforcement. At this point we can assume that the already in place no-knock FBI team can then come in to your home, accuse you publicly of a henious crime and take away all your possessions. Guess they forgot to mention that in the article.

How does the company defend it's product?

A spokesman for Brilliant Digital Entertainment disputed that, saying the technology would be "non-invasive," would not compromise privacy, would be legal in the U.S. and elsewhere, and most important, would curtail the global proliferation of child pornography.
"I don't think it takes many voices before the Internet industry separates out those who are prepared to build a business on the trafficking of child sexual exploitation," said Michael Speck, Brilliant Digital's commercial manager in charge of law enforcement products. "If boxes started turning up with Pablo Escobar's special-delivery cocaine inside, they'd stop it, they'd do something about it."

The mind boggles.

In doing what I do for a living, there is an expectation that general principles of what an ISP is legally allowed to do. At least in California, I would guess that this would be allowed if law enforcement (or any other government funded institution) is not involved such dragnet activity (without per-person warrent). This is of course ignoring all of the moral aspects of this technology.

For the record it would be trivial to avoid this technology as it is reminiscent of antivirus software in the late 1990s. This is hardly a ringing enforcement.

There was another entry about the NSA hoovering up yet more data - phone calls, email, network traffic - but really if you think that that is not happening now there are larger problems.

The destruction of our personal privacy will not take place via some great momentous declaration with tanks in the street. It will be digested one tiny bit at a time. For our own good and yes, for the children.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

(for the whole thing see this)

I hope that a change in government will begin to undo all this madness.

DOJ to you: "What COINTELPRO? Bitches."

2008-10-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

There may come a time
When youll be tired
As tired as a dream that wants to die
And further to fly
Further to fly

"Further to Fly"
Simon and Garfunkel

Just a little something in case you think that I am imply fixated on fiscal short bus that is running around and around the block. Oh no. In an effort to avoid confusion amongst agents who are bound by rules of conduct based on the type of investigation that they officially declare, DOJ has declared that for the assessment of a criminal threat, the FBI can:

• Conduct surveillance without an otherwise required court order

• Obtain grand jury subpoenas for personal telephone and e-mail accounts

• Recruit informants for feeding information about a group or person to the bureau

• Examine records maintained by federal, state and local government agencies, which are typically not accessible to the public, like police databases profiling past criminal suspects.

Groups or individuals targeted for an assessment may simply resemble to an agent a risk to public safety without any advance information indicating that was the case. It's not clear, then, how the bureau determines what groups or people should be spied upon if they haven't broken any laws and whether that process is arbitrary.

From The Center for Investigative Reporting:

In particular, the powers allow agents to "collect information relating to demonstration activities," according to the guidelines, for the purpose of protecting "public health and safety" before a major event, like the party conventions that occurred in St. Paul and Denver. The bureau can gather intelligence to determine where political demonstrators are lodging during the event, how they're traveling there, where demonstration activities are planned and how many people will attend, all without advanced proof that a national-security threat exists.

Agents can also access commercial databases containing large volumes of personal information on U.S. citizens, like those maintained by the private company ChoicePoint, which specializes in serving government agencies.

The fucking Attorney General of the US says:

"Under the new guidelines, the investigative steps that the FBI may take in a particular investigation will not be driven by irrelevant factors, such as the type of paperwork the agent uses to open the investigation," Mukasey told a crowd during an August anti-terrorism conference in Oregon. "The revisions also aim to eliminate distinctions in the existing rules that make it, in practice, harder to gather information about threats to the national security than it is to conduct 'ordinary' criminal investigations."

Think about what was said - irrelevant factors like the type of paperwork are the sort of important detail oriented things that a society's top law enforcement organization should be interested in. If a person can't get that right, why are they in a position of power to begin with?

These rules and laws were put into place on purpose after the DOJ proved again and again that they were incapable of not doing the Wrong Thing. COINTELPRO anybody?

Ugh. I have to go get some work done

A short diversion

2008-10-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix..."

The truth is, I have been completely at a loss to digest the goings on from the last month or so. It has been so inconceivably stupid and out of control that no amount of digestion, drinking or hope has made a damn bit of difference. We no longer live in a Representative Democracy.

The best background that I have found on the mortgage/banking clusterfuck is found in a stick figure montage. Seems fitting somehow.

There is so much more though. The averace which spawned the mess that we are in today is not being cleaned up. The same basic fear driven policy which has been the hallmark of the current administration is pushing forward with this sick desire, this pathological need to take every little scrap of goodness and hope and sell it to the insiders for maximum profit.

The rise of the Italian Fascist movement involved a corparitist form of government.

We are entering a new relationship between government and the people it is charged to represent. Seems like ages ago I wrote at some length about Rule of Law. Again and again and again.

Rule of Law.

We sit and wonder what new found horror will creep out of the television today. What new 'fuck you' will be unceremoniously delivered, uncommented, by the news. What new expression of privilege and contempt will fall our way. Keeping track of the ever changing and ever growing mess is becoming more complex. New cards for the pile.

When the elections were originally stolen in 2000 there was a great deal of confusion. We were pissed, but our representatives did not want to make a stink. As most effectively expressed in this usenet post:

The Republicans' use of fraud and force has been shocking. Let's go beyond that shock for the moment. What's truly troubling is that their tactics have been so blatant -- for example, the organized mob attack on the vote counting operation in Miami by a gang of out-of-state Republican operatives, including known staff members employed by highly placed officials. They didn't bother to conduct that as a covert operation. They didn't even hide the cashflow that paid for it.

Such an approach is not sustainable long-term under our present system of law and government. But there's no use in seizing power just long enough to get inaugurated if all you do is spend the next four years pinned down in a hopeless tangle of legal actions and political countermeasures. Therefore, we have to assume that they are planning to consolidate their power shortly after Bush is inaugurated.

If you're not following me: This is the equivalent of that moment in the plot where the guy who's being held captive by the bad guys realizes they're planning to kill him because they're letting him see their faces and hear their names spoken. They're not worried about the consequences.

The Republicans are not worried about the consequences of their blatant abuses. The logical conclusion is that once they've consolidated their power, things are going to get a lot worse.

Compare our tepid response to the whole sale sacking of our democracy with the Nixon era exchange:

Within two years after congressional Watergate hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Nineteen corporations and sixty-one people, including Nixon's own chief of staff, four former cabinet officials, and his personal lawyer, had been charged with crimes relating to Watergate; dozens of the president's men had already been convicted and sentenced to prison. In the next presidential election his party was driven from power.

When the DNC took the threat of impeachment off the table, then entire balance of power shifted. It had already been shown that they were willing (and perhaps even desirous) to have the Executive branch set the tone, agenda and perhaps most important, the language of debate. While arguably the notion of trilateral power (Judicial, Executive, Legislative) lost a wheel when the supreme court elected Mr. Bush, the unwillingness of the House and Senate members to do their jobs killed it dead.

I am more fearful now for the fabric of our Democracy than ever before. There is so much more to say, but so little time.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free

churn

2008-08-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

I just have a moment to comment on the current state of psychological dissonance in the political sphere.

There is a great deal to say about the current set of democratic holdouts for which nothing the party candidate can do or say will be enough. If I have to read "But how do you know that Obama will be better than McCain" one more fucking time I will crawl through the godsdammed interweb and strangle the shit out of the moron on the other end. It is ok to be disappointed or to have reservations about some candidate other than the one you wanted, but get a grip folks.

On the other side of the divide we have a republican VP candidate who is willing to say:

"what is it exactly that the VP does every day"

Crap. One step away from POTUS. This honestly has to be a show, but this is taking the Forrest Gump thing a little too far. I had this foolish notion that our nation has had it's fill of short bus politics. Guess I call it Moronathon for a reason.

As a proponent of full disclosure, this is a sentence fragment yet the lack of context does not change the intended meaning. See HERE for a link to the complete conversation.

This is going to be a race to the bottom between the racism on the right (and left...), and sexism on the left. On the off chance that the Democratic side fails in it's built in sexism - and trust me that it will not - there will be a constant stream of Ratfucking going on to make sure that that meme gets propagated effectively.

I am hoping that there will be a little more time to vent my spleen (yum!), errr, share my informed opinion, but that is difficult to say. We are just a little busy around here.

Like PAB says: "I ate some fuzz!"

Live Not By Lies

2008-08-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that.

Excerpt from Live Not By Lies, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
RIP

Please take a moment and go read the whole thing. It sits on one side of a balance. With it sit the quaint notion of Rule of Law and all that it represents.

On the other side we have one of the more despicable judicial proceedings of our time. The first military commission trial goes to jury today and it is a sad cynical affair. It has been called Potemkin in nature, but I wonder if such a term could truly encompass the layering of lies, double speak and grotesque posturing that makes up this event.

From the LA Times we have:

The war crimes case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan today goes to a jury of his enemies, hand-selected by the Pentagon official who charged him on behalf of a president who has ordered him imprisoned even if acquitted. ...

Hamdan's defense was encumbered by "protective orders" that prohibited even the mention of the CIA or its handling of Hamdan during a month in late 2001 when the defendant disappeared into "a black hole" in Afghanistan, said the tribunal's deputy defense chief, Michael J. Berrigan. He called the two-week trial an "obscenity." ...

Citing national security concerns, none of the agents nor the reports from CIA interrogations of Hamdan were available to the defense. Four prosecution witnesses testified anonymously, and two Army special forces officers called by the defense were questioned behind closed doors, with no media or independent observers allowed.

What riles me the most is that this is a war crimes tribunal. Think about that in all of it's grotesque irony. The ACLU has a few things to say:

"This trial has been an embarrassment. It's embarrassing that the United States would convene the first tribunal since World War II to prosecute such a lowly and marginal figure, and it's embarrassing that this system has been devised to allow prosecution of the alleged crimes of the detainees while covering up the crimes committed against them," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. ...

"From Hamdan's perspective, this is a Potemkin proceeding," Wizner said, a dry run to provide assurance that no barriers arise to the introduction of coerced evidence or hearsay in future trials. [Emphasis added]

(text and form borrowed heavily from a Cab Drollery posting on this).

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants--but just don't disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don't even fear universal nuclear death, and we don't fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage.

end

language redux III

2008-07-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

One more time (though perhaps not the last) we have another linguistic fuckaduck brought to you by the Current Administration.

A summary of the effects can be found here, but a short quote might be illuminating:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them "abortion."

The effect of this is vastly multiplied on people who can not really afford to just pay out of pocket in the event that this passes. The primary focus of this part of the bill would probably be recipients of title X and Medicaid. As described, the changes would also supersede state laws forcing equal access to contraception. New York and California are expressly described as part of "the problem" since they require prescription drug insurance plans to provide coverage for contraceptives. These rules would even interfere with New York State law that ensures survivors of sexual assault and rape receive emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.

The anti-choice movement has always had the elimination of contraception as a significant part of their agenda. These proposed changes are just another step toward these vaulted goals.

The second part of this would be the codification of a persons right to refuse to perform procedures or distribute medication that they disagree with. I personally find this part of it at least as offensive as the first part. In the comments section of the article we find the proverbial:

Read a little more about the proposed bill. It is NOT about banning birth control pills! It is an antidiscrimination bill that would protect the right of healthcare workers who do not want to take part in abortions.

Two quick comments:

1) If you do not like the processing and sale of meat, do not go and work in a meat packing shop. Oh, and then go and say that your belief in the gods damned flying spaghetti monster forbids you to sell hotdogs so the rest of the world needs to deal with it. You got into healthcare or pharmacy or whatever as an adult like person knowing damn well what you would be doing. Transfer to another department.

2) Note here the redefinition of the term 'abortion'. It moves from an actual surgical procedure complete with volatile and politically charged baggage to contraception. Listen to what the ratfucking author of the message says - this bill protects (her) right not to perform or assist in 'abortions' which have been redefined to include contraception (and even the discussion of contraception). So when the only pharmacist in town refuses to sell the pill to you cause baby jebus tells him not to even when he works at a publicly funded hospital, tough luck.

More information can be found here as well regarding additional appalling things about this administration and reproductive rights. I have to go pick fucking LICE out of Mrs. set.elemet's head thereafter she will return the simian favor

A What?!?

2008-07-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

I just need to get this off my chest. From the New York Times Opinion page we have a tedious hack job from a so called 'Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian' who says amongst many enlightened things the following pandering nonsense. (This was written some months ago, so the tedious ratfucking political side of it does stand out a bit more than it might have at the time.)

But BBBBBB’s approach to the subject is that of a top-down progressive. BBBB speeches about privacy suggest that BBBB has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.
Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security.
AAAAAAAA, by contrast, is not a knee-jerk believer in the old-fashioned liberal view that courts should unilaterally impose civil liberties protections on unwilling majorities.

I blocked out the names as much as possible since the content of the discussion is the relevant part.

Hmm. How about "We hold these truths to be self evident" or perhaps the entire framework built into the constitution and related documents which help avoid the tyranny of the majority. So who the fuck cares about these civil liberties being imposed on us by experts and judges besides some deranged minority? Better reach out to the untold masses of conservative libertarians and their sensible balances. Sounds like the usual republican "Father knows best" bullshit.

I really hope that this was just a particularly cynical Modest Proposal.

Either was I really need a drink.

Phone Fun

2008-07-13T22:20:00.000-07:00

Another mixed drink here at Moronathon - geolocation and the everlovin need of Congress to act like a sad mix of boot licking toadies. My apologies to any toads out there who may feel slighted by this, perhaps unjust comparison.

Scene I: Enter Department of ~~No Stinking Badges~~ Justice

Agent1: There is this cool new feature where I can track my delinquent, err, godfearing teenager on a web page.
Agent2: Wow. I wonder if we can leverage this to track US citizens without court order or even probable cause?
Agent1: Sounds like a plan!

As per a BetaNews article (as well as slashdot) :

"Court decisions indicate that USAOs claim not to need probable cause to obtain real-time tracking information. News reports further suggest that some field offices are violating a Department of Justice 'internal recomendation' that 'federal procecutors seek warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise location data in private areas.'"

Think about this for a moment. This is real time information about your location. But don't worry, you really have nothing to lose if you have nothing to hide. Right?

Yes, the EFF/ACLU are suing for information on DOJ practices. Must do that before you can nicely ask them to quit being such assholes.

In a COMPLETELY UNRELATED and otherwise inconsequential bit of information, congress is ignoring US District Chief Judge Vaughn Walkers ruling against the government regarding immunity for telecoms in the NSA wiretapping case. In case you missed it, Walker (hardly a DFH) ruled:

Congress appears clearly to have intended to -- and did -- establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence surveillance activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.
(...)
This provision and its legislative history left no doubt that Congress intended to displace entirely the various warrantless wiretapping and surveillance programs undertaken by the executive branch and to leave no room for the president to undertake warrantless surveillance in the domestic sphere in the future.

Since this decision is now mute we can thank the DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY for caving in to the pack of craven goofballs running the executive branch. They (the craven goofballs) must have some Really Awful Stuff on the loyal opposition...

None the less, thanks folks for shitting all over the 4th amendment.

So tiny, and yet so Evil...

At last!

2008-07-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

Short and sweet personal note. Mrs. set.element is hitting send on her medical school application. Rock on Mrs. set.element!

Mr. set.element.

Heartland Redux

2008-06-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

I have a bunch of griping to do, but this was just a little too stupid to pass up.

A 12-YEAR-old American girl and her friends were astounded when a man walked up to their lemonade stand and demanded their takings.

"The guy came up and was, like, 'Give me your money,''' said 12-year-old Dominique Morefield of Terre Haute, Indiana, who was running the lemonade stand with her friends.

"I was shocked. It was just my immediate reaction to chase after him.''

She chased the man, who made off with $US17.50 ($18.50), to a nearby house before calling police, the Associated Press repported.

It took police 45 minutes to persuade Steve Tryon, 18, to come out of the house, where he was arrested and charged with robbery, the AP said.

He is being held in jail on a $US50,000 bond.

"I didn't think anyone would come up to a lemonade stand and steal. That's really low,'' 12-year-old Fred Erstine said.

John Yoo is Evil's Bitch

2008-06-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

That was kind of fun to write.

I have been reading a great deal about the torture memo and the additional revelation of Evil from the executive branch. Best one line summary:

"No civilian laws bar us from torturing prisoners because this is a war; the law of war doesn't apply to bar us from torturing prisoners because this isn't the kind of war where the law of war applies."

I started this back in April and it has sat in the 'Edit Posts' pile for some time now. There was some hope of examining the tension that the academic world seemed to be expressing about the tenure of John Yoo. Perhaps it is my lack of sophistication when it comes to matters of right and wrong, but when you build the legal framework that is used to torture and murder people there is something gods dammed wrong with you. Evil I think they call it?

Unable to leave well enough alone, our stalwart anti-hero jumped to the attack on the restoration of habeas to the detainees in Guantanamo by the Supreme Court this week. A brief aside:

(1) Our society is such a collection of lamer couch potato sheeple that the debate and decision of a 900 year old right goes un-noticed by the singular majority of the population. We ought to be out with pitch forks and torches. Mumble mumble mumble - I couldn't get child care either...
(2) We are discussing rights for the smallest minority of people illegally held by the US. What about the other 99% that are locked up in prison ships and in other countries?

In the article - a WSJ Op-Ed - he accuses the court of "judicial imperialism of the highest order". Imperialism. That's rich. The argument follows where he suggests that "an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention." While this is hypothetically true, we need to pause and examine how the vast majority of the people who find themselves under lock and key in US held Cuba get there. Give you a hint - it has little to do with people fighting. Perhaps some examples would be most illuminating?

Canadian citizen Maher Arar was also detained at the airport -- on a stop-over at JFK Airport on his way back from a family vacation to his Ottawa home -- and then sent to Syria to be tortured for 10 months, only for it to be discovered thereafter that he was completely innocent, that U.S. officials apprehended the wrong man. German citizen Khaled El-Masri was snatched up while on vacation in Macedonia, accused of being a Terrorist, shipped around to multiple countries, denied access to the outside world, tortured by the CIA for months, only to be released once they realized it was a case of "mistaken identity." And the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Lakhdar Boumediene, was a Bosnia citizen, living in Bosnia, who was arrested by Bosnian authorities at the request of the Bush administration, investigated, and determined by the Bosnian Supreme Court to be innocent. But upon his being released, U.S. forces inside Bosnia immediately seized him and shipped him to Guantanamo.

This argument embodies such a transparent attempt at fear mongering and outright lying that we once again stand gape jawed at the heartlessness of it all. As I have mentioned once or twice, this group of scoundrels deserve the sort of Justice that they have so aggressively denied so many others. It is the only way that we as a nation can begin to look one another in the eye again.

I leave my gentle audience (all three of you!) with this sequence from Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" which sums it up nicely:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

decaf freedom

2008-06-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

While puttering about the internets, I ran across an interesting factoid. At The Guantanamo Blog there was a a quesion brought up regarding the remaining 99% of US prisoners. This referenced an original article by Chris Floyd which discussed the disposition of the remaining majority.

The United States government is holding some 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to "harsh interrogation techniques" (to use the prim locution for "torture" used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

27,000 human beings. A line of people 12 miles long, shoulder to shoulder.

As an interesting foil, we have the DOJ Inspectors General report on U.S. complicity in torture.

“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”

One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners—“whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. ...” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.

You draw your own conclusions.

You are a Blockhead Charlie Brown

2008-05-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

In reading a short article on the excellent legal web site 'Balkanization' on the indefensibility of
torture from a legal standpoint, I ran across a now classic attack pattern:

Perhaps I missed it, but does Mr. Horton's campaign define what he thinks is torture? Its difficult to ban what one cannot define.
# posted by Bart DePalma : 7:50 PM

Bart here seems to be the resident troll for the site. What I find so interesting is the response to this. Now mind you, this sight is hardly a bastion of mindless liberal tree hugging - there is all sorts of things that discussed that I violently oppose. But the discussion rests on the bedrock of rational debate and exchange. Let us focus on this argument though.

There are few readers out there who might miss this as a classic Socratic attack on the original author. You can not escape a philosophy class without at least reading the Apology which is darn near dripping with this stuff.

So why the hell do we fall for it every time? Like Charlie Brown kicking the gods dammed football being held by Lucy, we actually engage in a discussion about term definition completely moving the discussion away from the original topic all together. Again and again. This style of debate is used against the 'rational' wing of the left with devastating effectiveness. If you just repeat the question again and again ignoring or egging on the rebuttals (which are in themselves an effective way of turning the conversation), some dammed fool with just have to try to make adult like conversation.

Back in my community college days, I had an instructor who invoked 'Big Bob' as the blunt instrument of philosophical menace to instruct us about the potentially reckless power of rhetoric. Little did I suspect (lo those many years ago!) that the left had somehow not been inoculated against the Big Bob meme.

This ideology has taken hold and drives the direction of debate with the executive branch. Rule of Law has been corrupted because the language used to define the core elements (can you say torture?) has been corrupted. Response to this has been confused as is expected.

So lets take back the language of debate, ok?

Quick Read

2008-05-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

In looking at the previous post, I wandered on the following. Take in the full thing, and enjoy a little snippet:

Our representatives -- and to a great degree we as a culture -- are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man's corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty ... dammmnnnn.

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying "You don't have the balls to take down a government. You don't have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don't. What's beyond that abyss -- what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation -- terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way."

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that --no we'd be admitting It Went Wrong.

Enjoy!

Dragged Down by the Stone

2008-05-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

Not really sure why this resonates with me. Perhaps it will make sense at the end of this thing.

Things have been a little skinny here at Moronathon. Life is intervening with increased ferocity and we are working quite hard at doing that full speed ahead, chin up thing. Leaves little time for complaining. None the less, we return to our friends Responsibility, Justice and Rule of Law. Hmm. Perhaps we had better start with Paranoia instead as it is a little easier to find in this day and age.

Those of you who read this blog with regularity know that I have a fascination with the relationship between our Government and our Privacy. In reading the following, please think about the utility and reasoning behind keeping even the idea of a government keeping an organization or plan secret. A rational might be created for hiding details - ie we hold up the following people in the event of a flying gerbil attack on Gotham City - but this gets a little less strong when you feel the need to hide the existence of the FGAPP (Flying Gerbil Attack Preparation Plan) or more likely the whole DFGAP (Department of Flying Gerbil Attack Preparation).

Attack Preparation... The US Government has quite reasonably developed plans for dealing with rotten things happening to the country and itself in order to maintain a continuity of operations. This is a Good Thing. For the past thirty years though these plans have added a significant inward looking component which is somewhat troubling. A very interesting article by Christopher Ketcham goes into a great deal of detail with regard to a good number of these changes. The points I make in this section are shamelessly taken from that reading.

The 'enemy lists' of Hoover's FBI are well known and understood. During the same time period the Federal Preparedness Agency (now known as FEMA) maintained a database of at least 100,000 Americans located at Mount Weather, which was publicly investigated in 1975 by Senator John V. Tunney. From the Ketcham article:

The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Moving ahead 10 years enter Oliver North. I am unable to express my contempt for this POS, except to say that he gives the usual group of political scoundrels like Donald Rumsfeld a bad name. We are also seeing the same distancing of the executive branch from congressional oversight via the same legal condescension that is being enjoyed today. Another quote:

A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.
North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

I am going through the information a little differently than the original article - 'Main Core' is the current implementation of the big unregulated database holding personal information about suspicious people that might need special attention in the event of a 'national emergency'.

The exact details are less important than the main points: information is being collected outside of the normal scope of regulation and oversight whose main purpose will be the detection and survaliense of American Citizens. The decision to use these rests with the executive branch as defined in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. Finally, the historical firewall between states and the use of Federal troops - Posse Comitatus - was reduced in scope as well.

For the record I am somewhat skeptical that any notion of regulation or oversight is meaningful in the context of this sort of operation. It exists at a layer of government which is not all that well defined for those of us brought up in the now quaint notion of three house government.

I am also skipping the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as there has been some further clarifications act brought to us by the Supreme Court which I would need to look up and do not really have the space. Google "Salim Hamdan and Military Commissions Act" for more details.

So what? Those fans of the old X-Files series remember the tin foil hat brigaded talking about FEMA and a Vast Conspiracy to lock up countless Americans. Such a joke right? Until quite recently I felt the same way. Where we sit today the people with the power to do this are without shame or dignity. They have expressed contempt for the Rule of Law. They have sullied and destroyed our national reputation and treasure. American Citizens can and are being held without constitutional protections. They feed on the hopes and dreams of us leaving nothing but bitter ruin.

We - the United States - are currently holding more than 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to "harsh interrogation techniques" (to use the prim locution for "torture" used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

Do you really think that they would be afraid to use this if it was in their best interest?

free advice for new visitors

2008-05-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

The traffic profile for the previous post picked up a couple of interesting visitors. I suspect that one or more staff people for one or more of the mentioned senators spend some chunk of the day looking to see what stupid bloggers such as myself are saying about their employers. This seems like a reasonable and well thought out thing to do.

For my new visitors from washington: Quit browsing the web right now and go update your flash versions. Folks the versions on the browsers I saw are both really old and really vulnerable, and if you are not currently nodes for the Russian Business Network you sure will be soon. The thought of that bothers me a little...

This in no way changes what I think and feel, it is just a little public service net hygiene.

To help ensure the return of our friends from washington, I will re-post the bits of (todays) post which has names and whatnot.

Republicans, meanwhile, made their feelings about the hearing clear from the outset. In his opening statement, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) declared the hearing an utter waste of time. "These cases are old news," he fumed. His colleague, the former Texas judge Louie Gohmert, echoed those sentiments. "Why are we here today?" he demanded, noting that the committee had to cut short a markup of seven important crime bills to convene the hearing that he claimed was born out of "desperation." Gohmert ticked off a list of items he found more relevant for the committee's attention, including a random and inexplicable reference to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who Gohmert thought ought to be investigated for perjury based on his numerous appearances before the committee regarding the outing of his CIA wife, Valerie Plame. Then, the Republican congressman stormed out of the hearing room, never to return.

These cases are old news, why are we here today?

2008-05-19T21:54:00.000-07:00

That will be the theme of the next eight years.

We will hear again and again how this is all just old news and should be left to rest. Nothing to be seen here. Move along.

Congress holds an oversight committee, about things that happened less than 8 years ago. Illegal attacks on our system of government. The DOJ - a major player in this mess - doesn't even show. Just a no-show, like the fucking rule of law that they are supposed to stand for, that we the taxed are paying for, just does not really mean anything when you are supposed to be investigating violations of the law that got you in power.

And what does the GOP have to say:

Republicans, meanwhile, made their feelings about the hearing clear from the outset. In his opening statement, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) declared the hearing an utter waste of time. "These cases are old news," he fumed. His colleague, the former Texas judge Louie Gohmert, echoed those sentiments. "Why are we here today?" he demanded, noting that the committee had to cut short a markup of seven important crime bills to convene the hearing that he claimed was born out of "desperation." Gohmert ticked off a list of items he found more relevant for the committee's attention, including a random and inexplicable reference to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who Gohmert thought ought to be investigated for perjury based on his numerous appearances before the committee regarding the outing of his CIA wife, Valerie Plame. Then, the Republican congressman stormed out of the hearing room, never to return.

Fire them. How fucking long would you last if you skipped out of a court appearance? Fire them and let the same rule of law that they have alternatively ignored or perverted provide them a little more down time on the tax payers dime.

Life has been complex as of late and I have not had the time or energy to work much on this endeavor. I am hoping to fix that a bit.

note on goings on

2008-04-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

I am working on a pair of posts that discuss the Yoo torture memo/discussion that top white house staff were expressly invloved in the decition making process for torturing captives. See this ABC news link for a little more.

The second is a breakdown of the recent revelations that white house legal thought that the 4th ammendment did not necessisarily apply. Nice writeup from the EFF:
"The EFF has uncovered a troubling footnote in a newly declassified Bush Administration memo, which asserts that 'our Office recently [in 2001] concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.' This could mean that the Administration believes the NSA's warrantless wiretapping and data mining programs are not governed by the Constitution, which would cast Administration claims that the programs did not violate the Fourth Amendment in a whole new light — after all, you can't violate a law that doesn't apply. The claimed immunity would also cover other DoD agencies, such as CIFA, which carry out offline surveillance of political groups within the United States."

More later ...

Spit please!

2008-04-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

Another quick post.

Short version: Having completely lost the distinction between an individual accused of committing a crime and an individual convicted of said offense, Congress has authorized the justice department (no big 'J' for you!) to gather DNA samples from anybody who gets arrested.

This includes all those international travelers who have not even been charged with anything.

See DNA is the new duct tape of law enforcement. Just like all the wire tap infrastructure, we have nothing to fear with regard to our privacy given that there are rules by which law enforcement has to follow in order to get at the data.

Interesting quote:

Ablin said the DNA collection would be subject to the same privacy laws applied to current DNA sampling. That means none of it would be used for identifying genetic traits, diseases or disorders.

Perhaps I have been drinking the paranoid juice just a little too long, but that disclaimer is quite specific. Think for a moment of things not in that list that you would not like the justice department to be able to do in a large dragnet database sort of way. Do you have something to hide?

Money for Nothin'

2008-04-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

Just in case you thought the state of the educational system was not quite crappy enough, I bring you a sad tale of the big corporation and the Really Stupid Book. This book is a favorite amongst the up by the bootstraps middle class, but alas, it is no Frankenstein.

Perhaps more of an ideological bodice ripper.

This may all be an act of fiction since I did not bother to track down the original sources. It would surprise me somewhat if that was the case. With that in mind I leave you with the complete quote:

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand….

“A corporation crosses a line and a university is complicit in crossing the line if it accepts money” and accedes to a request to assign specific books, said Jonathan Knight, director of the program on academic freedom, tenure and governance for the American Association of University Professors, in Washington. “It’s unique in my experience.” Knight has worked in the field for 31 years….

After BB&T mandated that some schools teach “Atlas Shrugged,” grant seekers became aware of Allison’s interest and now tailor their applications by stating up front their interest in Rand, Denham said.

Scholars scoff at the Rand bounty, saying her ideas are too shallow to build courses around her.

That last line has got to hurt just a little though...

Grown up Pants

2008-04-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

Life has been just stupidly busy, so I have not had the pleasure of sharing my wit and charm with the legions of loyal readers across the globe. While waiting for some numbers to crunch for a homework set, I had the misfortune of reading a few political blogs. Jesus Mary and Joseph, what the fuck is wrong with the democrats? Do they have to shaft themselves at every opportunity?

From team O we seem to be getting a recycling of old Right Wing talking points about the Clintons. Did you not read my previous post? * The only thing that this is doing is providing free cannon fodder for the right.

From team C we get sentence dissection and other sophomoric crap. People mis-speak - if I had every thing I said or did dissected to this degree it would be a real horrorshow. To make my point clear, I will provide context for the quote since it is yet another stupid question script derived from a 24 like mentality. By the way, can someone please tell me just exactly why "Hardball" (sweet jebus...) is relevant.

MATTHEWS: Let me give you a scene that may face you in the next year or two, where the national security adviser calls you at 3:00 in the morning and tells that you a couple of jet — commercial jets have been hijacked. And they believe it is al Qaeda. And, as we know, al Qaeda always tries a second time. They tried for the World Trade Center after ‘93. They came back in ‘01. They’re heading for the Capitol. What do you do?

OBAMA: Well, look, I am hesitant to engage in hypotheticals like that, because…

MATTHEWS: But it has been predictable.

OBAMA: Oh, well, the — I don’t think anybody predicted 9/11. And, so, we don’t know what kinds of circumstances are going to come up.

Let me make my point - issues issues issues. The more time the left spends tearing itself up over sound bytes and fluff, the more disgusted actual people are getting with them. I want to know what the candidates are going to do about the economy, the war, the constitutional crisis, health care, corporate welfare, the mortgage crisis, New Orleans, the debt, jobs and what not. Do not fucking tell me about anything else. Quit with the racism and the misogamy and get it together because we do not have four more years to give to John McCain.

For the record, you get some really crazy shit for putting 'pants' into googles image search.
-----------------
* Three people read it actually.

ratfucking et al

2008-03-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

While I recognize that the current debate and consternation between the two Democratic candidates is good and healthy (what with being a democracy and all), the tone that some members of each camp seem to be taking with one another has always seemed a little over the top.

There is a term which emerged out of the Watergate investigations which might be useful here: ratfucker. This is a political operative who has the interesting position of thinking up rotten things to do to the opposition party.

Let us for a moment step into the way back machine and embrace the greatest ratfucker of them all - Karl Rove. He began the public segment of his career with - this will shock you - Richard Nixon. Before then he did whateverthefuck one does in preparing for a career steeped in Doing Evil. Pulling the wings off of flys and the heads of off dollies, worshiping cathulu, squeezing that little bit of humanity out of his soul so that it would not accidentally pull a Grinch on him. Bastards. Who the fuck knows?

Segretti recruited Karl Rove, the executive director of the College Republicans, to work in this dirty tricks campaign. In the fall of 1970, Rove had used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Democrat Alan J. Dixon, who was running for Treasurer of Illinois. He stole 1000 sheets of paper with campaign letterhead, printed fake campaign rally fliers promising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing”, and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, with the effect of disrupting Dixon’s rally.

Segretti went to jail for that one, Rove just moved up the food chain. As a protégé of Segretti, Rove helped to paint Nixon opponent George McGovern as a “left-wing peacenik”, in spite of McGovern’s heroism during World War II piloting a B-24.

I am stealing much of this from a deliriously hysterical post which really is a must read. In a classic move he took the position of the Director of the College Republicans from Robert Edgeworth by using a different version of the C.R. constitution. The election was a tie, so the decision was made by George Herbert Walker Bush. Ok, tell me with a straight face that the republican party is not composed entirely of creepy incestuous back scratchers.

Oh, my point? Well is was supposed to be simple. When you get some troll showing up and being all psycho and reactionary - serving no purpose at all except to sow disagreement, maybe you are just being visited by a ratfucking stooge. Reading the comments on the above mentioned post and you will come to realize that this message just bounced right the hell off the pointy heads of the commenter's. Things have gotten to heated up and crazy, that I don't think that they need to have stooges any more.

Imagine how proud this makes Karl.

Two quick comments: (1) I do not labor under the impression that the Democrats are somehow not creepy and incestuous. They just lack the high gloss approach that the repos have. (2) I have waited a long time to use the phrase 'ratfucking stooge' in my writing. Thank you for humoring me.

Click on the link, knock knock.

2008-03-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

In looking for the graphic on this posting, I ran across a number of fringe organizations and people whose sights I might not normally find myself at. This is not all that unusual when you enter a series of words - like "thought crime" in to the google images search.

Keep this in mind, and also think about how many times you have found yourself in a site that might be considered illegal or immoral by the standards found in the local community.

Enter the DOJ. From a news.com article:

The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

Two things quick. First, players in the kid porn world deserve the wood chipper. Second, that 'gibberish' was probably a nice attack vector with call back code in it.

Regardless, think about what is going on here. Someone connected to a linking using the IP address registered to your account with the ISP - maybe it is you, maybe not - and accesses a link watched by the FBI. On the strength of this information alone, your door gets kicked in and you are accused of a crime to which you really have no chance of defending yourself against.

When anyone visited the upload.sytes.net site, the FBI recorded the Internet Protocol address of the remote computer. There's no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn't tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message.

With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids.

What troubles me about this (besides the nature of the accusation) is fairly complicated. First the person did not actually access illegal material. In a more traditional (say drug related) situation, you must exchange money for drugs before a crime takes place. Here a link is accessed from some IP address. There is no strong causality - either in terms of who did the access (remember, we only have records for the internet address, not the person) and more importantly the fact that the transaction never actually took place. Nothing illegal was accessed - only 'gibberish'. In addition, how the address accessed the link was not recorded (as per the quote above), so there is no indication of what means the illicit link was accessed by - say in an email or web site or even as an image referral in a particularly broken email client.

In addition, it is not unusual to have legal precedent created for a crime like drug use or porn where there are few people who look at this as a potential civil rights infringement. Hell, they are happy to see that sort of asshole locked up no matter what the means. The problem is, such legislation tends to suffer from feature creep.

When asked what would stop the FBI from expanding its hyperlink sting operation, Harvey Silverglate, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge, Mass. and author of a forthcoming book on the Justice Department, replied: "Because the courts have been so narrow in their definition of 'entrapment,' and so expansive in their definition of 'probable cause,' there is nothing to stop the Feds from acting as you posit."

It is not the individual described case that concerns me as much as the big picture. There is a layer of abstraction happening here which seems a bit slippery. It is not the notion that intent is irrelevant - think about conspiracy charges. It is the lack of causality between the act of someone accessing an internet site, and the FBI kicking in your door and dragging you away in front of your neighbors. You are not just accused of a crime that is poison in our society, but also having the FBI dig through your personal items and papers:

The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements.

You tend to get this stuff back when they are quite ready to give it to you.

It is the feature creep that is causing me the most grief.

Happy Zombie Day!

2008-03-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Neither Mrs. set.element, nor myself are religious people, PAB is allergic to eggs, and we are a little horrified at the thought of our little love child chomping the heads off of chocolate bunnies or peeps. Out of respect for all the goofy organized religions that are doing whatever wine drinking and cracker munching that makes them happy, we recognize their odd predilection and declare today "Zombie Day." So happy Zombie Day people!

looters

2008-03-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Once again I am at a loss to adequately describe what a chickenshit world we live in. All these rugged individualist free market types with there condescending little fuck you attitudes and their 'the market will sort things out' bullshit children's stories.

These assholes fucked us all over and are now expecting to be bailed out again without even a hint of the regulation that you or I might receive for the privilege of food stamps. Please stop what you are doing and read a most excellent rant - I am humbled by the power and grace of this mighty smackdown.

Back? After years of taking the economy out for a drive, and parking it next to his corporate buddies to feed out of the trough, Allen 'Bubbles' Greenspan is playing the the Ronald Regan card and suggesting:

Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief.

Who might possibly have thought that something might have gone wrong? He says a few other things that are loathsome in the extreme. Actually the whole tone of the article is so swarmy and obsequious that you really have to go read it to experience the whole malevolent effect. In case you are not up for such an unclean adventure, I will select a few choice words. We start at the beginning.

Home price stabilisation will restore much-needed clarity to the marketplace because losses will be realised rather than prospective. The major source of contagion will be removed.

Who in this case will be footing the bill? The companies who created the investment vehicles which are responsible for this current state of illness? No, just you and I - ie the current mortgage holders and more importantly the US taxpayer. Just think about the use of the word contagion. Assholes.

After running on and on about this and that, we get two interesting quotes. The first is a clear declaration that the current system represents the best and greatest hope to get us out of this mess.

I hope that one of the casualties will not be reliance on counterparty surveillance, and more generally financial self-regulation, as the fundamental balance mechanism for global finance.

After all, interfering with financial 'self regulation' might interfere with the steady flow of capitol from your pocket into theirs... At the same time, we get this interesting little tidbit after he goes on and on like some weird Laplacean Ayn Rand fiend - because if only we had the right model, then perhaps we might maximize the flow of capitol from the taxpayer to the nice rich people. The final straw is the following:

But these models do not fully capture what I believe has been, to date, only a peripheral addendum to business-cycle and financial modelling – the innate human responses that result in swings between euphoria and fear that repeat themselves generation after generation with little evidence of a learning curve.

So the real problem is out stupid little monkey brains. Not avarice, filthy greed or the need to assign blame to every other person except ourselves.

Greenspan is falling into the pattern of every other tool in the box of this administration. The same fucking "gee, who would ever think that this would be a problem??" that the entire remainder of the educated world seems to be able to see through. More word games.

And what tossed me over the edge? Just some dumbfuck comment on another article describing the problems with mortgage baked securities. To snip out the quote:

"If anyone deserves a bailout, it's the small homeowners who heard financial authority figures telling them for years that buying a house was a wise decision on any terms"

Yes, those poor soles. The same ones in California that lied about their income in order to qualify for absurdly low teaser rates and option ARMs because they had to have their dream house NOW. The same ones that watched long term interest rates fall to historically low levels, and instead of locking them in, decided to "liberate equity" to buy kitchen upgrades, new cars, vacations, and jet skis. yes, the poor home buyer.

Fucking jet skies. As if the entire system was spun up to move equity from the middle class back to the rich via mortgages and investment vehicles? Remember the stock market and how the middle class was bilked out of trillions in investment pyramid schemes. Same shit, different tool.

This asshole has obviously never tried to save 50 or 75 thousand dollars for a house out in California. You just do not get to put down 10 - 15% without a little help from your parents. If you happen to be supporting your parents, you might just be a little fucked. So we knowingly enter into the fight with the fore-knowledge that the entire system is gamed to make you roadkill.

Too bad I can't just claim that I had no idea that this would happen and can this all just go away.

Visualization

2008-03-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

I am normally loath to just leave a quote out there as a stand alone expression. This one though is too perfect in and of itself to require any comment.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that a significant number of America's worst social problems would be alleviated by summoning the insurance industry's top managers to an economic summit, and then setting packs of wild dogs on them. - PNH, 6 January 2003

Walls?!? We don't need no stinking walls...

2008-03-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on the collection and sharing of domestic information between classic intelligence gathering agencies and civilian law enforcement. Seems like, if you can imagine, large quantities of information were being gathered on law abiding citizens for strictly political reasons.

From a facinating Washington Post article:

"A guy that's got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing," said Thomas E. Bush III, the FBI's assistant director of the criminal justice information services division. "Run the guy and he's had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue."

I will get to the article shortly, but this little quip is quite interesting for several reasons. Initially I wonder what the rational for gathering the volume of low grade information suggested in this. The inference here is that if you get enough stuff piled together that it is possible to infer patterns which provide some sort of high grade end product. This is, I believe, total bullshit.

And what is this all about?

Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root out terror plots.

What a marvelous slippery slope of information gathering possibilities. Rules were put into place for misconduct that happened when it was difficult to gather information on people. Real paper folders and whatnot changing hands. Imagine what can be done now. With this system in place, non-governmental companies are taking care of the integration, performing an end run around laws and rules which are supposed to limit the flow of information gathering and criminal prosecution. Not being bound by by these niceties, corporations can create bridges over the walls. Even more so, they can 'value add' things like credit information and the like to the mix. Ask yourself what an internet advertising company, or google knows about you.

Now attach this great volume of information to law enforcement. Not just DOJ law enforcement, but anybody hooked up to Coplink. Think about the leverage that this volume of information might be able to assert if used as a stick in, say, local politics...

In my line of work, we do a great deal of work with little bits and pieces of information. It gets fed into systems which tend to do a great deal of collating and fumbling about, and we smelly apes look at the results and make decisions about what happened. For every system there are false positives and false negatives, each of which represents a failure mode in the analysis. If a similar volume of information - some correct and some not - is available, I do not think that the entire set of people using this new resource will be ready to digest the information with the sort of skeptical eye that it needs to be.

In case there might be uncertainty regarding my skeptical bias toward law enforcement - and federal law enforcement via DOJ in general - I provide the following talking points. Back in November, I had a little discussion about cell phones and privacy. From there:

"Law enforcement has absolutely no interest in tracking the locations of law-abiding citizens. None whatsoever," Boyd said. "What we're doing is going through the courts to lawfully obtain data that will help us locate criminal targets, sometimes in cases where lives are literally hanging in the balance, such as a child abduction or serial murderer on the loose."

With this in mind, we now look at a little bit of information regarding the accidental disclosure of a significant privacy issue.

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

This is the same thing as described in a 2006 lawsuit against Verizon.

I guess my point is that the continuing creep toward transparent access by the Corporate - Government complex, legal or otherwise, marches on.

(In)Security Primacy

2008-03-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

Life has been alarmingly busy as of late - school, life, work and PAB have left me with little time for complaining. Bummer, as there has been quite a bit going on in the world worthy of note.

I have taken the basic idea from Digby's mega-blog and will not pretend to be doing little more than borrowing text for a while. It resonates with me in that it is a reminder to us regarding just how far things have changed in the past seven years. Short version:

In an American contest, "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" should matter just as much as life (remember Patrick Henry?). Justice, the general welfare and liberty should matter just as much as the common defense and domestic tranquility. We have really lost our way on this front, to the point that even saying your first priority as President or in Congress is anything but security is considered blasphemy. That is an incredibly frustrating, teeth-grinding loss of our national purpose, to such an extent that it has become an untouchable symptom in our national decline.

When you stop and think about it, this is illuminating. The rise of the military industrial complex to an unquestioned and dominating influence on both political parties, and the effect this has on our own vision of America belittles it's effect as a lens that we see our entire national image. Some time ago there was this guy who said (amongst other things):

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Naturally, this is Dwight Eisenhower. It really is a refreshing thing to read after seven years of this cheeze-wiz president.

Now that we have an appetizer to work on, we get to the real meat. Or tofu or whatever. Again, a short quote to begin (from the LA Times):

The recent decisions of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey's action.

In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

Interesting. An entire branch of government immune from the same laws that bind the remainder of the citizenry. I have spent endless time discussing the lawyer fetishism which seems to be endlessly overpowering for the executive branch. This rational is the logical conclusion of that ideology. Immunity from rule of law by changing the language and interpretation of law. Like kids covering their eyes insisting that you have disappeared. That war crimes and the systematic elimination of civil liberties are negotiable.

I was going to map this whole mess into the FISA telco immunity circus playing itself out over the past week or so. This is a broken dirty mess which encompasses both parties being culpable to this assault on our rights. The end result being immunity for the executive branch law breaking.

At this point I am so dulled to the daily routine that anger. There is much more, but it is late and there is a large quantity of code to be written.

Golem

2008-02-21T22:01:00.000-08:00

In 18th century Prague, as legend has it, a Rabbi created a Golem by mixing wax, clay and semen, speaking invocations, drawing a figure and then setting it on fire, so the figure would come to life. Ms. Shelley used this legend to create Frankenstein story. The Golem was inanimate and had no soul. It was a Godless creature that proceeded to wipe out the Rabbi’s enemies, and then, by accident, the town’s innocents and then, very nearly the Rabbi himself.

I continue the tradition of bitter complaint about legal injustice. There is an interesting tension between two different aspects of the Global War On Terror that have been in the news, but not really in the News.

The first component involves Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department official who heads up the Office of Legal Counsel, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. Exciting stuff, yes? What makes this so unbelievable is that this testimony reveals just what may have pushed former A.G. Ashcroft to threaten to resign. The second looks at the so called justice that six "high-value detainees" will enjoy at the hands of their military commissions this spring.

Both involve a strict reinterpretation of the notion of rule of law. Rules are re-written and re-interpreted so that you can play by your lawyers interpretation of the rule of law, yet express the rule of man. This is the Golem.

The Bradbury testimony represents once of these condescending word games that this administration has become noted for. Except in this case we need to keep in mind that the topic at hand is rationalizing the torture of human beings. Excerpts really do not reveal what a cold hearted shit this person is, so go read the remainder. A sampling:

"Under the mental side, Congress was very careful in the torture statute to have a very precise definition of severe mental pain or suffering. It requires predicate conditions be met and then, moreover, as we said in our opinion in December 2004, reading many cases, court cases, under the Torture Victims Protection Act, it requires an intent to cause prolonged mental harm. Now that's a mental disorder that is extended or continuing over time and if you've got a body of experience with a particular procedure that's been carefully monitored that indicates that you would not expect that there would be prolonged mental harm from a procedure, you can conclude that it's not torture under the precise terms of that statute."

This represents the mechanized dehumanization that has been one of the defining characteristics of the rendition program as described by an essay in The New Yorker named The Black Sites . I had a little discussion about it last September and had a few choice things to say. Does this sound familiar?

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

More of the same. A rhetoric based attack on humanity.

The second course for the meal is what slides out the other side of the meat grinder. After a sufficiently long stay down in Cuba - where in spite of Michael Moores insistence on 24 hour medical care people seem to be getting really sick and dropping dead - the powers that be need to seek some kind of closure on the whole affair. This is an election year and all.

The show trial will begin this spring and will be run with the same attention to detail and the new rule of law that has been the hallmark of this whole misadventure. Misadventure being a euphemism for kidnapping hundreds of people, denying them basic human rights, then sending what is left of them back to their hostile countries to be treated in whatever way politically volatile people are.

Harpers had a little post on it, where I get the following:

According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal. Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”
...
“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

The entire article is worth reading if only to grasp what the remainder of the world thinks about this whole banal affair. There will be talks about how this is the moral equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. If only that were the case. This will be Nuremberg kabuki - where the rubric of Justice will be presented without the bother of meat on the bone.

There is a systematized illness here which is not clearly under the direct control of any single person. All this time I have been predicating my model on the simple idea that there is actually someone making deliberate decisions about specifics. I wonder now if perhaps we might just have a bunch of greedy little boys who have discovered the power of language. The fact that there has always been tension between the gross incompetence demonstrated by this cabal and the Evil Plans for World Dominance has always struck me as a little off key.

The problem is that this scenario scares me a whole lot more than the directed back room politics ever did.

The Golem was inanimate and had no soul.
It was a Godless creature that proceeded to
wipe out the Rabbi’s enemies, and then, by
accident, the town’s innocents and then,
very nearly the Rabbi himself.

I hope you burn for eternity but I love you and will be praying for you.

2008-02-16T12:57:00.000-08:00

I have long sworn to myself that it is a fruitless waste of time to read the long psychotic arguments that, without fail, fall out in the comments from the great vast field of camp followers who stalk postings on evolution. This is far less an issue here where I have a nominal number of readers...

My anger freely flows from reading about the upcoming movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." Why I am angry about this is really beyond me. Should you get angry at mice for stealing your cheese? You might, but it really doesn't do much good. It is just what they do. In the same sort of rational, I ought to expect that people who are selling a movie predicated on the notion that evil (Evil?) Academia is crushing the valiant efforts of a few rag tag fugitive scientists to out the truth about ID (no no! Not the id, rather Intelligent Design).

So here we go again - the same sorry arguments that we see dragged out again and again. No data. No rational framework. No literature. No Science. No there there. The same nasty little blob of argument dipped in freedom of expression sauce and sold by the box full to a hungry America.

Who cares? I do because these pissy little cowards want journalists to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they can watch a pre-screening of the movie which is supposed to be there for reviewing and publicity. They also have to sign the same sort of non-disclosure for a 'press conference' where pre-screened questions are answered by the films makers.

From Dan Whipple at the Colorado Confidential:

Now if Expelled can be said to have a theme, it is that all sorts of ideas should be batted around the ballfield of science and theology, that there should be freedom of expression. I was jazzed. I'd get to ask my questions. It would be American intellectual combat at its most naked. As producer Walt Ruloff put it:

"What we're really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students, people in applied or theoretical research to have the freedom to go where they need to go and as the questions."
This makes it ironic, at least, that they expected the Orlando Sentinel to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Another reviewer had similar viewpoints, part of which I snip out here:

He uses "straw man" tactics to attack, mainly The Origin of the Species, as Darwin wrote it in 1859. That's like a music critic reviewing "the latest" by only referring to Edison's wax cylinders. He sets up false theses that "the other side" must hold (classic Limbaugh) and knocks those straw men down. Citing scientific research as recent as 1953, he can't understand why no peer-reviewed scientist thinks his "fairytale" version of the emergence of life is worth his or her time. No, not having a definitive answer about the moment life began...YET...is damning enough for Ben.

This is just chickenshit. I need to get going, but the thing that set me over the edge was this nice (sadly representative) post by a good Mr Larry Fafarman:

Posted by: Larry Fafarman | February 04, 2008 at 01:58 PM

To all you crazy 'Darwinists':

I refer you to the excellent Thomas Fagan post (Feb 2) where he suggests some new and intriguing ideas along with some compelling evidence.
He even references some notable scientists such as Behe, Demski and Wells – which should convince you further.

For even more irrefutable evidence you should check out these additional scientists:
Kirk Cameron – his fascinating ‘crocoduck’ argument
Ray Comfort – the spellbinding ‘designed banana’ lecture
Come on folks – get with it. Time to do your homework!
Check out Mr. Cameron in “Left Behind: World War III” for a swift kick on your atheist butt if you need inspiration.
You ‘evolutionist world view’ people crack me up.
I hope you burn for eternity but I love you and will be praying for you.

Perhaps I just don't get it. Perhaps this is just a joke? Perhaps this is just a new type of irony.

The Widening Gyre

2008-02-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, The Second Coming

The turn of events and the unrelenting lack of humanity as of late have left me a little off balance.

Where to begin? When you don't know where, return to first principles:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
US Constitution, 4th Amendment

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
US Constitution, 8th Amendment

This is on one side of the scale. Words and rules which have been (mostly) successful in keeping the great unwashed more or less out of the thresher. We operate on assumptions. Rules. An implicit understanding of right and wrong. We are drifting away from those things in an accelerating curve.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia provides a little insight on the 8th Amendment.

SCALIA: Seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face. It would be absurd to say that you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can an infliction of pain be?

The entire quote should be digested within context and in it's entirety. It is a disgusting expression of this whole '24' mentality which seems to have locked up the whole dialog surrounding the US involvement in torturing suspects. This is a Supreme Court justice, and the model that he uses is a fucking television show. Broken.

There is no discussion of legal guilt. There is no discussion of legal rights or process. There is no discussion of real boundaries or applicability. Just a fucking tv show. From some drunk on the bar stool next door I might tolerate such a chickenshit weak minded argument. From this person I demand much much more.

We have set the stage. Enter Jose Padilla. US Citizen. Tortured and held without charges for years. Go read this somewhat long and detailed description of the treatment and trial of this human being ( link ).

Over strong objections from the government, elements of Padilla’s confinement were revealed. Here’s how the Christian Science Monitor described it:

“Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over… He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyers were prevented from seeing him for nearly two years.”

And another (somewhat long) quote:

“What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind. That’s what happened at the brig. His personality was deconstructed and reformed,” Dr. Hargarty told Goodman. “In the darkness or in the light—in the cells, the light would be all dark for a long time or all light for a long time. And for a very long part of his detention he had no mattress at all. And sometimes he would try to sleep on the pallet, if you will, the hard steel pallet, or other times he would be in essentially stress positions where he’s got shackles and a belt and is in an awkward and uncomfortable position for long periods at a time....he would hear the click of the door opening, which is a loud click that sort of echoed, and then a very loud bang over and over and over again for hours at a time, possibly days. He had no way of knowing the time. The light was always artificial. The windows were blackened. He had no calendar or time, as you mentioned earlier. He really didn’t see people, especially in the beginning. He only had contact with his interrogators.”

This represents the systematic destruction of another human beings self. Then he was put on "trial" with any information regarding his treatment of unbiased evaluation of his mental state.

An often overlooked event, which in more equitable proceedings might have led to a mistrial, occurred just prior to the July 4th recess: the Miami jurors filed into the jury box -- first row, second, and third. But in what could only be a clear signal of its lack of impartiality, the first row of jurors that day were dressed all in red, the second row all in white, and the third row all in blue. This overt act, antithetical to a democratic judicial process, should have made any respectable judge livid and any responsible media outlet vocal. But it did neither.
Thus, it was no surprise this jury of red, white and blue -- having been denied the facts about the government’s ever changing charges, Padilla’s torture and illegal imprisonment, along with the denial of his other constitutional rights – such as the right to a swift trial -- took only a day and a half to review and consider three full months of testimony before finding Padilla and the other two defendants guilty on all counts.

I am not sure what more I might add to that.

As this is getting a little long, we frost this tasty little story with parting gift from the DOJ/FBI. Since we need to get the remainder of these trials rolling in order to look like something is being done about those pesky evildoers, plans for a series of show trials have begun.

The problem is, we have been systematically abusing and torturing these individuals. Even if DOJ says 'okey - dokey' about the waterboarding and whatnot, there are still pesky issues surrounding admisability and tainting. This is important since the Death Penalty will be the ultimate goal of these proceedings. I suspect that punishment was taken off the table in Padilla’s case so that fishy evidence could be introduced and a body of case law generated that these cases might push off against. Then again I know shit about law...

Short version:

Prosecutors and top administration officials essentially wanted to cleanse the information so that it could be used in court, a process that federal prosecutors typically follow in U.S. criminal cases with investigative problems or botched interrogations. Officials wanted to go into court without any doubts about the viability of their evidence, and they had serious reservations about the reliability of what the CIA had obtained for intelligence purposes.

“It was the product of a lot of debate at really high levels,” one official familiar with the program said. “A lot of people were involved in concluding that it may not be the saving grace, but it would put us on the best footing we could possibly be in. You can’t erase what happened in the past, but this was the best alternative.” […]

John D. Hutson, a retired Navy rear admiral and former judge advocate general. “Once you torture someone, it is hard to un-torture them. The general public is going to be concerned about the validity of the testimony.” …(read on)

Unlike the previous link, there is no moment of clarity here. No closure. I end with the second half of the Yeats poem and a haunting feeling that what comes slouching along to Bethlehem is not particularly welcome.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Banality, Hubris et al.

2008-02-09T12:28:00.000-08:00

I need to take a moment from an otherwise spiffy day and get a few things off my chest. This labor is obviously futile, but none the less it provides the illusion of getting something done without being as difficult as, say, sifting through a long list of citations and making sure that everything is correct.

Mark Thursday Feb 7th as a Very Interesting Day. As the core of much of this has been covered already, I will simply quote someone smarter and more articulate than I:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is back on the Hill today, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. Paul Kiel is covering it at TPMmuckraker.

So far, he's dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration's warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

This is really the height of lawyer fetishism which seems to have gripped the current administration. I am using the term here as a nice way of referring to the uncomfortable fact that the political appointees who seem willing to discuss the moral relativism of torture in such a way that Derrida blush are the ones who are making the decisions about what constitutes legality.

As a later update clarifies, it is not just that they can 'ignore' the law by saying that some act or another is ok. There is no legal recourse - criminal or civil - within the United States systems of law once the DOJ says okie-dokie.

The white house needs more lawyers and more opinions in order to normalize the unspeakable, the Banality of Evil. Yet when the smoke clears, Evil still will have been done. They would like to normalize there actions to the degree that it is ok to openly admit such acts without shame. Waterboarding is not torture, not illegal if we say so. Not quite true. Never will be. Jack Balkin notes:

Actually, it violates the law whether or not you call it illegal. Generally speaking, war criminals don’t usually admit that they have engaged in war crimes. They usually say they were justified in acting as they did.

A line has been passed in that all the cards seem to be on the table now. This is a big deal, and we need to force the two democratic (and yes, also our republican) candidates to answer the question of exactly what they are going to do about the executive branch. I, naturally took this idea from here:

This is the only issue in the presidential campaign. It is the only truly existential threat to the country. Everything else -- health care, climate change, campaign finance, the deficit -- mean nothing if we fail on this fundamental issue.

This reminds me of a quote that has already appeared here but which rings more truthfully now that when I first heard it. The authoritarian fascist will come up to you and say exactly what they are going to do long before they do it:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way that the world works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

The first time that I read that all I thought was 'what a pompous asshole.' I am wondering if this is a case of significantly underestimating (for lack of a better term) our opposition.

I am not completely sure what our Reality Based Community can or should do. This is a complex and real problem with ramifications that could last for generations. I go now to make some noodles and play out in the glorious sunshine with PAB. There is much to think about.

I voted

2008-02-05T21:39:00.000-08:00

So much has been going on as of late that I have not had time or really the desire to punt out some great steaming blob of angry verbiage. Now there is quite a bit to catch up on.

This will be a bit shorter than usual as there is a homework assignment and a research paper to complete. Complain complain complain. I have been reading about economics which is making my head ache and the lining of my stomach deplete itself. I have been reading about the Attorney General refusing to deny torture as a legitimate tool of our so called democracy. I have been reading details about Jose Padilla - a US citizen tortured, held without charges, and denied access to legal representation until he got railroaded in a mock trial. Real Ministry of Love stuff.

Not all is so bleak. I have enjoyed the second birthday of PAB tremendously. Many good friends to be had. If only I might extract such pleasure from balloons... I continue to look forward to the time I can find with Mrs. Set.Element, since she is busy busy busy and has a world of family crap as well. We trudge on.

More later...

One small step backward

2008-01-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

This is post #51 - haha who would have thought I had so much crap to say. s.e

------------------------------------------------------
A topic that I have been writing about for some time has once again stuck it's head up and flipped me off, so here we go again...

For quite a while I have been writing about the growing movement within government to develop the infrastructure and capability to monitor all in house network communications. Short version:

The classified joint directive, signed Jan. 8 and called the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23, has not been previously disclosed. Plans to expand the NSA's role in cyber-security were reported in the Baltimore Sun in September.

According to congressional aides and former White House officials with knowledge of the program, the directive outlines measures collectively referred to as the "cyber initiative," aimed at securing the government's computer systems against attacks by foreign adversaries and other intruders. It will cost billions of dollars, which the White House is expected to request in its fiscal 2009 budget.

You are sick of hearing about this I realize, but there is a 'frog slowly boiling in a pot of water' activity going on and I feel the need to share my frustration over it as well as a little paranoia.

So it looks like the first half of the program has passed the directive stage and will in all likelihood be funded. Seems like this sort of project does not fall under the scrutiny that the rest of the office of science (for example) does. Guns before butter kids...

There are a few interesting things that come up in the article which I found facinating. The initial read did not really provide a clear idea as to the state of domestic survelance. This struck me as a little odd, so I re-read and it became less opaque. None the less they spend nearly a third of the word space talking about domestic non-governmental monitoring as if already passed. It did not and perhaps I am reading too much into it.

But think about it this way. The NSA (and it's proxy organizations and companies) are building out their already sizable infrastructure to do really large scale monitoring - as if they don't already do. In addition they will build on the expertise to (hopefully) do real large scale correlation and analysis.

Correlation and analysis.

But we citizens are safe, yes? As this is just for governmental networks where notions privacy expectations are somewhat alien. Not so fast. They already have the infrastructure in place and are doing deep packet monitoring of US based traffic. This is a documented fact.

Feel better?

Then there is this weird attitude that somehow this is a simple problem to solve and that the most natural way to take care of the issue is to glom all the analysis together under one system.

Ed Giorgio, a former NSA analyst who is now a security consultant for ODNI, said, "If you're looking inside a DoD system and you see data flows going to China, that ought to set off a red flag. You don't need to scan the content to determine that."

and even weirder:

Under the initiative, the NSA, CIA and the FBI's Cyber Division will investigate intrusions by monitoring Internet activity and, in some cases, capturing data for analysis, sources said

The Pentagon can plan attacks on adversaries' networks if, for example, the NSA determines that a particular server in a foreign country needs to be taken down to disrupt an attack on an information system critical to the U.S. government. That could include responding to an attack against a private-sector network, such as the telecom industry's, sources said.

The first is breathtaking in its naive style of analysis. You right fucking need to look at what is going over the wire. Anybody who tells you otherwise is simply telling you a lie. This person is a consultant who is planning on getting to blindingly stupid rich on this pig roast.

The second is a little creepy since they are talking about intentionally targeting civilian computational resources via official US military means. When that country or nation state defends itself by returning the favor, we have a reason for the infrastructure to be rolled over to the civilian side of the house.

This is exactly what has been suggested in the last post I did:

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

cyber blah blah blah

2008-01-21T22:10:00.000-08:00

I was reading slashdot the other day and ran across an interesting article. In it there was a discussion about the CIA admitting that 'cyberattacks' have caused at least one power outage that affected multiple cities.

This is, on the whole, an interesting bit of information - quite a bit more interesting when put in the context of what has been said. On Dec 28, I had a little discussion about the proposed NSA/DHS joint program which would be used to monitor internet traffic on US commercial links. The section relevent to the power outage is the following quote:

Policymakers have become increasingly alarmed at the vulnerability of trains, nuclear power plants, electrical grids and other key infrastructure systems, which rely on Internet-based controls that could be hijacked remotely to produce a catastrophic attack.

In another article from Forbes, we can get a little more information (sans details):

Cyber-security experts have long warned of the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like power, transportation and water systems to malicious hackers. Friday, those warnings quietly became a reality: Tom Donahue, a CIA official, revealed at the SANS security trade conference in New Orleans that hackers have penetrated power systems in several regions outside the U.S., and "in at least one case, caused a power outage affecting multiple cities."

What is quite hysterical is at the same time as this is playing out we have a fluff interview of Mike McConnell by the Wall Street Journal where he states:

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

So, to set the stage we have a joint NSA/DHS program that expressly states that it is interested in monitoring both governmental and non-governmental internet traffic which has remained a non-discussed non-issue even to the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. This program is being driven by Mr. McConnell. A common argument for this program is that it will be used to secure sensitive and critical infrastructure against cyberattacks. Imagine my surprise when the CIA announces multiple city power outages based on computer attacks (and, errr, insiders - but we digress!).

Back to your regularly scheduled programs.

inconvenient science

2008-01-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

As a sad comment on the state of my life, the acronym HSPD-12 actually means something to me. As a sad comment on the state of the world, it means a great deal more to a bunch of folks working out at NASA JPL.

A good chunk of this brought to you by the Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Tim Rutten.

After 9/11, the Bush administration engaged in a great deal of Security Kabuki. A great many bad decisions were made which shunted giant piles of money into the hands of countless contractors and NGO's to do things that might be simultaneously nice examples of how not to do security as well as an endangerment of our basic freedoms and liberties. This is the usual corporate welfare that we all know and love.

One thing which transpired was the passing of HSPD-12 (Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12) which was supposed to standardize the badging process for all employees and contractors of the federal government. Boring. Or so you would think.

Most agencies (including the one that I work for) more or less ignored the directive, which made me quite happy since it looked like a real pain in the ass. Unfortunately NASA Administrator Michael Griffin directed Caltech (who holds the contract to run JPL for NASA) to make sure that all of it's employees were in compliance. Such a word never holds well for anything...

Form 'SF85' and 'SF85P' were send out. Not signing them meant terminating your employment. Signing them allowed:

That the release form on the SF85 or SF85P authorizes an investigator to obtain "any information" on you from schools, residences, employers, criminal establishments, and any other sources, and that the investigation is explicitly "not limited"?
That each of the neighbors, supervisors, and references you are required to provide will be sent a questionnaire asking about your "mental or emotional stability," "financial integrity," and "abuse of alcohol and/or drugs," among other things?
That SF85 remains in effect for two years, whether or not you stay at JPL? In other words, federal agents can use your SF85 release as permission to investigate you for two full years, even if you are no longer affiliated with a federal agency
That the new rules prevent JPL from issuing retiree badges?
That the official SF85 and SF85p forms describe the process as "voluntary," but that jpl will terminate your employment if you don't fill it out?

In addition:

Investigators wanted license to seek information as to whether "there is any reason to question [applicants'] honesty or trustworthiness." At one point, JPL's internal website posted an "issue characterization chart" -- since taken down -- that indicated the snoops would be looking for "patterns of irresponsible behavior as reflected in credit history ... sodomy ... incest ... abusive language ... unlawful assembly ... homosexuality." (We'll leave it to others to explain a standard that links incest with unlawful assembly.)

A copy of the "issue characterization chart" can be found here. This is some really sad shit. I can go on and on about of freaky it is that the right wingers are all control freaks obsessed about everybody else's sex lives, but I will not. I prefer to look at this as blackmail pure and simple. Why would I think such a thing?

Many at the lab believe that there's more than governmental overreaching at work here. They point out that Griffin is one of those who remain skeptical that human actions contribute to global warming, and that some of JPL's near-Earth science has played a critical role in establishing the empirical case to the contrary. They see the background checks as the first step toward establishing a system of intimidation that might be used to silence inconvenient science.

Inconvenient science. Really says it all.

Semantic Attack

2008-01-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

Now that I have disgorged that technological hairball in the form of the previous post, I can get on with the usual soap box hysteria and cranky ranting. I apologize in advance for the length of the quotes. We begin with the following:

In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The Court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Finally, the Court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantánamo had any constitutional rights.

Yeesh. This was a decision (Jan 11, 2008) from the District of Colombia circuit court regarding an action brought by four former British detainies in Guantanamo Bay against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse.

Think about what this is saying. For those of you endeared by bullet points:

Detainees are not persons according to US law.
Torture is an expected consequence of military detention, so the tortures should not be responsible for their actions.
Torture is not a criminal act unless the torturer is expected to know that the person is a US Citizen.

I have a great deal to say about this, including some legal goop about recent laws and tort actions against federal employees. From a purely emotional level I am disgusted. This sick, venal horrorshow needs to be dragged out into the sun and left to die. The Rule of Law that I am such a fan of has been perverted to such a degree that I am sometimes lost in a sea of minutia.

To flavor the following discussion, I provide a short (ha!) quote regarding US interrogation policy. This is from a larger post on the same subject.

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

Details, details, details. In comments on the original posting I ran across a very lucid description of why the tort was tossed out.

I don't like it either (look up tort first), but technically the decision is correct, the Federal Tort Claims Act clearly applies here so they had little choice. Same with foreigners not being persons as far as US constitutional rights are concerned, as this been held so by US courts for quite some time.

For uninitiated the primary purpose of FTCA is to shield government people from having to answer criminally for things they do, this is somewhat similar in purpose to the infamous "qualified immunity". Torts usually result in monetary compensation, prison time is highly unusual. The calculation here is this, if we think we will lose we will settle in tort proceedings to avoid harsher penalties, if not we will fight it out in courts. Fine by me, although some government transgressions are so serious prison time would be highly desirable if only for its presumed deterrent quality.

Ok. I am a detail oriented sort of person and I recognize that in the current legal environment what was done is technically based on fact and current case law. I have an honest question that I am having a little difficulty answering. For how long has a 'person' in the US been distinct (in a legal sense) from a regular human sense. This is in the context of there being no congressionally declared war, so short term derailments of habeas from (say) the US Civil War do not count. Recently the wedge was driven in regarding 'illegal immigrants' , the war on (some) drugs and now terrorism. What about pre-Regan?

I am offended so for two reasons. The first is that my vision of the Law is different than the vision being brought forth by the legal arguments being brought forth specifically by the executive branch. It makes me angry when the nice rational universe that I have worked so hard to get along with starts saying things like :

Salmons did pledge that the Executive Branch will use care in deciding who is designated an “enemy combatant.” In response to one judge’s question about the President applying the tag to an activist from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Salmons joked, “the representative of PETA can sleep well at night.”

Nevertheless, Salmons argued that the judgment on who is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely the discretion of President Bush. [NYT, Feb. 2, 2007]

These assholes can not be trusted to not crash the clown car, and I am supposed to trust them?? Is this what rule of law has become? It sickens me.

The second is more fundamental, and is really an extension to the first. It involves the idea that by redefining the legal meaning of a word like person, it is possible to sidestep any and all moral obligations that are inherent in the meaning of the original content. This is just sophomoric bullshit. Year after year we sit around and are talked down to again and again about Responsibility and Duty and Freedom and Sacrifice by whatever political party happens to be in charge. What is happening is just word play, but the end result is the continuing erosion of our political existence. A semantic attack on our freedoms.

A perfect example of this can be found during the following transaction:

The administration’s contempt for habeas corpus and other fundamental rights was reflected again in a strange colloquy between Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Sen. Arlen Specter during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18.

Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; that it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales’s remark left Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, stammering.

“Wait a minute,” Specter interjected. “The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there’s a rebellion or invasion?”

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

The idea of habeas corpus pre-dates the writing of the constitution by hundreds of years. To even suggest that this right is not built into the fabric betrays their contempt for the lifeblood of the democracy. The Constitution typically defines rights by describing negatives - by describing what the government can not do.

Enough of this. I need a drink.

Enjoy the following while you can:

No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Got Meat? Thoughts on the FBI Carnavore System

2008-01-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Some months ago, I downloaded from the EFF the freedom of information mandated information relating to the DCS-3000 system. I spent a few days (evenings really) looking over the information and thought that I might provide my own insight into what I found.

For the record I have no access to any sore of inside or classified material. If I did, it would be illegal and against my own code of ethics to do so - anything here can be found out on the internets. I do have some familiarity with the style of paperwork which composes many of the most interesting parts of the information. NIST based Site Security Plans are excruciating to do under any conditions, so my condolences to those people who had to put together that package...

The most up to date run down of the design and operation of the DCS-3000 seems to be a Wired article from August 29, 2007. Besides that, the original documents (and a good many more interesting things!) can be found here. This entry is meant to augment the already published information rather than replace it, since they did such a nice job of describing the other details of the system.

Overall Design
The overall design of the system is actually a number of different systems which fulfill many different functions and suggest that the overall mission of the system has grown somewhat organically. Exercising my somewhat anemic graphic arts skills, I have put together a diagram of what I suspect things look like. This is a composite of various hints, diagrams and information from the various pdf files available.Please be kind as I have limited graphics skills... In addition to the boxes shown, there are also connections to the internal FBI network, storage components and the usual collection of infrastructure components.

One of the most interesting things I discovered is in the MultiVANGuard section, so if you are skimming take a look there.

A few details and notes follow - first some notes on each of the hardware and software components, then thoughts on the general security architecture provided in the system.

DCS-3000
This seems to be the general control system for interacting with the telco switches as well as the main interactive gateway to the other systems(?). The two basic classes of wiretapping are Call Data Channel (CDC) which is more of a pen-register style, recording call metadata. The second is Call Content Channel (CCC) which records both call metadata and content.

Logins happen into this system as well as the other through a set of id's which are (at a minimum) DCSAdmin and ERFAdmin.

The following applications are described in the site security document:

Client: Users Guide 070207_dcs03.pdf
The DCS Client application is configured to collect data for Court-approved surveillance operations. The Client receives call related data from the DCS Server or MultiServer and packages it into target data files that are saved, forwarded, or printed. At times, the Client is used to reformat and export call related data for use in external databases. The Client cannot record call content. However, installing a Recorder Control Interface (RCI) card allows the Client to control standard recording devices, which record such audio.

Server: Users Guide 070207_dcs04.pdf
Breakdown of options described in the server section of the user documentation, and a few notes where it might be interesting. The server is designed to operate on a single recording event.

Using the DCS Server
Working in the Server Window
Configuring the Server
Configuring the Client
Configuring the VSELP Decoder

From Wikipedia:
Vector Sum Excited Linear Prediction (VSELP) is a speech coding method used in the IS-54 standard. This codec was used in early TDMA cell phones in the United States. It was also used in the first version of RealAudio for audio over the Internet. The IS-54 VSELP standard was published by the Telecommunications Industry Association in 1989.

Establishing a Connection
Monitoring Activity
Storing Target Data Files
Shutting Down the DCS Server

MultiServer
See above and below for details.

VANGuard
See below. 'MultiFOO' is just 'FOO' that is designed for multiple source data instances.

MultiVANGuard
Notes on MultiVANGuard (this might be a red herring) from penlink.com, a company that specializes in communication interception and analysis. Regardless, this shows that the technology exists as of 03/02/2007 for Skype interception, which is interesting in and of itself.

A snippet from the page includes:

Updated ETSI 101 671, et al. Add support for Ericsson specific ASN.1 messages.
Updated GISH by addiing support for SMS messages containing commas.
Updated GIS Mapping for calls and cell tower records to add a button to allow user to toggle transparency of cell tower sectors.
* Phone Company Autoload : Added Skype.
* Phone Company Autoload : Added Snake River PCS.
* Phone Company Autoload : Removed both Sprint Spectrum options.

* Phone Company Autoload : Removed VoiceBox (delimited) [old format, no column indicators].
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Alltel Tolls.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Bell South CSV.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Bell South Trap and Trace.

* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Centennial Wireless.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Cricket CSV.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Dobson Communications.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Generic Multi-format [Windstream text format, Alltel PDF, Edge Wireless, Cingular PDF].

* Phone Company Autoload : Updated MCI Business Gold.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Nextel CSV.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Qwest CSV.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated SBC Trap File.

* Phone Company Autoload : Updated T-Mobile Prepaid.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated TeleSur [Suriname Telco].
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Unicel.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Verizon Wireless.

* Phone Company Autoload : Updated VoiceBox Session Detail.
* Phone Company Autoload : Updated Vonage.

And so much more. I suspect that this represents more or less the cutting edge in current communication decoding technology. The whole list is quite interesting to look over

DCS-5000
This is the system designed to handle FISA related activity, so it operates at a higher security level that the DCS-3000 which it is connected to. Naturally there is not all that much information on this system in the documentation. Reason suggests that there is not much in the way of technical differences between the software on the 5000 and the 3000, but really I have no idea. The main difference between the two systems function is the sensitivity of the information that is being looked at. The CI 100 has the interesting job of segregating the lower classified DCS-3000 from it's higher classified neighbor while still allowing for information flow. More on it below.

DCS-6000
This system is used for Title III style, full content (ie CCC) type wiretap orders. Like the DCS-5000, the same data that can be accessed from the DCS-3000 can be as well from the DCS-6000.

Pix Firewall
Since the DCS-3000 and DCS-6000 exist at the same security clearance level, there is no need for anything more complicated than a classical firewall to be placed between them. I suspect a more detailed reading of the SSP for the 3000 system will lend a listing of windows based services which are required, but that is not what I am looking for here.

CI 100 (link to base document)
This system is designed to be an information level firewall which sits between the higher security DCS-5000 and the less paranoid 3000. There is a whole chapter in the users guide on this pair of (windows based Dell servers).

From p.20:

The CI-100 acts a a controlled interface security device connecting an unclassified system (Low side) with a confidential or secret system (i.e., High side). The connection between the two security domains is accomplished by a "one-way transfer" (OWT) through the use of a modified RS-232 serial cable or fiber optic cable. The modified cable permits information to travel from the low side to the high side and eliminates the possibility of the high system from passing data to the low. This is accomplished by converting the data packets from TCP/IP to serial or UDP, both connectionless protocols. The data is pushed from the low side and across the OWT cable to the high system. Once on the classified system, the information is converted back to TCP/IP and sent out to the classified network.

There is quite a bit more, but the system is just a firewall for information running on a windows box. Really quite cool...

Cisco 2610
This system is referenced in the training manual, and I suspect just used for general interaction with the other, non-DOJ telco equipment. Any details were redacted.

JSI-3084 (link to base document)
This is an interesting bit of equipment. Since all the useful diagrams are blocked out, I had to infer the existence of this system from the system security architecture diagram, figure 3 attachment B in the April 28, 2006 Site Security Plan for the DCS 3000 where it is listed as a separate accreditation device.

Not really sure exactly what this system does, but it may be a legacy pen register device (but that is just a guess based on a table of system descriptions.

Notes:
The most surprising thing was the presence of two system level accounts without any strong password controls. Based on a description of running services, there may be kerberos available which would be quite useful for user level authentication (with the usual access control attached to each account).

Access to the account information is assigned to a "need to know" basis, which is always a little suspicious. There is no way to confirm that any of the passwords are different. There were other interesting things in the POEMS (basicly a list of things that the auditing agency found wrong which need to get fixed). There were quite a few scary things like portable drives being plugged in and no anti-virus software installed.

That's it - there are hundreds of pages which can probably yield even more interesting results, but I really don't have the time. If anybody actually reads this and wants to know more, please leave a comment and I can add whatever you would like to see.

10% hypocrisy

2008-01-05T21:40:00.000-08:00

I started out with a little rant about the proliferation of international legislation relating to computer hacking tools. The most recent addition are new guidelines relating to the creation and distribution of hacking-tools. The key issue here is summarized in the following article:

Following industry lobbying the government has come through with guidelines that address some, but not all, of these concerns about "dual-use" tools. The guidelines establish that to successfully prosecute the author of a tool it needs to be shown that they intended it to be used to commit computer crime. But the Home Office, despite lobbying, refused to withdraw the distribution offence. This leaves the door open to prosecute people who distribute a tool, such as nmap, that's subsequently abused by hackers.

More details about amendments can be found here as well.

These guidelines join new language put into the German computer crime laws. In an article discussing the two laws:

This hope was important because earlier this year the German Government had introduced similar language into Section 202c StGB of the computer crime laws, which would have made the mere possession of (creates, obtains or provides access to, sells, yields, distributes or otherwise allows access to) tools like John, Kismet, KisMAC, Nessus, nmap, and the ability to Google effectively a crime.

The fallout from this is that a number of security related research and development groups have moved out of the country or closed up shop entirely. In an interesting quote (see previous link) from Stefan Esser (a PHP security activist) :

"The law does not affect our freedom of speech to report and inform about security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them.
We are just not allowed to create/distribute/use software that could be used as "hacking tools". "

My feelings about this are quite mixed - seems like the overall notion of free speech and expression is being curtailed. The most significant issue with this not that there will be this large scale crackdown on security researchers of all types. Rather this places a powerful tool in the hands of law enforcement with regard to generating probable cause for wiretapping. This is most interesting in the context of international treaty.

There are a number of other nations who have enacted or are looking to enact similar legislation including the US. I have blathered endlessly about the tedious chipping away of civil liberties in this country so this will be (mercifully) skipped. An interesting fact is the US has a treaty with the Council of Europe with regard to cybercrime issues. The EFF has a nice paragraph on it:

The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce
other countries' "cybercrime" laws -- even if the act being
prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. Countries
that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige
the FBI to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics
or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign
governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other
jurisdictions' requests to log their users' behavior without
due process or compensation.

Have I managed to get across the point that there is an even greater legal apparatus in place than you probably ever imagined? Since most of my international experience seems to come out of Romania (a fascinating cybercrime region!) - a country which seems not to have entered into the agreement - I was unaware of this till today.

Notice that this entire effort seems to be geared toward the individual, or small group of individuals. What if it is a corporation or (gasp!) small nation state doing the attacking or creating/supplying the software. What if it is part of their regular business practice.

We might ask Sony about that one. I will not go on and on regarding what bullshit it is that if I lobbed a rootkit into thousands of windows boxes I would be prosecuted under a slew of (US) national and international laws. They got to say 'oops!' and pay out a bunch of money. Money is really not punishment.

Did our international corporate overlords learn much? Maybe enough to include a EULA in the process. Sears has introduced a new internet community. When you join, you get to install software on your system. Details include:

Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of "community participation." Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software ("the proxy") on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted. This extreme level of user tracking is done with little and inconspicuous notice about the true nature of the software. In fact, while registering to join the "community," very little mention is made of software or tracking. Furthermore, after the software is installed, there is no indication on the desktop that the proxy exists on the system, so users are tracked silently.

There is quite a but more here which describes in some detail what exactly is going on. But may annoyance today is about the clear disparity between what a company like Sony or Sears can seem to do without regard to users privacy. This is a rootkit, something illegal under law but not prosecuted as anything except a civil offense.

Must go, this is getting a little boring and I have dishes to do. Feh.

spinning down

2007-12-31T17:02:00.000-08:00

Just a few thoughts as the year spins down to a merciful end.

These are strange times. Kind of un-fun dark and anxious times. The nation that I grew up in seems to be a fading memory, and there seems to be little recourse on the part of our elected officials. We now live in a place where rule of law (for what it is worth) has been displaced at least in part by rule of man.

Where we see:

Former Guantanamo inmate set free. Australian David Hicks, “the first person convicted at an American war crimes trial since World War II was freed from prison on Saturday, after completing his U.S. imposed sentence.” Hicks spent five years in detention at Guantanamo Bay, followed by a nine month sentence in prison. “He was told to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.”

There can be no practical reason to prohibit this information from being discussed except for political embarrassment. Not sure what a war crimes tribunal might think of the limitations on communication - they might frown on the "don't tell anybody about the torture until after the end of the political season or we will drag you back and torture you for the remainder of the nine year term." Nice.

And discussions about torture inevitably decay into arguments about the minutia of just how effective one form of torture might be over another in some hypothetical (ie unreal) story line. Rule of law. No discussion about due process so the base assumption here is that said person is just guilty, not found guilty by judicial process. If the decision about torture is predicated on effectiveness, then why don't we quite fucking around and apply it on the general US criminal population (more so than it already is). Torture and more importantly the threat of torture exist as a weapon of fear against an entire population. As a tool of information gathering it is denounced as useless so can we all just shut the fuck up about it and move on.

On the whole the Hicks situation reminds me of the redacted judicial opinion which, in whole reads:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

particularly given the details of the case.

The whole rubric of 'security' has been so poisoned, that any mention of the word invokes the same feel good impressions that the Ministry of Love invoked in our demi hero Winston Smith. Security is about Fear Management rather than some archaic notion of personal or societal safety. It disgusts me.

As the new year approaches, there are quite a few interesting things that await us. Besides the agonizing Kabuki of the political process, we will see the steaming remnants of the executive branch mopped up and placed into the ash bin of history. We sit on a cusp - an inflection point really - where decisions made now will have generational consequences. Think about Miranda and the fallout from that, except for the judicial steam engine speeding in the other direction.

Not much else to say.

no one is united
all things are untied
perhaps we're boiling over inside
they've been telling lies
who's been telling lies?

there are no angels
there are devils in many ways
take it like a man

X, The World's A Mess It's In My Kiss

Island of content

2007-12-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

Mrs. set.element gave me the nicest gift ever. Went out with friends, had excellent dinner, watched my favorite band perform better than I have ever seen them. Ears still ringing.

Happy.

See, I can post non-grumpy/paranoid/angry.

s.e

Left Hand, meet Right ...

2007-12-28T12:14:00.000-08:00

Regarding the post last Saturday about the proposed joint DHS/NSA program, I wandered across a few other interesting notes.

In a letter to to the Bush administration, Rep Bernnie Thompson (Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee) politely asked "WTF mates?" Seems like repeated requests by he and his committee to get any sort of information have been repeatedly ignored.

More details can be read in an article here.

Thompson - whose panel oversees the Homeland Security Department, which would run the initiative - said he was unaware of the program's existence until it was revealed by The Sun in a Sept. 20 article.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said Chertoff had received Thompson's letter, which was dated Monday, and would respond "in a timely fashion."

"We do agree that cybersecurity is a very important issue, and that is why since the beginning of this congressional session DHS has provided more than a half a dozen briefings to the House Homeland Security Committee on cyberthreats and related issues," said the spokeswoman, Laura Keehner.

So a program that has been in design phase for many months (if not years) which is expected to run for at least seven years and cost billions of dollars, which will require a revamping of the NSA charter and which involves access to highly sensitive personal information of everybody who is using The Internets transiting US geography - this is US citizens - is running silent and deep.

No indication of legal authority to even run the show. No indication that evidence gathered will even be usable when weighed against the remaining fourth amendment constitutional rights we still have. No notion of utility - how and what are they going to do?

That is what I want to know. Getting the data is surprisingly easy. Making intelligent decisions based on this collection of flows and application data can be quite difficult. Using the infrastructure to spy on people is trivial. Rather amusing in a cynical sort of way.

And we do trust them, yes?

The first part of the implementation seems to be a continuation of the Einstein program which is geared to globally monitor US government networking resources. This would be in conjunction with the OMB plan to reduce the number of POP sites hooking up government networks with the internet proper. No issues with this - we have seen budget and planning indications for this above the table. Government gets to monitor government networks. No expectation of privacy there(!).

What I am hearing though is this:

Policymakers have become increasingly alarmed at the vulnerability of trains, nuclear power plants, electrical grids and other key infrastructure systems, which rely on Internet-based controls that could be hijacked remotely to produce a catastrophic attack.

Recent attempted attacks on Pentagon and other government computer systems have heightened concerns about holes in government networks, as well.

Monitoring internet traffic will not actually address these issues. What exactly is the point of this program? Network monitoring sounds good and can be quite powerful in addressing some classes of attacks. I am not all that confident that it is the right tool to address issues related to real large scale threats to our resources. Nation-State level threats require smart responses rather than large responses. Sophisticated zero day attacks against high value targets are currently blindingly successful. Perhaps not tomorrow? Not sure.

PAB will awake soon, so I must go mop the floor.

All the news, errr, just a bit of news.

2007-12-26T13:38:00.000-08:00

Now that the majority of Squidmas events have passed and we are left with the less than fun task of cleaning up the place, it seems like a natural time to ignore the many tasks at hand and do a little writing.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. (...)

So I have been thinking a bit about the role of media in the perception of the world around us. This is not original or even all that interesting to most people. We all know and understand it, but this subject has been on my mind as of late so I will cast it out on the internets...

On Dec 18th, the NY Times (our Paper of Record) took the successful filibuster of the telco immunity bill and essentially ignored it - while I do not think that every little obsession that I have deserves to be on the front page, trumping this real and important information with 2/3 page coverage about small town high school football team. A great steaming pile of bucolic meat and potatoes americanism. The NYT did manage to make an showing on A29 for the filibuster.

The filibuster was one of the most significant political events to happen for quite some time and represented if not a departure from the current political kabuki, at least a tiny bit of fiber in the otherwise jello like political landscape.

My point to this is that with the new round of media consolidation the barriers to big business monoculture have been lowered again. The people who own the large media outlets are the same ones that are disinterested in a agressive and thoughtful social and political process. They want you to care about steroid use, or some stupid persons sex life, or whatever dumbfuckery is rolling by in todays sound byte.

I can (and have) gone on and on about this stuff, but need to tie this up and get on with the rest of my work.

Do I have a final destination for this? Naturally. It is a little more out there than the usual post material, but if you can't post unauthenticated irrationally paranoid rantings on your blog we live in even darker times than I think.

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.”
- Thomas Paine, Dissertation on the First Principles of Government

The introduction of closed source, privately owned software companies into vote counting and tallying has resulted in significant change in the electoral process. Don't go running away just yet - I have a point to make (!!!).

Ok. The presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and the mid term elections of 2006 were rigged. Period. The inconsistencies with voting summaries and exit polls in Florida for 2000, and the exit poll fiascos of 2004 combined with the Ohio election mix up point to real actional events that have been carefully analyzed and determined to be hugely anomalous in US voting history.

Nothing new I know. People do not give a shit that the school house rock democracy that they have had described to them for their entire lives has become a lie. It has never been a truth, but the magnitude of difference that I am seeing here is overwhelming. People do not give a shit because the ability to process this abstract change has calcified from an excess of fear, corporate porn and sound byte politics. Class politics has devourered the democratic process and intends to perpetuate the bilking of our Great American Democracy until it is useless to them any more. The bones will be left for the less bright theocrats to make little houses out of.

Done with my paranoia. There is hope, there is light, there is hope.

A Good man of Business

2007-12-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

Upon this day a very brief moment to stop picking up bows and little scraps of paper and fully embrace the meaning of our business. Many good friends over yesterday. Much food and talk and fun - truly a good squidmass.

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"
[...]
"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?""I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"Scrooge trembled more and more."Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"
[...]
"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself."Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Indeed.

He knows when you've been bad or good ...

2007-12-22T13:52:00.000-08:00

Like I mentioned yesterday, there are just too many government agencies and non-governmental groups that want my magic ball of string.

There are a number of different topics that I have been hoping to have time to write about, this just came up and I thought that it would be nice to share. This is the season of sharing - like the head cold that I got from a nice person on BART for example...

So in the big struggle between the civilians (represented by DOJ), and the military (represented by NSA and in part DHS) to scoop up all of your personal data we have another move.

As have been discussed again and again, NSA + DHS have been gathering all the publicity for hoovering up everybody's packets and doing interesting graph analysis on them. Not to be out done, DOJ is now entering into contract to spend 1 billion dollars on a vast database of uniquely identifiable characteristics:

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

Two things - the money has already been allocated since they have a ten year contract to award. No surprise there. Nice to know that they are sharing in the budget pain with the rest of the government. The second and more, well evil, is the notion that the normal firewall between your average corporation and law enforcement seems to be gone here. Reminds me of the gilded age where the nice robber barons had such a good working relationship with law enforcement. Mind you, a brush with the law is not the judicial system finding a person guilty.

But it does get better...

Again, from the article:

The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.
Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

As a personal note, I wonder if that anachronistic notion that law enforcement should have a reason to go poking about my business will ever be meaningful again. On a less philosophical note is the problem of false positives. As an exercise for the reader, you can connect the dots back to other posts regarding similar activity. PAB is just getting up and there is much to do before Squidmass eve!!

Feel safer yet?

Sweeping out corners...

2007-12-21T15:52:00.001-08:00

Prolog: In staring this blog, a major part of writing has been involved with exploring the various groups and agencies that are interested in protecting us from those dark shadowy evildoers that live in deep cyberspace. At this point it is really getting difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of participants who have lined up to play this game. Hell a shorter list might be those people disinterested in your packets.

Go figure.

Anyway, as discussed previously our friends in the executive branch requested some large block of funding ($282 million) for some sort of anti-terrorism humdrum to be spread across DOJ and DHS. I provided what I thought was a argument mostly based on innuendo and character assassination but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Some part of the dark budget side of that proposition seems to be surfacing.

From the Baltimore Sun (which has removed the original article which can still be located in a google search):

In a major shift, the National Security Agency is drawing up plans for a new domestic assignment: helping protect government and private communications networks from cyberattacks and infiltration by terrorists and hackers, according to current and former intelligence officials.
(...)
The plan calls for the NSA to work with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to monitor such networks to prevent unauthorized intrusion, according to those with knowledge of what is known internally as the "Cyber Initiative." Details of the project are highly classified.

Hmmm. Guess details of this project are beginning to emerge. This is the same set of folks that engage in illegal warentless wiretaps of American citizens. This is what they say about the whole thing:

Another former NSA official said that if the government wants to prevent cyberattacks, it makes sense to tap the agency's skills.

"I've got to be able to at least look at something to determine: Do I have a threat or don't I have a threat?" the former NSA official said. "It's important that you have the best thinkers with the deepest experience working these problems on behalf of the nation."

A little farther down we see:

Amit Yoran, the Homeland Security Department's first chief of cybersecurity, said in an interview that while the government has made progress, federal efforts have been "somewhat spotty" overall.

Among the main challenges, he said, is that the Homeland Security Department has been given responsibility for the problem but lacks the authority and expertise to compel other agencies and the private sector to follow its lead.

The new cybersecurity effort aims to build, in part, on an existing NSA program, code-named Turbulence, which has had a troubled start, the senior intelligence official said.

The language that is being used here is quite interesting. What does it mean that one agency will 'compel' other agencies and the private sector to do something. As an act, this is hardly without precedent (think about basic federal regulations). On the other hand we are not just talking about seat belts here...

I have several issues here: The least of which is that DHS/NSA have not proven themselves compitent in the domain of commercial computer security. This has been commented on before.

More importantly the NSA can not be trusted. Period. Ever. They have a long and glorious history of abusing their considerable power for pure political ends. Given the machinations that the EFF has had to go through up till now to show that they are already looking at most of this data anyway, it seems a little odd about the selection.

A final question in this day before the weekend before Squidmass, is simple. Who will monitor these folks? The DOJ? [hahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahah!!!] Even if I trusted them any more than DHS/NSA - which seems somewhat unlikely - they lack jurisdiction to do anything except to complain to congress, the courts or (you know this is coming!) the executive branch. Feh.

And what the heck is the 'Turbulance' program mentioned at the bottom of the article?

Turbulence is a loose collection of at least nine programs designed to give the NSA the ability to continuously patrol global communications networks. The Sun revealed the existence of Turbulence and outlined its management problems earlier this year.

This could all just be FUD and the program might be canned (or not even started). Just seems a little broken to me to even begin thinking about security in these terms.

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* The dictionary options for this word include 'insecurity' which seems more than a little more applicable to me...