More On Total Information Awareness

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Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
by Faye Bowers and Peter Grier for the Christian Science Monitor.
See the ton of good links at the bottom too!

Credit-card companies already carry out such paper profiling as an antifraud device, say proponents of the new effort. That’s why you get a call when you suddenly start spending lots of money far from home, or exceed your daily allotment of transactions. Using such techniques to prevent another Sept. 11 may thus be simply a natural progression in technology.
But the recent theft of thousands of identities from commercial databases points out what can happen when such data falls into the wrong hands, say critics. And the federal government is not American Express. It has far greater power, and citizens thus need to assiduously protect their privacy from its snooping.
“Data files that become available [to the government] are likely to be used beyond their initial purpose, and we need to guard against that somehow,” says Robert Pfaltzgraff, professor of international security at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass.

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“Trials of Henry Kissinger” Author Explains The Facts

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The Latest Kissinger Outrage — Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?

By Christopher Hitchens for MSN Slate.

On Memorial Day 2001, Kissinger was visited by the police in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire, requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in Pinochet’s Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the international terrorist network that went under the name “Operation Condor” and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in several countries. The most spectacular such incident occurred in rush-hour traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing a senior Chilean dissident and his American companion. Until recently, this was the worst incident of externally sponsored criminal violence conducted on American soil. The order for the attack was given by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who has been vigorously defended from prosecution by Henry Kissinger.

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Is This Some Kind Of Joke?

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Surely there is a better candidate for heading up the 911 investigation than a highly controversial alleged
war criminal who was quoted as saying this in 1992:
(from Quotes by Henry Kissinger)

“Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops
entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow
they will be grateful. This is especially true if they
were told there was an outside threat from beyond,
whether real or promulgated, that threatened our
very existence. It is then that all peoples of the
world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from
this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown.
When presented with this scenario, individual rights
will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their
well being granted to them by their world
government.”
— Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21,
1992 Bilderburg meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger,
his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.

More allegations     More allegations    More allegations    More allegations    More allegations     More allegations…

Shrub Threatens To Eliminate Due Process For Select Individuals

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This kind of policy scares the hell out of me. In a nutshell, what it means is that if you were mistakenly thought to be a terrorist for some bizarre reason, you could basically disappear off the face of the earth and be denied the right to contact a lawyer, your family, or anyone else. (Yes — even if you are a U.S. citizen!)
Of course, this can’t be legal. But how can it ever be challenged if the prospective challengers aren’t allowed to exercise any of their rights?

In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects — Those Designated ‘Combatants’ Lose Legal Protections
By Charles Lane for the Washington Post.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen’s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.
Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute. But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely intelligence.
“I wouldn’t call it an alternative system,” said an administration official who has helped devise the legal response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “But it is different than the criminal procedure system we all know and love. It’s a separate track for people we catch in the war.”
At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary legal system into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end to the war against terrorism.
The final outlines of this parallel system will be known only after the courts, including probably the Supreme Court, have settled a variety of issues being litigated. But the prospect of such a system has triggered a fierce debate.
Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an executive-branch power grab that will erode the rights and freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy — and that were enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil rights era, Vietnam and Watergate.
“They are trying to embed in law a vast expansion of executive authority with no judicial oversight in the name of national security,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group that has challenged the administration approach in court. “This is more tied to statutory legal authority than J. Edgar Hoover’s political spying, but that may make it more dangerous. You could have the law serving as a vehicle for all kinds of abuses.”

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Cheney Continues to Use White House Influence To Defy Federal Judge’s Demands

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Judge Again Bars Effort to Keep Cheney Files Secret
By Katharine Q. Seelye

A federal judge today again rejected Bush administration efforts to protect as confidential documents from Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy committee.
The 36-page ruling is the latest step in a lengthy procedural dispute between the White House and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.
Nothing of substance was resolved in the ruling. The White House has ignored Judge Sullivan’s rulings, going over his head by asking a higher court to exempt Mr. Cheney from having to comply with the judge’s orders over the last five months to turn over the documents.
The judge set Dec. 12 as the next time for the administration to meet back in court with the two groups, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, that brought the case. The earlier order compelling the White House to release the documents by Dec. 9 remains in effect.
The case is also in two other forums, and either could see action before Dec. 9.
First, the administration has gone directly to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to appeal Judge Sullivan’s earlier orders that require it to produce nonprivileged documents or explain in detail why it does not want to.
Second, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is suing Mr. Cheney, arguing that the White House has to disclose whom Mr. Cheney met as he formulated energy policy and what they discussed.
The Sierra Club suit says the administration violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by refusing to tell the public how it developed that policy. Environmental groups say energy companies that were big contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 wielded undue influence in formulating the policy.

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Cringely to the Music Industry: Adapt Or Die

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Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media
By Robert X. Cringely for PBS.

Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can’t be stopped — not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can’t be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think…
Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren’t going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won’t be enough. That’s when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.
That’s when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.
This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They’ll say they will do it for us. They’ll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won’t even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.
My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic — and occasionally military — force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf’s actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn’t be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn’t about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn’t go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf’s job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.
Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.
Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won’t work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We’re not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

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“Rezrobics” Exercise Video Free to American Indians

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Rezrobics is a video providing health and exercise information that comes with a second video designed to make light of the first.

Here’s a great video created by Gary Rhine about exercise and eating right. The video is freely-available to American Indians and a $40 donation for the rest of us. My guess is that most everyone can use the information this video contains. I’ll let you know more when my set arrives.

Diabetes is a serious problem in Indian communities as a result of the nutrition-poor commodity-based diet that they were forced to survive on since around the turn of the last century, when Indian people were forced onto reservations and forbidden to hunt or fish.

The government promised to provide whatever food would be needed and did so with commodities; primarily white flour, white sugar and lard. A high sugar, high carbohydrate, high fat diet for the last 100 years has caused type two diabetes to become quite commonplace among Native American populations.

The videos are available free of charge to those of American Indian descent. A $40 donation is requested for non-indians. Order Now!

There is also a special commons-friendly message on the tape asking viewers to please make copies and distribute them freely:

Copies of the videos are being distributed free of charge throughout the Indian communities of North America. While Navajo Health Promotions distributes on and around The Navajo Nation via clinics, schools and video stores, DreamCatchers oversees distribution to the rest of “Indian Country”. There is no FBI warning on the programs. Instead, the opening message states, “Please make copies and give them to your friends and relatives”.

Senator Robert Byrd On the “Hoax” of the Homeland Security Act of 2002

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Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Debbie Stabenow — Delivered on the Floor of the US Senate
re: THE HOMELAND SECURITY ACT OF 2002
[Excerpted from Congressional Record of 11/14/02]

There are a few things that I know are in it by virtue of the fact that I have had 48 hours, sleeping time included, in which to study this monstrosity, 484 pages. If there ever were a monstrosity, this is it. I hold it in my hand, a monstrosity. I don’t know what is in it. I know a few things that are in it, and a few things that I know are in it that I don’t think the American people would approve of if they knew what was in there…
And this is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years. I will have been in Congress 50 years come January 3… Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body. And we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages tomorrow. Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don’t know all of them. It is a sham and it is a shame.
We are all complicit in going along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, ROBERT BYRD is going to vote against it because I don’t know what I am voting for. That is one thing. And No. 2, it has not had the scrutiny that we tell our young people, that we tell these sweet pages here, boys and girls who come up here, we tell them our laws should have…
This is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax. We ought to tell the people the truth. They are not going to be any safer with that. That is not the truth. I was one of the first in the Senate to say we need a new Department of Homeland Security. I meant that. But I didn’t mean this particular hoax that this administration is trying to pander off to the American people, telling them this is homeland security. That is not homeland security.

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NYT On Women In Blogging

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Wow! I got a mention in the New York Times. How totally cool.
Telling All Online: It’s a Man’s World (Isn’t It?)
By Lisa Guernsey, for the NY Times.

But women’s blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)
Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.
“I think that what’s happening is that we’re meeting in the middle,” Ms. Frankonis said. “The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues.”

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