Posts from — May 2006

Some idiot in the Veterans Administration apparently wanted to work on a project at home so s/he copied a data base containing the names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth of over 26 million people and took it home.

The data was stolen in a burglary, so everyone in the VA files has to worry about ID theft. What gets cut to provide the millions of dollars it is going to cost to notify everyone who is affected of the loss and danger?

These people do not have the faintest concept of security.

Just rewards:

U.S. Rep. John Murtha, an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, and Alberto Mora, a former Navy general counsel who clashed with superiors over abuse of terrorism detainees, were honored Monday as recipients of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Apparently unable to break into the payday loan market, Microsoft is going into the rent-to-buy scam: Pay-As-You-Go Computers Are Coming.

Poor people in poor countries have to come up with a big down payment, and then buy time on the computers under the FlexGo system.

It is schemes like this that keep poor people poor, while making obscene profits for the companies.

It’s the birthday of Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL, who was born in Scotland of Irish parents and lived in England, making him a British author.

Most of his works are available on-line, so you can learn about “the dog in the night” without leaving your computer screen.

The BBC reports that Montenegro ‘chooses independence’. This vote is the final nail in the coffin of yet another bad idea foisted upon people by the European powers after World War One. Serbia and Montenegro were the last vestiges of the European construct of Yugoslavia, and now they are “divorced”.

The independent Republika Crna Gora [Republic of the Black Mountain] has less than a million people and is slightly smaller than Connecticut at 5,333 mile², but it has a coastline.

This change makes Serbia a landlocked country.

I’ll go further than Atrios in labeling Israel: Iran ‘months’ from making nukes the basest form of jingoistic garbage. Israel does itself no favors when Olmert spreads disinformation like this.

If I had access to the enriched uranium I could build a bomb in my workshop. If it was difficult the two minimum wage workers in Japan wouldn’t have been able to start the Tokaimura Criticality Accident with a couple of milk pails and a vat. [It was stopped with boric acid, normally used down here to kill roaches.]

The hard parts are not dying while you are building the bomb, controlling the conditions required to start the reaction, and getting the bomb where you want it.

The refining process takes time, because if you do it too quickly and don’t follow all of the steps, as happened in Japan, you will get an unintended chain reaction. This is a precision manufacturing process and it can’t be rushed. You need a highly educated work force with absolutely no suicidal tendencies to build nuclear weapons. One misstep and you lose your workforce, your facility, and your weapon in an instant.

Any fool can keep adding enriched uranium until a chain reaction starts. You can’t ask the Japanese workers about it, because they died of the radiation when they added one pail too many to the vat.

Florida License Plates

Florida Animal Friend, Inc.

A new weekend feature of Why Now.

Everyone agreed that in normal circumstances the proper method of dealing with the dissent would be to hold a discussion with those who held the differing views and explain why they were wrong, but these weren’t normal circumstances.

Many on the losing side had refused to accept their loss and continued to oppose the march of history and the need to safeguard the people, therefore this was no time to pause for the education of the dissenters. The people were threatened and the highest purpose was to protect the people.

The high ideals they all had long declared would have to wait for peaceful times. The individuals would understand that they had to give way to the greater good.

These were extraordinary times and extraordinary measures were needed to deal with them.

[Read more →]

Is there no end to Republican spying on individuals? Is there no corner where the GOP will not impose the government?

They are calling their latest venture in Stalinism the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act, “Internet SAFETY Act.” [Is there a course at Patrick Henry University for acronyms?]

From CNet – Congress may make ISPs snoop on you:

Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is proposing that ISPs be required to record information about Americans’ online activities so that police can more easily “conduct criminal investigations.” Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year.

In addition, Sensenbrenner’s legislation–expected to be announced as early as this week–also would create a federal felony targeted at bloggers, search engines, e-mail service providers and many other Web sites. It’s aimed at any site that might have “reason to believe” it facilitates access to child pornography–through hyperlinks or a discussion forum, for instance.

ISPs [Internet Service Providers] can’t afford this. We are talking major investments in storage and software, an unfunded mandate.

After these people have funded universal pre-natal care, childhood nutrition and health care, universal childcare, etc. I’ll believe they give a damn about children. Until then they are perverts who want to spy on people.

There was no Congressional oversight. Giving 8 of 535 members of Congress a classified briefing that they can’t discuss with anyone, is not oversight.

There is certainly no oversight when you refuse to give investigators the clearances they need.

Steve Bates found a gem of an essay by Bruce Schneier on privacy.

I’m sick of this “if you have nothing to hide” attitude. We all have something “to hide”: our real feelings about people we deal with every day.

Do you really want people to know what you really think of their children’s behavior? Do you want people to know whether you really think they’re “good looking”? Do you want people to know what you really think of their gifts?

There are a lot of “white lies” in this world that make society possible. Being “brutally” honest is just that, brutal.

Most of the time only feelings would be hurt, but the fact that you think your boss is an obnoxious jerk with the IQ of a brick could result in homelessness if it became public knowledge.

This case is an extreme example of what happens when private information is available to the wrong people. This happened is spite of all of the changes put in place as a result of a 1989 case, to protect privacy.

When do they outlaw curtains and blinds?

As Publius points out so well, carbon dioxide is a Waste Product, whether it’s created by the digestion of carbohydrates or the combustion of hydrocarbons.

You’ll see another corporate ad on many of the big blogs asking: “Do you want the government to regulate the Internet?”

Well, no, I don’t, but I’d be very happy if they’d regulate the telcos and cable companies who are planning to plunder the Internet.

The basic research and structure was created with tax dollars. Let the people who risked the capital, the taxpayers, enjoy the benefits.

Today on All Things Considered they had a conversation with Carol Wilson, editor at-large for Telephony magazine.

Her explanation triggered two memories that are making me uneasy about what we really know about the NSA data collection program.

She reminded me that when you pick up your telephone you are connected to a control circuit or channel that is outside of the voice channel. That channel is where the accounting takes place: the numbers of both ends of the conversation are recorded, the caller id information is retrieved, and the timer starts.

If the phone being called is busy, or needs to be forwarded, or any of the other “housekeeping” operations takes place, it is on that circuit, not the main voice trunks. If you tap that circuit you will get all of the accounting information, but none of the actual conversation.

So now we know that it is the accounting circuits that are being tapped wholesale, and we have a grip on the situation – except, those circuits may not involve the telco.

By now you have probably noticed that if you have a problem with your cable or telephone service, the technician who shows up is not an employee of the company. They are generally guys who have a contract with the company. The telcos and cable companies have just about eliminated their repair people to save money. Well, the repair service isn’t all that gets split off.

When they started the utility deregulation in California a number of electric companies started reducing their expenses by outsourcing everything they did. I know for a fact that some of outsourced their billing, because I had a client who printed and mailed utility bills from computer tapes, and the tapes weren’t coming from the utility.

If the telcos have outsourced their billing, the government would go to the billing company, not the telco, for the information. In the same way, they would go to the company that publishes the phone book for the names and addresses that go with the numbers, which, again, may not be the telco.

Update: TPM Muckraker in their article, Did Telcos Hire “Scapegoat” To Give NSA Phone Records?, has the same suspicion.

Shakespeare’s Sister, among others, reproduces this statement: “I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties, but you have no civil liberties if you are dead.” This was said by Senator Pat Roberts [R-Kansas], Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in explaining why he refuses to do anything about the illegal activities of the Shrubbery.

Pat, as many of your chosen pundits would be more than happy to explain to you, the Munich Agreement did not provide Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, “peace in our time.”

Benjamin Franklin noted: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” And at the conclusion of his best known speech Patrick Henry intoned: “…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Now that is has been determined by your own words that you feel no obligation to “support and defend the Constitution” as required by the oath you took when you entered public service, why don’t you stick your tail between your legs like the whipped hound you are and crawl home?

In case you don’t understand, Pat, your personal choice about which of your rights you would give up is of no interest to me.  You have chosen to represent the interests of the citizens of Kansas and the state that produced Amelia Earhart and Dwight Eisenhower might not share your cowardice.