Marcy Wheeler has been busy going through a new pile of documents that are the result of a Freedom of Information request on NSA and the FISA court and is generating multiple posts about the oversight of the system.

The bottom line is that there is no effective oversight, nor is such oversight actually possible, because Alexander the Geek and his merry band of hackers and crackers don’t actually know how their own system works.

There are a 1000 system administrators, but no overall system administrator who rules them all. There doesn’t seem to be a master system design showing how the parts are supposed to function and who is responsible for what, and who has access to what. Despite being ordered to isolate and protect certain types of information, there is no effective method of doing that in the current overall system, which will come as a shock to anyone who has ever set up a network, because that capability is readily accomplished in almost all network software I’ve ever used going back decades.

This reflects such complete incompetence and total lack of planning and design, that it makes me suspicious that it may have been done on purpose to cover what they were really up to.

So Pam Bondi ran for Florida Attorney General based on being tough on criminals. One of her signature issues was to reduce the time from being convicted of a crime and given the death sentence and having that sentence carried out. She was going to eliminate all of the ‘unnecessary delays’ caused by defendants getting stays of execution.

Floridians now know that she has added a new justification for a stay of execution: to accommodate her reelection fundraiser.

A man convicted of multiple murders and rapes was give a three-week stay because the execution date would interfere with Ms Bondi’s reelection launch. This is her idea of doing her job.

Position: 33.0N 67.0W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West-Northwest [300°] near 6 mph [ 9 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1010 mb ↑.

Currently about 135 miles [ 220 km] West-Northwest of Bermuda.

The storm has weakened to a tropical depression.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Position: 19.1N 29.0W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North [360°] near 13 mph [20 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 85 mph [140 kph].
Wind Gusts: 95 mph [150 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 150 miles [240 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 35 miles [ 55 km].
Minimum central pressure: 982 mb ↓.

Currently about 395 miles [ 630 km] Northwest of the Cape Verde Islands.

The first hurricane of the season and tied for latest to form since World War II.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

September 11^th, 2001