In 2006, Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an "immediate threat" to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.nullnull

When Do People Care About Civil Liberties? When Their Team Doesn't Run the Federal Government, That's When - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

For WikiLeaks and Julian Assange:

* You're more secretive than the people you target, by far. When will you be more open about your own workings.

For the U.S. government:

* When it comes to invading other people's lives, with increasingly oppressive security and surveillance, your mantra is "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide." Will you give that a little more thought in the future?

For journalists who get the documents directly from WikiLeaks:

* [These cables] are often pure gossip. Do you have an obligation to provide more context for the material you're publishing and discussing?

A few questions about the WikiLeaks release - Dan Gillmor - Salon.com

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel's presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to "determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization," putting the group in the same company as al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

"WikiLeaks appears to meet the legal criteria" of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, King wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed by CNET. He added: "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States."

Implicit in the vitriol over Wikileaks are the following assumptions:
1. This information was secret before Wikileaks revealed it.
2. If Wikileaks had not revealed this information it would have remained a secret.

I'm not sure I buy these assumptions.

I heard that millions of people had access to this data. Millions. That seems like a very large number. Is that true?

There is no such thing as a secret that millions of people have access to, particularly in an environment that is targeted by professional spies.

I have to assume that if Wikileaks can get this data that other people can get it too. That other people have gotten it before and have ready access to it now. Furthermore, its unlikely that anyone would put anything particularly damaging into this environment knowing that millions of people have access to it, and so its unlikely that buried within this data is some smoking gun that is going to either cause significant negative implications for the US government on the one hand or change the world on the other hand.

Wikileaks has taken information that was essentially public information and certainly available to every spy worth his salt made it literally public information available to every bored journalist and web surfer.

So far no one, on either "side" of the "issue", has been able to articulate a specific consequence associated with the disclosure of this information. The whole thing has been a big yawn fest with a bunch of hand wringing about the fact that it is happening and whether or not things like this ought to be allowed to happen.

I'm worried about what this thus far consequence free situation is being used to justify. The whole thing seems like a pre-game. Its particularly fishy the amount of money that seems to be involved. Who is funding wikileaks?

Some day the US government will have something they really do wish to suppress, and they need processes, procedures, and legal tools to suppress it. Regardless of whether or not this is theater, it will result in the creation of those tools, and those tools will be used in the future in a situation that isn't so consequence free, FWIW.

Attacking open society

The Homeland Security Department's customs enforcement division has gone on a Web site shutdown spree, closing down at least 76 domains this week, according to online reports....

Earlier this week, Homeland Security shut down a popular hip-hop music site, RapGodfathers.com, which had nearly 150,000 members. The site claims it is compliant with copyright laws, as it doesn't host copyrighted materials. However, its users posted links to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload, where copyrighted material may have been shared.

More...

What’s most disturbing in the case of OnSmash and RapGodfathers is that both sites claim to have complied with any DMCA removal requests. In the case of OnSmash specifically, the labels themselves gave the site the song links which OS provided to the public.

Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order | Raw Story

"I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime," she said. "So what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?"

Soon they'll add schools, sports stadiums and malls. Being naked in front of government employees will become a normal part of life in America.

It May Be Time for Trains, Ships and Mass Transit to Use Body Scanners, Napolitano Says - FoxNews.com

This is one of those situations where its trivially easy to tell how American's political opinions are carefully managed and groomed by a single third party.

After spending 8 years defending every Bush administration violation of fundamental constitutional principals it has now become fashionable for the right wing to be offended by intrusive searches by the TSA, and this is couched in libertarian language as if it relates to a general principal! The exact same people who had never heard of a constitutional principal they wouldn't shred in their zeal to defend us from terrorists a couple years ago are suddenly concerned about liberty!?

Whats worse, is that it has become fashionable on the left wing to defend the government! The Obama administration has gone back on every promise they've made regarding civil liberties and now folks at the Nation have jumped on the bandwagon and called the entire outrage over the strip searches a Republican plot!

Clearly, the left is in the process of jettisoning its libertarian baggage to the right. In America, the party that is out of power is the only one that cares about civil liberties.

The incoherence and direct hypocrisy of this suspends disbelief.

There are people who are paid to make these fashions. They do not serve us.

The left and the TSA and the Tea Party...

Mozilla just added them this Winter. In related news:

Using ‘man-in-the-middle’ to intercept TLS or SSL is essentially an attack against the underlying Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key agreement protocol [. . . ] To use our product in this scenario, [government] users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate key they obtain (potentially by court order) or they can generate ‘look-alike’ keys designed to give the subject a false sense of confidence in its authenticity.”

Your browser trusts the Chinese CA

Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs.

By adding in the FPGA, customers are able to make fundamental changes at a hardware level without having to go through a hardware revision cycle - which means lowered development costs and faster time to market.

I've been waiting for this for 10 years. I think this kind of solution may be useful in PCs for accelerating graphics work and other math intensive PC tasks.

Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA

This is a free tool for the analysis of malicious PDF documents.

RE Corner

I found the tone of this letter surprising...

As a Transportation Security Administration officer, I have been following the growing media frenzy regarding body scans and pat-downs now being implemented at airports around the country.

The fact is the full-body scanners are not a "virtual strip search" as many have described, and the pat-down procedure was changed in order to better find prohibited items potential terrorists could use to harm passengers or aircraft. The TSA was formed to protect the flying public, and many in our ranks are former military and law enforcement officers.

I find when we do our job in a courteous, professional manner, travelers are reassured they will reach their final destination safely.

Unfortunately, threat levels are fluid and the Department of Homeland Security must put into place evolving technology and procedures to protect our citizens. This is done in order to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm. Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated.

John Jacobs; Memphis

On some level it sounds like he is saying that TSA agents "will not tolerate" limits to their power to search travelers. There is a real tension between civil liberties and law enforcement's desire to successfully catch bad guys. Its interesting to see it in print in the editorial pages of the USA Today.

Around the web:

The FBI is not in the business of spying on Americans; we are in the business of preventing acts of terrorism. We must be able to connect the dots between thousands of names and numbers that arise in terrorism and espionage cases.

The American public expects us to uphold the Constitution and to safeguard privacy rights and civil liberties.We must use all legal tools at our disposal and use them correctly. Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated.

John Miller, Assistant Director, FBI Office of Public Affairs, Washington

On the other hand...

"Police officers are expected to be beyond reproach," he said. "Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated by this department."

Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated...