For years, a handful of civilian agencies have used limited images from the nation’s constellation of spy satellites to track hurricane damage, monitor climate change and create topographical maps. But a new plan to allow emergency response, border control and, eventually, law enforcement agencies greater access to sophisticated satellites and other sensors that monitor American territory has drawn sharp criticism from civil liberties advocates who say the government is overstepping the use of military technology for domestic surveillance.

There seems to be a conflict here even though nothing is going on yet. However, this discussion is inevitable. Why bother installing cameras on street corners when you already have them in space? Just think of it as a force multiplier. You don't have any right to privacy when you are outside! People COULD see you. Ergo it is OK if the government always sees you and keeps records of that indefinately. There is no difference!

Liberties Advocates Fear Abuse of Satellite Images - New York Times

I've had a Sidekick for a while. Unfortunately, I now have a Blackberry, per my employer's "request." They are terrible. If you own a Blackberry and think you've got a "real" phone, stop kidding yourself. Its a scam. If you are professionally able, switch to a different phone. Of course, my experiences come from dealing with T-Mobile, a company that has dropped about 15 notches in my opinion scale as each new horror of what living with this thing will mean becomes apparent. Your mileage may vary, but it probably won't.

1. With a Sidekick $20 a month covers unlimited internet and sms. They want $30 a month for "unlimited internet" for a blackberry. This doesn't include SMS. Unlimited SMS costs another $15... So thats $20 or $45 a MONTH for the SAME THING.
2. Apparently tmobile tries to charge you for AIM messages as if they were SMS messages. IE the "unlimited internet" doesn't apply to some internet services. Now I'm fucking down for federal network neutrality legislation. If you are selling me "unlimited internet" access, you better fucking be selling unlimited Internet access. Anything else is FRAUD.
3. The keyboard is too small and the keyboards keep getting smaller in newer phones.
4. There is no way to scroll sideways on the older phones.
5. You called BBSs in the late 1980s that had a more pleasant form UI than the one used for adding new contacts to the address book.
6. They are just now adding cameras. Its 2007.
7. Trying to download software over GPRS and having to restart every time you don't make it through the 30 minute process without a hiccup. Honestly, I haven't had to deal with something this stupid since Z-Modem was released.
8. They are charging your company a bunch of money to run this system that allows you to access your email from your cellphone. Its called IMAP over SSL, and its MUCH MUCH cheaper than a Blackberry Enterprise Server. In fact, ITS FREE.
9. IMAP over SSL is less likely to provide a backdoor through which someone can gain complete access to your corporate network. How often have you accessed your intranet server from your cellphone? I didn't think so.
10. tmo.blackberry.com... Worst email domain ever.
11. All your Internet access is proxied through your employer's servers!

The bottom line is the Paris Hiltons of the world ARE in fact smarter than your average account executive. They are buying more phone for less money. This isn't terribly suprising, but thats not how things are supposed to work.

A whole new level of fame for Virgil. He did something that made Penny Arcade. :)

Wikipedia Scanner on Penny Arcade

The humble mosque would soon move to a hilltop headquarters in Ashland, thanks to financial support from a Saudi Arabian charity known as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which has since been shut down by U.S. and Saudi authorities for alleged terror ties. Lawyers for Al-Haramain have denied those charges and have filed suit against the U.S. government seeking to have its name cleared.

"What I didn't expect was that over time my ideas would fall into line with theirs," he said. "I wasn't to shake hands with women. I wasn't to pet a dog. I wasn't to wear shorts that came up above my knees. But conversely, my pants legs couldn't be too long."

In 1999 he left his job at Al-Haramain for law school at New York University. Away from his co-workers, he was free to question the radical doctrines he'd learned in Oregon and meet with others about spirituality, including Christians. A year later, he converted to Christianity and was eventually baptized in the Baptist church.

It was a decision he took extremely seriously because he said his colleagues at Al-Haramain had preached that leaving Islam was punishable by death.

This is the same Al-Haramain that joined the EFF v. AT&T fracas.

Radical Islam in America

Surveillance & Society

the fully peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online surveillance studies journal.

Surveillance & Society Homepage

Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

You will be very hard pressed to find a more informed discussion of the issues surrounding the recent FISA bill and the less recent Habeas issues than this video. Its about an hour and a half. I enjoyed it.

Bloggingheads.tv: Kerr vs. Lendermann

THREAT LEVEL's Kevin Poulsen is ruling the cable lines today, explaining what's going on with the hunt to de-anonymize self-serving Wikipedia edits. He taped an appearance for Fox News earlier today and then at 5:30 PST, he'll be on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

This was yesterday. They are currently 168 articles about this on Google News.

Virgil's project on TV news

This is very, very bad! Maybe Ron Paul is right about having a gold based currency. Interest rate changes are warranted to smooth the edges of the business cycle, not to bail out a bunch of transparently poor financial decisions made by borrowers and lenders! This is the most socialist, politically motivated, special interest serving thing that I have ever seen the fed do!

In the free market, those that made bad credit decisions must be allowed to pay the price, and only by paying dearly can lessons truly be learned. Borrowers who were unwitting and took on too much debt must learn that there are consequences for their actions. Homebuilders that built too many homes or overpaid for land need to face the consequences. Wall Street firms that provided credit to all of these activities with too much laxity must also pay a price. This is all part of a healthy correction.

Fed Rate Cut!

In closing arguments, Padilla's lawyers argued he never spoke in code. His voice is heard on only seven of 300,000 taped conversations.

They also tried to rebut a key piece of prosecution evidence -- an al Qaeda terrorist training camp application or "mujahedeen data form."

A covert CIA officer -- who testified in disguise at Padilla's trial -- said he was given the form in Afghanistan, and a fingerprint expert found Padilla's prints on the form, prosecutors said.

But Michael Caruso, Padilla's defense attorney, said the prints on the form were not consistent with someone who filled out the document.

"Jose at some point handled the document, but did not fill out the form," Caruso said.

Per the script, clearly you can convict terrorist suspects in the criminal justice system, even if you have almost no evidence, and the evidence you do have is questionable.

I think perhaps we don't use juries because they are actually a good way of determining whether or not someone is guilty. We use them to distribute responsibility for making the determination, so that no one person can be held personally responsible if it was wrong, or completely baseless, or politically motivated. We don't know how to build a system that makes good decisions, so we've built a system that makes unaccountable ones.

Was that part of a script?

Jury finds Padilla guilty on terror charges - CNN.com