The Jose Padilla case is complicated, and those who need a script for commentary when the verdict is handed down in an hour or so should follow these simple guidelines:

Script for Supporters of the Bush Administration: If the jury convicts, this proves how strong the government's case has been all along. If the jury acquits, this proves that you can't try to bring terrorism cases in a criminal court system.

Script for Opponents of the Bush Administration: If the jury convicts, this shows how the criminal justice system can indeed handle terrorism cases. If the jury acquits, this shows just how weak the case against Padilla has been all along.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Scripts for When Padilla Jury Hands Down Its Verdict:

Bondy, for the government, gets the last word and neatly sums up the case for the three judges.

"It's entirely possible that everything they think they know is entirely false," he says.

If you trust us, you're stupid.

Threat Level - Wired Blogs: The NSA surveillance hearing

What would Thoreau do?

BoingBoing's brief sarcasm about the NYPD quote is worth noting.

Boing Boing: Starbucks, Borders, jail: all

"Quest for Bush," a.k.a. "Night of Bush Capturing," is a free online game released by the Global Islamic Media Front, a radical organization that has ties with al-Qaeda. Armed with a rifle, a shotgun or a grenade launcher, players navigate various missions that include "Jihad Growing Up," "Americans' Hell" and "Bush Hunted Like a Rat." In the final stage, you fight Bush.

This is an old article, but worth noting in regard to this notion.

Way Radical, Dude - washingtonpost.com

The closest Young comes to explaining to me why he created Cryptome is this: "I'm a pretty fucking angry guy." He describes it as a public education project. But for every hard data point he offers, there's the ever-present admonishment that secrecy corrupts everything. "We caution people, don't believe anything we publish," he says. "We're totally untrustworthy. We may be a sting operation, we may be working for the Feds. If you trust us, you're stupid." It's like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn't want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.

Radar Online : Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn't want you to see

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

George Orwell is Shot by Fascist Sniper in the Spanish Civil War

Joe Engressia has died.

Boing Boing: RIP: Joybubbles, Granddaddy of Phone Phreaking, 1949-2007

This is from an official US Comptroller's report!

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

FT.com / World - Learn from the fall of Rome, US Comptroller warns

VMware - trading on the NYSE under VMW - looks to ship 33m shares at $29 each. That leaves the sever virtualization maker hoping to bring in $957m. Most indications have the company blowing past that figure and igniting a Silicon Valley boom.

I can't seem to find this on any of the finance sites, but this would be a good one to own.

VMware's IPO - Insanity turns Silicon Valley back to normal | The Register

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Virgil's on Wired. :)

Threat Level is voting on the best self interested Wikipedia edit.

Slashdotted!

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign