California is one step closer to joining a national movement that would change the way that the Electoral College works without amending the U.S. Constitution.

AB 2948 by Assemblymember Tom Umberg, Chair of the Assembly Elections Committee is a simple bill that would have California join in an interstate compact with other states to award our electoral votes to the Presidential candidate who won the national popular vote.

I like this.

California Assembly Passes Electoral College Reform - California Progress Report

After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.

Memeing this because it demands commentary. Rolling Stone often has good political articles, but for something this serious I dare say its the wrong forum. Partisan conservatives, most of whom have certainly never read Rolling Stone, are likely to laugh out loud at the idea that a Kennedy accused them of fraud in a rock and roll magazine. If, say, a law professor accused them of fraud in a dry academic journal, and the results were publicised elsewhere, that would be a very different thing.

In any event, a little bit of fraud might get you 1,000 votes here or 1,000 votes there. If you have enough local political power to pull it off, you can sustain a small margin this way. You can't convert a large margin. Can you produce 2 million votes?

In any event, I think the greatest injustice of our system is that a 2 million vote difference grants broad power to the nutjobs who make up each party's respective "base." America is moderate.

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Heathyr wrote:
Willy Wonka could have powered his Great Glass Elevator on hydrogen produced from his chocolate factory.

E. Coli is a critical ingredient in the coming robopocolypse, in which evil robots hunt, kill, and eat people and use their flesh to generate electric power.

RE: New Scientist Tech - Technology - Chocolate generates electrical power

They'd gathered for the ISS World Conference, a trade show featuring the latest in mass communications intercept gear, held in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Virginia.

More surveillance journalism. Catch it before something else becomes popular.

Wired News: Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball

On or around May 8, the following personal ad appeared on the Internet classified ad site Craigslist. (It has since been removed.)

For mein fraulein

Mein Fraulein, I haven�t heard from you in a while. Won't you
call me? 212 //// 796 //// 0735

If you actually called the number, up until a couple of days ago you would have heard this prerecorded message (MP3). It's a head scratcher to keep you National Security Agency analysts occupied in your spare time. Each block of numbers is repeated twice; but below I have transcribed them only once for clarity.

Another use of VoIP to disconnect a phone number from a physical location, this time apparently for an intelligence purpose (although this seems an anachronistic way to deliver a ciphertext). "Group 415" might be a reference to the area code in San Francisco, where Craig's List is most popular. There is also a song in the recording. Identifying the song might aid analysis... The voice is clearly sampled.

Voip cipher lines

Porting the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world, magazines like Make and blogs like Boing Boing are making it cool for geeks to get their hands dirty again...

But the hands-on revival is leaving home chemists behind.... “There are very few commercial supply houses willing to sell chemicals to amateurs anymore because of this fear that we’re all criminals and terrorists,” Carlson says. “Ordinary folks no longer have access to the things they need to make real discoveries in chemistry.”

To Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” says unreasonable fears about chemicals and home experimentation reflect a distrust of scientific expertise taking hold in society at large.

This Wired article is very apropos in light of my CACM article. Apparently between trying to prevent terrorism, meth production, and fireworks accidents, state and federal regulators have pretty much made amateur chemistry illegal in the United States, which is going to do wonders for our future.

There was a debate on MemeStreams about whether product liability and tort law restricted individual freedoms. This is also a perfect example of that.

Wired 14.06: Don't Try This at Home

They may sport love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks, some Silicon Valley techies turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.

Um, dude, it was a metaphore.

CNN.com - Computer techs turn to fisticuffs for fun - May 29, 2006

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

Al Qaeda on Orkut

noteworthy wrote:
But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

This seems to go back to what I said about the distinction between ideas and action. The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. By definition, open source intelligence is available for anyone with the time and inclination to collect it.

In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect but this is an extremely difficult thing to do and you're likely to screw it up unless you hire someone with experience. If the guy you turn ends up getting hanged you could end up impacting the overall strategic situation negatively, and so I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. However, doing this by passing a law seems a bit silly as, well, covert operations aren't covert if you get caught by the police. Its best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV.

People in the computer security industry actually do hum-int. Its not a problem by itself (mostly because these operations aren't serious enough to actually infiltrate anyone who would retaliate violently, as far as I know). The problem comes when they lie or exaggerate the results of these operations to their customers, while claiming be making authoritative representations of the people they are spying on because they are "on the inside." Having interesting results helps you sell your result finding service, and people in this position are incented to find stuff where there is nothing to find. This article claims that SITE has this problem. I don't really have a hard time believing that simply because it occurs in other contexts. Customers of such a service should take results with a grain of salt.

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime, say by running a sig-int operation... hacking into a computer, or, perhaps, by using violence to acheive a tactical goal. Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc forces is already troubling in this regard. Not only does this sort of activity complicate the strategic situation for the real military, but the reason that governments have deliberative processes that might be frustrating to hard liners is that governments attempt to use force justly. Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of it's funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Having said all of this... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Counterterrorism as vocation. True Believers Wanted.

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

It's clear the US government, and much of the international community, seeks to deter, detect, and seize the proceeds of international fundraising for terrorism. But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

If private counterterrorism is deemed terrorism in the eyes of official national governments, how should transnational corporations respond when terrorists begin targeting them directly? To whom do you turn when your infrastructure is simultaneously attacked in 60 countries? Must you appeal to the security council, or wait for all 60 countries (some of whom are not on speaking terms with each other) to agree on an appropriate response? What about when some of those countries are sponsors of the organization perpetrating the attack?

"The problem isn't Rita Katz -- the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

It's the computer security story again. Katz runs a full disclosure mailing list. Privately the Feds are subscribers, even as they complain publicly about training and propriety.

This article probably earns a Silver Star, although it might have been even stronger if it had been a feature in Harper's or The Atlantic, where it could have been twice as long, and could have been less a personal profile and more about the substance and impact of her work.

It's been a year now, and at risk of self-promotion, I'll say it's worth re-reading the Naftali thread.

Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker