If, based on their zip code, voters could access wiki based information about upcoming local and federal races and referenda items relevant to their districts, working families would have a powerful and democratic information resource at their disposal in the ballot box.

My submission.

A wiki voter information guide | SinceSlicedBread.com

We're looking for fresh, new ideas for a better America. Do you have a common-sense idea that will improve the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans? Or an opinion on how working families can succeed in the new global economy?

You have until December 5, 2005, to submit your idea and to weigh in. A panel of judges will select the top 21 ideas. All of America will be able to vote on the finalists, and on February 1, one person will win $100,000—runners up receive $50,000 each.

Got Clue?

SinceSlicedBread.com

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond.

The WashPost has a very good feature on National Security Letters here.

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny

Some New Orleans residents are calling it the "Katrina Cough" — a general upper respiratory irritation afflicting people returning to their hurricane-ravaged city.

ABC News: Some Hurricane Survivors Develop 'Katrina Cough'

ICANN suffers from regulatory capture, mostly to the benefit of US-based corporations.
To cite the main episodes:
• Capture of International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) (1998): The process
by which the Internet community was to design ICANN was captured by powerful
industry and technical stakeholders. They boycotted public meetings and successfully
proposed their own secretly-written bylaws for ICANN.
• Capture of ICANN Board (2002): The same industry and technical interests
eliminated user representation on the board. (This remains the case today.)
• Capture of the Internet Society (2002): In 2002 ISOC revised its bylaws to ensure
that the society would be governed by its largest corporate members. This has led to
two derivative acts of capture:
o Capture of .ORG registry. This registry is now managed by ISOC.
o Capture of ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). Nearly 60% of
certified user-related organizations in ICANN are chapters of ISOC.
• Capture of .COM by Network Solutions. This US corporation has extended its very
profitable control of the most popular domain name.

The goal of legitimate private governance of the Internet has not been met. Powerful
stakeholders are able to bend rules in their favor, while the influence of users and civil
society groups has been minimized.

Hans Klien makes a solid arguement that ICANN needs to have a clear government charter and a judicial review process. The problem is that no one has the political legitimacy to establish this. I continue to beleive that this global taxonomy idea is going to come crashing down.

ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law

So let's set aside fears of U.N. "designs" on the Internet. Much as some would like to open up another front of attack on the United Nations, this dog of an argument won't bark.

This editorial by Kofi Annan is notable if meandering. I think he is making assurances that don't jive with whats going on.

The U.N. Isn't a Threat to the Net

The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh.

Grandpa is sued over grandson's downloads

To be sure, the Internet's openness begets big headaches:
it is difficult to track spammers, and the system is tremendously vulnerable to hacking.
But the open network is like the open society -- crime thrives, but so does creativity.
We take for granted that the Internet we enjoy today will continue to have these
characteristics, but this is hardly certain. It all depends on who controls the
domain name system and what priorities they choose to set....

I'm trying to reconcile this source with how wildly inaccurate some of this peice is. No DNS policy is going to fix computer security problems. DNS policies can only control what law abiding people do.

Foreign Affairs - Who Will Control the Internet? - Kenneth Neil Cukier

The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. BAC recently has been adopted as a best practice by the ICAO New Technologies Working Group and will soon be formally added to the ICAO specifications. BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number (PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted, providing further protection.

Most of the folks commenting on the new RFID rule didn't mention this. This will satisfy most of the security concerns.

Anti-skimming covers are not the only feature in new passports.

This component is not malicious and does not compromise security.

A compenent that enables people to hide files from me on my computer compromises security. Who do they think they're kidding!?

Boing Boing: Sony releases de-rootkit-ifier, lies about risks from rootkits -- UPDATED