We report, you decide...

Supreme Court Justice or crazy man from Six Flags Commercials?

Links for photos and video of the Ski and Snowboard jumping event last weekend on Fillmore Street in downtown San Francisco. Gnarley.

ICER AIR 2005

When people ask me why I blog, the answer is that it helps me organize my thoughts, memorialize them, work them out.

In short, to discover what I think.

The Big Picture: Why Write ?

As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.

Serenity

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

These people are silly. Threatening to leave the DNS system just because you don't think you have enough influence? What do you want them to do differently? Have you made reasonable proposals that have been ignored? Don't you realize that if you can leave the DNS system so can I, and so your influence cannot be coercive?

It is inevitable that the DNS system is going to fragment... I'm all for it. We ought to start talking about what kinds of tools we need to support multiple roots on one computer, and put an end to this government puffery as well as vile sitefinder once and for all.

EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse

Acidus says:

I've be doing quite a bit of work on anonymously and permanently publishing information on top of existing webservices (often without the service's knowledge/consent).

I thought I'd meme the grand daddy work on the subject Ross Anderson's Eternity Service paper. A must read about using the fragmented nature of USENET to overlay a hypertext-based layer where thing can never be unsaid.

One of the best computer security papers of all time...

The Eternity Service

ibenez wrote:

NEW YORK — A federal judge Thursday ordered the release of dozens more pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib (search), rejecting government arguments that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

If this is going to provoke terrorists, which anyone with a brain realizes it will since anything Abu Ghraib seems to do - then what the HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ACLU and this judge?

Why release these pictures now - can't it wait a few years till we're leaving Iraq? I don't understand where this anti-Americanism comes from - we are at war why doesn't this judge realize that? Doing this UNDERMINES the war - so if they do realize that we are at war - they are KNOWINGLY abiding the enemy.

I agree that releasing these pictures will hurt the war effort. I don't think irreparibly so, but there are costs. I think I can explain "what the hell is wrong with the ACLU and this judge." I'm not sure they are right, but I think understand what they are thinking, for what thats worth.

We don't yet know exactly what these pictures document, but it is clear that they document a significant war crime. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina said "The American public needs to understand we’re talking about rape and murder here. We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience."

The ACLU, and this judge, aren't thinking about this specific incident. They are thinking about the long term. They would likely offer that the people who hurt our war effort aren't the people trying to publicize these pictures but the people who were responsible for the abuses in the first place. These kinds of problems are certainly not unique to America. But they shouldn't happen and the question is how can we prevent them from happening in the future.

This matter was not receiving the high level (Congressional) attention it deserves until after the pictures were originally released. The proceedures needed to prevent this sort of problem were not in place (otherwise it wouldn't have occured). The Red Cross has argued that this sort of problem is systemic and this is not an isolated incident.

If we live in the sort of society which would cover things like this up (ie if the law allows the Pentagon to prevent the disclosure of the pictures), then there is no direct incentive for the Pentagon to establish the right processes to keep this from happening other then their general benevolence, and there will be limited means for third party organizations to investigate this kind of problem when it occurs again. If this sort of thing can damage war efforts, then those tasked with making war will be careful to avoid it. That is the sort of incentive this judge and the ACLU seek to create, for the long term, and they are prepared to accept some cost in order to do that.

The question becomes, will the damage that the release of these pictures will do to our present effort be more significant long term then the benefit of ensuring that the military is strongly incented to prevent these things from going on in the future. That is a question that I feel completely unqualified to answer.

RE: FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Judge: Release Abu Ghraib Photos

This is a highly opinionated discussion of Able/Danger. However, it has some additional information about the sort of data mining that was going on:

According to military sources familiar with the Able Danger legal
side, the effort stepped over the line when LIWA contractors purchased
photographic collections of people entering and exiting mosques in the United
States and overseas. One source says that LIWA contractors dealt with a questionable source of photographs in California, either a white supremacy group or some other anti-Islamic organization.

"There are records of who goes where regarding visits to mosques," Shaffer told Government Security News. "That was the data that LIWA was buying off the
Internet from information brokers." It was stuff no one else bothered to
look at, says Shaffer.

LIWA purchased an open-source, six-month data run, Shaffer
says, and analysts developed a set of eight data points common to 1993 World
Trade Center bombers and associates. With advanced software, including facial recognition software able to track individuals from the collected photographs, Shaffer says contractors "made the link between [Mohammed] Atta and [Sheik Omar Abdel] Rahman, the first World Trade Center bomber."

It also includes a link to a reminder, from the Pentagon, about why the Pentagon has rules preventing the Pentagon from collecting information on US persons, (because intelligence agencies where used for political purposes only 3 decades ago), and exactly what those rules are.

The real story here is how another renegade intelligence effort subsisting on hyper secrecy ran afoul of regulations first implemented in the Ford administration when U.S. intelligence agencies were caught collecting information on community, religious and labor leaders, civil rights protestors, and anti-Vietnam war demonstrators... 

"What began as a force protection mission for DOD organizations, evolved, through mission creep, lack of clear rules, and the lack of meaningful oversight, into an abuse of … Constitutional rights…," William Dugan, Pentagon chief of intelligence oversight, said last week. He was describing the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s.

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com

Vaguely gross instructions for blowing up a large animal corpse.

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness/Exploding-Horse

The Federal Communications Commission thinks you have the right to use software on your computer only if the FBI approves.

No, really. In an obscure "policy" document released around 9 p.m. ET last Friday, the FCC announced this remarkable decision.

According to the three-page document, to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement." Read the last seven words again.

Thankfully the FCC doesn't have that kind of power.

FBI to get veto power over PC software?