George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his resume on file at the agency asserted.

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA - New York Times

1) Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.
2) More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.
3) Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4) Poverty is on the rise.
5) Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.

Short and to the point.

via the Economic Policy Institute.

What's wrong with the economy?

A Chinese editor has died as a result of a police beating he received for his paper's reporting on corruption, journalists and rights groups say.

Wu was reportedly attacked by some 50 policemen after his paper accused them of charging illegal bicycle fees.

These are dark days for the global media estate...

BBC NEWS | China editor 'died after beating'

The latest (February 6) issue of Newsweek has a picture on page 39 of
George Bush visiting the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. A wall-sized
screen in the background displays the latest versions of our favorite
open source security tools, including Nmap, Metasploit, Snort
Ethereal, Cain & Abel, and Kismet. Nifty.

Fyodor's nmap scanner makes another cameo appearance, this time its not with Trinity in the Matrix, but with George Bush in a press conference at the NSA.

Nmap Development: NSA tracking open source security tools

The Homeland Security Department is scheduled to test federal and private-sector readiness for cyberattacks next week, an industry executive said.

The national exercise, named Cyber Storm, will take place Feb. 6-10, said Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center (IT-ISAC).

DHS to run cybersecurity exercise

The National Security Agency has secured the cooperation of large telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MCI and Sprint, in its efforts to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls by suspected terrorists, according to seven telecommunications executives.

The executives asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the program. AT&T, MCI and Sprint had no official comment.

This point can now firmly be moved into the fact category, and out of the speculation category..

It will be interesting to see if any executives come forward from the mobile industry. That would really light some fires, as being limited AT&T, MCI, and Sprint still gives the impression that the program is limited to international calls.

USATODAY.com - Telecoms let NSA spy on calls

The bulk of this article is about Steve Jobs, Pixar, and Disney. When followed up with this, its and odd mix:

"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!

"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.

"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.

"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.

Its only truly useful if you can directly engage the people involved in the discussions being monitored. There is the model of watching and the model of interaction. Ideas evolve and are tested through dialog. The strength, rigidness, and degree of development of ideas is only truly tested when they are put to the test. Hence, when viewing something being monitored, you don't know if its people blowing steam, or if you have encountered a developed ideology of any strength. All these things can be effected and steered. The traditional intelligence agencies seem to have had trouble doing that without having it backfire.

Hrm.. Who do we know who has been working on that kinda stuff? Where do I apply to be the Steve Jobs of public focused open source intelligence tools? Is that position open? I'm not a sociopath either...

Cringely NSA Spying addendum

Hindus consider it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ''War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!" In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed.

It didn't happen, of course. Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent.

That anything so mild could trigger a reaction so crazed -- riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings -- speaks volumes about the chasm that separates the values of the civilized world from those in too much of the Islamic world. Freedom of the press, the marketplace of ideas, the right to skewer sacred cows: Militant Islam knows none of this. And if the jihadis get their way, it will be swept aside everywhere by the censorship and intolerance of sharia.

This situation has completely gotten out of control. Several embassies and consulates have been burned down. There have been riots in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iran. Could someone please tell me how the word "reasonable" translates into Arabic? It it a commonly used word? What's the connotation associated with it? Is it a sign of weakness or something?

This is not how to get taken seriously. This is how to get regarded as impossible to deal with.

We are all Danes now - The Boston Globe

This is a roundup about the new book by James Risen, "State of War : The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration", published on January 3 and currently in the overall top 50 on Amazon and number 16 on the NYT nonfiction list.

In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers reviews the book and offers additional commentary in his article, The Biggest Secret. He writes:

Far from being a "vital tool," as described by President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing will-o'-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And far from saving "thousands of lives," as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.

...

The systematic exaggeration of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq and the flouting of FISA both required, and got, a degree of resolution in the White House that has few precedents in American history. The President has gotten away with it so far because he leaves no middle ground—cut him some slack, or prepare to fight to the death.

The book is also reviewed, here by Walter Isaacson, in today's New York Times.

This explosive little book opens with a scene that is at once amazing and yet not surprising. It is riveting, anonymously sourced and feels slightly overdramatized, but it has the odious smell of truth.

Risen appears to feel that if something is secret and interesting, it should be exposed.

Risen's archvillain is George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, whom Risen portrays, through a brutal procession of leaked anecdotes, as so eager to be liked by Bush that he prostitutes his agency.

So what are we to believe in a book that relies heavily on leaks from disgruntled sources?

As long as we remember that the truth these days comes not as one pronouncement but as part of a process, we can properly value "State of War" for being not only colorful and fascinating, but also one of the ways that facts and historical narratives emerge in an information-age democracy. So let the process begin!

NYT offers an excerpt from ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

'State of War' Roundup

Muslim demonstrators in Damascus, Syria, torched the Norwegian Embassy and the building housing Denmark's embassy, because newspapers in those countries had published what they consider blasphemous depictions of Islam's Prophet Mohammed.

Norwegian ambassador to Syria, Svein Sevj, confirmed the fire but said the embassy staff was safe. He said the embassy had asked Syria for more security but did not receive it.

CNN.com - Muslim protesters target embassies over cartoons - Feb 4, 2006