Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

This story is all over the media. That's a good thing.

Hopefully I'll have the chance soon to write some of my thoughts about the matter. It's very significant and will have massive long term ramifications.

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times

Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative.

But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community. "The domestic news blocking system is really interesting," wrote one blogger. "I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches." Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines.

If you remove the "hl=zh-CN" from that Google news search above you get VERY different results. There are some relevent links in the Chineese web search results right now, but the results seem odd given the amount of press coverage. This news search has relevent information, but its mostly coming from a handful of protesty news sources (peacehall & epoch times), same ones that show up in the google search, and not mainstream media. Its possible that these are approved dissenters. (Although VOA also shows up.) More totally unreliable information here. Stratfor has coverage here.

Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest - New York Times

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

Please tell me this is some nut-job exaggerating the accuracy of his sources. So far all references to this point back to the writer of this article. I will maintain my doubts as to it's validity, if just to maintain my own calm. I don't want to believe Bush said that in the Oval Office, regardless of how much I dislike him.

This should be examined further. Bush took an oath to uphold that "goddamned piece of paper." Even in a fit of anger, making a statement like that is going way too far.

Update: More about this fellow's sources here. I hope some more media outlets look into this. I have trouble buying into any story where the single point of failure is one reporter and media outlet I know little about.

Capitol Hill Blue: Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'

A systematic effort by hackers to penetrate US government and industry computer networks stems most likely from the Chinese military, the head of a leading security institute said. The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity.

"These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization," Paller said in a conference call to announced a new cybersecurity education program.

"We know about major penetrations of defense contractors," he said.

"We have a problem that our computer networks have been terribly and deeply penetrated throughout the United States ... and we've been keeping it secret," he said.

In the United States, he said there are some areas of improvement such as the case of the Air Force, which has been insisting on better security from its IT vendors. But he argued that "the fundamental error is that America's security strategy relies on writing reports rather than hardening systems."

Hacker attacks in US linked to Chinese military

This site has been getting attention on the real news this weekend. HappyNews is for people who prefer to look at the world through rose colored glasses. Only happy things. Good things. Upbeat things. There is a "unhappy news alert" banner over the stocks. The weather listings always show you some place where the weather is nice. There is only one horoscope.

By selectively picking (and editing) stories off the AP wire, HappyNews presents only the happy side of things. Instead of reading about government pressure on the cable companies to eliminate "raunchy programming", you can hear about how the cable companies are becoming more family friendly. There is a story on the upcoming Iraq vote, which is a whole four sentences. There is an editorial about how things are better now than in the past, in general. And of course, the current hard hitting headline story about Michelle Kwan.

In short, this site is completely useless. However, it is good to know about so when someone says that the news media focuses on bad news, you can point out definitively that if they only focused on good news, it would be vapid and useless.

HappyNews.com - All The News That's Fun To Print

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Chase wrote: "I am truly sorry to have offended you, sir. Whatever fame comes to me from this will be ill-gotten indeed."

Seigenthaler said he "was not after a pound of flesh" and would not take Chase to court.

Chase resigned because, he said, he did not want to cause problems for his company. Seigenthaler urged Chase's boss to rehire him, but Chase said this had not happened.

Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, said that as a longtime advocate of free speech, he found it awkward to be tracking down someone who had exercised that right. "I still believe in free expression," he said. "What I want is accountability."

Wikipedia prankster confesses

Pre-teens with fully automatic machine guns... What can be said?

Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot - Google Video

In state of the art studios, producers prepare the daily mix of music and news for the group's radio stations or spots for friendly television outlets. Writers putting out newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Kabul converse via teleconferences. Mobile trailers with high-tech gear are parked outside, ready for the next crisis.

The center is not part of a news organization, but a military operation, and those writers and producers are soldiers. The 1,200-strong psychological operations unit based at Fort Bragg turns out what its officers call "truthful messages" to support the United States government's objectives, though its commander acknowledges that those stories are one-sided and their American sponsorship is hidden.

Lincoln says it planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans, since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges."

According to this NYT report, most of the planted articles are attributed to the "International Information Center", if attributed at all.

Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive - New York Times

Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, died Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Richard Pryor, Rest in Peace.

Comedian Richard Pryor Dies At 65

Matthew sez, "According to this BBC News story, Warner Chappell's legal threats against the creator of PearLyrics are just a preview of a campaign to be launched in 2006 by the Music Publishers Association. The MPA is seeking to take lyrics and tabs sites offline and-- get this-- 'Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can 'throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective'.'"

This is ridiculous. I don't accept the argument about this cutting into the sales of sheet music. Not only is sheet music for most popular music not available, but when it is, it's way overpriced. You also can't buy by the song. If you want to learn one or two songs off an album, which is almost always the case, you have to pay for an entire collection.

I think the attitude taken by artists like Frank Black is the right way to approach it. He puts tablature of all his solo work and The Pixies on his website.

Don't artists want fans to play their songs? I certainly would...

And jail terms for lyric sites? That's just completely unreasonable. This will backfire.

Boing Boing: Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites