At the crux of all the unease (and rage in some cases) expressed by us "civil libertarians" at Patriot I(I)+, is the perception of no safeguards, protection, or review. On a bad day when someone such as myself spins into a rant, it is the worst case scenario firmly in our focus. It is important to remember, that at the very least the people on the other end of the bargain want to get it right. Really.

When taking in recent events, all we seem to be seeing is what the government needs from us. We know the powers that the intelligence agencies require to do their work. They have made it happen. Good for them, I guess. I do expect them to be aggressive in defending the place..

There is something more noble to the act of complaining if its constructive. We have till somewhere late 2005'ish to come up with serious answers as to how we _want_ these powers to work. This is the type of stuff I want to see way more of.. Wether we like it or not, we are going to have to deal with way more elements of our society being transparent, just because information spreads around easier. Records stick, they are searchable, and relational. Information wants to be all kinds of things, free just being one of them. The effects of it all are only going to increase, and we best not be cocky and think we fully understand it now.

If we only focus a fight on keeping this type of record collection and mining from happening at all, we will only create a leadership vacuum. These various types of tracking and database mining efforts are not going to stop because we would rather things slow down a little while while we catch our breath. Answers are what are necessary, and we need to help come up with them too.

As one of the town criers, I propose we make a point of trying to focus more on what type of rules we want for how these various databases being created will be overseen. I don't think the average joe is going to be that helpful in keeping the bad laws from getting in, because as demonstrated recently we don't pick up on these things.. They happen, we have chances to see them, but can miss it, and regardless we don't seem to have the power to stop shit when we do see it coming. What needs to be done is to create the right answers, not just try to stop the ones we don't condone.

Anyway, here is BusinessWeek chiming in with a glimer of hope, and a show of progress amid one off the more contraversal issues of late: the fingerprinting of foreign visitors.

] Yet, hardly a peep has been made about privacy. For
] once. On the day U.S. VISIT launched, Homeland
] Security's Privacy Office unveiled a Privacy Impact
] Assessment, or PIA, which outlines the program's privacy
] policy and a clear map of how data will flow from
] department to department and how it will be shared,
] accessed, and stored. The Privacy Office is also soliciting
] comments on the policy and requesting advice on what... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

BW Online | Privacy Progress at Homeland Security

Here is a review of the Sharper Image field sobriety test. It's pretty funny.

The Sushi Pants Story

] A little known online music store is experimenting with a
] new pricing system in which most songs start out costing
] a dime, and their prices fluctuate from there based on
] customer demand.

] "We a have certain amount of money allocated for this,
] and when that runs out, we'll go back" to higher prices,
] said Holly Cooper, Digonex's marketing director. "This
] is basically so we can gather some real world data."

Music site tries floating price tags | CNET News.com

] ZEYAD, an Iraqi blogger I regard as trustworthy, has
] posted a dreadful-sounding story of misbehavior by
] American troops in Iraq. I find the story difficult to
] believe, and it's secondhand, but Zeyad obviously
] believes it. Someone in Iraq needs to look into this as
] soon as possible.

Check out this story and the way its developing. People not just in Iraq, but all over the place are looking into this. This is completely indy/blog media thus far, but its already got enough attention where an investigation is underway. All of it, very, very fast.

This definitely warrants an investigation, even though as a number of the posts Glenn Reynolds links here are pointing out, this is highly likely a hoax. This really does not sound like how American troops conduct themselves, on a purely tactical level. To paraphrase another blogger, it ain't three kings.. These guys have trained in protocol that keeps them alive, its an easier sell to make me think they cracked and had a moral breakdown, then started disregarding that. Some of the details don't jive. However, we are third hand already, and we know how that goes.

Zeyad is the blogger in Iraq who is relaying the letter with the story, and does not claim to be the source of the letter. He seems to have some room for skepticism, but not much.. Clickthru, read the links. Watch it develop. This is new journalism. We are going to see more of it, this is the edge. Good stuff.

Instapundit.com - Zeyad war atrocity story

] Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source,
] extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler
] project.
]
] Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix , or misspelled or
] missaid as heratrix / heritix / heretix / heratix ) is an
] archaic word for inheritess . Since our crawler seeks to
] collect the digital artifacts of our culture for the
] benefit of future researchers and generations, this name
] seemed apt.

The odds just went up greatly that MemeStreams will keep a cache and revision record of every page that get's meme'd. (Add that to the list of everything else we have promised..)

I have not had a chance to look at this in depth yet, it just hit my radar. (via BoingBoing)

OSS'ing this was a great move. I was thinking about trying to get a part-time job working down at the Internet Archive. I'm a big supporter of everything they are doing over there..

Heritrix - Home Page - Archive.org open sources crawler

Decius's response: The US IT industry cannot employ the people domestically that it has available to it today, and it has no plans to employ more people domestically in the future. That is the reason that it is beginning to fall under political pressure. Their response is to pretend that this problem does not exist by quoting statistics developed during the dotcom boom, and then, with a straight face, request assistance with moving money across international borders, assistance with R&D expenses, and the training of EVEN MORE engineers ("We can't use the resources we have, so please give us more resources.").

This country does not produce as many Engineers as China because Engineering bears a stigma in this country of being an undesirable profession. Numbers increased in recent years because that perception began to change, but its going right back down again. This is because the IT industry has failed to make a compelling case that people should WANT to be Engineers. If they wish to see the US produce more and better engineers, they need to sell teenagers on the idea that being an Engineer is worth all the work. They need to demonstrate to people that there are real opportunities.

How many of those 61,000 Engineering graduates from the class of 1999 do you know who have been underemployed or unemployed in the last 3 years? What kind of message is that sending to people who are considering following in their footsteps? If the IT industry really wanted more Engineers domestically they would be addressing that concern directly instead of getting up in front of Congress and asking for lower taxes. The fact that they chose the later option further contributes to the idea that this is all a big crock. It should surprise none of you that this is the same industry group that cuts deals with the RIAA to sell DRM into your house.

This sort of complete leadership vacuum does not bode well. Leadership vacuums get filled, inevitably. Sometimes by dangerous people.

Choose to Compete - What the IT industry told Congress today

] Intel chief executive Craig Barrett said the United
] States "now has to compete for every job going forward.
] That has not been on the table before. It had been
] assumed we had a lock on white-collar jobs and high-tech
] jobs. That is no longer the case."

They are smarter. They are hungrier. They have a better work ethic. Their dollars go futher, and they are used to having less stuff. Their labor regulations are looser. This isn't about tech jobs, this is about service/knowledge jobs. This is only the beginning. American dominance is over. There are too many skilled people, no one knows how to utilize all of them, and you are far from the most attractive of them. Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas (TechNews.com)

The Aztecs dubbed them "the flesh of the gods", Siberian shamans used them to enlighten their path to the spirit world, and they were the preserve of hippies and the pioneers of the psychedelic movement in the 1960s. But now magic mushrooms are at the centre of a new - and legal - retail boom.

The UK has really been pumping up the drug supply lately.

High times in magic mushroom business - and it's perfectly legal

This is fun to watch, and doesn't take up *too* much bandwidth.

This is neat, I've previously only been exposed to NASA TV via various friends' satellite TVs. It has that "high school tv station" feel to it. Meaning, that they are either playing some educational tapes, showing a blank screen, etc.. Although, it tends to get interesting whenever NASA has something going on of public interest. In the past, I've seen everything from just idle shots of the earth spinning coming back live from the shuttle to cycling through various information screens from probes they are in current contact with. For instance, during shuttle flights they usually relay some telemetry data and the comm channel if they do not have other programming..

[ Update: NasaTV hasn't changed that much since the last time I exposure to it. However I don't think I emphasized enough how much random rad stuff they pump over it whenever they have something going on, and its easy to forget how much NASA has going on at any given time. The ISS (and its leak), animations built from Chandra data, the current Mars activity.. As I typed this, I just caught a series of gnuplot graphs fly by plotting out various rover related stuff. This is a nice feed to have chilling out on monitor #2.. ]

Live stream from NASA TV

Hmm.