Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead.

Sunday's firefight took place near Nusoor Square, an area that straddles the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Mansour and Yarmouk.

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, the official said.

The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square.

The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, and the witnesses said the vehicles are the kind used by Western security firms.

"We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf said Monday. "The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq - CNN.com

Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Greenspan's book -- The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World -- is going to be a must read...

Fed’s Ex-Chief Attacks Bush on Fiscal Role - New York Times

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said Friday after being asked about it.

The community of interest data sought by the F.B.I. is central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American counterterrorism officials have turned more frequently to the technique, using communications patterns and other data to identify suspects who may not have any other known links to extremists.

Mike Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said in a statement Saturday in response to an article posted on The Times’s Web site on the bureau’s use of the community-of-interest requests that “it is important to emphasize that it is no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy, was used infrequently and was never used for e-mail communications.”

“Getting a computer to spit out a hundred names doesn’t have any meaning if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “If they’re telling the telephone company, ‘You do the investigation and tell us what you find,’ the relevance to the investigation is being determined by someone outside the F.B.I.”

At least someone is objecting to making the phone company part of the IC, rather than just an asset of the IC. That's a little bit better than "checks and balances kill people, so just trust us."

F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets - New York Times

William Gibson in WaPo:

"One of the things I've been doing in the eBay era -- I've become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world's attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world. . . .

"Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

Through the Looking Glass - washingtonpost.com

Two mayors and two state legislators are among 11 public officials arrested in New Jersey as part of a corruption investigation, the U.S. attorney's office in Trenton announced Thursday.

"The defendants allegedly demanded and accepted payments ranging from $1,500 to $17,500 at any one time," the release from the U.S. attorney's office alleges. "In most cases, the defendants sought to establish and perpetuate a corrupt relationship with the cooperating witnesses to continue receiving bribes."

Corrupt public officials in Jersey? Say it ain't so!! Heh..

This is really great to see. Maybe there is some hope of making the NJ state government effective in the next century or so..

Mayors, legislators arrested in New Jersey corruption probe - CNN.com

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials.

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

Remember the unrestricted warfare meme? It got a ton of discussion offline...

The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.

Um.. Thanks for the help with that?

To underscore the threat, he notes that no cyber red team – hackers enlisted to attack systems to help identify weaknesses – has ever failed to meet its objective.

To underscore the larger context of the threat, I should note that no elite US military unit - soldiers enlisted to look at ways to make shit go "boom" - has ever failed to come up with all kinds of ways to make shit go "boom".

Cyberspace is Spook Country these days... I imagine this is an interesting time to work in counter-intelligence. May ye' live in interesting times..

Indeed, such are the Beijing government’s efforts to control the activities of its citizens on the internet that any hackers operating from China are almost certainly working for the authorities. Yet it is probably also right to assume that the US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments. It is therefore disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back.

The attractions of using cyberspace for spying are obvious. It is cheap and governments do not have to deal with the risks and insecurities associated with intelligence officers, agents and informers operating in foreign countries.

At least the weird looking guy in charge of the kingdom of failure only seems to have nukes and missiles and bullshit..

Lieutenant General Robert Elder, senior Air Force officer for cyberspace issues, recently joked that North Korea “must only have one laptop” to make the more serious point that every potential adversary – except Pyongyang – routinely scans US computer networks.

North Korea may be impotent in cyberspace, but its neighbour is not. The Chinese military sent a shiver down the Pentagon’s spine in June by successfully hacking into an unclassified network used by the top policy advisers to Robert Gates, the defence secretary. (link)

That OSD shitstorm...

It was another great year at DragonCon.

This year I was on staff for the Space and Science Track again. Jonnyx will post more followup on the website. However, right now it's recovery time for everyone.. :)

Here are some quick highlights:

The Geek Group brought out their singing tesla coils. A YouTube video of one of them got a lot of attention here on MemeStreams. Some videos of the stuff in action this weekend should appear soon.

One of the telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory was being operated over the Internet from one of the conference rooms. It got rained out two days in a row before the weather in Arizona decided to work with us..

The Orbital Commerce Project brought it's sub-orbital flight simulator out again.

Kari, Grant, and Tory from The MythBusters completely packed the biggest ballroom at the conference.

It was a ton of fun. I look forward to seeing everyone again next year!

In researching the book, Draper interviewed President Bush six times. He includes some very intimate details about the president’s life. Bush is quoted as saying that “self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency.” But the president is quoted as saying First Lady Laura Bush reminds him that this was his choice, saying “she reminds me that I decided to do this."

Draper says President Bush also admits that he cries. “I've got God's shoulder to cry on. And I cry a lot. I do a lot of crying in this job. I'll bet I've shed more tears than you can count, as president," Bush told Draper.

Kind of fitting.. I'm pretty sure the word "tragic" will be used often when referring to this presidency.

Bush: 'I do a lot of crying in this job'

I ran for school board where I live this past fall and created some TV commercials including this one with a 'Star Wars' theme. A few months ago VH1 grabbed the commercial from YouTube and featured it in a segment of its show 'Web Junk 2.0.' Neither VH1 or its parent company Viacom told me they were doing this or asked my permission to use it, but I didn't mind it if they did. I thought that Aries Spears's commentary about it was pretty hilarious, so I posted a clip of VH1's segment on YouTube so that I could put it on my blog. I just got an e-mail from YouTube saying that the video has been pulled because Viacom is claiming that I'm violating its copyright. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on their copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

Peel back the layers of the irony onion...

Slashdot | Viacom Says User Infringed His Own Copyright

We're reaching the final stage!.

Now we get to AjaxWorld West 2007 and there are 5 presentations about security and all of them look great. Brian Chess from Fortify, Joe Stagner from Microsoft, Byran and I from SPI/HP, Danny Allen from Watchfire/IBM, and Pothiraj Selvaraj from CGE. I am absolutely floored by the turn out. And its not just more security speakers at Ajax conferences. There are other indications thats people are accepting Ajax Security. We are seeing a number of books on Ajax Security come out. Ajax frameworks are starting implement security features natively. In some cases framework developers are reaching out directly to the web security companies that seem to get it. For example SPI has been to Redmond multiple times this year working with the ASP.NET and Atlas teams. We see security vendors and consultants who were in denial about Ajax have toned down the rhetoric. Now vendors from the scanner and source code analysis spaces are joining SPI on stage this year on AjaxWorld. We've gone from a 20 something with long hair talking about Ajax security to CTOs and CEOs, and VPs spreading the message. And that is extremely satisfying.

I suppose if anything, AjaxWorld 2007 is a nice breath of fresh air. A cause SPI has been championing for nearly 2 years now is becoming more mainstream and finding acceptance in the Security and Development communities. I welcome my friendly competitors to the party, even if they were a little late and got lost along the way. :-) Because at the end of the day, more smart people working on tough problems helps everyone.

Kudos to the SIP crew. They have been instrumental in bringing attention to the security issues that must be dealt with when developing Ajax applications. I will not be attending this conference, but if your company develops Ajax apps, it's highly suggested that you send one of your engineers..

Ajax Security Acceptance: The Last Stage