Lost in the intriguing story of a Wal-Mart employee who allegedly spied on a New York Times reporter was this tidbit: The "technician" managed to pluck text messages out of the air and read them, according to the company. And these messages weren’t just communications between Wal-Mart employees and a professional journalist covering the firm; innocent bystanders and their messages also were swept up in the spying, it said.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams offered scant details of the spying activities by the fired employee on Monday, but she stated that the text messages were intercepted by the employee using a radio device, then scanned for certain keywords. She declined to elaborate on the technology used to pluck the messages out of thin air, other than to say the radio device pulled down messages within "a mile or so" of the company's headquarters.

She also wouldn’t say how many innocent people had their messages read, other than to say there were only "a handful" of other victims.

On Tuesday, Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar confirmed that the text-message prying occurred, but said the company couldn’t reveal any additional details about the incident.

Wal-Mart said on Monday that it believed the employee’s recording of telephone conversations between the New York Times reporter and members of the company’s media relations department broke no laws because it's legal in Arkansas for telephone conversations to be recorded as long as one of the parties involved is aware of the recording.

It is illegal to surreptitiously intercept electronic communications without a warrant under the federal wiretap statues enacted in 1968. In 1986, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act clarified wiretaps laws to extend to interception of signals from modern radio-based devices, explicitly prohibiting the monitoring of cellular phone transmissions by third parties without a court order.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas is investigating the incident.

Cellular interceptor technology that could pluck text messages from the sky is readily available on the Internet -- for those who have $500,000 or more to burn and can prove they work for a law enforcement agency.

"I'm waiting for the James Bond theme to start playing here," he said. "Minus the James Bond, NSA-type capability, that kind of thing doesn't happen. If messages are sent on a modern, digital network, they are encrypted. You need serious NSA-type capability to do that."

Even that might not be an impossible barrier at a large company like Wal-Mart. Like most Fortune 500 firms, Wal-Mart employs former FBI and CIA agents to work in its corporate security department.

Text message snagging: child's play or cloak and dagger? - The Red Tape Chronicles - MSNBC.com

President Bush opened a weeklong tour of Latin America on Thursday as police clashed with protesters in Brazil and across the region.

Riot police fired tear gas and beat some protesters with batons after more than 6,000 people held a largely peaceful march through the financial district. And in the southern city of Porto Alegre, more than 500 people yelled, "Get out, imperialist!" as they burned an effigy of Bush outside a Citigroup Inc. bank branch.

Meanwhile, the police commander of Colombia, which Bush will visit on Sunday, said authorities had thwarted leftist rebel plans to disrupt Bush's visit to Bogota.

"We have taken measures to neutralize them," said Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro, Colombia's highest-ranking police officer.

Also in Colombia, at Bogota's National University, 200 masked students clashed with 300 anti-riot police and shouted "Out, Bush." In Mexico City, about two dozen demonstrators gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy chanting slogans against Bush and the U.S. project to construct border fences.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Bush "enjoys traveling to thriving democracies where freedom of speech and expression are the law of the land." Bush himself played down expected protests in interviews with Latin American news organizations ahead of his trip.

"I am proud to be going to a part of the world where people can demonstrate, where people can express their minds," he said in an interview with Univision.

He told CNN En Espanol: "The trip is to remind people that we care."

Take note of this picture. The welcome mat isn't exactly rolled out...

Bush arrives in Brazil amid protests - CNN.com

Congress could not have made itself any clearer: Do not build a whole bunch of conventionally-armed Trident ballistic missiles to go after terrorists, it told the Pentagon. The idea is half-baked, the scenarios you have come up with are far-fetched, and the weapon -- which looks and flies almost exactly like a nuke -- could very well start World War III. To force you to comply, we are cutting your funds for this program by 80%. Go put your thinking caps back on before you ask for more cash. Oh, and get a National Academies study done, too. And a haircut.

HypnomissileBut when it comes to these "Global Strike" weapons, the Defense Department doesn't seem to be able to take no for an answer. According to Inside Defense, "the Navy has budgeted $175 million for the project in fiscal year 2008 -- nearly $50 million more than the service requested in FY-07 and $150 million more than Congress actually appropriated for the so-called Conventional Trident Modification, or 'CTM,' during the current fiscal year." (My spies are giving me slightly different budget breakdowns; but the pig-headed idea is the same.)

In the meantime, I'll leave with you this sage advice, from a DANGER ROOM pal: "I don't know why you bloggers all concluded that the CTM was dead. Nothing is ever dead in this Pentagon...."

DANGER ROOM is getting high marks from me. Good things are happening these days over at Wired Blogs.

Danger Room | Missile Mania Just Won't Die

This Flickr photo set contains some amazing pictures taken from communication towers during the photographer's work travels.

Communication Tower Photos

I'm pleased to pass on the news that C-SPAN has announced "two major initiatives designed to greatly expand citizen access to its online video of federal government activities, such as congressional hearings, agency briefings, and White House events."

The first congressional hearing under this new policy is up live on the Internet Archive.

There has been real progress on this front in the past few weeks, mostly due to the efforts and advocacy of Carl Malamud. I'm glad that CSPAN has seen the light.

Boing Boing: CSPAN embraces freely copyable video

Acidus's Stripe Snoop was discussed by Mark Frauenfelder on the Colbert Report!

Mark Frauenfelder on the Colbert Report

Hijexx writes:

Summary: A retired chemist and food plant manager converted his car to run on a vegetable oil / diesel blend. He has used it this way for the last four years.

He gets a visit one morning at his home from agents of the Illinois Department of Revenue. He is being investigated for criminal activity.

Turns out, Illinois wants him to pay retroactive fuel taxes on the vegetable oil. They also want him to apply for a license to become a special fuel supplier as well as a special fuel receiver. He also has to pay a $2500 bond as insurance that his "business" will pay the taxes in the future.

The State also sent him a cease and desist letter, threatening him with felony charges if he continued to operate his vehicle without giving the State their cut and dancing their dance.

Thankfully, there is a State Senator taking up his cause, but this is just patently wrong on its face. Why send agents out to someone's house who is trying to do the right thing? Why use that Gestapo tactic? I hate seeing people being bullied like that.

Worth a read, article has some good points.

On first read, this seems too stupid to believe. This man is doing something that should be commended. Garage level innovation in alternative fuel sources is something that should be encouraged. Someone needs to look at the big picture here, and see that a stop is put to the harassment he and anyone else in his situation is receiving. This is a story that should be tracked.

State makes big fuss over local couple's vegetable oil car fuel

This is what happens when you hire idiots that get their on-air graphics from a Google Search without even looking at the results.

Click the image to see the full graphic that WAGT broadcast to all its viewers. You will clearly see text in the image that says "So good, you'll suck dick."

Livin’ in Cowtown by Corey Spring » NBC Affiliate Gets Goo All Over Their Faces

The Department of Homeland Security is at work on its own version of a massive, anti-terrorism database-sifting application -- not dissimilar to the Congressionally-halted Total Information Awareness program -- but it may have already run afoul of Congressional auditors by testing the system on data about American citizens that wasn't thoroughly anonymized, according to a story in the Washington Post last week.

Congress's investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, will soon be issuing a report saying that the system, known as Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), violated basic data privacy practices by re-using citizen data without notice or approval, according to the story. That program got $50 million in funding in 2006, and one employee says it has already helped foil terrorist plots.

What does the system do?

That's hard to say. From what little I've read it sounds like it's supposed to discover terrorists plots in real time and create social network graphics to find leads for investigators by translating news and blog stories into structured information in real time and by monitoring who is communicating with whom in real time.

According to this DHS Workshop paper (.pdf), the system is supposed to be able to handle one billion structured and one million unstructured text messages per hour.

The only data I can think of that would provide one billion structured pieces of information per hour would be the world's phone and internet traffic logs.

That same document also wonders if the system could help solve the following questions:

* Can patterns in the financial transactions of terrorists be detected and exploited?
* What is the structure of power in a group of terrorists?
* What were the main topics of intercepted terrorist messages over the past five years?
* Can a group that is purposely trying to deceive by swapping cell phones with innocents be tracked? In other words, can such changes be tracked over time?

The diagram above comes from this paper (.pdf), which is also related to the ADVISE system.

I bet I have a pretty good idea of what it does..

27B Stroke 6 | Massive Gov Data Mining Project

Psychotropic video in the spirit of EBN. Worth checking out his Youtube page: TV Sheriff

ARMAGEDDON DISCO PARTY