Decius writes:

This is infuriating.

Feingold, who today flat out called the program illegal and who last March... went on to attack Gonzales for a speech he made in November, where he said that critics of the government's warrantless wiretapping program believed in a definition of freedom that was "superficial" and a "grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

Feingold took issue with that and asked who in the country actually believed that terrorists should not be wiretapped.

Gonzales said he knew that it wasn't Democrats and his real targets were blogs, where you can find people who don't see that the government is trying to protect them.

Unfortunately, this is the closest thing I can find to coverage of this hearing. Transcripts do not seem to be available. If anyone has the exact quote from Gonzales, please post it. I DO have the exact quote and context for his statement in November.

Some people will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program targets. Instead of seeing the government protecting the country, they see it as on the verge of stifling freedom.

But this view is shortsighted. Its definition of freedom – one utterly divorced from civic responsibility – is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people.

As Justice Robert Jackson remarked in the case Terminiello v. City of Chicago, “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

The central quote was decontextualized and passed around in the media. Of course, you can find crazy people on the Internets, but the people out there who "will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program tagets," and I have never, ever seen anyone make that argument, but they are clearly too far and inbetween to constitute "a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

Gonzales is almost Chomskesque in his careful use of language which simultaneously means many things and nothing. If you support the idea that the executive need not get court approval for domestic surveillance, what you hear... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Alberto Gonzales on Bloggers

In April of 2006, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen sued the United States Customs and Border Patrol under the Freedom of Information Act. Poulsen won the case, and yesterday the trial court granted Poulsen $66,000 in attorney’s fees.

Poulsen had asked CBP to disclose under the FOIA documents about a computer failure suffered by the US VISIT system, which was established to screen foreign nationals entering the country against terrorist watch lists. CBP refused, then asked Poulsen to drop his request, then denied the request. claiming that if the public knew what caused the outage, it would harm national security, among other reasons. Poulsen believed that if the problem was fixed, as it should have been, the public had a right to know why the US VISIT computers were malfunctioning.

On summary judgment, Judge Ilston in the Northern District of California ordered CBP to release documents and the documents revealed that the computers were infected with the Zotob worm, a common Microsoft Windows vulnerability.

The Zotob infection and CBP’s management of it was one of many technological and bureaucratic problems that ultimately led the government to abandon the US VISIT program, after almost two years and $1.7 billion dollars. Talk about information the public has a right to know.

Jennifer Granick has the full story.

Victory in Poulsen FOIA case

That translates into about 14 million people who were using the 'read-write Web' to contribute to political discussion and activity," the study's authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.

Pew's findings again suggest that the much-feared "Daily Me" balkanization and creation of self-reinforcing echo-chambers doesn't appear to really be a problem. Folks online are probably exposed to as much, or more, information that challenges their point of view as anyone else.

This is a good run down of the results from the Pew study.

Pew: 14 Million Online Political Activists in U.S. Today | Personal Democracy Forum

A Moroccan man returned home to find his 11-year-old son hanging dead from the ceiling, a newspaper said on Thursday, the latest victim of a macabre game in which children mimic the death of Saddam Hussein.

The boy decided to copy the former Iraq leader's execution while playing with his younger sister at their home in Khemisset, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of the capital of Rabat, newspaper Al Ahdat al-Maghrebia reported.

It's the new hip thing. All the kids are doing it.

Since then, several stories have emerged of children dying or being injured after being captivated by the manner of Hussein's death or by family conversations about the execution.

One 12-year-old Saudi boy died after using a chair and a metal wire to hang himself from a door frame, while another in Algeria was found hanging from a tree, papers reported.

Two boys in different regions of Azerbaijan hanged themselves at the weekend and may have been influenced by Hussein's execution, a security source in the country said.

The death of a 15-year-old boy last week in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca was also suspected of being the result of another re-enactment.

I'd venture to guess that in all these cases, the father fo the house was ranting the previous night about how Saddam was a hero...

Another boy dies copying Saddam Hussein's hanging - CNN.com

boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information, explores how young people negotiate the presentation of self in online mediated contexts. Her research focuses on how this young audience engages with "digital publics" - connected social spaces such as MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube.

Currently, boyd is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Anneberg Center, and social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Her recent work has explored diverse topics such as the creation of digital publics in Myspace.com (Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace), the design of culturally adaptive software (G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide), and the exploration of folksonomy (HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead).

At Berkeley, boyd is advised by Peter Lyman and Mimi Ito. She holds an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Judith Donath at the Media Lab, and a B.A. from Brown University. boyd is frequently cited in top media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and Salon.com. She even went toe-to-toe with scary old Bill O'Reilly once. boyd blogs at www.zephoria.org/thoughts/, a must-read destination for those interested in social technology.

This has been in my queue of things to watch for awhile. Danah is the leading thinker in this space. I highly suggest watching this.

A Discussion with danah boyd

The music industry opened up a new front in the war on online music piracy yesterday, threatening to sue internet service providers that allow customers to illegally share copyrighted tracks over their networks.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said it would take action against internet companies that carry vast amounts of illegally shared files over their networks. It stressed that it would prefer not to pursue such a strategy and is keen to work in partnership with internet providers.

John Kennedy, the chairman of the IFPI, said he had been frustrated by internet companies that have not acted against customers involved in illegal activity. He warned that litigation against ISPs would be instigated "in weeks rather than months". Barney Wragg, the head of EMI's digital music division, said the industry had been left "with no other option" but to pursue ISPs in the courts.

What do they expect? ISPs to inspect every piece of traffic that goes over their networks? Have they even thought through the repercussions of that?

Independent Online | IFPI threatens ISPs over piracy

The Bush administration has agreed to allow a federal court that specializes in wiretap requests to oversee its non-warrant electronic surveillance program, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

In a letter to Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote that a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has agreed to authorize the program and preserve "the speed and agility necessary" to battle terrorism.

The Bush administration has asserted for more than a year that it had the authority to monitor U.S. residents' international communications without a judge's approval, as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires. But many lawmakers and legal observers have questioned that claim and argued that President Bush violated that 1978 law by authorizing the eavesdropping.

"It proves that this surveillance has always been possible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and that there was never a good reason to evade the law," Reyes said in a written statement.

Well, it's about damn time.

"These orders allow us to do the same thing that we've been doing, but we will be operating under the orders we've obtained from a FISA judge," the official said.

The government will ask the court to approve surveillance requests for 90 days, after which it must seek renewed permission. Justice Department officials said the court issued more than one order governing the program, but they refused to provide details of the still-classified program.

Basically, what they are saying is that the whole time there was no reason to be operating the program outside of the long established legal framework designed to govern this type of monitoring, and that the whole time this was just an attempt to see if they could get away with skirting checks intended for this type of program.

Gonzales wrote that the effort to bring the program under the FISA court dates back two years. That assertion drew questions at the White House, where Snow tried to fend off suggestions that Wednesday's announcement was politically timed.

I call bullshit! Of course it was politically timed. This would not have happened if the Republicans didn't lose control of Congress.

Administration to let court monitor domestic spying - CNN.com

Scientists on Wednesday changed the time on Chicago’s Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight, or the apocalypse, based on what they said is the “most perilous period since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” during dual announcements in London and Washington, D.C.

"We foresee great peril if governments and societies don’t take action now” to offset climate change, said astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has warned that the survival of the human race depends on its ability to colonize space because of the increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth.

I've been wondering when the clock would be advanced for awhile now...

MyFox WGHP | Countdown to the Apocalypse: Scientists Change Doomsday Clock

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

That does sound too good to be true.

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist

Decius found this little treasure by Negativland in YouTube's trough. The theme is torture conflicting with American values.

Negativland - The Bottom Line