] "But since Sept. 11 and the government's expansive
] campaign of monitoring and detention, people are turning
] to the 82-year-old organization to help safeguard their
] liberties. Among them are conservatives who made the
] phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" a political
] insult, but who are signing up. "

This is good to hear... Conservatives spent a decade talking smack about the ACLU because the Christian right likes perpetuating misconceptions about the first amendment with the goal of establishing religion. This obviously conflicts with the general conservative notion of upholding "individual liberties." This is the most central contradiction in modern conservative thought. Of course the Libertarians have been saying that for years.

ACLU Membership up

In protest of TIA John Gilmore provides Poindexter's home address, phone number, and aerial photographs of his house!

If there is a Sainthood equivalent for technology peeps, John Gilmore will recieve it in his lifetime.

Eyeballing Total Information Awareness

] I know you’ve been thinking it. And if you haven’t, you probably
] haven’t been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has
] been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has
] been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many
] of us have missed its demise.

Pretty much the same thing happned to every music movement that came out of the past decade or two. Its all boiled down to shit now. I wonder about the reasons often.. It seems to get easier by the day to point your finger at the Big Media say "stop fucking up our culture in the process of making your buck!"

When you turn on the idiot box and see all the thugz, playaz, and gangstas parading around MTV, who do you think the enemy causing our culture to go to shit _really_ is?

Fuck Hip Hop

] "This year, I'm thankful for the blessing of Total Information
] Awareness."

www.mnftiu.cc | get your war on | page seventeen

this is elonka's talk on steganography from phreaknic. elonka is a bad ass cypher freak. the slides are well worth 15 minutes of your time. some reasonable thought about the likelyhood that al-q actually used stegaNography in images tO conceal Their plans for 911. jonnyx's goggled face offers clear evidence that universities that have searched for stego on the web and not found it simply have not tried hard enough. the reader is left to ponder the possible.

Rattle: I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for inadvertently distrupting Elonka's panel. There was a little stir when several people realized that I had hijacked the wireless network as I was watching Elonka speak.

Elonka.Com - Steganography

] "Urge Your Representative to Co-Sponsor the DMCRA! "

There is a law on your side... You ought to support it.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center

] "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
] passage, here is what will happen to you:
]
] Every purchase you make with a credit card, every
] magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription
] you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or
] receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank
] deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you
] attend all these transactions and communications will go into
] what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized
] grand database." "

This is a little more juicy...

You Are a Suspect

A few weeks ago someone called me from a rock concert in Texas, held the phone up, and told me to listen to one of the songs. The person in this email claimed they were busted by security at a rolling stones concert for doing the same thing. Ubiquitous cell phones means ubiquitous audio recording (and surveillance), ubiquitous cameras, and soon video. What are the implications of this? For privacy? IP? Media?

Cellphones and copyright

"The fact that we're having this discussion at all is a symptom of the polarizing effect that Bush and his top dogs have had on the United States since assuming office and even more so in the hard-right free-for-all that followed the Sept. 11 attacks."

Ted Rall IS the mainstream voice of American communism, and as with all political extremes, unsubstantiated paranoid conspiracy theories are par for the course on ANY day, regardless of any "polarizing effect" offered by the current environment. The radical left is almost indistinguishable from the radical right, especially in this regard.

Having said that, I *LOVE* paranoid conspiracy theories, and this is a particularily GOOD one. A political link to the Ron Brown plane crash! A missing black box! This is the stuff that the Art Bell show is made of! So, I heartily recommend this one. Imagine if its true! What can we expect come 2004? Oh, the drama!

Yahoo! News - THE (POSSIBLE) ASSASSINATION OF PAUL WELLSTONE

"We hold that the primary cause of current telecom troubles is that Internet-based end-to-end data networking has subsumed (and will subsume) the value that was formerly embodied in other communications networks. This, in turn, is causing the immediate obsolescence of the vertically integrated, circuit-based telephony industry of 127 years vintage. "

A lot of smart people tell the FCC to let the Bells die. I'm not sure what I think of this. Some of the comments are most certainly true, but there is a self-congradulatory tone here. "Circuits are bad; everything thats not IP oriented is bad policy" is every bit as protectionist as the opposite philosophy. The Internet has serious problems, and most of the industry is so blinded by its success that they cannot turn a critical eye to it. They sound like the winners of the French Revolution chanting "off with their heads."

Telling the FCC to tell the Bells to take a long walk...