BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

Oh Fuck...

Hard To Do Any Worse

This is truly choice.

It's a song called "The Drugs I Need" and features a little pill, smiling and waving. The artwork looks like maybe the SpumCo guys had something to do with it (which would be appropriate).

Video: 'The Drugs I Need'

Decius wrote:

Does encrypting Internet communications create a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents, triggering Fourth Amendment protection? At first blush, it seems that the answer must be yes: A reasonable person would surely expect that encrypted communications will remain private. In this paper, Professor Kerr explains why this intuitive answer is entirely wrong: Encrypting communications cannot create a reasonable expectation of privacy. The reason is that the Fourth Amendment regulates access, not understanding: no matter how unlikely it is that the government will successfully decrypt ciphertext, the Fourth Amendment offers no protection if it succeeds. As a result, the government does not need a search warrant to decrypt encrypted communications.

If you put an encrypted file in a password protected stuffit file, would that give the file fourth ammenment protection from the access needed to open the stuffit file and actual protection from the encryption? If you are handed a warrant demanding "access" to some file, you should not be required to surrender your encrypted key as well because "understanding" is not required by law, right? Somehow I think that the analogy doesn't hold water. Because "understanding" requires forging an algorithmic key to break apart an encrypted framework, I think that access is required for understanding. If you wrote a message on a piece of paper and folded it in on itself and sealed it with glue, this would qualify as an envelope. Encryption mathmatically "folds" communication and seals it with a key. There is no closer digitaly secure envelope analogy one can make. If one were to contend that digital communications should be a valid and useful method to communicate, the envelope is needed to assure viability for most important uses. If you can't count on encryption for this, what can you count on?

RE: The Volokh Conspiracy - Can Encryption create an expectation of privacy

Google has launched a site that allows you to do searches on keywords for graphs of their usage, as well as the top cities, regions, and languages involved. This is the right way to expose this kind of data. This type of statistical data is useful, but does not infringe in anyone privacy. This will be useful for trend spotting and interest gauging.

Strangely, there seem to be some strange things missing. For instance, take these two Google queries: "aol search database" and "quicksilver mac". For both, MemeStreams has similar result ranking on Google, either second or third term. I can pull up trend data for "quicksilver mac", but not "aol search database", even though queries for the AOL database are about 5 times more prevalent.

This could just be because the AOL related searches are more current.. However, that's the situation where this might be most useful. I would very much like to be able to gauge interest level associated with issues over the first week or two of their inception. That would be _very_ useful, especially considering that links are provided to news stories that include the term.

Google needs to turn the knob up to 11 on this one. Anything that sends a few dozen referrals to sites from unique users should get included in this.

Google Trends

“Consequently, the court finds defendants’ arguments that they cannot defend this case without the use of classified information to be disingenuous and without merit,” she wrote.

NYT article linked for brevity. Full decision here.

Federal Judge Orders End to Warrantless Wiretapping - New York Times

The Army is considering a proposal to allow a private developer to build a military-themed park that would include Cobra Gunship rides and bars including a "1st Division Lounge."

"You can command the latest M-1 tank, feel the rush of a paratrooper freefall, fly a Cobra Gunship or defend your B-17 as a waist gunner," according to the proposal, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

County officials have no authority over the Army's decision because the site is federal property. County Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman said he thought the entertainment concept died last year and said he had no interest in turning a military museum into "Disney on Rolling Road."

Sounds like a blast.

CNN.com - C'mon kids, let's go to Army World! - Aug 8, 2006

I flew into SFO (San Francisco) from Asia in May 2006.

I went straight to the customs agent as I had no luggage.

The agent asked to go through my only bag.

I gave him my bag.

The agent took out my laptop and turned it on.

He then asked for my password

He said that he wanted to verify that I had no illegal content on my hard drive...

While operating my laptop he said that we was tasked with preventing illegal pornographic material from entering the United States

Travis Kalanick
Red Swoosh, Inc.
Founder, CEO

Yes they ARE doing random laptop searches at borders

Learn to Poop. You know you guys need this.

YouTube - How to poop - Japanese potty training video

Philip R. Zimmermann wants to protect online privacy. Who could object to that?

He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

Key Escrow was settled in the 90s by the simple fact that it pgp was too hard to use so noone used it.

Voice Encryption May Draw U.S. Scrutiny

Letters written to god by kids.

dear god letters