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There was ample warning, and the procedures for intereception were absolutely standard, but were not used, as demonstrated by this thorough analysis using only mainstream news sources.

There are precedents for this. During the 1960s, senior figures within the US Government considered staging terrorist incidents to justify a war with Cuba (including downing a US passenger jet).

And there's the classic example: Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. He blamed the Christians, but many suspected that he started the fire.

Alot of CIA files were released on the financial records of the MK-Ultra program, but I cannot find them online. Alot of knowledge about that program came from therapists and psychatrists, whose patients were part of the program.

You should read up on Operation Northwood. (The Document is a pdf.) It is an interesting read about how the government was brainstorming on creating an incident where they could make a positive military intervention in Cuba. They were brainstorming faking incidents were "Cuba" shot down a F16 and a passenger plane, to give them an excuse to invade.

I'm drawing quotes from several previous posts. If this gets confusing... tough. I don't mock you at all in this post, except to exercise my love of self-referntial sentences and admit that maybe you deserve it.

It does nothing to reduce our role in the action, compared to your depiction of the US being fully responsible -- Marsha unilaterally deciding to move Jacob into Bill's house??

That's right. Sharing responsibility doesn't reduce it. If there were 500 people in Al Qaeda all with equal authority to bin Laden, and all agreed to bomb the WTC, each would be as culpable as bin Laden is by himself today.

Surely you can't mean that. Because that would imply that the only way the USA could escape full culpability for that act would be if it had launched all-out war on the UN to prevent it happening.

Um, no. Having it be not our idea, and not agree with the idea, would reduce our culpability greatly. If it was plausible that we were a dissenting minority, pressured somehow into accepting the majority decision, that would be sufficient. Given the U.S.'s position after WWII, however, it is difficult to see what "pressure" could have been great enough to cause us to bow. But that's beside the point, because we didn't bow, we agreed whole-heartedly.

No, the analogy was from an objective viewpoint, illustrating the distinctions between how people view reality and reality itself.

Once I got done with it, yes. You see, when you said in the other post...

(Note how cleverly this Tina supporter words it: the dead ones were "involved" because Marsha "burst in" and were merely "near Billy", not because Billy burst in, took hostages, and killed a few. This sort of willfully-manipulative rhetoric is a classic means by which Tina and her supporters convince many of the moral equivalence of good and evil.)

... you weren't pointing out some horrible flaw in my analogy, or the "classc means" of Tina... I was demonstrating events as seen by those bystanders. You see, the third person perspective does not need be objective. In literature, it rarely is. And honestly, you must take into account subjective point of view to have any hope of analyzing this situation. You use events as you see them to make moral judgements and practical evaluations. Others do the same. To discuss moral issues without perspective, to pretend to be able to discuss them "objectively", is to accept that one's own view is the only one worthy of judging. You yourself have judged events based solely on your own experience, but called it "objective". By seeing how someone else experienced something, and trying to understand it, you expand your possible viewpoints to include another view. This is not the path to objectivity (which is still impossible -- you cannot escape subjectivity, no more than you can escape the perception of self), it is the path to having more than one subjective viewpoint from which to judge things. I believe that having more viewpoints is always good, and I also believe that you can understand another viewpoint and find it valid without agreeing with it (which doesn't seem to be a commonly held belief). So yes, I included a stilted viewpoint that is as those people see it. The purpose was to show how their viewpoint on Marsha's actions leads to similar decisions on their part as did the townsfolk's viewpoint on Billy's actions.

How serious can your response truly be, when you don't answer straightforward questions,like, did my original analogy, with a morally neutral backstory, suggest to you Marsha was morally equivalent, in her actions, to Billy?

Perhaps because that is a ridiculous question. Your story was about as "morally neutral" as the Brother's Grimm are neutral on the subject of gender roles. You stilted it as much as you could, or at least that's what you would have been doing if you weren't presenting what you see as "reality". I didn't answer the question, because the answer is meaningless. I ignore things that aren't worth responding too, no matter how important you think they are. I normally don't answer meaningless questions. Yet I will, and the answer would be "no, they were not morally equivalent".

In another post, you said:

First, how about you answer the question based solely on the analogy, assuming a morally neutral backstory, without having to "decorate" in ways you didn't bother to mention in your posts morally equating the US with al Queda?

Ah, I see your issue now. When I posted without decoration or backstory, I didn't bother to mention it not because it is irrelevant, but because I assumed that since all the decorations are part of the public record, I didn't have to. Because intent is what matters, the backstory is critically important. It is by viewing one's actions over time that you can begin to determine intent. There is no better way to predict what someone would do in a certain situation than to study what they have done in previous situations. The past is the only guide we have to the future. Thus for the question of intent, the why not the what, we cannot ignore the backstory.

Which I hope explains why your analogy was not worth it to me to consider seriously, as it stood.

Now, with this understanding, let me explain my position. First, anytime I say "we", or "the US", I'm referring specifically to the government. In my (admittedly non-exhaustive, but also self-directed and not driven solely by popular conception or word of mouth) study of our own actions during and since WWII, I have concluded that our intent is to protect our own interests, both political and economic, by any means necessary. These "means" are restrained by political reality, public reaction to the means (if they are discovered), and our capabilities. Nothing else obvious comes to mind. Not an abiding sense of "goodness", to be sure. Which isn't to say that we don't think our interests are good. Fighting communism, preserving our solidarity, etc. I'll take it as given that we believe we are "in the right". Because I have no doubt that Al Qaeda, from its viewpoint, sees it's own goals as "in the right". In that way, we are similar. It is what we are willing to do to achieve those goals that I see the picture of similarity completed.

This is, of course, a conclusion you will not agree with, nor will you any time soon even if you decide to give it due consideration. It took me a long time, myself, and I was a cynic to begin with. But let me try to support it.

I started with the fact that there was a situation in which we decided to use not one, but two nuclear weapons. Targeted at civilians. No "accidental" death here. Justification is not important to argue for or against, because that would only establish the necessary modifier to my "any means". I personally (meaning from my viewpoint) do not think that it was necessary, but I can understand that from the viewpoint of the decision makers of the time it may have seemed so.

Now I fast-forward to post-Vietnam, not because of a lack of interesting data points, but because I wish to keep this short and get to the important part to show that my hypothesis applies recently, not just half a century ago.

You said that you thought that we had learned our lesson from Vietnam. And indeed we have. We have learned that it's better to use a proxy to fight our wars for us. The public reaction is less severe when it comes to the death of some other country's soldiers. It is easier to conceal the actions of a proxy, and thus prevent public reaction. It makes it possible to maneuver around political realities that would prevent us from dircetly intervening. And atrocities of the kind committed by our own soldiers in Vietnam achieve all of the above benefits as well. With a proxy, while your "means" are limited greatly by not being able to use your own forces, they are in other ways greatly liberated.

Central America in the 80's is a perfect example. Rather than dispose of unfavorable governments ourself, we paid for and directed rebellions against them. Nicaragua was such a case. They had overthrown a fascist regime that was created and supported by our own government, and proceded to do very well for themselves without our help, and without giving in to our business interests. They were starting to show communist tendencies, and the opposing groups that inevitably appeared were the tools by which we exercised our interests.

You see, Regan was trying to free hostages, which is surely a noble cause by itself, even if the method did make us war profiteers by selling weapons to both sides of a war at the same time. But that wasn't the extent of it. The profits of this war profiteering went to fund the Contras, since Congress had dropped support. Thus what had at first seemed like merely breaking the law and our stated policy on terrorism to save hostages ended up being just the means for us to further our interests in Central America.

Not that this was the only problem with the Contras. Outside of money from arms sales to Iran, the Contras were also funded by drug money, with the coordination and cooperation of the CIA. Massive amounts of cocaine entered this country, starting the boom of that and derivative drugs in the US. It is conspicuous in the detail that the CIA doesn't deny this, but merely asserts that an investigation of their financial records showed no evidence. That documents in the public record would contradict the former statement might explain why.

The Contras themselves engaged in actions that could be called terroristic. They didn't restrict themselves to military targets, by any means. And this wasn't just the unfortunate action of our tool -- they received training in many of these activities by us. Our field training manuals on interrogation were somewhat disturbing in that they argued against -direct- physical torture simply because it is ineffective -- recommending instead indirect physical pain, and mental pain. Torture, assassination, hired death squads. Is this the action of a morally superior government, or of one that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve its goals?

And of course all of this comes along with rampant concealment and manipulation of information. Clearly, public reaction can be manipulated both in extend and even existence, and thus increase those means which are available for achieving ends.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was no proxy to fight for us. But that was fine, because political reality was such that we could engage them ourselves, with lots of help even. Whatever humanitarian reasons might have been given as motivations -- much like the saving of starving Afghans -- was so much crap, as we ignored Iraq's actions against the Kurds even as we supplied them with more weapons for their war with Iran.

And speaking of ignoring, despite our vow of "Never Again", our response to genocide has demonstrated that our intent is anything other than humanitarian. If there is one thing anyone in this century can agree on morally, it is that genocide represents one of the greatest evils imagineable. Yet when it happens in countries that are not of national interest, it is ignored by our Vietnam-wisened government. A pathetic bombing cannot compare to what happened in Rwanda, or in Bosnia. We never intervened in Rwanda, and what little action we took in Bosnia may have actually made it worse. In this case, our interest was to not get involved, and this was done by whatever method made this politically feasible. You blame Clinton for lying about getting his winky wet? What about lying about genocide and ethnic cleansing? Claiming ignorance so that we wouldn't have to get involved?

"By any means necessary" was a phrase Malcom X could have easily borrowed from the CIA handbook. We have done things that we would like people to believe only countries like China would do. We do these things, and we conceal them, lie about them, and justify them because of "national security". Our interests.

Willing to achieve its goals by any means necessary, limited only by political reality, capability, and public reaction. Am I talking about the US or Al Qaeda? I'm talking about both. Al Qaeda is operating within grossly different parameters of political reality, capability, and public reaction. These differences are the source of the conceptual problem of seeing the two groups as "the same", but that is only a matter of situation, of "viewpoint" not intent. The intent is the same -- what I want, no matter what. It is my conclusion that were the U.S. government to have the same limiting parameters as Al Qaeda, its actions would be no different. Thus, they are morally equivalent.

And, from my viewpoint, equally reprehensible.

So now you probably think I'm a loon. That's fine. Is it because my analysis of events is flawed? Or because you don't believe the events I describe transpired? The former may be true, or it may just depend on my own subjectivity. The latter... Well, that's really the triumph of our government. They can release documents proving what I've said, readily available under the FOIA, and people still don't believe it.

By the way, there is one question you haven't asked, though it's probably because you think you know the answer. You never asked me if I thought we should have attacked Afghanistan, even though we all know civilians would die. If you had asked, I would have said "I can't see what else we can do... So yes."

Necessity is a horrible thing.

You are ignorant of history -- even recent -- and actions taken by your own country.

Thanks for trying to educate me (NOT!!).

Thanks for making it sound like it's my fucking job! Educate yourself. I'm not your tutor.

But I'll throw you a bone. Outside of Google, a good place to start is
here.

Okay, I'm starting to mock again. I'm done now. Really.

Promise?

Hey, I didn't mock you, did I? And now I'm done, period. Happy truth-hunting. Cya on the other side.

Northwood is very similar to the name Northwoods.

Operation Northwoods was the plan the U.S. government came up with to frame terrorist attacks against both Americans and Cubans on the Cuban government.

Coincidence? Or, does Intel have a secret plan to take out AMD? ;)

So, what have we learned? People in Idaho can afford to buy cars, people in rural China cannot. People in Idaho can afford to have a quality of life as good as those in New York, those in rural China cannot. And for that matter, most people in urban china can't afford to buy a car, to say nothing of a $3k motor scooter. That would be like average Joe in New York city making $25k/year buying a $75k car.

..and here's some info on it:
here and here

This page (document 27) at the national security archive contains a PDF of the heavily redacted memo. In addition to the kitty, there is also material about spy satellites and other such things.

A fresh batch of newly declassified CIA documents, however, provides a more nuanced picture of the CIA's directorate of science and technology. The documents - requested under the Freedom of Information Act by Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the national security archive in Washington - chart the development of the extraordinary US spy satellites as well as the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. But they also record some of the gaffes and wrong turns along the way, which reveal the CIA's boffins to be as accident-prone as any government institution.

A fresh batch of newly declassified CIA documents, however, provides a more nuanced picture of the CIA's directorate of science and technology. The documents - requested under the Freedom of Information Act by Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the national security archive in Washington - chart the development of the extraordinary US spy satellites as well as the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. But they also record some of the gaffes and wrong turns along the way, which reveal the CIA's boffins to be as accident-prone as any government institution.

My government protects me from corporate abuses. Why can't their government protect them?

Oh yeah, because their government sucks! That's my point.

Why does their government suck?

Gee, could it be the fact that our government systematically and illegally destabilizes and undermines and blatantly overthrows any attempts at local democratic self-rule in third-world countries, preferring instead to prop up easily-controlled ,corrupt militaristic regimes?

" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

"Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

"Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

"Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

"One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

"The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

"Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
-- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

For decades, our government -- with all its military and financial clout -- has deliberately shat upon other peoples in their efforts to attain the very freedoms we take for granted.

And you have the gall to suggest that this is their fault?

My government protects me from corporate abuses. Why can't their government protect them?

Oh yeah, because their government sucks! That's my point.

Why does their government suck?

Gee, could it be the fact that our government systematically and illegally destabilizes and undermines and blatantly overthrows any attempts at local democratic self-rule in third-world countries, preferring instead to prop up easily-controlled ,corrupt militaristic regimes?

" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

"Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

"Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

"Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

"One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

"The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

"Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
-- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

For decades, our government -- with all its military and financial clout -- has deliberately shat upon other peoples in their efforts to attain the very freedoms we take for granted.

And you have the gall to suggest that this is their fault?

The United States government supported Osama bin Laden. We funded, armed and trained his forces, both in war and terrorism. We helped build his terrorist army to fight a superpower, the Soviet Union. I don't like communism, but our politicians created a monster in Afghanistan. Now it seems that monster has attacked us.

Those that are now protesting against the bombing in Afghanistan condemned the Taliban long before tragedy of September 11. And yet the United States continued to fund them through May of this year.

• The United States Supported Pinochet.
• The United States Supported Saddam Hussein, even after he used nerve gas on his own people in 1988.
• And the United States supported the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
• Even today the United States trains people in torture and terrorism at The School of the Americas.

I do think that something should be done about the Taliban's tyranny, but you have to realize that the Afghans are the first victims, not our enemies.

If we are really to put an end to terrorism we must stop our politicians from creating terrorists in the first place.

Everyone,

As is often the case, the Economist seems to have the best story: America under Attack

Also see The Economist front page

Stratfor provides interesting and more complete analysis.

Lax Security One of the important points made in the article is that security in U.S. airports and on U.S. airplanes before the bombing was lax compared to the security in Europe.

George Bush had Increased Support for Israel. The Economist article does not mention that the Bush Administration in the U.S. had recently increased its support for the Israeli government and therefore also Israeli violence. The Clinton administration, in contrast, was more careful not to do things which could be interpreted as an incitement to violence.

Once again, intelligence agencies were useless. It is amazing to me that "intelligence" authorities claim that they did not have any idea that there would be an attack like this. Below is a link to an album cover from a band called "The Coup". It is black American "Party Music". The album was sold long before today's bombing. The album cover shows both towers of the World Trade Center in New York in flames:

The Coup -- Party Music, album cover shows the World Trade Center towers burning.

If black rap artists can have this idea, why didn't the intelligence agencies have it? The idea was not particularly innovative, since the World Trade Center had already been bombed once. Did the intelligence agencies think that those who did it would just stop trying?

From one of the Stratfor articles: "Reuters is reporting that Arabic satellite television channel MBC warned Sept. 8 that followers of suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden were planning a major attack on U.S. and Israeli interests in the next two weeks."

Violence is Assumed. Commentators on three of the largest U.S. TV networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, have made comments that assume without debate that the U.S. will engage in military action in retaliation. One U.S. senator said on TV that the U.S. response should be comparable to the U.S. response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. One of the U.S. responses at the time of Pearl Harbor was to be the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons. Is the senator suggesting that?

This is my reply to the many people who are recommending violence as an answer to violence:

Do you have any thought that violence in retaliation might be a mistake, and might just invite further violence? Those who say no may change their minds after they consider the following issues:

The U.S. government (not necessarily the U.S. people) has a history of thinking that violence is the answer. The U.S. government killed 2,100,000 people in Vietnam and maybe 150,000 people in Iraq. The U.S. has bombed 14 countries in 30 years, killing a roughly estimated 3,000,000 people. None of the people who were killed were in any way directly threatening the U.S. These people had mothers and fathers, friends and families and wives.

Most of the citizens of the U.S. had, and have, no idea of the beliefs of the people that their government killed. Most people in the U.S. cannot even locate the countries the U.S. government bombed on a map of the world. People cannot be thought to have chosen violence when they do not come close to understanding the issues. It is often the government that chooses violence, not the people.

No matter how violent a country is, or how many people a violent country kills, there is still an inexhaustible supply of people in other countries who also want to engage in violence. Violence can be unending. Do you want that?

No matter how angry you are, there are thousands of people who are more angry than you. Do you want them to attack you?

As was mentioned above, the Bush administration recently increased U.S. support for the violence of the Israelis. This was sure to make the people being killed by the Israelis unhappy. Do you find it surprising that some of them are motivated to violence also?

There are many countries where people are severely distressed by Israeli violence. Recently there was a TV news story about street violence in which Israelis were killed. The Israeli counter-attack was shown on TV: A helicopter fired rockets at a building, causing huge explosions. It is not important in this instance whether the Israelis are the aggressors. What is important is that a significant number of people in the world think they are the aggressors.

The problems between the Jews and the Arabs have existed for 3,300 years. The Jews say that they are the "chosen people" of God. The Jews say that Arabs are descended from an illegitimate child of their tribal founder, Abraham, and a slave girl.

It is not difficult to understand the thoughts of the Arabs. It is not difficult to understand that it is annoying to live next to a group of people who claim that they are superior, and that Arabs are inferior. It is not difficult to understand that it is annoying to live near people who claim that you are a descendent of a bastard and that God doesn't like you as much.

It is also not difficult to understand that the constant claims of the Jews of superiority over everyone else (including people of European descent like me) are mentally de-centering to Arabs who happen to be psychologically conflicted.

Violence is caused by mentally de-centered people. Mentally de-centered people engage in violence. It's that simple. Being violent toward them makes mentally de-centered people even more mentally de-centered. That's why violence is not a good answer to violence.

The U.S., and all those who hate violence, should take very strong action. But the action must be designed to cure the problem of highly-conflicted, mentally de-centered people. Whatever that response is, it must be more sophisticated than violence.

The terrorists are extreme examples of mentally disturbed people. Remember that those who crashed airplanes into the buildings cannot possibly benefit from their own actions. They are dead. Someone who is willing to commit suicide is about as mentally de-centered as it is possible to be.

Does the U.S. really have a place in a dispute that began 3,100 years before the founding of the country? How many people here really understand this dispute? What percentage of the citizens of the U.S. can even find Israel on a map of the world? I think the percentage is low.

I find the arrogance of my Jewish friends annoying, too. However, there are many differences between myself and the terrorists. I am less conflicted. I am better educated. It doesn't matter to me what other people have been saying for thousands of years; I don't believe Jews actually are superior. I don't live in an area where I am at risk of being killed by Israelis. I am not Arab, so I am not the target of the strongest claims of Jews that they are superior.

I can also understand why Jews would find Arabs annoying. There is an element of the Arab culture that allows Arabs to think that lies are sometimes acceptable. My Arab friends have sometimes lied to me over trivial issues. To someone who values careful thought, lies are extremely repugnant.

Should we be giving Israel money when that will be seen as us a choosing to enter a 3,300 year-old conflict? The U.S. government gives billions of dollars every year to Israel. If anything, this money seems to have made Israel weaker. The Israelis have spent money they didn't earn; this is always a corrupting influence; they have had problems with inflation. It can hardly be said that the people of the U.S. give the money; most have no idea that money is going to Israel. So, the people pay the money, but the government gives it away. Rightly or wrongly, sensibly or crazily, the Arabs see this money as encouragement of Israel's violence toward them.

On this particular issue both cultures are crazy! They've been killing each other since the time of the Pharaohs! What does this have to do with the U.S.? Do we walk into bars and take part in any fight that is happening there?

The U.S. has a history of secret interference with the governments of other countries. We often hear about secret activities of the U.S. government after it is too late to object. The U.S. supported the killing of president Mossadegh of Iran, and then supported an extremely weak man, the Shah of Iran. (See Iran 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings) [thirdworldtraveler.com], for example.) This provoked a revolution in Iran that was hostile to the United States. Citizens of the U.S. were kept hostage.

The U.S. secret agencies' secret answer to the anti-U.S. sentiment was to support Saddam Hussein of Iraq against Iran. We supported Saddam Hussein's violent war against Iran. However, when Saddam Hussein became violent toward another country in the region, we spent billions of dollars to kill an estimated 150,000 Iraqis and destroy their property.

When executives do things openly they make lots of mistakes, and are sometimes held accountable, usually in a very peaceful way, and usually by their own staffs. When executives do things in secret, there is little accountability, and the mistakes can become huge.

Anyone interested in the activities of secret U.S. agencies may have been interested in a segment of the CBS show "60 Minutes" about the secret involvement of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the killing of Chilean General Rene Schneider. The show aired on Sunday, September 9, 2001. General Schneider was a strong supporter of democracy. Here are links to information about U.S. interference with democracy in Chile:

National Security Archive Chile Documentation Project [gwu.edu]

PBS News Hour: "... evidence of a policy to undermine democracy in Chile and to support dictatorship there" [pbs.org]

Hinchey Report, CIA Activities in Chile [state.gov]

Iran, Iraq, and Chile are just three of the countries that have suffered from secret U.S. involvement. There is some discussion of U.S. government interference in Saudi Arabia below. Also, don't forget Nicaragua. I asked someone who went to Nicaragua during U.S. involvement there whether it was possible to see the wealth that the U.S. government was pouring into that small country. The amount was said to be about $1,000,000 per day. I was told, no, there was no evidence of the money that was spent.

There is a cycle: 1) The U.S. government influences other governments in hidden ways, including arranging the killing of foreign leaders. 2) Some members of the countries with whom the U.S. has interfered want to retaliate violently to the violence of the U.S. 3) The U.S. uses the violent retaliation as a justification for more hidden activity.

Invading countries and killing the residents and destroying their property is not a way of relating I consider socially skilled. Why do the citizens of one country think they can kill the citizens of another? If killing is the answer, can't the U.S. ask a better question?

The interference in the affairs of other countries by the secret U.S. agencies has prompted some people to retaliate. These people who retaliate are called "terrorists" in the U.S. The terrorists make everyone in the U.S. less safe. So, U.S. citizens have, in some ways, gotten less security for the money they spent on secret activities.

The violent attitude toward people outside the U.S. has, predictably, spread to the internal police forces in the U.S. When some religious fanatics decided to do stupid things in Waco, Texas, the U.S. government responded by bringing in very violent-minded people. The result was that people were killed.

There were people who didn't like the activities of the U.S. police forces in Waco. There were people who were psychologically de-centered by these activities. One of them, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a U.S. government building in Oklahoma. So then the U.S. government killed him.

Secrecy encourages people not to trust. Violence encourages violence.

We tend to hear about the activities of secret U.S. government agencies about 30 years after they occur. What are they doing now?

It is 10:00 o'clock. Do you know what the U.S. government is doing? No, it is a fact that you don't. You don't know any other time, either. You cannot even know how much of your money is spent on secret activities, because the budget for secret U.S. government agencies is hidden in other appropriations.

Definition of a terrorist: The other country's CIA.

There is in the U.S. very little attempt at understanding other cultures. Arab friends of mine have described situations in Saudi Arabia that are extremely volatile. Apparently Osama bin Laden, and many average Saudis who live in the U.S., feel very unhappy with U.S. influence in Saudi Arabia. They think that there should be political parties and democracy in Saudi Arabia. However, the U.S. government strongly supports the dictatorial regime of the house of Al Saud. Residents of Saudi Arabia, for example, are not allowed to leave the country without an exit visa. They are potentially prisoners of their own country.

Why not ask ourselves why Osama bin Laden is willing to go to so much trouble to promote terrorism? Maybe we would learn something. I am NOT saying Osama bin Laden is right about anything, and definitely his violence is reprehensible. Nevertheless it may help to understand him. According to Arabs to whom I've talked, there is considerable good reason to be dissatisfied with the secret actions of the U.S. government.

As other people have said in the past, the U.S. government has a history of supporting corrupt dictatorships. The U.S. government supported Pakistan against India! India is the world's most populous democracy. It has been suggested that the preference for supporting dictatorships is due to U.S. government corruption. A dictator is almost certain to be willing to support embezzlement of U.S. government money, and to keep it secret. Trying to arrange embezzlement would be very dangerous in a democracy because of the danger of being discovered.

Under the stress of conflict, people show how they truly think. It has always annoyed me that people who call themselves Christian often reveal that they don't really believe in the important messages of Christianity, and that they don't even understand those messages.

Basically, Jesus Christ's idea of not returning violence with violence means that we can vigorously protect ourselves, but that any response must be the true minimum necessary to achieve security. This is a theory that can be recommended even to the majority of people in the world who are not Christian. The theory seems to fit the facts. The facts seem to be that violence always has severely negative side-effects that overwhelm any effect that might be seen as positive.

Answers? Prevention is an answer. Better understanding is an answer. Being charitable long before any problems begin occurring is a good answer. And maybe there are times when we just don't know the answer.

There is often considerable misunderstanding about non-violent methods. One reason to suggest non-violent methods is that they can be extremely powerful. For example, suppose that representatives from the U.S. knew Osama bin Laden's family. Or suppose that you understood how money is transferred to bin Laden. Or suppose the U.S. was so well-liked in the region that bin Laden had difficulty finding supporters. One of the values of non-violent methods is that literally hundreds of them are available, and many of them are far, far cheaper than violence.

The desire for non-violence is a desire to be extremely powerful. Those who are really powerful can have a strong influence just by voicing disapproval.

There are many people who support violence because they want to act out their own personal anger, while at the same time hiding their internal conflict from themselves. It is a fact that such people would be FAR more comfortable if they could be helped to understand and take responsibility for their anger. Acting out anger is like a drug. It provides only temporary relief, and it makes the person who does it more angry. Having un-recognized anger is like carrying a 100-pound sack of cement on your back wherever you go. Un-recognized anger drags you down 24 hours per day.

Violence is not a good answer to violence.

Regards,

Michael Jennings

Michael Jennings
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.

E-Mail: M_Jennings@USA.com

This letter maybe sent to anyone by email without permission from the author, provided that no changes are made. If you print this article with no changes, you may give it to anyone you know. Other use requires permission. Copyright 2001.

Please mention errors and shortcomings to the author.

Just to let y'all know, I had a previous post along these lines and figured that it was relevant:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21544&cid=2279 948
When I woke up this morning, I heard sirens going off all over the place. I had no idea what was going on, but as soon as I got up my roommate was running into the room yelling about the Pentagon being bombed. We looked out our window and saw black smoke billowing out across the city, and decided to see what it was.
There were all manner of different people clustering to see what was going on - there were tourists from Russia, reporters, agents from every conceivable branch of the government en route to the Pentagon. We saw a number of generals standing in the shade outside of it, and there were military personnel all over the place. Most of the streets were blocked off, too. Pennsylvania Avenue was strangely devoid of traffic, and I know that at this point they aren't letting anything remotely near the White House.
I figured that I'd add that there have been a number of bomb threats going off around the city - most notably to me at the Marvin Center at the George Washington University, because that's where I tend to get food. They evacuated the Center and shut down the entire school for the day - you can see the University's warning message at http://www.gwu.edu/~virtual/message.html
Oh yes, and while I was walking to and from the Pentagon, my friends and I happened to see - or at least we believe we did - Marine 1, the President's personal chopper. Seeing as he wasn't in DC at the time, it was probably Cheney or some other officials checking out the damage. It was a damn sight to see - the chopper was accompanied by a fighter plane, and it is ENOURMOUS. The thing is easily bigger than you'd ever think it could be.

Anyone interested in the activities of secret U.S. agencies may have been interested in a segment on the CBS show "60 Minutes" about the involvement of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the killing of Chilean General Rene Schneider. The show aired this Sunday, September 9, 2001. General Schneider was a strong supporter of democracy.

We tend to hear about the activities of secret U.S. government agencies about 30 years after they occur. What are they doing now?

Here are links to information about U.S. interference with democracy in Chile:

National Security Archive Chile Documentation Project

PBS News Hour: "... evidence of a policy to undermine democracy in Chile and to support dictatorship there"

Hinchey Report, CIA Activities in Chile

The strongest argument I have seen for these types of arguments was made in the Law Professor's Brief in the DeCSS case. Similar arguments was also made below, but rejected by the District Court. Because almost all transactions using a computer use a network, the interstate commerce requirement is probably satisfied under the affectation doctrine, though the point you raise is a fair one.

Alas, the Second Circuit didn't seem remotely interested in these arguments, apart from the First Amendment issues.

• Siding with Credit Unions on allowing them an expansive definition of who can qualify as a CU member in a civil decision against the American Bankers Association.
• Deciding that the FDA can regulate/label GM foods just like any other food additive. Not likely to make the Greens happy, but a reasonable, consumer/regulatory friendly decision. And,
• Finding against the CIA in FOIA suit brought by the National Security Archive, requesting bios the CIA prepared on Communist leaders. This was aparently the first decision that didn't uphold a doctrine held by the CIA that they didn't have to release documents if it they claimed to neither confirm nor deny the very existence of the documents, however, it was on a technicality that the CIA in fact already acknowledged the documents existed

MS buttfucking spyglass, or the conjuring of Steve Barkto, or maybe even vaporware

I know this stuff was touched upon in the suit, but during the whole trial it was just a big argument over whether or not MS could bundle IE with its OS.

And the senators who want an XP junction, unfortunatley, have missed the point as well, stating the bundling is the problem, but neglecting to address the issues of not letting people legitamately use the products they paid for.

1. The routes are supposed to be planned, however, I seriously question the planning of the alternate routes. A typical race day for Sunrayce is about 200 miles. The typical day for us pulling the trailers [I was supposed to be one of the drivers for the car, as I'm just under 5'8", but never got fitted to the car after I built the roll bar, and the staff advisor and other driver were in the 5'4" height range, so it wasn't discovered 'till qualifyings that I didn't fit, so I got trailer duty, as I was one of the people normally talking back to the staff advisor]. One day in particular, I went through 4 states. The main race route only crossed one border. Another day, I found that there was a ferry along the alternate route.
   As for the hills, they try to avoid them up to a point.... unless some major landmark is involved. Things such as a day's end point [normally schools, which they like to build on hills], and the particularly lame ending of the race at the top of a hill outside of Denver, Co, [which after 2 days of clouds, I think only 4-8 cars actually made it to the finish line before the race was called early, as 20+ cars were on the Denver beltway at rush hour]
   
2. Uphill/downhill matters more than full sun/no sun. In the case of GW in 1995, we actually got more power on cloudy days than full sun, because of a problem with the manufacture of our solar panels. [don't use conductive epoxy on solar cells. It creates oxidation when in contact with aluminum, so we were running at 1/3 the power of other schools]
   
3. The batteries are there for multiple reasons. Basically, they take the excess power from the panels, and store it for later use (going up hill, cloudy conditions, etc.) Also, most of the races have 'charge times' where the car isn't running, but you have the array up to collect light in the early morning/later afternoon.
   
4. As was already said, it's dependant upon the types of batteries. The GM SunRayce limits cars to using lead-acid to help even the playing field. Some races have more than one class, so that cars are ranked against similar cars. [Although, our team was in the lowest class, and won overall in Akita, Japan in '96]
   
5. During the road race, the cars are normally part of a convoy. (lead vehicle, solar car, chase vehicle). I assure you that if someone pulled something like that, the folks from the chase vehicle would beat the crap out of the person.
   
6. No clue, as we kept our GPS (and backup) in the chase vehicle. We were running Lynx (real time operating system) with a radio modem in the car. I didn't worry about that power, as it was running on a seperate bus (the motor was running at 60-72V, depending on the race)

1. The routes are supposed to be planned, however, I seriously question the planning of the alternate routes. A typical race day for Sunrayce is about 200 miles. The typical day for us pulling the trailers [I was supposed to be one of the drivers for the car, as I'm just under 5'8", but never got fitted to the car after I built the roll bar, and the staff advisor and other driver were in the 5'4" height range, so it wasn't discovered 'till qualifyings that I didn't fit, so I got trailer duty, as I was one of the people normally talking back to the staff advisor]. One day in particular, I went through 4 states. The main race route only crossed one border. Another day, I found that there was a ferry along the alternate route.
   As for the hills, they try to avoid them up to a point.... unless some major landmark is involved. Things such as a day's end point [normally schools, which they like to build on hills], and the particularly lame ending of the race at the top of a hill outside of Denver, Co, [which after 2 days of clouds, I think only 4-8 cars actually made it to the finish line before the race was called early, as 20+ cars were on the Denver beltway at rush hour]
   
2. Uphill/downhill matters more than full sun/no sun. In the case of GW in 1995, we actually got more power on cloudy days than full sun, because of a problem with the manufacture of our solar panels. [don't use conductive epoxy on solar cells. It creates oxidation when in contact with aluminum, so we were running at 1/3 the power of other schools]
   
3. The batteries are there for multiple reasons. Basically, they take the excess power from the panels, and store it for later use (going up hill, cloudy conditions, etc.) Also, most of the races have 'charge times' where the car isn't running, but you have the array up to collect light in the early morning/later afternoon.
   
4. As was already said, it's dependant upon the types of batteries. The GM SunRayce limits cars to using lead-acid to help even the playing field. Some races have more than one class, so that cars are ranked against similar cars. [Although, our team was in the lowest class, and won overall in Akita, Japan in '96]
   

Look up information on the "Invisible Web" - islands typically untouched by search engines, where you need another site to "hop" to these nets of information - cool stuff can abound in these disconnected areas. Here are some links to get started with:

DirectSearch - Invisible Web Search

The InvisibleWeb

WebData.com - Invisible Web Search

InfoMine - Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

AlphaSearch - Invisible Web Search

IIRC, Slashdot even ran an article about this not too long ago - I think this is it, not sure...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

• Rods are sensitive but quite slow, compared to cones.
• An individual cone is either short, medium or long wavelength detecting. They are commonly imprecisely called red, green and blue. Red cones peak at green wavelengths.
• The bandwidth of the optice nerve is spectacularly low. John Carmack compared it to a 57.6kbps modem. He should know about these things. I tend to believe him.
• Cones are not 'inefficient due to their complex nature'. They are designed to be used in daylight viewing conditions, having fewer buckets of photosensitive goo than rods. Their small size makes them quick to respond.
• Most humans can reliably detect a flash of light dim enough that only one in a hundred rods will receive a photon.
• The optic nerve thingy is obviously more than 2-3cm in length, considering that the visual cortex is at the back of the head.
• Blurring is just what happens when a moving image is integrated over time. The viisual cortex doesn't have do anything special here.

It's hard to say what the maxinum frame rate a human eye can perceive directly is. It depends on the viewing conditions and the observer. In daylight, I can easily watch the progress of the video beam on a 50Hz TV as it makes its way from the top to the bottom in each field of each frame.

If 'frameless rendering' can be used (an option if real-time raytracing is feasible), then the natural smearing and removal of temporal aliasing in a quickly changing scene will lessen the need for a very high frame rate. Try searching for 'Frameless rendering'. I'm looking forward to Quake XXIV Bitchfight implementing it.

B&N has challenged validity and enforceability from the get-go, particularly during the Preliminary Injunction hearing. As you can see by reviewing the District Court Opinion, the Court rejected those arguments.

This is not to say there aren't new arguments of invalidity that can still be made at trial. Maybe, maybe not. However, only arguments made during the preliminary injunction hearing can be argued on appeal.

In fact, the headline is entirely appropriate. As the linked article clearly explains, the b+n position was not previously based on the validity of the patent-- b+n were simply arguing that they were not _infringing_ on that patent.

This is false. See the District Court Opinion granting Plaintiff's motion for an injunction, which focuses substantially on the question of invalidity for anticipation and obviousness as well as unenforceability of the patent.

Further, if what was quoted above were true, B&N would never be permitted to argue invalidity on appeal:

The purpose of an appeal is not to re-try a case. Appeals are permitted only to test whether the Court properly applied the law to the facts as the case was tried below. It is a a cannon of appellate law that you may not (with extraordinary exceptions not relevant here) argue any issue for the first time on appeal. If, as was suggested here, B&N did make a "substantial shift in the substance of the case," the Federal Circuit would be obliged to affirm summarily the preliminary injunction.

Though I was not myself present at the initial hearing before the District Court, news reports of the Preliminary Injunction made quite clear that B&N relied heavily on the validity of the patent.

Uh, no.

Weapons grade uranium is 90% U235. The rest is U238 (plus some other junk).

The uranium used in reactors is also U235.

Naturally occuring uraniu m is 0.72% U235.

Naturally occuring uranium is slightly enriched, to 3% U235, for use in reactors.

And, actually, there are multiple ways of seperating isotopes. Centrifuging uranium hexaflouride is just the cheapest and easist way, requireing ten passes to get weapons grade. Previously, magnetic deflection of ions (like in a mass spectrometer) was used.

Ok, to return to my point, I should have said the most difficult part in getting fuel grade uranium to explode, is the construction.

The reason weapons grade uranim is used is because it's a lot easier to make explode, in a controlled manner. And it gets you big bangs.

Fuel grade uranium will not get you a much bigger bang than, say, 13 kiltons, assuming your careful about how you build it.

That is a mere fire cracker compared with todays 100 megaton bombs. At one 100000th of that power, it's the same size as the Hiroshima bomb.

If you were ever going to build one from fuel grade uranium, it would be a terror weapon. Even if all it did was blow up a block, that wuold do.

[Aside: Fuel grade uraium can be made into a bomb: the chain reaction co-efficent of a nuclear reactor is 1 (by definition). This is controled by control rods, that allow the maximum chain reaction co-efficent to be reduced (but not enchanced). Thus the natural peak chain reaction co-efficent of the fuel must exceed 1.]

Alternativly, you could build an FBR to produce plutonium, but that's getting off the point.

would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law

There are other provisions for non-disclosure such as an Executive order. There is also a provision whereby non-disclosure is granted by a specific statute (law passed by Congress). A real juicy example of this the "Death Squad Protection" act.

would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law

There are other provisions for non-disclosure such as an Executive order. There is also a provision whereby non-disclosure is granted by a specific statute (law passed by Congress). A real juicy example of this the "Death Squad Protection" act.

Agreed. Jeffrey Rosen has written a lot of smart things about how a
lot of things about ugly working environments have been treated with
the wrong legal tools: harassment laws, where laws about personal
space and dignity would have been more appropriate, with the effect of
causing great intrusions into privacy. His new book `The Unwanted
Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America', looks very promising,
and I hope his ideas are influential. There's a good review here and
an extract has been available for a while.

Did John plan to write a review? It is hard to tell if he is summarizing the content of the book or propviding his own political commentary.

For another review of the book check out this link.

The prologue to the book and another review are available on the New York times site (free registration required...).

An interview Mr. Rosen gave to NPR's All things Considered can be heard here. Note: For some reason I cannot listen to this on my computer...

He manages to leave out many of Mr. Rosen's arguments for why private speech should be protected, and why these protections should be extended to our electronic utterances.

Mr. Rosen points out that much of our private speech only makes sense in context, and that that context includes our relationship with the person we are communicating with and their knowledge about us. Thus my letters to my wife or my best friend may make no sense when read by a perfect stranger (such as a police officer, judge or jury member).

He also touches on how allowing stranger access to our private thoughts and communication infringes our freedom. The title of the book even comes from a tenet of Jewish law that protects others from being watched without thier permission (thus the 'unwanted gaze').

IMHO It is much more important to publicize and emphasize the real reasons privacy is a basic freedom, rather than just repeating privacy like a mantra and grumbling about how stupid and thoughtless Americans are to let these freedoms be eroded by the "Corporate Republic".

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv /NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/22-01.htm

"According to my prof. ADA is used in military tasks involving 100% reliablity (submarine radar traking systems, air traffic control systems, stuff like that). "

Are air traffic control systems a purely military thing? Ada is used most often when high reliability is required, not because it is a "complex" language, but because it is a safe language.

As people have mentioned, it is heavily used in Air Traffic Control, Aircraft, Railway Systems and so on, both military and commercial. Pretty much anywhere where peoples' lives are at stake in the event of failure.
For a more complete list check out:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~ mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html.

Anyway, on this list of NSA documents with descriptions I found the following passage:

The program, codenamed ECHELON, has been described as a global surveillance network that intercepts and processes the world' communications and distributes it among the primary partners in the decades-old UKUSA alliance-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand

And this right after it:

In reality, ECHELON is a more limited program, allowing the UKUSA allies to specify intelligence requirements and automatically receive relevant intercepts obtained by the UKUSA facilities which intercept satellite communications (but not the U.S. facilities that receive data from SIGINT satellites). It is also limited by both technological barriers (the inability to develop word-spotting software so as to allow for the automatic processing of intercepted conversations) and the limitations imposed on collection activities by the UKUSA allies-at least as regards the citizens of those countries. Thus, the NAVSECGRU instruction also specifies that one of the responsibilities of the commander of the Sugar Grove site is to "ensure the privacy of U.S. citizens are properly safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18."

(no, I don't know what the references to the "Sugar Grove site" are referring to, and don't ask me about all those silly government acronyms). Somewhere on George Washington's National Security Archive is where they claimed to have found these documents about echelon. I searched for a while but found nothing concrete. But I was pretty lazy about it. There's no reason to doubt that some juicier stuff is there somewhere, since it looks like it's a pretty big archive.

And no, I'm not a student at George Washington University (nor am I anywhere near it or in any way associated with it--I just went hunting around their web page looking for this stuff after I read the article).

Anyway, on this list of NSA documents with descriptions I found the following passage:

The program, codenamed ECHELON, has been described as a global surveillance network that intercepts and processes the world' communications and distributes it among the primary partners in the decades-old UKUSA alliance-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand

And this right after it:

In reality, ECHELON is a more limited program, allowing the UKUSA allies to specify intelligence requirements and automatically receive relevant intercepts obtained by the UKUSA facilities which intercept satellite communications (but not the U.S. facilities that receive data from SIGINT satellites). It is also limited by both technological barriers (the inability to develop word-spotting software so as to allow for the automatic processing of intercepted conversations) and the limitations imposed on collection activities by the UKUSA allies-at least as regards the citizens of those countries. Thus, the NAVSECGRU instruction also specifies that one of the responsibilities of the commander of the Sugar Grove site is to "ensure the privacy of U.S. citizens are properly safeguarded pursuant to the provisions of USSID 18."

(no, I don't know what the references to the "Sugar Grove site" are referring to, and don't ask me about all those silly government acronyms). Somewhere on George Washington's National Security Archive is where they claimed to have found these documents about echelon. I searched for a while but found nothing concrete. But I was pretty lazy about it. There's no reason to doubt that some juicier stuff is there somewhere, since it looks like it's a pretty big archive.

And no, I'm not a student at George Washington University (nor am I anywhere near it or in any way associated with it--I just went hunting around their web page looking for this stuff after I read the article).

According to this Wired story, Echelon proof has been discovered in declassified NSA documents. The documents are located here.

Another mirror @ gwu.edu/~wahern/decss/decss.html.

• Space Tourism Initiative
• SpaceFuture's Tourism page
• Space Markets: Tourism
• The Prospects for Space Tourism
• Zegrahm Space Voyages (wait until 2002)
• Artemis Project: Recreation (mostly lunar)

When you build a bridge, lives are at stake. That is the reason for the regulation. When you're a programmer, it doesn't make much difference if your end product just happens to crash an end user's machine every 10 minutes. Annoying? Yes. Dangerous? No.

Additionally, when you're done coding, your product is tested for problems. Problems can then be fixed. But once you've built a bridge, that's it. You can't really improve on it.

Programmers can correct each other's work with no trouble whatsoever, but once the bridge is built you're stuck.

Witold
gwu.edu/~chrabasz