Slashdot Mirror

The full story is posted at the Monterey Co. Herald's website: http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_23554739/restricted-web-access-guardian-is-army-wide-officials The article says:

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative "network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

"We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security," he wrote, "however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information."

So what happens if activists start mass-emailing the Guardian article to @mil email addresses -- will NETCOM's "strict policies" require that they disable the DoD's email servers?

We've been having a lot of this sort of thing lately. --Not all of them get this much notice, or accurate coverage. --There was a report of a 'plane' going down over some American town a week or so back, creating a huge aerial show and loud bang, putting the residents and authorities into a tizzy. --The only thing was that no planes were reported missing and they didn't find any wreckage.

I half suspect when we get one of the big ones that the PTB will have chutzpah to call it a terrorist nuke if they can get away with it.

A skimming of noted events for October. . .

Astronomy enthusiast Howard Edin reports that he was looking in the opposite direction at the time, but saw the whole observing field light up and at first thought someone had turned on their car headlights.

Reports came from residents from Carmel Valley to Salinas of a fireball shooting through the Tuesday night sky and hitting the Earth. A sheriff's deputy patrolling Carmel Valley saw it and thought enough of it to call for reinforcements.

IT appeared against the early evening sky like a flare - moments later roofs rattled and verandas shook as it crashed to earth.

[...]The Evening Telegraph has been inundated with calls and e-mails from readers who saw a strange fireball cutting a swath across the heavens[...]

For the second time this year, The University of Western Ontario Meteor Group has captured incredibly rare video footage of a meteor falling to Earth.

A bright light sped across the sky, followed by a loud explosion. Osborne County Sheriff Curtis Miner tells KSAL News that it was not an unidentified flying object, or anything sinister. It was a large meteor.

-FL

Note that the last few times I flew, the planes were pretty much full. Hardly a sign that security regulations have impacted ticket sales all that much.

That has a lot more to do with the number of canceled flights, reduced seat capacity, ticket prices, and overbooking than any impact from security. As onerous as the security theater has become there really isn't a decent substitute for airline travel over long distances so it would have to get REALLY intrusive (think latex gloves) to seriously impact ticket sales volume.

• An Iron Curtain is Descending on US
  
  
• Cheney: Water torture is OK
  
  
• Bush administration says detainee shouldn't be able to tell attorney how he was tortured in secret CIA prison
  
  
• The United States is now prosecuting suspected terrorists on the basis of their intentions, not just their actions
  
  
• Man arrested for saying "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible"
  
  
• Civil Liberties Advocates' Worst Fears Realized with Patriot Act Scandal
  
  
• Activist, anti-Bush lawyer "falls to death at hotel
  
  
• Abuse and Torture by U.S. troops
  
  
• plenty more, regretfully...
  
  

• An Iron Curtain is Descending on US
  
  
• Cheney: Water torture is OK
  
  
• Bush administration says detainee shouldn't be able to tell attorney how he was tortured in secret CIA prison
  
  
• The United States is now prosecuting suspected terrorists on the basis of their intentions, not just their actions
  
  
• Man arrested for saying "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible"
  
  
• Letter to the editor prompts visit from Secret Service
  
  
• Activist, anti-Bush lawyer "falls to death at hotel
  
  
• Abuse and Torture by U.S. troops
  
  
• plenty more, regretfully...
  
  

Even if true this does not make legitimate exposing a CIA agent and puting many lives at risk. Don't take my word for it.

"I'm beyond disgusted," a CIA official said last week. I am especially angry about the b_______ explanations that she is not a covert agent. That is an official status, and there are lots of people in this building who are on that status. It's not up to the Republican Party to determine when that status will end for an agent."
Whatever the damage to Plame, there remains the cost paid by the CIA generally. In the wake of the disclosure, foreign intelligence services were known to have retraced her steps and contacts to discover more about how the CIA operates in their countries.

And now his sexual escapades are coming to light. Maybe messing with the CIA wasn't a good idea.

He's toast, get over him. Which country do you support again?

That's fine -- if your local library has any serious funding and you have some way to get there.

In at least a couple of cases I can recall, the information was obtained by stealing magnetic tapes with customers' data that were being transferred by air. For instance, this story
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/2005/05 /03/business/11551144.htm
concerns "misplaced" computer tapes containing personal information on some 600,000 TimeWarner current and former employees. From the article:

"Iron Mountain [a secure records storage firm] last month issued a press release urging companies to use encryption software to scramble their backed-up data files. Data stored in this manner is almost impossible to decode without a special key.

But a recent survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a research firm in Milton, found that the majority of companies don't encrypt their backup files. Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst for the group, said recent data-security problems are causing many companies to begin taking encryption more seriously.

The latest security problem has made a believer of Time Warner. McKiernan said the company will begin installing a system to encrypt future backup tapes."

Stolen unencrypted tapes were also involved in the earlier disclosure of Bank of America records on over a million government workers.

...haven't had the pleasure of learning to drive in deep snow without 4WD and chains.

Actually, they probably should have hired Californians with experience driving 4WD vehicles across SAND since they got stuck in a dune. Maybe somebody who has experience in the Imperial Sand Dunes. Driving in snow is very different than driving in sand, I've done both. Plus, the rover appears to be a six wheel drive.

Don't forget the guy from UCLA that is predicting a 6.5ish earthquake in southern california within the next few days.

49 a year in just one county
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mcherald/news/46 94741.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

From a Miami Herald story about the issue:

"American society is racist, even though there are antiracist laws," Lesly Voltaire, minister for Haitians living abroad, told The Herald. "It's based on a formerly slave-owning society, which has left its mark, and there are people who think they can make money on that racism."

And it's not offensive and prejudicial when a government official from another country makes a judgement on an entire society based on a practice abolished over 100 years ago?

The world makes me so mad, and this issue is just idiotic.

I was being a bit causual with my use of bullet and shell (in all cases I meant bullet...). Technically, energy (work) is defined by Newton as the rate of change of momentum over a distance. In the case of a fragmenting bullet, there is a greater transfer of momentum (and therefore more energy released) caused by greater contact area with the medium it is passing through as opposed to a non-fragmenting round traveling at the same velocity. Also, as many people on Slashdot are known to do, I typed a sentence without proofreading it (it was redundant, if you remove the last "and causing greater damage" its just fine). As for the fragmentation of the bullets used in the DC case, I read an article similar to this where it states "Because of fragmentation of the bullets, they were unable to determine conclusively whether the other two Maryland shootings involved the same gun." and took this to mean, perhaps erroneously, that the sniper was using fragmenting bullets. This last point, however, is completely irrelevant as to whether fragmenting bullets are more damaging than standard bullets and the mechanism by which they are more dangerous, which was my original intent.