Then apparently Apple has divine protection, or the exploits are worthless. Someone would have used them by now, even if just to be the first to succeed.
And this is said while the FBI is raiding the home of the former number 3 at the CIA; the Vice President is about to be indicted for outing a CIA operation monitoring Iranian nuclear bombmaking; the entire administration has created a nationwide spy operation they didn't feel Justice lawyers needed to be consulted about; the Admin has been running covert special forces ops in Iran for over a year - an act of war, illegally done in secret; the Pres has been outed for secretly delaring war on Iraq on false pretext, killing over 30 thousand civilians...
What does religion have to say about all that? And why does the "law" care more about a teenager pulling pranks than about slaughtering 30 thousand people for no reason at all?
I should respect the law, why? The President has adopted Nixon's notion that the President IS the law, and therefore cannot ever break the law. I guess I just suppose this kid is the law, and cannot break it either. Either statement is equally constitutionally correct.
When the law is obviously manipulated to smash the relatively innocent and pardon the murderous, who cares about it anymore? The law enforcement agencies obviously don't. Powerful people make a call, a kid goes to prison, make another call, and 30 thousand people dead don't count, even as a news story.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION by Greg Palast May 12, 2006
THE SPIES WHO SHAG US THE TIMES AND USA TODAY HAVE MISSED THE BIGGER STORY -- AGAIN
I know your shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed , called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 c
Like the Florida battle, it's not the counting that's hard, it's the people manipulating the process to make it hard.
Where diebold lands, Republicans get elected. And as Texas showed, even Republicans get angry when the machines are gamed to change primary elections of Republicans (more people voting than actually exist).
It'll be hard as long as it elects Republicans. You have to live here to understand how much they hate "liberals", what they'll do to make sure they stay in power.
National bankruptcy might kick them out soon. Hope so. Nothing else will.
Shut them down, throw them away, invalidate anything these things touched. Republican partisans own and run the companies that make these damned things, first, and second it doesn't take much to reach out and flip some votes, undetectably. Computer geeks think that computers are cool and any system can be made secure. BUT. NOT IF THE SYSTEM WAS DESIGNED TO BE MANIPULATED FROM THE GETGO. There is no defense against malice. Not open code, not monitors, nothing can stop a system that was made to be gamed. They can be hacked at the terminal, the accumulator, the network, the aggregation boxes. Even if the code is known, the code can be changed in memory on the fly without a trace. Which is the IDEA.
Canada still uses manual counts, and they get the job done in hours. People counting cards are faster than malfunctioning and manipulated boxen. Counting cardboard gets slow when a political party flies in thousands of operative to jam the progress. A full manual recount of Dade would have been completed in less than 24 hours if the Supreme Court hadn't shut it down.
We're being conned, people.
Get rid of these things, or Jeb Bush will be president in 2008.
"So the fact that both NSA programs were routinely reviewed by both the Senate and House intelligence committees made up of members from both parties doesn't count right?"
These programs are NOT overseen by regular committees, and the sight of Alberto Gonzalez lying to the Congress some months ago -- on television -- on this very matter should tell you all you need to know about what "review" of these spying programs are permitted.
There are a couple of members of the intelligence committees that are privy to some of the nonsense that Bush is doing -- BUT.
They are sworn to secrecy, and to discuss the matters they know of to anyone would be a federal offense, punishable by loss of office, a fine, and a prison sentence in real federal prison. The "oversight" is garbage, for the people overseeing the NSA cannot tell anyone about what they know. Sort of opening the crate with the crowbar nailed inside the crate. They may be of the opinion that the operations are illegal and the President needs to be impeached -- BUT.
THEY CAN'T TELL ANYONE.
The "oversight" is manipulated to be impotent.
I somehow think that "oversight" will return as a Republican issue as soon as both the new Democratic president is sworn in. Oversight of his sex life, foreign policy, bank loans his staff's interns were involved in, real estate deals from twenty years ago, his military career or lack thereof, on and on and on and on and on on every cable channel for four solid years, and then redoubling in volume and nastiness when the Democrat is reelected in 2012. I don't think "national security" will stop them. Hypocrites and slime.
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
And do we get to ask the same about the lords hiring us? Do we get their credit reports? I always found that building a multi-million dollar house on the beach in Florida was a huge flag that someone is stealing funds from the stockholders, no joke.
OH -- only the peons get checked. Grovel, tip of me hat to the duke, forgive me sire, I shall kiss the hem of my employer's robe as is his due as my Lord and Employer.
Do I get an acre of land? And serve as a pikesman in milord's army when he raids the villianous IBMers across the river? Is there a horse collar in it for me at the end?
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
"These are amazing dogs if they can smell the difference between pirated data and fake data. And can they search these packages without any sort of warrent or anything?"
Ah, but 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, it's a different world now, nothing is the same, the constitution was okay in its time, but these are different days, privacy is dead, get over it, we must trust... blah blah blah...
"especially those willing to pay $100,000 for a car."
The racing car he built would cost 100 grand. That isn't the price of the commuter model he wants to build, which I assume would be around the cost of a new gasoline-powered car.
Give it thought: an electric car would have almost no moving parts in the drivetrain. No oil pump, no coolant, no fan, no radiator, no valves, nothing, nada. Motors are sealed and located in the wheel hubs, or just inside the car with transaxles linked to the wheels. The real cost is the batteries, the electronics, and the car itself. An electric car is *cheaper* to produce than a gasoline gar. And the act of mass production would drive the cost of the components down, reducing it further.
Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery, so there's why the price for NMH for cars is so damned high. They're not about to mass produce the batteries for electric cars and drive down the unit cost. They've their collective finger on the scale.
Here's a lovely thought: tax the American oil companies for their windfall profits. Nationalize the NMH patent portfolio. Exxon-Mobil didn't invent it anyway, they bought it to control the technology. Use the hundreds of billions to build a national battery industry to drive down the unit cost of NMH batteries for electric cars. Also, give out 10,000 dollar tax rebates to anyone who buys an NMH electric car.
Why? We've no problem killing almost 3,000 soldiers and over 30,000 civilians to, frankly, control the oil spigot, as it's a national security issue. Reducing the oil consumption is a critical national security issue. If killing our soldiers is an acceptable outcome, then Exxon-Mobil can lose its damned NMH patents and we can nationalize battery production. If that is too high a "sacrifice" (that Exxon-Mobil would be making) for us to make, cheap electric cars that we've already paid for, dammit, with the oil market gouging us for the last few years, than the only sacrifices we're willing to make are other countries' citizens and our soldiers. Which is it gonna be? Time is ticking: we're about to take on Iran for its oil as the Project fot the New American Century called for. How many millions will die so we don't nationalize existing tech to build transportation that costs less and doesn't require oil imports? And creates a cheap battery industry so we have something to *export* something for once, gawd?
Ah, a new member of the club
on
Head Rush Ajax
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· Score: 2, Insightful
However, when arriving home after a 10-hour day at the office programming, who has the energy to plow through yet another new facet of emerging technology?
Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I'm working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I'm just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.
The key to this project is the government's Enhanced 911 program, which will soon require all cellphones to transmit a GPS signal so that police can locate callers in need. So far, only Nextel, Boost Mobile and BlackBerry allow third-party companies to build software that uses that signal, but other carriers will follow suit this year.
Since Mologogo launched in October, its 1,000-plus members have found plenty of uses for it: following marathon runners, keeping track of the kids, planting a phone in the car in case it's stolen, watching a boyfriend's every move . . . Uh-oh.
1. Go to mologogo.com and order a starter kit, which includes a phone preloaded with the tracking application, as well as two chargers, a USB cable and $10 in prepaid credit--nearly enough for the first two months of data service. Activate the phone following the included instructions. Make sure you choose the Mobile Data plan.
2. Create two accounts at mologogo.com, one for the phone and one for the person tracking it. In each account, add the other as a "friend."
3. Set up the Mologogo software on your phone at Main Menu> Java> Apps> More> Mologogo. Enter the account information you got from the Mologogo site.
4. Give the phone to someone. Sign on to the site and see where they are.
So. Where are the viruses, then? It's been at least five years.
There aren't any. That fact alone would be a challenge to a malicious hacker. The first successful writer of Mac viruses would earn enormous respect.
And it hasn't happened. Either the virus writers are idiots, or it can't be done.
This story is FUD based on the evidence. The article is spreading -- the article is the true virus. Microsoft and its little family of corps are at it again.
if he were being trained for combat, he would have been trained on the appropriate plane. he was a man who was not slated for combat. his air guard unit was a dumping ground for those who could wangle a way out of real combat. that was the whole point of being in the texas air guard.
and he did boogie out of his assignment for a year without authorization, which is not technically, but actually desertion during wartime. he worked on a political campaign for that year. it was just understood that nothing would happen to him.
we've detailed service records on all pilots, but his went poof when he started his run for pres. there are plenty of witnesses as to his whereabouts during his awol year, but they've clammed up tight rather than be ratherized. as a matter of fact, rather was ratherized to protect just such a witness -- that was the "failure" cited to can rather, the inability to produce the witness. the witness wanted to stay anonymous to avoid retaliation -- which would definitely happen -- so mapes and rather had to be labeled "bad reporters" and the story miraculously was "disproved". in other news stories, witnesses can stay anonymous if retaliation is forthcoming. such rules were disrearded at cbs to placate the raving maniacs who wanted rather and that story smeared dead.
Markets are not free. Witness the oil distribution system and the profit gouging. In a free market, the oil companies would compete for the lowest price gasoline, since the winner would be the most popular with consumers -- no?
Doesn't seem to be working. And everyone's getting rich in the supply chain, except the customer terminal operators. The customers, and even the *shareholders*, and I am one, are getting screwed. I should be getting gazillions in Exxon dividend payouts this year. I ain't. But Exxon is *down*, the profits seem to be going to 400 million dollar retirement bonuses to executives, and the economy is Europizing into a high-priced gasoline mode.
The free market is a mirage. It works on a bazaar level, but with high speed encrypted communications and a worldwide distribution system of labor and materials, a natural collusion sets up amongst the big players and the costs of production go down while the prices go nowhere but up. The free market is a religion, and about as logical. Libertarians are getting in the way of reining in the bastards who are using them for ideological cover. The unfree market is bankrupting the world, to the enrichment of a few tens of thousands of men.
"Walmart "has crushed suppliers into a [sic] no-win situations" - sure, "crushed" is a strong emotional word, but is generally understood in this context to mean "rendered them unable to make enough money to cover their expenses, thus forcing them to go out of business." The "no-win situations" referred to here aren't explained, because it's assumed that the reader already understands what is meant by this (I would assume it's talking about Walmart convincing a supplier to do business with them, then changing their demands in ways the supplier can't keep up with, forcing the supplier to neglect their other customers, then dropping that supplier altogether and leaving them without enough revenue to cover their costs)."
But I said all that with one word. I'm efficient. Smiley face.
Yep, and I followed that red herring of Harvard for over ten minutes, sorry. My memory for ideas is fantastic but mundane details escape me. I can tell you the history of Chicago in broad strokes, but couldn't give you dates at gunpoint.
But I located and posted the link to the article I originally read (not radio, not NPR) in the thread, hope it's interesting. It's pertinent to the discussion of the Wal-Mart wiki because it speaks to the false meanings of "objectivity" and "bias" that has warped how we read news and information in the past half-century. It took Edward R. Murrow to finally break the "objectivity" meme and bring down McCarthy, and he paid dearly for it. If anything, the anti-bias fog has become denser than it was in the fifties.
BINGO! Found a source. That was really buried.
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Wal-mart's Wikipedia War
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's fitting, then, that after some hanging chads lynched his political ambitions, he returned to his roots, accepting a post at Columbia's journalism school to teach about the intersection between journalism, his first career, and the Internet, his longstanding obsession. The class, which began in Spring 2001, was entitled "Covering National Affairs in an Information Age." Gore's first lecture engaged objectivity itself, challenging the journalistic trope that fairness resides in controversy and an article has to represent all sides -- no matter how marginal -- equally. Instead, Gore argued that the journalistic impulse to exalt even the most fringe views to parity in order to furnish opposing perspectives is harmful to basic accuracy. This didn't sit well with more than a few of the wannabe reporters in the class, many of whom were aghast at the suggestion that the media should attempt to actually mediate between truth and spin. As Josh Bearman, a student in that class and now an editor at the LA Weekly, recalls it, "He stood up there challenging the entire dogma of the journalism school. First semester, you learned that objectivity was emperor, then Gore came in and told you it had no clothes."
And along with that backlash, the old anti-intellectualism Gore experienced in 2000 made a reappearance. As Bearman tells it, "He knew more than everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he was smarter than they were, and they didn't like that. We witnessed exactly what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior." Gore did not return to teach the class in 2002.
But our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to "truth." Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough. It's not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward puts it, "the latest," we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. Steven R. Weisman, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and a believer in the goal of objectivity ("even though we fall short of the ideal every day"), concedes that he felt obliged to dig more when he was an editorial writer, and did not have to be objective. "If you have to decide who is right, then you must do more reporting," he says. "I pressed the reporting further because I didn't have the luxury of saying X says this and Y says this and you, dear reader, can decide who is right."
No, an open mind in the face of overwhelming fact is willful refusal to pass judgement, not a lack of bias.
It is NOT BIAS to conclude that a thing is true. In this case, Wal-Mart has indeed made a policy of annihilating unions, shutting down entire stores to do so. It has crushed suppliers into a no-win situations. It has dropped wages overall. It has pumped manufacturing overseas. It has passed health care costs onto the taxpayers. These are things that are real. They are not opinions. That the earth orbits the sun, that hemoglobin carries oxygen, that heat in ocean water powers hurricanes, these are not opinions.
"Bias" is not refusing to provide both "points of view" if there is only one justifiable point of view. The "bias" meme has destroyed the news coverage in the U.S., rendering it worthless for sane evaluation of reality. There will always be a well-funded tiny group of businessmen who are willing to provide an instant astroturf group that will provide the "other side" of any economic or political issue, even if they have to invent a set of pseudofacts to spout. As long as the "bias" meme runs its course in the new media, the talking heads will provide both "sides" in a sprightly debate. Since the pro-business side is well funded and quite well manned, they not only create a debate where none is justified, they wear down and exhaust the quite unfunded and unmanned "other side" representing reality.
I heard a little story about Al Gore the other week. After the 2000 election, you may recall that he took a teaching position at Harvard (I think) at the school of journalism. You may also recall he left after a short time. Turns out he was lecturing the students about this very "bias" meme. He told them that it was their journalistic duty to not only to provide different points of view, but to *provide context* about those points of view -- taking a stand about the falsity of an argument. That their job was not to provide a forum for two "sides" to talk, but to question and point out that one side's arguments were actually not true if that was the case -- and this is important, not to provide a forum for false information if the information was indeed false. Apparently the students, all of which have signed on the Goldbergian "Bias" meme, revolted and wouldn't listen, and Gore eventually surrendered and left, defeated by the bias meme.
The thing to take away from that is that even Harvard's school of journalism is graduating a class of fake journalists who won't call a lie a lie, and will go on providing forums for liars to lie, and call themselves non-biased thereby. That's the best of the breed. And they will suck as journalists, and the liars will hold dominion for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Then apparently Apple has divine protection, or the exploits are worthless. Someone would have used them by now, even if just to be the first to succeed.
And this is said while the FBI is raiding the home of the former number 3 at the CIA; the Vice President is about to be indicted for outing a CIA operation monitoring Iranian nuclear bombmaking; the entire administration has created a nationwide spy operation they didn't feel Justice lawyers needed to be consulted about; the Admin has been running covert special forces ops in Iran for over a year - an act of war, illegally done in secret; the Pres has been outed for secretly delaring war on Iraq on false pretext, killing over 30 thousand civilians...
What does religion have to say about all that? And why does the "law" care more about a teenager pulling pranks than about slaughtering 30 thousand people for no reason at all?
I should respect the law, why? The President has adopted Nixon's notion that the President IS the law, and therefore cannot ever break the law. I guess I just suppose this kid is the law, and cannot break it either. Either statement is equally constitutionally correct.
When the law is obviously manipulated to smash the relatively innocent and pardon the murderous, who cares about it anymore? The law enforcement agencies obviously don't. Powerful people make a call, a kid goes to prison, make another call, and 30 thousand people dead don't count, even as a news story.
then the test of this is the presence of exploits, and soon. if none arise, then something is amiss in the calculations of risk.
http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=502&row=0
...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 c
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Greg Palast
May 12, 2006
THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
THE TIMES AND USA TODAY HAVE MISSED THE BIGGER STORY -- AGAIN
I know your shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed , called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence
Like the Florida battle, it's not the counting that's hard, it's the people manipulating the process to make it hard.
Where diebold lands, Republicans get elected. And as Texas showed, even Republicans get angry when the machines are gamed to change primary elections of Republicans (more people voting than actually exist).
It'll be hard as long as it elects Republicans. You have to live here to understand how much they hate "liberals", what they'll do to make sure they stay in power.
National bankruptcy might kick them out soon. Hope so. Nothing else will.
Shut them down, throw them away, invalidate anything these things touched. Republican partisans own and run the companies that make these damned things, first, and second it doesn't take much to reach out and flip some votes, undetectably. Computer geeks think that computers are cool and any system can be made secure. BUT. NOT IF THE SYSTEM WAS DESIGNED TO BE MANIPULATED FROM THE GETGO. There is no defense against malice. Not open code, not monitors, nothing can stop a system that was made to be gamed. They can be hacked at the terminal, the accumulator, the network, the aggregation boxes. Even if the code is known, the code can be changed in memory on the fly without a trace. Which is the IDEA.
Canada still uses manual counts, and they get the job done in hours. People counting cards are faster than malfunctioning and manipulated boxen. Counting cardboard gets slow when a political party flies in thousands of operative to jam the progress. A full manual recount of Dade would have been completed in less than 24 hours if the Supreme Court hadn't shut it down.
We're being conned, people.
Get rid of these things, or Jeb Bush will be president in 2008.
"So the fact that both NSA programs were routinely reviewed by both the Senate and House intelligence committees made up of members from both parties doesn't count right?"
These programs are NOT overseen by regular committees, and the sight of Alberto Gonzalez lying to the Congress some months ago -- on television -- on this very matter should tell you all you need to know about what "review" of these spying programs are permitted.
There are a couple of members of the intelligence committees that are privy to some of the nonsense that Bush is doing -- BUT.
They are sworn to secrecy, and to discuss the matters they know of to anyone would be a federal offense, punishable by loss of office, a fine, and a prison sentence in real federal prison. The "oversight" is garbage, for the people overseeing the NSA cannot tell anyone about what they know. Sort of opening the crate with the crowbar nailed inside the crate. They may be of the opinion that the operations are illegal and the President needs to be impeached -- BUT.
THEY CAN'T TELL ANYONE.
The "oversight" is manipulated to be impotent.
I somehow think that "oversight" will return as a Republican issue as soon as both the new Democratic president is sworn in. Oversight of his sex life, foreign policy, bank loans his staff's interns were involved in, real estate deals from twenty years ago, his military career or lack thereof, on and on and on and on and on on every cable channel for four solid years, and then redoubling in volume and nastiness when the Democrat is reelected in 2012. I don't think "national security" will stop them. Hypocrites and slime.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/domestic_spying;_ylt=Al
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
___
On the Net:
Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/index.html [usdoj.gov]
National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm [nsa.gov]
sorry -- i posted to the wrong story. me bad.
"There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that."
Straw man. Limbaughian. No one argued for permanent employment, just sanity.
And do we get to ask the same about the lords hiring us? Do we get their credit reports? I always found that building a multi-million dollar house on the beach in Florida was a huge flag that someone is stealing funds from the stockholders, no joke.
OH -- only the peons get checked. Grovel, tip of me hat to the duke, forgive me sire, I shall kiss the hem of my employer's robe as is his due as my Lord and Employer.
Do I get an acre of land? And serve as a pikesman in milord's army when he raids the villianous IBMers across the river? Is there a horse collar in it for me at the end?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/domestic_spying;_ylt=Al tzCvZmCXzQ.QsFg5wYT2Os0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBH NlYwN0bQ--
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
___
On the Net:
Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/index.html
National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm
"These are amazing dogs if they can smell the difference between pirated data and fake data. And can they search these packages without any sort of warrent or anything?"
Ah, but 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, it's a different world now, nothing is the same, the constitution was okay in its time, but these are different days, privacy is dead, get over it, we must trust... blah blah blah...
"especially those willing to pay $100,000 for a car."
The racing car he built would cost 100 grand. That isn't the price of the commuter model he wants to build, which I assume would be around the cost of a new gasoline-powered car.
Give it thought: an electric car would have almost no moving parts in the drivetrain. No oil pump, no coolant, no fan, no radiator, no valves, nothing, nada. Motors are sealed and located in the wheel hubs, or just inside the car with transaxles linked to the wheels. The real cost is the batteries, the electronics, and the car itself. An electric car is *cheaper* to produce than a gasoline gar. And the act of mass production would drive the cost of the components down, reducing it further.
Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery, so there's why the price for NMH for cars is so damned high. They're not about to mass produce the batteries for electric cars and drive down the unit cost. They've their collective finger on the scale.
Here's a lovely thought: tax the American oil companies for their windfall profits. Nationalize the NMH patent portfolio. Exxon-Mobil didn't invent it anyway, they bought it to control the technology. Use the hundreds of billions to build a national battery industry to drive down the unit cost of NMH batteries for electric cars. Also, give out 10,000 dollar tax rebates to anyone who buys an NMH electric car.
Why? We've no problem killing almost 3,000 soldiers and over 30,000 civilians to, frankly, control the oil spigot, as it's a national security issue. Reducing the oil consumption is a critical national security issue. If killing our soldiers is an acceptable outcome, then Exxon-Mobil can lose its damned NMH patents and we can nationalize battery production. If that is too high a "sacrifice" (that Exxon-Mobil would be making) for us to make, cheap electric cars that we've already paid for, dammit, with the oil market gouging us for the last few years, than the only sacrifices we're willing to make are other countries' citizens and our soldiers. Which is it gonna be? Time is ticking: we're about to take on Iran for its oil as the Project fot the New American Century called for. How many millions will die so we don't nationalize existing tech to build transportation that costs less and doesn't require oil imports? And creates a cheap battery industry so we have something to *export* something for once, gawd?
However, when arriving home after a 10-hour day at the office programming, who has the energy to plow through yet another new facet of emerging technology?
It's called aging, kid. Welcome to the club!
Track Anyone With a Cell1 0vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
.com, one for the phone and one for the person tracking it. In each account, add the other as a "friend."
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/f88b973910a9a0
Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I'm working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I'm just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.
The key to this project is the government's Enhanced 911 program, which will soon require all cellphones to transmit a GPS signal so that police can locate callers in need. So far, only Nextel, Boost Mobile and BlackBerry allow third-party companies to build software that uses that signal, but other carriers will follow suit this year.
Since Mologogo launched in October, its 1,000-plus members have found plenty of uses for it: following marathon runners, keeping track of the kids, planting a phone in the car in case it's stolen, watching a boyfriend's every move . . . Uh-oh.
1. Go to mologogo.com and order a starter kit, which includes a phone preloaded with the tracking application, as well as two chargers, a USB cable and $10 in prepaid credit--nearly enough for the first two months of data service. Activate the phone following the included instructions. Make sure you choose the Mobile Data plan.
2. Create two accounts at mologogo
3. Set up the Mologogo software on your phone at Main Menu> Java> Apps> More> Mologogo. Enter the account information you got from the Mologogo site.
4. Give the phone to someone. Sign on to the site and see where they are.
So. Where are the viruses, then? It's been at least five years.
There aren't any. That fact alone would be a challenge to a malicious hacker. The first successful writer of Mac viruses would earn enormous respect.
And it hasn't happened. Either the virus writers are idiots, or it can't be done.
This story is FUD based on the evidence. The article is spreading -- the article is the true virus. Microsoft and its little family of corps are at it again.
if he were being trained for combat, he would have been trained on the appropriate plane. he was a man who was not slated for combat. his air guard unit was a dumping ground for those who could wangle a way out of real combat. that was the whole point of being in the texas air guard.
and he did boogie out of his assignment for a year without authorization, which is not technically, but actually desertion during wartime. he worked on a political campaign for that year. it was just understood that nothing would happen to him.
we've detailed service records on all pilots, but his went poof when he started his run for pres. there are plenty of witnesses as to his whereabouts during his awol year, but they've clammed up tight rather than be ratherized. as a matter of fact, rather was ratherized to protect just such a witness -- that was the "failure" cited to can rather, the inability to produce the witness. the witness wanted to stay anonymous to avoid retaliation -- which would definitely happen -- so mapes and rather had to be labeled "bad reporters" and the story miraculously was "disproved". in other news stories, witnesses can stay anonymous if retaliation is forthcoming. such rules were disrearded at cbs to placate the raving maniacs who wanted rather and that story smeared dead.
Markets are not free. Witness the oil distribution system and the profit gouging. In a free market, the oil companies would compete for the lowest price gasoline, since the winner would be the most popular with consumers -- no?
Doesn't seem to be working. And everyone's getting rich in the supply chain, except the customer terminal operators. The customers, and even the *shareholders*, and I am one, are getting screwed. I should be getting gazillions in Exxon dividend payouts this year. I ain't. But Exxon is *down*, the profits seem to be going to 400 million dollar retirement bonuses to executives, and the economy is Europizing into a high-priced gasoline mode.
The free market is a mirage. It works on a bazaar level, but with high speed encrypted communications and a worldwide distribution system of labor and materials, a natural collusion sets up amongst the big players and the costs of production go down while the prices go nowhere but up. The free market is a religion, and about as logical. Libertarians are getting in the way of reining in the bastards who are using them for ideological cover. The unfree market is bankrupting the world, to the enrichment of a few tens of thousands of men.
"Walmart "has crushed suppliers into a [sic] no-win situations" - sure, "crushed" is a strong emotional word, but is generally understood in this context to mean "rendered them unable to make enough money to cover their expenses, thus forcing them to go out of business." The "no-win situations" referred to here aren't explained, because it's assumed that the reader already understands what is meant by this (I would assume it's talking about Walmart convincing a supplier to do business with them, then changing their demands in ways the supplier can't keep up with, forcing the supplier to neglect their other customers, then dropping that supplier altogether and leaving them without enough revenue to cover their costs)."
But I said all that with one word. I'm efficient. Smiley face.
Yep, and I followed that red herring of Harvard for over ten minutes, sorry. My memory for ideas is fantastic but mundane details escape me. I can tell you the history of Chicago in broad strokes, but couldn't give you dates at gunpoint.
But I located and posted the link to the article I originally read (not radio, not NPR) in the thread, hope it's interesting. It's pertinent to the discussion of the Wal-Mart wiki because it speaks to the false meanings of "objectivity" and "bias" that has warped how we read news and information in the past half-century. It took Edward R. Murrow to finally break the "objectivity" meme and bring down McCarthy, and he paid dearly for it. If anything, the anti-bias fog has become denser than it was in the fifties.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&n ame=ViewPrint&articleId=11299
Never let it be said I don't do the legwork...
It's fitting, then, that after some hanging chads lynched his political ambitions, he returned to his roots, accepting a post at Columbia's journalism school to teach about the intersection between journalism, his first career, and the Internet, his longstanding obsession. The class, which began in Spring 2001, was entitled "Covering National Affairs in an Information Age." Gore's first lecture engaged objectivity itself, challenging the journalistic trope that fairness resides in controversy and an article has to represent all sides -- no matter how marginal -- equally. Instead, Gore argued that the journalistic impulse to exalt even the most fringe views to parity in order to furnish opposing perspectives is harmful to basic accuracy. This didn't sit well with more than a few of the wannabe reporters in the class, many of whom were aghast at the suggestion that the media should attempt to actually mediate between truth and spin. As Josh Bearman, a student in that class and now an editor at the LA Weekly, recalls it, "He stood up there challenging the entire dogma of the journalism school. First semester, you learned that objectivity was emperor, then Gore came in and told you it had no clothes."
And along with that backlash, the old anti-intellectualism Gore experienced in 2000 made a reappearance. As Bearman tells it, "He knew more than everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he was smarter than they were, and they didn't like that. We witnessed exactly what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior." Gore did not return to teach the class in 2002.
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/4/objective-cunning ham.asp Re-thinking Objectivity
a snippit:
But our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to "truth." Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough. It's not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward puts it, "the latest," we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. Steven R. Weisman, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and a believer in the goal of objectivity ("even though we fall short of the ideal every day"), concedes that he felt obliged to dig more when he was an editorial writer, and did not have to be objective. "If you have to decide who is right, then you must do more reporting," he says. "I pressed the reporting further because I didn't have the luxury of saying X says this and Y says this and you, dear reader, can decide who is right."
It was Columbia's school of journalism... not Harvard... and since I heard it on NPR, it's damned hard to track down... be with ya soon, I hope.
No, an open mind in the face of overwhelming fact is willful refusal to pass judgement, not a lack of bias.
It is NOT BIAS to conclude that a thing is true. In this case, Wal-Mart has indeed made a policy of annihilating unions, shutting down entire stores to do so. It has crushed suppliers into a no-win situations. It has dropped wages overall. It has pumped manufacturing overseas. It has passed health care costs onto the taxpayers. These are things that are real. They are not opinions. That the earth orbits the sun, that hemoglobin carries oxygen, that heat in ocean water powers hurricanes, these are not opinions.
"Bias" is not refusing to provide both "points of view" if there is only one justifiable point of view. The "bias" meme has destroyed the news coverage in the U.S., rendering it worthless for sane evaluation of reality. There will always be a well-funded tiny group of businessmen who are willing to provide an instant astroturf group that will provide the "other side" of any economic or political issue, even if they have to invent a set of pseudofacts to spout. As long as the "bias" meme runs its course in the new media, the talking heads will provide both "sides" in a sprightly debate. Since the pro-business side is well funded and quite well manned, they not only create a debate where none is justified, they wear down and exhaust the quite unfunded and unmanned "other side" representing reality.
I heard a little story about Al Gore the other week. After the 2000 election, you may recall that he took a teaching position at Harvard (I think) at the school of journalism. You may also recall he left after a short time. Turns out he was lecturing the students about this very "bias" meme. He told them that it was their journalistic duty to not only to provide different points of view, but to *provide context* about those points of view -- taking a stand about the falsity of an argument. That their job was not to provide a forum for two "sides" to talk, but to question and point out that one side's arguments were actually not true if that was the case -- and this is important, not to provide a forum for false information if the information was indeed false. Apparently the students, all of which have signed on the Goldbergian "Bias" meme, revolted and wouldn't listen, and Gore eventually surrendered and left, defeated by the bias meme.
The thing to take away from that is that even Harvard's school of journalism is graduating a class of fake journalists who won't call a lie a lie, and will go on providing forums for liars to lie, and call themselves non-biased thereby. That's the best of the breed. And they will suck as journalists, and the liars will hold dominion for decades.