Do they also take a picture when you put it back on the shelf? What if you bumped the shelf and knocked one off with your cart and put it back? What if you picked one up and decided that some other brand was a better deal? On the hardware side, what happens if someone spends half an hour removing and putting back razor blades? I suppose this is all digital, but do they have a flash card big enough for that many photos?
Continuous non-discrimatory survellience is fine by me, but this idea clearly has issues that may not have been thought through by Tesco. Its these issues that bother me whenever privacy concerns come up: "What happens to the people when automated systems fuck up?"
I can do that just fine on my couch in the living room with the TV there
Though, a laptop... I've been thinking of getting the 17" Powerbook. Nice widescreen aspect display perfect for movies. I could live with 17" as a mobile movie-watching platform.
Now if only I could find a battery backpack I could hook up to it for 'round the clock entertainment.
I see no difference between this and your fingerprint.
Its difficult for me to plant your fingerprint. I would have to somehow convince you to touch either a soft moulding material, or collect a fingerprint which I could then somehow etch into a moulding material. (There was a CSI episode about this...)
Its trivial for me to plant your DNA. I could just go anywhere you've been and pick up saliva from dinnerware or cigarette butts, or if you have readily visible hair, lost strands of hair. Granted, this wouldn't be much material, but I could gather more in a casual meeting. I could be walking down the street with an armload of wood or something and just accidentially bump into you and manage to draw blood. Sure, you would quickly remember that I cut you, but it wouldn't help you before the cops came to arrest you.
In the end, I feel that can trust DNA when its being used as a "final nail in the coffin" type of evidence in a case. When its the only evidence though, thats when I start to wonder.
but, it is really hard to condemn a case like this, where a man has been brought to justice as a result.
Was he?
Look at it this way: When you have a pre-existing registry, how hard is it to tell your crime lab "Hey, can you fake up a lab report to match this DNA? Thanks!"
And before people start talking about how the good ole US government would never do anything like that, read up on the crime lab scandals here in good ole Houston, Texas.
How long before it's possible to reliably decipher burnt, cross-shredded documents?
Not long at all. Intact burnt documents can be recovered already, since the inks used have a different chemical composition from the bare paper. Of course, the solution to this is to cross shred your document, burn the pieces, then mash up the ashes until it is dust.
The problem isn't so much of the everything-morphing-into-one-uberdevice variety but of the 802.11* variety. I have a number of devices now that have wireless built in, and I have to start the device (including wireless) before I can turn it off. If I forget to do this before I get on the plane, well, I suppose I can hope nobody notices the plane making a dive while I quickly disable the network)
And yet movie clips on your cell phone are the Next Big Thing (at least thats what the cellphone makers claim)?
Personally, I'm in the bigger-is-better camp when it comes to video. I'd rather just wait until I was at home instead of trying to watch a movie on a laptop (or those tiny portable dvd players. eww). Right now, I'm torn between getting a really large rear-projection TV, a 50" plasma tv, or a really nice projector. (Whatever I choose, it will have to wait until I have a place to put it)
That said, coupling something like this with the "real world hyperlinking" to point at a movie poster or something and get a preview clip would be nifty. Just not trying for full-length movies or shows.
Hm, actually this may not be too hard. Apache already has mod_python. The problem would be you would still need some kind of persistent daemon, which handles the actual tracking and communication between the clients. I'm not sure a mod_torrent type thing would be such a good idea (even though the docs here says it could be), since you would have to handle the IPC between all the different copies of apache spawned to handle the requests. Still, if you work out the persistence and locking you'd need to maintain a list of peers, it shouldn't be much of a problem...
Then we just need to setup more legit torrents. Why not prod the people at sourceforge to setup a bittorrent system?
If technologies begin to be judged "good" or "evil" based on the majority of its usage rather than its intent or capability, then all it takes is to spawn as many instances... no matter how trivial... that aren't "evil" as are necessary to win. If bittorrent's life is in the balance, a few bittorrent mirrors of sunsite, debian, and rpmfind should do the trick.
This is where we get into the useful uses of technologies like Palladium. Not some crazy harebrained DRM scheme fingerprinting everything you do and tying it to your computer forever, but a (hopefully) cryptographically sound method of indicating that Executable X is the original, untouched Executable X, and that its current memory image is valid. (My God, it would mean that you could trust your computer! I better scrap this before the "Trustworthy Computing" people get a hold of it!)
Imagine something like VMWare with "selective rollback". Because of the combinatorics, I'm not sure it's entirely possible
Something like this would work fine as long as the intruder didn't change anything that was being changed by a normal process. If the intruder started writing or removing CC numbers from a CC list that was being updated (as if I'd keep them in plain text...), then a rollback would have to be very very crafty to identify "bad" changes vs. "good" changes (hence the idea of custom write() and such in libc - modifying it to somehow log each write, the data written, and the responsible process would help with this rollback process).
Not easy by any means, but possible (with the same caveats of statically compiled tools provided by the intruder as in my original post). The next step would be embodying this idea within the filesystem or kernel itself, so that libc hacking would not be required.
So how would the above solution deal with all that other than at the postmortem stage?
I don't think User Mode Linux is "there" yet, but this scenario is the kind of thing I'm thinking of:
Intruder exploits yet another overflow in wu-ftpd and fires up a shell. At this point, the IDS has determined that wu-ftpd is acting erratically and forks the system: the original was actually an UML instance running on a host with a bit of ipmasq/conntrack glue. A new UML is spawned, all the services restart within it, and iptables is updated so that all traffic except that to/from the intruder is re-routed to the new UML. Meanwhile, the old UML has switched to a copy-on-write filesystem mode (this would need to be written) where everything looks and behaves as if the filesystem was being changed, but behind the UML scenes, the altered files are actually being stored in a completely different directory. Eventually, IDS determines the intruder has packed up, and kills the UML. The directory of changes is archived for analysis, and iptables is updated to drop the intruder's packets forever.
Meanwhile, the replacement UML continues as if almost nothing has happened (This wouldn't work so well for databases, since their file storage would be inconsistent and missing a lot of cached data, though you could get creative and signal the "compromised" UML's db server to flush cache and clean up before switching to the copy-on-write fs mode.
All of this assumes that nothing compromisable is running on the host system, and that the UML/host isolation is perfect, which it probably isn't (I haven't considered using UML in this way before).
Question: If you know how the intruder got in using this on-the-fly automated system, why not just patch the vulnerability in advance?
You don't need to know in advance the vulnerability to figure out how someone got in. If Apache suddenly spawns a shell, well, that is a pretty good hint right there (or that some nutter is using a shellscript as a CGI, but they deserve getting false negatives in that case).
Plus, if you combine this with packet data logging (probably with a protocol level filtering tool, so you only have to deal with interesting parts of the conversation), it can be quite useful (although slow...), say you log apache starting a shell, and at the same time you logged an "interesting" request consisting of the same byte repeated 5000 times followed by a known shellcode pattern, you'd have an even better idea of what happened.
That is absurd. When you have free and unlicensed access to media, you are less likely to buy it, and thus the owner loses money.
But they don't lose the song. Theres a difference between theft/robbery (where something is taken) and damages which arise from copyright infringement (where nothing is taken, but foggy damages somewhere in a misty future are incurred). Current copyright law greatly overvalues these damages (see the multibillion dollar RIAA lawsuits), resulting in damages that are sometimes far, far more than the infringed item was worth.
Lets look at some numbers. Such as 3 years of jail time (6 for repeat offenders)+$250,000+$150,000 per infringement. If I download a song which I can point to having a "market value" of $1 (see iTunes), how is $400,000 even close to a reasonable punishment for "theft"? And remember, this is per infringement... each song I download would get me another $150,000 charge.
Now, lets take a look at REAL theft. Assuming no criminal history exists, if I steal a $1 candybar, I get AT MOST $4,000 and no more than a year in Jail per incident, and thats if it gets all the way up to a Class C Misdemeanor (thats grabbing a LOT of candybars!) (See This retailer info page for Texas).
So, compare those numbers for a moment and reflect on your "copyright is theft" schtick. Now run back to your RIAA mommy and don't come back until you can explain why this inequality in supposedly "equal" thefts exists.
I think the next step from intrusion-tolerance would be a system that logs intruder activity, determines how the intruder got in, and when the intruder leaves, cleans up whatever rootkits, etc. were left behind after logging everything it can about the event.
Other interesting ideas would be determining "tainted" processes run or otherwise affected (library overwrites, etc) by the intruder, and automatically sandboxing these processes in a nifty little world that looks realistic, but couldn't be used for a DDoS.
Anyone up for writing a drop-in libc replacement that screens any attempts to overwrite libc? You'd also have to override the linker behavior, so that an attacker couldn't just LD_PRELOAD a normal libc for their apps. You'd still be open to statically compiled apps, so this may be a lot of work for only a little gain.
Of course, this would make it hard to upgrade libc;)
Actually, some systems have nice numbers running one way, and some have them running the other way. Whenever I touch a platform I've never used before, I always check the manpages for common utilities I use. Thats avoided all sorts of wonderful things like using "killall" on Solaris.
>>There is a large quantity of child porn on Freenet.
>On what authority do you make this claim?
Good point. If everything is encrypted, how can one claim to know that there is a large quantity of child porn on it? Even if the poster put it there themselves, how would the poster know it was still there, since after all content expires and disappears if it is not in demand.
Of course, the poster could just be claiming a "well, it can be used like this, therefore it must be being used like this a lot." Which is a persuasive argument, except for the fact that it has fallen flat on its face, HARD, time and time again. Just think about this example yourself: Concealed handgun act in Texas... people were saying that this would increase the murder rate, since if everyone was packing a gun, robbers would just start shooting first and then looting the corpse instead of trying for the old stick'em'up routine. Didn't happen.
I think if I had to give a name to this logical failure, it would be "Reverse Application of Ockham's Razor"... the Razor says that the simplest cause is probably the correct one. It cannot be applied in reverse to indicate that the simplest outcome will occur.
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network.
Its not much of a file sharing network at all. You can't search it anonymously. Sure, there are spiders and indexes and such, but these all operate outside of the field of anonymity. So you could establish a child porn ring using it, but the only useful way to make use of it would be if you had a non-anonymous external channel for communicating with your conspirators.
Yeah, and of course anyone who complains about the cameras in their daughters' rooms MUST be breaking the law. After all, the only people who complain when privacy rights disappear are the ones who have something to hide.
Of course, by the time it reaches a point where even the staunchest pro-survelliance-anti-privacy advocates realize the government has crossed the line, it will be too late... they'll have the cameras in their childrens' bedrooms too, and speaking out against them would clearly indicate that they have something to hide...
So yeah, your drive *might* have kiddie pr0n, but the way freenet works is that unpopular stuff eventually expires from your host. If nobody can find the kiddie pr0n, nobody can request it, and it dies.
Of course, someone could post the key to the kiddie pr0n somewhere, but that would risk being caught. I don't think that kiddie pr0n makers are as much of a candidate for martyrdom as, say, someone with the Falun Gong would be.
In the end, it comes down to "Is kiddie pr0n more popular than other forms of communication?" If it is, then freenet will eventually fill with it. If it isn't then freenet will eventually expire it. Your answer to that question depends on your faith in your fellow users.
I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone.
Thats just not going to happen. There is far too much expense in terms of R&D and Risk for a company to be involved. Otherwise, companies would already be involved. Right now, we have NASA, and a bunch of rocket hobbyists on steroids competing for the X-Prize, and thats it.
So my representatives' time is being spent going over every item on the receipt, interviewing the individual who did the purchase, and the individual which sold the goods, to make sure that the $500 toilet seats really are $500, and that the CIA didn't come up with a very real-looking receipt?
You're not being paranoid enough. There are always things in the government that Official X doesn't know about. I'm just trying to get the paranoiacs to bite by pointing out that its entirely possible for all these ridiculous (congress-approved) expenditures to be a smokescreen for something more sinister than toilet seats, ashtrays, and hammers.
What do you think? Where does the extra $450 of a $500 toilet seat go? Enough toilet seats and I could buy a decent fighter jet. Does congress know that all $500 of those dollars really did go to the manufacturer of the toilet seat? That toilet seats weren't bought for $50 each, then the number inflated to make secret project money secretly disappear?
Then it doesn't come from tax dollars, and I don't care.
Well no, it does come from tax dollars. Do you think that congress takes the time to see how the money is actually spent after it allocates it? Does congress know that Ashcroft's office isn't paying out "salary" to employees it doesn't actually have? I wouldn't be suprised if after congress "kills" TIA by not funding it, that Ashcroft's office suddenly finds itself with a few new employees, like "Thomas I. Anglemeyer" and "Theresa I. Allman". I'm sure they're even better at making up fake names than I am. And if they can't make up enough names, they'll suddenly need to order new "$500" toilet seats and hammers.
The fact is, if you're a conspiracy nut, nothing the government will do will convince you that TIA is gone. If you're not a conspiracy nut, why are you reading this, since to you, TIA was never a problem in the first place?
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Do they also take a picture when you put it back on the shelf? What if you bumped the shelf and knocked one off with your cart and put it back? What if you picked one up and decided that some other brand was a better deal? On the hardware side, what happens if someone spends half an hour removing and putting back razor blades? I suppose this is all digital, but do they have a flash card big enough for that many photos?
Continuous non-discrimatory survellience is fine by me, but this idea clearly has issues that may not have been thought through by Tesco. Its these issues that bother me whenever privacy concerns come up: "What happens to the people when automated systems fuck up?"
I guess this is what happens when you do your accounting on Tombstones!
I can do that just fine on my couch in the living room with the TV there
Though, a laptop... I've been thinking of getting the 17" Powerbook. Nice widescreen aspect display perfect for movies. I could live with 17" as a mobile movie-watching platform.
Now if only I could find a battery backpack I could hook up to it for 'round the clock entertainment.
Sort of a new meaning to rubbing someone out ;)
I see no difference between this and your fingerprint.
Its difficult for me to plant your fingerprint. I would have to somehow convince you to touch either a soft moulding material, or collect a fingerprint which I could then somehow etch into a moulding material. (There was a CSI episode about this...)
Its trivial for me to plant your DNA. I could just go anywhere you've been and pick up saliva from dinnerware or cigarette butts, or if you have readily visible hair, lost strands of hair. Granted, this wouldn't be much material, but I could gather more in a casual meeting. I could be walking down the street with an armload of wood or something and just accidentially bump into you and manage to draw blood. Sure, you would quickly remember that I cut you, but it wouldn't help you before the cops came to arrest you.
In the end, I feel that can trust DNA when its being used as a "final nail in the coffin" type of evidence in a case. When its the only evidence though, thats when I start to wonder.
but, it is really hard to condemn a case like this, where a man has been brought to justice as a result.
Was he?
Look at it this way: When you have a pre-existing registry, how hard is it to tell your crime lab "Hey, can you fake up a lab report to match this DNA? Thanks!"
And before people start talking about how the good ole US government would never do anything like that, read up on the crime lab scandals here in good ole Houston, Texas.
How long before it's possible to reliably decipher burnt, cross-shredded documents?
Not long at all. Intact burnt documents can be recovered already, since the inks used have a different chemical composition from the bare paper. Of course, the solution to this is to cross shred your document, burn the pieces, then mash up the ashes until it is dust.
The problem isn't so much of the everything-morphing-into-one-uberdevice variety but of the 802.11* variety. I have a number of devices now that have wireless built in, and I have to start the device (including wireless) before I can turn it off. If I forget to do this before I get on the plane, well, I suppose I can hope nobody notices the plane making a dive while I quickly disable the network)
And yet movie clips on your cell phone are the Next Big Thing (at least thats what the cellphone makers claim)?
Personally, I'm in the bigger-is-better camp when it comes to video. I'd rather just wait until I was at home instead of trying to watch a movie on a laptop (or those tiny portable dvd players. eww). Right now, I'm torn between getting a really large rear-projection TV, a 50" plasma tv, or a really nice projector. (Whatever I choose, it will have to wait until I have a place to put it)
That said, coupling something like this with the "real world hyperlinking" to point at a movie poster or something and get a preview clip would be nifty. Just not trying for full-length movies or shows.
Hm, actually this may not be too hard. Apache already has mod_python. The problem would be you would still need some kind of persistent daemon, which handles the actual tracking and communication between the clients. I'm not sure a mod_torrent type thing would be such a good idea (even though the docs here says it could be), since you would have to handle the IPC between all the different copies of apache spawned to handle the requests. Still, if you work out the persistence and locking you'd need to maintain a list of peers, it shouldn't be much of a problem...
Then we just need to setup more legit torrents. Why not prod the people at sourceforge to setup a bittorrent system?
If technologies begin to be judged "good" or "evil" based on the majority of its usage rather than its intent or capability, then all it takes is to spawn as many instances... no matter how trivial... that aren't "evil" as are necessary to win. If bittorrent's life is in the balance, a few bittorrent mirrors of sunsite, debian, and rpmfind should do the trick.
This is where we get into the useful uses of technologies like Palladium. Not some crazy harebrained DRM scheme fingerprinting everything you do and tying it to your computer forever, but a (hopefully) cryptographically sound method of indicating that Executable X is the original, untouched Executable X, and that its current memory image is valid. (My God, it would mean that you could trust your computer! I better scrap this before the "Trustworthy Computing" people get a hold of it!)
Imagine something like VMWare with "selective rollback". Because of the combinatorics, I'm not sure it's entirely possible
Something like this would work fine as long as the intruder didn't change anything that was being changed by a normal process. If the intruder started writing or removing CC numbers from a CC list that was being updated (as if I'd keep them in plain text...), then a rollback would have to be very very crafty to identify "bad" changes vs. "good" changes (hence the idea of custom write() and such in libc - modifying it to somehow log each write, the data written, and the responsible process would help with this rollback process).
Not easy by any means, but possible (with the same caveats of statically compiled tools provided by the intruder as in my original post). The next step would be embodying this idea within the filesystem or kernel itself, so that libc hacking would not be required.
So how would the above solution deal with all that other than at the postmortem stage?
I don't think User Mode Linux is "there" yet, but this scenario is the kind of thing I'm thinking of:
Intruder exploits yet another overflow in wu-ftpd and fires up a shell. At this point, the IDS has determined that wu-ftpd is acting erratically and forks the system: the original was actually an UML instance running on a host with a bit of ipmasq/conntrack glue. A new UML is spawned, all the services restart within it, and iptables is updated so that all traffic except that to/from the intruder is re-routed to the new UML. Meanwhile, the old UML has switched to a copy-on-write filesystem mode (this would need to be written) where everything looks and behaves as if the filesystem was being changed, but behind the UML scenes, the altered files are actually being stored in a completely different directory. Eventually, IDS determines the intruder has packed up, and kills the UML. The directory of changes is archived for analysis, and iptables is updated to drop the intruder's packets forever.
Meanwhile, the replacement UML continues as if almost nothing has happened (This wouldn't work so well for databases, since their file storage would be inconsistent and missing a lot of cached data, though you could get creative and signal the "compromised" UML's db server to flush cache and clean up before switching to the copy-on-write fs mode.
All of this assumes that nothing compromisable is running on the host system, and that the UML/host isolation is perfect, which it probably isn't (I haven't considered using UML in this way before).
Question: If you know how the intruder got in using this on-the-fly automated system, why not just patch the vulnerability in advance?
You don't need to know in advance the vulnerability to figure out how someone got in. If Apache suddenly spawns a shell, well, that is a pretty good hint right there (or that some nutter is using a shellscript as a CGI, but they deserve getting false negatives in that case).
Plus, if you combine this with packet data logging (probably with a protocol level filtering tool, so you only have to deal with interesting parts of the conversation), it can be quite useful (although slow...), say you log apache starting a shell, and at the same time you logged an "interesting" request consisting of the same byte repeated 5000 times followed by a known shellcode pattern, you'd have an even better idea of what happened.
That is absurd. When you have free and unlicensed access to media, you are less likely to buy it, and thus the owner loses money.
But they don't lose the song. Theres a difference between theft/robbery (where something is taken) and damages which arise from copyright infringement (where nothing is taken, but foggy damages somewhere in a misty future are incurred). Current copyright law greatly overvalues these damages (see the multibillion dollar RIAA lawsuits), resulting in damages that are sometimes far, far more than the infringed item was worth.
Lets look at some numbers. Such as 3 years of jail time (6 for repeat offenders)+$250,000+$150,000 per infringement. If I download a song which I can point to having a "market value" of $1 (see iTunes), how is $400,000 even close to a reasonable punishment for "theft"? And remember, this is per infringement... each song I download would get me another $150,000 charge.
Now, lets take a look at REAL theft. Assuming no criminal history exists, if I steal a $1 candybar, I get AT MOST $4,000 and no more than a year in Jail per incident, and thats if it gets all the way up to a Class C Misdemeanor (thats grabbing a LOT of candybars!) (See This retailer info page for Texas).
So, compare those numbers for a moment and reflect on your "copyright is theft" schtick. Now run back to your RIAA mommy and don't come back until you can explain why this inequality in supposedly "equal" thefts exists.
I think the next step from intrusion-tolerance would be a system that logs intruder activity, determines how the intruder got in, and when the intruder leaves, cleans up whatever rootkits, etc. were left behind after logging everything it can about the event.
;)
Other interesting ideas would be determining "tainted" processes run or otherwise affected (library overwrites, etc) by the intruder, and automatically sandboxing these processes in a nifty little world that looks realistic, but couldn't be used for a DDoS.
Anyone up for writing a drop-in libc replacement that screens any attempts to overwrite libc? You'd also have to override the linker behavior, so that an attacker couldn't just LD_PRELOAD a normal libc for their apps. You'd still be open to statically compiled apps, so this may be a lot of work for only a little gain.
Of course, this would make it hard to upgrade libc
Actually, some systems have nice numbers running one way, and some have them running the other way. Whenever I touch a platform I've never used before, I always check the manpages for common utilities I use. Thats avoided all sorts of wonderful things like using "killall" on Solaris.
>>There is a large quantity of child porn on Freenet.
>On what authority do you make this claim?
Good point. If everything is encrypted, how can one claim to know that there is a large quantity of child porn on it? Even if the poster put it there themselves, how would the poster know it was still there, since after all content expires and disappears if it is not in demand.
Of course, the poster could just be claiming a "well, it can be used like this, therefore it must be being used like this a lot." Which is a persuasive argument, except for the fact that it has fallen flat on its face, HARD, time and time again. Just think about this example yourself: Concealed handgun act in Texas... people were saying that this would increase the murder rate, since if everyone was packing a gun, robbers would just start shooting first and then looting the corpse instead of trying for the old stick'em'up routine. Didn't happen.
I think if I had to give a name to this logical failure, it would be "Reverse Application of Ockham's Razor"... the Razor says that the simplest cause is probably the correct one. It cannot be applied in reverse to indicate that the simplest outcome will occur.
You know, freenet isn't just a file sharing network.
Its not much of a file sharing network at all. You can't search it anonymously. Sure, there are spiders and indexes and such, but these all operate outside of the field of anonymity. So you could establish a child porn ring using it, but the only useful way to make use of it would be if you had a non-anonymous external channel for communicating with your conspirators.
Yeah, and of course anyone who complains about the cameras in their daughters' rooms MUST be breaking the law. After all, the only people who complain when privacy rights disappear are the ones who have something to hide.
Of course, by the time it reaches a point where even the staunchest pro-survelliance-anti-privacy advocates realize the government has crossed the line, it will be too late... they'll have the cameras in their childrens' bedrooms too, and speaking out against them would clearly indicate that they have something to hide...
I keep seeing this, but there is one problem...
There is no search engine for freenet.
So yeah, your drive *might* have kiddie pr0n, but the way freenet works is that unpopular stuff eventually expires from your host. If nobody can find the kiddie pr0n, nobody can request it, and it dies.
Of course, someone could post the key to the kiddie pr0n somewhere, but that would risk being caught. I don't think that kiddie pr0n makers are as much of a candidate for martyrdom as, say, someone with the Falun Gong would be.
In the end, it comes down to "Is kiddie pr0n more popular than other forms of communication?" If it is, then freenet will eventually fill with it. If it isn't then freenet will eventually expire it. Your answer to that question depends on your faith in your fellow users.
I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone.
Thats just not going to happen. There is far too much expense in terms of R&D and Risk for a company to be involved. Otherwise, companies would already be involved. Right now, we have NASA, and a bunch of rocket hobbyists on steroids competing for the X-Prize, and thats it.
So my representatives' time is being spent going over every item on the receipt, interviewing the individual who did the purchase, and the individual which sold the goods, to make sure that the $500 toilet seats really are $500, and that the CIA didn't come up with a very real-looking receipt?
You're not being paranoid enough. There are always things in the government that Official X doesn't know about. I'm just trying to get the paranoiacs to bite by pointing out that its entirely possible for all these ridiculous (congress-approved) expenditures to be a smokescreen for something more sinister than toilet seats, ashtrays, and hammers.
What do you think? Where does the extra $450 of a $500 toilet seat go? Enough toilet seats and I could buy a decent fighter jet. Does congress know that all $500 of those dollars really did go to the manufacturer of the toilet seat? That toilet seats weren't bought for $50 each, then the number inflated to make secret project money secretly disappear?
Then it doesn't come from tax dollars, and I don't care.
Well no, it does come from tax dollars. Do you think that congress takes the time to see how the money is actually spent after it allocates it? Does congress know that Ashcroft's office isn't paying out "salary" to employees it doesn't actually have? I wouldn't be suprised if after congress "kills" TIA by not funding it, that Ashcroft's office suddenly finds itself with a few new employees, like "Thomas I. Anglemeyer" and "Theresa I. Allman". I'm sure they're even better at making up fake names than I am. And if they can't make up enough names, they'll suddenly need to order new "$500" toilet seats and hammers.
The fact is, if you're a conspiracy nut, nothing the government will do will convince you that TIA is gone. If you're not a conspiracy nut, why are you reading this, since to you, TIA was never a problem in the first place?