NSA Surveillance: Not Only A Rights Violation, It Doesn't Even Work
From the No Shit department: it appears that not only is the NSA's surveillance program that eavesdrops on phone calls without warrants possibly illegal and definitely a violation of civil rights, it doesn't work. The program thus far has identified very few suspects and provided very little, if any, usable evidence of terrorist activity. How bad is it?
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
And if you think those 5,000 people are it, you're wrong. The policy is so obtrusive and so aggressive in its scope that it's almost impossible to tell just how much data traffic is viewed, but it's incredibly naive to believe that it's limited just to people suspected of terrorism.
There's a further problem here. If the program is this ineffective, it harms the administration's legal arguments for its existence.
National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.
This is what kills me about the Bush Administration's "war on terror": by using bad tactics like widespread, scattershot surveillance and torture, not only does it piss on the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention and international law, it doesn't seem to work either. To me, the fact that it's just so bad means that the stark choice between security and civil rights the administration tries to frame the debate in is utterly false.
Forget You, You Flippin' Melon Farmer
ABC wasn't taking any risks in its broadcast of the Superbowl halftime show this time around. They ran the whole game on a five second delay and actually edited out two naughty words from songs performed by the Rolling Stones:
In "Start Me Up," the show's editors silenced one word, a reference to a woman's sexual sway over a dead man. The lyrics for "Rough Justice" included a synonym for rooster that the network also deemed worth cutting out.
If memory serves the lines would be, respectively, "you make a dead man come," and "now I'm just one of your cocks."
According to the AP writer, knocking out the words "come" and "cocks" "brought a little rock 'n' roll danger to the ultimate 'safe' gig and - if they're lucky - it distracted attention from their mediocre show."
Well, you take your rock 'n' roll danger where you find it, I suppose.
Dell Discontinues Hard-Drive MP3 Players
The iPod takes another step toward global domination, as Dell discontinues manufacturing and sales of all of its hard drive-based MP3 players, leaving only the DJ Ditty, a flash-based player.
The decision underscores the difficulty companies including Dell have had trying to unseat the best-selling iPod. Dell introduced the music players in 2003 as part of a strategy to expand sales beyond desktop PCs. The versions being scrapped used hard drives to store music; newer models use cheaper flash-memory chips.
It follows Apple's introduction last fall of the Nano, an ultrathin MP3 player that uses flash instead of a hard drive. It replaced the popular iPod Mini, which used a hard drive. Apple's full-size iPods still contain hard drives.
"No vendor other than Apple has really stepped up to the combination of design, marketing and user experience that is required by this segment," said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group, a research firm based in San Jose, Calif.
According to an article in The Statesman, iPods accounted for 69% of all MP3 player sales from November of 2005 to January of 2006.
I guess this is market forces at work, but over-consolidation always ends up screwing consumers somewhere down the line. And when the iPods all simultaneously become self-aware and turn on their human masters, we're all going to fell pretty stupid (moments before we all die in a barrage of clicky-wheels and U2 videos.)
The Glamour of War
In the Boston Globe, Michael Socolow considers "The Glamour of War." Why do journalists, ranging from Jill Carroll to James Nachtwey, head into war zones? The are many reasons, says Socolow: they perform a public service, it puts them in the spotlight, it feeds their egos, and it's intensely thrilling.
The job requires accepting enormous risk and living life as a gamble. So why do so many volunteer? One explanation rarely surfaces in this discussion. That's the powerful, almost narcotic pull of experiencing life at its most intense. In the war zone, senses are primed, awareness is heightened, and profound bonds of friendship are indelibly formed. Sharing drinks and stories of narrow escapes, the combat journalist finds a community supportive of the addictive adrenaline habit that infects them all.
Risking life daily is powerfully romantic, and challenging that concept is anathema to the war reporter. In the conclusion to ''Dispatches," Michael Herr recounts a conversation with the severely injured photojournalist Tim Page. Page's body had been badly ravaged by a bomb in Vietnam. A publisher proposed that Page author a book titled ''Through with War." The book would ''take the glamour out of war."
Page would hear none of it. ''Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?"
via Boing Boing
Shalit Offends GLAAD
Of all the people that I imagine might offend the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Gene Shalit ranks somewhere between Richard Simmons and Clay Aiken. But his harsh review of Brokeback Mountain, wherein he describes Gyllenhaal's character as a "sexual predator", has done just that.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation accused him of inciting homophobia with his comments, which aired Jan. 5, and demanded an apology.
On Tuesday, GLAAD said it received a statement from Shalit, saying, "In describing the behavior of "Jack" I used words ("sexual predator"
that I now discover have angered, agitated, and hurt many people. I did not intend to use a word that many in the gay community consider incendiary. . . . I certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself. I regret any emotional hurt that may have resulted from my review of 'Brokeback Mountain.' "
Coming to Shalit's defense was his gay son, Peter Shalit.
"It is precisely because my dad is not homophobic that he felt free to criticize the movie as he saw it," wrote Peter Shalit, a gay physician and author who lives in Seattle and is a longtime supporter of GLAAD.
Shalit said he felt GLAAD's press release about the NBC Today show review, broadcast on Thursday, was a "mischaracterization" of his father[...]
By suggesting Gene Shalit was homophobic, GLAAD had "defamed a good man, by falsely accusing him of a repellent form of bigotry," Peter Shalit wrote[...]
3D Scan Your Penis
How wrong is it that the first thing I thought of when I saw this product was "Dude, guys will be scanning 3D images of their dicks and uploading them to MySpace now!"
The NextEngine is a $2500 desktop scanner that can create renderings of 3D objects. The scanner field comes in two sizes: "Coke Can" (5.1" x 3.8" with 400 DPI) and "Shoebox" (13.5" x 10.1" with 150 DPI). The scanner, which uses a laser array for mapping and a 3 Megapixel image sensor for photography, can be used under ordinary lighting with no special backgrounds. It comes with software to allow you to edit the scans and create composite images from multiple scans.
Now, if only they can get 3D color modeling printers sized and priced for household use, we're one step away from being able to transmit physical objects over the internet...
Making Sounds
Music Thing profiles what has to be just about the coolest instrument ever: Richard Water's Waterphone! It has been used to make weird, unearthly sounds in movies like the Star Trek films, Poltergeist, and the Matrix:
Richard invented it in the late '60s, and he's hand made over 1,000 since then. It's a series of tuned brass rods attached to a base filled with water. The rods are played with a violin bow, and moving the instrument makes the water shift to bend the notes and create 'acoustic, schiziosonic, modulations'.
You can listen to three waterphone samples here, and it's true: it is a strangely familiar sound. I never knew what made it till now. Videos of Waters himself playing it can be found here.
Blade Exchange for Self Harmers?
Self-harm is not a joke and is still poorly understood even after years of campaigns. Now British nurses want see clean blades provided to patients to reduce the risk of infection in the same way that drug users get clean needles.
This could include giving the self-harm patients sterile blades and clean packets of bandages or ensuring that they keep their own blades clean. Nurses would also give patients advice about which parts of the body it is safer to cut.
The proposal for safe self-harm which is to be debated at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Congress in April is likely to provoke controversy. At present nurses are expected to stop anyone doing physical harm to themselves and to confiscate any sharp objects ranging from razor blades to broken glass and tin cans.
However, Ian Hulatt, mental health adviser for the RCN, said: There is a clear comparison with giving clean needles to reduce HIV. We will be debating introducing a similar harm-reduction approach. This may well include the provision of clean dressing packs and it may mean providing clean sharps. Nurses who encounter individuals who self-harm on a regular basis face a dilemma. Do they go for prohibition? Or do we allow this to occur in a way that minimises harm? Some nurses will not support this because our code of practice says we should not do patients any harm. But this may be less harmful than patients using dirty implements. There are mental health units that already allow the use of sterile implements.
In the UK, 170,000 people (0.28% of the population) attend a hospital's emergency department after deliberately harming themselves. A number of these continue to harm themselves for a period of time. This idea is from the Royal College of Nursing's mental health nursing forum: an unidentified nurse said "We may not like someone self-harming, but they are going to do it whether we like it or not and we will need to deal with the problems afterwards". Not everyone is in favour:
Katherine Murphy, director of communications at the Patients Association, criticised the move. She said: Supplying individuals who self-harm with blades cannot be good for them. Nurses should not be supporting patients to self-harm.
By giving self-harmers the tools they need, the nurses could be seen as encouraging individuals to harm themselves. We should be doing something to discourage this behaviour.
In the UK, support is available to those who self-harm by the National Self Harm Network (who sadly have to obtain some of their funding from the National Lottery) and the National Children's Bureau. A Self Injury Awareness Day is being held on the 1st March.
While the "blade exchange" program seems like a no-brainer, what is needed is enough medical staff with sufficient awareness that they can offer real support at the point of care.
The Lost Arkestra
I have owned a scratchy copy of this Batman and Robin album since I picked it up at a Salvation Army some time in the '70s, but I never knew this:
In 1966, a toy company in Newark, New Jersey released a children's record called Batman and Robin to cash in on the popular Adam West TV series of the same name. The music on the LP was credited to "The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale," but in fact the band was one of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time, including the core of Sun Ra's Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project. To keep the music licensing fees to a minimum, all the tracks were based on public domain items like Chopin's Polonaise Op. 53, the horn theme from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, and generic rock riffs.
Wow. WFMU provides mp3s for the entire album. Man, I love those guys.
Good Stupid Fun
If you feel like wasting some time and annoying your neighbors (and who wouldn't?) here's a good way: a Flash synth board for creating your own Super Mario Bros remixes.
You pick a tune from the panels on the left, and mix in effects by clicking the sprites on the right. Stupid! Brilliant!
(via Boingboing.)
Libraries Worried About DRM
While changing formats is something we've all got used to in music (from 78s to MP3) and video (VHS, DVD and beyond), the written word has really only seen a major change when they switched to the printing press. Now, major repositories, like the British Library, are getting worried about digital rights management as digital publishing is getting a foothold.
Many publishers put restrictions on how digital books and journals can be used [and these] controls may block some legitimate uses, the British Library has said. And there are fears that restricted works may not be safe for future generations if people can no longer unlock them when technology evolves.
The British Library spends £2m of its £16m annual acquisitions budget on digital material, mainly reference books and journals. But by 2020, 90% of newly published work will be available digitally - twice the amount that is printed - according to British Library predictions published last year.
Libraries are allowed to give access to, copy and distribute items through "fair dealing" and "library privilege" clauses in copyright law. But as publishers attempt to stop the public illegally sharing books and articles, the DRM they employ may not cater for libraries' legal uses. "We have genuinely tried to maintain that balance between the public interest and respecting rights holders," [said] Dr Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections "We are genuinely concerned that technology inadvertently may be disturbing that balance, and that would be unhelpful ultimately to the national interest."
More and more of us are buying digital music online - fueling a three fold revenue increase in the last year. Yet few of us have contemplated how long it will last, and the risk of moving your song files from one computer to another. The rising number of competing formats isn't helping: Apple won't licence their Fairplay system, and protected WMA files won't play on iPods. And who's to say that in twenty years, the technology will still be around to support these? It is therefore easy to appreciate the Brtish Library's concerns, who have items dating back hundreds of years. The UK's All Party Parliamentary Internet Group is conducting an inquiry into DRM for both customers and government use alike, started in November:
The inquiry will focus on:
- Whether DRM distorts traditional tradeoffs in copyright law;
- Whether new types of content sharing license (such as Creative Commons or Copyleft) need legislation changes to be effective;
- How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues;
- How consumers should be protected when DRM systems are discontinued;
- To what extent DRM systems should be forced to make exceptions for the partially sighted and people with other disabilities;
- What legal protections DRM systems should have from those who wish to circumvent them;
- Whether DRM systems can have unintended consequences on computer functionality;
- The role of the UK Parliament in influencing the global agenda for this type of technical issue.
The UK's National Customer Council also said last month in written evidence that they were concerned that customers' rights were being abused by such anti piracy measures. I'm still buying CDs - I'm old fashioned that way - and so far, all the e-documents I've had have not had DRM on them, but it is only a matter of time
Journalists Overhype Virus Threat (Again)
If you read a major news publication or watched TV over the past week, you may have seen journalists warning of the doom and gloom that would be unleashed on February 3rd. This deadly computer virus was called Blackworm, Kama Sutra, Nyxem, and many other names depending on the security research company the particular media group talked to. The whole world's Microsoft Office files and PDFs were going to be overwritten, and the computer world as we knew it was supposed to grind to a halt.
It didn't happen.
With only about 300,000 infections worldwide, journalists are patting themselves on the back for getting the word out. I'm chalking it up to an overhyped threat, better user education, and increased use of automatically-updating operating systems and antivirus software.
A current poll being taken by SANS in the security professional community indicates that 98% of industry professionals didn't see a single instance of this supposedly deadly and widespread worm on any of the computers they are in charge of. Most infections are being seen in countries like India and Peru.
Perhaps most people have finally learned that when a random stranger sends you a file called "HOT MOVIE" or "SEX.MPG" or "Crazy illegal Sex!" or "Fuckin Kama Sutra pics," you shouldn't open that file?
Betty Friedan Has a Lousy Birthday
Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.
I hope she will be remembered as one the most influential people of the 20th century.
I hope her works and activism, and her firm voice against perpetuation of the belief in the inferiority of a person because of gender, will continue to influence.
I hope that we can be reminded that nothing is finished or solved yet, that leadership is about raising the opportunities and rights for all members of a society, not just the favorite class. She was a leader, and I hope we will find another.
"We can't be arrogant," Friedan said. "We move incrementally. But all that incremental movement has made a big change."
There are a bazillion links to every facet of her life, good and bad, and I encourage a little reading to let you form your own opinions...
(courtesy wikipedia)
Google or Yahoo will lead you to enlightenment of what she accomplished.
Spiking Oil in the 21st Century: It gets worse, never better
The White House tried desperately to spin Bush's statement that the U.S. would aim to cut our addiction to imports of Middle East oil by seventy-five percent during his State of the Union address. Whatever the President "meant", the addiction to oil must be fixed. If experts' projections are anywhere close to the truth, the cost of oil is going to spike.
One of them, Hermitage Capital's Bill Browder, has outlined six scenarios that could take oil up to a downright terrifying $262 a barrel.....
To come up with some likely scenarios in the event of an international crisis, his team performed what's known as a regression analysis, extrapolating the numbers from past oil shocks and then using them to calculate what might happen when the supply from an oil-producing country was cut off in six different situations. The fall of the House of Saud seems the most far-fetched of the six possibilities, and it's the one that generates that $262 a barrel.
More realistic -- and therefore more chilling -- would be the scenario where Iran declares an oil embargo a la OPEC in 1973, which Browder thinks could cause oil to double to $131 a barrel. Other outcomes include an embargo by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez ($111 a barrel), civil war in Nigeria ($98 a barrel), unrest and violence in Algeria ($79 a barrel) and major attacks on infrastructure by the insurgency in Iraq ($88 a barrel).
Regressions analysis may be mathematical but it's an art, not a science. And some of these scenarios are quite dubious, like Venezuela shutting the spigot. (For more on Chavez and Venezuela, click here.)
Additionally, the West must contend with other powerful leaders, such as Vladimir Putin, who recently shut off the natural gas line supply to Ukraine. Rather than proposing significant transformations in natural resource and fuel policy, the White House continues to feed the addiction. The nightmare scenarios become a reality through force of habit. As with any addiction, it gets worse, never better.
Manhunt for Gay Bar Suspect Ends in Violence
The search for the teenager sought in the hatchet and gun attacks at a Massachusetts gay bar ended Saturday following what had begun as a routine traffic stop in Arkansas.
The stop was anything but routine.
"As the officer approached the car, he was shot twice and killed," [District Attorney] Walsh said.
Witnesses said they saw a green Pontiac with Kentucky license plates leaving the scene. Police had been looking for a Pontiac with Massachusetts plates.
A state trooper saw the car about 15 minutes later on Arkansas Highway 201, and began pursuit ...
The suspect, Jacob Robida, then proceeded to go on one of those high speed chases you often see on 'COPS' - driving over spike strips, running on tires that aren't really tires anymore - until he could go no further.
That's when the shooting began.
Walsh said that Robida's car spun 180 degrees and was the facing the officers' vehicles.
"Our best information is that at that point he shot and killed the woman in the car," Walsh said.
Robida then began firing through his windshield at the officers, and "police opened fire, hitting him twice in the head," Walsh said.
The kid is still alive even after being shot twice in the head.
I believe we may have found pure evil.
Ferry Carrying 1400 Sinks
An Egyption ferry carrying over 1400 people sank early Friday morning. A fire broke out in the vessel's parking bay, though the ferry continued to move on.
Passengers said fire broke out on board the ship early in its trip. Transportation Minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour told reporters early Saturday that the fire was "small" and that investigators were working to determine whether it was linked to the sinking.
"The fire happened about an hour or 90 minutes into the trip, but they decided to keep going. It's negligence," one survivor, Nabil Zikry, said before he was moved along by police, who tried to keep the survivors from talking to journalists.
A spokesman for President Hosni Mubarak said the ferry did not have enough lifeboats, and questions were raised about the safety of the 35-year-old, refitted ship that was weighed down with 220 cars as well as the passengers.
Four Egyptian rescue ships reached the scene Friday afternoon, about 10 hours after the ferry likely went down some 57 miles off the Egyptian port of Hurghada.
Not enough lifeboats, too many cars, a disregarded fire, and a 10 hour wait for rescue efforts.... What thoughtlessness!
Rampaging Syrian Muslims Torch Danish Embassy
According to a recent report on CNN furor in the Muslim world continues over some caricatures of the prophet Mohammed published by a Danish newpaper last September. Since that time Palestinian gunmen have raided the Gaza offices of the EU, a Hamas leader has stated:
"We should have killed them, we should have required just punishment for those who respect neither religion nor its holiest symbols."
Violent protests have broken out in several nations.
Since the original publication, several other European newspapers and magazines have reprinted the cartoons in a demonstration of the free press in action.
Today, protesters in Syria broke through police barricades and torched the Danish embassy in Damascus. Elsewhere, demonstrators have clashed with police by throwing sticks and stones.
It seems somewhat hypocritical that while Muslims claim the right to burn foreign flags, burn foreign leaders in effigy, issue fatwah calling for the murder of both foreigners and their own citizens, and claim freedom of speech and the press in their own countries; they fail to extend the same freedoms to the citizens of other countries within those other countries own borders.
By assaulting and burning the embassies of multiple foreign nations (both Chile and Sweden had their embassies in the same building) these Muslims have moved dangerously close to a replay of 1979 Tehran.
No More Incumbents
This May, Mr. Russ Diamond wants to overthrow the government of Pennsylvania. Following the midnight pay raise the Pennsylvania legislature awarded itself, Mr. Russ Diamond has organized Operation Clean Sweep, a non-partisan PAC that is seeking to vote out every incumbent in the Pennsylvania House and Senate, as well as the Governor, who signed the bill. He is amassing an army of candidates to challenge the entire government in the next election. Despite the repeal of the raise after intense public backlash, Diamond still wants them out.
"I know when we started soliciting candidates to challenge incumbents that people had this fear that we would end up with a group of people right out of the Cantina from Star Wars," Diamond said[...]
"We have people who have served in local and county offices and school boards. They are serious candidates and will offer voters an alternative," Diamond said. "We are going to take back our government fair and square. Through the electoral process."
He had me at "Star Wars".
Editor's Note: Now, if only we could do the same with the federal government...
Don't Call Them Misfits
The L.A. Times discovers the world of lowbrow toys in "Don't Call Them Misfits." At up to $150 a pop, 3-D vinyl designer toys by Tim Biskup, Nathan Cabrera, Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman, and Michael Lau, ranging from conjoined twin girls to graffiti-headed boys, are becoming increasingly popular at Meltdown Comics and Span of Sunset. This week, Kidrobot released its L.A. Dunny collection, created by L.A. artists.
The company's first city-based series, the L.A. Dunnys so named for Kidrobot's popular, bunny-like form that serves as a canvas for artists' designs are testimony to L.A.'s "incredible art scene," which is influenced by everything from graphic design, anime and graffiti to cartoons, comics, illustration and fine art, owner Paul Budnitz said. "There's a certain sort of graffiti-like style that's creeping in with illustration right now, and it's really coming to fruition in California."
The L.A. Dunnys will retail for $5.95, but some will no doubt eventually trade for much more. The designs were produced in different quantities 200 to 9,600 per artist making some more collectible than others.
Like many miniature designer toys, each 3-inch figure in the series comes in a blind package, meaning the box does not say which artist's design is inside. But it does indicate the buyer's chances of happening upon each one. The Shepard Fairey Dunny, for example, is among the most rare. Buyers have only a 3% chance of getting one.
But one L.A. Dunny comes with only a .25% chance, and the artist isn't even known. Kidrobot won't reveal who it is because "that's part of the fun of it," Budnitz said.
The artist's identity and design can be revealed only by the buyers, who are likely to go online and flaunt their finds and possibly sell them to the highest bidder.
Count 'em: 6
Would you like to hear six versions of Joseph Arthur's song "In the Sun," performed by, mixed by, appearing in, and/or "featuring" Michael Stipe, Chris Martin, Justin Timberlake, that Black Eyed Peas guy, that Smashing Pumpkins guy, that Fountains of Wayne guy and ABC TV's Grey's Anatomy?
Even if it's for a good cause, like hurricane relief?
Well, if so, the new full-featured digital e.p. "In the Sun" will be available on iTunes on February 5.
(Flash warning on that Joseph Arthur site, by the way.)
