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 Thursday, January 26, 2006
Congress catching up on the importance of blogs. Interesting article from CNet about how members of Congress are using blogs. By noemail@noemail.org (John in DC). [AMERICAblog]
Blogs will increase. It is way too easy to mobilize the grass roots and personalize ones politics. Becoming part of a community means that the community supports you. It makes it easier for people to understand. 10:38:45 PM 
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Stopping 9/11
I spent yesterday recovering from a particularly nasty flu, hence the lack of commentary on Bush's speech right here in Kansas, or on Dembski's speech last night at KU. I was more or less dead to the world at the time.
Hope and Politics explains
why Bush chose Kansas State for his defense of illegal spying.
She also points out
a poll from USA Today
in which 51% of people think Bush was wrong to undertake warrantless wiretapping and 58% think there ought to be a special prosecutor.
Apparently, the head of NSA said yesterday that if we were doing this stuff before 9/11, "we would have detected some of the 9/11 al-Qaeda operatives in the United States."
This is what we in the business call "revisionist history." An NSA intercept lead the CIA to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The CIA identified several people at the meeting, and followed several of them with varying competence. They failed to ask the NSA to run the names of people through its database, which would have given better names, and running the names through the State Department would have revealed the fact that at least two people had visas to come to the US.
The CIA failed to pass on its information to the FBI, so when one of those men stayed with an FBI informant in LA, no one had thought to ask the informant to keep his eyes peeled.
According to NSA head Michael Hayden (who is now blaming the absence of warrantless spying for 9/11) "Throughout the summer of 2001, we had more than thirty warnings that something was imminent" (from Bamford's
A Pretext for War
).
The hijackers stayed in a hotel just outside the NSA campus, used their real names, paid with a credit card, etc. They communicated with Afghanistan using internet chat at a local Kinko's.
Again, according to Bamford "For more than a year, the NSA had occasionally picked up [hijacker] Almihdhar's phone calls to teh al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen, never knowing that his calls were coming from the United States ñ or possibly even the same town."
On Sept. 10, the NSA intercepted two messages, one translates to "The match begins tomorrow," the other to "Tomorrow is zero hour." They came from al-Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, but were not translated until September 12.
And this brings us to a key fact about the NSA. Despite having the most powerful assemblage of computers in the world, there is vastly more material coming in than they can possibly analyze in a timely manner. It's difficult to imagine how increasing the workload would have made them more effective, given that the NSA, like the CIA and FBI, failed to capitalize on all the opportunities that al Qaeda gave them for years prior to 9/11.
These are the items that will be used to write books about how they let it happen. If Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen, then these facts will really be a treasure trove. 10:34:54 PM
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Military response to Bush's speech
via
Blue Girl, Red State
, a former military nurse, who watched from an Officers' club:
Everyone except the president seems to be painfully aware that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the attacks on America. You could almost hear the audience mentally shouting "Oh Yeah? Where the hell is Osama bin Laden?" when he said we were hunting down the terrorists and fighting them there. Indeed, a chorus of officers shouted just that in the O-club where I was watching and listening.
Indeed.
This needs no further comment. 10:31:54 PM
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Bush Press Conference
In his conference, the President explained that a brief contact with a potential criminal is justification enough for intense surveillance unless the surveillance is politically harmful.
In the first, he explained that it was justifiable on its face to surveil people connected in any loose sense to al Qaeda. The fact that someone is prepared to assert such a connection is safeguard enough.
He's refusing to release photographs of himself with Jack Abramoff because he talks to lots of people and shakes lots of hands, and doesn't see why anyone should tar him simply for shaking a hand.
And that would be a fair point if he weren't insisting that any connection at all to al Qaeda is sufficient to justify intense invasions of privacy.
The logic he's applying in case 1 is: Person A is suspected of being a criminal, or at least of associating with criminals and wanting to be one. Person B, simply by contacting person A, is a legitimate target of surveillance.
The logic of the second case is: Person A is a confessed criminal and an associate of murderers and other criminals, convicted and indicted. Person B, simply by contacting person A, should not be a target of surveillance.
No one minds surveilling terrorists. That's fine. Warrants aren't there to interfere with surveilling criminals, they make certain that the surveillance doesn't sweep up innocent people. Which is exactly why the administration claims it doesn't want to release these photos. I wish they'd extend that same protection and some sort of safeguards to the rest of us.
Now the President explains, "FISA passed in 1978Ö it's 2006." Also, he asked his staff if they could do this under the existing law, they said "no," so we went ahead with it anyway. But he resents the implication that he circumvented the law. Very bizarre.
- Josh Rosenau [Thoughts from Kansas]
Making a logical argument appears to be beyond this man. The lament that if I do it it is not illegal is getting tiresome. He still has not answered why they could not get warrants for these wiretaps. Secret warrants from a secret court (something i find distressing but at least it is the law) that could be gotten 72 hours after the wiretap. If they needed to hear the conversations between the phone calls, what was the reason to not get a warrant? Simply saying that they feel this is legal is not good enough, not from an Administration that has already shown way too much incompetence regarding the rightful use of information it gathers. 10:28:43 PM
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Bush Decided To Evade Surveillance Law Instead Of Changing It.... A July 2002 Justice Department statement to a Senate committee appears to contradict several key arguments that the Bush administration is making to defend its eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without court warrants.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law governing such operations, was working well, the department said in 2002. A "significant review" would be needed to determine whether FISA's legal requirements for obtaining warrants should be loosened because they hampered counterterrorism efforts, the department said then.
[The Huffington Post | Full News Feed]
When Congress wanted to hand them the legal tools to do what they have been shown to want, they turned it down! It was easier to keep doing something illegally than to change the law, change it with COngress's approval. And the reasons they used for not eanting the law changed (loss of privacy, constitutional concerns) are the same ones they are now saying are irrelevant. Wankers. 10:22:13 PM
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The Strength of Internet Ties -- new tools for creating social capital?. (Thank you, Lars!)
Some interesting and credible evidence just arrived to lend some actual data to the ancient armchair theorists debate about whether online media enable the creation of social capital or suck the life out of face to face communities. The Pew Internet and American Life Project just released a report on "The Strength of Internet Ties," (PDF) that "highlights how email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network." The researchers are well known experts in social network analysis of cybersocializing -- John Horrigan, Jeffrey Boase, Lee Rainey, and Barry Wellman.
Our evidence calls into question fears that social relationships âo[per thou] and community âo[per thou] are fading away in America. Instead of disappearing, peopleâo[dot accent]s communities are transforming: The traditional human orientation to neighborhood- and village-based groups is moving towards communities that are oriented around geographically dispersed social networks. People communicate and maneuver in these networks rather than being bound up in one solidary community. Yet peopleâo[dot accent]s networks continue to have substantial numbers of relatives and neighbors âo[per thou] the traditional bases of community âo[per thou] as well as friends and workmates.
The internet and email play an important role in maintaining these dispersed social networks. Rather than conflicting with peopleâo[dot accent]s community ties, we find that the internet fits seamlessly with in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live nearby. Moreover, there is media multiplexity: The more that people see each other in person and talk on the phone, the more they use the internet. The connectedness that the internet and other media foster within social networks has real payoffs: People use the internet to seek out others in their networks of contacts when they need help.
Because individuals âo[per thou] rather than households âo[per thou] are separately connected, the internet and the cell phone have transformed communication from house-to-house to person-to-person. [Smart Mobs]
The ability to mobilize large, ad hoc social netowrks is pretty unique in human history. As we grapple with its power, or abuse, we will continue to see things like Howell at the Washington Post, where the concept of such a rapid response was unthinable, revealing how 20th Century was their thinkins. 9:57:38 PM
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Yet Another Thing The Recording Industry Wants To Charge For: Endtones. This has to be a joke, right? Earlier this week we were noting how the greed over ringtone sales was leading the recording industry and the mobile industry to seek out other ways to charge you yet again for the same song you probably already purchased. Ringback tones have now been around for a little while (replacing the "ringing" noise that people hear when they call you -- meaning, yes, you're paying for someone else to listen to music as you'll never hear it yourself) and have succeeded mainly in confusing a lot of people into thinking that they dialed incorrectly. On Monday we were talking about SMStones, as the latest idea to get you to pay again for an even shorter clip of music... but that's already out of date. Now people are talking about endtones, hang-up tones and drop tones -- bits of music to play when a mobile phone conversation ends via people hanging up or a call is dropped. While there may be something to said for knowing when a call gets dropped (to avoid that awkward moment where you just keep talking and wonder why the other person is being so quiet), are there really people who are going to pay to have a special song play whenever they're reminded that their mobile operator's coverage sucks?
[Techdirt]
This should be somewhere in the bad business models hall of fame. Pay money to hear a song when a call is dropped? Not that many of us are made of money. I'm saving mine for my DVDs ;-) 9:54:26 PM
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Identity Thieves Going After The Sucker Born A Minute Ago. As the often mis-attributed statement goes, "there's a sucker born every minute." With more adults getting educated on internet scams and frauds, it seems that some identity thieves have figured out that it's easier to go after the more recently born suckers and have increasingly started to target children. It comes as no surprise to find out that scamming identity thieves have no qualms about going after kids, but it is worth remembering if you do have kids. Many people have learned to carefully monitor their own info, but haven't even thought that their six year-old's name may be on half a dozen credit cards somewhere.
[Techdirt]
Very important to remember. And, also, the link about Barnum was really interesting. 9:51:04 PM
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Talking Seriously About Mobile Porn. For years and years we've been hearing about how mobile porn is going to be a big business. Those who believe it point out that the VCR and the internet both represent markets that were driven forward by adult content -- and therefore mobile content will grow in the same way. In fact, there's an entire conference this week dedicated to the business of mobile porn. Since it's focused on the business side, it's not too surprising that it actually sounds fairly boring. However, most of the people at the conference have a vested interest in the business, so they're hyping up just how big mobile porn will be. There's just one problem. People just aren't that interested. Sure, some people are, but what people seem to be missing is that the VCR and the internet were pushed forward by porn because it helped people view porn in the privacy of their own homes. Mobile porn is the opposite -- about allowing people to view porn outside of their home, in public and on a tiny, tiny screen. So, sure, there are going to be some people who want it, but it's still difficult to see it really being that big a market.
[Techdirt]
Exactly. Privacy is what made por, not the technology. Putting porn on an iPod seems to be going against the purpose. I guess it could make it easier to watch porn in other rooms than your TV room, like the bathroom, but why, if you have privacy anyway? It is not something you will watch on the way to work. 9:45:36 PM
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No one, that is, who was on vacation
and not paying attention. The White House was warned that Katrina might breach the levees. The President stayed at the ranch, then said "no one anticipated the breach of the levees." [The Reality-Based Community]
Actually, I think he went on to California for some fundraising stuff and got filmed playing a guitar. Of course, warnings about disasters, whether natural, as in Katrina, or unnatural, like 9/11, always seem to come when he is on vacation and no one apparently knows what to do. 9:23:44 PM
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Sabl's Law of U.S. Political Rhetoric. "No argument can succeed in American politics if it contains a subjunctive." Consider the wiretap debate. [The Reality-Based Community]
But this would require someone to kow grammar, if one were to try to make a political argument, correct? Say, for example, that I were to make a political argument. It should succeed, if I were not using a subjunctive phrase. If I were not, I would have a potent argument. I could simply say, 'I'm right. You are wrong. He is a liar!!" If I were to make an argument, which did not contain a subjunctive. 9:18:19 PM
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