Iraq's Post-Election Unrest - Forbes.com

So the election doubted as proof of the desirability of US invasion and occupation results in a clear win by Shiite Islamic fundamentalists. We impose democracy only to lend democratic credence to theocracy in Iraq. What a wonderful result!

Perhaps we will wake up to the fact that Western democratic ideals cannot be imposed on a people. But I doubt it.

CNN.com - Inquiry into leak of NSA spying program launched - Dec 30, 2005

What is this country coming to? Bush breaks the law by syping on Americans without proper authorization as mandated by FISA. Breaking these laws is a felony offense. Justice should be investigating Bush. Instead they go after those who enabled the media to tell the American peole about this outrageous behavior. This is totally inverted. What is this country coming to? It is coming to be not a nation of laws, not a nation that protects the freedom of the people, but a nation where government, especially the Executive, can do whatever it wants to the people and punish those who even inform the people as to what it is doing. Americans should rise up and tell this Beast of a government who is really boss in this supposedly free country.

Wired News: Bush OKs Smut-Stripping Tech

I see. It is quite alright to cut and paste a copyrighted work without the owner's permission as long as the result makes the government happier. It is alright to make the devices we use to find and view information and entertainment enforce government notions of what we should or should not see or hear. Do we consumers get to play? Can we remove types of comercials and political messages that offend us? No?

CNN.com - U.S., Canada eye overflight lists - Apr 22, 2005

Exactly how does this make sense? Pesumably the means employed to insure persons on planes cannot do major damage is already quite good. So how does it aid anything legitimate to also insist that planes flying over US territory must not contain any person on a US watch list? These lists are quite problematic in that the criteria for placing persons on such a list and for challenging inclusions of persons on the list has not been worked out. Persons have been put on the list and have found it very difiicult to get off the list who are no threat and who there was no reason to put on the list in the first place. Now we are asked to not only countenance such lists that provide only very marginal additional security but to apply them to all flights from all countries that overfly the US.

It is high time we stopped resoponding in knee jerk ways to pressings of the fear button and instead applied a bit of analysis of costs including costs in restricted freedom, loss of privacy, danger of arbitrary de facto unanswerable persecution versus actual benefit in increased safety.

tohay's Lesson:

those in authority have the right to know your every move "for your own good" of course. Teach a generation that pervasive surveillance, random searches and drug tests, police in the hallways are all normal and "necessary for your safety". Pay attention class. There will be a test.


USATODAY.com - Parents protest student computer ID tags

Microsoft takes on pirates

Brilliant. If users want Microsoft to plug the criminal number of security issues in its products then they must jump through Microsoft hoops to be sure MS has extracted its full extortionary fees. Users whose installations are not certifiable will remain infected and infect other machines. Obviously, MS does not care about security, only about its profits.

It is increasingly common that we see appeals to alter anything and everything that terrorist might be able to make use of. As any and all information services are possibly useful to some technology savvy baddie somewhere this would effectively stifle information technology and its use by the rest of us in order to keep it from being used by terrorists. We have heard such urgent appeals before with pedophiles, for instance, substituted for terrorists.

Server technology, along with many other quite useful things, is merely a tool. It can be used for good, bad or indifferent purposes just as a very low level tool like a box cutter can. Saying we must somehow make the tool able to distinquish the intentions and/or identity of the user is the way to make the tools useless and the level of prying into the lives of all users utterly odious and dangerously invasive.

The place to stop terrorism is in its planning and commission of acts of terror, not in its mere communications. Communication and information tools must be unencumbered if they are to be truly and maximally useful.

It also should raise suspicion when the very things that make governments a bit uneasy such as open internet empowerment of all the people are precisely what it declares as needing radical revision and to be under its control to "fight terrorism". Terrorism makes a convenient excuse for massive increase of governmental control (industry "policing itself" is not an really effectively different) and attendant massive decrease of individual access to information, communication and distributed computational resources.

This is certainly not remotely the answer and I frankly find it more than a little suspicious that a supposedly savvy publication like Technology Review would mostly simply parrot such a suggestion.

One of the more disturbing trends to be observed in the US media is the way that news, especially news regarding the Bush administration, is "unreported". The below article on a change to Social Security for instance never bothers to actually explain what the proposed change is. The reader is left to guess what calculating SS benefits on "inflation" instead of wages would mean. My own guess is that it would mean the government gives you whatever amount it believes a generic retiree needs based on some inflation based formula regardless of how much you may have paid in. So those who have paid the most get shafted the most. But this is only my guess. The non-news piece below doesn't actually bother to say.

White House ponders changing the way benefits are calculated - Jan. 4, 2005