Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran

Over the last couple years there's been a ratcheting up of rhetoric by the U.S. Administration against both Iran and Syria. This ratcheting up is exactly what happened before we launched the illegal war against Iraq. During the run-up to the war in Iraq a lot of things were said by the Administration that have later been shown to be false, and it's likely the Administration knew they were speaking falsehoods (a.k.a. lying).

The ratcheting up of rhetoric against both Iran and Syria fits the Neocon agenda. My background material posting goes into just how far back their agenda goes. What's important about the Neocon agenda is just who the neocons are. They include people like Dick Cheney (today the Vice President), Donald Rumsfield (today Secretary of Defense), Zalmay Khalilzad (today the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq), I. Lewis Libby (today under indictment for major malfeasances), and Paul Wolfowitz (today chief honcho of the World Bank).

I'm going into that to suggest that the ratcheting up of rhetoric against Syria and Iran is purely to justify launching a war against either of those countries. That is, after all, what the Neocon agenda was stated to be in the mid 1990's.

Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran: is an independent campaign organisation with the purpose of opposing sanctions, foreign state interference and military intervention in Iran.

Event in San Francisco: Stop the war against Iran before it starts!

ALTERNATIVES TO WAR FORUM: JANUARY 4, 2006
7 P.M., 65 NINTH STREET
SAN FRANCISCO

Talk and discussion with a UK anti-war activist, Abbas Edalat, co-founder of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)

Job descriptions add ability to blog, aid PR

Corporate blogging is on the rise. The big sign given in this article is that some job postings are now asking for an "ability to blog". That's certainly a sign ... Job descriptions add ability to blog, aid PR (Mary Jacobs, Dallas Morning News, Dec. 31, 2005 12:00 AM) The way Mary Jacobs spins this story, bloggers have been beating up on corporations for so long, and now it's time for corporations to bring some of them inside the corporate walls and use their knowledge of blogging practices for corporate benefit.

"Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective," a recent BusinessWeek article declared. "They're a prerequisite."

... "A company that gets a blog needs to know that it's informal and involves give-and-take," said Tom Mighell, a veteran blogger who is senior counsel and litigation technology support coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas.

"You need to be willing to push the envelope a little bit and show that you're willing to share with your public."

... Currently, only 4 percent of major U.S. corporations offer public blogs, according to a survey by New York research firm eMarketer. Still, ads for blogging jobs are turning up on online job boards, and many expect the field to grow.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki - Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

Here's a useful resource to help understand the scope of blogging by corporations. Corporate blogging is distinct from personal blogging in that the blogger is writing for the benefit of the corporation. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki This is a list of the Fortune 500 companies who have blogging activities.

Guardian Unlimited | Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons

What is the reason for the Iraq war? Was it an altruistic exercise in helping a poor oppressed people join the community of enlightened Democacry countries? Naw, because if it were then why doesn't the U.S. launch similar wars on other oppressive countries? There's a bigger picture going on and it's more than a coincidence that the plan by the Project for a New American Century to reshape the world begins in the heart of the Middle East, where the oil is. And, at the same time, there is a game afoot to bring oil from Central Asia to market, with the chosen U.S. path being a pipeline built through Afghanistan. And why did we go to war in Afghanistan? If it was about Osama, then why have we let Osama and the other leaders get away?

That's what is implied from this article: Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power (Richard Drayton, Wednesday December 28, 2005, The Guardian)

He starts out with an observation about technology.

Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession.

I remember that was the dream floating about during the .COM bubble in the late 90's. But, this kind of thinking is in denial of a real problem. The driving force of the expansion of technology is not technology, it is oil and natural gas. The energy used to drive the technological marvels are these fossil fuels whose use is destroying our environment and which are becoming scarcer by the day.

The public has been misled to believe the technology will keep flowing forever. But that promise is based (today) on fossil fuels.

The problem with that picture is it appears the oil is running out. There is a model put together decades ago which describes the availability of oil. The model shows an unnavoidable fact, that at some point in the future the production capacity of oil will "peak" and after that oil will inexorably decline. There are many indications we are at or near the peak, today.

The rest of the article goes into describing megalomaniacs who have the capabilities to act out their megalomania. The writings of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) show them to be megalomaniacs. The PNAC is a think-tank whose founding members are today holding positions of high power in Washington DC (that is, Cheney, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Jeb Bush, etc). In the mid-90's the PNAC published a series of position papers describing the need of America to assert global dominance, ensuring a Pax Americana. The justification was that "we" are the worlds sole remaining superpower, and that we had to use our strength to take the moral high ground and that it was our duty to reshape the world in our image.

According to this article these people learned certain strategies from the classics of literature:

or the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

The technology that is supposed to free us all, is also these peoples weapon used to dominate us all.

The vision they've had, and which Rumsfield has been busily implementing in the Defense Department, is that high technology weaponry can be used to create battlefields with few soldiers. Hence we have unmanned aircraft doing both surveillance and firing weapons, we have a rise in robotic tanks, we have a global satellite system delivering GPS positioning coordinates and others spying on everybody's activities. The next time you're in the back yard making love with your sweetie, think about the Pentagon watching you.

But their vision missed something which Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated. Satellites in the sky can't stop the acts of individuals. In Afghanistan the leaders made their escape so they could make new plots in the future. In Iraq the U.S. forces have been hobbled by the improvised explosive device (IED) in ways that satellites cannot see or prevent.

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

Here's some more on wiretapping issue. This NY Times article gives an overview of the depth of the program. The program is about what they call "data mining". In case you don't know, "data mining" is a common technique in IT organizations. Essentially data mining about processing one set of data to create a second set of data.

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report (By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN, NYTimes.com, Published: December 24, 2005)

This might help understand what this is

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This is what they call the "envelope" information. This would be like the post office writing down the addresses on the outside of envelopes they handle. By tracking just the sources and destinations of physical mail you learn a lot. And it's the telecommunications equivalent to this, such as the source and destination phone numbers of all phone calls, that the article talks about.

It's not just this envelope information, but they're looking for "patterns" of contacts. This kind of analysis is not about listening to the actual phone calls, but who is calling whom, and how often.

The article discusses how the government has made special arrangements with the telecommunication companies. The NSA has a secret "backdoor" letting them directly tap into the core of the telecommunication infrastructure.

This says that what's happened has had widespread agreement from a broad spectrum of government and business entities. This took a long time and had to involve a lot of people to implement.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

One final interesting piece is whether U.S. laws govern privacy of telephone calls that just pass through equipment which happens to be located in the U.S. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the way telecommunications is installed in the world it is sometimes cheaper or easier for transmissions from one country to another country to pass through equipment in the U.S.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

... The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

Bangladesh won't be another Afghanistan: Nizami

When you think of terrorism Bangaladesh doesn't exactly come to the front of the mind. For some reason this country isn't getting much coverage in the War On Terror, but according to this article there are "terrorists" active there: Bangladesh won’t be another Afghanistan: Nizami (By UNB, Dhaka, The Nation of Bangaladesh, Sat, 24 Dec 2005, 11:15:00)

The article quotes a speech by Jamaat-e-Islami chief Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami talking about some bombings that occurred recently in Bangaladesh. The culprits haven't been identified, but Nizami claims it's clearly the "terrorists". It's clear that what he means by "terrorists" are the Islamic people who are into bombs and fighting The West.

Probably what's going on stems from Bangladesh being an Islamic country. There is a movement among the Islamic countries for hardliner fundamentalists to convert their governments over to strict Islamic law. Bangaladesh is no doubt being affected by this movement.

The thing that stands out in this article is the broad brush stroke used to apply the "terrorist" label. This is a pattern a lot of people are following.

There are different organizations around the world who use terror tactics. If you label them all "the terrorists" that implies they're working together in some way. But why would you expect the Northern Ireland terrorists to be in cahoots with the Islamic terrorists or to be in cahoots with the Basque terrorists?

Terror is a tactic used by people fighting wars. In fact, the label of "Terror act" can clearly be placed on the "Shock and Awe" phase of the Iraq war. Both acts have the same goal, that is to induce "shock and awe" into an enemy. The difference is most terrorist groups try to work under the radar, on a shoestring budget, while the Shock and Awe phase of the Iraq war was funded by the U.S. Government and operated totally in the open.

In any case, I would really appreciate it if news commentators and others would remember, there are multiple groups who use terrorist tactics. It's innapropriate to label them all as "the terrorists" because it confuses the issue.

CNN.com - Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation - Dec 24, 2005

I suppose "people" are a little sensitive right now to warrantless searches by government law enforcement people. We're in the midst of the snoopgate scandal, in which the Bush administration has admitted to spying on Americans. And, in which, the Echelon system has been implicated in being used in snoopgate by the NSA to vacuum up all communications for analysis by the NSA.

It's in this context we learn: Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation (From Kevin Bohn and Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Saturday, December 24, 2005)

This is about the FBI and/or other agencies monitoring radiation levels at specific places inside the U.S. A major target are mosques and other muslim-connected places. While the article says some non-muslim sites were also monitored, the article shows outrage from muslim spokespersons basically complaining of racial targeting.

One thing the article discusses is the warrantless nature of this monitoring. Technically a warrant isn't required because radiation can be monitored from a distance. And, for that matter, other government agencies do warrantless monitoring like this all the time. For example the FCC regularly monitors for illegal radio stations, simply by listening on the radio and using radio direction finder equipment to narrow down the broadcast location.

The program is part of the "dirty bomb" meme that's been running around for a long time. You know this one ... in the confusion shortly after September 11, 2001, someone was accused of a dirty bomb plot. A dirty bomb is a regular chemical explosive device that's been laced with radioactive material. The idea is to spread the radioactive material over a large area through the explosion. But ever since that accusation one of the scares which are repeatedly reinforced in the public mind is this dirty bomb meme.

One possibility I see here is to make monitoring equipment ubiquitous. Rather than this being a special arrangement, suppose all the street lights had equipment mounted on them to monitor air pollution, temperature, rain, radiation, various chemicals, etc. The equipment would need to transmit the data "home" to a data collection repository. That would provide a very interesting set of data not just for law enforcement, but also environmental monitoring and climatology.

Already there are a slew of video cameras being installed by governments. Why not add to them other kinds of monitoring?

CNN.com - Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation - Dec 24, 2005

I suppose "people" are a little sensitive right now to warrantless searches by government law enforcement people. We're in the midst of the snoopgate scandal, in which the Bush administration has admitted to spying on Americans. And, in which, the Echelon system has been implicated in being used in snoopgate by the NSA to vacuum up all communications for analysis by the NSA.

It's in this context we learn: Officials: Muslim sites subject to secret monitoring for radiation (From Kevin Bohn and Jeanne Meserve, CNN, Saturday, December 24, 2005)

This is about the FBI and/or other agencies monitoring radiation levels at specific places inside the U.S. A major target are mosques and other muslim-connected places. While the article says some non-muslim sites were also monitored, the article shows outrage from muslim spokespersons basically complaining of racial targeting.

One thing the article discusses is the warrantless nature of this monitoring. Technically a warrant isn't required because radiation can be monitored from a distance. And, for that matter, other government agencies do warrantless monitoring like this all the time. For example the FCC regularly monitors for illegal radio stations, simply by listening on the radio and using radio direction finder equipment to narrow down the broadcast location.

The program is part of the "dirty bomb" meme that's been running around for a long time. You know this one ... in the confusion shortly after September 11, 2001, someone was accused of a dirty bomb plot. A dirty bomb is a regular chemical explosive device that's been laced with radioactive material. The idea is to spread the radioactive material over a large area through the explosion. But ever since that accusation one of the scares which are repeatedly reinforced in the public mind is this dirty bomb meme.

One possibility I see here is to make monitoring equipment ubiquitous. Rather than this being a special arrangement, suppose all the street lights had equipment mounted on them to monitor air pollution, temperature, rain, radiation, various chemicals, etc. The equipment would need to transmit the data "home" to a data collection repository. That would provide a very interesting set of data not just for law enforcement, but also environmental monitoring and climatology.

Already there are a slew of video cameras being installed by governments. Why not add to them other kinds of monitoring?

Saddam Hussein tortured? Important?

The latest twist to the Trial of Saddam is that he claims the U.S. has been torturing HIM (!gasp!). Apparently this has become a big thing in the mainstream media (I don't watch TV, so I don't know for sure). Now, this raises interesting considerations to say the least.

I think it's best illustrated by this exchange in the State Department daily press briefing, December 22, 2005

QUESTION: Yesterday, I think it was, Saddam Hussein accused the U.S. of beating him and torturing him while he was in jail.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

QUESTION: I know you spoke briefly to it yesterday. I'm wondering whether the U.S. or Iraqi authorities have investigated those charges and whether you have any information on it, or whether you intend to.

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, the people from our Embassy spoke very clearly to this, I think the Iraqi investigative judge spoke to this, that these allegations are bogus. And frankly, I think it is -- you know, I've seen this -- I've seen this issue play a lot on the cable TVs. I've seen it in the headlines. I've seen a lot of stories about it. And frankly, this sort of grandstanding detracts from what the real story is. The real story is, and the voices that need to be heard, are the victims of Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein was one of the most violent mass murderers of this century or any other century, and what you have now is an opportunity for the victims of Saddam Hussein to detail the tyranny, the oppression, the brutality, the violence of this regime. That's what's on trial here, not the U.S. Government, not the new Iraqi Government. It's Saddam Hussein. And that's where the focus should be, frankly.

And I understand you need to ask these questions, but I think that it does a disservice to the world when the equal ink and airtime, if not more, is not given to the stories of these people, horrific stories of, you know, women being raped, being brutalized, people who have had molten plastic applied to their skin so it could be ripped off, people's relatives -- families -- being wiped out. That's the real story here. And you know, frankly, I would encourage you to ask more questions about that as part of this trial and your coverage of it.

QUESTION: When you talk about grandstanding, don't you have the feeling that this trial is going out of control?

MR. MCCORMACK: I think the Iraqi judges and the Iraqi judicial authorities are doing the best job they can under difficult circumstances to bring to justice those responsible for the oppression of an entire people for over the course of more than two decades. We are working closely with them. But I think that these are a brave group of people -- the prosecutors, the judges -- who are working on these cases. These are people who are working under threat, a threat to their lives by those who don't want to see this trial move forward. So I think that what they deserve is our encouragement and support in moving forward on the best possible judicial process that they can.

That exchange sounds rather reasonable, but let me offer a different interpretation than the guy obviously intended. This press secretary is obviously spinning the story the way the administration wants it to go, which is: Saddam Hussein was evil, evil acts occurred under his administration, and those evil acts justify any evil we might do in order to prosecute him for his crimes.

That's essentially what Mr. McCormack is saying, that the press should ignore any accusation by Saddam Hussein against the U.S. Instead the press should keep their attention strictly on the evil performed under Saddam Hussein's regime.

Now, what strikes me is how duplicitous this is. Evil is evil, no matter who performs it. The danger of prosecuting someone else for their supposed evil, is the evil you yourself have to embody in order to do so. The example is before us, with U.S. soldiers guilty of torture in every region the conflict has reached. Torture is not an American value, yet here we are having soldiers committing torture. What has this country come to?

Now, I'm expecting that Saddam probably is lying in claiming the U.S. has tortured him. Mr. McCormack also says his claims are bogus, as does the Iraqi courts, etc. The truth or not of whether Saddam has been tortured isn't my point. My point is the attitude Mr. McCormack shows in how he directs the attention in the direction of "Saddam's evil justifies any evil the U.S. might want to do".

Saying "the ends justify the means" is something attributed to the Russian Dictators. Again, is that an American value? No.

iraq saddam hussein torture usa

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey -- The Independent

Apparently in England the government is very open about wanting to track every citizens every movement. For example they're planning a national ID card that presumably will be required everywhere. But the article in question, Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored (By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independant) concerns automatically monitoring cars and other vehicles driving down the road. They'll be using TV cameras monitoring the roads, connecting them to computers which can identify and read license plates. Hence, all cars driving the roads will be identified and tracked.

Hmm... I guess Big Brother is arriving a little later than predicted.

For that matter, this capability is one of the ones to be developed under the Total Information Awareness system. Under TIA it's not just license plates which would be recognized and tracked, but faces. For example if you have a crowd of people going into a sports arena, it would be "helpful" to do face capture and recognition of everybody entering the arena. Well, "helpful" so long as you can clearly identify culprits.

What occurs to me of why this is disturbing, is this makes a broad presumption that everybody is a criminal. Until now the only time Police would stop and identify you is if they had reasonable cause to believe you were some kind of criminal. For example if your driving is weaving all over the road, they might think you're drunk, pull you over, and in the process identify you.

But under this system, the police is going to be identifying everyone regardless of any determination of whether they're a criminal. Every car driving the road, or everybody walking down the sidewalk, everybody will be inspected by a computer and identified.

In the Independant article they talk about caravaning. Criminals will sometimes steal a car, then the stolen car plus several others (a.k.a. caravan) elsewhere to commit a crime using the stolen car as some kind of subterfuge to hide their tracks. A caravan is several cars driving together, so one pattern they could program into their BigBrotherPro software is "has this group of cars been together for more than 'n' miles of driving". But, isn't it possible to accidentally caravan with someone? And if you accidentally caravan with the 'wrong' people, ones who later commit a crime, might you not be accidentally caught up in their crime?

Think the police don't make mistakes?

Just last month it was revealed a German tourist was mistakenly identified as an al Qaeda operative. He was kidnapped by U.S. agents, illegally renditioned to Afghanistan, where he was tortured for several months. Once they realized their mistake they flew him to Kosovo and dumped him on the street with no money. And that's just one mistake that happened to get into the mainstream news.

The potential for grave mistake is very high here.

AlterNet: In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind

I just listened to this via the iTunes podcast system, and you can listen to it here: In the Kingdom of the Half-Blind (By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted December 16, 2005.) It is a speech given by Bill Moyers about the Freedom of Information Act, the work of the National Archives, and about official secrecy that he's witnessed both working inside the White House (he was Lyndon Johnson's Press Secretary) and as a Journalist. Bill Moyers is a great man who has been doing wonderful work for decades. His speech is a wonderful and eye opening account of official secrecy and the ideal role for independant journalism to counter official secrecy.

He begins his speech with his recollection of the opening salvo of a different war which was launched under official lies. He was LBJ's Press Secretary, as I said, and on August 4, 1964 he was by LBJ's side as he received the information that led him to launch the counter-attack on North Vietnam which precipitated the Vietnam War. Unfortunately there was no pretense for a counter-attack, because there had been no attack in the first place, but it wasn't even clear to Moyers, who was in the room at the time, that there was any subterfuge.

Maybe it's helpful to remember this as we think of the lies and deceit showered on us by the Bush Administration. Clarity isn't always available when it comes time to make a decision. LBJ was in a great deal of doubt, it was unclear what actually was happening, and he made decisions which were later shown to be influenced by false information, yet which led to a disastrous war. Perhaps some of the decisions made by GWB have been alsoo clouded with bad information. We can't really know because of official secrecy, however.

In any case it is interesting to listen to Moyers speech and think of the day it was recorded, and the day it was published on AlterNet's web site. On December 17, 2005, we learned that GW Bush had ordered the NSA to bypass the law and spy on American citizens. AlterNet published Moyers speech on December 16, and it was given on December 9. I think Moyers would have given a different speech today, just 4 days later.

He was speaking of official secrets -- and one can't think of a more important official secret to have been disclosed than this one about domestic spying.

Salon.com | Uncle Sam is listening

In the snoopgate scandal it's important to not get lost from the details. Not only was it egregious that the President bypassed the law to spy on Americans, but it's interesting to ponder the sort of wiretapping that was conducted. This Salon.com article, Uncle Sam is listening says the wiretapping in question was performed using the Echelon system. Now, Echelon isn't widely known about and fortunately the article describes it pretty well. Basically, we're talking about a "vacuum cleaner" approach to wiretapping.

The stereotypical wiretap has a listening post connected to a small number of individual phone circuits. It's this model which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was meant to cover. If the spooks want to tap X's phone, they get a warrant, etc.

But todays telecommunications environment is far more complex than in the past.

The article implies that Bush turned to NSA because the FBI's wiretapping capabilities were rooted in the old model, while the NSA offered a new model. Echelon sucks in "everything", and uses pattern matching filters to extract the parts that are "important".

Most likely, Bush wanted a whole new surveillance paradigm. You can think of the FBI's capabilities as "retail surveillance": It eavesdrops on a particular person or phone. The NSA, on the other hand, conducts "wholesale surveillance." It, or more exactly its computers, listens to everything. An example might be to feed the computer a transcript of every conversation that mentions "Ayman al-Zawahiri" and monitor everybody who uttered the name, as well as everybody contacted. This type of surveillance was not anticipated in FISA and raises all sorts of legal issues. As Sen. Jay Rockefeller wrote in a secret memo after being briefed on the program, it raises "profound oversight issues," and it is unclear whether FISA would have approved this activity.

The memo by Sen. Rockefeller linked above is interesting because his mind jumps immediately to the TIA program, as does mine.

TIA, or Total Information Awareness, was a DARPA umbrella project led by former Admiral Poindexter. You may remember that Poindexter was convicted for lying to congress in the 1980's during the Iran/Contra scandal. So it's entirely fitting that he would be overseeing the creation of Big Brother. I choose the Big Brother phrase precisely because that's what TIA aimed to create.

Most of the links on my TIA page are dead (linked above) but I carefully copied over all the important points. Basically in TIA they envisioned a system which would suck in all information and filter it. It would be looking for patterns and once it found a dangerous pattern it would notify a national security agent. The "all information" would include such things as credit card transactions, cars driving through tollgates, automatic face or car license plate recognition in surveillance cameras, all communications, etc. Part of the system included automatic language translation so that they could hire whitebread americans from Texas who only know how to speak 'Merican and still have them able to analyze communications captured from any of the languages spoken by humans.

A few years ago a small part of the TIA program made it into the press, where it created a hubbub that lasted a couple weeks. The specific program had brainiacs playing a "predict the next terrorist attack" game by placing bets, and somehow this offended some professional harrrrumphers who harrumph'd until they got that program canned. The official story was TIA was killed by this, but TIA was so much more than these brainiacs playing games. And somehow the harrumphers totally missed the most consternating part of the program.

As Rockefeller says in his memo above, the idea of sucking in all the kinds of data Echelon or the larger system envisioned under TIA, well, that simply challenges the mind. As he says, how do we grasp this well enough so we can understand the oversight issues?

In the U.S. we govern through checks and balances. One branch of government oversees another branch, and checks the power held by that other branch. The goal is to keep the country from dictatorship through the branches of government holding back the power grabs by other branches of government.

snoopgate

Salon.com | Uncle Sam is listening

In the snoopgate scandal it's important to not get lost from the details. Not only was it egregious that the President bypassed the law to spy on Americans, but it's interesting to ponder the sort of wiretapping that was conducted. This Salon.com article, Uncle Sam is listening says the wiretapping in question was performed using the Echelon system. Now, Echelon isn't widely known about and fortunately the article describes it pretty well. Basically, we're talking about a "vacuum cleaner" approach to wiretapping.

The stereotypical wiretap has a listening post connected to a small number of individual phone circuits. It's this model which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was meant to cover. If the spooks want to tap X's phone, they get a warrant, etc.

But todays telecommunications environment is far more complex than in the past.

The article implies that Bush turned to NSA because the FBI's wiretapping capabilities were rooted in the old model, while the NSA offered a new model. Echelon sucks in "everything", and uses pattern matching filters to extract the parts that are "important".

Most likely, Bush wanted a whole new surveillance paradigm. You can think of the FBI's capabilities as "retail surveillance": It eavesdrops on a particular person or phone. The NSA, on the other hand, conducts "wholesale surveillance." It, or more exactly its computers, listens to everything. An example might be to feed the computer a transcript of every conversation that mentions "Ayman al-Zawahiri" and monitor everybody who uttered the name, as well as everybody contacted. This type of surveillance was not anticipated in FISA and raises all sorts of legal issues. As Sen. Jay Rockefeller wrote in a secret memo after being briefed on the program, it raises "profound oversight issues," and it is unclear whether FISA would have approved this activity.

The memo by Sen. Rockefeller linked above is interesting because his mind jumps immediately to the TIA program, as does mine.

TIA, or Total Information Awareness, was a DARPA umbrella project led by former Admiral Poindexter. You may remember that Poindexter was convicted for lying to congress in the 1980's during the Iran/Contra scandal. So it's entirely fitting that he would be overseeing the creation of Big Brother. I choose the Big Brother phrase precisely because that's what TIA aimed to create.

Most of the links on my TIA page are dead (linked above) but I carefully copied over all the important points. Basically in TIA they envisioned a system which would suck in all information and filter it. It would be looking for patterns and once it found a dangerous pattern it would notify a national security agent. The "all information" would include such things as credit card transactions, cars driving through tollgates, automatic face or car license plate recognition in surveillance cameras, all communications, etc. Part of the system included automatic language translation so that they could hire whitebread americans from Texas who only know how to speak 'Merican and still have them able to analyze communications captured from any of the languages spoken by humans.

A few years ago a small part of the TIA program made it into the press, where it created a hubbub that lasted a couple weeks. The specific program had brainiacs playing a "predict the next terrorist attack" game by placing bets, and somehow this offended some professional harrrrumphers who harrumph'd until they got that program canned. The official story was TIA was killed by this, but TIA was so much more than these brainiacs playing games. And somehow the harrumphers totally missed the most consternating part of the program.

As Rockefeller says in his memo above, the idea of sucking in all the kinds of data Echelon or the larger system envisioned under TIA, well, that simply challenges the mind. As he says, how do we grasp this well enough so we can understand the oversight issues?

In the U.S. we govern through checks and balances. One branch of government oversees another branch, and checks the power held by that other branch. The goal is to keep the country from dictatorship through the branches of government holding back the power grabs by other branches of government.

snoopgate

Bush's Snoopgate - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

To hear Impeachment being discussed again excites me because I've been certain since 2003 this President is highly impeachable. The current justification for impeachment is this scandalous wiretapping by the NSA inside U.S. borders without warrants. By law the NSA is only supposed to operate outside the U.S. and there's a special procedure by which the Foreign Intelligence services can obtain warrants to act inside the U.S. President Bush ignored that law and is in clear violation of it.

Jonathan Alter calls it Bush’s Snoopgate, writing in Newsweek.

The main point of this article is the desparation Bush must be feeling. He called the publisher and editor of the NY Times into the Oval Office to ask them to withold publishing the article detailing the legal violations.

Bush's demeanor in his public appearances has been very combative since the article was published. In Alter's article the phrase is "President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda" ...but... "We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War."

We are living in interesting times, that's for sure.

Salon.com News & Politics: The President is spying on U.S.

Yesterday I wrote a bit on the wiretapping activities authorized by President Bush. What's caught my eye is how congressional leaders are very overwhelmingly concerned by this. For example Senator Arlen Spector saying "That's wrong, clearly and categorically wrong," and that they will take it up for examination when Congress returns to work next month.

Spying on Americans: Did Bush break the law? (Salon.COM War Room) Asks about the legality of Bush's actions. As I noted in yesterdays posting, the President had available a process of obtaining wiretap authority through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but he did not use it. The legal qualm is basically that he's ignoring the law.

I remember a previous president who thought he was above the law. President Nixon was tossed out.

The War Room entry refers to an old Newsweek article that contains this section:

The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a —high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

The whole article talks about how the Administration has been following this line of thought: "There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11,", saying that "after-9/11" everything was different, that this is a different kind of war, and that the old rules do not apply to this war. The article itself was written in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib disclosure and talked of the extreme torture methods being used by the military, and how clearly that scandal wasn't a few bad apples but instead an across the board policy to bring torture into use by American Military personell, and to upend America's longstanding conformance with the Geneva Convention.

Between these two we have a clear picture of a U.S. Administration that is acting above and beyond the law.

If the Rule of Law is to prevail in this country, then we who are the country need to stand for the Rule of Law. We need to demand legal accountability of our government.

CNN.com - Bush says he signed NSA wiretap order - Dec 17, 2005

Big Brother has been official government policy for awhile. It just took awhile for this to be acknowledged by the main stream media. The NY Times knew for over a year about presidential orders authorising the NSA to spy on Americans, and it sat on the story for over a year while it considered whatever considerations they had in mind.

Bush says he signed NSA wiretap order Adds he OK'd program more than 30 times, will continue to do so (CNN.COM, Saturday, December 17, 2005; Posted: 8:07 p.m. EST (01:07 GMT))

And, of course, as has been the official pattern ... as soon as the NY Times published their story, the President started bashing the NY Times. For his part, the President claims his actions were legal, and that the NY Times was damaging national security.

During an unusual live, on-camera version of his weekly radio address, Bush said such authorization is "fully consistent" with his "constitutional responsibilities and authorities."

Bush added: "Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

Congress is apparently united in opposing this. The article quotes both Democratic and Republican congresscritters voicing protest. They're pointing out there is an existing channel through which the administration can get wiretap authority against American citizens, but that the administration ignored that existing channel.

After hearing Bush's response, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, said there was no law allowing the president's actions and that "it's a sad day."

"He's trying to claim somehow that the authorization for the Afghanistan attack after 9/11 permitted this, and that's just absurd," Feingold said. "There's not a single senator or member of Congress who thought we were authorizing wiretaps."

He added that the law clearly lays out how to obtain permission for wiretaps.

"If he needs a wiretap, the authority is already there -- the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act," Feingold said. "They can ask for a warrant to do that, and even if there's an emergency situation, they can go for 72 hours as long as they give notice at the end of 72 hours."

In related news, Congress refused to extend the PATRIOT Act. The article quotes several Senators saying this news about illegal wiretapping swayed their vote.

As for GW Bush, well, Bush: Senate vote on Patriot Act 'irresponsible' (CNN, Saturday, December 17, 2005; Posted: 5:52 p.m. EST (22:52 GMT))

Will Jews be blamed for stealing Christmas?

A couple days ago I posted a piece on the "battle" for Christmas. What's happening is the politically active Conservative Christian crew has decided to gang up on the supposed sidelining of Christmas celebrations. Which I find odd, because it's hardly sidelined at all.

Will Jews be blamed for stealing Christmas? (By MATTHEW E. BERGER, Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2005): This article is proof of one of the theories I put forward. The writer is wondering whether the Jews will be blamed for this supposed marginalization of Christmas. In the U.S. we have a lot of religions, not just Christianity. In the constitution we gaurantee freedom of religion. So, he asks, will the fundammentalists blame the Jews?

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism is an interesting book. Well, judging by the first chapter anyway. It purports to tell us corporate excess of the kind that contributed to the recent stock market collapse of the last few years. It goes to the root of what capitalism is about, namely owners putting their capital on the line to make investments and reap the rewards.

Today we have something else, where the people in charge are the corporate managers, and the ownership is so diffuse nobody knows who owns what. yet at the same time the percentage of total wealth owned by the top 1% has gone from 15% in 1970 to 40% today. Coupled with this is a shift from business as a practice of high integrity, to one where people regularly stab each other in the back and agreements last only so long as they are useful. Integrity isn't just moral, he says, but it also promotes a strong business climate as it is easier to do business with someone in whom you have trust.

The author of the book is not some outsider looking in. He was the founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard Group, and has been an advocate of individual investors for a long time.

The battle for christmas

It's Christmas season. In todays newspaper is an article detailing efforts by so-called "conservatives" to have the official celebrations actually say what's being celebrated. In the past (oh, 50 yrs ago) in the U.S. the Christmas celebrations were clearly said to be about Christmas. The city/county/state would decorate a Christmas tree, the schools would be out for Christmas vacation, there would be Nativity dioramas on the courthouse lawn, etc.

But in the intervening years there's been a slide towards calling it "winter break" rather than Christmas vacation, and rather than decorating a christmas tree it would be a holiday tree, etc. Now, there's a clear legal reason for this. The U.S. Constitution clearly says there will be a separation between Church and State, and it's a reasonable legal interpretation to say that the State cannot be preferential to one religion over another.

And over the last few years the so-called "conservatives" have been working at all sorts of levels to promote Christianity (usually in a fundamental form) and Christian viewpoints all through the U.S. The recent push to get "Intelligent Design" accepted as teaching curriculum is obviously a subterfuge to get more influence of Christianity in America.

But, let's think about Christmas for a moment. One thing that strikes me is how, in truth, this is a very un-Christian celebration. It's fairly well known that many of the things about the Christmas celebration were elements of a "Pagan" holiday which the early Catholic Church wanted to replace with a Christian celebration. Hence they moved the date of Christs birth to fall upon the Saturnalia celebration, overlaying Christian themes on top of the pagan elements.

What about Christs birth has anything to do with a tree? Nothing. The tree is taken from the "pagan" holiday. As is the Mistletoe.

What about "Santa Claus"? The origins of that chubby guy are murky, but one thing I know is he has nothing to do with Christ. And Reindeer? And Elves? And Frosty the Snowman? What do any of these things have to do with Christ?

And what about the gross commercialism? Spending yourself silly buying gifts? Is that anything to do with Christ?

The article refers to The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought and I think "what 'sacred' holiday is he talking about???".

What is sacred about shop til you drop? Or what is sacred about stuffing yourself on a huge meal? Or what is sacred about murdering an innocent pine tree so you can watch it starve to death while it's hung with baubles and doodads?

I would be very happy if these people were to support celebration of a sacred holiday. You know, honor Jesus the Teacher who came to us. Honor his teachings. Consider again the teachings of love and forgiveness, or accepting and loving your neighbor as if they are yourself, and so on. But that's not what they're doing.

Instead what they're doing is telling people a big lie. That the people in America should feel persecuted, that their religion is being taken away from them. Huh? It is? Since when?

Clearly the founding fathers felt there was a grave danger if the Church and State were joined in one entity. In modern times we have examples of several fundamental Islamic countries to warn us away from joining a fundamentalist style of Church with the government. To the founding fathers their example was the fundamentalism rampant in England shortly before America gained its independence. The fundamentalists in England had a tight rein over the government, and ruled with a bloody iron fist killing anybody who got in their way.

Christianity is just one form of spiritual worship. This country clearly is a melting pot of every culture that's walked the face of this planet. Maybe it's that I live in California and it's a bit more obvious here. How can the Christians rightfully claim their religion should take pre-eminence in America over the other religions that are practiced here?? I'm not saying the Christians should be shoved aside or persecuted. But what's at stake here is the freedom of all Americans, not just the slice of Americana that celebrates Christianity.

Bomb kills anti-Syrian legislator in Beirut - Africa & Middle East - International Herald Tribune

Since the Lebanon Civil War, Syria had occupied Lebanon. Supposedly it was to help maintain stability in Lebanon, but it could also have been a subterfuge to having a larger border with Israel. I don't know what Syria really got out of occupying Lebanon, but they sure did it for a long time.

Earlier this year they were asked to leave Lebanon. The Lebanese people managed to get up enough gumption to protest the occupation seriously enough that then world leaders could demand Syria leave Lebanon. Which they did.

Unfortunately since then several anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon have been killed, and Syria seems to be the culprit.

Unfortunately the leadership of the United States is on record as planning to reshape the Middle East, starting with Iraq and then moving on to either Syria or Iran. Iraq has been underway for three years, and the U.S. has been belligerating towards both Syria and Iran.

Bomb kills anti-Syrian legislator in Beirut (The Associated Press, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2005) -- Covers the latest killing, and gives an overview of the concern.

Lately I've been listening to the podcast of the U.S. State Department daily briefing. In yesterdays briefing (December 12, 2005) they discussed Lebanon, but I think it was before this latest killing. It was mentioned that Lebanon has officially requested help in uncovering the "truth" of these crimes. The U.S. has pledged to keep this issue before the UN Security Council.

That's mighty nice of us to take this series of assassinations so seriously. What after the long history of the U.S. ignoring assassinations around the world it's nice to take one so seriously. I suppose the ones we've ignored were in countries that didn't have strategic importance. It is convenient that these assassinations occurred in an area of strategic importance, and in a way where the U.S. could potentially further the neocon agenda of megalomaniacal takeover of the middle east.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Hong Kong on high alert as thousands of protesters fly in

Okay, we have another World Trade Organization (WTO) summit coming up. And, as a prelude to the summit, we have protesters coming in from around the world.

Here's an article going over the preparations for the protesters: Hong Kong on high alert as thousands of protesters fly in (Jonathan Watts in Hong Kong, Monday December 12, 2005, The Guardian)

And what strikes me about this is how the article completely ignores two things: Whatever are the WTO attendees going to be discussing at the summit? And whatever are the grievance causing these protesters to fly in from around the world?

Clearly it costs a lot of money to fly around the world. The money spent by the protesters are indicative of the depth of their feelings about their grievances (whatever those are).

It would really be interesting to see a fair and balanced comparison of the two. Just what are the world leaders putting into motion through the WTO? And just why are there people flying around the world in protest?

Doesn't that sound very interesting?

Now, tell me, just why is the news media ignoring this and instead focusing on how the riot police are going to keep the calm?

Corporations podcast their marketing nets

It's not just corporations adopting blogging, but some are toying with podcasting. Large corporations generally have some audio or video production crews already, so it's a natural extension for the output those crews make to be distributed on the Internet using the podcasting mechanism.

In Corporations podcast their marketing nets we see an overview of what's going on with corporate podcasting. It really runs the gamut.

It names Johns Hopkins Medicine, General Motors, IBM Investor Relations, Sun Microsystems, The BBC, President Bush, and Senator Barak Obama.

The article also discusses how some attempts, e.g. GM's, have come across as too much like a cheesy marketing piece rather than an authentic podcast. Okay, fine, whatever. Podcasting is just a medium for distributing content, and that medium can be used for whatever some webmaster wants to use it for.

I suppose the point is that for someone to listen to a podcast they have to find it useful. Would you want to listen to many minutes of marketing schlop? Well, okay, I think the answer might be in all those infomercial programs on television. For some reason people watch them even though they're obviously biased.

Telstra has begun corporate blogs

Telstra is a large telecommunications company in Australia. I guess it's the Australian equivalent to what AT&T used to be in the U.S. Anyway, they've joined the ranks of companies that are blogging.

The web site is here: http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/ ... sigh, what a goofy name ... but then the goofy name just matches the goofy web site.

On the web site they promise "We want you to have a say in Australia's telecommunications future. This site is about giving you information and letting you tell us, and others, exactly what you think..."

That's a nice goal, but I hardly think they're accomplishing it. That's because the site looks like it was created by the marketing department. The main clue to this is on the list of blogs. For a company which ought to be employing 10's of thousands of people, they can only sponsor 11 blogs?

Another tweaky thing is in their discussion guidelines they say they're interested in an open dialog, but there are moderators on hand to delete postings. The moderators will do much more than delete postings, but they're free to edit postings, rename postings, cut postings into pieces, etc. Obviously they're trying to avoid SPAM and flamewars, and I don't blame them. At the same time the rules allow them to be big brother and only to skew the topics and discussion into directions their agenda says it should go.

It appears to be a new site. It looks pretty, but I think pretty looks doesn't guarantee success for a site. What I've always noted about online community is it needs enough people to form a critical mass. Once the critical mass threshold is reached, there's enough inertia to keep the discussion going. Less than the threshold and the discussion will eventually die. More than the threshold and you just have noise. It appears to me this site is well below critical mass. This is especially true as there are no RSS feeds to be found -- having RSS feeds brings people back to the site.

For a telecomm company to make such a thumb-fingered blunderous site as this is astonishing.

BBC Getting into Blogging

Another large organization is tentatively trying out the blogging waters: BBC Getting Into Blogging (Neville Hobson, Expert Author, Published: 2005-12-09)

The blog is located here: http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/nickrobinson/

From the domain name one can conclude it's going to be a general blog operation used by the BBC. However at the moment Nick Robinson is the only blogger and he says this is a tentative experiment.

The webpronews.com article points out the BBC had someone blogging earlier in the year, but not on a BBC-owned site.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | World 'losing patience with Iran'

This story has been going on for awhile. Iran has been developing nuclear teachnology, and the power plants they're building are of a design which as a byproduct produces weapons grade material. The sticky point is that Iran was hiding these plants from the rest of the world, until it was revealed by a dissident group. Ever since the "world community" has been breathing down Iran's neck.

This dovetails nicely with the neocon megalomaniacal plan for world domination. They would first invade Iraq in a pincer, invading from the south through Kuwait and from the north through the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. And, indeed, this is the plan that was used in March 2003 (of course Donald Rumsfield is a neocon). After invading Iraq and turning it into a moderate democracy, their plan was to either invade Syria or Iran and turn them into a moderate democracy as well. The strategy is that by installing moderate democracies in the middle of the middle east the whole region would become "reasonable".

World 'losing patience with Iran' (BBC News, December 9, 2005)

So, here we go ... the so-called international community is "losing patience" with Iran, just in time to be the next step in the reshaping of the Middle East. Conveniently the reason for leaving Iraq may be congealing as the democratic institutions are beginning to take shape there. Assuming it goes well then later in 2006 we may have freedom to invade another country.

But that's not what the article talks about. Instead it talks of the IAEA's concern over Iran's nuclear programs and how the parties need to sit and negotiate with one another.

We just have to remember what the neocon agenda is. The Bush Administration has been taking a hardline stance against Iran, and one wonders whether that's a baiting tactic to get the Iranians to do something stupid which the West can construe into justification for invasion.

Los Angeles Fire Department blog is one year old

LAFD - First Year of Blogging on the Map: Congradulations are in order to the LAFD for being a trendsetter in your field.

Re: Federal law may make blogging at work illegal

I have in front of me an article with a misleading title, but talking about something with wide ranging consequences. The U.S. Federal Election Commission oversees the conduct of U.S. elections. Over the last year or two they've been mulling the role of blogging in politics, and some bloggers have been really concerned over whether a bungling government agency might accidently strangle blogging.

See, it's clear that some political bloggers are being paid under the covers to promote political agendas. You might think that falls under "free speach", but it's really paid advertising. There's an existing rule that paid political advertising needs to be declared to the FEC and also carry notices as to who placed the advertising. This helps the public in interpreting the message.

Federal law may make blogging at work illegal Law falls under campaign-finance reform (By: Justin Malvin, California Aggie, December 9, 2005)

The article refers to this blog posting: The Reformers' Trojan Horse: Killing the Office Blogger ... and I think it's fair to summarize that blog posting as one mans theory and personal interpretation of a rule proposal being made by the FEC.

The danger proposed is this ... the FEC proposed rule that is cited limits an employee of a company to blogging (on company time, using company equipment) for more than an hour per week. According to a quote in the California Aggie article, this is just an extension of an existing rule about employee use of company time and equipment. And, to my eye this is a very benign rule as one would expect employers to be really concerned about employees blogging while on the clock.

To my eye they're making a mountain out of a molehill, and along the way trying to smear the FEC for some reason.

It's clear that while an employee is "on the clock" and using company equipment, they should be performing their job. What's the big deal?

Especially as one big concern in election law is a corporation using their employees as political activists. Suppose a company wanted to influence an election? One way is to tell your employees "blog supportively of candidate X" and lead them to believe candidate X will be good for their jobs. For example a few years ago when the push to expense stock options was being made, Scott McNealy sent an email to Sun's employees (where I work) exhorting us to support efforts to prevent that rule from being enacted. He claimed it was an important part of how we get paid, but I wonder also just how much his personal interest swayed his opinion (as a huge part of his "salary" is stock options).

I think political blogging does need some attention by the regulators. There is a huge amount of room for political blogging to affect elections. The 2004 election cycle was a prime example with bloggers playing a big role in taking down several big figures, and in general playing a big role in shaping the debate. I think that bloggers who are being paid by a political organization to blog need to declare it both to the FEC and in a banner on their blog, and that doing so would be a simple extension of existing laws.

At the same time there's a vast quantity of blogging which isn't political and doesn't need FEC regulations. So I expect the FEC to be careful in defining just what blogging the rules apply to.

Defense Tech: Insurgents Using Chem Weapons - On Themselves?

How do you get people to go to war? That is, how do you get a group of guys to risk death and enter a battle? It goes against the human survival instinct to do so, so how is it accomplished?

Of course there's several ways to get people to fight one another. But one way appears to be brainwashing. And that's what I have to share about today.

Insurgents Using Chem Weapons - On Themselves? defensetech.org

The title of that article is a little misleading, as the chemical weapons in question are actually hallucinogenic drugs. However they were drugs developed by the U.S. military for use as weapons, hence the article title is accurate if misleading.

What he details are reports that the "insurgents" in Iraq are often hopped up on several kinds of drugs. One specific drug is named BZ and is the byproduct of U.S. Military research.

BZ or "Agent Buzz" is the military name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, an extremely powerful hallucinogen. After experimenting with a whole stash of mind-altering substances including cocaine, heroin and LSD, the Pentagon selected BZ for weaponizing. Its major advantages are that it can easily delivered in an aerosol cloud, and it is very safe. With many substances, the effective dose can be dangerously close to the amount needed to kill - ask any anesthetist. With BZ, the tiny effective dose (maybe two milligrams) is around one-thousandth the lethal dose. It is also odorless and invisible, and there is currently no means of detecting it.

Agent Buzz was tested between 1959 to 1975 on some twenty-eight hundred US soldiers at several locations. It proved extremely effective as an incapacitant. The physical effects are increased heart rates, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, increased temperature, and flushing of skin – as a med school mnemonic has it “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as Hades, red as a beet.