Crusading state-level Attorneys General seeking to take down corrupt financial industry - Maddow

This week a major focus on Rachel Maddow's show is the corrupt financial industry that nearly killed the U.S. economy.  The deed was enabled by corrupt business practices that were in turn enabled by relaxed regulatory regime.  Largely speaking, even though many companies in the financial industry died, bankrupted, merged, etc, the people who committed the practices are often still employed in the same financial industry, and the regulatory system around them has changed very little.

As Maddow recounts, earlier in this decade a crusading NY Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer, took down several corrupt NYC financial industry titans.  That was before he went on to a prostitute scandal and a stint as a CNN host.  In her coverage this week she focused on two Attorneys General, Eric Schneiderman from New York and Beau Biden from Delaware.   One take-away from this is that Change can happen when bright people pursue a course of correcting wrongs, and use their position of power to enable change in the world.

Of course there is positive change and negative change.  Someone in a position of power can create a corrupt system, or work to remove corruption.  It depends on how they apply the power their position gives them.

These people who are in public service - ideally their job is serving the better interests of all.  Consider the Attorney General job.  It's about seeing justice is served, lawbreakers are found and punished, the law is applied in a just manner, etc.

But history is replete with people who used positions of power to instead feather their own nests, or work with cronies to feather each others nests, or create a regime of dictatorial control, or .. etc .. on and on ..  There have been plenty of Attorneys General who used their positions of power to hide corruption, to stonewall investigations, etc.  Again, it's a matter of how each individual uses their time in the position of power.

During the interviews below, Maddow asked Beau Biden (son of Vice President Biden) why these investigations are happening at the state level rather than the federal level.  Interesting question, and he answered that while there is a lot of state-level investigation, that it seems the state level investigators are cooperating, there is also federal level investigations.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This starts a little slow with analysis of Republican advertisements, the poor pitiful state of Democratic advertisements .. etc ..  The segue point is a Democratic ad that really hits hard on the mortgage crisis corruption.   Almost half of Arizona home-owners are "under water" with foreclosures "everywhere" but Romney's message to Arizona is that he wants the mortgage crisis to "hit bottom" and that home-owners are on their own.

In other words - the banks (e.g. the rich 1%) got bailed out, while we the 99% get foreclosed.

Would it work to brush the corruption under the rug and ignore it?  The business-friendly Republicans want to brush this aside, but does this mean they think "business-friendly" means "corruption-friendly"?

A lot of the base raw feelings driving the Occupy protests is this exact issue.  Rampant financial corruption and corrupt practices.  Who is going to step up to the plate to correct this?  A minute ago I suggested that people in positions of political power have a choice, to use their power for the good of all, or to use their power to protect corrupt practices keeping the game going.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Later in the show they had Glenn Greenwald on to shill for his latest book, but this weaves into the same narrative.  This book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, "lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability" and "shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud".

The book has a chapter titled - Too Big To Jail - great meme.

Basically, he was there to talk about officially sanctioned corruption and the general pattern that the rich get away with things we little people would be in jail over.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In this segment Maddow shows, with numbers charted on a graph, the effect of the system.  Note that Greenwald identified a tipping point 40 years ago when Richard Nixon got pardoned, and by being pardoned started this "Too Big To Jail" precedent that's been used to let others get off with little or no punishment for misdeeds.

Here the graph shows how, upon the election of Ronald Reagan, the economic well-being of the 99% and 1% began to diverge.  The Rich got Richer far faster than the rest of us, creating an enormous gap in financial well-being.  Reagan did a lot to remove the regulatory system that had kept the financial system in check, keeping corruption out of finance.  One thing that enabled was for the rich to get richer, and it enabled the rampant corruption.

Oh, and this more-or-less proves how bogus were the "Trickle Down Economics" of the Reagan era.  We see right here that there's no trickle-down.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is the segment where she talks about Elliot Spitzer in the period he was the crusading New York Attorney General, the role now held by Eric Schneiderman above.  The segment starts with a quote from the Chamber of Commerce complaining about Spitzers effectiveness.  From the Chamber of Commerce perspective we can imagine they saw Spitzer as a threat, but that just fits the meme where "business-friendly" really means "corruption-friendly" doesn't it?

Thanks to Spitzer, Wall Street was being "perp walked" for stuff they used to routinely get away with.

Sure, investments are not a sure thing and investors should certainly know this.  THe one thing investors deserve is honest advice.  Instead what they got was crap self serving advice that actively misled investors to investing in crap.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Immediately after the prior segment, we have Beau Biden (VP Biden's son) on to talk about what Delaware is doing.  Where Delaware enters the picture is jurisdiction.  Where Delaware is the preferred state to register corporations, those corporations are subject to accountability by Delaware's judicial system.

Beau Biden as the Delaware Attorney General has just launched a lawsuit against the entire mortgage industry.

The allegation is that in the mid 90's the banks privatized regulation of mortgage notes, so that mortgages could be securitized so that they can be traded on the open market.  A result of the securitization was that it's now nigh-on-impossible to determine who actually owns a given house, because the mortgage originator securitizes the mortgage to sell the mortgage securities on the market.

 

British and American lawyers debate: Was the US Declaration of Independence legal, or not. WTF?

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corp) recently ran a news magazine article about a debate, held at Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Hall, over the legality of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.  Was it legal for America to declare itself independent or not.  It's interesting to think about this in the context of current events with the Arab Spring and now the Occupy Wall Street movements where the population is standing up to demand change.

To start with there can easily be a WTF reaction to there even being a question whether the Declaration of Independence is illegal or not.   (if you don't know what WTF means, you simply don't get out enough)  Let's start there … how could there even be a debate on this.  The U.S. is a fully legal country, recognized as a country everywhere, so how could there be a question that its founding moment was illegal.

The British case against the Declaration of Independence goes thusly: (Is the US Declaration of Independence illegal?)

The Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to. What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union?

Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right. The Declaration of Independence itself, in the absence of any recognised legal basis, had to appeal to "natural law", an undefined concept, and to "self-evident truths", that is to say truths for which no evidence could be provided.

Further they claim the grievances cited by the Founding Fathers were pretty minor things.  That's the British point of view mind you, and while I'm not entirely in agreement it does give interesting food for thought.

If a population has proper grievance against their rulers, what are they to do?  Lodge a complaint with the powers that be?  Vote them out of office come next election?  Run a recall election to boot them out of office right away?  Rise up in mass protest to demonstrate the ruler has no support and should therefore resign?  Pull your guns out of the closet and start fighting?

Those are a number of possible reactions and you can surely think of a few examples of each path.  For example Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California when a group of citizens started a recall effort against Gray Davis, booted Gov. Davis out of office, installing Schwarzenegger in his place.  In Egypt the Mubarak regime was toppled by a mass protest that was relatively peaceful.  However in LIbya the Qaddafi regime required a massive civil war, fighting from city to city, bloodshed, and outside intervention, before the regime fell. (http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/libya-real-us-drone-war.html and http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/will-economic-hitmen-undo-political.html)

I suppose from the viewpoint of the leaders of Egypt, the massive protests that ended up toppling the Mubarak government were illegal and perhaps treasonous.  From the viewpoint of the protesters, it was the government that was illegitimate, brutal, dictatorial, and had to go.  Would there have been a "legal" way for the Egyptians to change their government?  Apparently there wasn't because that government rigged the system to disallow any change.

In the case of Libya that leadership promised to crush any its own population who dared defy the regime.  Clearly Qaddafi thought the Libyan protesters (rebels) were illegal and treasonous.  Hence the Libyans who sought change had no choice but to battle for change, because Qaddafi wasn't going to allow peaceful change.

In other words it's all nice and proper to say populations who secede from their rulers are illegal and treasonous, what is a population to do when the rulers in question give no meaningful method for the population to peacefully create change?

Senator Dodd acts to restore Habeas Corpus

Waycool! Senator Dodd of Connecticut has found some cajones, and has introduced a bill that would, among other things, restore Habeas Corpus. However the bill has a bunch of other aspects, so maybe we should carefully look at the rest of it to make sure he's not bringing in some nefarious other stuff under the guise of restoring something we all want restored.

Dodd Introduces Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act; Brings Terrorists to Justice, Honors America's Good Name

The Effective Terrorists Prosecution Act is said by Dodd's web site to have these nice sounding characteristics.

• Restores Habeas Corpus protections to detainees
• Narrows the definition of unlawful enemy combatant to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the United States who are not lawful combatants
• Bars information gained through coercion from being introduced as evidence in trials
• Empowers military judges to exclude hearsay evidence they deem to be unreliable
• Authorizes the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to review decisions by the Military commissions
• Limits the authority of the President to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions and makes that authority subject to congressional and judicial oversight
• Provides for expedited judicial review of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to determine the constitutionally of its provisions

Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

URL: 

Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

Description: 

This is the full text of the Habeas Corpus law. The year given is 1679, and I know the concept goes back several hundred years before then. This is an ancient concept in European culture, and for GW Bush to throw it away just because it smells bad to him is ridiculous. Why did Congress go along with it?

The text of the law is very interesting, as it clearly is meant to avoid abuses by government officials in the form of holding prisoners excessively long without just cause.

Natalee Holloway is missing, and so are a lot of other people

Natalee Holloway's mom crushed by loss of 'last shot': In case you were hiding under a rock on Mars .. the capsule summary of who Natalee is/was: She was vacationing with her family in Aruba (an island country off the coast of South America) when she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There was a big whoopdedoo made over the case, and it made the national media frenzy pattern for a couple weeks.

This kind of media frenzy happens all the time. The facts are someone gets killed, or gets arrested, or exposes their private parts, etc. Somehow that event triggers the national media frenzy pattern when other people doing the same event does not trigger that frenzy.

For example the current media frenzy is because Mel Gibson got arrested for Drinking while Under the Influence of Alchohol (DUI). People get arrested for DUI every day, in the hundreds. Yet, it's Mel Gibson, and he was recorded swearing at the Jews and how they control everything etc. So his ravings about the Jews are making the news frenzy go nuts, fueled I think by the belief that racial slurs against the Jews are more important than racial slurs against others.

In the case of Natalee Holloway let's get some perspective here. NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics for 2005 is statistics published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (U.S.).

The National Crime Information Center’s (NCIC’s) Missing Person File was implemented in 1975. Records in the Missing Person File are retained indefinitely, until the individual is located or the record is canceled by the entering agency. The Missing Person File contains records for missing who:

• have a proven physical or mental disability (Disability – EMD),
• are missing under circumstances indicating that they may be in physical danger (Endangered – EME),
• are missing after a catastrophe (Catastrophe Victim – EMV),
• are missing under circumstances indicating their disappearance may not have been voluntary (Involuntary – EMI),
• are under the age of 21 and do not meet the above criteria (Juvenile – EMJ), or
• are 21 and older and do not meet any of the above criteria but for whom there is a reasonable concern for their safety (Other – EMO).

As of December 31, 2005, there were 109,531 active missing person records in NCIC. Juveniles under the age of 18 account for 58,081 (53.03 %) of the records and 11,868 (10.84 %) were for juveniles between the ages of 18 and 20.

During 2005, 834,536 missing person records were entered into NCIC, an increase of 0.51 % from the 830,325 entered in 2004. Missing Person records cleared or canceled during the same period totaled 844,838. Reasons for these removals include: a law enforcement agency located the subject, the individual returned home, or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record is invalid.

There were over 834,536 missing person reports during 2005. Yet this one, of a cute white girl vacationing in Aruba, gets huge media attention when the others do not.

Why?

Israel's campaign against Lebanon may constitute war crimes, by Israel, and may violate US law

There is a conflict happening between Israel and Lebanon right now. It's an extension of 50 years, or more, of previous conflict and is in the context of the larger Middle East conflict which has been with us for decades. (Also see this previous blog entry)

I want to outline several articles that have come up in my news scans. These articles provide a non-mainstream view of the conflict, one that Fox News is unlikely to air.

Attacks Qualify as War Crimes, Officials Say: This was published in the NY Times, and republished on CommonDreams.org. The contention is that because Israel is making attacks that are killing civilians, that perhaps they are targeting cibilians, and to do so is illegal conduct under International law concerning the conduct of war. For example one source in the article is quoted saying:

“International humanitarian law is clear on the supreme obligations to protect civilians during hostilities" ... “Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians," ... “Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged innocent civilians is unjustifiable.”

Additionally: The Swiss-based International Red Cross, the recognized guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war, said Wednesday that Israel had violated the principle of proportionality provided for in the Conventions and their protocols.

Thousands Flock to Hills, Parks and Schools, But No Place Safe from Bombs: Provides some "color" in terms of what life is like in Lebanon under Israel's attacks.

Civilian Toll Raises Questions: Discusses how intertwined is Hezbollahs infrastructure with the civilian society around them. It is claimed it would be very difficult for Israel to effectively attack and destroy Hezbollah without inflicting collateral damage.

"The reality is, we're fighting an organization that stores the missiles it launches against us in people's homes," ... "They do it on purpose."

"This is Going to Be A Big War": A discussion by a longtime Iraq War analyst who claims this war with Lebanon is going to escalate even further. Similarly the other day I saw an article based on a speech by Newt Gingrich where he said we are now in World War III.

A Handful of Neocons Are Instigating a Wider War: Points a finger at the Neo-Conservatives for instigating an escalation of the war. This follows along with their plan from the mid-90's to use the U.S. position as being the "world's sole superpower" to throw our weight around and reshape the world into a kind of Pax Americana where the U.S. calls all the shots, and the world will enter a golden age of peace and harmony led by the U.S. Or some kind of bullcrap like that. I think it's sheer megalomania.

In US, Not All Casualties Are Equal ..and.. Remarks by Ambassador John R. Bolton, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, on the situation in the Middle East, at the Security Council Stakeout, July 17, 2006: There is a curious logic going on which we've seen before. In Israel's attacks on Lebanon, the number of deaths is highly skewed where there are approximately 300 deaths in Lebanon to approximately 30 deaths in Israel. The same kind of ratio holds with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, where tens of thousands of Iraqi's have died compared to nearly 3000 U.S. soldiers.

John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., has a curious statement to this effect:

Reporter: Over the weekend, a Canadian family was killed on vacation in southern Lebanon by the Israeli air campaign. I’m wondering how concerned you are about the civilian deaths? Ambassador Bolton: Well, it is a matter of great concern to us, to the President in particular, that these civilian deaths are occurring and it’s a tragedy. There’s simply no other way to describe it. But I think it would be a mistake to ascribe a moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts, the very purpose of which terrorist acts are to kill civilians, and the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths as a result of military action taken in self-defense. Our moral and legal systems make all the difference in the world between acts based on what their intention is and it’s simply not the same thing to say that it’s the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their death, to fire rockets and use explosive devices and examples like kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense. But there’s no doubt that all of these civilian deaths are tragic and that’s why if Hezbollah would release the two soldiers it’s kidnapped, then I think we’d have a quick way to get back to a peaceful situation.

To the people who died, do you think they care whether it was a tragic and unfortunate consequence, or whether it was a terrorist act? They died either way. And, as noted above, there is the question of whether Israel is purposely targeting civilians.

The U.S. and Israeli authorities probably feel they have to deny any purposeful targeting of civilians. Since it is a violation of International war conventions to do so, if they want to avoid being brought to trial for war crimes violations they have to spin their actions their way, and hope nobody catches on.

Here's the breakdown: More than 250 Lebanese, most of them civilians, including women and children ... To date, 25 Israelis have been killed, half of them uniformed soldiers in combat with Hezbollah fighters.

Now, if we look at what Bolton said, he claims it is Hezbollah who is deliberately targeting civilians. But if that's what Hezbollah is doing, then why are the casualties from their actions heavily skewed to the military? Why are the casualties due to Israeli actions heavily skewed to civilians? Just who is targeting civilians?

On the other hand Hezbollah has been hiding their weapons in peoples homes, and all their infrastructure is located among the civilian population. What's Israel to do?

The final question I want to raise is the issue that Israel's attacks in Lebanon violates U.S. law.

Their attacks are being carried out using weapons provided by the U.S. Under U.S., weapons sold to another country can only be used for defensive purposes. Israel is claiming this is self defense, but at the same time their form of self defense is to invade and occupy Lebanon. Are they waging an act of aggression, or are they committing self defense?

Re: Fascism: Are we there yet?

At antiwar.com is the question Fascism: Are We There Yet? Hmmm... I suppose if I'd taken more political science courses in college I might have an understanding of the meaning for fascism and totalitarianism but, like Democrat and Republican and Liberal and Conservative, these are just words which, to me, seem more like the name of a team rather than an ideological anything. I'd written before from the quest to understand what fascism is. There's a lot of people who'll declare Bush is a Fascist, but it doesn't seem to me they understand the meaning any better than I do. The Nazi party in Germany was Fascist, but what does that mean?

All that aside, the article linked above does make for an interesting (and alarming) case. There's clearly a growing capability within the U.S. Government to establish ubiquitous screening of all activities. Their justification is to find terrorists, and to find terrorists they'll capture records of all our activities and then deploy a zillion computers to sift through that data to find suspicious patterns.

When the plan was more public it was called Total Information Awareness ... while that project name was canceled and closed by the DoD, the individual projects were continued to be developed. For example document analysis, tracking telephone calls and more. Again the article linked above has other examples of TIA projects continuing onwards.

As he points out - the administration officials promised us they weren't spying on us. They've also said that revealing the existance of surveillance programs would give "the terrorists" too much information. And they promised the wiretapping that was revealed in 2005 was "it", and that the surveillance they were doing was targeted carefully and did not track domestic phone calls. But the most recent program revelation showed those were all lies. The most recently revealed program is tracking all phone calls, even domestic. Why are we not surprised they lied to us again?

The most interesting thing I found through the above linked article is a discussion of totalitarianism: Lecture 10, The Age of Totalitarianism: Stalin and Hitler ... this is part of a series of lectures about history, so it's mostly about events that happened in Eastern Europe and other European countries in the 1900's. There were many regimes during that period with brutal governments, brutal supression of the people, and which are called totalitarian.

What I gather is totalitarianism is a government practice of having total control over the people that are being governed.

Several times in the article it said totalitarianism required sufficiently fancy technology to make total control effective.

As I've discussed in other blog entries, what is enabling a vision like Total Information Awareness is the increasing capability of computer systems.

So, it's worth pondering how it could be that a database of phone calls leads to totalitarianism? The Fascism article makes a claim it does, but to understand what he's getting at lets try and reason it through.

It's clear that by itself a database of phone calls doesn't tell very much. Especially as, supposedly, the database doesn't have peoples names in it, just phone calls. The most you can do with just a list of phone calls is to build up a map of connections between phone numbers based on who is calling whom.

Building up a map of connections between phone numbers is interesting, but without a connection to people it's not terribly useful. You know phone A called phone B, but that carries little information. If you can add to that the names of the caller and callee, that adds a lot of information. If you can record the phone call, that adds even more, especially if you can automatically translate the voices to text.

By the way, one of the projects in the TIA was specifically to automatically translate any voice into text.

With that in hand you have information. Information about connections between people based on the phone calls between them. There are databases showing the owner name for a given telephone number, and since the phone companies are apparently willing to cooperate with the government to give them access to the phone calls being placed, it's not too far a leap to think they might also share with the government the owner names for each phone number.

But, where is the totalitarian control?

I think it gets to the stereotype of the totalitarian regime. That "spies are everywhere", and that there's a file of your activities being kept by the secret police. Except, in this case the ubiquitous spies are being built into the computer equipment that's running our society, and the files are being kept in a database.

I'm pondering away and keep coming back to this: Collecting data is one step. The totalitarian control comes when the government acts on that data.

An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.

With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Their work is described this way:

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

...

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

In other words their job is similar to the Google Earth service. But it's likely that, because they're the military, the resolution on their images is much better.

The images available through commercial services are, by law, limited to a resolution of 1 meter. Meaning the smallest object that can be identified is 1 meter in size. So we wonder what their resolution is. For example if you have a habit of having sex in the back yard, the commercial images won't recognize what you're doing, but what about theirs?

The article raises a big question. Just what are they doing spending most of their effort looking inside the U.S. territory? What are they looking for? An obvious use leaps to mind, that this service could help locate marijuana fields and the like. It might also help locate illicit airfields, such as used by drug smugglers.

I expect one strategic service they provide is finding new construction. This would require some fancy image analysis, but with a whole world full of images detecting new construction would be very labor intensive. However a computer, with fancy image analysis, might be able to identify changes between pictures taken at different times. The tricky part of course is the pictures will never be at the same angle or lighting conditions, hence the required fancy image analysis.

My thought is that if "change" is detected in a series of pictures, then a flag could be raised to send those pictures to an analyst for further study. It may be benign, but it may be an illicit nuclear weapons construction facility.

In any case the current hubbub is over domestic spying. Earlier in this I suggested this is probably legal. My reasoning is pictures taken of the outdoors are, by definition, public spaces. A warrant is not required for anybody to take a picture of the outside of a building, nor is one required to take a picture from above. That's all they're doing.

Where it becomes a little tricky is they have made arrangements with building owners to incorporate video from surveillance cameras. Where are those surveillance cameras pointing? Inside or outside buildings? Are they pointing into private spaces or only public ones?

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006

Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says, DefenseTech.org May 12, 2006

"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database DefenseTech.org, May 12, 2006

NSA's data mining explained, CNET News, May 12, 2006

The system in the latest revelation relies on cooperation from the telephone carriers. The telephone carriers worked with the NSA to install equipment in their switching systems, and the equipment extracted certain information from the telephone switching systems, and transmitted that information back to NSA headquarters.

The claim is the data is simply the telephone numbers involved with every phone call. This is known as "envelope" information, as it is akin to the addressing on the outside of an envelope sent through postal mail.

The way I understand this, each individual telephone call doesn't give much information. But by collecting a huge number of phone calls one can build a map of associations between telephone numbers. That is, if person A at phone number N regularly calls person B at phone number Z, that's an association.

Each call sets up a relation between the phone numbers involved in the call.

If, by other means, the spooks have determined that phone number T is used by nefarious individuals, then any phone call to/from that phone number should be of interest to the spooks. Calls to/from that phone number associates the other phone number with those nefarious activities done by the owner of phone number T.

Since the system only records the envelope (supposedly) all phone calls have equal significance. Suppose the nefarious people at phone number T decide to make an innocent phone call? For example someone might come to their door saying "my car broke down, can I call my brother". Now the brother of this innocent bystander has now become associated with the nefarious people. Who knows what method the spooks have for detecting innocent bystanders and weeding them out.

This system is obviously a followon to the Total Information Awareness system. I recorded the status of the TIA back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's important to point out that the discovery by the public of the TIA caused a privacy hubbub, which then caused the Congress people to make enough hubbub that the Department of Defense "cancel" the program. What they actually did was cancel a couple of the programs, and then migrate the rest of the programs to other directors.

Among the TIA projects existant in 2002, there are two which are obviously related to this.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) involved detection of interesting correlations and connections between specific elements in large sets of data. The discussion I wrote above about the relations between telephone numbers by tracking the calls between phone numbers would fit very well with EELD.

Genisys describes a data collection and storage system that would be very useful to EELD.

I think it's very important to interpret this relevation within the larger context. It's clear that the U.S. Government wants a very intrusive system that watches everything that we do. The revelations last year of wiretapping, and the current revelations of collecting the phone numbers of every phone call, these are not isolated incidents.

The prior existence of the Total Information Awareness system tells us what they are interested in. They will not have lost interest in their goal, instead they will have moved the projects around putting them behind cloaks of secrecy and more.

Again I find myself thinking -- is this the world we want to create? Does this match the core values of America? Or is this representing a government that has diverged itself from American values?

I think this is divergent from American values. If this is true, then why are we, Americans, sitting on our hands and not doing anything about this?

UPDATE: William Arkin with the Washington Post just posted Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg which gives more details of the existing programs being developed by the government. Included in this posting is a list of 500 software tools that have been developed by government agencies for intelligence data gathering and mining.

Of course it makes sense for the government to be employing advanced software tools. As technology advances, shouldn't the government make use of it?

Well, okay. But, the issue is how often are they going to make mistakes, and whether the systems are intrusive or not.

The President ignoring the law?

In his Huffington Post blog, Cenk Uygur writes about The Shadow Government ... that is, he's claiming that President Bush has declared his administration will ignore over 750 of the laws that have been passed during his tenure in office. And further that we know his administration is ignoring FISA, a law passed long before his tenure in office, which raises the question of how many other laws the administration is ignoring.

Because the administration is engaging in wholesale ignoring of the laws of this country, he says the government we think we have governing us doesn't exist. In it's place is a shadow of the government we think we have.

So, what's he talking about? As always it helps to understand the facts behind the story that's being presented. Fortunately in this case we can get to them.

He's pointing to this Boston Globe article: Bush challenges hundreds of laws President cites powers of his office

That article discusses the practice known as "Signing Statement". I don't know how common signing statements were before G.W. Bush, but under Bush they are very common. The signing statement is published at the same time as when a new law is signed by the President. The law that's being signed comes from Congress, as always, but the signing statement comes from the Administration. The signing statements I've seen detail how the Administration will interpret the law the President is signing.

Unlike Cenk Uygur's hype about this, the signing statement does not commit the administration to ignoring the entirity of the law. Instead the signing statements I've seen discuss certain provisions in the law, and detail how that provision will be interpreted.

This might sound like a benign practice. After all, most laws are full of strange legalese and could stand for some interpretation help. But in actuality these signing statements are, in effect, rewriting the intent of the law in drastic ways.

This is one of the examples cited by the Boston Globe article:

March 9: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Bush's signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

The actual signing statement is on the whitehouse.gov site and is itself full of legalese. Including that troublematic "unitary executive" phrase.

In any case it's alarming that on the one hand Congress is requiring the Administration to hand over certain information, and the Administration is saying they'll decide what information they'll hand over. This is an administration which has repeatedly picked out select portions of intelligence reports, for example to "justify" the invasion of Iraq when the actual evidence to justify that invasion was nonexistant. Under their signing statement they'll be able to continue cherry-picking the data they send to Congress, to continue puffing out smoke to obscure what they're really doing.

As Cenk Uygur says: Wrong information equals wrong decisions. People can't be blamed if they don't know. It is the job of the press to let them know. The 2006 elections are the last chance to check this imperial presidency. If the press fails our democracy at this critical juncture and the electorate doesn't know what we know by the time they step into that voting booth, we will have done great damage to our country and its principles.

So, if the Administration is free to send select information to Congress, then how is Congress to have a clear picture of what's actually happening in the world? But, there's nothing new here. Wars have been launched before based on falsified evidence, the most infamous being the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the Vietnam War.

As I've kept coming to in my blog entries ... is this the country we want? Is this the country we thought we had? If not, then what are we going to do about this?

If we let these events continue without challenging them, then our country of freedom will become another dictatorship.

Should Donald Rumsfeld be charged with Genocide alongside Saddam Hussein?

Will Any Americans Be Charged As Accomplices in Saddam's Genocide Trial? raises an interesting point. Saddam Hussein has been charged for Genocide based on stuff done in the early 1980's. At that time the U.S. government was actively supporting the Iraq government, U.S. officials knew all about the Iraqi use of chemical weapons, the U.S. officials knew Iraq was violating the treaty against chemical weapon use, and despite that those same U.S. officials continued supplying money, armaments, intelligence, etc in Iraq's war against Iran.

That makes Rumsfeld just as culpable in the "Genocide" as is Hussein.

Or, that's what the article says. Like I said, that's an interesting thought.

UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens

Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.

What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.

My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.

So, yeah, there's some clear air safety considerations. The AOPA is doing their job in raising those concerns.

But, that's as far as they're going. I get the impression that if the FAA enforces some set of rules against UAV's the AOPA will be happy. But what about the rest of us, the ones who are going to be spied upon?

On the one hand the government and industry representatives are portraying this as being used for border security. Again, the danger of terrorists lurking in every corner ready to kill us if we don't deploy eternal vigilance. But on the other hand these were used to monitor a biker rally. It was used to watch for "unruly behavior". Yeah, you can expect "unruly" behavior at a biker rally alright, but does that warrant spying on the people?

It seems that yet again I'm coming up with the same question that's turned up before.

Technology is giving us more and more capabilities. But is the world that's being created around us the one we want to live in?

Is the technology getting away from us and creating a monster that will be difficult to reign in?

Resources and articles

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies discusses regulatory concerns about the depoloyment of UAV's in the U.S. for border surveillance, detection of marijuana crops, and buzzing biker rallies.

AOPA acts to keep unregulated UAV operation out of navigable airspace and AOPA questions FAA's 'stealthy' UAV TFR on Mexican border discussing actions by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to cause the FAA to review UAV usage for safety considerations.

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours and High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us and Aerovironment tests a hydrogen powered airplane -- my previous UAV coverage.

Theocracy in America, an "Unholy Alliance"?

Kevin Phillips is one of the political operatives who helped bring the Republicans into power in the 1960's and 1970's. He's billed as a Republican Strategist, and eventually worked in the Reagan White House. With that as background we have a very interesting book from him, warning of the danger of the neo-Theocracy we find ourselves with today in the United States.

Here's some resources:

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Interview with Democracy Now, March 21, 2006

The Unholy Alliance Kevin Phillips believes the U.S. is threatened by a combination of petroleum, preachers and debt

This gives a sense of where the book is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you talk about radical religion, about debt, and about oil, about this being an oil war. You also talk about peak oil. That's not talked about very much in the mainstream. Explain.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The peak oil idea is that just as the United States oil production peaked in 1971, that we have a limited amount of oil globally, and that it’s something that can't be re-created. It’s running out. And the expectation of some is that the oil production of the non-OPEC countries will peak at some point during the 2010s, and that then the production of OPEC itself will peak in the 2020s or 2030s. Now, some people think that Saudi production has already peaked.

Now, if you believe this, and it’s possible, then we face an enormous convergence, again under specific oil-related circumstances, of a global struggle for natural resources as the price of oil climbs, as we turn the armed services into a global oil protection service, which has been happening, and as we see the administration refuse to grapple with the need to really curb oil consumption in the United States, which is mostly through transportation and especially motor vehicles.

And I just have a sense, as many others on the conservative side do, this administration has no strategy to deal with these converging problems, be they foreign policy, military, oil, debt. They are like the three little monkeys on the old jade thing – the one sees no evil, one speaks no evil, and one hears no evil. Do they know anything? You know, that's an open question.

But, it just goes on and on. Such as an assertion that: "that the Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you have a president who got his start in national politics as his father’s liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and ‘88, you just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way."

Archbishop of Canturbury backs evolution over creationism

Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution ... Apparently the Intelligent Design quandry has been raised in England as well as here in the U.S. I shouldn't be surprised since it's clear the political strategists behind this are international in scope. In any case it's interesting how Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury, have all announced that it's a mistake to teach creationism in schools, and how we should accept evolution into religious peoples view of the world.

The Intelligent Design crowd are fundamentalists who seem to be at odds with leading religious figures. Hmmmm.... Interesting.

Here's the Guardian article: Archbishop: stop teaching creationism ...or...

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.
The debate over creationism or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot, so-called "intelligent design" (ID) which argues that creation is so complex that an intelligent - religious - force must have directed it, has provoked divisions in Britain but nothing like the vehemence or politicisation of the debate in the US. There, under pressure from the religious right, some states are considering giving ID equal prominence to Darwinism, the generally scientifically accepted account of the evolution of species. Most scientists believe that ID is little more than an attempt to smuggle fundamentalist Christianity into science teaching.

It's clear these religious leaders aren't saying to ignore the Creation story and only look at Science and Evolution. The Archbishop's words seem to center on guarding the specialness of the Biblical Creation story.

In my eye the story isn't as simple as Evolution is superior over Intelligent Design. And, for that matter, its disturbing that the Archbishop seems to be saying we shouldn't be questioning or debating the validity of the Creation story.

First, consider this: Establishing control over a society ... the gist is that religion is easily be used to control the beliefs of society. The Intelligent Design debate is precisely an example of religious claims being pushed by political operatives to establish some control over society. And, further, it's an example of the people in society being expected to suspend their power of critical thought just because their church tells them to do so.

Why shouldn't the claims of religion be tested? We have the power of critical thought. We have the power of independant reasoning. Why not examine spiritual practices, experiences and beliefs?
Okay, one problem with that leaps immediately to mind. Scientists have regularly tried to test religion and ended up bashing religion, largely because they're testing it in the wrong way. Religious folk are expected to lean on "faith" and to not ask questions, leading to a dependency on something other than rational critical thought for making decisions. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to trust only logic and equations and critical thinking, and to distrust subjective experience.

The problem is the nature of the religious claims. God is said to be something which created the universe and everything within it. God is said to be everywhere. How can a scientist hope to measure such a claim? The proof of God comes from subjective experience, the thing scientists are taught to distrust.

For example, when you pray what happens? Do you feel good when you pray? Most do. Is that a subconscious thing firing off some brain chemicals, and that because you believe God is helping you feel nice when you pray, therefore the chemicals your subconscious fires off will help you feel good? Or is there a divine presence that reaches inside you?

What about miraculous healing? What about prayer for someone who's sick? It's been shown in several studies (double-blind etc) that intercessionary prayer helps the ones who are prayed for.
It seems to me the critical mind, the dependence on logic, can easily go too far. And that the dependence on logic interferes with subjective experience. That the way to experiment with the divine is to operate with both subjective experience, and the critical mind. Subjective experience is not to be pushed away but to be embraced. Just as we are wired for the critical mind so are we wired for subjective experience.

Hmmm... I seem to have strayed from Intelligent Design versus Evolution. Sorry....

A meditation on the speed limit

Who was it that sang "I can't drive 55"? A Meditation On the Speed Limit is a project launched by a group of college students who wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous speed limit.

I like this because I myself do the same thing, which is to drive the speed limit regardless of what speed the nutballs behind me want to drive. They are in Atlanta, and did this on the perimeter highway, getting four cars together to cooperatively drive the speed limit. And by cooperatively driving the speed limit, they could block all lanes and keep everybody at the speed limit. And, they filmed everything posting the result to the web.

They wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous limit, but for me I think highway speeds are ridiculously fast. My thought is that at highway speeds death can come very quickly. Which just shows I'm in a different place than they are.

What was astonishing (well, not really) is the offensive reaction they got and the dangerous driving others got into. Apparently american drivers are addicted to driving fast on the highway. Watch the video for more details.

Employee free speech, and a VA nurse being investigated for Sedition

In September 2005 a pair of hurricanes hit New Orleans and the surrounding land. As a result much of New Orleans has effectively been destroyed. The government response to help the people of New Orleans and the surrounding land has been egregiously bad.

Shortly after the hurricane, a VA nurse in Albuquerque wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining of the bad government response to the hurricane. Immediately afterward she was referred to the FBI and since then has come under investigation by the FBI for "sedition". Sedition being the legal word for advocating the forceful, violent overthrow of the government.

The story is here: V.A. Nurse Accused of Sedition After Publishing Letter Critical of Bush on Katrina, Iraq (as presented on Democracy Now)

The story is astonishing and alarming. The nurse, Laura Berg, acted under belief she was protected by the First Ammendment gaurantee of freedom of speech. In the interview she reiterates her claim of first ammendment gaurantees of freedom of speech.

The government is threatening her with years of jail time, the sentence for "Sedition". But how could her letter to the editor be taken as advocating violent overthrow of the government? This is the U.S. and we have a long history of the right of citizens to criticize their government.

As she says:

LAURA BERG: Amy, I did not sign away my First Amendment rights as a citizen, you know, by choosing to serve in the federal government and choosing to serve veterans and care for people that have been wounded like this, you know. And this letter sounds like something from a totalitarian regime, you know, that we are supposedly going in and share our democracy. This is way out of line. This was way out line. I have a right to speak my opinion. I have a right to say I'm a V.A. nurse. I do not speak for the V.A. I speak as a public citizen....

In my mind the case is open and shut, but for one thing.

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

Should your company have a corporate blogging policy?

FOX Sics its Dogs on "Un-American" Professors

The general principle in the articles I've linked is -- employers have the right and ability to restrict the speech of their employees.

How so? For example, what is proprietary information? It's information a corporation wants to keep secret, that gives the corporation competitive advantage, and if an employee is caught revealing proprietary information the employee can very likely be fired for having done so.

That's just one example of many sorts of ways an employer can limit what an employee says.

There have been instances of people being fired for blogging about aspects of their job, even when doing that blogging from home on their own computer onto their own blogging account. For example a teacher with DeVry was fired over comments she blogged about her students. Someone else, who worked in a customer support job, was fired for derogatory comments she wrote on a blog talking about the people who came to her for support were dweebs etc.

The issue with Laura Berg is that her employer is the U.S. government. Specifically, the Veterans Administration. The U.S. government has more options at its disposal for threatening its employees. e.g. trumping up charges of Sedition.

With the tradition of employers being able to control the speech of their employees, what happens when that employer is the U.S. government?

And, I think the bigger question is, why is there such a blanket acceptance of employers controlling the speech of employees? Clearly it represents a huge blanket of suppressed rights to free speech.

RenewableEnergyAccess.com | Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project

The cape wind project intends to install dozens of wind towers off Cape Cod. This project has drawn a ridiculous storm of criticism with "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) style protests from people who normally support ecological initiatives, but call this a blight. er... The huge cities are ecological blights, but how are wind towers a blight?

Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project discusses a proposed ammendment by Alaska Congressman Don Young which would change the buffer requirements around offshore wind tower projects. There's more details in the article, the gist being that the current standard is a 500 foot zone around each wind tower and any shipping lanes. Further the current standard has the Coast Guard reviewing these plans. The proposal arbitrarily sets a 1.5 mile buffer zone, and removes the Coast Guard from review.

Fortunately this is only a proposal to put an ammendment on in committee. But it's a dangerous sort of thinking that's clearly intended to scuttle offshore wind projects.

Jeremy Scahill: On CNN The Real Abu Ghraib Scandal is The Photos, Not the Torture | The Huffington Post

U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq are torturing their prisoners. Pictures are published documenting the torture. And what's done? What does the press do, that is? The press complains that the only legitimate pictures that can be taken are ones by the Defense Department, and can only be done for documentation purposes. At least that's the story here: On CNN The Real Abu Ghraib Scandal is The Photos, Not the Torture

Jeremy Scahill quotes a CNN reporter who repeatedly said: "Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is all about."

er... Again, U.S. and British soldiers are conducting torture, and the whole thing the story is about is the illegally taken pictures? What about the bigger crime of torture?

Is this the country we want to have, where our soldiers are conducting torture?

Encrypted file systems, terrorism, personal privacy, oh my

Here's an interesting question ... suppose police capture a terrorists laptop and they want to get into the laptop to extract plans and other documents? Suppose the laptop is rigged so the file system is encrypted meaning the police can't get through the encryption? Suppose there's a ticking bomb, and the plans for the bomb are in the laptop?

That's the scenario posed here: UK holds Microsoft security talks (By Ollie Stone-Lee, BBC News political reporter) Microsoft is apparently in talks with the British Government to install a backdoor allowing Police to snoop into otherwise encrypted hard disks.

Hmmm... One glaring fault leaps to mind. Any backdoor installed for Police use could also be used by "hackers" to sneak through the same back door. And, for that matter, what if the Police (or someone) were to come up with a stealthy virus, that didn't announce itself, and simply sneaked through the backdoor and retrieve any interesting data? The utility of the backdoor of course depends on the implementation. But since the backdoor is targeted to be used by Police departments, that means the details are going to be widely dissemenated and hard to keep secret. There's an adage that security through secrecy just does not work.

The article makes this out to be a new problem brought about by Windows Vista. It's actually older, since on some operating systems you can make encrypted disk images that require a password to open. The easiest to use implementation is on Mac OS X, one simply makes a disk image file (using Disk Utility) and specifies options including read/write and encryption. When you want to fiddle with sensitive files, just open the encrypted disk image and fiddle away. Make sure to unmount it when you're done.

Suppose your computer is stolen, would you want the thief to have easy access to all that data? Wouldn't you breath easier knowing the data on your computer was safe because the thief didn't have your password?

And, why does the article only talk about the need to thwart terrorists? "Terrorists" have become the big bugaboo under which all sorts of threats to civil liberties have been enacted. Shouldn't the same concern also be aimed at ordinary criminals?

Would this backdoor only be documented for nice police departments? Or would it also be made available for other police departments, e.g. in totalitarian states? Another current events story is China gaining some success at their dissident crackdowns through working with the tech companies. Clearly a tech company like Microsoft would be obeying Chinese law by helping the Chinese government in understanding the backdoor into Windows Vista. And, then what?

Would China then have greater success in cracking down on their dissidents? Whom, from western eyes, are freedom fighters?

And, for that matter, it's well known that the majority of cyber attacks are coming from China. What if the backdoor Microsoft discloses to the Chinese government is also something they can use in the cyber attacks, which then threaten American computer security?

Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII

arsTechnica has an interesting overview of government spying on U.S. Citizens. Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII It refers to a Christian Science Monitor article I discussed here: U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet as well as other information.

The overall context for this story is the Total Information Awareness system which had been under development by the DoD, been exposed to the public, which caused a stink, resulting in the supposed cancelation of the project.

What actually happened is one sub-project was canceled, and the remnants has continued on. As the arsTechnica article says:

When Total Information Awareness (TIA) was shot down by Congress amid a storm of public controversy, it seem pretty clear that the government would keep trying, and trying, and trying until it got something that was very much like TIA. The promise of the Big Database in the Sky, the database that knows everything about everyone and can tell who's been naughty and who's been nice, is just too tempting for The Powers That Be to pass up. As it turns out, there's more than one program going on at the moment that's designed to implement such a database,

They discuss two (known) projects that are obviously implementing the same goal. The first, Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), is discussed by the Christian Science Monitor article. The other is Topsail, which is the actual successor to the TIA project (minus the futures market).

Topsail is discussed in this Newsweek article: Wanted: Competent Big Brothers As the Senate frets over whether the NSA has violated the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no one is paying attention to the real issue: proficiency. by Michael Hirsh

There's an interesting question here between the different views in these articles.

On the one hand we, Americans anyway, are very opposed to massive government surveillance. I say this because of the nearly universal abhorent reaction to 1984 (the book). Just say Big Brother and watch the heebie jeebies crawl up peoples spine.

On the other hand Michael Hirsh makes some interesting points. His article is very positive to these developments. His article claims the NSA is stuck in old technology, and old ways of conducting its business of watching communications. His article repeats the claim that the spy agencies had enough facts about the terrorist attack, but didn't have the technology required to connect the dots.

As Hirsh says "data mining", when used well, can connect facts together to let one see the bigger picture. Given that there are, clearly, some people out there who want to cause damage to society, it makes some sense to use advanced technology to try and find their tracks.

A part of this story is that the capabilities of technology are advancing. As we make more powerful computers, the spooks can do more stuff.

The spooks clearly want to create a system that can track a large portion of the transactions that happen every day. By connecting together disparate transactions, they might detect an attack before it happens.

For example ... take the Oklohoma City bombing. The story is the bomb was made from fertilizer and kerosene, and they used a rental truck as a "car bomb". This means the conspirators will have bought certain supplies before making their attack. Since the area has a lot of farming, a large fertilizer sale wouldn't be too strange by itself, but when connected by data mining to other purchases that together could create a bomb. Well, that's tantalizing the spooks, I'm sure.

But, I think, what about when they make mistakes? As the arsTechnica article alludes, they don't know what patterns to look for.

In the Newsweek article, Hirsh relies on perfect hindsight. It's easy to say the attackers used some specific weapon, and if only we'd known what to look for ahead of time we could have stopped the attack. But, in truth how can one know what to look for ahead of time? That is, until someone makes a weapon how do you know what form their attack will take?