News 10 Now | New air­port secu­rity mea­sures tested. “It’s really humil­i­at­ing and debas­ing,” explained Bar­rie Ger­wan­ter of
the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union. “It’s a vir­tual strip search and
it’s some­thing that shouldn’t be used unless it’s as last resort.”

Full-body scans; you step inside and the pic­tures say it all. But the
TSA says it plans to test the machines at sev­eral air­ports very soon.

“They would reveal pos­si­bly very per­sonal details about the size of
their gen­i­talia, the size of a woman’s breasts, whether they have some
med­ical device on their body, and that’s really unnec­es­sary and
intru­sive and it has noth­ing to do with air­port secu­rity,” said
Gewanter.

Offi­cials with the TSA say they like the new machines, because unlike
tra­di­tional metal detec­tors, they pick up some items oth­er­wise left
unde­tected. But the ques­tion is, ‘Will pas­sen­gers be will­ing to
sac­ri­fice per­sonal pri­vacy for peace of mind?’

[Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

A more accu­rate way of phras­ing that ques­tion would be, “Will pas­sen­gers be will­ing to sac­ri­fice per­sonal pri­vacy for a false sense of secu­rity?” The answer is cer­tainly “yes.” If they weren’t, they would already have refused to go through an airport.

A NATION OF INFORMANTS. For God’s sake, can’t some­one put a stop to the insan­ity being per­pe­trated by Sensenbrenner?

Neigh­bors spy­ing on neigh­bors? Moth­ers forced to turn in their sons or daugh­ters? These are images straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, or a remote total­i­tar­ian state. We don’t asso­ciate them with the land of the free and the home of […] [The Light Of Rea­son]

Sensen­bren­ner is appar­ently ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed that he doesn’t live in the Soviet Union, so he’s doing his best to remake Amer­ica in the Soviet Union’s image.

Pro­tec­tion­ism Cre­ates Jobs, Pro­motes Free-Enterprise And Can-do Spirit. ‘Buy Amer­i­can’ leg­is­la­tion draws fire:bq. On Fri­day, the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica called the mea­sure bad secu­rity pol­icy and bad eco­nomic pol­icy. The leg­is­la­tion, an amend­ment to the Home­land Secu­rity Autho­riza­tion Act, would force the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity to buy prod­ucts mostly made in America.

The leg­is­la­tion was authored by Rep. Don Manzullo, an Illi­nois Repub­li­can, and passed by the House on Wednes­day. It would require more than 50 per­cent of the com­po­nents in any end prod­uct pro­cured by the depart­ment to be mined, pro­duced or man­u­fac­tured inside the United States.

“With this pur­chas­ing pro­hi­bi­tion, I guess (the depart­ment) will have to learn to do with­out com­put­ers and cell phones,” ITAA Pres­i­dent Har­ris Miller said in a state­ment. “I can­not think of a sin­gle U.S. man­u­fac­turer that could meet this 50 per­cent thresh­old for these devices, and I doubt that those charged with pro­tect­ing our safety here at home can either.“
[…]
Accord­ing to ITAA’s Miller, the lat­est “Buy Amer­i­can” leg­is­la­tion would invite sim­i­lar restric­tions from other coun­tries and raise the government’s cost of doing busi­ness. “This leg­is­la­tion puts pol­i­tics in front of com­mon sense in com­bat­ing ter­ror­ist threats. At the same time, it sends a sig­nal to our trad­ing part­ners that pro­tec­tion­ism trumps global trade,” Miller said in a state­ment. “That’s a lose-lose propo­si­tion for the nation.” [Mises Eco­nom­ics Blog]

bq. “With this pur­chas­ing pro­hi­bi­tion, I guess (the depart­ment) will have to learn to do with­out com­put­ers and cell phones,” ITAA Pres­i­dent Har­ris Miller said in a statement.

That sounds good to me.

EATING THEIR OWN, AND LOVING IT. Com­pletely pre­dictably, Time lunges at the oppor­tu­nity to pound the stake into Newsweek’s heart, not real­iz­ing that it is com­mit­ting sui­cide at the same time (sub­head: “How Newsweek botched its report on pris­oner abuse

I saw Star Wars Episode III yes­ter­day, thanks to a free ticket and time off from Syman­tec. It was much bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous two, although still not really good. The act­ing var­ied, with Ian McDi­armid doing a great job as Pal­pa­tine, and Hay­den Chris­tensen doing a hor­ri­ble job as Anakin. The dia­logue wasn’t any bet­ter than the last two, but there was so much fight­ing and spe­cial effects scenes that it didn’t mat­ter as much.

One thing I’ve noticed in both this and the pre­vi­ous movie; Darth Vader was sup­posed to have been a good man who turned to the dark side. How­ever I didn’t really see much evi­dence that he had ever been a good man. I think the best that could be said of him is that he wasn’t com­pletely bad at first.

Gal­loway v the US Sen­ate: tran­script of state­ment [Times Online]

A tran­script of George Galloway’s state­ment to the Sen­ate. Some excerpts:

bq. “As a mat­ter of fact, I have met Sad­dam Hus­sein exactly the same num­ber of times as Don­ald Rums­feld met him. The dif­fer­ence is Don­ald Rums­feld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the bet­ter to tar­get those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanc­tions, suf­fer­ing and war, and on the sec­ond of the two occa­sions, I met him to try and per­suade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspec­tors back into the coun­try — a rather bet­ter use of two meet­ings with Sad­dam Hus­sein than your own Sec­re­tary of State for Defence made of his.

“I was an oppo­nent of Sad­dam Hus­sein when British and Amer­i­cans gov­ern­ments and busi­ness­men were sell­ing him guns and gas. I used to demon­strate out­side the Iraqi embassy when British and Amer­i­can offi­cials were going in and doing commerce.

“You will see from the offi­cial par­lia­men­tary record, Hansard, from the 15^th March 1990 onwards, volu­mi­nous evi­dence that I have a rather bet­ter record of oppo­si­tion to Sad­dam Hus­sein than you do and than any other mem­ber of the British or Amer­i­can gov­ern­ments do.

[…]

“Now, Sen­a­tor, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the pol­icy that you pro­moted. I gave my polit­i­cal life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanc­tions on Iraq which killed one mil­lion Iraqis, most of them chil­dren, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other rea­son other than that they were Iraqis with the mis­for­tune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you com­mit­ting the dis­as­ter that you did com­mit in invad­ing Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, con­trary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruc­tion. I told the world, con­trary to your claims, that Iraq had no con­nec­tion to al-Qaeda. I told the world, con­trary to your claims, that Iraq had no con­nec­tion to the atroc­ity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, con­trary to your claims, that the Iraqi peo­ple would resist a British and Amer­i­can inva­sion of their coun­try and that the fall of Bagh­dad would not be the begin­ning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

“Sen­a­tor, in every­thing I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 peo­ple paid with their lives; 1600 of them Amer­i­can sol­diers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them dis­abled for­ever on a pack of lies.

Revamp­ing Freenet.. Revamp­ing Freenet. N3wsByt3 writes “Many will have heard about the anony­mous P2P-system Freenet.
What many prob­a­bly don’t know is, that a big change is at hand: the
Freenet devel­op­ers have decided to drop all sup­port for the 0.5x
ver­sion, to skip ver­sion 0.6 and to com­pletely revamp the 0.7 build
into some kind of poorly described, pre­sum­ably scal­able dark­net.
The main coder even threat­ened to quit if such a dark­net would be
rejected.
So, is it finally going the right way with the devel­op­ment of Freenet?
Maybe not, since they seem reluc­tant to pro­vide real data and rather
rely on secu­rity through obfus­ca­tion, and then there is still the prob­lem of their gen­eral inabil­ity in regard to pool­ing human resources, which, for any OSS project, is of the utmost impor­tance.” —
Obvi­ously, the arti­cle sub­mit­ter has his own feel­ings on Freenet, but
notwith­stand­ing that, what’s the lat­est scut­tle­butt from within the
Freenet crowd? [Slash­dot] [Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

Inter­est­ing, but I didn’t find any­thing about it on the Freenet site.

Backscat­ter X-Ray Machines. Air trav­el­ers stripped bare with X-ray machine: Elec­tronic strip search, com­ing to an air­port near you.

bq.

Secu­rity work­ers using the machines can see through clothes and peer at what­ever may be hid­den in under­gar­ments, shirts or pants. The images also paint a reveal­ing pic­ture of a person’s nude body.

And here’s a lit­tle les­son in mar­ket­ing: when you’re push­ing a prod­uct that is inher­ently inva­sive, and some would say degrad­ing, do not call your com­pany “Rapiscan.”

Seri­ously — that’s what the com­pany that makes this sys­tem is called. It shares the first five let­ters of its name with “rapist.” I’m not a mar­ket­ing guru, but it strikes that that’s a pretty stu­pid name for this com­pany. [Gadgetopia]

Any­one want to bet on how long it takes after these things are intro­duced before the Air­port Gestapo starts post­ing nude pho­tos of female air trav­ellers on the Inter­net? I fig­ure eight hours, pos­si­bly less.

I’ve updated my “PGP key” with a new encryp­tion subkey.

Newsweek: Retract…Or Else!!. So says the estab­lish­ment who lied about Jes­sica Lynch and cov­ered up Pat Till­man being killed by friendly fire.

The Koran was never flushed down the toliet at Guan­tanamo because a Newsweek source who had no com­ment ini­tially now says he’s no longer sure. Inter­est­ing that this uncer­tainty now fol­lows an inter­na­tional firestorm, riots, and deaths.

Mean­while, the White House’s Scott McClel­lan sniffs that because of Newsweek “[t]he image of the United States abroad has been dam­aged.” You know, the Newsweek that invaded Iraq look­ing for WMD, and tor­tured pris­on­ers at Abu Ghraib. Right Scotty. It’s ALL Newsweek’s fault. By Dale Stein­re­ich. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Note also that the Newsweek story is true, and is actu­ally old news that has been widely reported out­side the US.

As for the Iraqi Infor­ma­tion Min­is­ter White House Press Secretary’s com­ments about dam­ag­ing the image of the United States abroad, I can only hope that for­eign­ers, unlike Mr. McClel­lan, are aware that the United States and its gov­ern­ment are not the same thing.