From the man­ual for DEVON­think Pro:

bq. Note: If you think the user inter­face for the styles edi­tor is crap, you’re right. But don’t blame us, it’s built into Mac OS
X.

It’s refresh­ing to see hon­esty like that from a soft­ware company.

Go, Chicks!. The Dixie Chicks’ new album, Tak­ing the Long Way, has debuted at #1 on the charts.… By Lew Rock­well. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

I bought it, even though I nor­mally don’t lis­ten to them.

Build­ing the Police State. Now that he is con­firmed as CIA com­mis­sar, Michael Hay­den can get on with his real job: vastly step­ping up the spy­ing on those the gov­ern­ment really fears: the Amer­i­can peo­ple. (Thanks to LL for the link.)… By Lew Rock­well. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

bq. This nation is under attack. We, the peo­ple, are under attack. And the enemy in this case is not an Islamic rad­i­cal hid­ing in a cave in Afghanistan but a cabal of truly evil men and women at 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue and on Capi­tol Hill aided by carefully-picked, law-ignoring appointees at the Hoover Build­ing on Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue, a black glass-walled build­ing at Fort Meade, MD, and a com­plex in Lan­g­ley, Virginia.

I finally replaced my Nikon LS-2000 film scan­ner with a new Nikon LS-9000. I had planned on replac­ing the scan­ner some­time this year, as it’s seven years old and has been rather heav­ily used. Fol­low­ing an OS upgrade on the scan­ning machine it stopped work­ing, prob­a­bly because of an incom­pat­i­bil­ity with the really old scan­ner or SCSI card.

The new scan­ner is much larger, because it han­dles medium for­mat film as well as 35mm. The LS-2000 had a motor­ized neg­a­tive film feeder which pulled in strips of up to six frames; this has been replaced by a plas­tic tray that holds two strips clamped in place. So far this has been a real pain, as get­ting curled up strips of film to lie flat in the right spot is quite tricky.

Scan­ning a frame takes con­sid­er­ably longer, which is hardly sur­pris­ing given that its res­o­lu­tion is 4000 dpi, up from 2700 dpi. The scan qual­ity is as good as the old scan­ner, besides the higher resolution.

El Al Doesn’t Trust the TSA. They want to do secu­rity them­selves at Newark Air­port, as they already do at four other U.S. airports.

bq. No other air­line has such an arrange­ment with U.S. offi­cials, author­i­ties acknowl­edged. At the four other air­ports, El Al has installed its own secu­rity soft­ware at bomb-detection machines, which author­i­ties said is more sen­si­tive than that used by Amer­i­can car­ri­ers. [Schneier on Secu­rity]

I don’t trust the Ter­ror­ist Safety Admin­is­tra­tion either, in part because they don’t allow me to do secu­rity myself.

FBI Search­ing Jour­nal­ists’ Phone Records. ABC News reports that the FBI has admit­ted that it is increas­ingly seeks reporters’ phone records in leak inves­ti­ga­tions.
bq. “It used to be very hard and com­pli­cated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion,” said a senior fed­eral offi­cial.
…Offi­cials say the FBI makes exten­sive use of a new pro­vi­sion of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek infor­ma­tion with what are called National Secu­rity Let­ters (NSL).
The NSLs are a ver­sion of an admin­is­tra­tive sub­poena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone com­pany receiv­ing a NSL for phone records must pro­vide them and may not divulge to the cus­tomer that the records have been given to the gov­ern­ment.
The Patriot Act isn’t just for “ter­ror­ists” any­more, but, then, it never was really. That was just the excuse given to the Amer­i­can sheeple, and they swal­lowed the lie hook, line, and sinker. —ABC News [Police State USA]

A reminder that when the Bushe­viks go on about how they’re “at war,” they mean it–at war with us.

Drip, Drip, Drip. Don’t worry about NSA wire­tap­ping, we were told, it only con­cerns inter­na­tional calls.

Well…bq. The National Secu­rity Agency has been secretly col­lect­ing the phone call records of tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, using data pro­vided by AT&T, Ver­i­zon and Bell­South, peo­ple with direct knowl­edge of the arrange­ment told USA TODAY.

The NSA pro­gram reaches into homes and busi­nesses across the nation by amass­ing infor­ma­tion about the calls of ordi­nary Amer­i­cans — most of whom aren’t sus­pected of any crime. This pro­gram does not involve the NSA lis­ten­ing to or record­ing con­ver­sa­tions. But the spy agency is using the data to ana­lyze call­ing pat­terns in an effort to detect ter­ror­ist activ­ity, sources said in sep­a­rate interviews.This is where I tend to part ways with many of my fel­low lib­er­tar­i­ans. Pri­vate data banks of per­sonal infor­ma­tion scare me just as much as gov­ern­ment data banks, because given how easy it is for gov­ern­ment to get access to the pri­vate infor­ma­tion, “pri­vate” and “pub­lic” are vir­tu­ally indistinguishable.bq. AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Ver­i­zon, Bell­South and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies; they pro­vide local and wire­less phone ser­vice to more than 200 mil­lion customers.

The three car­ri­ers con­trol vast net­works with the lat­est com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies. They pro­vide an array of ser­vices: local and long-distance call­ing, wire­less and high-speed broad­band, includ­ing video. Their direct access to mil­lions of homes and busi­nesses has them uniquely posi­tioned to help the gov­ern­ment keep tabs on the call­ing habits of Americans.

Among the big telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. Accord­ing to mul­ti­ple sources, Qwest declined to par­tic­i­pate because it was uneasy about the legal impli­ca­tions of hand­ing over cus­tomer infor­ma­tion to the gov­ern­ment with­out warrants.

[…]

Accord­ing to sources famil­iar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nac­chio, was deeply trou­bled by the NSA’s asser­tion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to pro­ceed. Adding to the ten­sion, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its cus­tomers’ infor­ma­tion and how that infor­ma­tion might be used.

Finan­cial impli­ca­tions were also a con­cern, the sources said. Car­ri­ers that ille­gally divulge call­ing infor­ma­tion can be sub­jected to heavy fines. The NSA was ask­ing Qwest to turn over mil­lions of records. The fines, in the aggre­gate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the data­base, the sources said. As a mat­ter of prac­tice, the NSA reg­u­larly shares its infor­ma­tion — known as “prod­uct” in intel­li­gence cir­cles — with other intel­li­gence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were trou­bled by the expan­sive­ness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest’s par­tic­i­pa­tion to com­pletely cover the coun­try, pushed back hard.

Try­ing to put pres­sure on Qwest, NSA rep­re­sen­ta­tives point­edly told Qwest that it was the lone hold­out among the big telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies. It also tried appeal­ing to Qwest’s patri­otic side: In one meet­ing, an NSA rep­re­sen­ta­tive sug­gested that Qwest’s refusal to con­tribute to the data­base could com­pro­mise national secu­rity, one per­son recalled.

In addi­tion, the agency sug­gested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its abil­ity to get future clas­si­fied work with the gov­ern­ment. Like other big telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies, Qwest already had clas­si­fied con­tracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get com­fort­able with what NSA was propos­ing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its pro­posal to the FISA court. Accord­ing to the sources, the agency refused. Sounds like a good rea­son to switch to Qwest, if you ask me.

Track­Back (0) | [The Agi­ta­tor]

Indeed, it’s great that some­one was still will­ing to stand up to the Gestapo. I would have been sur­prised if this wasn’t going on, but hope­fully this story will prompt a few more peo­ple to wake up and real­ize that the United States of Amer­ica is long dead, and noth­ing remains but a rot­ting corpse long past due for burial.

How intense is the guer­rilla war in Iraq?. One good way to gauge the level of inten­sity in Iraq is to com­pare the casu­alty rate to pre­vi­ous wars. Of course, that is dif­fi­cult to do since there have been sub­stan­tial upgrades to med­ical care and body armor. It… [John Robb’s Weblog]

“Fly­ing Robot Attack ‘Unstop­pable’: Experts”. The head­line was just too deli­cious to resist, in the first place. But this story–about the ter­ror­is­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties of remote-controlled… [Hit and Run]

Hope­fully Sky Cap­tain will pro­tect us.

Cell-Phone Track­ing: Laws Needed. The wide­spread track­ing of police sus­pects through their cell phones must be clar­i­fied by Con­gress, observers say. Ryan Sin­gel reports from Wash­ing­ton. [Wired News: Top Sto­ries]

Laws are irrel­e­vant, because the cops will just ignore them. What’s impor­tant is that the wide­spread track­ing is fairly well known now, where just a few years ago any­one sug­gest­ing it could hap­pen was accused of paranoia.