Maybe it's too soon to tell, but the alliance of Google and Verizon seems a bit fishy to me.

Fifth, we want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation. Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options. Our proposal also includes safeguards to ensure that such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules. The FCC would also monitor the development of these services to make sure they don’t interfere with the continued development of Internet access services.

Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. In addition, the Government Accountability Office would be required to report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers.

This sounds quite a bit like a tiered net and a lot like cable TV with its premium channels and pay-per-view. It sure doesn't sound like net neutrality.

I really should restrain myself and not comment on this, but really what the hell is wrong with these people? Sarah Palin called on "Peaceful Muslims" to "pls refudiate" the project via her Twitter feed. She was soon joined by Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's call to prevent the building of any mosques near Ground Zero "so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia" Even the the Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the act. First of all, the mosque isn't at ground zero, it's a couple of blocks away and the people involved with mosque aren't the ones who caused 9/11. They say their aim is, "steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions." Interestingly, Blake Hounshell in FT calls on George W. Bush to speak out against this madness, arguing he's the only conservative left who can speak out against this insanity. Does the conservative movement really want to be identified as a bigotry movement?

This pretty much sums it up: there is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration. ACLU, Establishing a New Normal

Wikileaks recently released over 95,000 formerly secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Obviously, this has caused quite a buzz in the news media. Boing Boing and Dan Gilmore are expecting backlash from those who keep secrets. Me too, I guess. However, from what I've read about the documents, are there really surprises? The following aren't surprises, even to someone like me who doesn't pursue war news in depth: the war is going badly; lots of civilians are killed; US troops commit war crimes; Taliban and Al Qaeda are even worse; the Pakistani ISI aren't really our allies, but often work for the Taliban etc. Haven't we been hearing this for the last couple of years? Maybe that's why support for this war is declining rapidly.

The Whitehouse response is interesting. It's along the lines of That's so 2009. Things are better now and Pakistan is our ally. Yeah, right.

You can find a flowchart of the new vs. old FISA laws at the Ketchup and Caviar blog. One of the more interesting aspects of the law is that it removes the requirement that there be probable cause that the foreign subject whose communications are being intercepted be a suspect of any kind. Basically, the law allows dragnet surveillance of communication between Americans and non-Americans. Knowledge of who talks to whom, even without details of the communication is extremely valuable to government and business. Supposedly, one of the functions of the great firewall of China is to accumulate data on who talks with Chinese citizens for economic analysis. Would the US government use a law supposedly designed to catch terrorists for economic analysis? Would elements of the US government feed data about who competitors talked with to their friends in business, particularly, since oversight is weak or non-existent? Nah, couldn't happen here.

Glenn Greenwald expresses this much better than I can.

Today, the Democratic-led Senate ignored those protests, acted to protect the single most flagrant act of Bush lawbreaking of the last seven years, eviscerated the core Fourth Amendment prohibition of surveillance without warrants, gave an extraordinary and extraordinarily corrupt gift to an extremely powerful corporate lobby, and cemented the proposition that the rule of law does not apply to the Washington Establishment.

I actually expected this to pass. Both parties seem agree that the US should become a police state, with corporate interests and government paranoia trumping constitutional rights. I am particularly disappointed in Sen. Obama's performance. I had started to buy into his rhetoric about positive change and the idea that he was a different kind of politician. I'm old enough to know better, but hope springs eternal. I have reverted to my usual level of cynicism about politicians and consider Sen. Obama just another one, like the others.

The ACLU plans to fight.

In other news: The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. Coincidence?

I don't usually agree with Fox News, but they got this right:

But there’s a reason why this Congress is such a failure–it’s because they don’t care, are obsessed with irrelevant petty squabbling, and apparently have contempt for the American people. If they didn’t, out of simple respect for the people, all Democrat and Republican leadership in the House and the Senate would apologize and resign en masse.

This guy sums up my feeling on the issue:

How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?

How can both men who seek to become our next president cast such a vote when both should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder declaring that they would govern by our consent and with our approval, not by wielding the coercive and corrosive and corrupt powers that King George III and his latter-day namesake from Texas thought are theirs by divine right?

From Wikipedia article on Jerry Falwell

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Falwell said on The 700 Club, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" Fellow evangelist Pat Robertson concurred with his sentiment. After heavy criticism, Falwell apologized, though he later said that he stood by his statement, stating "If we decide to change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built, we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as he has in the past."

In February 1999 an unattributed National Liberty Journal articleclaimed that Tinky Winky, a Teletubby, was intended as a gay role model.

Why is Barack Obama held to a different standard than John McCain? McCain delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University. Why is Obama expected to disassociate himself from a crazy preacher, while McCain gets a free ride from the MSM while he openly courts right-wing crazy preachers?

Never mind, I know the answer.

The main stream media (MSM) has itself worked up about some quotes from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a preacher somehow associated with Barack Obama. ABC's Jake Tapper wants to know Just What Did Obama Know About Wright's Past Sermons?. He quotes Wright from a Rolling Stone article:

Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college,' he intones. 'Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!' There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. 'We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. ... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. ... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: 'And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS S***!'"

I'm trying to figure out what's really going on behind this. There's nothing in that quote that's not true and nothing that hasn't been said before many time. Why is this news? I think we know why, because Obama's opponents, both Republican and Democrat, want it to be. The swift-boating is starting.

The US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Bush administration's domestic spying program by refusing to hear the ACLU's appeal of a lower court's dismissal of the suit because the plaintiffs could not prove their communications had been monitored.

Let me get this straight: you can't have the case heard because you can't prove that the government wiretapped you, but the government won't tell you it wiretapped you because it's a secret. That's even though the wiretaps are warrantless and thus illegal. Welcome to 21st century America. You can check out our new constitution here.

“Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act intending to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and residents, and the president systematically broke that law over a period of more than five years," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. "It’s very disturbing that the president’s actions will not be reviewed by the Supreme Court. It shouldn’t be left to executive branch officials alone to determine what limits apply to their own surveillance activities and whether those limits are being honored. Allowing the executive branch to police itself flies in the face of the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

From today's Whitehouse press briefing:

QUESTION: Any reaction to the study out from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, when they did what they called a count of hundreds of false statements made by the president and top administration officials regarding the threat posed by Iraq. And they counted during the two years after 9/11.

PERINO: I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on. It is so flawed, in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world.

Because, as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence. And the other thing that that study fails to do is to say that after realizing that there was no WMD, as we thought as a collective body that there was, that this White House, the president set about to make reforms in the intelligence community to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.


White House Press Secretary Dana Perino attacked the study because it only counted false statement from the administration and not Congress, the British administration or the press. She doesn't deny that they were all lying. The second part of the statement is interesting too. The intelligence before the war was totally wrong AND they lied about it.

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks (link). I guess it's also not much of a surprise that it took this long for them to be called on it. It's easy to beat up on the main stream media (MSM), but isn't it their job to hold politicians to a standard of truth? The did very little of that in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Boing-Boing reports that a five-year-old boy was taken into custody and thoroughly searched at Sea-Tac airport because his name is similar to a possible terrorist alias. This is, of course, beyond stupid, but this sort of no-thinking response to anything is typical of Homeland Security. However, what I found interesting was this comment posted on Boing-Boing. I hope they don't mind my quoting it:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katerina, a friend (Canadian) told me of his adventures in the rescue and clean-up efforts. A hospital he ended up at was without power. No one could operate the emergency generator. He volunteered and got it going. What struck him most was that absolutely no one there was willing to take the responsibility of even TRYING - for fear of being blamed if it broke or didn't work.

...
American culture has somehow inculcated this mentality at the most basic levels of service workers. The five year old a the airport was searched because no one dared take responsibility at even the lowest,simplest level. The recent stopping of an ambulance carrying a heat patient emergency (at the Canada/US border) because the guard was afraid to take any responsibility is another example.

I think this poster is correct. It's not just that, as Bruce Schneier points out, we're subject to secuity theater not real security at airports, it's also that no one is willing to ever step outside the prescribed limits of his/her job. Another poster point out that in the US, we keep people locked in their jobs because of fear of loss of health insurance. I think that's correct. To a person with a family, loss of insurance can be devastating. America, land of the fearful?

I have tried my best to ignore the Iowa caucuses, but the news about them has been hard to avoid. Last night on CNN some talking heads were opining about the results from Iowa. One of the heads, David Gurgen, made a comment along the lines that Hillary needed to change her message to appeal to the voter's hearts rather than being so analytical. In other words, use an emotional based appeal like the successful candidates, Obama and Huckabee. Just for the record, I'm not a Hillary fan. However, Gurgen's comment, and I've heard similar comments about Hillary's approach from other MSM commentators on outlets like NPR, goes to heart of the problem with the MSM. As John Hockenberry points out in this MIT Technology Review article, the MSM goes for the "emotional center" of the story. Why do we get so many stories about lost white girls (white woman of the month), drunk celebs, and holiday exercise tips? As Hockenberry points out, MSM news reassures the audience by telling it what it already knows rather than challenging it to learn. The "emotional center" also make it easy to manipulate the audience. By appealing to emotions rather than thinking, the audience can be convinced of that Iraq has WMDs and is a threat to them, they need to give up their rights to be protected from terrorists, etc. It also makes the news a fitting tool for the political establishment to manipulate the public. The current administration's manipulation of the public by fear would be impossible without the cooperation of the MSM and its appeal to the "emotional center".

Bruce Schneier points out that data mining for terrorists is an idea that just won't die, but won't find any terrorists either. The basic problem is one of false positives. Terrorist plots are very rare. This means that even very accurate systems will be flooded with false alarms. There are possibly millions of false alarms for every one real attack, even assuming an unrealistically accurate system. The amount of possible data is so huge that even a 99.9% accuracy can potentially generate over a million false positives. Also, it is extremely difficult to know if you are correct. There is no well defined terrorist profile. It's easy to connect the dots after the fact, but it's much harder to do so before the fact. This will lead to police investigating innocent people while the real terrorist go about their work. Finally, as he points out: There is something un-American about a government program that uses secret criteria to collect dossiers on innocent people and shares that information with various agencies, all without any oversight. It's the sort of thing you'd have expected from the former Soviet Union or East Germany, or modern-day China.