December 31, 2005
Frankenfoods → Superweeds
I can't remember where I read it, and now I can't find a link, but somewhere I think some researcher was putting cockroach genes into potatoes, for some reason. Right, like when you want a potato chip you want to bite into cockroach bits?
The thing is, frankenfoods are not good for anybody, and the industry that's backing them is not doing so for pure motives, such as feeding people. This article about the emergence of superweeds as a result of planting GM crops is just one example of the bad things that happen. There's lots more. But the bottom line is that the GM industry is mostly interested in trying to acquire patents on much of what farmers grow. Sort of a leaf from the tech industry book, where some companies have much or in certain cases all their assets in squiffy patents: their main business activity consisting of patent litigation. Which is sort of a metaphor for where our society is today. We don't want to invent things, or make things, or improve things – collectively, the main idea seems to be to take stuff from people who're weaker than you...
December 30, 2005
Covert Torturers
Dana Priest isn't a Robert Fisk, not yet anyhow – and frankly I doubt she ever will be if she remains at the Post – but her story today is stellar, first-class reporting. At first glance it seems perhaps merely a coda to her recent work on the torture camps, yet her light touch at the keyboard is deceptive: this is by far the biggest torture story to date, the complete institutionalization of un-American practices at the heart of the CIA.
The quirky bureaucrat in me wants to know now, for example, is there a career specialization in torture at the Agency? Can one enter the Senior Executive Service as a torture specialist? What sorts of special allowances and perks go along with that job? And how exactly does personnel plan to help place retiring senior torture specialists – will they mostly work as consultants overseas or can suitable work be found for them here at home? Are there special torture training centers, a torture training cycle, a torture manual? What a fascinating little cancer to pick at this one is...
December 27, 2005
Telling It Like It Isn't
There are probably at least half a dozen honest journalists in the world. Maybe more. One of them is Robert Fisk. How he does what he does is something of a mystery and a miracle. It's always refreshing to read his latest.
A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy
This is an excellent article by the former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit. Rasch points out that Federal efforts to track cell phone locations are increasingly blurring the lines regarding where one can have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It's of a piece with the ongoing NSA story. The quote: "What this means is that Congress needs to step in and establish guidelines for both private, public, law enforcement and intelligence acquisition and use of this passive tracking information."
December 22, 2005
"Department's Mission Was Undermined From Start"
There're lots of good reasons not to bother reading the Washington Post, but they can produce some good reporting. This story on the Department of Homeland Security is one such. I'm pretty sure, however, that neither reporters nor editors really understood what they'd got. The money quote: "The White House did not support us," said one of Ridge's top advisers. "That occurred repeatedly. It was [as] if the White House created us and then set out to marginalize us."
Instead of treating the story as yet another example of bureaucratic failure, fodder for the next generation's Wildavsky, people should be asking themselves whether, to what extent and why might the Bush gang have set out to fail with this particular entity.
NSA's New Technology
Here's about the best set of speculation about NSA's program that I've seen. Ars Technica deserves a little more play than it gets -- just because it's primarily a site for computer geeks who incessantly tinker with their equipment doesn't mean that it's not technologically savvy in a wide range of areas.
That said, let me boil the point Ars makes down to a couple sentences. Most likely the NSA is using a new combination of hardware and software tools that goes orders of magnitude beyond what wiretap technology has been in the past. Instead of looking at specific targets and then following them, most likely what's happening is a rolling mass wiretap of virtually all communications into and out of the United States. Your phone call to Aunt Ingrid in Denmark will be picked up for a few seconds, reviewed by software for content and voice signatures, and then passed by for other calls. If your call to a band in France includes a mention of some act 'bombing,' if that phrase is picked up, that call and subsequent calls may be more scrupulously monitored. Etc.
December 20, 2005
A Rebuttal
The following remarks from the Senate by Senator Feinstein on December 16 are perhaps the clearest exposition available of what the law says about executive wiretap authority and how it was violated:
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today as a 12-year member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a 5-year member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I do so indeed with a very heavy heart. I have had, until now, great confidence in America's intelligence activities. I have assured people time and time again that what happens at home has always been conducted in accordance with the law.
I played a role in the PATRIOT Act. I moved one of the critical amendments having to do with the wall and the FISA court. Today's allegations as written in the New York Times really question whether this is in fact true. I read it with a heavy heart, yet without knowing the full story.
Let me be clear. Domestic intelligence collection is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. This law sets out a careful set of checks and balances that are designed to ensure that domestic intelligence collection is conducted in accordance with the Constitution, under the supervision of judges and with accountability to the Congress of the United States.
December 18, 2005
Who's Minding the Spies?
This NSA spying on Americans story has hit the elite's collective brain like a double espresso. Smart folk -- in an archetypal intra-elite scrum which won't involve the unwashed -- realize the incredible potential for abuse, the near-impossibility of safeguards if Bush were allowed to continue the program on his own terms.
Unlike some critics I've always had a deep admiration for the recent former head of NSA, Gen. Mike Hayden, now deputy director of national intelligence. I don't think Mike would mind if I now identify him (he'd held other positions at the time) as one of my best sources during the Bosnian conflict. I always found him honest, direct, and -- perhaps unusually so for someone in his position -- the recipient of enormous loyalty from his staff, which he courageously returned. If implementing Bush's spying game were left just up to Mike or somebody like him I wouldn't much worry about it. But of course the problem isn't about people with character, it's about all those sharks in the system. If somebody like Rove, for example, or Bolton, can tap this machinery to spy on anti-neo-con political leaders, or who knows what others, much mischief may ensue.
December 16, 2005
US Walked Back, Slightly
ABC news wants to charge you $15 for the transcript of World News Tonight!? When NBC provides its transcripts free! I wouldn't have noticed this except that I haven't completely broken the habit of tuning in to ABC, developed while the late Peter Jennings was there, so I happened to see a George Stephanopoulos story on Bush's concession on anti-torturer legislation and later wanted to read the transcript. Stephanopoulos -- he's not at all alone (see, for example, this report in the Washington Post) -- doesn't get it that there's an important backdrop to the White House's decision on torture, namely, that the Europeans are not playing ball. Possibly Bush would have given ground to the McCain amendment strictly on its own merits or political force. We don't know. What we do know is that Condi just got back from Europe and no matter how effectively her entourage spun the trip (see here, here, here, and here) the fact is that the Europeans told her they would continue to pursue allegations of torture flights and, indeed, they are. As much as anything else they have walked the Bush regime back a half step...
December 13, 2005
Diebold CEO, Under Fire, Resigns
Wally O'Dell, according to the Raw Story, Business Week, and other sources, has resigned under pressure. Moreover, Bradblog reports a securities fraud class action suit filed against Diebold today in Ohio, alleging "Fraud, Insider Trading, Manipulation of Stock Prices, Concealment of Known Flaws in Voting Machines and Company Structural Problems." Not a good day for Diebold...
One hopes this is only the beginning of a process that will result in several current and former Diebold officers being found guilty and penalized for their criminal activities.
December 10, 2005
The Whig Interpretation of Recent History
By Werther*
It is said that the earth’s magnetic field is about 10 percent weaker than it was when Carl Friedrich Gauss first measured it in 1845. At some point, the field will reverse poles and regenerate itself. Compasses will then point south.
This process, which will no doubt confuse migratory birds, may or may not be an example of intelligent design. But as a metaphor for the life of political parties, the magnetic field theory has some merit. As the issues and controversies which motivate the formation of a party inevitably fade, the party’s platform becomes hollow rodomontade, full of sound and fury signifying only jobs for the boys.
Once the causes which formed the party pass out of human memory, attendant rituals weaken to the point where, at some unrecorded instant, the ideological platform may actually reverse, with no one understanding why. Unlike the earth’s magnetic field, however, the party process is not necessarily a perpetuum mobile. Should the party no longer hold the allegiance of its followers, it collapses.
Continue reading "The Whig Interpretation of Recent History"...
December 8, 2005
Diebold Whistleblower
Another Diebold whistleblower has turned up in therawstory. I'm continually amazed that there isn't more outrage on the part of the public over elections stolen through rigged electronic voting.
Pinter's Nobel Speech
Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered by video, contains a remarkably candid look at the exercise of American power, post WWII.
December 6, 2005
Timing is Everything
How much trouble is the Bush gang in? Just look at today's Washington Post, with two front page pieces that impact Rice's trip: one on the trip itself, the other a story about CIA lies to the Italian government over one of their kidnappings for the US' subcontracted torture gulag.
Neither complimentary, both timed for maximum impact with the Europeans, who do read the Post. There's been a spate of pre-trip reports, most focused on Condi's efforts to spin away the torture scandal before she even left Washington. None of those, though, were real news. It'll be very interesting to see what stories appear later today and tomorrow once she's been in a few meetings and the Europeans have had a chance to get in some words of their own.
December 2, 2005
UK Legal Opinion
I know I'm going on a lot about torture flights, but I think these things are a much bigger deal than the US media has recognized, and certainly of enormous consequence to US diplomacy -- something the Bush gang doesn't worry about. Here's a splendid opinion piece in the Independent, by a former deputy head of the Foreign Office legal team and now a fellow of Chatham House. In other words very representative of official British thought.
December 1, 2005
Rendition Opposition
Good for the New York Times, reporting further on US torture flights. And there's new news coming out of the BBC and the Guardian. Next week when Secretary of State Rice visits Europe she's sure to get a frosty reception. But the Europeans should connect the dots and not limit their outrage over torture flights to the particulars.
