the frig blig

Retired AT&T techie Mark Klein reported details of a room in San Francisco used for warrantless monitoring of AT&T’s network in that city — and the story was killed by the Los Angeles Times (after reporting the details to the feds) and ignored by Congress. He describes this briefly in a Computerworld interview and in more detail in a self-published book Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine…And Fighting It.

Snippet from the interview:

IDGNS: What do you think you’ve accomplished by coming forward with these documents?

Klein: My main accomplishment is to let everybody know about what exactly the government is doing to people. How the government in detail is screwing over people’s privacy and trampling over the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment, and lay out in great detail how everybody’s personal lives are being delved into by the government and stored in secret databases for future reference.

And I personally wonder if Facebook is cooperating with the NSA…and if so, how much does it slow them down (the spooks, not the geeks)?

Geov Parrish reports in the June 25 issue of Eat The State that former KIRO-TV news anchor and current King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison is not only a creationist — but she served on the Board of Directors of local “think tank” Discovery Institute. And he also reports that this information was removed from her website once she announced her candidacy.

Pass it on. This fact deserves widespread knowledge, fast.

I’m trying to understand why the U.S. finds it “unacceptable” (Secretary of State Clinton as quoted by the BBC) for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons, when the U.S. itself has literally thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment’s notice. If it’s good enough for America, why shouldn’t the Koreans — or any other country — have the same opportunity to play with nukes? I mean, if you examine the historical record, the U.S. has invaded more countries than North Korea, and AFAIK the U.S. is the only country to have actually used nukes against another country. So arguably we’re the more dangerous country. The moral high ground Clinton sounds like she thinks she’s standing on is fairly blood-soaked.

Yesterday’s New York Times ‘Week in Review’ section features a front-page, top-of-the-fold story by Philip Taubman called The Trouble With Zero about the nuclear disarmament movement. On first read it appears like a straightforward-enough status report on that subject. But turning to the story’s continuation on page 4 I was immediately struck by the accompanying photograph — a picture of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb from 1945 ironically captioned ‘New Weapon’!

Why did the editor select a photo of a nuclear warhead over fifty years old, when there are thousands of more modern weapons in the U.S. arsenal? Photos are not hard to find — here’s one of the B61, a light weight, intermediate yield bomb with variable yield options, of which the U.S. has several hundred stockpiled. Or this one of the newer W87 intermediate yield strategic ICBM MIRV warhead. Or the beautiful photograph of neutron pulse tubes for the W76 undergoing testing at Sandia National Laboratories (which I’m using to illustrate this blog entry).

I can only guess that the editor’s motive in selecting an ancient history nuke instead of a contemporary one is to lull the reader into complacency, by portraying nukes as quaint and old rather than presenting a picture of current reality; viz. scores of thousands of modern high-tech weapons of much greater megatonage deployed in U.S. silos and submarines, ready to be used on command.

President Barack Obama was elected to office on a platform of ‘hope’. So it comes as no surprise that he is extending hope to CIA torturers. As he is offering hope to bankers (as long as they’re big enough) and Zionists.

Read award-winning economist Paul Krugman’s analysis of the latest bank bailout plan, as published by the New York Times. He’s “more than disappointed”, which is depressing.

Upon reading news of ‘the world’s cheapest car’ it made me notice an apparent contradiction between people’s efforts trying to slow global warming, and trying to slow global economic recession. Bailing out the U.S. automakers, for instance — possibly helps slow the recession, while possibly hurting the environment.

Which leads me to the headline question: Did mother nature have a hand in causing the global economic recession, in order to slow global warming? Could Mona be another ‘invisible hand’ on the market of which economists speak?

POGO reported four days ago that a paragraph titled ‘Protect Whistleblowers’ has been removed from the White House website’s ethics section. In fact, a search of the site now returns zero hits for ‘whistleblower’. Seems rather counter to the spirit that prompted the new president’s repeal of a 2001 executive order granting former presidents and vice presidents the ability to keep official documents secret past the 12 years allowed by law.

Maybe O is sayin, you can’t hide once you leave the presidential office, but no snitches tolerated while you’re holding that office?

If you’re not sick of them yet… might as well get a chuckle:

International banking firms are reporting billions of dollars lost to the self-described Ponzi scheme of Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff.

“The allegations made appear to point to a systemic failure of the regulatory and securities markets regime in the US” said London investment firm Bramdean in a statement reported by the BBC.

The bigger picture is that not just financial oversight, but all US federal regulatory agencies have been systematically defanged and redirected by Bush-appointed heads to “ease up” on their ostensible missions over the past eight years. For agencies where such tactics were less feasible — the FBI, for instance — budgets were cut to assure that the agencies had insufficient resources to adequately perform their job. This ‘fox in every chickenhouse’ strategy was entirely intentional and consistent with this administration’s goals, and was probably viewed by them as a great success.

What’s sad is the degree to which this story has been under-reported by the domestic US media. (Could increasingly concentrated ownership of the mass media by a few corporations play a part? Might media owners benefit from less regulation and oversight — obtaining bigger, less competitive markets perhaps?)

That grinding sound emanating from the Potomac is coming from those federal directors with half a clue, trying to see how many documents they can shred before leaving office to slow down the discovery of more potential scandals.