Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

We still have time to mess this up!

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

In my day, never was longer.

Everybody saw this coming.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

People are complicated. Love is not.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

“But what about the lurkers?”

We are aware of all internet traditions.

You are here: Home / Archives for Security Theatre

Microsoft, Just Following Orders

by | 17 Comments

This post is in: , ,

As part of an ongoing series subtitled “Above the Law”, the New York Times reports that “Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent”:

… Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.
__
As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.
__
Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
__
Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.
__
After The New York Times presented its reporting to senior Microsoft officials, the company responded that it planned to tighten its oversight of its legal affairs in Russia. Human rights organizations in Russia have been pressing Microsoft to do so for months. The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft this year saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.” …

Microsoft, Just Following OrdersPost + Comments (17)

School/Car Culture

by | 85 Comments

This post is in: ,

This WSJ piece by Lenore Skenazy examines the the absurdity of the new normal: kids can’t walk to school. In addition to wasting gas and parents’ time, it encourages sedentary behavior. But there’s another side effect that she doesn’t mention: it makes all the teenagers sleep deprived.

It’s the first day of school in my burg, and the streets are lined with sleepy teenagers waiting for the bus. School starts at 7:20 for them, a schedule dictated in part by the need to run buses in shifts so the high, middle and elementary schools can use the same set of buses.

Early start times are bad for teenagers, and school districts that start later report good results, but it’s hard to change a culture that believes that a child walking to school is a kid in grave danger. (via)

School/Car CulturePost + Comments (85)

America.gov

by | 95 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

I got this email from one of my sisters:

So, I have been watching them leaving Iraq on tv and went to the US Embassy in Iraq website, just to have a look around. From there, I went to the US propaganda website, america.gov. OMG it’s so sad to read with what’s been going on. It’s just like “we like you, we like Muslims, we have Muslims here and they are FINE, they are doing VERY WELL and thriving and not at all marginalized and look at all these pictures of them: happy and praying.” It says, “offering a place for everyone.”

Here’s the quiz on the front page:

Where is the largest mosque in the United States?

* A. Dearborn, Michigan
* B. Miami
* C. New York

Then there’s this:

20 August 2010
Off to Find America, Mosque by Mosque
Two New Yorkers take to the road for Ramadan

Washington — For Ramadan, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are touring Muslim America. They are fasting their way across 30 states and celebrating iftars in 30 mosques. They are driving 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) to get closer to their faith. And they are having a great time. Ali, 26, an Indian American, and Tariq, 23, a Pakistani American, are buddies in New York. A year ago, they said, they were praying at a mosque with a big crowd on the first day of Ramadan and came up with the idea of spending the holy month visiting a different mosque each day — 30 mosques in 30 days. “In New York City, there’s over 800,000 Muslims. If you type my address on Google, you can find 162 mosques in a five-mile radius,” Ali said. “And so we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s try it.’”

And this:

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in a Fox News interview that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” a comment that drew criticism for appearing to equate those proposing the Islamic center with Nazis.
Asked about the view that such remarks could fuel radicalism, Mr. Gingrich sent an e-mail response on Friday that did not directly address his critics but said that “Americans must learn to tell the truth about radical Islamists while being supportive of and inclusive of moderate Muslims who live in the modern world, respect women’s rights, reject medieval punishment and defend American laws and the American Constitution.” He added that he believed “it is possible to be a deeply religious Muslim and a patriotic American.”
Muqtedar Khan, an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware, said he was not sure the Islamic center dispute alone would radicalize anyone. But he said it was “demoralizing” for Muslims like him who defend the United States as an open and tolerant society.
“For the first time, anti-Islamic rhetoric has gone mainstream,” he said. “What this really does is weaken the moderates and undermine their credibility.”

America.govPost + Comments (95)

No Worries If You Have Nothing to Hide

by | 35 Comments

This post is in: ,

The NSA is launching a program called “Perfect Citizen”, which may or may not involve spying on domestic networks:

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

It doesn’t matter as long as we’re safe from cyber-terrorists, of course. This is about right:

Wired has asked the NSA some pointed questions about whether Congress has been briefed on the program. My guess is that they haven’t, at least not in any meaningful way. Congress hasn’t insisted on exercising any oversight of any part of CNCI under either Bush or Obama. They probably don’t know anything about this, and they don’t want to.

If the term “Homeland Security” wasn’t enough to creep you out about the direction this country is going, “Perfect Citizen” should do the trick.

No Worries If You Have Nothing to HidePost + Comments (35)

Early Morning Open Thread: Spy vs. Spy

by | 19 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

I am such an unpatriotic American, when I first heard about the Illegals Eleven arrests, I’ll admit I was dubious of the timing. In our Total Information Awareness Era, nothing says “Eff you, Obama, and your Russkie-hugging DFH ways” like scheduling the disclosure of a ten-year multi-agency survelliance operation to coincide with a media-friendly state visit by the Russian President. Especially when the the announced charges against the ten defendents and one fugitive amount to “conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general” (maximum penalty: five years) and “conspiracy to commit money laundering” (max charge: 20 years, under post-9/11 ‘anti-terrorist’ codes intended to guarantee that any individual suspect could be brought into custody quickly and conveniently without a lot of loose talk about their so-called Constitutional rights). Of course, this is just reflexive tin-foil-hattery; both William J. Casey and J. Edgar Hoover have been dead for many years, and there’s only so much one man, even a man like Dick Cheney, could have done to reinstate the ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan days of OSS hijinks during a mere eight years.

The Washington Post reports:

… Federal law enforcement officials portrayed their operation as a spectacular counterintelligence success that uncovered a group of spies capable of doing great damage to U.S. national security. “I can’t remember a case where we’ve been able to arrest 10 intelligence officers from a foreign country in one fell swoop,” one official said. “This network in the United States has now been completely compromised.”
__
But other officials said the Russian network appears to have accomplished little, if any, of its espionage aims, even though some of the suspects had lived in this country for up to two decades. “These are people trying to get inside the tent that you would expect to see more charges on if they had succeeded in doing so,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation, who added, “It certainly is a wake-up call” for those on the alert for Russian spying.

I’m sure that as this narrative unfolds, we will all have reason to be grateful for the FBI’s viligiant and unwavering devotion to duty. News stories about the current details, however, share a certain Graham-Greene-ish aura. The BBC titled an article “Cold War meets 21st century meets ‘burger summit'”
:

… Some of what they were said to be after, like information about nuclear “bunker-buster” warheads, seems rather serious. The Department of Justice has, however, made clear that none of the information at stake was classified. In fact it is a bit unclear what the suspects actually managed to get their hands on…

show full post on front page

Early Morning Open Thread: Spy vs. SpyPost + Comments (19)

Hope and Change

by | 39 Comments

This post is in: 

I wonder what’s different about British politics that allows them to back down from a nationwide identity card scheme, yet we’re still larding on ever more useless bits of intrusive security theater.

Presumably, the next time there’s a terrorist attack in Britain, the media will play woulda-coulda-shoulda to show how an identity card could have stopped it. For some reason, the spectre of those kinds of recriminations didn’t stop the new coalition government, and I’d be interested in knowing why.

Hope and ChangePost + Comments (39)