Congress Strikes A Blow For Freedom

Congress has put into law its official disbelief in anything the President might ever say about the threat of Iran.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: "Midday Open Thread
by mcjoan
Fri Jun 23, 2006 at 10:37:01 AM PDT

* The Iran Intelligence Oversight Act Harry Reid announced at Yearly Kos passed the Senate last night as part of the Department of Defense Authorization Act. The legislation requires intelligence community professionals to monitor and certify administration statements about the threat posed by Iran."

Congress could do even better in preserving the nation's purse by requiring the intelligence community to certify any and all administration statements about threats to the nation.

Let The People Have Their Oil

The typical American soldier in Iraq, when asked by television crews why he is there, will say that he is in Iraq to spread freedom and democracy.

An insurgent would say that he is fighting to keep his country's oil from being stolen by the foreigners. The various militias and the powers that they represent are trying to make sure that they get their share of the wealth and that we don't. The terrorists hope the same.

There is a difference of perceptions about our reasons for being in Iraq.

Children of alcoholics manage to live an amazingly normal life while surrounded by the madness of their parents' disorder. Americans have learned to do the same.

This country, the USA, has sent an expeditionary force to the Mideast in an attempt to capture a hold on the spigot of one of the world's richest pools of oil. Here in the USA, American citizens focus intently on how we are "spreading Democracy" as they watch their children slowly be destroyed.

While a failing administration pouts at the press for not showing its successes on the ground in Iraq - at a time when even the Voice of America reporters no longer go outside the Green Zone - word from the ground is that our position there is becoming increasingly untenable.

Although the elected government of Iraq has finally after months of negotiations found leaders for all its ministries, they could not hold another election there today. It has been months since that was possible. Chaos rules.

Native translators and other Iraqi Iraqi assistants at the US Embassy work in increasing fear of death. What would we do without them? What to do, what to do?

Well, we could give up our wish to "manage" their oil. And so, it appears, we have.

Upon completion - selection and approval of all the ministers - of the Iraqi government and the successful killing of Iraq's number one public enemy Abdul-Musab al-Zarqawi, our United States president flew secretly last week to the Green Zone, a protected area in Baghdad that is the center in Iraq for US operations, and he met there with the new Iraqi president.

The next morning, back in Washington, the president held a press conference.

Among other things, he said,

"I reminded the government that that oil belongs to the Iraqi people, and the government has the responsibility to be good stewards of that valuable asset and valuable resource."

"... that oil belongs to the Iraqi people". Shout it from the hills, Hosannah!.

Maybe if someone shouts it loud enough, it will split the insurgents away from the terrorists.

Non-citizens can go home. And so can we.

Tomorrow's News Today

As television news departments pick up more and more of their stories from the web, the game of predicting tomorrow's news becomes ever more fun to play.

Fact one - the Afghan war against the Taliban is failing. Ground is being lost. What to do, what to do...

Fact two - the war in Iraq is also failing in that it is failing to succeed. There is no end in sight. The troops are worn. Elections could not be held today.

While we wait for Saddam to be demised (for we dare not pull out before that happens) our sword is frozen in the ground. Our unwelcomeness becomes ever more apparent.

Hopes of a controllingly close relationship with our protege government have dwindled to encouraging them to tell their citizens that the oil belongs to them, in hope that the people will start to discuss how the oil revenue can help their society and maybe they will begin to see their government as worthy of support.

Both battleground failures can be dealt with by one decision: "The terrorists have moved the war to Afghanistan. So we must follow them there. "

The logic is unassailable. After all, we are at war in Iraq to fight the terrorists. That was the script. This logic follows the script. We are over there to fight terrorists, not to prop up oil companies while they make their dirty deals, as some would think. We fight the terrorists, we move on. If we liberate a country from its dictator in the process, well, we were glad to be of help.

Consider how various parties will be impacted if we follow the terrorists to Afghanistan.

Middle Easterners in general would much rather see us bogged down in Afghanistan than in Iraq. It's a much trickier bog, as the Russians learned.

For the portion of the economy whose business it is to support the military, it should provide untold opportunities for consulting contracts, richer than Iraq, and more continuing.

Members of the Iraq insurgency will either dissolve into the normal political sphere like Black Panthers of the 60's or join the pirates.

The piratic terrorists intent on the snagging the oil are now placed at odds with the citizens. Suddenly they no longer are useful in controlling foreign armies. They can go. Or be turned in.

The Iraqi militias will only have themselves to fight. The Oil Ministry will recruit them, if it hasn't already. They will become nationalized in a year or two. Better retirement plan.

Europeans will be delighted to see our brazen bullying be rationalized back into goodness again.

Americans will once again be heroes.

Baloney Gets Sliced In The Information Age

Here's a lovely example of how quick the blogosphere has become at spotting "invented truth". White House Press Secretary Tony Snow floats some baloney and it gets popped like a balloon.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall June 21, 2006 01:17 PM: "
(June 21, 2006 -- 01:17 PM EDT)

Okay, back on Monday we discussed Tony Snow's comments about how if polls had been taken during World War II's Battle of the Bulge people would probably have been pushing for a change in the course of the war as they are now in Iraq.

That's actually an insult to the American people generally, as well as the men who fought World War II and those who supported them on the homefront.

In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren't taken at the time.

But he's wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow's whole point. ..." (link to full story, with charts)

Historical research that used to require twenty years of study now takes 20 hours for the group-mind blogosphere.

The sooner the embarrassment, the truer the utterer's words will become.

History judges even as we speak.

Lawmakers To Crack Down On Data Brokers

It appears that the NSA has been gathering information about Americans on the black market. Since they're already on the "black" side of government, invisible (supposedly), this may be a simple matter of color coordination.

On the other hand, it may be yet one more example of our government becoming active in that world beyond the law, a world where things aren't quite illegal but certainly would be if anybody knew about them.

And it sounds like legislators have found out about the NSA's bottom feeding and do intend to make it illegal.

Bully for them. Government must obey the law. Bring it to heel.


Lawmakers to crack down on data brokers - Yahoo! News: "Lawmakers to crack down on data brokers

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago

"WASHINGTON - Lawmakers promised on Wednesday to end shady practices by private data brokers who gather Americans' telephone records without subpoenas or warrants on behalf of banks, bail bondsmen and, sometimes, federal and local police.

These brokers, many of whom market aggressively on the Internet, have tricked telephone carriers into disclosing private customer information and broken into online accounts, in some cases guessing passwords that were the names of pets, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press."


The article goes on to describe a private eye acquiring data that he could not legally get in his day job as a police chief...

" 'She has two pets, one named Rainbow and the other is Max,' wrote a private detective, Donnie Tidmore of Waco, Texas, in September in an e-mail to a data broker, PDJ Investigations of Granbury, Texas.

Tidmore, who also is police chief in nearby Crawford, Texas, where President Bush owns his ranch, wanted lists of cellular calls and the Social Security number of a Virgin Mobile USA subscriber for a case. Tidmore works on the side as a private eye.

Tidmore told the AP on Wednesday the data brokers he used obtained information about targets through legal means. He acknowledged he has no idea how PDJ could obtain another person's phone records lawfully without a subpoena or warrant. Tidmore agreed that, in his capacity as police chief, he would have needed a subpoena or warrant to obtain a citizen's phone records.

PDJ's owner, Patrick Baird, was among 11 people identified as data brokers who refused to testify Wednesday at a congressional hearing. They invoked their Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate themselves.

'This is a crime and we need to put a stop to it,' said Rep. John D. Dingell (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee."

...

Although the data brokers invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves, their personal information and business plans are probably available for the right fee. On the black market.

The question is implied: should the NSA be permitted to acquire stolen data about Americans?

In another news story today, the NSA is reported to be spying on Internet traffic. Think before you click. "Do I want the government to know I'm looking for this?"

Information Hunger Pools The Data

Ignorance leads to pain. As we open our eyes at the beginning of life, we hunger for information. Living creatures, we strive to know all we can about the worlds through which we wander. We become anxious when something that we do not know enough about may affect us. To living creatures, information has value.

Information has value. Also, it costs almost nothing to copy. Value and direction of movement from one to another define a vector. Information wants to flow like rain wants to fall.

As information disperses, its value decreases. There are increasingly more sellers, there are fewer buyers. The wave of interest gets satisfied.

Since more and more information can be stored for lower and lower cost, the cost of ownership approaches the cost of acquisition. The cost of acquisition has devolved into a personal investment of time. Information disperses until no one wants to pay what it costs or to spend the time needed to acquire it.

This suggests that the end state of information movement may be a universal repository that is universally accessible because it is universally dispersed.

This repository is already here in virtual form. For a price, one can get almost any bit of information. Although the marketplace consists of information in transit, it is information that has been replicated from a source which the seller retains. Another copy can be sold. The set of these sources is a dispersed repository. There is a secondary market for information about this repository, indexes and Google for example, and this market unifies the repository in spite of its dispersal by making its information product universally accessible.

This dispersed but singular information repository may not seem real. It is virtual - until it is asked for data. Then it becomes as real as any web page that opens on the screen before you, which is itself a good example of this repository in action.


An interesting information war between government and the people appears now to be developing on two fronts.

First, the government is trying to record all it can about the people, their contacts, their purchases, their movements, their MySpace data and links. (Someday it may dare to ask their opinions.) Not everyone likes this. It's hard to choose a dish soap while the government is watching.

At the same time, people want to find out all they can about their government. They particularly want to know what their government knows about them. They want to find out who is pulling the strings.

There are things the government does not want the people to know about. Particularly, it doesn't want them to know what it knows about them. It may also want them not to learn how much money is getting spent on the trivial. Not to mention finding out who is pulling the strings.

But people are discovering that government secrecy covers interesting scandals, many of which involve wasted money. Money being short, the government is being called to account.

The information the government gets about the people is increasingly trivial.

The information people get about their government is increasingly entertaining. Increasingly valuable. A mandate for change, a call to action.

As the government develops its increasingly trivial repository on the people, the people develop their increasingly revelatory depository on the government.

If the government could begin to realize that there are things it will just never know, then boundaries on its packrat madness can become concievable.

Until then, one can only pay in cash and watch the circus.

This is getting to be more fun than Watergate.


P.S. To make life even more interesting, the government is now sending "National Security Letters" to those whom it wants to hush up. If you get one, save it! You can sell it on eBay in a few years for big money. Sell prints of it first for maximum return.