Arrrh!

Iowahawk reveals more unconstitutional warrantless surveillance:

NY TIMES: CLAUS OK’D ILLEGAL SURVEILLANCE

The New York Times reported today that Polar authorities are engaged in a secret program to conduct warrantless monitoring of private communications and activities among U.S. minors. Anonymous sources within the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency said the program, codename “Operation Coal Lump,” dates as far back as 1879, and received approval at the highest echelon of Polar administration, including President Santa Claus himself.

The disclosure of the program sparked an immediate furor among civil libertarian organizations and brats right groups. ACLU spokesman Dan Knaggs said “that chill in the air isn’t December — it’s Big Brother Kriss Kringle unconstitutionally watching, and following, and evaluating your every move.”

Josh Cleland, 9, a spokesboy for the Council For Misbehaving Americans, decried the program as “a looming threat to the economic rights of millions of young Americans, many of whom may be guilty of nothing more than a wedgie or Indian burn of self defense.”

Cleland added that “Stop hitting yourself, retard. Stop hitting yourself, retard.”

At an afternoon press conference, Claus angrily defended the secret youth surveillance program, saying that “with limited toy inventories, it is critical that we know who has been naughty and nice.” He also called for an investigation into the leak, saying that “by revealing sources and methods, it has put thousands of our covert elves at risk for BB gun violence and worse.”

UPI is publishing a puzzling report alleging that the 43 year old German archaeologist recently kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq is really a German Intelligence agent:

WASHINGTON — Susanne Osthoff, the German archaeologist kidnapped by Iraqi gunmen on November 25 and released before Christmas was connected with her country’s intelligence service, the BND, and had helped arrange a meeting with a top member of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, possibly Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi himself, according to well informed German sources.

The sources on January 7 confirmed German press reports that the 43-year-old woman had worked for the BND in Iraq on a freelance basis, and had for some time even stayed in a German intelligence safe house in Baghdad.

A convert to Islam and a fluent Arabic speaker, Osthoff had lived in Iraq for over a decade, and was at one time married to an Iraqi.

Archeology is a classic intelligence cover: T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) posed as an archeologist in the Middle East in the early part of the last century. But archeology is Osthoff’s real profession. One Washington-based German source said Osthoff had been working on arranging a rendezvous with an Al Qaeda member on behalf of a German intelligence agent in Iraq.

Germany is believed to have paid a ransom for Osthoff’s release, consisting, at least in part, of the release of the Hizbullah terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, who murdered US Navy diver Robert Dean Strethem in 1985.

Upon her release, Osthoff gave a peculiar and incoherent interview on German public television, dressed in a black Islamic head covering concealing everything but her eyes, in which she expressed sympathy for her kidnappers and asserted that she had been well-treated.

2004 Documentary on Republican in Hollywood reviewed:

Hollywood has a richly-deserved reputation as an extremely liberal town populated by celebrities who rarely hesitate to assail their audiences with their political opinions…

But just as there may be a few Britney Spears fans at a death metal concert, surely there must be some Republicans in Hollywood; and Democratic speechwriter and independent filmmaker Jesse Moss set out to find them in his short documentary Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood, which initially ran on the American Movie Classics channel in September 2004.

Navlog describes a “Reality Mom” turning to concealed carry, and identifies the personal defense handgun as a potential tool for changing voting habits of suburban soccer moms.

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If you want to annoy your wife, click on his main page with the jet engine noises.

J. Peter Mulhern, at American Thinker, debunks the premises underlying the fabricated NSA Flap:

The NSA flap has very little potential to hurt President Bush and every serious player among his enemies must know that…

You can’t sustain a scandal by revealing the shocking truth that the President of the United States is doing his job. He isn’t ashamed of gathering intelligence on our deadly enemies and nobody who doesn’t already loathe President Bush will blame him for it. It takes some scandalous material to make a scandal. There may, for example, be a scandal when the President sodomizes an intern in the Oval Office. Whatever the President and the First Lady may do in the family quarters after hours, it isn’t going to cause a scandal.

But, but, I hear them sputter, the President violated the law. He bypassed the checks and balances Congress wisely provided when it established the secret FISA court. Isn’t that enough to get him in serious hot water?

No. All the arguments about whether FISA applies to wartime intelligence gathering are so much pettifogging pedantry. FISA is a model of opaque draftsmanship. Don’t take my word for it, try to read it yourself.

Good luck.

It is certainly possible to read FISA as attempting to limit President Bush’s power to intercept al Qaeda communications. It is also possible to read it more modestly. In the last analysis, however, FISA is beside the point.

If FISA tries to restrict the President’s power to spy on our enemies during a state of war that Congress itself proclaimed then FISA is blatantly unconstitutional. Only a fool or a traitor would suggest that Congress can constitutionally require that the President play “Mother-may- I” with a motley collection of judges before intercepting enemy communications in wartime.

Congress can no more empower judges to make decisions about how we gather intelligence than it could empower them to decide what targets our Air Force should bomb or what streets our troops should patrol.

There is nothing complicated about this. The President is Commander in Chief. He makes the military decisions. He decides, with the advice of his subordinate commanders, when and where the United States government should gather intelligence because that is a military decision…

FISA may instruct the President to consult a panel of judges before listening to enemy communications. If it does it is unconstitutional, null, void and asinine.

When Congress violates the Constitution by trying to hamper the legitimate exercise of executive authority the President has both the right and the duty to ignore it. Which brings us to the second reason that the NSA nonscandal will sink without a trace.

There won’t be any riveting hearings, trials or judicial decisions to keep the NSA pot boiling because the President’s determination about the scope of his own constitutional authority to gather military intelligence is not subject to any meaningful review. With the advice of the Attorney General and his other lawyers the President has decided that he is constitutionally empowered to authorize the NSA program which is currently under attack. For all practical purposes that decision is final.

Ralph Peters, in the New York Post, tells democrats and their MSM allies promoting the ersatz NSA scandal:

Stop lying. Show us the victims.

Name one honest citizen who has been targeted by our intelligence system. Name one innocent man or woman whose life has been destroyed. Come on, Nancy. Give it up, Howard. Name just one.

Can’t do it? OK. Let’s dispense with the partisan rhetoric and reach for the facts:

Has a single reader of this column suffered personally from our government’s efforts to defend us against terrorists? Have any of your relatives or even your remotest acquaintances felt our intel system intrude into their lives?

That’s what I always ask the group-think lefties. Not one has ever been able to answer “Yes.”

The same big-lie politicians attacking the president’s efforts to uncover plots against America by monitoring terrorist communications will be the first to shriek that the War on Terror has failed when we’re attacked again.

They want it both ways: Drop our defenses, then blame Bush when terrorists strike

Jarod Lanier (above) writes about Technology the way certain of my college friends used to talk about these kinds of things after a couple of hash brownies. This specific (brilliant, crossing the barriers of a variety of separate and distinct topics, wildly original and speculative, and a trifle daft) form of discourse was referred to in our circles as space-ranging. Criticized by his interlocutors for his prolixity, for the profusion of his ideas, for their chaotic disorganization, and for indulging in the characteristic intellectual overreach of the seriously stoned, one Early Concentration Philosophy classmate of mine, had on a particular occasion declared memorably in his own defense: “I am a Space Ranger!”

As the rings of Saturn fade distantly in the view-finder, Lanier remarks:

As it happens, I dislike UNIX and its kin because it is based on the premise that people should interact with computers through a “command line.” First the person does something, usually either by typing or clicking with a pointing device. And then, after an unspecified period of time, the computer does something, and then the cycle is repeated. That is how the Web works, and how everything works these days, because everything is based on those damned Linux servers. Even video games, which have a gloss of continuous movement, are based on an underlying logic that reflects the command line.

Human cognition has been finely tuned in the deep time of evolution for continuous interaction with the world. Demoting the importance of timing is therefore a way of demoting all of human cognition and physicality except for the most abstract and least ambiguous aspects of language, the one thing we can do which is partially tolerant of timing uncertainty. It is only barely possible, but endlessly glitchy and compromising, to build Virtual Reality or other intimate conceptions of digital instrumentation (meaning those connected with the human sensory motor loop rather than abstractions mediated by language) using architectures like UNIX or Linux. But the horrible, limiting ideas of command line systems are now locked-in. We may never know what might have been. Software is like the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which each day is the same. The passage of time is trivialized.

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But, as is often the case in space ranges, there is some very good stuff in here. The concept of the Antigora, i.e., a privately owned marketplace whose owner benefits both from its use by, and from the volunteer labor of, entrants is potentially quite useful.

I have a strong suspicion that Lanier’s use of Agora, and variations thereon, as his preferred term for one kind of marketplace and another, stems from the influence of the late Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004), founder of a unique strain of California counter-cultural Libertarianism which he called Agorism, whose theories were promulgated via Sam’s own Agorist Institute. Potlatch metaphors were also a characterististic trope of Konkinian Libertarianism. One can hear the echo of Sam Konkin’s sunny optimism in the following analysis:

Perhaps it will turn out that India and China are vulnerable. Google and other Antigoras will increasingly lower the billing rates of help desks. Robots will probably start to work well just as China’s population is aging dramatically, in about twenty years. China and India might suddenly be out of work! Now we enter the endgame feared by the Luddites, in which technology becomes so efficient that there aren’t any more jobs for people.

But in this particular scenario, let’s say it also turns out to be true that even a person making a marginal income at the periphery of one of the Antigoras can survive, because the efficiencies make survival cheap. It’s 2025 in Cambodia, for instance, and you only make the equivalent of a buck a day, without health insurance, but the local Wal-Mart is cheaper every day and you can get a robot-designed robot to cut out your cancer for a quarter, so who cares? This is nothing but an extrapolation of the principle Wal-Mart is already demonstrating, according to some observers. Efficiencies concentrate wealth, and make the poor poorer by some relative measures, but their expenses are also brought down by the efficiencies.

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An amusing read and a fine provocation. John Perry Barlow, Eric S. Raymond, David Gelernter, and Glenn Reynolds will all be replying.

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Adventures in Troubleshooting offers advice on understanding Mac Geeks, who will be making their annual hajj to San Francisco to hear the Prophet Jobs deliver his latest revelation. Not everyone understands, or appreciates, the one-button mouse approach to computing, but some do contend that “everything is just prettier on a Mac.” AIT goes even further:

Apple makes technology cool. They make computing cool. This is why they hold such high esteem with many geeks. They make what we do into something that can get us laid…. Girls love Rebels. Steve Jobs could have so many many many more chicks than Bill.

Primary Colors author, Joe Klein, writing in Time, predicts that democrats will inevitably pay the price for their partisan games-playing on issues of National Security:

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, engaged in a small but cheesy bit of deception last week. She released a letter, which quickly found its way to the front page of the New York Times, that she had written on Oct. 11, 2001, to then National Security Agency director General Michael V. Hayden. In it she expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with “specific presidential authorization.”

The release of Pelosi’s letter last week and the subsequent Times story (“Agency First Acted on Its Own to Broaden Spying, Files Show”) left the misleading impression that a) Hayden had launched the controversial data-mining operation on his own, and b) Pelosi had protested it. But clearly the program didn’t exist when Pelosi wrote the letter. When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, “Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it’s all fruit.”

A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are “fruit,” and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent…

It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.

There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.

…liberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo’s family in the right-to-die case last year.

But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.

The Mirror is reporting on warning information being distributed in British military camps in Iraq:

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.

Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their “kill rate” from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.

Under the heading “HIV/Hepatitis” the document states: “There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference.”

Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim 50 metres away and infect them.

Time reports:

Angered by recent leaks of information about sensitive intelligence operations, CIA Director Porter Goss is redoubling efforts to get his spooks to keep their mouths shut. At staff meetings last week, CIA managers at the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters told employees that the leaking had got out of control and needed to stop. “They’re exercised about it and are trying to do what they can to clamp down,” a former senior CIA official tells TIME…

there are efforts within the government to identify leakers. The Justice Department is investigating who gave away the NSA secrets. While such probes rarely succeed, the department’s new willingness to subpoen a reporters and their records could change that. And the CIA has a group of mostly retired officers on contract to read news stories that contain classified material and try to uncover their sources. This may be the toughest spook work. Over the years, the unit, nicknamed “the leak chasers” by some agency hands, has been able to finger only a few talkers. But it has an enthusiastic—and active—backer in Goss. He told TIME in June that he had made dozens of leak-investigation referrals. “Virtually every day I can pick up a paper and find somebody who is an anonymous source,” he said. “That is willful. And it seems to me there ought to be a penalty for that.”

It can’t be terribly hard to identify the leakers. One could start by subpoenaing the reporters who published information received from unidentified offficials.