If you're a security pro, you might be familiar with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) requirements, which basically require companies to check their customers' identities against a list of known terrorists to prevent them from unwittingly providing products or services to an enemy. Most major credit bureaus check customers and applicants against these lists, so if you're vetting your partners and customers that way, you're probably covered.

However, you may not have heard yet about the Federal Trade Commission's "Red Flag" program, which is designed to warn companies when they are about to do business with identity thieves or money-laundering operations. The Red Flag program, which takes effect Nov. 1, requires enterprises to check their customers and suppliers against databases of known online criminals -- much like what OFAC does with terrorists -- and also carries potential fines and penalties for businesses that don't do their due diligence before making a major transaction.

"The final rules require

Companies May Be Held Liable for Deals With Terrorists, ID Thieves

A total of 2,208 intercepts authorized by federal and state courts were completed in 2007, an increase of 20 percent compared to the number terminated in 2006. The number of applications for orders by federal authorities fell less than 1 percent to 457. The number of applications reported by state prosecuting officials grew 27 percent to 1,751, with 24 states providing reports, 1 more than in 2006. Installed wiretaps were in operation an average of 44 days per wiretap in 2007, compared to 40 days in 2006. The average number of persons whose communications were intercepted decreased from 122 per wiretap order in 2006 to 94 per wiretap order in 2007. The average percentage of intercepted communications that were incriminating was 30 percent in 2007, compared to 20 percent in 2006.

Full Report</>.

2007 Wiretap Report

There is a hell of a lot of smoke being blasted up around this WVWV situation. The PR strategy here is confusion. I offer this as what I consider clarity. The linked news article is from February.

Sarah Johnson, communications director for the organization, said Friday that not including information about the source of the voter registration effort was "absolutely an accidental omission."

She said the group was changing its nationwide phone alerts to make clear who is coordinating the effort.

Its May. If this was a mistake, they would have cleared it up in nearly 3 months. It doesn't take THAT long to change out a recording in a mass calling machine. As far as I can tell at no point in this controversy have they specifically addressed why they did not change their recordings after they said they were going to.

This is not proof that they were deliberately engaged in voter suppression. There are three possibilities:

1. They were lying about this being a mistake. They were engaged in voter suppression.

2. They were lying about this being a mistake. They have found unidentified recordings to be more effective for some legitimate reason other than voter suppression. If they were lying, the problem that the general public has is that we have no reason to accept that their further insistences that they are not engaged in voter suppression are honest.

3. They are so incompetent that they managed to create a voter suppression scare, literally promise the general public that they were going to address the issue, did absolutely nothing, and created the exact same voter suppression scare again.

Door number 3 is the only option where I think we get to be comfortable with this organization, however, I'm not convinced that it's credible that these experienced "professionals" are that incompetent. I can't think of a place where I've ever worked where if I made a mistake that caused the Virginia Police Department to issue a public advisory upper management would not have been directly involved. People just don't get caught up in problems like that and then blow it off and not do anything. Thats the sort of problem that people tend to take very seriously.

Virginia voter registration effort proves legit after fears of scam | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

In the summer of 1976, as Chairman Mao lay on his deathbed in Beijing, the pigs at the Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, also began to die. The first batch of five were found with “their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances.” The commune vet declared they had succumbed to “what we call the Red Death” and ordered them to be cremated and buried immediately. But it had been raining for weeks and the ground was too waterlogged. Dousing the carcasses with kerosene and trying to set them alight simply filled the farm with vile-smelling smoke. Soon 800 more pigs were infected. A fresh team of vets arrived by motorboat with more sophisticated medicines, but their ministrations were of little help. Dead pigs were piled up throughout the farm, their bloated forms expanding and exploding in the heat.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

The House Judiciary Committee voted Tuesday to compel a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney to testify to the committee about the Bush administration's interrogation practices.

David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, refused to testify without a subpoena. No date has been set for his appearance before Congress.

Which Addington will ignore citing executive privilege. And people thought Nixon was bad.

The Associated Press: House panel subpoenas top Cheney aide

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

Way to go guys. A fine illustration of Republican "values."

Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens - washingtonpost.com

The news coverage of the Iraq War almost always ignores the daily lives of ordinary Iraqis. Seeking out those personal stories could help us understand the war's human cost.

Listening to Iraq | The American Prospect

As I pointed out in my last post, Directed Sentence Drawings generated from a text make it extremely difficult to see in what order the various topics were discussed and that a simple bar for each sentence in the order they occurred in the text and coloured by topic would be much better in most respects. I've built a graphic to show what I mean. I have also added the most frequent topic words for each set of 10 consecutive sentences.

State of the Union Sentence Bars