So, the other day a video came up on the twincities.indymedia.org site claiming to have outed a couple of "provocateurs" at one of the marches.

Not only are their criteria for determining if someone's a cop laughably loose, they can't handle criticism either. Let's see how long my response to this lunacy lasts _this_ time.

cop != provocateur.

Perhaps they need some really paranoid people (e.g. hackers) to explain to them how to properly vet someone (and how to handle a crowd).

How NOT to out a cop

So, the other day a video came up on the twincities.indymedia.org site claiming to have outed a couple of "provocateurs" at one of the marches.

Not only are their criteria for determining if someone's a cop laughably loose, they can't handle criticism either. Let's see how long my response to this lunacy lasts _this_ time.

cop != provocateur.

Perhaps they need some really paranoid people (e.g. hackers) to explain to them how to properly vet someone (and how to handle a crowd).

How NOT to out a cop

So, more fodder for "exactly how are the police behaving according to law in MSP"? This is a short interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy NOW! shortly following her release from jail after having been illegally arrested yesterday.

Note that immediately after her arrest, the Secret Service pulled her credentials and clearance for being allowed in the convention center.

Amy Goodman (of Democracy NOW!) comments on her arrest

This is just insane. The cops arrested Amy Goodman.

Amy Goodman *ARRESTED*

So, I'm just going to lay this out very simply, even though in the linked video, Olbermann appears to consider this too distasteful to do more than just touch upon (and indeed, there are bigger fish to fry first).

An "interview" is supposed to be a question and answer session between a reporter and the interviewee, right? So that the reporting is basically saying, "the reporter asked this question, and the person being interviewed gave this particular answer to that question", right?

So, in what lunatic alternate dimension does this become "an interview is a creative reinterpretation of what we think we'd like this person to have said in response to these questions" and make Katie Couric's interview session with John McCain, as aired not a massive breach of journalistic integrity because basically, what they aired showed McCain giving an entirely different answer to the question asked about the troop surge.

In short, what CBS aired was decidedly fiction and "news" is supposed to be non-fiction.

So, doesn't CBS believe in 'journalistic integrity'?

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Bellovin on Decius's HOPE topic

He seems to be searching for reason and order in an area that is patently unreasonable and hypocritical. In the case of U.S. citizens, the information customs agents are digging through their laptops for would be protected by a warrant requirement if it was transmitted Internationally over the Internet instead. The FISA update signed yesterday by George Bush makes this even more the case than it was before, as now warrants are required to monitor the communications of U.S. persons even if they are overseas. These searches are not part of a comprehensive approach to preventing the smuggling of information. No comprehensive approach is possible because warrant requirements and encryption stand in the way. The fact that neither of these things stand in the way of customs officials at the border is an accident of time, space, and technology, and not a willful result of policy.

These facts completely undermine the arguments made in the senate hearing, particularly by the Heritage Foundation's representative, that these searches are necessary for some sort of policy reason and legalistic objections to them miss the point. There is no policy reason. If there were, then you'd have to allow warrantless law enforcement monitoring of all international communications and you'd have to require cryptographic key escrow. We don't. We're not going to. We don't need to. And so we don't need to do these searches either.

RE: FISA and Border Searches of Laptops

I've been seeing this distasteful thing being aired for a couple of days now, and I'm aghast they'd even have considered airing it once.

A customer approaches the ticketing counter and says he needs a flight to SFO for his business for a VC pitch, puts his card on the counter. It's a custom card with kittens on it. The attendant looks at it and says "...and you said this is a business flight?".

Almost immediately, there are two TSA employees behind the customer, telling him to come with them. One of them is snapping on a latex glove.

While he's being led away, another customer comes up and buys a ticket to SFO, hands over his AMEX card, and is simply thanked.

So, is it just me or is this commercials veiled threat that if you don't use Amex you're going to get someone facist's hand shoved up your ass particularly beyond the pale?

American Express's New, Especially Insane Commercial

It looks like everyone's un-favorite asshat lawyer has just gotten another nail for the coffin of his legal career.

Correction, make that twenty-seven nails... or four really big nails depending on how you look at it.

As a refresher, Mr. Thompson is the jackass who sprung up in front of the media blaming violent video games every time some unstable kid with parents who don't watch them closely enough does something stupid and dangerous with a gun. Some highlights of his career would include repeatedly harassing Rock Star Games with downright silly lawsuits, up to and including trying to have Bully declared a public nuisance.

We are now just waiting for the Florida Supreme Court to rule on the matter and have Jack completely disbarred.

...and there will be much rejoicing.

The noose tightens on Jack Thompson

In a move almost staggeringly myopic, agents from Swedish National Crime and the Swedish Security Police raided Dan Egerstad on Monday of this week, rather clearly on the basis of his massive non-hack of the TOR routing service.

For those not catching on, Dan is the gentleman we all cheered a short while ago for having the ingenuity to set up and connect several new TOR (an anonymizing packet routing system) nodes and see if people were actually using the network with unencrypted protocols (which would basically be foolish in the extreme). It turns out that Dan's suspicions were right, and that not only were people using the network insecurely, lots of people, up to and including embassies and government and military offices were using the network unsafely--effectively sending emails and other sensitive traffic across the network completely in the clear where anyone who added their connectivity to the network could see it. This is very, very bad.

Let me make this clear... Anyone, myself included, can at any time, add their resources to and use the TOR network, simply by joining it and using it. (Non-technical explanation for simplicity) Participants in the network pass each other's traffic back and forth randomly through encrypted links, counting on the misdirection of a massive shell game to protect their privacy. Users are supposed to encrypt all their traffic as well as an additional step to keep the last site that handles the traffic before it goes back out to the Internet at large from being able to see what's being sent around. The encryption of the TOR network itself protects the contents up to that point, but no farther. For embassies and other installations that might have things going on where a breach of security could mean people die, incorrect use of the network almost guarantees that someone's likely to get hurt--possibly many, many someones. Dan figured that if anyone can do this, bad people were probably already doing it.

After doing his due diligence and trying to tell the people using the network unsafely the mistakes they were making (and getting nowhere), Dan took the more civic-minded approach of shouting it to the heavens by publishing samples and account information of the hapless fools on his website, and announcing the disturbing results of his completely legal and ethical research to security-oriented mailing lists in hopes that people would take notice and stop endangering themselves and others. The resulting splash he hoped would penetrate far and wide and just maybe, make the problem go away.

It now appears that, true to history, anyone foolish enough to take away any powerful organization's ability to lie to itself about utter and terrifying failures of their security model is someone those organizations are going to try to hold responsible for it and crush. Seeming to be under pressure from other organizations (very likely the ones Dan was trying to protect) the Swedish authorities have basically confiscated most of Dan's stuff, and it remains to be seen just how far this will go before sanity takes hold again.

We can now chalk up another one to the forces of ignorance and stupidity for attacking people who are working to help them stay safe. Dan should have been getting a medal (or at least a thank you) for this work, and instead, people are trying to destroy his life. Way to go, folks.

Hacker arrested for... um... *not* hacking?

Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy's family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley's charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts.

So rather than actually do something, someone in Mitch McConnell's office sent out email to beat the drums for people like Malkin and Limbaugh to further fuck up the life of a 12 year old kid whose life is already hell after a car wreck. Reprehensible doesn't even start to describe this.

Political Radar: Dems' Poster Child Faces a Firestorm