Atlanta Electronic/Eclectic label Nophi is holding their first ever festival this Thanksgiving weekend, which also allows me the opportunity for me to play the first ever Logickal gig in the ATL!

Hope to see some of you guys there, pass word along because it should be a fun weekend!

Nophest

The story about phone number stations posted to Craigslist has been mentioned here before. This is one of those interesting little mysteries. The hearsay only adds to it..

People have suggested that the messages are pranks, or are some sort of commercial gimmick. But at least one person, who is in the U.S. military, says he sent a copy of one of the messages up the chain of command and was promptly notified that it was classified and he wasn’t cleared to know anything further about it. I don’t know whether this is standard operating procedure for any encrypted message or whether it indicates that there’s something to be found.

Third phone numbers station: 678-248-2352 - Homeland Stupidity

This is how to install bootcamp and end up with one OSX Partition (NFS ), one XP partition (the preferred NTFS system) and one MS-DOS Fat32 Data partition that both operating sytems can read/write to.

Bootcamp, sharing data between OSX and XP with 3 partitions - Detailed (Long!) Version

A federal appeals court panel in Manhattan questioned a lawyer for the federal government yesterday as to whether the Central Intelligence Agency had a legitimate national security interest in refusing to confirm or deny the existence of documents authorizing it to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects overseas.

The tough questioning came in oral arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union and lawyers for the C.I.A. before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The civil liberties group is trying to force the C.I.A. to disclose how much authority it has been given to interrogate detainees since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, the A.C.L.U. is seeking documents, including a directive said to have been signed by President Bush, giving the agency the authority to set up detention sites outside the United States and to interrogate prisoners. In its lawsuit, the group says the existence of these documents has been hinted at in news reports.

But the government has refused to confirm or deny the documents' existence, saying that to do so would jeopardize national security by revealing C.I.A. methods and activities. Last September, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court upheld that position, and yesterday's hearing was part of the A.C.L.U.'s appeal of his ruling.

Judges Press C.I.A. Lawyer Over Withheld Documents - New York Times

Karl Klomp's video hacking and circuitbending. I want me some.

-_=/

The phrase "It is what it is," for the uninitiated, is one of the most deflective, meaningless, redundant, and idiotic phrases in the English language. And not surprisingly -- mostly because it's at times useful for ending an argument without having to justify your point -- it's beginning to penetrate the vernacular. And certainly, the White House.
[snip]
The cliche is used most often as a declaratory way of saying, "I'm done talking about this. I can't or don't want to quantify my logic in this exchange; I have no defense. Just accept what I'm saying without any further argument, and let's change the subject." So to see it used so blithely by Scott McClellan when discussing a matter as serious as listening in illegally on peoples' conversations is absolutely galling.

Why yes it is, isn't it?

'It Is What It Is'? Well, Not Actually.

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

Total F**king Information Awareness.

US plans massive data sweep | csmonitor.com

"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!

"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.

"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.

"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.

"They have a history of that."

Cringely NSA Spying addendum

Psychogeographic Paintings. Via Dataisnature

Also a good link in the dataisnature comments to a google images search on Lebbeus Woods.

Julie Mehretu

A few current and former signals intelligence guys have been checking in since this NSA domestic spying story broke. Their reactions range between midly creeped out and completely pissed off.

wiretap3ddvdcase-eng.gifAll of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.

Defense Tech: Wiretap Mystery: Spooks React