Congressman Markey,

While I'm not one of your constituents, your statements and actions often have an impact that reaches beyond your district. Yesterday you were quoted in several news media outlets as having called for the arrest of Christopher Soghoian, a PHD candidate at the University of Indiana Bloomington, because he created a web page that generates phoney airline boarding passes. As you are likely aware, your call was answered by the FBI who reportedly broke into Soghoian's house last night and seized all of his computer equipment.

I am a professional computer security researcher. I work for one of the worlds largest IT companies. My job involves finding vulnerabilities in software systems and getting them fixed. Responsible vendors are usually very responsive and willing to work with my team when we contact them with information about problems with their products. Through this process we are able to locate and repair vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure before the bad guys can find them and exploit them. However, there are always a few unsophisticated people who seek to shoot the messenger instead of dealing with the flaw.

Christopher Soghoian is one of the good guys. He is not a criminal and he is not enabling criminals. He did not create the vulnerability in the boarding pass screening process. This problem has existed for years, and it has been noted in other quarters, most recently by Sen. Chuck Schumer. However, the problem hasn't been fixed. Soghoian's website was intended to demonstrate how simple this is, and he has clearly and repeatedly stated that his intent in creating the site was to raise awareness about the problem so that it will be fixed. His website does not make this much easier than standard desktop publishing software available on anyone's personal computer.

Your call for his arrest, and the subsiquent events that have unfolded over the past 24 hours, have done serious harm to the national security of the United States. You could have simply contacted him, informed him of the legal problems that one could face for operating such a website, and discussed shutting it down. By choosing instead to prosecute him you are sending a message to security professionals in this country that if you observe a problem with national security policies or practices and make people aware of those problems in good faith so that they might be fixed, the government will treat you as an enemy and will prosecute you if possible. The inevitable result will be that people will hold their tongues, and problems will persist until they are discovered by someone who has malicious intent.

I strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this matter. The current course of action is not in the best interests of this country.

Respectfully,
Tom Cross

Congressman Markey also go a letter from myself. Christopher Soghoian is a whistleblower. Any number of people have already blown it but sometimes it takes loud and clear for that blow to sound. I have no dobt this will get Mr. Markey to add some substantial additions to his message, but I have serious doubts about the status of Mr. Christopher Soghoian.

God help him in a counntry where waterboarding has been given a green light.

My Letter to Ed Markey

A post about Travolta's fly-in house.

[That's cool, but check out the house!]

Google Sightseeing Jumbolair

"How good would it have looked for the government in general if we still couldn't have stopped the fourth plane an hour and 35 minutes [into the attack]?" Azzarello asked. "How good would it have looked if there was a total breakdown in communication and nothing worked right?"

This is just scary.

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes

(Of course in its discussion of legislative history the Court wholly ignores the President's signing statement, which explicitly set forth his understanding that the DTA ousted jurisdiction over pending cases.)

Of everything in the opinion, concurrences and dissents, nothing is as scary as this one line from Scalia. He is assigning, at minimum, the equivalence of legislative intent to a signing statement. The executive is not the legislative and equating them is a grossly pernicious error.

HAMDAN v. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, et al.

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

A fabulous rebuttal to Cohen's quite honestly absurd arguments from a few days ago.

William Rivers Pitt | An Open Letter to Richard Cohen

The veteran rocker hired the luxury Royal Suite at the five-star Imperial Hotel in Vienna, Austria, for June when the Stones are due to play a gig in the city.

Bush’s aides then tried to book it to tie in with a summit meeting.

But Mick put his foot down and insisted he was keeping the booking.

Sorry W, they're just looking out for their future interests.

The Sun Online - News: Mick beats George to suite

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

Way to go!

Oglala Sioux Tribe on the South Dakota Abortion Ban : SF Bay Area Indymedia

For example, he called Khallad daily, despite instructions to call only in an emergency, to the point where Khallad turned his cell phone off.

So Moussaoui was basically the Al-Q version of the clique fly that no one likes and they can't get rid of. Fifth plane my ass...

Al-Qaida Plotters Dismiss Moussaoui's Role - Yahoo! News

Savanna Samson did just that, but when it received a score of 90 to 91 out of 100 by wine guru Robert Parker, the project became serious. It turns out Samson, the star of "The New Devil in Miss Jones," has produced an exceptional wine, becoming the toast of two industries: wine-making and pornography.

Not only is the story unusual, but I'm wondering what the folks at Reuters were thinking uploading the photos for this one...

Porn star hits it big as wine-maker - Yahoo! News

He was cited by a group of
Homeland Security officials for selling a T-shirt on federal property - in this case, near a FEMA center in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Chalmette, La.

Barisich, 49, says he didn't sell the shirt, which said: "Flooded by Katrina! Forgotten by FEMA! What's Next, Mr. Bush?" He says he gave it away.

The government is sticking to its guns. "If we ignored this violation, you could have potentially 20 to 30 people standing out in front of the (FEMA) center, obstructing things," says Dean Boyd, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman. "We've got a duty and a job under the law."

First, it's not federal property, it,s a Wal-Mart parking lot. Second, maybe if these dipshits had done their job, he'd be handing out shirts that say how good FEMA was.

Cleaning us the mess from Katrina will take a long time. Cleaning us the mess from Bush will take decades.

FEMA critic's shirt gets him tangled up in ticket - Yahoo! News