Justice Robert H. Jackson:

Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government.

David K. Shipler:

If we cannot mobilize sufficient concern about what we cannot see, then the invisible surveillance will continue undermining the Fourth Amendment without the resistance required to preserve our rights.

Publishers Weekly:

The wars on crime and terrorism have turned into a war on privacy and freedom ... In this first of two volumes, Pulitzer-winning journalist Shipler focuses on the Fourth Amendment's guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, and finds violations that remind him of his days covering the Soviet Union.

Dan Carden:

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

Joseph C. Massino:

You never talk in a club, you never talk in a car, you never talk on a cellphone, you never talk on a phone, you never talk in your house.

Sandy Pentland:

Phones can know.

Nick Bilton:

Technology also has a way of advancing far ahead of the law.

Sandra Silva, on her cybercoyote:

It's like a guide through the desert.

Rebecca Brock, in 2004:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Decius, in 2006:

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

David Kilcillen, in 2006:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in 2006:

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

One frustrated counterterrorism official, in 2006:

There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden! Nobody!

Malcom Gladwell, in 2007:

Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

Thomas W. Gillespie, John A. Agnew, Erika Mariano, Scott Mossler, Nolan Jones, Matt Braughton, and Jorge Gonzalez, in 2009:

One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama bin Laden?

Peter Baker, Helene Cooper, and Mark Mazzetti, today:

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Let the what-does-it-all-mean metareporting begin.

Bin Laden Is Dead

Teun Lucassen and Jan Maarten Schraagen:

Because of the open character of Wikipedia readers should always be aware of the possibility of false information. WikiTrust aims at helping readers to judge the trustworthiness of articles by coloring the background of less trustworthy words in a shade of orange. In this study we look into the effects of such coloring on reading behavior and trust evaluation by means of an eye-tracking experiment. The results show that readers had more difficulties reading the articles with coloring than without coloring. Trust in heavily colored articles was lower. The main concern is that the participants in our experiment rated usefulness of WikiTrust low.

WikiTrust seems to be slightly more useful when only small parts are colored, but even then usefulness is limited. Participants in our experiment were not sure what to do with the information on the age of words in the text. Further development of WikiTrust could benefit from knowledge about the (heuristic) strategies of Wikipedia users when assessing trustworthiness.

WikiTrust is a promising support tool and in fact the only one that made it to the stage where it is actually available to the Wikipedia public. This study has shown that the decision to present trust information by a separate tab was right since reading behavior is affected by its coloring. However, more effort should be put into the usability of the system. This study showed that users are having problems to see how they can benefit from it, even though a clear explanation was provided and the participants were highly educated Master's students.

Virgil Griffith:

They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia.

Decius:

We believe that Wikipedia can be a useful resource if it is used properly and read with a critical eye.

Luca de Alfaro:

We are happy to announce that WikiTrust works on the English Wikipedia!

Evaluating WikiTrust: A trust support tool for Wikipedia

Joseph L. Hoffman and Nancy J. King:

The never-ending stream of futile petitions suggests that habeas corpus is a wasteful nuisance. We need a new approach.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Have you seen Conviction?

Justice, Too Much and Too Expensive

NIST:

Unfortunately, on the Internet as in life, not everyone is looking out for our interests.

Howard Schmidt, from last June:

What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

NIST, today:

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) envisions a cyber world -- the Identity Ecosystem -- that improves upon the passwords currently used to log-in online.

The identity ecosystem is voluntary.

Mark A. Marshall, President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, on Facebook:

If you're not dealing with it, you better deal with it.

Nick Bilton:

The Internet never forgets.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Steven Bellovin

People often suggest that adding strong identification to the Internet will solve many security problems. Strong, useful identification isn't possible and wouldn't solve the security issue; trying to have it will create privacy problems.

National Strategy on Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Art Coviello:

Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

It's troubling that the integrity of deployed SecurID systems is in any way dependent on information stored on the RSA intranet.

From the archive, a US analyst:

He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing.

On John McCain:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

BBC:

The dessert, called Baby Gaga, is churned with donations from London mother Victoria Hiley, and served with a rusk and an optional shot of Calpol or Bonjela.

Mrs Hiley, 35, said if adults realised how tasty breast milk was more new mothers would be encouraged to breastfeed.

Open Letter to RSA Customers

Randall Munroe:

What's more important? Games, or mosquito nets and medicine for kids?

Billy Hoffman:

There is nothing more important than how you spend your time.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith:

Obama asked: "What's the endgame?" and did not receive a convincing answer.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

xkcd: Charity

Joe Brown:

The first Veyron is an engineering marvel. It required the intellectual might of one of the largest and arguably smartest car companies in the world to birth a car that was not only faster than anything on the road, but easy enough to pilot that anyone could drive it.

To make the Grand Sport, Bugatti's engineers had to do the same thing, only with a giant hole in the middle. It was like designing a picture frame to break rocks.

They had to bolster the floor, doors and B pillars (where the back edges of the windows rest) with acres of carbon fiber. They had to turn the topside air scoops into structural supports for protection during a rollover. Then they had to sacrifice 100 virgins and have the production facility in Molsheim, France, blessed by druids.

The result is the most structurally rigid convertible in the world, which, miraculously, weighs no more and goes no slower than the coupe on which it is based. With the transparent roof removed, air resistance limits the Grand Sport to 217 mph, but you'd want that roof on for a top-speed run anyway; the wind could rip your face off at around 245.

You can spend $600 on a steering wheel and pedal set to drive your Veyron in Gran Turismo 5, and that will buy you a lot of realism, but one thing it won't do is rip your face off.

Peak Oil: Bugatti Makes a Car for the Ages | Product Reviews | Wired.com

Mike Mike:

The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity.

Adam Harvey:

CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

And because face detection is the first step in automated facial recognition, CV Dazzle can be used in any environment where automated face recognition systems are in use, such as FaceBook, Google's Picasa, or Flickr.

Insafe:

It's more than a game, it's your life.

Marco Arment:

Think of the crappiest iPhone app you ever saw that made it into the store. Now imagine what they must reject.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Michael Lewis:

You can't forget to bear-proof the garbage cans, and expect the bears won't notice.

Higgins, via Kara Hansen:

One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it.

Silvio Berlusconi:

I am not worried in the least.