"There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship."
-- The Nation, Jan. 9, 2006
So today our little dictator George Bush decided to cry "Wolf" in the most retroactive fashion possible in an attempt to scare the "house-is-burning" blinders back onto the American populance.
Bush would find it very satisfying that his bleating over this "terrorist plot" overshadowed this story:
Terror risk from WMD exaggerated, experts say:
But that's actually the good news. The rest of the news might make you want to kill yourself. But now they won't even let you do that.
We'll start with the good news, which Bush doesn't want you to hear about.
CANBERRA (Reuters) - The threat that militants could develop and use weapons of mass destruction was exaggerated, international experts said on Tuesday as Australia and the United States warned the rik was real and disturbing.
Lawrence Freedman, profesor of war studies at London's Kings College, and the Australian National University's (ANU) Robert Ayson, both played down the likelihood that militants could use weapons of mass destruction in an attack.
(snip)
He said it would be difficult for militants to develop weapons of mass destruction as they would require more people with extensive expertise, making it difficult to maintain security and increasing the risk they would be detected.
Ayson, director of studies at the ANU's Strategic and Defense Studies Center, said governments should be doing more to ease public fears about weapons of mass destruction.
"We should be disarming our nightmares," he said, adding that governments should separate the debate about terror threats from debate about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"In 10 years' time, we will look back and see the threat as exaggerated."
Stupid Bushco, at least they'll be gone in a few years. Because with the power of the Internet, right here at your fingertips, we're gonna organize and fight. Right?
The Internet is OURS, RIGHT?
Well maybe not.
What we have now may be too good to last:
Senators Mull an Internet With Restrictions
Celia Viggo Wexler & Dawn Holian Wed Feb 8, 1:00 PM ET
The Nation -- In the time it takes to watch Wedding Crashers, nine experts on Tuesday galloped through testimony before a handful of Senate Commerce Committee members in a hearing room packed with telecommunications and cable lobbyists.
(snip)
In an argument that some senators seemed to have difficulty following, Cerf, Stanford Law School professor and open-access guru Lawrence Lessig, and Vonage head Jeffrey Citron argued that one could not assume the continued existence of the freewheeling Internet that fosters innovation. That is because the FCC changed the rules, upending a forty-year commitment to open access and nondiscrimination. That decades-old commitment made it possible for "innovation without permission" and the development of the World Wide Web, Yahoo, Google and Amazon, Cerf said.
Those policies were altered in 2002, noted Lessig, when the FCC changed how it would regulate Internet service providers. Companies that built and maintained the Internet pipes had been regulated like telephone companies, and they were not permitted to discriminate among content providers or Internet applications.
Under the FCC's current regulatory regime, these old constraints are gone. That leaves the door open for companies like Verizon and AT&T to drastically change the rules, hogging bandwidth for their own products, like the films and games they'd like to sell to subscribers, and charging other content providers a premium for quality access to their customers, leaving little space for other content and applications. "The only companies that could afford to buy access to the fast lanes on the Internet...are companies that already have succeeded in the marketplace," Lessig said. "The next generation of Yahoos and Googles...would face barriers to entry."
Well how bad would that be? After all, aren't Yahoo, and Google, with their oh-so-playful names, purveyors of carefree Internet experiences? Well .... no.
Here's another depressing headline for the day:
Yahoo Aided Crackdown on Dissident
BEIJING - Yahoo Inc. provided Chinese authorities with information about one of its users that was used to jail the man for eight years, an activist group said Thursday. It was the second time Yahoo was accused of helping authorities jail a Chinese user.
Yahoo's Hong Kong unit provided information about Li Zhi, a man from southwestern China who was sentenced to prison in 2003 on subversion charges after posting comments online criticizing official corruption, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said
Okay, fine. I'm so depressed now I'm just gonna go get a nice stable anonymous career with a big company like IBM. In a few years, I'll retire, I can ignore all this horrible political news by enjoying my pension and watering my lawn.
Right?
Wrong.
Pension? What Pension?
The Nation -- When Big Blue, as IBM was once called, decides it's time to start shedding pensions, the stampede is definitely on. A couple of weeks ago this company, which was once famous for taking good care of its employees in return for a Stepford-like obedience, announced it was freezing its pension program.
Until now perhaps no more than one large corporation in ten had abandoned the pension system, but since big business tends to rush pell-mell together with whatever is the fashionable idea of the hour, the IBM announcement is a harbinger of the disappearance of almost all retirement pensions in the private sector.
Okay at this point you might be thinking "fuck it! I'm gonna rage against the dying of this country! I'm gonna go for it! How will they ever catch me?"
Well, government and corporations are COLLABORATING on mining every little bit of data about you and storing it on one big-ass computer so that every psychotic J. Edgar Hoover wannabe can peer into every detail of your life.
US plans massive data sweep
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.
(snip)
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.
DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."
(snip)
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records.
(snip)
As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.
I don't know about you, but that last quote should scare the hell out of all of us.
Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness , a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.
Echoes of a past controversial plan
ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."
Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.
"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."
Okay at least we know what this is all about now, don't we? That fellow just said it OUT LOUD.
At this point you might be thinking "Fine! I'm gonna fight anyway, and they're gonna have to arrest me and they can send me to Guantanamo, I don't care! If I end up there, I can just end it all and kill myself!"
Kill yourself in Guantanamo? Nope. They won't let you.
US straps down Guantanamo hunger strikers: report
Thu Feb 9, 4:50 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, strapped hunger-striking prisoners into restraint chairs for hours to feed them through tubes and isolated them in cold cells, The New York Times said on Thursday.
A Pentagon official said there was no one immediately available to comment on the report.
The Times, citing unnamed military officials, said tougher measures came in recent weeks after authorities concluded some of the prisoners were determined to kill themselves.
No, folks, it looks like there's only one way to end it all these days. And Bush can actually help you with that: