Read it. THE KISS OF DEATH: How the frenetic, heated, and borderline-insane race to oust Democratic Senate hawk Joe Lieberman brought new meaning to the term “partisan politics” By Kenneth Cain.

How to win a primary: stand up for what's right.

Long Tortuous Trip

Orcinus reminds us of how many opportunities we -- that's America we -- to behave like Americans. Like humans. Handmaidens to Torture.

Suppressing news reports.
Condoning torture all the way up the chain of command.
Pretending the Geneva Conventions don't apply to a practice like waterboarding.
Pretending one state (the U.S.) can define a preemptory norm that applies to the entire community of nations, that is just about the most basic international norm we have.
Barring the invocation of the Geneva Conventions in a U.S. court.
A president who apparently thinks torture will actually get you good intel.



Tracking the Torture Taxi

"Yeah, I hacked the Georgia Election"

Will The Next Election Be Hacked?Fresh disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an industry insider -- prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted

We had control of everything.

Read the whole thing. Look, I understand that people are willing to cede a great deal of power to us geeks who care nothing for power and everything for knowledge, but CUT IT OUT. Stop basing fucking ELECTION SYSTEMS on INCOMPLETE SOFTWARE.

Speaking of Bad Voting Systems

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

The Definition of a Hacker

Bruce Schneier wrote:

A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity.

I'd say, for INTJ hackers, at least, this definition is incomplete. An INTJ must understand the system, it's our nature to do so, and the only way to understand a system is to watch it flex, to get down underneath it, around it, surround it, and know its every aspect. Because only then do you see the true boundaries -- where it cannot shift, and where it can. Only then do you achieve true understanding of how, and quite frequently, why, the system is the way it is.

The vague definition Schneier provides encompasses this quite well: "Understanding how the...system worked -- that was the true prize."

"I can't imagine basing the success of an election on something so fragile as these terrible, buggy machines."

And that's Avi Rubin's report of the Maryland primary, 2006, in a nutshell.

I hope that we got it right in my precinct, but I know that there is no way to know for sure. We cannot do recounts.

Feeding that fear is a true crime

And the media and the Bush Administration are guilty as hell.

I Remember Townsend... -- on VJ Day, Pearl Harbor, Sept 11th, and reporting the truth.

FDR was right. Fear itself is the enemy. It makes you do stupid things. It makes you close your eyes because you think it'll make the monsters in the closet disappear, too. Wallowing in fear does nothing. Feeding that fear is a true crime. Lying about it to entertain the masses or make a political point, however...well...that's just a sin.

We know it. And it's time to show it. Boycott ABC and Disney, and vote the bums out of office.

It's incumbant [sic] upon us as citizens to get it right, and you can't get it right if you're selective with the facts. The only way to get the facts is to listen and investigate. We as a nation have yet to do either in any satisfactory way.

We have a duty to the truth, neighbors. Don't back down.

Clinton, et al., should sue ABC for libel

In ABC's '9/11' Libel By Fiction Exposure, Michael Froomkin points out:

[Generally, in the United States, it is very difficult for a public figure to win a libel case.] Plus, libel claims based on fiction are obviously much harder than claims based on assertions in supposed non-fiction. But neither of these bars is insurmountable. And on the facts as reported, they could be surmounted surprisingly easily.

As one New York court put it not so long ago, a claim of "libel by fiction" requires that "the description of the fictional character must be so closely akin to the real person claiming to be defamed that a reader of the book, knowing the real person, would have no difficulty linking the two." The novel Primary Colors didn't meet that test as it didn't use real names, nor were the physical description of any character like the plaintiff in that case. But the 9/11 show differs from Primary Colors in a very basic way: It uses actors portraying real people with their actual names involved in activities that are a blend of real things they did and of the partisan imagination. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to get a court to see the difference from Primary Colors-like facts. Furthermore, even if ABC were to run a big disclaimer with the episode, that wouldn't necessarily suffice.

It's even harder to make out a case of libel when the victim is a public figure. Basically, to win you have to show that the author of the libelous work demonstrated a "reckless disregard for the truth." Given the public nature of the warnings that various scenes are false, if in fact they are false then I think this part of the case should be pretty easy.

If I were at ABC or Disney I'd be having a serious talk with my lawyers right about now.

And AmericaBlog points out that American Airlines is about to get smeared:

As I first noted yesterday, I have the entire "Path to 9/11" video. And one of the very first scenes makes it explicitly clear that American Airlines had Mohammad Atta in its grasp, warning lights flashing on the computer screen, yet the airline simply blew off the threat and helped Atta kill 3,000 Americans.

Unfortunately, it's a total lie.

Wrong airport, wrong airline, and an implicit accusation of negligence.

Was Mrs. Wilson Outed to Muddy the Waters about Iraq's Invisible WMDs?

What Valerie Wilson Really Did at the CIA

She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit of the Counterproliferation Division of the clandestine Directorate of Operations. For the two years prior to her outing, Valerie Wilson worked to gather intelligence that would support the Bush White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was loaded with WMDs. This means that Armitage--as well as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby--leaked classified information about a CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam's WMD programs. During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting. She was no analyst, no desk-jockey, no paper-pusher. She was an undercover officer in charge of running critical covert operations.

[S]he had spent two years trying to find proof of the administration's claims that Iraq posed a WMD threat. She and the Joint Task Force on Iraq, of course, came up empty-handed.

"Thanks for the Fear"

Thanks for the Fear, from On the Left Tip. Read the whole thing, even if you can't bear to read a "where I was on September 11" story.

That's real fear. It's real fear when you immediately notify authorities (whoever is closest) when a bag is abandoned on the Metro or in front of a building or in the Dulles Airport. It's ever-present. It's livable, but it's always there and it's tied to real-life concerns.

So it really fucking pisses me off when the terror alert level is raised, right before and election, based on information that is four years old.

Followup to yesterday: And now the EU wants to know where they are

EU lawmakers demand to know location of CIA jails

Bush said on Wednesday the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had interrogated dozens of suspects at undisclosed overseas locations and 14 of those held had now been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

A leader of Europe's chief human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said the revelation vindicated the investigation the body had conducted after the Washington Post reported last year that the CIA had run secret prisons in Europe and flown suspects to states where they could be tortured.

Bush Admits Secret CIA Prisons Exist

Bush Admits Secret CIA Prisons Exist

Well, well, well, well.

U.S. Terrorism Enforcement, post-9/11

Criminal Terrorism Enforcement in the United States During the Five Years Since the 9/11/01 Attacks

Bruce Schneier has some highlights

Oral History -- Katrina

The Great Deluge Oral History Project

Rumsfeld Wrong Again

New Enemies Demand New Thinking

He asks, or complains, actually:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?

• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?

• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world's troubles?

The law enforcement remark is my fave -- given that it's the one approach that seems to have some effect.

Rumsfeld's point in this article, however, is that criticizing America is a Bad Thing.

No, Mr. Secretary. This is a democracy. Criticizing America is the Patriotic Thing. For it is only a sharp eye on our methods and motives that will see us through to a brighter future.