“The head of the government’s Total Information Awareness project, which aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling.” In an amusing twist on the TIA story, after a column in SF Weekly included […]
“It’s 10 p.m. — do you know what your government is up to? It seems that Iraq is not the only ‘regime change’ that the Bush Administration is working on. The US government has apparently decided that President Chavez of Venezuela must go, one way or another. True, Saddam Hussein is a brutal tyrant who […]
“Last week, at Strom Thurmond’s 100th-birthday party, Mr. Lott recalled Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 race for the presidency. ‘I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all […]
In case you were wondering just how some political ideas get accepted as being “mainstream” these days, check out this week’s This Modern World here.
“A judge in the US has ruled that Vice-President Dick Cheney does not have to release details of meetings with oil executives to the investigative arm of Congress. The General Accounting Office sued the White House for names of people consulted over energy policy as part of its remit to ensure the government’s accountability.” The […]
“Former US president Jimmy Carter has warned of the potentially ‘catastrophic consequences’ of a pre-emptive US war on Iraq. The comments came in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo. Mr Carter did not mention either country by name, but said: ‘For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventative war may well set […]
“In North Carolina last month, a woman attending a lecture I was giving asked me when America would go to war in Iraq. I told her to watch the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post for the first smear campaigns against the UN inspectors. And bingo, right on time, the […]
Posted anonymously to both the cypherpunks and cryptography mailing lists: “For years we cypherpunks have been telling you people that you are responsible for protecting your own privacy. Use cash for purchases, look into offshore accounts, protect your online privacy with cryptography and anonymizing proxies. But did you listen? No. You thought to trust the […]
“Malaysia has added its voice to a growing row in Asia after Australian Prime Minister John Howard raised the possibility of pre-emptive strikes against militants in the region. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said any unsanctioned action against groups on its soil would be considered an act of war. But the US has backed Mr […]
“The Israeli army (IDF) has become embroiled in a dispute with the United Nations after it destroyed a building containing hundreds of tons of food aid for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” So what was the IDF’s justification for this? Well, apparently they are in the process of creating a “safe passage for Jews between […]
