Tuesday, January 24, 2006

NSA Wiretaps: General Hayden Speaks. In "Hayden Delivers Impassioned Defense of NSA," Powerline excerpts Hayden's Speech to the National Press Club (PDF). One section that jumped out at me was: GEN. HAYDEN: You know, we've had this question asked several times. Public discussion of how we determine al Qaeda intentions, I just -- I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. And I know people say, "Oh, they know they're being monitored." Well, you know, they don't always act like they know they're being monitored. But if you want to shove it in their face constantly, it's bound to have an impact. [C]onstant revelations and speculation and connecting the dots in ways that I find unimaginable, and laying that out there for our enemy to see cannot help but diminish our ability to detect and prevent attacks. It jumped out at me because I discussed precisely his issue about a month ago: The first is enhancing terrorist awareness of their threat environment. This is important. As time passes, people become complacent. As they become complacent, their investment in security processes drops off. In "Do Wiretap Revelations Help The Terrorists," I analyze this line of thought, and believe that there's much that Hayden couldn't or didn't talk about. Perhaps that's a result of the wiretapping agency not being the agency that does other parts of counter-intelligence. Regardless, if you're following the story closely, you ought to read his remarks. [Emergent Chaos] 11:01:07 PM    comment []

Bombs Kill Eight in Restive Iranian City [New York Times: International News] 11:01:01 PM    comment []

Iran's real secret weapon. Could Iran's embrace of the euro bring down the American empire? [Salon - How the World Works] 11:00:58 PM    comment []

Google's great firewall of China. Search engine agrees to restrictions but faces a free speech backlash. [Guardian Unlimited] 11:00:54 PM    comment []

Jailed Iranian blogger taken to his college exams in handcuffs.  25 year old Mojtaba Saminejad has been in prison in Iran since February, 2005 for "insulting the Supreme Guide" and inciting "immorality" on his blog. He was escorted in handcuffs to take exams at Azad University in Tehran last Saturday. The human rights organization Reporters Without Borders issued a statement today "welcom[ing] the fact that the Iranian courts have allowed him to continue his university course," and calling for Saminejad's release. "We have never stopped our condemnation of the unfair conviction of this young student who has been imprisoned for nearly a year for posting a few messages on the Internet," read the statement, "We urge the authorities to show leniency. Bloggers like Mojtaba represent no threat to Iranian society. On the contrary, they support the emergence of a citizen's debate." Image: Saminejad photographed inside his school in Tehran, as he entered to take his exam. Here is his former blog: Link, and here is a new url. [Boing Boing] 11:00:37 PM    comment []

Dan Gillmor looks back and offers a year's worth of lessons drawn from his experience with citzen media in From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community. [Dan Gillmor's blog] 7:13:53 AM    comment []

Reuel Marc Gerecht thinks we're lucky to have Ahmadinejad. In his new Weekly Standard piece Coming Soon: Nuclear Theocrats, the AEI scholar also has tough things to say about the State Department (where many assume a democratic Iran to be impossible), the CIA (its ineptitude in covert and overt operations regarding Iran) and waffling about the Mullahcracy within the Bush administration itself. But he concludes: Remember: Ahmadinejad is heaven sent. Unfortunately, things in Iran are probably going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better. Read the rest in ... Roger L. Simon By Roger L. Simon. [PJM - Top Stories] 7:13:31 AM    comment []

Iraqi Shiite Cleric Pledges to Defend Iran [Washington Post: Top News] 7:13:00 AM    comment []

Conservative Alumnus Pulls Offer to Buy Lecture Tapes. A conservative activist who had planned to pay students to tape-record the lectures of left-leaning professors backed down. By CINDY CHANG. [NYT > Education] 7:12:29 AM    comment []

A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land. If the controversial Analog Hole bill makes it into law, US technologists will have to obey a law whose most important details are a trade-secret. The entertainment industry, always a bastion of media savvy, has proposed its "A-Hole" bill as a legal means of limiting the conversion of analog music and video to digital files. Under the bill, every maker of a device that can convert analog signals to digital ones (like iPods, camcorders, and PCs) would be required by law to be built with a detector for a proprietary watermarking technology called VEIL (the use of free/open source in these technologies would be outlawed to prevent the removal of VEIL detectors). The idea is that any time you attempted to make a digital recording, your device would seek out the VEIL watermark and respond to any special instructions (e.g., "No recording allowed") it discovered there. But what the hell is VEIL? No one really knows. The sole commercial deployment of this technology to date has been in a Batman toy (why this makes it fit to be included by law into every American recording device is beyond me). Copyfighting Princeton Prof Ed Felten called the company that makes VEIL to find out how the technology works. Their answer? They'll tell Ed how VEIL works only if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they'll only tell him how the decoder works -- there's no price you can pay to find out how VEIL encoding works. As Ed points out, this should be a deal-breaker for even considering the A-Hole bill (of course, there are lots of other deal-breakers in that bill, but this is a big one). How can the American public and its lawmakers determine whether this is a fit technology to mandate if its workings are a secret? The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret. Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it? The A-Hole bill is making the rounds of the House, EFF has an easy way to write to your Congresscritter about this. Link [Boing Boing] 7:12:17 AM    comment []