Sunday, December 24, 2006

Seasons Greetings!

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that the United States is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Disclaimer: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

(From mlaw.org.)

American financial scandal

Washington Post, Sunday, December 24, 2006; B06

The largest employer in the world announced on Dec. 15 that it lost about $450 billion in fiscal 2006. Its auditor found that its financial statements were unreliable and that its controls were inadequate for the 10th straight year. On top of that, the entity's total liabilities and unfunded commitments rose to about $50 trillion, up from $20 trillion in just six years.

If this announcement related to a private company, the news would have been on the front page of major newspapers. Unfortunately, such was not the case -- even though the entity is the U.S. government.

To put the figures in perspective, $50 trillion is $440,000 per American household and is more than nine times as much as the median household income.

The only way elected officials will be able to make the tough choices necessary to put our nation on a more prudent and sustainable long-term fiscal path is if opinion leaders state the facts and speak the truth to the American people.

The Government Accountability Office is working with the Concord Coalition, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation and others to help educate the public about the facts in a professional, nonpartisan way. We hope the media and other opinion leaders do their part to save the future for our children and grandchildren.

DAVID M. WALKER

Comptroller General of the United States

Government Accountability Office

Washington

(Hat tip to Sheldon Richman.)

UPDATE: At Cafe Hayek, Robert Cote observes in a comment:

"Total liabilities is a red herring. While I share a deep concern for accounting and deficit, your totalling liabilities without also anticipating revenues is misleading. Besides, a huge component of those liabilities are entitlements; medical and retirement that I know for sure I'll never see. If I'm not going to see any then they aren't ruly liabilities now are they?"

UPDATE (January 17, 2006): Ed Brayton has chimed on on this subject.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Which historical lunatic are you?

I'm Joshua Abraham Norton, the first and only Emperor of the United States of America!
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Like John Wilkins and Afarensis, I got matched with Joshua Norton.

I was glad to make this match, since I've actually been interested enough in him as a historical figure to read his biography (and you can find some references to him on my discord.org web page).

Tagged with a meme

By Einzige...

- Grab the nearest book...
- Name the book and the author...

Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (I just finished reading it a few days ago).

- Turn to page 123...
- Go to the fifth sentence on the page...
- Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog...

I might have been attending an expensive private academy instead of a public school; there were only eight of us in the class--the minimum for forming a class--and all of us were girls. We began each class with a pep rally. "Mesdemoiselles, levez-vous!" the teacher would say, and we would rise and sing "La Marseillaise".
[I've dropped the "tag three more folks" part...]

Friday, December 22, 2006

FCC Indecency Rules

Looks like the FCC had a hard day before the U.S. Court of Appeals defending its arbitrary indecency standards, and Susan Crawford points out an example of just how absurd those standards have become in the era of YouTube.

UPDATE (June 4, 2007): The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its decision in Fox Television Stations v. the FCC, and the FCC has decisively lost. Adam Thierer points out how the case could pave the way for completely removing the FCC's authority to regulate content for indecency. Susan Crawford reports on the content of the decision in the form of a letter to the FCC.

UPDATE (April 28, 2009): The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the 2nd Circuit in a 5-4 ruling.

More reasons why checking IDs doesn't enhance airport security

Via Bruce Schneier's blog:

Is this why Chavez called Bush El Diablo?

Critique of tax protester legal claims

Sheldon Richman has a nice three-part series criticizing the legal reasoning of tax protesters who claim they don't have to pay U.S. income tax titled "Beware Income-Tax Casuistry." With any luck, somebody tempted by such nonsense will read it and avoid jail or fines.

UPDATE (December 28, 2006): Sheldon Richman also points out this excellent GWU law professor's website on tax protestor claims.

Staffer for Congressman tries to hire hackers to change grades

Todd Shriber, communications director for Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), tried to hire hackers at attrition.org to change his college GPA for him. He corresponded in email with "Lyger" and "Jericho" (former Phoenix resident Brian Martin, who runs attrition.org), who strung him along and then published the entire email correspondence on their site. To keep things entertaining, they made some odd requests:
From: security curmudgeon (jericho@attrition.org)
To: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 17:30:44 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Question for you or other Attrition members

: Wow, I feel dumb now. I honestly cannot rember if there were pigeons on
: campus or not. A lot of crazy squirrels, but I can't remember pigeons.
: Just for my own edification, why do you need to know that? I'll find out
: for you.

Hey, squirrels work fine. First, let's be clear. You are soliciting me to
break the law and hack into a computer across state lines. That is a
federal offense and multiple felonies. Obviously I can't trust anyone and
everyone that mails such a request, you might be an FBI agent, right?

So, I need three things to make this happen:

1. A picture of a squirrel or pigeon on your campus. One close-up, one
with background that shows buildings, a sign, or something to indicate you
are standing on the campus.

2. The information I mentioned so I can find the records once I get into
the database.

3. Some idea of what I get for all my trouble.


When he replied that he no longer lives near his campus (he's in D.C., and attended Texas Christian University), they told him that any old photo of a squirrel would do--and he sent them one.

They ended their trolling by claiming that they had been caught, and that Shriber shouldn't even visit their website anymore:
From: lyger (lyger@attrition.org)
To: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com)
Bcc: security curmudgeon (jericho@attrition.org)
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:15:31 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: the squirrels are nice here...


On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Todd Shriber wrote:

": " I'll take a quick look on Saturday and get the changes
": " to you immediately following that. Let me know if it's
": " OK for me to log into that site.

todd... no more.. omfg we are SO busted.. fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK
everything was PERFECT until their night noc ran a reverse udp traceroute
back to one of the hosts we had set up after that, straight DOWNHILL.
i've already been called twice by my isp asking about unusual activity,
some other shit about access attempts to a federally monitored system they
have everything in logs including the rot-26 stuff that finally got me
access all goes back to your login sorry i really fucked up BAD

theyre prob gonna end up calling you since they have your info just duck
and run if you can, i'm going deep underground if they ask about me or
attrition we don't know each other you know youre just as guilty and
liable so when they come knocking dont say anything without a lawyer and
when you ask them to put the gun down say it nice because that shit isnt
fun

man dont even visit attrition.org again theyre trying to check web logs
one last email should be ok but we're so fucked sorry

Paul McNamara has covered the story at Network World, and it's summarized at Talking Points Memo. The full email correspondence is up at attrition.org, but their server is having some trouble handling the traffic they're now receiving on this.

UPDATE: Welcome to Todd and/or his colleagues at the U.S. House of Representatives!

Domain Name
house.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address
143.231.249.# (Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives)
ISP
Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives
Location
Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
State : District of Columbia
City : Washington
Lat/Long : 38.8933, -77.0146 (Map)
Distance : 1,975 miles
Language
English (United States)
en-us
Operating System
Microsoft WinXP
Browser
Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript
version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution : 1024 x 768
Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit
Dec 22 2006 8:55:54 am
Last Page View
Dec 22 2006 8:55:54 am
Visit Length
0 seconds
Page Views
1
Referring URL
http://blogsearch.go...Todd Shriber&ie=UTF8
Search Engine
blogsearch.google.com
Search Words
todd shriber
Visit Entry Page
http://lippard.blogs...n-tries-to-hire.html
Visit Exit Page
http://lippard.blogs...n-tries-to-hire.html


UPDATE: Todd Shriber has been fired.

Redacted Iran op-ed shows Bush administration insanity

As an undergraduate, I read Victor Marchetti and John Marks' book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. Marchetti, a former CIA officer, was forced to redact large portions of the book, and the publisher decided to print the book with a bunch of blank spaces to show where the redactions occurred. This led to a fun game of trying to fill in the blanks. (The only section I tried to fill in--successfully, as this was years after the book was published--was about CIA-operated air transportation companies operating out of Pinal Air Park in Arizona near Marana.)

Now the New York Times has printed an op-ed by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann about Iran using the same strategy--it's filled with black marks indicating the CIA-demanded redactions. This op-ed actually contained no classified information, but the Bush administration applied pressure to the CIA to get them to demand redactions. Leverett and Mann write, in an explanatory preface:
Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.

These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board.

Leverett and Mann provide citations to other published material which describes the redacted sections, allowing the blanks to be filled in.

The Bush administration's behavior here is simply insane.

UPDATE: The Onion addressed this issue back in 2005.