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Thursday, August 30, 2007

Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog) Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog)

An excellent review of what is happening right now in Iraq: Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog). It looks at why the situation throughout much of, in particular, Sunni Arab Iraq has swapped so markedly over the last six months, with most of the tribes switching from helping al Qaeda to essentially declaring blood feud against them, and joining us against them.

One big point is that the insurgency ratio can be changed much more rapidly and markedly by swapping insurgents to our side than by surging troops.

But there are a lot risks remaining, as the article points out.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Hillary: Sending Katie Couric to Iraq ‘Too Little, Too Late’ Hillary: Sending Katie Couric to Iraq ‘Too Little, Too Late’

ScrappleFace: Hillary: Sending Katie Couric to Iraq ‘Too Little, Too Late’:
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, today said that the decision by CBS to send Evening News anchor Katie Couric to Baghdad, Iraq, was a “desperate move” that she called “too little, too late.”

“When what you’re doing isn’t working, you need to cut your losses and pull out,” said Sen. Clinton, noting that, “Almost a year into the Couric anchorage, CBS News has failed to unite any substantial group of viewers and the evening news landscape remains a hopeless quagmire of sectarian fighting.”

CBS producer Rick Kaplan, however, said that sending a widowed, single mother of two young children into a war zone would “demonstrate that we mean business.”

Mr. Kaplan called on Sen. Clinton to “allow the Couric surge plan time to work, rather than advocating a defeatist strategy of cut-and-run.”
The big question though is whether the perky Katy Couric gets out of the "Green" zone and actually has a chance to see what is going on in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that the MSM stays in the "safe" part of Baghdad, and bombs accordingly..

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Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs


Above photo shows Edwards' house and the SUVs parked around it. Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs:
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles.

The former North Carolina senator told a forum by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, yesterday he thinks Americans are willing to sacrifice.

Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs.
Mr. Two Americas thinks that Americans are willing to give up their SUVs so that he can continue to fly in private jets and live in a 20,000+ squate foot house.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

By Refusing To Count Our Votes, Democrats Are Writing Off Florida By Refusing To Count Our Votes, Democrats Are Writing Off Florida

Tampa Tribune: By Refusing To Count Our Votes, Democrats Are Writing Off Florida points out the absurdity of the DNC refusing Florida's Democrats a vote at the DNC convention next year because of the moving of the Florida primary.
The Democratic National Committee, which accused Florida of failing to count every vote during the 2000 presidential election, says it won't count the votes of Florida Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary.

That's right. The party that castigated Florida for disenfranchising voters now plans to disenfranchise every Democratic voter who participates in Florida's primary.

What hypocrisy.

The DNC treads dangerous ground by snubbing Florida voters at a time when Republicans are running hard.

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Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers

Business Week: Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers points out the legal problems that Apple and AT&T are facing trying to enforce the software lock between the iPhone and AT&T's cellular network.

They are trying to utilize the DMCA to prevent people from unlocking iPhones. But there is an exemption in the law for unlocking phones and the purpose of the DMCA was to protect copyrights, and cellular networks are not protected by copyright.

The reality is that they are trying to tie the two together. While that may seem like good business, it is questionable legally. I might suggest a Sherman antitrust attack on the tying, esp. given the lack of DMCA support for it.

Personally, I find the iPhone ridiculous. I may be going overboard from my bad experiences with a phone running Windows, but I just can't believe that I could easily make or answer calls on the ski slopes wearing gloves.

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

NYT: The Spy Chief Speaks NYT: The Spy Chief Speaks

NYT: The Spy Chief Speaks provides the same sort of comic relief as the paper has for the last decade or so, as it lives in its own BDS reality. It starts off with:
After more than a year and a half of administration stonewalling on President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping, it was nice to see Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, finally unburden himself in a newspaper interview.
Of course, there was never a finding by a court of illegality... and the President's Article II powers haven't even been litigated here.
Take, for example, his disclosure that the government has eavesdropped without warrants on thousands of telephone calls in which one party was outside the United States. He said the government got warrants to continue spying on the person in the United States only “100 or less” times.
This is what was actually said:
And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing.
I read that to mean that when a U.S. person is involved, a warrant is, and always has been, acquired.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to intercept communications between people in the United States and people abroad without a warrant. That is a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.
Maybe, and maybe not. Besides, most of what was being intercepted was purely foreign.
Now we know the law was broken thousands of times. In 100 or so cases, the unlawfully intercepted calls led agents to believe that the person in the United States was a bad actor (Mr. McConnell implied, sort of, that they were terrorists), and the government’s lawyers obtained a warrant. We are still looking for that loophole in the Fourth Amendment.
Obviously, from the quote of McConnell, this conclusion was invented with little regard to reality. And as for the 4th Amdt? That is just silly. It only prevents unreasonable searches, and the U.S. has intercepted international communications during every war since electronic communications became commonplace. No court of final and competent jurisdiction has ever said that international calls with declared enemies of this country have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Besides, even if they did (and they don't), the NSA TSP surveillance of such would still not be unreasonable, given the reality of the threat, and that the interceptions are not being used in criminal prosecutions.

The remainder of the article is more of the same, mischaracterizations of the law and what McConnell said, all pandering to a BDS unreality that bears little if any relationship to what is actually happening.

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Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act

Transcript of a question and answer session with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell about FISA, the TSP, etc.

Reading the transcript shows the disconnect between those panicked about civil liberties and the reality of what the NSA is doing to combat terrorism. Some of the stuff that I noted here:

- The idea that the NSA coule reverse target Americans and stay within the recent amendment that used the word "directed" instead of "targeted" seems far fetched. That isn't how the NSA operates here. Rather, they target telephone numbers and record stuff coming and going from them. If the targeted number is here in the U.S., a warrant is required.

- The long term problem that precipitated this was that back when FISA was passed into law, most international communications were through the air, interception of such was not deeded to be w/i the U.S., and thus, the more lenient 50 U.S.C. 1801(f)(1) applied. But now most communications are via fiber optics that need to be intercepted at the switches on U.S. soil, and thus, interception moved to 1801(f)(2). Under (f)(1), FISA didn't apply if the target was foreign or the person here was here illegally. Both of those disappear in (f)(2).

- The other thing that changed was that when a second FISC judge looked at the program, it appears that he determined that when there was a mere possibility that one end of a conversation might be in the U.S., and it was tapped at one of those fiber switches in the U.S., FISA was triggered. The problem is that sometimes they don't know the location of both ends of a conversation - notably with satellite calls.

- Finally, as the AG has repeatedly stated, the problem is the paperwork involved - 200 hours per warrant. That is fine for situations where one party is known to be in the U.S. But that is a fraction of the relevant calls, and that FISC judge's ruling was causing a 10x increase in the warrants required - all at the 200 hours per warrant cost.

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DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates

Not a good move. WaPo: DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates. The DNC has stripped the state that gave Bush the presidency in 2000 of its delegates to the 2008 convention. They probably did have a chance there, since their governor no longer has a brother running for president. Until this...

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

More FISA Fear-Mongering by Andrew McCarthy More FISA Fear-Mongering by Andrew McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy talks sense on FISA reform in: More FISA Fear-Mongering (the New York Times strikes again). The NYT breathlessly reported that the recently enacted FISA amendment would allow all sorts of implausible incursions into our civil liberties, most of which had nothing to do with international and foreign electronic communications (generically, and not as defined by FISA), the subject of FISA and its recent amendment.

I have gotten a bit tired of hearing about how the "directed" language in the new law can be theoretically, maybe, by Darth Bush (McCarthy's term), perverted to allow indiscriminent tapping of American phones. Never mind that the intelligence community has repeatedly pointed out that they see the language as being essentially equivalent to the "targeted" language of the original FISA. But somehow, it is supposedly possible for a rogue Administration to target Americans by targeting al Qaeda operatives.

Yes, the language may be a tiny bit more lenient than was in effect for interceptions made outside the U.S. (and most of those making these arguments admit that most international communications could be and were tapped "outside" the U.S. when FISA was enacted). But the amendment addressed some real problems with where FISA had gone.

First, the technology had changed significantly since then, to the point where interception outside the U.S. is now technologically infeasible (we are now tapping fiber optics at the switches as the cables come onshore, instead of out of the ether, as was previously done).

Secondly, much purely foreign traffic is intercepted at those same fiber optic switches, as AT&T had kindly routed it through this country, partially at the behest of the NSA (and partially because they are an American company with their infrastructure here). That was fine, since foreign traffic is exempt from FISA - until a FISC judge determined that FISA applies if there is a chance that one end ended up here in the U.S. That might not have been an issue, except that the NSA doesn't always know where both ends are (for example, with satellite phones).

So, if OBL were sitting in his cave on the Afgan/Pakistan border, and used a sattelite phone to call someone, a FISA warrant would now be required, because the NSA couldn't guarantee that the phone call wasn't made from this country.

Those are two big things to keep in mind when talking about the amendment to FISA. First, the big thing it did was change the standard from absolute knowledge to reasonable belief. If they detect OBL, they don't have to worry about whether he sneaked into this country somehow. And that the "directed" language is being interpreted as equivalent to the "targeted" language in 50 U.S.C. 1801(f) (and note that this part of the amendment specifically refers to 1801(f)). The person of interest must be reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. for this provision in the amendment to apply. The idea that someone here can be targeted but the surveillance be "directed" at someone outside the U.S. is just ludicrous. Since "targeted" is really narrower than "directed", this just doesn't work.

Finally, it is only temporary - six months.

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Monday, August 20, 2007

Vista #10 Vista #10

Typical weird Microsoft Vista problem. Right now, I am using my Vista laptop to post this. The connection is via a cross-over cable to my Windows 2003 Server, and thence out another Ethernet port to the Internet. The two Ethernet adaptors on the server are bridged, and DHCP on the server assigned the Vista machine its IP address.
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So, can either system see each other? Of course not. Not only can Windows on each system not see the other system, but I can't ping the other system either. You would think that that indicated a lack of connectivity. Of course not. The Vista machine can ping the modem and the print server through the Server, and, indeed, can access the Internet through the Server. It can't find DNS on the Server, but can find external DNS's.

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Sunday, August 05, 2007

Ping Tian Resorts Ping Tian Resorts

A long time friend and family acquaintance, Chuck Tolton, is the VP of Resort Operations for Ping Tian Resorts, which is scheduled to be the largest ski resort in Asia. It will be 20 sq. miles, with a 3,600 foot vertical drop. And that is big. Very big.

Hopefully, I can visit and ski there in a year or two when more of it is in place.

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Undercover Reporter Outed, Flees DefCon Conference Undercover Reporter Outed, Flees DefCon Conference

PC WorldUndercover Reporter Outed, Flees DefCon Conference.
DefCon organizer Jeff Moss called out Michelle Madigan, an Associate Producer for NBC-Universal, from stage during the "Tactical Exploitation" session.
He said:
"It came to our attention that a reporter might be here with a hidden pinhole camera," Moss told the crowd, which he said left two options. One was to let her corner some 13-year-old kid and get him to admit to hacking. The other was to escort her away.
As Glen Reynolds points out at Instapundit.com:
YOU DON'T TUG ON SUPERMAN'S CAPE, and you don't spy on hackers unless you're, you know, actually good at it
I find the whole thing quite humorous. This lady was obviously out of her league, and got called for it.

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