jmcmichael

Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist →

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using “software to hide encrypted data in digital photos” or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone “overly concerned about privacy” or attempting to “shield the screen from view of others” should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

I think the Net generation is beginning to see knowledge in a way that is closer to the truth about knowledge — a truth we’ve long known but couldn’t instantiate. My generation, and the many generations before mine, have thought about knowledge as being the collected set of trusted content, typically expressed in libraries full of books. Our tradition has taken the trans-generational project of building this Library of Knowledge book by book as our God-given task as humans. Yet, for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument. That social activity — collaborative and contentious, often at the same time — is a more accurate reflection of our condition as imperfect social creatures trying to understand a world that is too big and too complex for even the biggest-headed expert.

— Internet theorist David Weinberger, in What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

— Brian Kernighan

Darren wants a drama free relationship

(Source: slashleen)

Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases →

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

- Glenn Greenwald

The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war →

A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s.

The United States Constitution rests on a handful of closely related premises. (Let’s call them “Madisonian.”) First: the Constitution has to serve the interests of citizens, not politicians and especially not state politicians. For an emphatic statement see Federalist 45 (To appreciate the depth of Madison’s conviction on this point, note that the verbal bombast in 45 is out of character for him. Even his letters to Dolley sound like they were written by her accountant.) Second: the Constitution has to make politics possible and discipline it against factional abuse. For the general theory see Federalist 10. Third, the Constitution has to ensure stability, both in the sense of institutional durability and of preventing political hyperactivity. For the perils of a “mutable government” see Federalist 62.

Now invert the premises. First: the Constitution must protect the “states as states”—that is, their political elites and hangers-on. Second: the Constitution should facilitate interest group politics. Third: the Constitution should be democratic (and since the demos is fickle, the Constitution should be unstable). There you have the actual Constitution, upside-down. Get used to it: it’s the New Deal Constitution under which we live.

— Michael S. Greve, discussing his book The Upside Down Constitution

If he asks “Are you Sarah Conner?”
Just say “NO!”

Movie Posters from an Alternate Universe

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
Bruce Lee 

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.