The full text of the amicus brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Salon and other organizations — filed as part of the ACLU’s challenge to the USA Patriot Act — is now available. (See my original posting on this for more.)
The ACLU also has a lot more information online about the proceeding. Here’s the ACLU’s news release.
Stay up late on the West Coast and you get tomorrow’s New York Times today. Tonight brings a long “From the Editors” note that reconsiders the WMD hysteria that marked some of its prewar coverage and marred its reputation:
“It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.”
“We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”
For the Times, this transparency thing is still very new. And admitting that major stories that helped launch an ill-conceived war were at best careless and at worst fraudulent is a painful thing for any journalistic enterprise. But admitting mistakes is the first step toward preventing their recurrence.
Now if we can only get our president to understand that principle. Instead, here he is solemnly announcing, in his speech last night, that “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror.” Sure it is. How did it get that way? It wasn’t such a front before we invaded. Our mistakes — Bush’s mistakes — opened another front for bin Ladenism to exploit.
Will Saletan in Slate has a smart deconstruction of the strange rhetoric in Bush’s speech that omits any acknowledgment of missteps and all reference to his own agency in the unfolding Iraq disaster. Bush hasn’t done anything; instead, “history is moving.” It would be funny if there weren’t so many lives already lost, and more on the line.
One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.
This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!
(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)
Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.
What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.
The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.
(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)
If you haven’t been reading Salon’s War Room blog, here’s an example of what you’ve been missing. Geraldine Sealey notes Tom DeLay’s complaint that Nancy Pelosi, in criticizing President Bush, was endangering American lives, and offers a catalog of recent harsh criticisms of Bush from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Mark Helprin, Bill Kristol, George Will and a handful of Republican Senators. All “dangerous” statements, according to DeLay.
If you were reading this blog earlier this year you may recall my recently kindled enthusiasm for the music of The Mountain Goats. This enthusiasm has not waned as I have explored the back catalog of this “band” of (mostly) one. It has, if anything, waxed.
As I wrote about my delight in this discovery I uncovered the existence of kindred spirits here at Salon, including our jack-of-all-trades editorial operations director Max Garrone, who swears by “The Coroner’s Gambit,” and our Renaissance-man IT support manager, Jim Fisher.
Perhaps you’ve read some of Jim’s in-depth reporting for Salon on technology and the environment, or some of his great poems that we’ve published. (I’m not the only one who thinks highly of his work; he has recently won a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.)
Anyway, I learned that last year Jim had written an in-depth critical essay on the music and lyrics of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle. For various reasons the essay never got published in Salon. It is perhaps of more interest to those already hooked on this work than those not yet familiar with it. But the piece deserves a home on the Web, so I’ve published it in this blogspace, here.
Jim’s piece was written months ago, at the time of the Mountain Goats’ release of “Tallahassee.” Earlier this year saw the release of “We Shall All Be Healed.” I’m not sure Jim agrees with me on this, but I think that album fulfills the prediction at the end of his essay of an “all-studio masterpiece” from this artist, much of whose previous work was recorded direct-to-boombox.
For those of us working primarily on the Web, Microsoft Word’s various “Smart” features (smart quotes, auto correct, auto format, etc.) have always been hydras whose heads one had to repeatedly lop off. Even if you didn’t work in Word yourself, colleagues would submit copy composed in it, and you’d have to deal with the problem of introducing junk characters. Some of us have become reasonably familiar with exactly which boxes and buttons you need to press to “web-safe” a Word installation.
Now Microsoft seems to have grown hip to how frequently we have to tell Word to “stop doing” the things its programmers have spent years enabling it to do. This is from today’s New York Times review by David Pogue of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac:
| Smart Buttons, descended from a similar feature in Word for Windows, are tiny pop-up menus that appear in your text whenever Word has something to offer you. For example, one appears whenever Word auto-formats something you’ve typed (a chronic sore spot with Microsoft customers): turning a Web address into a difficult-to-edit Web link, for example, or automatically numbering a list. You’ve always been able to turn off these intrusions in a dialog box or undo individual changes by pressing Command-Z. But Smart Tags put “Undo” and “Stop doing this” commands right in front of you where you can’t miss them. |
I broke out laughing when I read this. Consider the baroque logic: Microsoft has now reached that rarefied state of software existence in which it can offer “improvements” in the form of new features that make it easier to turn off those annoying “improvements” of yesteryear that were hitherto too difficult to discard!
But how deep within Word’s menus must one hunt to turn off “Smart Buttons” if they get annoying? And is anyone at Microsoft going to flip the page of the newspaper section in which Pogue’s review appears and read “A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple”?
Yesterday evening I visited Technorati‘s first “developers’ Salon,” an event at which non-developer bloggers and “content producer” types like me were made to feel quite welcome. You can find blog notes about the event from JD Lasica and Christian Crumlish.
Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks presented the latest stats from the “cosmos” of blogs that Technorati tracks: 11-12,000 new blogs are added each day. (Roughly 45 percent are abandoned over time.) Over 200,000 new blog postings per day. 2.4 million blogs total tracked.
That’s some serious volume — though it pales compared to the total size of the Web that, say, Google surveys Technorati specializes in tracking, and keeping up with, the part of the Web that’s constantly being updated. The blogs it follows provide a collective editorial filter on the news and the Web (see for instance the Technorati “Current Events” page).
Among the most interesting graphs were those that demonstrated the size and dynamic importance of blogging’s “tail end of the curve.” There’s a vast number of blogs that don’t have thousands of readers or links; maybe they only have ten or a hundred people reading them and linking to them. But, both individually and aggregated into small relational groupings, they provide a wealth of data about what people care about and what’s on their minds. Sifry said that Technorati is trying to figure out better ways to “expose the really interesting stuff that’s going on in relatively small communities.”
The room was packed with three or four dozen developers and blog enthusiasts filled with pizza and beer and the unquenchable notion that their code could make a difference. Technorati is a small startup company (eight on staff now, Sifry said) with a clear and honestly communicated notion that it will at some point need to bring revenue in via advertising and subscription services. But right now it’s at that happy moment when its programmers can just explore new ways of making their users’ worlds more interesting.
Jeff Jarvis echoes Howard Kurtz’s observation that most U.S. reporters in Iraq aren’t daring to venture outside the Green Zone. Given the chaos there and the danger of being taken hostage or worse, it’s hard to second-guess the decisions these journalists are making. But there’s no question we won’t get the full picture from Iraq this way.
Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That’s certainly good advice.
But it’s also worth pointing out that Salon’s coverage from Iraq was not “embedded” during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Phillip Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering eyewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that’s not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.
Seymour Hersh’s piece in the new New Yorker, “The Gray Zone,” begins thus:
|
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.” |
Hersh’s report, which seems too detailed and credible for the administration simply to dismiss (though no doubt they will try), suggests that the testimony Rumsfeld offered Congress last week was at best a patchwork of outrageous omissions and at worst a passel of outright lies.
It’s also clear that Hersh’s sources are intelligence officials who decided to step forward with this tale only after Rumsfeld’s testimony. (Otherwise, presumably this material would have appeared in one of the reporter’s previous dispatches.) According to Hersh, the “black budget” operations his piece describes were top secret, and Rumsfeld could not have talked about them in public hearings. But clearly, something about the definitive nature of the Defense Secretary’s insistence on the “handful of loose cannons” line enraged someone at the CIA who knew a different story — enraged him enough to spill the beans to Hersh, using words like “bullshit” to describe Rumsfeld’s testimony.
It’s no secret that the CIA and the Bush administration are fighting their own war with each other, one that dates back at least to the buildup to the Iraq war, when the intelligence service kept telling the Bush team that there was no evidence Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush team kept throwing away the CIA’s info and seizing anything that looked like an excuse to invade. In each of the two biggest screwups of Bush foreign policy — the failure to anticipate 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq — Bush’s people have pointed fingers at the CIA and declared the problem to be a “failure of intelligence.” (Given this interpretation of history, you’d think Bush would have given George Tenet the boot long ago. But Tenet is loyal, and that’s all that seems to matter in this administration.)
Now the CIA is firing back. And that’s perfectly understandable. But you get the depressing feeling that, as all this bureaucratic crossfire ricochets, the biggest casualty will be the “war on terror” itself. Which is why the mistreatment and torture of the people we were supposed to be liberating is not only a moral calamity but a strategic disaster.
David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games (1978): I actually have a copy of this book in paper, dug up in some used book store pile ages ago, but now, you can revel in its full glories online.
Before there were sprites and polygons and first-person-shooters, before there were CRTs on every desk to splash graphics in our eyes, there were simply teletypes chattering out lines of text. And there were paper tapes for you to store your work. Right around the time Richard Nixon was being kicked out of office, I was learning BASIC by reading the code to some of these games. (We didn’t get them from the book — they were just floating around on the minicomputer we timeshared.) “Hammurabi,” a sort of primitive, text-only SimCity, was the one I and my circle of friends latched onto — and proceeded to amend. Because all these programs were free and, in the manner of their time, open source. [Thanks, Boing Boing and Oblomovka]
