January 2006 Archives

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January 16, 2006 | Hitchens And Bamford Sue Bush Administration! No Really!

It was going to be the journalistic equivalent of Cagney and Lacey, but better. Well, better, but with fewer lesbians.

James Bamford, the studious and diligent one who has written books on the NSA, who has a soft spot for conspiracy theoeires was cast as the soul-searching, muckraking honest journalist who just might find out things he doesn't want to know are true..

Christopher Hitchens, the wild one prone to lighting up in elevators and putting whiskey in his oatmeal, would play the bitter, lost journalist who thinks all his colleagues are sellouts and pansies, but he has a soft side and spell checks his byline.

Together the duo would fight injustice, drink and smoke and make fun of editors, and have secret Meet-Ups, IM Department of Agriculture whistleblowers and wage the war on terror and anti-terror (the plan was to alternate weeks) with word processors! Word processors with byline spell checkers, of course.

And their first case?

Here's the shocker -- they don't write anything in the pilot episode. Instead, Bamford hears immediate clicks on the phone when he calls Mossad sources. For his part Hitchens hears clinks in his the highball glass when he calls on his sources.

Both suspect the government is wiretapping them.

So they sign up to have the ACLU sue the government, claiming the government probably eavesdropped on their phone calls (Hitchens vaguely recalls a late night international booty call from some months back, while Bamford claims not to have known that the NSA could intercept his calls to his sources in Israel., No really, he has at least one source there. No really some of his best friends are high level Israeli spooks.).

Too bad reality just scooped me.

No really, it did.

I swear on Echelon, reality bit me.

My blockbuster is in the New York Times. The news section of the NYT.

"There's almost a feeling of déjà vu with this program," said James Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications.

"It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A.," said Mr. Bamford, who has written two widely cited books on the intelligence agency.

Although the program's public disclosure last month has generated speculation that it may have been used to monitor journalists or politicians, no evidence has emerged to support that idea. Bush administration officials point to a secret audit by the Justice Department last year that reviewed a sampling of security agency interceptions involving Americans and that they said found no documented abuses.

[...]

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; ...

Wiretap Lawsuit.

Remember this isn't old-school Trotskyite Hitchens; this is the post-9/11 Hitchens.

I guess we should have seen the re-reversal coming after he threw this bomb after the government decided to start confiscating his lighter when he gets on planes ((no I don't know how he lit the fuse after they took away his lighter) and yes, yes, I and You know that wasn't the administration pushing the lighter ban and we know that Michael Moore and Byron Dorgan are to blame but Hitchens doesn't know that and like Blutarsky, he's on a roll so don't interrupt him.)

I guess that while Hitchens made good friends with the Neo-Cons (who are Trotskyites of a sort), they weren't kind enough to give him a get-out-of-surveillance free card.

Now those neo-cons are going to hear from his ACLU lawyer.

All I can say to that is God help the Kurds if they ever even think one mean thing about Hitchens.

Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006 | What Google Should Announce at CES

Two words: Google Points.

While there's much talk of a low-priced Google Box being announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, I'm thinking that Google should and may announce a way for people to pay for and get paid for video content uploaded to Google Video.

There's already been much speculation that Google would introduce a Google Wallet, which would be an online payment system that would compete with PayPal.

Certainly there's no reason that sites couldn't support more than one online payment service (think Visa, MasterCard and AmEx), but Google has said it isn't interested in competing with PayPal.

And moreover, the hassles of dealing with micro-payments, banking fraud and federal regulations may not be worth it.

But here's what Google will announce, if not on Friday, sometime soon.

Let's call it Google Points.

Google users who search when logged in, Gmail users, Blogspot bloggers etc. will get points based on their usage.

And what will the points buy them?

Google AdWords.

Say 10,000 Google points will get you $10 worth of Google AdWords.

Think frequent flier program, not PayPal.

Now, I hear you saying, "But, most people don't want to buy Google AdWords! These points would be useless."

Well, think of a frequent flier program that would let you transfer your miles to anyone, not just to licensed partners, such as hotels.

So, maybe someone like, say, eBay would let you pay for listing fees with Google points, or you could watch a documentary downloaded from Google Video or Skype would let you buy telephone minutes or Flickr would let you buy a premium account with those surfing points.

Google could take a small percentage to transfer the points, and those companies could use the points to buy ads. Google could also offer to pay sites in the AdSense program with Google points that would be worth more in AdWords cash-value than a straight cash payout.

If companies like Flickr don't want to buy ads, they could find a way -- outside of Google -- to sell the points. On say, eBay.

Google would gain more market share and would likely see more companies buy ads. But even if they don't the cost of the ads (and therefore, the points) to Google is minuscule.

I'm no economist, but this seems to me to be the best way to drive a payment system without actually having to deal with dirty pennies.

And BTW, if you like this post, feel free to drop me a couple thousand Google points using the Google Tip Jar button to the left.

(Oddly this idea came to me in a dream just before leaving for X-mas visits. Google should feel free to give me just a 0.0001 percent cut after they announce the program)

Posted by Ryan Singel at 05:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006 | Web 2.0 Data Mining

Following on the story about the NSA's recently disclosed data-mining project, Tom Owad launched his own data mining program targeting folks with a common first name who had Amazon Wishlists.

He pulled down all 260,000 lists using a couple of old computers, a few lines of code and two DSL lines. Then he searched for folks who liked books by Michael "I hate lighters" Moore and Rush "Jail is for poor drug users" Limbaugh.

(I wonder if Owad started this before or after the very predictable debunking of the Homeland Security monitors Inter-Library Loans of Mao's Red Book story?)

He then mashed up the hits with, oh yes, you Web 2.0 kids saw this coming, Google Maps.

All the tools used in this project are standard and free. The services, likewise, are all free. The technical skills required to implement this project are well within the abilities of anybody who has done any programming. The network connection used to download these files was a standard home DSL connection. The computer that processed the data was a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4. The operating system is Mac OS X 10.4, though everything could have been done just as easily with Linux (and probably with Windows). Not a penny was spent in the writing of this article, just 30 hours of time.

This is what's possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon's entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an "authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.

Very impressive experiment.

Good thing places like Google and ISPs don't keep track of your searches and internet travels for years, or somebody with a self-issued subpoena might decide to ask for that information from them in bulk, and do some mashing up on their own.

It's also a very visual illustration of the implications of 30,000 National Security Letters a year and the Bush Administration policy of allowing that information to all go into a central database that can even be shared with private companies.

For that latter story see Barton Gellman's November story in the Washington Post:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.

Posted by Ryan Singel at 05:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack