Ricke stellt sich ein nach Qualität der Dienstleistung gestaffeltes Kostenmodell vor, eine generelle Maut für die Infrastruktur sei nicht geplant. Ricke droht mit einem verzögerten Ausbau der Infrastruktur: "Wenn die Kunden nicht bereit sind, zu zahlen und Google & Co. nicht bereit sind, zu zahlen – dann kann es keine Autobahnen geben". Die Regeln der Neunzigerjahre seien in einer völlig neuen Welt fehl am Platz. (heise)
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
[...]
By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare." (Rolling Stone)
July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I'd spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora's box opened -- just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.
In the last few years, the press has lost all sense of its own mojo. Things bottomed out after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when any aggressive grilling of the administration branded reporters as unpatriotic, which potentially alienated their audiences. The high emotion surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror (or the new, improved Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, which the Beltway kids snarkily refer to as G-SAVE) have made them very useful hostage babies for the administration cowboys to shield themselves with during shootouts with the press. Somehow, aggressive questioning of the White House got spun as a heretical insult to slaughtered American innocents. It was so demoralizing that after a while the press succumbed en masse to what I call the Potomac dinge: passive cooperation in one's own degradation -- the deranged, unconscious complicity that is found in victims of ritual abuse.
"This is the most complacent and complicit media I've ever seen," Helen Thomas, the most senior member of the White House press corps, told me in an interview at her office at Hearst.
The Rove affair, however, and the artless info-block by Scott McClellan that followed, was one twist too many in the press corps' shorts. The long-simmering scandal about the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson, became a full-on plumbing emergency when it was revealed that the black stuff all over the faucet was the fingerprints of Karl Rove, President Bush's right-hand man, realpolitik guru and pet genius. Despite White House denials of any administrative vendetta, Washington smelled Rove's funk in the air. The stakes were raised by the president's assertion that anyone found to be involved in the Plame leak would be fired. When the humble folk of Press Town got word that Rove was, indeed, involved in the outing of Wilson's wife, they finally got morally indignant enough to go after McClellan and his boss lynch-mob style, with rolling pins and pitchforks. (Salon.com)
In summary:(technorati.com)
- Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
- Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
- Over 81 million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
- Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers
"Harriet, we hardly knew ye. The following week of daily strips on the planned confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers were intended for publication beginning Monday, October 31st, with a Miers Sunday strip to follow on November 13th. Rendered obsolete by the announcement of her withdrawal from consideration on Thursday the 27th, they are nonetheless presented below for your reading pleasure. This week's strips, and the November 13th Sunday, will be repeats." (Doonesbury)
"Die Kinowelt-DVD des Action-Reißers "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" setzt, wie berichtet, eine neue Kopiersperre ein: Alpha-DVD des koreanischen Herstellers Settec. Beim Einlegen in ein DVD-ROM-Laufwerk startet unter Windows eine Anwendung namens "PlayDVD.exe", die zur Annahme eines Lizenzabkommens auffordert und bei Bestätigung drei Dateien in den Systemordner des Betriebssystems kopiert. Alpha-DVD arbeitet auf zwei Ebenen: Zum einen verhindert die Sperre durch defekte Sektoren auf dem Medium ein "Ripping" des Films, zum anderen verankert sich der Schutzmechanismus über drei Dateien im System. Diese überwachen alle Zugriffe auf optische Laufwerke, was nicht immer gut geht." (heise)
"In astonishingly short time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has emerged as the most dynamic leader in Europe. That at least seemed to be the verdict of the applause meter at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 25. "You have given us hope for the first time in a long time," Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and chief executive of Swiss food giant Nestlé (NSRGY), told Merkel after she delivered the keynote address to a packed auditorium." (Businessweek)
"It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard," said new iMac owner Don Revis. "But when I turned off all the other electronics in the room and put my head right up next to my iMac, I could hear that the sound - which I had thought was a fan - is actually a tiny little voice going 'Wheeeeeeeeee!'
"It's kinda... creepy... actually..."
Revis' story was confirmed by several other users who say that while the processor most commonly makes a prolonged "Wheeeeeee!" sound as if riding a roller coaster, it also laughs, titters, giggles, chortles, and otherwise expresses its joy at being part of a Macintosh." (Crazy Apple Rumors)
"Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason." (Link)
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Link)
12. So FISA doesn't treat aliens and U.S. citizens equally?was in etwa meiner ersten antwort entspricht, da die abhöraktionen ohne 'warrants' und ohne 'probable cause' an amerikanischen staatsbürgern auf amerikanischem boden durchgeführt worden sind. hierzu auch telepolis:
If the target is a "U.S. person," which includes permanent resident aliens and associations and corporations substantially composed of U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens, 50 U.S.C.A. § 1801(i), there must be probable cause to believe that the U.S. person's activities "may" or "are about to" involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States. § 1801(b)(2)(A),(B); see also § 1801(b)(2)(C) (knowingly engages in activities in preparation for sabotage or "international terrorism" on behalf of a foreign power); § 1801(b)(2)(D) (knowingly enters the United States under a false or fraudulent identity for or on behalf of a foreign power or, while in the United States, knowingly assumes a false or fraudulent identity for or on behalf of a foreign power).
A "United States person" may not be determined to be an agent of a foreign power "solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States." 50 U.S.C. § 1805(a)(3)(A). (eff.org)
Wie die New York Times aufgrund von Informanten aus Regierungskreisen am Freitag [extern] berichtete, ging das von der Bush-Regierung geheim und unter Umgehung des FISA-Gerichts und des Patriot-Gesetzes beauftragte Lauschprogramm der NSA weit über die bisherigen Ausnahmen hinaus. Es wurde nicht die Kommunikation von einzelnen Menschen abgehört, die in Kontakt mit Terrorverdächtigen im Ausland standen - zunächst hieß es, es seien zu jeder Zeit um die 500 Personen gewesen -, sondern die NSA hat von großen Telekommunikationsprovidern einen direkten Lauschzugang auf inländische und ausländische Kommunikation durch die Einrichtung von Hintertüren erhalten. Allerdings habe die NSA seit jeher einen guten Draht zu den amerikanischen Unternehmen, um ihren Aufgaben besser nachgehen zu können (vgl. beispielsweise [local] Ein Netz voller Charity).
Laut der New York Times war das FISA-Gericht offenbar bereits besorgt angesichts einiger Anträge auf Lauschangriffe durch die NSA, die einen Zugang zu den Kommunikationsströmen suchte, die durch die Knoten amerikanischer Telefon- und Internetunternehmen laufen. Beim FISA-Gericht wurde anscheinend beanstandet, dass damit ein allgemeiner Zugriff auf die Kommunikation möglich wird, und forderte eine Begrenzung. Tatsächlich scheint die NSA aber das Abhören der gesamten Kommunikation im Rahmen eines umfassenden Datamining-Programms betrieben zu haben. Wie bei Echelon oder mit den dort entwickelten Mitteln wurde die Telefon- und Internetkommunikation nach bestimmten Mustern durchsucht, um Verdächtiges herauszufischen. Dabei sei es darum gegangen, wer wen anruft, wie lange die Kommunikation dauerte, zu welcher Tageszeit dies geschieht und von wo aus bzw. wohin sie gerichtet war. Dabei ging es anscheinend primär um die Verbindungsdaten, nicht um den Inhalt. Gleichwohl hätte der Kongress nicht das Durchstöbern der gesamten Kommunikation nach verdächtigen Informationen oder Mustern genehmigt. Das wusste man natürlich in der Bush-Regierung und begann daher wohl, heimlich und im rechtlosen Raum, in dem auch viele andere Aktivitäten durch juristische Scheinbegründungen angesiedelt wurden, mit einem möglichst umfassenden Lauschangriff. (telepolis)
Justizminister Gonzales unterstützte den Präsidenten und sagte, man sei im Weißen Haus davon ausgegangen, dass vom Kongress gebilligte "Autorisierung zum Gebrauch militärischer Gewalt" eben auch das Recht des Präsidenten einschließe, Abhörgenehmigungen zu erteilen. Das Lauschprogramm sei "das bislang geheimste Programm der US-Regierung". Das [extern] Rechtsgutachten, das vom damaligen Rechtsberater Yoo - der auch beim Konzept der Rechtlosigkeit für "feindliche Kämpfer" mitgewirkt hat - zu den vom Kongress gewährten Befugnissen des Präsidenten als obersten Kriegsherrn ausgearbeitet wurde, ist in der Tat ebenso umfassend wie wenig konkret.
Wie US-Präsident Bush argumentiert, sollte all diejenigen aufhorchen lassen, die vertrauensselig glauben, dass erweiterte Überwachungsmöglichkeiten der staatlichen Sicherheitsbehörden keine Gefahr darstellen, weil sie ja rechtlich begrenzt und parlamentarisch kontrolliert würden. Buch sagt pragmatisch, es dauere manchmal einfach zu lange, eine Genehmigung des FISA-Gerichts zu erhalten. Daher könne man in Notsituationen - die nun bereits vier Jahre anhalten - schon auch mal das geltende Recht überspringen. Man habe Kongressmitglieder informiert, zudem sei das Lauschprogramm ja nur beschränkt und werde auch immer wieder intern überprüft. Und überhaupt handele es sich um "einen anderen Krieg" und um "einen anderen Feind", weswegen man auch anders handeln müsse, was viele Freiräume eröffnet. (telepolis)
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
[...]
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it said the N.S.A. eavesdropped without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.
[...]
Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in this country by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.
Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.
Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.
Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.
[...]
Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.
The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant � intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups � and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.
Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.
[...]
Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.
The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
[...]
Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.
This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.
The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.
[...]
One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.
The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.
Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.
Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
In his campaign-style meeting, he was repeatedly applauded for authorizing the wiretaps, a decision that some of his political aides said they believed would ultimately help rebuild his approval ratings by demonstrating the lengths to which he would go to prevent another terrorist attack inside the United States.
[...]
The president never directly addressed the question of why he avoided the existing system, although his legal advisers and intelligence aides have said it was too cumbersome.
"There will be a lot of hearings to talk about that, but that's good for democracy," Mr. Bush said. "Just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I had the prerogative to make the decision I made, doesn't tell the enemy what we're doing. See, that's the danger."
[...]
This week, Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, released a 14-page legal analysis she had requested from a former C.I.A. general counsel, Jeffrey H. Smith, now a Washington lawyer.
Although recognizing the president's assertion that his power as commander in chief justifies warrantless surveillance, Mr. Smith called that case "weak" in light of the language and documented purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires warrants.
Mr. Smith also wrote that the Congressional resolution authorizing military force against those who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "does not, in my view, justify warrantless electronic surveillance of United States persons in the United States."
"The president was correct in concluding that many of our laws were not adequate to deal with this new threat," Mr. Smith wrote. "He was wrong, however, to conclude that he is therefore free to follow the laws he agrees with and ignore those with which he disagrees."
"With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor."und wenn sie schon was übernehmen und übersetzen sollten sie dann nicht auch den permalink verwenden?
Those words came in the middle of George W. Bush's State of the Union speech, and we certainly can't disagree with them. We only wish the president would live up to them." (Salon.com)
NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world. (CNN)fairerweise sollte man auch noch erwähnen:
As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the federal Office of Government Ethics. (CNN)
But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000 voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.
Sara Keene at Premier PR, the company coordinating Munich's Bafta campaign, blamed the mistake on human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted. "Someone pushed the wrong button," she said. "It was a case of rotten bad luck." She insisted that the film's distributor, Universal, was not at fault.
The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe. (guardian)
"An Excerpt from Naked Conversations:
Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:
1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog. You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
You can find each of these elements elsewhere. None is, in itself, all that remarkable. But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed."
