The Register has a good screed about W’s appointing convicted felon and anti-Constitutionalist John Poindexter to be in charge of the world’s most invasive database. You can read William Safire on the same topic here. (Thanks to Greg Cavanagh for the link.)

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AKMA casually mentions that he’s going to hang with Derrida. Get Buddy Rich on the drums and you’ve got a group that will swing!

I am drenched in envy. Forgive me.

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Craig Allen points us to a science fictionish story by Paul Ford about how Google could become the center of the known universe.

And Gary Unblinking Stock points to recent activity at his Gogglewhack site. (A Googlewhack is a word pair that gives one and only one hit when searched for at Google; the pair must not be enclosed in quotation marks.) In submitting a Googlewhack, one must also provide a definition of the pair. Yesterday alone Gary received (among others):

This is shocking! Given that our civilization is built on phallic overcompensation, this is like “Nigerian scam” turning out to be a Googlewhack.

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Have a laugh. It may be the last one for a while…

Also, Madkane has written new lyrics to Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” about kissing goodbye to our rights. I wish I knew the Billy Joel song. It’s so hard to keep up with what the kids are listening to these days.

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The Homeland Security Act is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution for civil liberties. Today and maybe tomorrow is the only chance you’ll have to tell your Senator to vote AGAINST it. You can get your Senator’s phone number here. (If you live in Massachusetts, Kerry is at (202) 224-2742 and Kennedy is at (202) 224-4543.

Here is William Safire’s piece on this in the NY Times today, reproduced in gleeful violation of the copyright law:

YOUR ARE A SUSPECT

WASHINGTON — If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, “The buck stops here,” arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the “Information Awareness Office” in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the “data-mining” power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter’s assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic “stovepiping.” And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person’s medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O’Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter’s operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome “Total Information Awareness,” the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter”s new Pentagon office reads “Scientia Est Potentia” — “knowledge is power.” Exactly: the government’s infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. “We’re just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy,” this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.

— William Safire
Thanks to Jeff Angus for email pointing out this outrage.

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Adina discourses on the hyperlinked nature of Judaism’s basic texts, saying in a couple of paragraphs what it takes The Talmud and the Internet an entire book to say.

(What does the hyperlinked nature of the text and the conversational nature of its interpretation tell us about the nature of the religion and the community/people?)

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From Declan McCullagh:

WASHINGTON — A last-minute addition to a proposal for a Department of Homeland Security bill would punish malicious computer hackers with life in prison.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday evening voted 299 to 121 to approve the bill, which would reshape large portions of the federal bureaucracy into new a department combining parts of 22 existing federal agencies, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center.

During closed-door negotiations before the debate began, the House Republican leadership inserted the 16-page Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA) into the Homeland Security bill. CSEA expands the ability of police to conduct Internet or telephone eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, and offers Internet providers more latitude to disclose information to police…

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I gave a talk yesterday to a library association and managed to make it all the way into the Q&A session before uttering the word “doomed.” We ended up talking about whether there can be librarians without books.

The very first model proposed by the audience was: “We’re the gatekeepers of knowledge.” This role will only become more important as the amount of bad information on the Internet grows. Supposedly.

But there are two forces working against the gatekeeper idea. First, we seem to be self-organizing our own gatekeepers. Sometimes they’re collaborative and sometimes our new gatekeepers emerge from the noise in unpredictable ways. There will certainly still be top-down gatekeepers in the traditional sense, but they are at least becoming less important because there are so many other gates.

Second, when there’s true abundance, gatekeeping actually drives down the value of what’s being protected: if there’s manna everywhere, putting a gatekeeper in front of a storeroom just means that that no one’s going to bother with the protected manna. Similarly, if I can find out everything I need about Ghana easily by surfing, I’m not going to pay the Britannica a fee to get the same information.

But, reply the librarians, you may not get the best information for free on the Web. No, but I don’t need the best information. I just need good enough information. And where I do need information certified as the best, I will be willing to pay for it. But the most important change in all this is indeed a movement away from thinking that there routinely is such a thing as “the best” information that’s kept in guarded, temperature-controlled cellars. For better or worse, in an economy of abundance, good enough is good enough.

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Masha Geller of MediaPost thinks she’s figured out why response rates to spam — um, “email marketing — are so low:

Email marketing company Silverpop yesterday released the preliminary findings of a study they conducted on response rates to permission email and found that one of the most overlooked causes of reduced response rates is “broken” or unreadable HTML. …

Here are some other reasons that occurred to me in just the last 24 hours:

If I had some domain names to register, I’d rather use .COM or .NET than .US or .NAME or .OBSCURE or whatever it is that you’re selling

The cheapest airline tickets are likely to have restrictions I wouldn’t like, even if they are totally guaranteed

Spying on my neighbor’s hot teenage daughter or on our babysitter would be just plain sick

I can’t fire my boss because, well, it just doesn’t work that way

I have more than enough printer ink for now

I haven’really been much interested in farm animals since I was 5 or 6, so I’m not going to go to your web site to look at photos

I don’t believe I can grow rich without doing anything of value

I don’t know what HGH is and I think I don’t care

While I’m flattered that you are impressed by my financial standing, I have more credit cards than I use

I read Nabokov’s Lolita and was quite disturbed by it, so I’m not interested in having Lolitas delivered to my inbox

Yes, my teeth are yellowing (how did you know??), but I’ll check with my dentist instead of buying whitener over the Net

I’m fortunate in not needing a debt reduction program

My wife’s not complaining

Nope, I still don’t need any HGH

I’m an animal rights type of guy so I don’t want a leather coat

Thanks for noticing that I am rather sexy, but sex with women less than half my age isn’t really all that appealing. Besides, if you can see that my teeth are yellow, why can’t you see the ring on my finger?

I’m not interested in toner cartridges that don’t come with HGH, whatever that is

I would have helped you get your money out of Nigeria, but how can I trust an email that doesn’t properly close all of its HTML tags?

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Last night’s panel discussion at the Jewish Technology Business Network turned out well. This is remarkable not because of the caliber of the panelists (Larry Weber, Chris Meyer, Cliff Conneighton) but because we didn’t have a topic. Moderator Scott Kirsner (columnist for the Boston Globe, contributing editor to Wired and Fast Company) did an excellent job of pulling the discussion together. The audience seemed happy.

Beforehand Chris Meyer said that Arthur Miller (the lawyer and moderator, not the playwright and Monroe husband) once told him that there are only two rules for a good panel discussion: Have fun, and no dead air.

Chris, in the course of the evening, had some quotable quotes:

“As they say in the AI industry, as soon as something works, it’s not AI any more.”

“No one has ever seen a bubble from the inside” — Lester Thurow

He also asked the audience whether the “mass of the US economy” has increased or decreased in the past century. And he meant literally how much the goods weigh. His point was that it’s decreased because we’ve miniatured and strengthened, and that’s going to happen again, radically, as nanotech emerges.

Finally, Larry Weber said that TV viewership is at an all-time low. Interesting.

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