I appologize to anyone trying to access the site this weekend. I was in the process of moving the server to its new location.
The move is now complete and the page should not experience any more significant outages.
Thank you for your patience.
The allowance of the reunification of at&t is beginning to make more sense everyday.
I have remained silent on this topic for far too long, I cannot bite my tongue any longer.
Yesterday, Brian Ross, of ABC News posted a startling entry to his blog.
An anonymous government source warned him that the NSA was looking at his call logs to find the source of leaks inside the CIA.
“Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters
for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post,
are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.”
Shockingly, today he reports that the FBI admits to monitoring phone records of reporters.
“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.
….
“Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.”
This catches the administration in yet another lie. Time and time again, we are told that the wiretapping is solely used to catch terrorist, and is only used on foreign calls. Yet, here we see that they are indeed monitoring domestic calls, and they are using the technology for other purposes than finding terrorists, because if the CIA leaks are coming from terrorists, we have larger problems on our hands.
This undermines everything this country was founded on. Since it is apparent that the current administration apparently failed to do their homework in high school and read the Bill of Rights, I will post the relevant Amendments below:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
“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.”
Now for translation:
The First Amendment is basically saying that the government may not limit free speech, and that press can not be silenced. Yet, here the government is watching the press, trying to scare informants from talking with the press, and worse, shrouding the whole thing as “Classified Information”, so that the press can be threatened with prosecution.
I am not advocating for one moment, that government officials who leak classified information that endangers American lives should not be prosecuted for treason. However, this is not the heart of the matter of this issue. For starters, no warrant was obtained. The CIA could easily file for a warrant for the reports phone records over a specified period of time. This prevents the government of have free reign and simply mining for information as is the case here. Secondly, there has to be some oversight in the government, otherwise the executive branch could just deem everything classified, even if it did not affect national security. The current administration knew that congress and the courts would not approve these actions, so it decided to simply side-step congress and the judiciary entirely. This prevents any sort of oversight which protects the rights of innocent Americans. It also shifts and unprecedented amount of power to the executive branch, as it allows the president to declare anything he doesn’t want congress or the judiciary to know as “Classified.”
The Fourth Amendment states that everyone has the right to privacy, in their homes, papers (which would include telephone calls), and other personal belongings. It specifically states that a person’s belongings (in this case telephone data and records) cannot be searched without a warrant. The administration is side-stepping the warrants using National Security Letters. This prevents judicial (or any other form) of oversight, and threatens the separation of power provided by the Constitution.
Let’s, assume for a moment that you truly believe the NSA is only collecting phone numbers, not other call information. If this is the case, why can’t they subpoena this information as it is contained in your phone bill? Instead, the major telephone companies have this Narus hardware installed. As outlined in this excellent article by Hannibal from Ars Technica on May 11, 2006, the Narus hardware has the following capabilities:
- Law enforcement has shown that they consider any
transactional data arising from voice communications—either POTS (plain
old telephone system), cellular, or VoIP—to be fair game and to be covered by a much lower threshold than “probable cause.”- In
the absence of up-to-date laws, the POTS-based definition of
“transactional information” is being stretched to fit new forms of data
arising from new forms of communication (e.g. location data arising
from cell phone calls).- The NSA, for its part, has gone
further and demonstrated that they consider such transactional data to
be theirs to snoop, aggregate, and mine without any kind of court order
at all.- This transactional data can be correlated to
specific end users by indexing their phone number(s) into a wide array
of commercially available databases that cover many other aspects of
our financial and private lives.- The NSA also has in place
the ability to collect “transactional information” for IP-based
communications, like Web sessions, email, FTP, VoIP, and more.
As you can see they are mining much more than simply phone records. Anyone who believes they are not really needs to review the Narus Product Page, then wake up and smell the coffee.
Americans are facing a massive erosion of rights and I am afraid many of us are asleep at the wheel.
For those of you who believe that the government should arrest the informants, because they are in someway jeopardizing national security by revealing “Classified” government programs, I will leave you with a quote spoken once again by Hannibal over at Ars Technica in a new article he wrote this morning. Please read his articles, as well as Brian Ross’, for more information about the topic of this post.
“I just want to make a quick point, in response to the inevitable objection that what Arkin and others have done is “treason” because they’re revealing secret information on tools and methods that could be used against the country: when it comes to infosec, security through obscurity is a small peg on which to hang the safety of a nation.”
This one has me reaching for the Advil.
Digital Trends is reporting that today, AT&T announced that they will be re-branding Cingular Wireless as… you guess it, AT&T Wireless. Again.
For those of you not keeping score at home, I decided to layout a basic history of events that lead us to this point. This list of events is surely not complete, and some of the events have been reordered for clarity, but this should give everyone a clear understanding of the lunacy that got us here.
So, without further ado….
1 ) AT&T creates a wireless division which they call, AT&T Wireless.
2 ) AT&T Wireless spins off of AT&T into a separate company.
3 ) Bellsouth and SBC roll their wireless companies together into a new company called “Cingular.”
4 ) Cingular buys AT&T Wireless for $41 Billion. They then spend an estimated $4 Billion advertising the merger.
5 ) SBC (60% owner of Cingular) purchases AT&T (parent company) for $16 Billion.
6 ) SBC renames themselves at&t (lowercase).
7 ) “at&t” (SBC) purchases co-owner of Cingular, BellSouth, for $67 Billion.
8 ) at&t (consisting of the former SBC, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cingular, and AT&T Wireless) renames Cingular Wireless “at&t Wireless” and spends another $2 Billion advertising the change
Let’s not forget this list doesn’t even cover the original antiturst split of “Ma Bell”, which led to the creation of companies like SBC and BellSouth in the first place.
That is a lot of zeros folks.
No wonder AT&T wants to create a tiered Internet, and charge companies like Google, Vonage, and Amazon to use “Their pipes.” Someone has to pay those bills, and my bets are on Joe Consumer.
Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express Editions will remain free permenantly.
Initially, Microsoft was promotionally offering the Express Editions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 free for 1-year to spur development, with plans to charge $49 for them begining in November 2006.
Microsoft has now changed these plans, and the Express Editions will remain free forever.
This Infoworld Article details Microsoft’s change of plans:
“Citing 5 million downloads since November,
Microsoft has cancelled plans to begin charging for its Visual Studio
2005 Express products, which feature abbreviated developer tools for
hobbyists, beginners, and students. The plan had been to price the
products at $49 beginning in November 2006. Thus far, they have been
available at no charge.”
This is great news for the development community as a whole and a smart move for Microsoft. This will continue to spur the adoption of the .NET 2.0 Framework, and will provide provide a wealth of applications and tools for windows users.
If you haven’t already, and have been wanting to begin development with .NET 2.0 Download the Express Editions Today!
Microsoft has released the April CTP of the Atlas an ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX implementation framework.
As if that is not exciting enough, Microsoft has also released the Atlas Server Controls Toolkit!
I have been playing around with the toolkit for the last hour and all I can saw is: “WOW!”
The toolkit comes with the following pre-built ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX server controls extenders:
The toolkit also contains Atlas extender templates for creating your own AJAX server control extenders!
Greetings Everyone,
Great news for regular readers of this site. I have tripled the amount of ram in my humble little webserver. Access for all users should be significantly improved.
Thanks,
Dave
Another intersting tool for .NET developers is this power toy for Visual Studio 2005 called MSBee. MSBee enables developers to build .NET 1.1 applications with Visual Studio 2005.
Should be a great tool for those of us who still have alot of .NET 1.1 code to support, but enjoy the enhancements in Visual Studio 2005.
Last week at the Mix ‘06 Conference, Microsoft announced WPF/E, or Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere.
From Mike Harsh’s Blog:
“So
what is WPF/E? It is a cross-platform, cross-browser web technology
that supports a subset of WPF XAML. WPF/E also has a friction-free
install model and the download size we’re targeting is very small. WPF/E supports programmability through javascript for tight browser
integration. The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform
subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code. Yes, we are bringing C# programming to the Mac.”
I am absolutely thrilled by this news.
I can’t wait to write cross platform, firefox compatible rich applications in .NET!
Check out Mike Harsh’s Blog for more information.
Michael Crichton, the man responsible for such works as Jurassic Park, ER, Twister, Congo, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain just to name a few, has posted an editorial in the New York Times about the patented future we face.
His editorial, titled “This Essay Breaks the Law” comments on the sad state the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has created for us, and the even more depressing future we face if something doesn’t change.
Check out his editorial at the New York Times website.
Let’s hope they don’t sue me for using their trademark.
A friend of mine notified me this morning that today is Pi Day.
I feel ashamed that I could miss such an event here at PiRootOfPi, but luckily I have friends out there who remind me of these things.
Pi Day is to be celebrated anually on March 14th at 1:59 P.M. (hint: 3/14 1:59 sort of resembles 3.14159)
For more information about Pi Day and how to celebrate it, see the wikipedia article here.
Dave