Entries from August 2003 ↓

Why does Charles Cooper have a job at C|net.com and not at Foxnews.com? His latest stupid screed indicates his bias and his lack of understanding of the issues. His most recent column, Hanging DARPA out to dry takes “the do-gooders and other high-minded guardians of the commonweal” to task for being suspicious of the motives behind DARPA initiatives like TIA and FutureMAP [PDF]. After all, Cooper assures us:

Don’t you feel reassured. After all, it’s going after foreigners! And there’s no evidence that the government has ever used its legal –and extralegal — powers to spy on ordinary Americans, right? (Unless you count J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO, Nixon’s enemies lists, the out-of-control investigation by Kenneth Starr, etc.) And, of course this domestic surveillance will just be looking at guilty people, right? (This proves he has no clue even about the technical issues a columnist for a computer new site should have: the idea of TIA is to look at EVERY PIECE OF DATA on EVERYONE and that will enable the government to pick out the potential terrorists… or anarchists… or liberals… or blasphemers…)

And, don’t worry, he tells us, there’ll be “effective safeguards”. Yeah… Just like the effective safeguards which allow the RIAA to acquire extra-judicial subpoenas in order to strip the privacy protections of citizens who are merely accused of violating a freaking copyright! Are we supposed to believe that it’ll be any harder for the Department of Defense or any of the other agencies subscribing to the TIA database to get their hands on that information when they claim the subject of the data is a potential terrorist? Keep dreaming moron.

Then, like every other half-assed justification for stripping our civil rights, liberties and consititutional protections, this hack trots out the already-cliched September 11 scenario:

Well, Charles, I’ve seen the smoking hole which used to be our Bill of Rights buried under lies, excuses and outright disdain for all the things which made this country a beacon of democracy. And all in the name of “Security”. I’ve seen this Administration engage in pre-emptive war, unilaterally break treaties, use secret trials, effective suspension of habeas corpus, establishment of concentration camps, re-institution of the possibility of a nuclear war, and every depredation of liberty which even Orwell didn’t imagine. And I’m sick and tired of hearing apologists — even in tech publications — excuse every wrong based on a twisted belief that ANY of it could have or would have averted the terrorist catastrophe which affected our nation nearly two years ago. Wake up! We had all the information we needed and we ignored it!

Cooper’s just further proof of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the conservatives, who are supposed to believe that government is bad, yet are willing to surrender every shred of privacy for some false security.

A Republican in a majority Democratic state, Maryland’s Governor Robert Ehrlich has decided to slow down a little in the state’s plans to purchase US$55 million worth of electronic voting machines from Diebold Election Systems. The slowdown comes as a result of a paper published by Johns Hopkins University computer security researchers which found that the machines were “…far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts…”

As part of Maryland’s ongoing contract with SAIC, the largest employee-owned research and engineering firm, the company will

It sounds great, and well-needed, but, as I’ve written about before, unless it contains a recommendation that there be a user-verifiable, paper-based, recountable audit trail, there will still be no reason to trust any results.

For this reason, everyone concerned with this issue — and that should be ALL voters — should encourage their Representatives to support H.R.2239, the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003″, introduced by Rep. Holt of New Jersey and co-sponsored by 29 other Representatives. The bill requires “…the voting system to produce a voter-verified paper record suitable for a manual audit equivalent or superior to that of a paper ballot box system…”

This is the only way to ensure that our future elections are free and fair.

I want to believe…
I need to believe that there were good men in the White House once.
I need to believe that men who served as President served their country and not just themselves.
I need to believe that men who were burdened with awesome responsibility made their decisions deliberately with their hearts and their heads while weighing the voices of dissent and the voices of assent.
I need to believe that they had doubts and remorse and they woke up sweating in the middle of the night years and decades later.

I need to believe that on the night of August 6, 1945, Harry Truman sat alone in his stateroom, returning from the Potsdam Conference, his wife and daughter far away in Independence, Missouri. Removing his glasses, he rubbed his eyes, held his heavy head in his hands and prayed to his God for forgiveness .
I need to believe that a tear fell from his face, landing on the telegram which informed him that, on his order, 70,000 men and women and children breathed no more.
I need to believe that he realized, at that very moment, that he had become the modern Pandora, loosing new ills and fears and horrors which would never again be contained.

“What a pity the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice. I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.” Harry Truman

This short segment on the NPR program “Living on Earth” caught my attention the other day. NASA has always made a point of calling attention to the “spinoffs” from the Space Program, including such things as scratch-resistant coatings for glasses, ear thermometers, and cordless vaccuums.

But, I’d never heard of the same sorts of technology transfers from the nuclear energy programs.

So, does this mean the nuclear energy industry isn’t all bad?

For such a formal process and status, marriage has a very fuzzy legal definition — other than the oft-repeated comparison to contract law. Although it is recognized as a statutory category, marriages can be performed by religious officials, judges, public officials and (according to urban legend) ship’s captains. There is often a requirement for registration of a marriage license, but unlike other state-issued licenses, it is almost never necessary to produce this license. Legal marriages in any state are recognized in any other state under the “full faith and credit” provision of the US Constitution. Marriages between foreign nationals are recognized in other countries by long-standing international custom.

However, with the possibility of Canada — and Massachusetts — recognizing same-sex marriages, this all may change. If the US and its several states decide to selectively recognize foreign marriages legal in their original country or state, there may be stricter requirements for proof of marriage at borders and offices and anytime a married couple comes into contact with the machinery of government. And that leaves me wondering about my (hardly unique) situation.

Although my wife and I are both American citizens, back when we were poor, we decided to get married in Florence, Italy. It was a romantic notion as well as a practical one: if we could only afford a big party or a honeymoon abroad, we decided we’d rather have the vacation.

It was a complicated process, involving visits to the Italian Consulate in New York, the New York Department of State, and having our birth certificates translated into Italian; then once we were in Italy, we had to visit the US Consulate, purchase official stamps from an apothecary shop, arrange for a translator, and navigate the bureaucracy to permit a waiver of the “posting of the banns” while speaking virtually no Italian. We were married by the Mayor of Florence in the “Sala Rosa” of the Palazzo Vecchio.

Immediately before the ceremony, we signed our names in a red vinyl looseleaf notebook which was then shelved on the wall with all the other notebooks in reverse chronological order; the newest books were like the one we signed, moving back in time to larger buckram-covered books, then back further to folio-sized, red leather-bound books in glass cabinets. The Mayor’s aide, who also served as our translator, told us that the books contained all the names of the people who’d been married in Florence going back to the mid-1400s.

Walking back to our hotel through the streets of Florence, Jenn carried a half-dozen white roses given to us as part of the ceremony. Strangers smiled, and recognizing the roses (obviously a tradition in that city), wished us “Buona Fortuna!” In the 7 years we’d lived together before tying the knot, we always considered ourselves mariied. Walking through the narrow streets of that Old World city, we felt that our marriage was now recognized by everyone else.

Back in the US, we filed away the flimsy little piece of paper which read “Certificato di Matrimonio, Commune di Firenze.” The only time we’ve ever taken it out since then is when we want to show people our honeymoon photo album. (Interestingly, Jenn’s middle name “Anne” was modified by the secretary who typed the certificate to the much more Italian sounding “Anna.”) When we filed our taxes that year, we filed as married, providing no documentation of that fact to the IRS. We’ve had a number of jobs since then, lived in two states and at least five different cities, bought a house, drafted a will, and no one has EVER asked us for proof of our marriage. Will this change?

And, if it won’t change, what’s to stop a same-sex couple from filing their income taxes as married one year? You need to start somewhere.