Qwest wouldn’t give the NSA all their call data records, and neither would T-Mobile USA. The why, from ThinkProgress: the fine in the event of successful legal action would be $1000 per violation, and with a multi-terabyte database of records, each one a few bytes, that’s a lot of money even to a monster telco.…
Read More Obligatory Total Surveillance LinksI don’t usually engage with the “decent left”/”pro-war left”/whatever gabble, but this is ridiculous. Sadly, the Evening Standard‘s web presence is still too impossibly dire to link to, so this has had to wait. Kelly said she wouldn’t change the way social housing was allocated in response to the success of the BNP in using…
Read More Nick CohenWere purchased from leftover Bosnian war stocks for the Iraqi security forces by U.S. agents in BiH, and flown out of the country by Aerocom in four runs with the Ilyushin 76 ER-IBV, serial no. 3423699. But where they were delivered remains a mystery, and it is feared that the weapons actually went to the…
Read More 99 Tonnes of GunsOf course they will! Major Chip’n’Pin securifart. It’s essentially the exploit described by Prof. Ross Anderson of the Cambridge Computer Lab, as described on his cracking blog (in both senses of cracking) – thieves have converted some point-of-sale terminals to collect the data from the cards’ magnetic strips, then made new cards. They can only…
Read More ID Cards Will Make Us SaferOne of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/GapAt 2022 CET, 5th May, relay2.cia.gov was in the house, googling for “east-west cargo sharjah”. They read this post. One of the best ones here, I think.
Read More King of ReferrersWhat a reshuffle it was, too. Despite all the pre-election expectations management (it’ll only be serious if it’s a loss of 400), it looks like the local elections really perturbed Blair’s systems. Take a look. So, after all the stand-by-your-man stuff, it’s the Angolan option after all, as Alan Clark would have put it. The…
Read More Chainsaw ReshuffleWell, after almost a full fortnight of semi-frantic canvassing and leaflet dropping around the streets of Englefield Green East, that’s it. I was not elected to the council. No surprises there. I polled some 282 votes, compared to 165 for the Lib Dems last time out. The two Tory candidates got in with 591 and…
Read More Runnymede Report BackThat’s it. It’s done. The most stupid remark possible. The Sistine Chapel of stupidity. Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then. From…
Read More The Climax of Stupidity“My family was advised that his deportation to Jamaica could be a typo which is indicative of the mistakes made on my brother’s case.” So where would he have been deported to but for the typo? Jamaida? Bamaica? Chile, naturally. The Home Office, a credit to the British government for sheer efficiency.
Read More Some Typo