Walked into an Iraqi Police Headquarters this evening where they were all sitting there watching Anchorman. Strange.

Doesn't get much more surreal than that. It's the little things.

What really bakes my noodle now, though, is the trail of breadcrumbs and the use of modern communication which led up to this whole snapshot.

1. A dispute over poorly-aligned, antiquated punch-card paper ballots in Florida created controversy over whether George W. Bush was our properly elected President in 2000.
2. A bunch of Saudi fundamentalists, trained in remote, mountainous, largely illiterate areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and armed with simple box cutters, stole jumbo jets -- small, fuel-filled flying towns -- and crashed them into mountain-sized buildings in Manhattan.
3. The Towers collapsed, killing thousands of people whose days had been spent working on computers, communicating instantly with colleagues around the world and using the very latest technology to run America's financial sector.
4. The summary justification for U.S. involvement in Iraq is based on questionable satellite images and photos from surveillance planes presented to the world by Colin Powell, in classic tv anchor style, as proof that Iraq's tyrant was building nukes and/or biological and chemical weapons.
5. We went to war in Iraq, quickly freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant's grip. Saddam, overthrown and on the run, is captured and later executed. That execution is illicitly recorded on a cell phone and posted on YouTube for the world to see.
6. Using jury-rigged, hand made, improvised explosives, insurgents from around the world gather in Iraq to fight off the Americans and our Western allies.
7. My friend, who I haven't seen since high school, joins the Army and finds his way to Iraq.
8. There, he works with Iraqi citizens who themselves are working to create order and stability. He stops by their office, a police headquarters, and finds them watching Will Ferrell in Anchorman, a movie lampooning San Diego, America in the 1970s, the absurdity of America's recent misogynistic past, and local U.S. tv news generally and on-air personalities in particular. The Iraqi police certainly have no context for any of the subtle humor, though Ferrell in that 'stache and those classic seventies' outfits goes a long, long way.
9. An Army MP goes back to his barrack, fires up his computer and logs on to Facebook, updating his status.
10. As Facebook is what reconnected us, I'm able to glimpse his surreal day from the opposite side of the globe, mixed-in with updates about one friend's Christmas cookies and another friend's love of cheese melted on burgers.

The mind. It boggles.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.

. . .

The Compliance Guide reveals, for example, that Yahoo does not retain a copy of e-mails that an account holder sends unless that customer sets up the account to store those e-mails. Yahoo also cannot search for or produce deleted e-mails once they’ve been removed from a user’s trash file.

The guide also reveals that the company retains the IP addresses from which a user logs in for just one year. But the company’s logs of IP addresses used to register new accounts for the first time go back to 1999. The contents of accounts on Flickr, which Yahoo also owns, are purged as soon as a user deactivates the account.

. . .

The price list that Yahoo tried to prevent the government from releasing to Soghoian appears in one small paragraph in the 17-page leaked document. According to this list, Yahoo charges the government about $30 to $40 for the contents, including e-mail, of a subscriber’s account. It charges $40 to $80 for the contents of a Yahoo group.

via Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List | Threat Level | Wired.com.

There's a new sheriff in town.

Use of torture, the murder of habeas corpus, secrecy and the unilateral use of force. Over time, these are four of the most powerful memories we will have of President Bush, and they will linger as a stain on Americas past.

It was widely speculated that one of Obama's first actions as President would be to move towards closing Guantanamo. Still, Cheney (along with commentators on the Right) argued that Obama would enter his new post, see the daily security reports, and change his position, finding that the threat was real and imminent, that Guantanamo was central to our security.

What did the new President do?

Hours after taking office on Tuesday, President Barack Obama ordered military prosecutors in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals to ask for a 120-day halt in all pending cases. . . . 

The request would halt proceedings in 21 pending cases, including the death penalty case against five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks in 2001.

An excellent start for the new President. Mark Day #1 down as a success. On to tomorrow...

[Image via The Big Picture.]

Politics transforms a reasoned system into a tool for control.

Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman is "perturbed by the state of debate over fiscal stimulus. ... This has not been one of the profession’s finest hours."

There are certainly legitimate arguments against spending-based fiscal stimulus. You can worry about the burden of debt; you can argue that the government will spend money so badly that the jobs created are not worth having; and I’m sure there are other arguments worth taking seriously.

What’s been disturbing, however, is the parade of first-rate economists making totally non-serious arguments against fiscal expansion.

Everyone he lists in his post is politically conservative, to which he says...

That’s their right: economists are citizens too. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of them have decided on political grounds that they don’t want a spending-based fiscal stimulus — and that these political considerations have led them to drop their usual quality-control standards when it comes to economic analysis.

Think back to the time between 9/11 and the Mission Accomplished press conference, when anyone who disagreed with President Bush was deemed, at best, a partisan opponent and, at worst, a traitor. Reasoned, honest debate was squashed as disingenuous political maneuvering.

Those were challenging, uncertain times, but the scale of that threat is dwarfed into absurdity by the systemic economic collapse continuing around us today.

When met with a crisis, we look to detached, objective experts to provide leadership and to create a path to safety. Economists who, thanks to their past, excellent work, have emerged as experts and leaders are brought front and center under the spotlight of societal need.

To revel in the spotlight and masquerade political plays as reasoned opinion is an abuse of trust and tarnishes the reputation of these experts. While the personal harm may be great, even worse is the harm to society. Krugman left the gloves on for that post, but should the posturing continue, I hope he ignores restraint and unleashes fury.

I expect that Obama and his team will have the confidence and security to cut to the truth. The real question is how will Congress respond? The last, Democratically-led Congress was weak. Hopefully now the leadership will be hitting their stride and will similarly be able to work for the public good. If, instead, politics trumps objectivity, we're all in trouble.

[Image by Warren Noronha, used under a Creative Commons license.]

Will W invade the sky to make sure the birds have no WMDs?

The Truce has been broken.

JERRY: You ran over some pigeons? How many?

GEORGE: What ever they had. Miranda thinks I'm a butcher but it's not my fault is it? Don't we have a deal with the pigeons?

JERRY: Of course. We have a deal. They get out of the way of our cars, we look the other way on the statue defecation.

GEORGE: Right! And these pigeons broke the deal. I will not accept the blame for this.

If anyone wants to shoot some damn pigeons, (those mutated scavengers, flying rats, vectors for disease), now is the time. Just watch your back.

And speaking of backs, it's amazing that no one on the plane was killed. Then again, according to Kramer the East River, though disgusting and toxic, has healing powers. Maybe the Hudson's waters are also magic...

[Image via flickr]

Caught Frost/Nixon yesterday. It's the most entertaining film about the making of an interview that you're likely to see.* Yes, the interview is important, but director Ron Howard made the issues around funding, preparation and distribution as close to a suspense-filled story as is reasonably possible.

The key moment of the 1977 interview, and the key to this film, is Nixon's response to questions about Watergate. The only time he answered direct questions about Watergate, Nixon stated that he made mistakes, likely broke laws, tarnished the office of the President specifically and our system of democracy generally, but still believed that anything a President does to serve his country is legal.

I'm interested in seeing how the movie's portrayal stacks up to the real interviews, released on DVD earlier this month. I also want to check out Charlie Rose's interviews about the movie with Ron Howard and Frank Langella, the actor portraying Nixon in the dramatization.

Having just returned from watching the movie, I opened my Wind and pointed Chrome to the NY Times. One of their top stories discussed the exit interviews being given by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. While Bush at least admits that he was unprepared for war, Cheney is completely unapologetic.

Mr. Cheney, by contrast, is unbowed, defiant to the end. He called the Supreme Court “wrong” for overturning Bush policies on detainees at Guantánamo Bay; criticized his successor, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and defended the harsh interrogation technique called waterboarding, considered by many legal authorities to be torture.

“I feel very good about what we did,” the vice president told The Washington Times, adding, “If I was faced with those circumstances again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”

It's been said many times before, but Cheney believes that the President is above the law when serving his country. I think Cheney would say that the executive must be unfettered by the law when protecting America... but the result is the same either way. In fact, it's clear that Cheney believes Nixon didn't go far enough, that he never should have felt guilty or admitted to anything.

Today, Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history, says he has no advice for VP-elect Biden, and clearly states that he authorized torture (or, as is the official term, "enhanced interrogation") of "terror suspects." He characterizes his decision as making the hard choice, and asks us to take it on faith that his action has made America safer.

Assuming that Cheney's statement is correct, even Nixon would ask: what point is there in acting to protect America if that act undercuts the very tenents upon which the country has been built and claims to hold high for the world as its banner ideals?

* If you saw and enjoyed Frost/Nixon, you'll also enjoy Fog of War, the brilliant film by Errol Morris centering around his interviews with Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy.

[Image via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.]

I hate the omnipresent announcements and signs in most areas of major travel, such as airports and trains, about making sure we pay attention to our luggage or report any suspicious activity. They sow fear and paranoia while enforcing stereotypes, and do so in the name of preventing a possible act which is so unlikely to happen that it should be laughable.

An article in the NY Times took a look at one such sign posted on the MTA. More specifically, it was the second run of the "keep your eyes open" MTA sign. The sequel. Part II: "The Search For More Terror."

After 9/11, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority coined the slogan, “If you see something, say something,” and put it on posters encouraging subway and bus riders to call a police counterterrorism hot line if they encountered anything suspicious. Then, last July, the authority trumpeted results on new posters and in television ads: “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.”

But the new posters, also placed in the commuter railroad trains, left out two things: What, exactly, did those 1,944 New Yorkers see, and what did they say? Presumably, no active terror plots were interrupted, or that would have been announced by the authorities.

Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.

The vast majority of calls had nothing to do with the transit system.

Great article. Even better, the article inspired a t-shirt mocking the sign. Buy it here. My favorite, of course, is the MF Doom version.

Admiral William “Fox” Fallon resigned as head of CentCom on Tuesday, reportedly in protest over the President’s push for war with Iran. Yet this was barely reported. Instead, the Spitzer scandal dominated the headlines. Why? Because people love them some drama, and the Spitzer drama was the tastiest kind of all.

I love everything about the Spitzer Sex Scandal. He’s a “man of the people” spending more money for an hour of sex than most people pay for their second car. He’s been trying to collect New York State sales taxes from internet retailers, literally nickel and diming his constituents, while he patronizes mob-run blackmarkets. Most ironic of all, the same abuses of the Fourth Amendment he championed as a zealous crime-fighter now have been used against him to destroy his life and career. You just can’t get better value for your entertainment dollar than in New York politics.

Meanwhile, the guy in charge of everything from Mombasa to Ust Kamenogorsk, including Darfur, the Horn of Africa, Iran, Iraq, all the ’stans’ from Afghan to Uzbek, and everyone of Israel’s neighbors, the guy in charge of US military operations in the largest contiguous “hot zone” on the planet, well he just had a fight with the President and walked out. I’d like to know what’s up with that, but I keep getting distracted.

Also see: Fallon's Exit Provokes Concern on Bush's Iran Policy

Well, C finally took a minute to hit up Google and was rewarded with the answer (via Yelp):

Every Tuesday at noon, San Francisco tests the Outdoor Warning System. During the test the siren emits a 15 second alert tone. In an actual emergency, the siren tone will cycle repeatedly for 5 minutes. Should you hear the sirens at any time other than Tuesday at noon, go indoors and immediately tune to a news source such as KCBS 740 AM, or other local media stations.