From a 1997 article entitled “Keep Big Brother’s Hands off the Internet.”
The Clinton administration would like the Federal government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer communications. The FBI wants access to decode, digest, and discuss financial transactions, personal e-mail, and proprietary information sent abroad — all in the name of national security. To accomplish this, President Clinton would like government agencies to have the keys for decoding all exported U.S. software and Internet communications.
This proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans’ privacy, in addition to tampering with the competitive advantage that our U.S. software companies currently enjoy in the field of encryption technology. Not only would Big Brother be looming over the shoulders of international cyber-surfers, but the administration threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.
There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?
The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.
So who is this crusading author, this champion of privacy rights and individual liberties?
This definitely qualifies for the, “Are they out of their frickin minds?” category. The geniuses in the Bush admin are wooing Iraqi Ayatollah Muhammad Bakir al-Hakim, based in Iran, as part of their attempt to go after Saddam Hussein.
Let’s get this straight. They are backing an Ayatollah, backed by the Ayatollahs they consider part of an Axis of Evil for overthrowing the secular dictator they put and kept in power, in order to help overthrow another part of the Axis of Evil led by a secular dictator they put and kept in power.
This week’s cartoon refers to the military discharge of six “highly trained” Arabic linguists. A couple of readers have pointed out that these guys were still at the Defense Language Institute when they were discharged, so “highly trained” may have been overstating the case. It’s hard to tell from this story the extent of their training, though the dischargees who are specifically discussed seem to consider themselves proficient (and it’s probably fair to assume that the DLI is not a haven for slackers). In any case, the point I was trying to make still stands: there’s a desperate shortage of Arabic translators, and for obvious reasons we need as many as we can get right now, so kicking these guys out because of their sexual orientation was incredibly stupid.
Afterthought: perhaps some of my readers in the military — and I do have them, believe it or not — can help set the record straight on this one (no pun intended this time).
Update: military readers respond (identifying details removed for obvious reasons).
Here is my take on the situation. I am a Sergeant in
the Army, stationed in ____________. I’ve been
in for ____ years. Your readers are right, they were
not “highly trained”, but were in the process of
becoming so. They were at the DLI to learn Arabic for
their new jobs as Arabic translators. DLI is no place
for slackers, as the course’s 68% pass rate attests
(I’ve never heard of an Army school with such a low
passing rate). The bottom line is, as you said, the
Army discharged 6 soldiers from an MOS (Military
Occupational Specialty) with a critical shortage of
soldiers for a poor reason (in my opinion, anyway, not
that I’m allowed to have one).
More interesting to me is the fact that we only know
that two soldiers were actually gay. The other seven
all told the commander that they were. Teling your
commander you are gay is the easiest way to get out of
the Army. After the murder of the gay soldier at Fort
Campbell, commanders want to get gay people out as
quickly as possible so that they don’t get killed. If
you tell your commander you are gay, you will get
discharged (honorably) in 72 hours. In comparison, my
friend is so injured that he hasn’t been able to carry
a weapon, march, run, or do any exercises for over two
years, and he will not be discharged for another 3
months. I suspect that they realized “Oh shit! I’m
going to Iraq to get gassed and die!” and decided to
get out ASAP.
Anyway, these are just my impressions on the story.
As long as the military has this assinine policy in
effect (Which we wouldn’t if Clinton had Harry
Truman’s balls and forced us to accept gays), stories
like this will happen.
* * *
I just saw your blog comment about the linguists and the complaint
that they were still at DLI. I just got off of active duty and spent
my last year at a Military Intelligence battalion and some of my best
friends were arabic linguists.
Now, this is no infantry unit. These guys sit around in Hummers all
day and interept transmissions. The fact that they were gay would put
very little stress on the soldiers around them in this environment.
Now, in defense of the armed forces, they have to uphold standards.
If someone lets it be known that they’re gay, then they have to be
discharged. That’s just the way the regulations read at the moment.
Of course, the current administration could change that, but there’s
no way Bush would do that no matter how much we needed these soldiers.
The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian government — using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat — sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.
Lou Dobbs has a poll on his site, which asks if you think the mainstream media is predominantly liberal, conservative, or neutral. As of this writing, at approximately 4 pm EST on Saturday, it’s running 65% liberal, 31% conservative, and 4% neutral.
Obviously the readers of thismodernworld.com have not yet had their say.
If you enjoyed that surreal Kikkoman cartoon that I linked to last week, then here’s a treasure trove for you (thanks for the tip to Sean Treacy).
And here’s a translation of the first cartoon, from a friend of reader Dallas Crum:
It came from the star of an soybean.
He is the messenger of justice.
Food will become very delicious if soy sauce is poured instantly.
Fly in dining out! It is mortal work Kikko-panch!
“fried egg … soy sauce is best.”
Show me Show you Kikkoman…
It came from the star of an soybean.
Funky that guy is Kikkoman.
Soy sauce is good for the body.
There is also a sterilization action.
It does not become a comparison in sauce and catsup.
It is mortal work Kikko beam!
“Therefore, it must also have been told to egg baking that soy sauce
was the best!”
Show me Show you Kikkoman…
This site makes no claim as to the accuracy of the above, but will brook no disagreement when it comes to Kikkoman’s soy-based goodness.
Despite my recent difference of opinion with Spinsanity, I remain supportive of their work. And I think they got it exactly right on the Daschle/Limbaugh thing:
While Daschle may feel there is a correlation between criticism by talk radio hosts and the number of threats he receives, there is no evidence suggesting that the hosts are the cause of the threats. Moreover, it is unreasonable to suggest that talking heads are responsible for the actions of a deranged few without specific proof that they have actively incited their actions.
Yet Limbaugh, especially, is guilty of extremely vicious rhetoric. Consider just a few examples from his frequent diatribes against Daschle over the last two years. On Nov. 15, he asserted that Daschle’s criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism amounted to “an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism,” called him “Hanoi Tom” and suggested that he is ” a disgrace to patriotism.” On other occasions, Limbaugh has suggested that “In essence, Daschle has chosen to align himself with the axis of evil” and has drawn an extended analogy between Daschle and Satan.
Pretty much what I’ve been thinking. You can’t hold Limbaugh responsible for the actions of his more insane listeners — unless you want to give up on the First Amendment entirely — but neither can you pretend that he’s just some sort of lovable harmless goofball. He spreads a lot of deliberate misinformation, and that’s what he needs to be held accountable for.
Just days ago, national security executives met secretly with airline CEOs to warn them that al-Qaida may be planning to fire shoulder-launched missiles at commercial jets in the U.S. There’s virtually no defense.
The Ministry of Truth. The Defense Department Information Awareness Office has been raising some eyebrows lately over its plan to collect and analyze a great deal of information about the formerly private lives of American citizens. The IAO list of proposed technologies consists mostly of things more or less related to the collection and interpretation of data, but also includes this odd item:
Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance.
Story telling and “truth maintenance” - the latter phrase would make Orwell jealous - are not, however, techniques of information gathering. Rather, these are elements of information manufacture, a function known as propaganda when not utilized by one’s own government. Call me suspicious, but somehow this makes me think that the IAO intends not only to collect information but to generate information too. That is, to fabricate and disseminate for public consumption stories that convey government-certified truth. The news media has provided this service to the administration pretty reliably for some time now, but maybe they’re ready to cut out the middleman.
UPDATE…”truth maintenance” may be less ominous than it sounds, according to Beard, who’s posted a correction:
Truth Maintenance: OOPS! No, I’m not referring to Object Oriented Programming Systems, I mean a big OOPS, as in my mistake! Darius Bacon, who knows his AI, has exposed a serious goof in my previous article - it turns out that truth maintenance is a well-known (except to me) Artificial Intelligence technique for pruning conflicting deduced or otherwise derived information from a knowledge base. So this particular sample technology from the IAO list, at least, is not as sinister as it sounds -it is legitimately a technique of information gathering, not dissemination.
I’m still a bit puzzled by the “storytelling” bit - this is an AI concept as well, but one that has to do with understanding how to generate a (necessarily) incomplete narrative that can still convey a message that is comprehensible to humans. I suppose that story telling technology could be used to expose gaps in available information - i.e. try to put what you know together as a story, and then see what’s missing - so I have to give this one the benefit of the doubt too.
That’s not to say that the information-gathering capability of the IAO is not seriously problematic, just that my conclusion that the IAO would be also engaging in propaganda was not well-founded. I feel like such a nimnoo. And for making this mistake in an article that’s been Tom Tomorrow’d, no less - I am sorry, sorry, sorry!
Hey, that’s the beauty of the blog — when you get it wrong, you can always set the record straight.
* * *
I’m playing hooky this morning, going to go catch a matinee of the new Bond film. True, I haven’t really, truly enjoyed one of these things in years — maybe going as far back as The Living Daylights, which I think is one of the more underrated entries — and this one will probably be no different, another heavy-handed, product-placement-laden spectacle which leaves me feeling logy and pummelled. And yet, I see a commercial with the cars racing on the ice and things exploding, and — most importantly — the Bond theme playing in the background…and I am inexorably drawn, like a moth to the flame. What can I say? Underneath it all, I am still a twelve year old boy.
UPDATE on Bond: big and bloated, but better than I expected. And now I’ve got to get some work done.
From a column by Doug Bandlow, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute (via Joe Conason, who asks why the anti-war right gets a free pass from the otherwise hysterical patriotism police):
Warns CIA Director George Tenet: “al-Qaeda is in an execution phase and intends to strike us both here and overseas.” An Italian investigator told Time magazine that al-Qaeda terrorists now “are better organized than at any point in the past year.” Muslim hatred of the West continues to grow. Palestinians and Israelis are at war. Islamic fundamentalists made dramatic electoral gains in Pakistan.
Why, then, the administration’s focus on Baghdad? Obviously Saddam is a monster. But Turkey treats its Kurds no better than does Iraq and Christian women are worse off in Saudi Arabia.
Baghdad has attacked its neighbors, but today is contained and constrained, far weaker than in 1990. Yes, Iraq deployed chemical weapons against Iran in war and maybe against the Kurds in civil war. But Saddam only used these weapons against defenseless adversaries. In contrast, the United States possesses thousands of nuclear warheads.
Baghdad is trying to develop an atomic bomb; so is North Korea, however. Brazil’s new leftist president-elect has expressed an interest in doing so. Islamic Pakistan already possesses nukes.
* * *
To not attack Iraq is “appeasement” and “moral cowardice,” charges Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation. Washington’s critics are against us and “with our enemies,” says Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.
In fact, opposition to the administration’s dangerous aggressiveness is simply good sense.
There is no more fundamental duty for government than to protect its people from outside threats. Yet President Bush admits, “We’ve got a long way to go” to defeat al-Qaeda. Making war on Iraq will make that defeat even more distant.
