Lee.org

Crap like this:

(audio version)

 
Letter of the Law
May 09, 2008
Last November the FBI used a top secret National Security Letter to demand user information from the Internet Archive, an online library. Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle decided not to comply. Instead he sued and the FBI backed down. Kahle describes what it’s like to challenge an NSL.

BOB GARFIELD: Last fall, an online library of webpages called the Internet Archive received a National Security Letter, or NSL, from the FBI. It’s a secret demand for information, and when the government issues one the recipient can’t talk about it, can’t even acknowledge that it exists, except to his or her lawyer.

In this case, the FBI wanted the email address, contact information and usage information for an Internet Archive user. The Archive chose not to cooperate and instead was the third recipient of a National Security Letter to fight the government in court. And this week, the government settled.

By now, Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle is well versed in all things NSL, but last November, when he first heard from his lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the FBI’s demand, he faced a serious decision.

BREWSTER KAHLE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation — it’s like an ACLU for the digital world — wasn’t able to call us and tell us about it. They actually had to physically come over because as part of the gag order, the lawyers representing us couldn’t use the telephone to discuss this.

So the EFF lawyers came over and talked to me about it, and it then put me under a gag order. I couldn’t discuss it with the board, any of the other staff members. I couldn’t even discuss the issue with my wife.

I had to make a decision of whether to give patron information over to the FBI or do what libraries do and protect their patrons and go against the United States government.

BOB GARFIELD: It’s hard to even fathom the frustration that you must have felt. But, unlike almost everybody else who has gotten such a letter, you did something about it. How did that play out?

BREWSTER KAHLE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, with the ACLU and the Internet Archive, decided to file suit to go and stop this demand and get some judicial review. If a judge had gone and said that they need certain information, then we would have tried to comply. But this has gone completely outside of the judicial system as it stood.

So we fought back against it, and not only did they decide then to withdraw their information request, they didn’t want a judge to decide whether this whole law was constitutional. So they wanted to settle. The only way that we would be willing to settle is so that we could talk about this and remove the gag order.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, previously, a recipient of a National Security Letter did litigate the matter and did win, and the court ruled that such letters are unconstitutional. But the government appealed that ruling, so the final result is pending.

In the meantime, what you’ve done is published what you call [LAUGHS] a cookbook for how to deal with an NSL, should you be unfortunate enough to receive one.

BREWSTER KAHLE: The first step is to go to one of these pro bono firms, like EFF and ACLU, and you can file a lawsuit. It’s legal, perfectly legal to push back on these, to get a court to go and say whether it’s actually required.

And if you go through that, in every circumstance they’ve been washed away.

So there’s now a cookbook of the forms that they use and how you can go about pushing back on these — is now all up on public websites.

BOB GARFIELD: When you spoke to the EFF about this and discussed your options, did you consider the idea of just going public and risking prosecution from the outset?

BREWSTER KAHLE: No. The jail sentence is kind of onerous, but the wondrous thing is the EFF and the ACLU didn’t blink. They said, of course, we’re going to help you with this. Because imagine what the alternative would be. If I’m running a library, I can’t even tell anybody about this. If I started incurring legal bills, I’d have to explain it to the board. There’d be no way to deal with getting this in front of a judge without incurring tens of thousands of dollars.

BOB GARFIELD: And yet, when the Congress learned that the FBI has been issuing these letters indiscriminately, Congress didn’t seem to get all that exercised about it. I mean, for example, this provision to date has not been repealed. Do you know of any attempts in Congress to deal with this particularly terrifying tool for a federal police agency?

BREWSTER KAHLE: In 2006, they tried to make some exemptions for libraries, but then a library gets served with one of these things. It’s still happening. And, unfortunately, because of the hyper-secrecy of this, there have been 200,000 of these requests over a course of four years. So 50,000 a year are being issued, and there are only three that have actually been challenged.

BOB GARFIELD: The FBI apparently, when they issued the letter to you, did not regard the Internet Archive as a library, I guess. I mean, I don’t know what they thought of your vast digital repository of — is it every page that has ever appeared [LAUGHS] on the Internet?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: But they weren’t thinking of it as a library. So when they settled with you, was it because the scales had finally fallen from their eyes and they realized that they had overreached and abused the National Security Letter privilege or because they realized they’d been caught on a technicality — oh, I guess he’s a library after all?

BREWSTER KAHLE: We don’t know. The speculation is that they just don’t want these cases brought before a judge. And there are perfectly reasonable warrants and subpoena approaches for getting information that you need. These are just a shortcut that they use currently, and they’re using it wildly. And that’s the reason why we pushed back, so that people can start to see what it is that’s going on out there.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Brewster. Well, thank you very much.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Thank you. Appreciate the time.

BOB GARFIELD: Brewster Kahle is director and co-founder of the Internet Archive.

and this:

(audio version)

Scott Bloch(ed)
May 09, 2008
The Office of the Special Counsel is supposed to protect government whistleblowers, but watchdog groups charge that under director Scott Bloch the agency has been ineffectual and worse. The FBI raided Bloch’s office this week amid these allegations. Jeff Ruch, director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, describes the investigation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. Three years ago, we interviewed Scott Bloch, Chief of the Office of Special Counsel. That’s the government agency that is supposed to shield civic-minded government whistleblowers from retaliation. We had him on to answer charges from watchdog groups that he was burying investigations and politicizing his office. He denied it.

SCOTT BLOCH: Sometimes I wonder if you have to fall through the rabbit hole to live in Washington. Things seem to be turned on their head in the media. The truth is I took an oath of office to defend whistleblowers and to take the meritorious claims and push them to the limit. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But controversy once again swirls around Bloch. This week he was back in the news, when FBI agents raided his home and office, seized computers and issued subpoenas to 17 employees. One of the organizations that first blew the whistle on Bloch was Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Executive director Jeff Ruch says his group’s complaint ultimately led to the FBI raid.

JEFF RUCH: The Special Counsel is, as we understand it, being charged with obstructing the investigation into our complaint.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What was your original complaint back in 2005?

JEFF RUCH: It was a multipart complaint that involved purging the staff, retaliating against whistleblowers, issuing illegal gag orders, improper refusal to enforce laws and politicizing the Hatch Act enforcement.

We filed this complaint back in March, 2005, and we still don’t have the results of that investigation. What we have is this interim step where the FBI has now intervened.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So do you suspect that there was actually criminal misconduct going on in the Office of Special Counsel?

JEFF RUCH: There have been many media reports about his efforts to obstruct the investigation, prevent his staff from interviewing with investigators as well as destroying documents on office computers. All of those could potentially fall under the realm of criminal misconduct — so, yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Another one of Bloch’s responsibilities was to enforce the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity. But wasn’t one of the principal charges against him that he politicized his own office?

JEFF RUCH: Yes. What he was accused of doing by his own staff was blocking investigations of prominent Republicans, like Condoleezza Rice, and pushing investigations in the activities of prominent Democrats, like Senator John Kerry.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Before we go any further, what does the Office of Special Counsel do? Is this really the high moral accountability office?

JEFF RUCH: He is supposed to be the guardian of the merit system, the merit system being the principles that govern federal service. And it’s a very important office that Congress invested with a certain amount of independence in that the person cannot be removed by the whim of the president. He may only be removed by the president for cause.

Mr. Bloch has told people that the White House has twice previously asked him to resign, and he’s refused.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Really? Why do you think it asked him to resign?

JEFF RUCH: Scott Bloch has been accusing the White House of being part of a gay rights conspiracy to persecute him. He took a position that the laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation couldn’t be enforced, and it was a position that, from what we could tell, didn’t match with the law and was reversed on the order of the White House.

And the Bush Administration’s not really known to be a proponent of what some would call the gay rights agenda, and so it took a fairly extreme position for their intervention. That appeared to start a cascade of bad blood that may have culminated in recent events.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We spoke to you in 2005. You said then that Bloch had dismissed 1,000 whistleblower cases without investigating them. Did that pattern continue despite the complaints against his office?

JEFF RUCH: Well, yes. Even though it’s the Office of the Special Counsel, not once during Scott Bloch’s tenure did they go to an administrative body and represent a whistleblower. So they never acted as a counsel.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Not one time?

JEFF RUCH: Not one time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You would say, then, that the people that he was supposed to protect, that is, government employees who are trying to blow the whistle on government misconduct, could find very little aid or comfort in his office.

JEFF RUCH: Whistleblowers have, in essence, been abandoned by the Office of Special Counsel, and never in the history of the federal government, in my view, have whistleblowers needed a champion more than during the Bush years.

We’re taking the position not only should Scott Bloch be fired but Congress should consider abolishing the office and starting over again. It’s to the point where this institution is now so compromised and distracted and paralyzed that it may be worse than nothing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If you really think that maybe the office should be eliminated and we should start all over again, what kind of replacement office would you create?

JEFF RUCH: We would design a system that would give the whistleblower much more autonomy over their own case and fate rather than depending upon a federal official to come in and save them, if you gave them the options – that would range from mediation to litigation to resolve their complaints – and take the remaining functions of the Special Counsel and put it in agencies that are competent, like the GAO, or moving Hatch Act prosecutions back to the Justice Department.

Certainly for the next few months, you’re not going to see anything productive out of an office where a fifth of the remaining staff have also gotten subpoenas to testify before a grand jury against the person who’s supposed to be supervising them. And if you’re a whistleblower that depends upon this institution, it’s just a recipe for disaster.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jeff, thank you very much.

JEFF RUCH: You’re welcome.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jeff Ruch is the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

A close friend found out that they need a dental implant, some crowns replaced, deep cleaning and some fillings repaired. The total bill will be in the $10,000 range. Money is pretty tight. Should they get this work done via medical tourism?

The whole thing (airfare and a week of luxury accomodations included) might cost $4,000 overseas.

Of course, there are issues like that right now it’s difficult to get to Bumrungrad hospital in Thailand because of political unrest…. hmmm. :-(

My sister and Niece Julia at Rockefeller Center Sunday. And my view of them via a webcam :-)

A few days ago I came up with the idea of a T. Pen. More to follow.

Ok, I might end up embarrassing myself on this one. But I’ll go ahead and put myself out there. I wanted to make mead but I wanted to do it in the laziest way possible… just to see how it goes. Maybe it will come out like crap. No fear.

It took me much longer to write this post than it did to actually make the mead.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 tsp of Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 1/4 tsp of Yeast Nutrient made by Brewmaster of San Leandro, from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 1/4 tsp of Red Star Cote des Blancs yeast from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 3.7 lbs Raw Blackberry honey from Rainbow Grocery. $3.59/lb flower honey
• empty glass 1 gallon bottle (from this organic apple juice they have at Rainbow Grocery)
• empty 64 oz juice container from Trader Joes
• 1 gallon Crystal Geyser bottled water

What I did:

1. At the store, I put about 32 oz of bulk honey in a 64 oz container, total 3.7 lbs.
2. Last night in the kitchen I put 1 splash of bleach in the glass bottle and filled it with water. I let it sit for 20 minutes.
3. I emptied the glass bottle and filled it a couple times with tap water, swishing it around a bit
4. I poured a bit of the bottled water into the honey bottle and shook it around so the honey would flow out of the bottle better.
5. I poured the honey into the 1 gallon glass bottle and filled it to about 3/4 with bottled water.
6. I put 1/4 tsp of Yeast Nutrient in the glass bottle
7. I capped and shook the bottle for about 10 full seconds to mix it all up
8. I put 1/4 tsp of Premier Cuvee yeast in the bottle and shook it again
9. I stuck the rubber stopper and airlock on it (it didn’t fit well so I used lots of packing tape to attach it :-( )
10. I stuck it in the corner inside a plastic bucket (to catch any honey goo that comes out if it gets too bubbly)

Done

I had some leftover honey in the 64 oz container… I’m not sure how much because it was mixed with water… maybe 0.5 pounds. I filled the container with the rest of the bottled water, 1/4 tsp of nutrient (oop, I probably should have added 1/8 tsp) and 1/4 tsp of Cote des Blancs. I splashed it back and forth into the now-empty water bottle a few times to try and get more oxygen into it (I read in a couple places that helps) and stuck a stopper and air lock in it.

Both bottles are now sitting next to my bed.
Research time: 3+ hours
Actual preparation time: 15 minutes

We’ll see how it comes out in 6 months or so…

The sites I found most useful:

San Francisco Brewcraft, 1555 clement st, San Francisco, CA 94118 in the Richmond betw 16th & 17th Ave.  415-751-9338
http://www.otolith.com/howitt/mead.html
http://www.gotmead.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=14
http://www.doctorbeer.com/joyce/mead/BeesLees.txt

Trav makes some excellent commentary about government intervention after the Katrina hurricane.

for want of a heavy rain a few billion dollars were lost

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05t…

many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.

Oh, good, a new victim class, ripe for dependency on the federal government, and the leftists who run it, and who profit from broken people and broken habits!

You know what the Germans were doing three years after we smashed their state, fire-bombed Dresden, and occupied their country?

They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Europe.

You know what the Japanese were doing three years after we burned Tokyo to the ground, nuked Hiroshima, nuked Nagasaki, and killed the better part of a generation of young men?

They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Asia.

You know what the residents of New Orleans are doing three years after it  rained  ?

Bitching, and moaning, and not accomplishing jack.

Ptooi.

For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was expelled from her Baton Rouge school for fighting and is now on a waiting list for a G.E.D. program, what was lost may be irretrievable.

I blame Bush.

More than 30,000 former trailer residents landed in apartments paid for by the federal government until March 2009,

WT* ?!?!?!?

I’m glad my tax dollars are paying for people so stupid that they lived below sea level to now live in taxpayer funded housing for four years.

I’ve read and heard several reports of people that were put into FEMA Katrina  relocation camps  trailer parks. Every report I heard was mind-bendingly bad. For example: suicide attempts at the parks are 79 times the national average.

Here is a local copy of the NPR radio  audio story, Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park. it’s 20 minutes long.

Here is a transcript excerpt.  

Look on the NPR website for more stories..  Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park

All Things Considered, August 8, 2007 · The first morning of my visit to Scenic Trails, I was walking the path between some trailers when I bumped into a man named Tim Szepek. He was young, tall, and solidly good-looking. I asked if I could speak to him for a moment and he agreed. We found a spot of shade beneath a tree, and I started with what I considered a casual warm-up.

“What’s it like to live around here?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I’ll be honest.”

“Ain’t a day goes by when I don’t think about killing myself.”

And so began my time in Scenic Trails, a FEMA trailer park deep in the Mississippi woods where 100 families have lived in near isolation for close to two years.

Though Szepek was the first resident to tell me he wanted to commit suicide, he certainly wasn’t the last. The day I spoke with him, three other residents confided the same.

The second person was Stephanie Sigur, a 28-year-old mother of two. She was sitting in front of her trailer at a picnic table, her daughter on her lap, when she explained that if it weren’t a sin, she would have blown her brains out months ago.

“I know it’s a bad thing to say because I’m a parent,” she told me as her toddler played with her hair, “but I can’t live like this no more.”

Stephanie Sigur and Tim Szepek aren’t alone. According to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi’s parks are 79 times higher than the national average. Major depression is seven times the national rate.

When I first read those numbers, I found them hard to believe. But after three days at Scenic Trails, they made a lot more sense.

The residents there, in essence, are trapped. It is no longer possible for them to live outside the trailer parks. Prior to Katrina, most of the people who now live in the parks were renters.

Along the Mississippi coast, a family of four could rent a two- or three-bedroom apartment or small home for around $500 a month. But when the storm wiped the Mississippi coast clean, it took out all the housing infrastructure that supported these people. Most of them are minimum-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Today, a two- or three-bedroom apartment in Hancock County, where Scenic Trails is located, costs $800, $900, even $1,000 a month. This is an impossible amount of money for the people who live in the parks, and there is no immediate end in sight. FEMA says it would like to close the parks, but state and federal government plans to rebuild low-income housing for Mississippi coast residents have yet to break ground. Housing experts says it will probably take years to produce enough low-cost housing to move people out of the parks.

And so they are stuck. And the place they are stuck is not the kind of place you would want to spend an extended amount of time. For two years, many have lived in travel trailers intended for weekend use. Families of four housed in a space the size of most people’s living rooms.

Worse, as time wears on, the communities around them seem to be falling into a kind of madness. At Scenic Trails, almost everyone at the camp has been burglarized at least once. Meth and cocaine addiction is rampant, and residents seem to be turning against one another.

Recently, the park has seen a rash of animal mutilations. One resident told me that her cat had come home bleeding – a long, thin razor cut along its leg. Another resident said his dog’s throat had been cut, and several people reported that someone in the camp had been feeding anti-freeze to dogs.

No one seemed to have a particular suspect in mind. There was no specific theory of why. That was just the way things went at the camp nowadays. With no way to leave, people were angry and frustrated, and so they act out.

On the animals. On each other. On themselves.

The government is not helping by “helping”.

Redbull had a soap box derby a couple weeks ago on Dolores in front of Dolores Park. I walked over with Rick.

It was fun :-)

That soap box car was a boat-thing. About 5 seconds after I snapped this image, the car bumped into a hay bale and the thing frickin SHATTERED into a milltion pieces. It was a wonder to behold!

Watch this

Yes, the source material The Daily Show used from Fox News is real. Here is the original Fox News broadcast on Youtube:

(local archive)

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

It is a discussion with Fox News Chief Carl Cameron and Bill O’Reilly (Daily Show quotes begin at about 40 seconds)

It’s a bit insane that Bill O’Reilly would try to defend a Vice Presidential candidate that, to his knowledge, could not name all of the countries in North America. O’Reilly said (starting at 1:53 in the video) “You can tutor people and you can get people up to speed on the basics… here’s the government, here’s the exceptionalism that we’re talking about, here’s the world map…”  

Umm, he’s trying to defend a VP candidate that, to his knowledge, doesn’t know how many countries are in North America. I’m sorry, that’s just not defensible. It’s fine to challenge the veracity of the claim but, I’m sorry, if it’s true that she can’t name the countries are in North America (that would be, the US, Canada and Mexico), then she shouldn’t be defended. So why is he defending her in this situation? That’s the question.

Note that I’m critisizing a couple things here: First, that Palin isn’t qualified (which might not be the case, the claims of her lack of knowledge isn’t entirely proven). Second, that O’Reilly would use the defense that he did, saying that it’s OK if she didn’t have the knowledge. And then of course there’s the whole media cover-up which was humorously hightlighted by the Daily Show.

Jon Stewart, “Why are we just hearing about this now?”

Fox News Chief Carl Cameron,  “Well, I wish I could have told you back at the time  but all of it was put off the record until after the election.”

Yipe. That’s not very Fair or Balanced.

Update 11-14-08: Some/most/all? of the digging of Palin are unfounded. The leaks about Palin not knowing about Africa and possibly other items were faked by a person going by the name of  Martin Eisenstadt. Google for him and his issues. My commentary about O’Reilly and Fox News stand firm.

I know that in high school and through my early 20s I held my stress in my throat. When I’d get stressed, when I had to do something nerve-wracking, My vocal cords and neck would get tight. My voice would get tired quickly under stressful conditions (like public speaking, pthaw).

Later, I recall holding quite a bit of my stress in my shoulders. Right in the spot between my shoulder blades would tighten.

This week I had some stress and it manifested in mid-back pain. About 8 inches below the spot between my shoulder blades. A very sharp nerve pain between two vertebra. I sat down to put my shoes on, slipped my right shoe partially on, crossed my right leg over my left, put my left index finger in the heal of my right shoe to slip the heal in and when I applied a little pulling force, that spot between my vertebra screamed. It was like the (very slight) sheering force was going to tear me apart.

I sat upright and held there for a minute, staring at my shoes, wondering how the hell I was going to get them on. Joy.

I resolved to gently work through the pain. The shoes went on and I went out.

My folks got me one of these when I was a kid. It was wonderful. The Walgreens down the street is selling this, the original Popeil Pocket Fisherman.

Ron Popeil, you are in my pantheon.