inkdroid

It’s great when our system of government works like it is supposed to. freedom_of_information_act++.

Not only does the Internet change everything, but it makes some good things work even better.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who was immediately reminded of this when the NSA spying story broke.

If you are interested in the perspective of a computer security specialist definitely take a look at what Bruce Scheneier has been writing. Schneier’s theory on why Bush needed to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Security Court is pretty harrowing.

The NSA’s ability to eavesdrop on communications is exemplified by a technological capability called Echelon. Echelon is the world’s largest information “vacuum cleaner,” sucking up a staggering amount of voice, fax, and data communications — satellite, microwave, fiber-optic, cellular and everything else — from all over the world: an estimated 3 billion communications per day. These communications are then processed through sophisticated data-mining technologies, which look for simple phrases like “assassinate the president” as well as more complicated communications patterns.

Supposedly Echelon only covers communications outside of the United States. Although there is no evidence that the Bush administration has employed Echelon to monitor communications to and from the U.S., this surveillance capability is probably exactly what the president wanted and may explain why the administration sought to bypass the FISA process of acquiring a warrant for searches.

Honestly, this kind of behavior from the Bush Administration isn’t at all surprising given their “go it alone” attitude. However I’m really dissapointed that the ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees didn’t make noise–any noise. I imagine they are bound by some oath or whatnot…but what good are checks and balances if they don’t work properly?

Indeed, a recent article from the NYTimes indicates that Schenier’s theory may in fact be, umm fact:

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

I’m really worried that we’re not teetering on a slippery slope but are actually in free fall. It appears that telecommunications companies are helping feed data mining operations at the NSA in real time. Perhaps they have a googlish front end where ‘professionals’ can type in ‘keywords’ and hit “I’m feeling lucky” and get a list of phone conversations or emails.

The Bush Administration’s prolific use of “fear” as an policy wedge is extremely dangerous. As Roosevelt famously said in a time of national crisis:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

On a somewhat lighter note, Schneier linked to a little trick devised by Richard M. Smith which allows you to detect if the NSA is monitoring your email communications. As my friend Ed Silva pointed out in IM:

I wouldn’t try it if you are planning on flying.

Uh, yeah I was planning on going to code4lib 2006 in a few months….maybe I’ll wait.

Umm, wow! Adrian Holovaty announced the Washington Post Congressional Votes Database. This site is of important for at least two reasons:

• it offers RSS feeds for tracking the voting of your house/senate representative
• it is powered by Python and the Django web framework.

As far as the RSS goes I just pulled up Dick Durbin’s recent votes and there were over 20 events since 11/17/2005, whereas the comparable service from GovTrack had only one event since then.

After the election I daydreamed about somehow getting involved in the political process in a technical way…which is how I found my way to GovTrack, who are essentially doing very elaborate screen scraping of the Thomas database at the Library of Congress. One thing I really like about the GovTrack project is they are making their data available as RDF, for downstream applications. Adrian’s work seems to draw on a richer data source, as I imagine is the case at a place like the Post. All I can say is well done, and damn…you’ve only been there for a couple months right? Talk about hitting the ground running.

At the recent Snakes and Rubies Adrian indicated that there was going to be some huge Django related news. When the voting db hit my Instant Messenger, IRC client and RSS aggregator I thought that this was it. But according to Adrian there’s something bigger in the works…

I was so pleased to read recently that there are others who find it appalling that the Kansas School Board isn’t considering teaching the solid scientific evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If the statistics on pirates and global warming aren’t enough to convince you, I have a little story to relate. One night I was driving along the road, and I saw some strange lights in the clouds. At first I thought it might be an airplane, but when I pulled over and got out I caught the aroma of spaghetti sauce and cooked pasta. I looked at my shirt, and didn’t see any spaghetti stains so I immediately thought that it had been the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the clouds. The next day I decided to hire an artist to draw what I imagined the Flying Spaghetti Monster to look like, lurking in the clouds. The result is above, and it’s *exactly* like the one I have seen reported elsewhere! Since I paid for this artist to do the picture, it is obviously scientifically accurate. I hope that this leaves no doubt in your mind, that FSM is not only a reality, but a very cool one indeed.

GovTrack has done some awesome work generating publicly available machine readable data for US government information. After the last election I decided that I really wanted to get involved in some sort of volunteer technology/political activity, so I started googling and found GovTrack pretty much just starting up. Now there is a loose affiliation of similar sites (including GovTrack) called Ogdex who are attempting to foster the collection of publicly available government information. In particular there has been some talk on the govtrack discussion list about local efforts to add state data to the collection of federal data…and even bounties for getting state data collection going. I’m going to take a stab at writing some scraping utilities for gathering together Illinois data and will report back with how it goes. If you are interested in helping out details are available.

Update: Joshua just set up a new drupal site for govtrack development.