For all the billions we dump into intelligence gathering on friend, enemy, and citizen, and basically anyone with email or a phone, for all the pissing done on the 4th Amendment, the whole ISIL/ISIS crisis in Iraq seems to have been a complete surprise to our political masters. Perhaps they’re too busy spying on Congress […]
Much like in Gulf War I, when we were looking for WMDs that we sold to Iraq during their war with Iran; in Gulf War III, we’re destroying weapons we gave to Iraq after Mission Accomplished in Gulf War II. It’s just the circle of life — if you’re a defense contractor. After all, someone […]
I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you, that the person responsible for black prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, and the destruction of evidence would stoop so low as to spy on Congress. He is, after all, a person of moral rectitude. Three guesses whether anyone will lose their job or be prosecuted for this, much […]
The real reason behind the increasing pressure for laws mandating cell phone kill switches? It's not stemming a wave of crime. The real thing it's killing is burners. If you have to have the ability to shut down a phone remotely, then you have to be able to identify who can shut it down. So […]
Microsoft lays off 18000. In other news, Microsoft sponsors 19972 H1B (and other) visa employees between 2011 and 2013. I’m sure it’s just coincidence the two numbers are so close.
Someone is developing an algorithm that finds not the shortest, or quickest, or cheapest route, but the most scenic. But what I want, having been burned twice in the last month by LA traffic construction, is one that lets you rule out routes. “Siri. The 5 North is closed. Find a way to get me […]
People are always telling me how great Van Morrison is, but invariably the folks who choose VM on the jukebox always choose Steve Miller next. So I ain't buying it.
Corporations are people, as are unborn fetii – women, not so much. Sorry about that. This then is totally predictable: “We’re not opposed to the practice of protecting and celebrating life set forth by your quaint, human Biblical standards,” said Ullman last week on Lou Dobbs Tonight. “But JCPenney is not that sort of company, […]
Once again, the failure of the MSM in general, and NPR in particular, in the simplest sense of not asking the next question. The obvious question. NPR is running a series on what one might find out about someone if they eavesdropped on them. Like, say, the NSA has been doing to the whole world. […]
There’s a new movie popping up on Netflix starring not just one, but TWO of my if-he/she-is-in-it-don’t-go-see-it actors: The Frozen Ground. Without actually looking at that IMDB page, I’m guessing it was S2V. Yeah, Cusack has done some things I liked (Grifters), but I think the last one was Grosse Point Blank. Even though when […]
Tagged moviesThe NYT has a new editor, after their botched and sexist firing of the first woman editor of the NYT. Of course, a previous editor spiked one of the first NSA stories in 2004. The new editor has a history of spiking stories about the NSA too, in 2007. “[W]e could not figure out what […]
Tagged Dark stateBig Brother is already using drones to spy on everyone: Sgt. Douglas Iketani acknowledges that his agency hid the experiment to avoid public opposition. “This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”he said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so […]
Those words are not a euphemism for “we’re going to make things better.”
I gave it six months. It didn’t even take five. The non-professional, non-trained, non-police TSA now wants armed TSA agents at checkpoints. In addition to the Stasi papers-please and prison patdowns, now we’ll have ill-trained guards armed with automatic weapons. Welcome to your third-world country. Like the TSA causes more crime than it prevents terrorism, […]
Who’s overseeing who? And now the spies are writing the legislation that affects them. Let’s see – the spies are spying on the legislative body that oversees them, and writing the legislation for that legislative body. If it wasn’t clear to you before, They have the goods on Congress. Now They’re not even trying to […]