genehack.org

….the rest of the story (with apologies to Paul…) Charlie Stross deconstructs the recent assassination via polonium-210 in London:

The point is, someone with access to fresh Polonium 210 (read: less than a year old, hot from the reactor) decided to use it to bump off an enemy.

And the terrorism alert status hasn’t risen a notch? Pull the other one.

Anyway, to the point: this wasn’t simply an assassination. There are any number of poisons out there that would do the job painfully well but much more rapidly, and without the same scope for a diplomatic incident. Likewise, a bullet to the back of the head would have worked just as well (as witness the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya).

What this is, is a warning: “we have the capability to detonate a dirty bomb in central London any time we feel like it, so don’t fuck with us”. (Just take Polonium and add a little TNT.)

So, first they win back the House, then Rummy jumps and/or gets pushed out the door, capped off by capturing the Senate. Not bad for a 2 day period, you crazy kids, not bad at all. I’m slightly happier than Medley reports she is, although at least part of that is willfully not thinking too much about the future and just enjoying the moment. This Billmon post captures a lot of my mood, roughly. There’s plenty of time in the next two years to dwell on how the Dems are screwing things up in their own way; for the moment, I’m trying to focus on the good news that things might not actually be as fucked up as they’ve seemed for the past couple three or four years (Marsellus Wallace comparisons notwithstanding, of course.)

I voted this morning on the way to work, after dropping off TheChild. TheWife had voted earlier at the same location, and called back to report that it had taken her about an hour to get through the line — so I was pleased that it only took me about five minutes. Diebold machine seemed to work correctly, but who knows what got written to that little card, or how it got counted once it got to the tabulator…

It’s around 2320 as I’m writing this; CNN called the House for the Dems about 15 minutes ago. It’s getting to be time for me to head to bed; here’s hoping that when I wake back up we’ve grabbed the Senate as well.

I haven’t been able to formulate anything approaching a coherent response to the Torture Bill — too overwhelming, too much outrage and indignation and sorrow. Making Light, however, had something to say that bears repeating:

ATTENTION US MILITARY PERSONNEL

You are not required to obey an unlawful order.

You are required to disobey an unlawful order.

(If you’re not sure how that relates to the Torture Bill, click through and read.)

I’m not registered with any party, so I didn’t vote in the primaries yesterday — there were a couple of Board of Election races I could have voted in, but I knew nothing about any of the candidates. TheWife voted in the morning, before work, and said that things were slow. And up Balmur-way, Avi Rubin was an election judge again — and it sounds like there’s a direct correlation between the amount of electronic gadgetry in the election process and how big a mess that election process is.

Unbelieveably awesome response to the War on (Some) Liquids from Kung Fu Monkey:

Osama Bin Laden got everything on his Christmas list after 9/11 — US out of Saudi Arabia; the greatest military in the world over-extended, pinned down and distracted; the greatest proponent of democracy suddenly alienated from its allies; a US culture verily eager to destroy freedoms that little scumfuck could never even dream to touch himself — I would like to deny him the last little check on the clipboard, i.e. constant terror. I panic, they win. To coin a phrase, Osama Bin Laden can suck my insouciance.

…

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

… and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

Read The Whole Thing ™.

Check it out, print it out, stick it on your door at work…

Saved in full, so I don’t have to dig through mail archives later, this Interesting People post:

From: Greg Brooks 
Date: July 8, 2006 1:45:57 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: RE: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push
Reply-To: gregb@west-third.com

First they came for the big ISPs
and I did not speak out
because I used a little ISP and ran my own server.

Then they came for the telcos
and I did not speak out
because I used VoIP.

Then they came to my little ISP
and I did not speak out
because I could still encrypt some traffic and control my own firewall.

Then they came for my router
and there was no one left
to securely ping back to me.

(With a respectful nod to Pastor Martin Niemöller)

Athenae lays it out:

You want to talk backlash? I’ll give you a backlash, you paunchy ex-jock hanging out at the Alumni Club afraid some guy is gonna hit on you because he’s blinded by your sex appeal and can’t see what all the women in the place see: a guy who listens to Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and actually gets nostalgic about high school, you fucking kitchen appliance. I’ll give you a backlash, you upright churchgoing family of 2.5 and a dog that thinks seeing something that makes you uncomfortable constitutes an intrusion of some sort. You know what? Seeing stuff you don’t like is called America, and if you want to start outlawing stuff you don’t like, get in line behind me, pal-o-mine because I’ve got a list of shit that pisses me off that I’ve been making for years, and every time you mention your goddamn sacrosanct throat and what’s getting shoved down it, you move closer to the top. You want to see a backlash? Keep talking.

Preach on, preach on…

Way, way behind on this story, but here’s the original EFF press release on the topic, and Wired just posted all the documents from EFF’s primary witness:

The documents, available on Wired News as of Monday, consist of 30 pages, with an affidavit attributed to Klein, eight pages of AT&T documents marked “proprietary,” and several pages of news clippings and other public information related to government-surveillance issues.

The AT&T documents appear to be excerpted from material that was later filed in the lawsuit under seal. But we can’t be entirely sure, because the protective order prevents us from comparing the two sets of documents.

…

The court’s gag order is very specific in barring only the EFF, its representatives and its technical experts from discussing and disseminating this information. The court explicitly rejected AT&T’s motion to include Klein in the gag order and declined AT&T’s request to force the EFF to return the documents.