Monthly Archives: December 2005

The Blogs Are Cooking With Dan

Posted on December 13, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Got lots to do, and anyway I don’t want to say anything more about Dan’s current 15 minutes, lest someone think (wrongly, I assure you) that I’m acting as his mouthpiece. But I’m reading it all with great interest and not a little glee.

So here’s some of the more recent choice commentary elsewhere on the ‘new Post’ / ‘old Post’ kerfuffle.

Don’t miss: Jeff Jarvis, Splitting newsrooms and hairs and the twofer (content & linkfest) in Jay Rosen, Press Think John Harris and Jim Brady Get Into It About “White House Briefing.” Dan Froomkin Replies. Almost all the links are really good.

Bonus tracks: Brad DeLong, The Future of the Washington Post and Marty Kaplan, Journalism’s Slo-Mo Suicide.

And, despite the great attraction of the readers’ suggestion that Dan’s column be re-named “Dan Froomkin’s ‘Cooking with Walnuts’,” it seems that White House Briefing is here to stay.

Update: Brad DeLong comes back for a second strafing run.

Posted in Dan Froomkin, The Media | 5 Comments

Dan Froomkin Briefing

Posted on December 12, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

The Washington Post’s new ombudsperson took a gentle swipe at my brother on Sunday, suggesting that the name on his column “White House Briefing” was somehow misleading or confusing.

Dan wrote a brief reply. Then the readers chimed in: and they love him!. Advantage, Froomkin!

Update: Wow. There’s even more pro-Dan-Froomkin outpourings after Post National Politics Editor John Harris replies.

Posted in Dan Froomkin | 18 Comments

‘What is the moose of cyberspace?’

Posted on December 12, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Susan Crawford, writing about David Post’s forthcoming book and his search for the The Moose of Cyberspace:

In the prologue, David tells the story of Jefferson fighting against the Old World belief that animals and humans degenerated in the New World — that every creature was smaller and less powerful in American than it was in Europe. To prove his point, Jefferson had an entire [dead] moose shipped to Paris and reconstituted in stuffed form in his entrance hall. There, see? Things are large in America! That moose was seven feet tall. (You can read another account of this controversy here.)

…

David wants to put Jefferson’s ideas to work in describing cyberspace as a new place — he’s writing his “notes on cyberspace” to reflect Jefferson’s “notes on the State of Virginia.”

The great question for me, and the question I put to my class today, is: What is the moose of cyberspace? What’s the thing you’d show people to convince them that the internet is hugely different from a telephone network or a broadcast system and that entirely new things are possible there? We’ve got this unbelievable group-forming-network-of-networks — how do we show people what it is?

Several people said Wikipedia is the moose of cyberspace — an amazing encyclopedia created by everyone. There were also strong voices for eBay and Google. Imagine having knowledge at your fingertips, 1/4 of a second away! That’s big.

So — what do you think is the moose of cyberspace?

Ten or more years ago, I would have said PGP or some other asymmetric encryption system. My vote today is for Google. Except of course that it’s a cheat, as Google is only magic because of all the content it makes available, so to say ‘Google’ is to in some sense just reference the whole thing.

(And of course, PGP didn’t turn out to be a very smart or lasting choice. Will Google?)

Posted in Internet | 14 Comments

CIA Getting Cold Feet on Rendition/Torture?

Posted on December 11, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

First there was the NY Times story that “The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them” in order to avoid torture. (Robert Waldman notes that this did get reported months ago, although it seems to have gone down the memory hole.)

Now comes a suggestion in the UK’s Observer — sadly, not an utterly reliable source — that CIA officers are getting cold feet about carrying on with these ‘renditions’. But not because they produce false intelligence. No, it’s the fear of law suits.

The Observer buried the leed: They start with the Yet Another Torture Allegation (YATA) story that An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies. It seems that
Mr. Binyam Mohammed, 27,

says he spent nearly three years in the CIA’s network of ‘black sites’. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

Then there’s a tie-in the Padilla case:

Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a ‘dirty bomb’ in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda.

That’s interesting. But the really eye-catching part comes next:

A senior US intelligence official told The Observer that the CIA is now in ‘deep crisis’ following last week’s international political storm over the agency’s practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ – transporting suspects to countries where they face torture. ‘The smarter people in the Directorate of Operations [the CIA’s clandestine operational arm] know that one day, if they do this stuff, they are going to face indictment,’ he said. ‘They are simply refusing to participate in these operations, and if they don’t have big mortgage or tuition fees to pay they’re thinking about trying to resign altogether.’

Could we actually be getting somewhere? And does this explain the nearly-rabid efforts by the Bush administration to keep the CIA exempt from suit for torture and ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ treatment?

But don’t get too optimistic: Binyam Mohammed got shipped to Guantanamo in September. UK and US law may not let evidence acquired under torture into court. But, so far that rule is inoperative in Guantanamo.

Posted in Guantanamo, Torture | 4 Comments

Wireless Woes at the Miami-Dade Public Library

Posted on December 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

The Miami-Dade Public Libraries, where I tend to hang out on Saturday afternoons because that is where the kids’ chess club meets, has a nice new new free wireless service but it’s infested with about the most restrictive web filters and port blockers it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.

Not only do they block digicrime.com, but they block download.com. And many other harmless sites also. And of course they block the archive.org versions of those pages too.

The library PC’s in the adult section of the library also operate under this highly censored regime. But when one tries to reach a blocked web site on one of those machines one gets an informative error message, and it is possible to request an override code from a librarian. In contrast, the wireless blocking happens in an a most uninformative way: Trying an http connection to a blocked site on the wireless access produces a long delay, followed by this informative popup:

The connection was refused when attempting to contact 192.168.99.32

How many people are likely to know that 192.168.xxx.xxx means a local network, meaning something has intercepted one’s request?

Even armed with the knowledge that one’s browsing is blocked, one is still out of luck: at present the library has no means to override the blocking for wireless users. We can of course use a desktop (if one is available – they’re quite popular), and ask for an override code; this workaround means that the blocking has a decent chance of skirting the First Amendment rules that constrain library content censorship.

And did I mention that anything other than port 80 (http web access) and port 443 (https secure web access) appears to be blocked too? I am unable to telnet or more importantly to ssh to my mail server. Why on earth should the library block me getting my email? Indeed it in was the search for a proxy tunneling tool that I hit the download.com block; there may be a method to their madness. (Is there a way to do ssh over http?)

The branch librarians are sympathetic, especially about the blocked sites, but they don’t control the filter list or the wireless port blocking policies. And they don’t get “ports” at all. All that computer stuff is handled by some distant, faceless, unresponsive central administration. So my requests for changes to the policy, so far, go unheeded, including written requests a week ago to unblock a site, and open port 22.

Only mildly relevant links:

Miami-Dade Public Library Internet/Workstation Policy

Miami-Dade County Liability Disclaimer and User Agreement (which states, notably, “Anyone using this system expressly consents to administrative monitoring at all times by Miami-Dade County and its authorized agents and contractors. You (User) are further advised that system administrators may provide evidence of possible criminal activity identified during such monitoring to appropriate law enforcement officials. If you (User) do not wish to consent to monitoring, exit this system now.” This would be a good exam question for someone as it suggests a rather broad waiver of the right to anonymous speech…)

Posted in Law: Free Speech, Miami | 6 Comments

Eleven Days in Jail for … Jaywalking?

Posted on December 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Guys, don’t wear long hair in Dallas. Parents, don’t take your children to Texas.

The Constitution remains a brilliant aspiration. Making it real is a never-ending project.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 4 Comments