WASHINGTON—The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.
As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.
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All the random stuff I come across. Mostly politics, but you never know.
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This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor’s practices. The defense is illuminating, not least for its implicit recognition that George W. Bush has more credibility on fighting terrorists than does the sitting president.
Certainly the most bizarre political ad I have ever seen.
On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.
Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum with the court stating that Ghailani’s claims are dangerous and off the mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution, he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the administration’s mishandling of Abdulmutallab.
“The United States was, and still is, at war with al Qaeda,” Mr. Bharara argued. “And because the group does not control territory as a sovereign nation does, the war effort relies less on deterrence than on disruption—on preventing attacks before they can occur. At the core of such disruption efforts is obtaining accurate intelligence about al Qaeda’s plans, leaders and capabilities.”
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Reblogged from nerdologyInstead of sending shredded documents to a recycling centre, incurring expense and energy, office managers will soon be able to feed them into a machine and turn them into lavatory paper.
Pop in 40 sheets of regular A4 paper, and a half-hour later, the paper has been shredded, mixed with water, turned into a pulp, flattened, dried and converted into a roll of lavatory paper.
The manufacturers of the White Goat machine estimates it costs about 10c (6p) to turn the waste paper into loo paper – equating to about six times cheaper than a roll of Andrex White Toilet Tissue, which usually retails for about 38p.
The quality of the paper, as demonstrated in the video, suggests a fairer comparison could be Tesco Value paper, which costs just 11p a roll.
I’m not a bandwagon-jumping greenie, but I am a firm believer in innovation and things that just make sense. I’ve worked in an office; I know just how much paper gets wasted. (Our office shred bags were sent to a puppy farm to be used for bedding, but still, this is better.)
Things that are “green” simply because they are less efficient do not sway me. Things that are “green” because they are better products, I can get behind. Like electric water heaters, that heat your water as you are using it, rather than traditional water heaters that keep large amounts of water warm. I’d put this product in the latter category.
Easy = True - The Boston Globe
Sounds like Sting wrote this paper.
Since I have been on the subject of terrorism the last couple of days, let’s broach one more aspect of the discussion.
In his daily online and email column Best of the Web Today, the Wall Street Journal’s online opinion editor James Taranto has repeatedly raised issue with President Obama’s handling of the terrorism trials. In today’s column, he restates the point he has made so many times before:
MSNBC.com quotes Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, repeating a threat Obama himself once made:
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he’s going to meet his maker,” said President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs. “He will be brought to justice and he’s likely to be executed for the heinous crimes that he committed in killing and masterminding the killing of 3,000 Americans. That you can be sure of.”A few years ago, we asked then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales why the Bush administration had placed such emphasis on trying terrorists for war crimes, as opposed to detaining them to keep them off the battlefield. He gave us an unsatisfying answer—something about how the families of terrorism’s victims wanted to see the perpetrators “brought to justice.” It occurred to us later that he might have been obliquely referring to the prospect of an execution—something he couldn’t mention explicitly because it would create the appearance that the U.S. was running show trials.
It seems the Obama administration wants people to think it is running show trials.
Obama has himself made the same accusation Gibbs did, as Taranto points out; similarly, Patrick Barry argues for criminal prosecution of terrorists because of criminal courts’ effectiveness, lauding, for example, a 91%+ conviction rate.
Is it true that these are actually show trials? If so, are they worth the effort (both to have the trial itself, and to make criminalization the focus rather than, say, military tribunals under a militarized view of counter-terrorism?) Moreover, if that is the case, is Don Smith correct in his Tucson Citizen column when he claims “It’s more important to interrogate [as in, draw information from] terrorists than to punish them”?
