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Open secret
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

That timmy thinks he's hung like donkey kong yet is actually well below average.? Probably,the jerk's nutless anyway so thats academic.No,I refer to a teaser in this weeks nude scientist.>>OPEN SECRET: An unbreakable code could soon become free for all.Sounds like a nightmare for professional spies...<< Weel sheet! Thats got to be good fucken news! Stale but still NS is a conservative mag,digesters reader for scientists.(They still broke the anthrax-US govt link.)This issue also has a story on the lost biowarfare battle and for Quantum crypto-punks the hope that with superconducting cables operating now in Denmark and Detroit and the news of single photon emissions in supercooled conditions,the quantum road to crypto-anarchy edges ever closer.On this day-1863 -- Russia: Nihilists annihilate Chief of Police.1971 -- US: Vietnam veteran antiwar protesters peacefully end their occupation of the Statue of Liberty. "The statue of Liberty welcomes innumerable pilgrims...while it is announced that the center of the world, which took millennia to shift from the Euphrates to the Thames, is now on the Hudson River. In full imperial euphoria the United States celebrates...but novelist Mark Twain, the old spoilsport, proposes changing the national flag: the white stripes should be black, he says, & the stars should be skulls & crossbones." 1973 -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn publishes Gulag Archipelago. "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world." 1984 -- Straw That Broke...?: Sam Peckinpah, film director, rides the high country, of cardiac arrest at 59. Any of you punks want to go back and get Angel?

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Strut like Tut,Tiny blur spotted in Egypt.
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

Subject: egypt dissident jailed,Toady Blecch could not care less. Egypt's First Web Prisoner Of Conscience by jonathan 5:56am Fri Nov 30 '01 Egypt's First Web Prisoner Of Conscience ''He is Egypt's first web prisoner of conscience," quipped one recipient of the news that a web designer was arrested last week, charged with posting an indecent poem on the Internet. Although the incident was not entirely unique -- people have been hounded in the past for posting Internet content deemed to be offensive to public morals -- the case of Shohdy Naguib, Al-Ahram Weekly's 39-year-old web master, is different because it relates to freedom of literary expression. Shohdy Naguib was taken from his home by police in the early hours of 22 November. He was accused of posting a poem by his late father, Naguib Surur -- a renowned poet, playwright, theatrical critic and actor who died in 1978 -- on a Web site. Naguib denied connection to the site. Although the prosecutor ordered his release on bail on the very same day of his arrest, Naguib remained in custody until 25 November, three days later. Naguib agrees. "The Internet is a virtual place where copies of everything proliferate. There are no Internet authorities as such, with the exception of those whose task is to make the net function. It doesn't have an owner, and won't unless a super-power emerges to control it," he told the Weekly. Cyberspace, he argued, belongs to all those who participate in it. "We cannot let it be a playground where only cats are allowed in and mice are banished." - Al-Ahram Weekly -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More stuff like this at KillYourTV.com

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PATRIOT games.
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

The PATRIOT shredding and flushing of the constitution was drawn up and ready to go.Some background I want to store online,justin Case. The Juvenile Justice Bill After the Columbine High School shootings, the US Senate passed the May 1999 Juvenile Justice Bill. Though unrelated in any way to "juvenile justice," several provisions were included that directly target animal rights and environmental activists. Reflecting industry pressure and influence, the Juvenile Justice Bill condemns people who commit politically motivated nonviolent offenses with exceedingly disproportionate prison terms. Unfortunately, this law is only one example of a systematic attempt by industry and government to discourage direct action by punishing activists with jail time that far exceeds time given to truly violent and dangerous people. Such sentencing preferences illustrate the priority the state (and our crypto-fascist , creep of creeps,Tim May btw.)gives to property over human life. The Juvenile Justice Bill also: 1. Makes it a federal crime to distribute information on how to make bombs (over the Internet or otherwise) or other weapons of mass destruction if the "teacher intends" for the information to be used to commit a federal violent crime, or knows that the recipient will use the information to commit such a crime. 2. Enhances penalties under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act by changing a minimum sentence to a mandatory five years instead of one. 3. Creates a "National Animal Terrorism and Ecoterrorism Incident Clearinghouse" to "accept, collect and maintain" information on crimes against animal enterprises or commercial activities because of their perceived impact on the environment. Records of such incidents are available for all law enforcement agencies. 4. Enhances sentences for "gangs," defined as the assembly of three or more people. These sentencing guidelines promote selective and politically biased prosecution by applying more serious penalties against those who commit crimes in defense of animals or the environment. The courts are being asked to evaluate the actions of an individual and the thoughts behind an action instead of simply evaluating the actual crime. The bill also undermines the First Amendment protection of websites and publications. The RICO Act In May 1999, Senators Orin G. Hatch (R-UT) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) introduced an amendment to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act, aimed at "Animal Enterprise Terrorism and Ecoterrorism." RICO was originally designed to combat traditional organized crime and its infiltration of legitimate enterprises; however, its most innovative, and controversial, aspects are provisions which allow the state to seize property owned by anyone charged with being part of a "criminal enterprise." RICO targets illegal activity organized across state lines. Thus, if you "organize" using email and telephone, you can potentially be prosecuted under federal laws. In the past, RICO has been employed primarily against white-collar criminals, anti-abortion protesters and mobsters. Now, target groups can include just about anyone. Oregon Declares War on Activists On March 12, two bills intended to stiffen penalties for "eco-terrorists" were unanimously approved by the Oregon House of Representatives. Under HR 2344 and 2385, Oregons organized crime laws would be expanded to include activities such as tree spiking and sabotage of animal research, livestock or agricultural operations. Convictions under the laws would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $300,000 fine. Reflecting the hysterical attitude and culture of propaganda currently prevailing in the Oregon legislature, Representative Bob Jenson claimed he received threatening letters and phone calls a year ago when lawmakers were first considering HR 2344 and 2385. He stated, "I will do everything to ensure that if you break the law as part of those protests, that you will get free room and board for 20 years." The process of attacking social movements in Oregon fits into a larger pattern of criminalizing dissent with respect to the anti-globalization movement, which is made up of anarchists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, students, Unions, teachers and others concerned about the fate of the planet and each other. David Helvarg, author of The War Against the Greens, stresses how difficult it is for ecologically destructive industries to look good and publicly justify their actions; therefore, their strategy has been "to make us look bad, demonize us and make themselves look respectable as a result." If one were to compare a cancer-causing industrial polluter to a teenage monkeywrencher, it would become glaringly apparent to the public as to who is the real "eco-terrorist." Groups to Watch Out For "A growing network of pro-technology activists is making sure that the message of my book, EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature, will produce results. By results, I mean congressional hearings and legislation to protect the public from environmentally motivated violence," says Ron Arnold in a Christian Science Monitor interview. Arnold is a spokesperson for the right-wing Wise Use movement and the executive director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. In a 1992 interview, he said, "Were out to kill the fuckers. Our goal is to eliminate environmentalism once and for all." He is a former spokesperson for Dow and Union Carbide and has financial support from corporations such as Exxon, DuPont, Georgia Pacific and Boise Cascade. Public relations firms, lobbying groups and think tanks work with and fund the Wise Use movement. Included amongst these institutions is the Heritage Foundation, which published a report entitled, Ecoterrorism: The Dangerous Fringe of the Environmental Movement. The report is a typical Wise Use mixture of truth, fiction and innuendo which targets Earth First! as a violent terrorist group. The report concludes with a strong denunciation of the use of violence as a tactic and claims that radical environmentalists are locked into an ever-increasing rampage of terrorist activity which is maiming, and which will inevitably result in the killing of innocent people. The report goes on to identify EF! as the enemy and pleads with the environmental community to isolate EF! and other so-called violent radicals from the environmental movement. It is interesting to note that this report was released in April 1990 and spread quickly through the Wise Use network. A think tank linked to the CIA, the National Strategy Information Center, operates a Counterterrorism Study Group (CSG). The CSG has identified all the possible sources of terrorism in the world today. Along with Iraq, Syria, and Lybia, it has concluded that a new source of terrorism exists within the "ecological movement," especially the elements of the movement which espouse biocentric views. The mission of the CSG is to identify the nature of various terrorist threats, devise new methodologies to analyze them and to implement responses through legal, military, political and intelligence means. The CSG has an international composition with academics, corporate officials and former government specialists in terrorism. Disinformation campaigns and psychological warfare against environmentalists are only some of the techniques that are practicednot only by the FBI, but by a whole alphabet soup of federal organizations, along with the participation of local police forces, private security firms, local government and Wise Use sympathizers. "The environmental movement is being subjected to obvious surveillance, intimidation, anonymous letters, phony leaflets, telephone threats, police over-reaction and brutality, dubious arrests and other threatening actions unfamiliar to most activists," says Chip Berlet in his article "Hunting the Green Menace." Berlet continues that the "labeling of a group as violent, terrorist or pro-communist is often a first step toward the delegitimizing of that group. Such labeling undermines public support and thus sanctions the use of aggressive surveillance and harassment by government agencies or private security firms. There is also a self-fulfilling prophecy with labeling, as police are likely to respond with unjustified force when they have been trained to think of peaceful protesters as violent terrorists."

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Outbreak on Clavius.Complete news Blackout.H.Floyd to investigate and report.
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

Subject: quarantine on Clavius and corralitos. During a health emergency, health officials would be able immediately to take over any materials or facilities "as may be reasonable and necessary" for emergency response -- including the management of a health care facility and the rationing of medicine and other supplies if a shortage develops. They could compel a person to submit to a physical exam or test without a court order or be charged with a misdemeanor offense and face the possibility of forced isolation. Physicians and other health workers could be forced to do the testing or face criminal liability. Court orders would be required for quarantining someone, but faced with an immediate threat, officials could quarantine first and go to court afterward. The law sets forth a procedure for contesting court orders and for hearings on the need for continued isolation. Officials could compel people to be vaccinated or treated for infectious diseases, though not those likely to suffer serious harm from a vaccination. The law would shield officials and their agents from civil liability, except in cases of gross negligence or willful misconduct. [George] Annas, the Boston University critic, says that the law's major problem is that it gives "tremendous powers to unnamed and unaccountable public health officials to order people examined, treated, vaccinated or quarantined and do it with immunity unless acting with willful malice. Mousepox that was converted to a selective strain that infects white men only with 100% fatality rates is suspected.It is believed a professor R ,a molecular biologist accidently released the virus on a recent trip to sacramento.

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Death to Capitalism.
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

the most stupefying characteristic of todays society is its ability to make daily comfort exist a hands breadth away from catastrophe. In the middle of October, 2000 in eastern Kentucky, a coal mine pond gave way, releasing 200 million gallons of sludge into streams, killing fish, washing away roads and bridges and fouling the water supply. The tar-like sludge spread into the Ohio River. But such disasters are not so uncommon. One need only consider the cyanide spill that happened in Romania at the end of January spreading as far as Yugoslavia and leaving a few hundred tons of dead fish (not to mention birds, otters and other creatures) in its wake, or the spillage of radio-active material at Tokaimura, Japan that caused major environmental damage for a radius of several miles around it in October of 1999. And of course, we cannot forget Bhopal or Chernobyl. But these are the most spectacular disasters, the ones that could not be made invisible (though even disasters of this sort may, in time, become so common that they cease to be newsconsider that there 45 coal mine ponds that were said to be at higher risk of failure than the one that collapsed in October). Disaster is, in fact an ongoing aspect of our present existence. The estuary at the mouth of the Colorado River is quickly dying, most likely due to the effects of hydro-electric dams. Chemical pollution has spread death from the mouth of the Mississippi River well into the Gulf of Mexico. The ozone layer disappears along with the forests and the plankton that feed it. And the melting of the polar ice caps has forced scientists to admit to the reality of global warming. When one adds to this the more blatantly intentional disasters caused by the attempts of the great powers to teach the lesser powers the meaning of democracy by bombing the shit out of the powerless, it is clear that life in the present is always lived on the edge of disaster. When the litany of disasters that surrounds us is sung, it is easy to feel that we are dealing with the inevitable, with an unavoidable fate. But this is not the case. Every one of the disasters described above can be traced to the functioning of specific social institutions and the decisions of the people who hold power in them. As has been said many times, there are people who make these decisions and they have names and addresses. They also share a particular social position. As the rulers of this social order, they benefit from it in terms of power and economic wealth. (That they do so at the expense of their individuality and any real enjoyment of life does not decrease their responsibility for the present existence.) While some of the disastrous effects of their decisions may have taken them by surprise, it cannot be honestly said that they acted blindly. After all, these are the same people who had no problem with showering a small predominately agricultural country with herbicide in an attempt to destroy its economy. The environment is not their concern; power and economic expansion are. When capitalism developed the technological system ideal for its expansion, the industrial system that began in the shipping industries which then provided the resources for developing the manufacturing industries, the door was opened to a world of daily misery and ongoing disaster. Whether it be the genocide against indigenous people who did not adapt quickly enough to their enslavement to the needs of capital, the illnesses and injuries that the regime of work imposes on workers, the increasing precariousness that faces everyone who is not of the ruling class, misery is the order of the day in this society. To fully understand why this is, it is necessary to realize that capitalism thrives on crisis. Its order is an order of crisis management. For the rulers of the social order this is not a problem. They are well protected from the consequences of the crises that they sometimes quite intentionally induce. Those at the bottom, those who have been excluded from any real control over the circumstances in which they live, suffer the consequences of this system. The industrial system, which is so necessary to the expansion of capital, has been an environmental disaster from the beginning, offering William Blake some of his most frightening poetic images. The famous London fog of the 19th century was, in fact, industrial smog which accompanied high rates of tuberculosis among the poorer classes. Today, the toxification of the environment combines with the stress of daily survival to create cancer, heart disease, immune system breakdown and increasing levels of mental distress and disorder from which those in power seek to protect themselves with medical care that most of us could never affordand which plays its own role in the toxification of this world. Capitalism will not provide a solution for the disasters it causes. It is a system of stop-gap measures, and, increasingly, as the new technologies come to the fore, a system of tinkering with ever tinier atomized bits. Unfortunately, in the face of economic precariousness and environmental disaster, survival tends to take precedence over life and joy. And in this way, the rule of capital penetrates even into our minds, as we find ourselves succumbing to the use of stop-gap measures, of the methods of crisis management, in an attempt to guarantee ourand the earthssurvival. Thus, the strange phenomenon some of those who call themselves anarchists using litigation, petition, even the electoral process in the attempt to save a patch of forest, stop a particular development or prevent the destruction of an indigenous culture. The problem is not that people struggle for these specific aims, but that in desperation they lay aside their ideals, their desires and their dreams, and use methods of struggle that only reinforce the economy of disaster that rules existence today. The struggle against this present existence in which misery and disaster are the norm must, in order to have a chance, base itself in our desire to live full, passionate lives, on the joyful intensity we create in our lives in spite of the existence imposed on us. Only then can our struggle move beyond the careful measurements of crisis management, beyond the stop-gap measures for guaranteeing survival at the expense of life that merely aid capitalism in maintaining and expanding its rule, instead embracing those methods of struggle that move toward insurrection, toward revolution, toward the unknown. Our present existence is a toxic prison. There is no way to know what lies beyond the walls. But here we know we are being killed and this can only end when our love of life moves us to tear down the walls. Link: http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/ProjectPl/willfuldisobedience/

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Kill the president
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

Waco president arbusto e nuemann today let on he was pissed that the secret way he wants his death squads to operate leaked(see below for background) He was also said to be put off his banana's and peanuts by the suspicion directed toward an arab-american oberstumtrooper of the SS.The SS are my ubermench gibbered the loopy ruprecht.(see below,below.) Subject: hoover fine example of seppo hero Nazi Tribunal Is Model of Deception Commentary. Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own. By Ann Woolner Atlanta, Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush cites the 1942 military tribunal convened to prosecute eight Nazis plotting attacks on U.S. soil to show how he wants to prosecute present-day terrorists. It's a model, all right. It's a model of a powerful government official using the secrecy of a military tribunal to deceive the public, falsely embellish his reputation, break promises to a whistleblower and sit by while a 30-year prison sentence is given to the man who thwarted the Nazi sabotage, a man to whom the agency had promised a presidential pardon. That official was Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover. His aim was glory for cracking this hugely important case. The problem was that it took no detective work whatsoever to crack the case. All it took was for FBI agents to believe a man, George Dasch, who twice called and then walked into FBI headquarters to tell them about the plot. Dasch told them that Nazi submarines had deposited him and seven other Germans at U.S. shores in New York and Florida in recent days. Supplied with explosives and timing devices, their mission was to blow up certain U.S. military equipment factories, transportation structures and Jewish-owned department stores. Dasch, aided by another would-be saboteur, Ernst Burger, led the FBI to the other six Germans, 14 American collaborators, $174,588 and a cache of explosives. Pardon Promised In return, FBI agents promised Dasch that if he pleaded guilty to his role in the plot, he'd get a prison sentence of no more than six months followed by a presidential pardon. It didn't turn out that way. During the 18-day trial, held in an FBI training room at the Justice Department building, agents played down Dasch's and Burger's cooperation, although one agent acknowledged Dasch had been promised the pardon. This was not reported, since no journalists were allowed to cover the trial. Secrecy was necessary, Attorney General Francis Biddle explained beforehand, to prevent America's enemies from learning ``how our intelligence services are equipped to work against them.'' All eight Germans were convicted and six were executed, less than two months after Dasch arrived by submarine. Burger got a life sentence; Dasch got 30 years. Hoover Censors Report Even after the war ended and a new attorney general, Tom Clark, wanted to disclose what had happened at the trial, Hoover intervened. He censored the report the Justice Department produced, cutting out information that could ``discredit or embarrass the bureau,'' Hoover wrote in a memo. Left out was any mention of the pardon promise and the fact that Dasch's own confession sparked the investigation. Decades passed and Hoover died before the full story came out. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, Atlanta Constitution reporter Seth Kantor obtained the trial transcript, FBI reports and other documents and wrote a series of stories in 1980. Those stories, on which this account is based, were recounted in an article this week by Cox News Service. Prison Riot As for Dasch, he'd been sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where his presence prompted a prison riot in 1944. Dasch, whom inmates threatened to throw off a five-story building, had been the principal target of the rioting prisoners, according to Biddle. He survived and was transferred to Leavenworth prison in Kansas. With pressure from new lawyers to release Dasch and Burger, President Harry Truman in 1948 ordered them deported to West Germany where they'd eventually be free. The White House statement continued the deception in explaining Truman's generosity toward these infamous Nazis: ``After their arrest, Burger and Dasch gave full and complete identities of all connected with the sabotage plot.'' This implied it was only after the FBI had tracked them down that they confessed. Nor did this version help Dasch in post-war Germany. Nazi sympathizers threatened to avenge the executions of the other six saboteurs and the thwarting of Hitler's sabotage plans, prompting Dasch to move from city to city, job to job. By 1980, his trail had vanished, Kantor wrote. He has since died, according to news reports. `Museum Piece' Bush has ordered the creation of military commissions to conduct tribunals for the prosecution of non-U.S. citizens accused of terrorism against the United States. The speed of such tribunals, their portability, the availability of the death penalty and their looser rules make them a good option, in Bush's view. But looser rules also mean a greater likelihood that the innocent would be convicted and the system manipulated by officials. Secrecy would mean no public scrutiny. ``To do this in a healthy fashion, one has to make trials as open as possible,'' says Ruth Wedgwood, a Yale law professor teaching international law and criminal procedure. Bush's order describes ``a pre-1950 format'' for military tribunals, says Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer and president of the National Institute of Military Justice. ``This is a museum piece that's being trotted out,'' says Fidell. ``The question is whether it's being properly brought back.'' Presscott's Reincarnation gets what PR wants. A Durham student activist gets a visit from the Secret Service B Y J O N E L L I S T O N A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking God it was Friday. It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in an hour she'd be meeting her boyfriend to unwind. November 21, 2001 T R I A N G L E S Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke Manor apartment. Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, "Are these people going to sell me something?" Photo By Alex Maness Threat or dissent? A.J. Brown and her anti-Bush poster -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department. "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around? "Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime. And all because of a poster on her wall. Though she's still a teenager, Brown is already more informed about political repression than most Americans. She's been politically aware and involved since grade school. "In second grade, I saw the Gulf War on television, and seeing those bombs drop, it did something to me," she says. "I knew from some news reports that there were innocent people dying." In middle school, Brown became interested in environmentalism and civil liberties. She made the shift to full-fledged activist at Jordan High School when she became involved with Youth Voice Radio, a media collective with a leftist bent. Most recently, she's been involved with the movement against the war in Afghanistan. Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments on free speech and political organizing, she says, as do some of her favorite hip-hop artists. She loves her music--and that may have been what sparked the turn of events that brought the Secret Service to her door. Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a Monday evening, she stayed up late playing some new CDs for her boyfriend. By her own admission, she was playing them too loud. Around midnight, a Durham police officer came by to tell her to turn it down, and she obliged. Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise complaint, and again a police officer came to Brown's door. This time, she says, her music wasn't playing at an offensive volume. The police officer speculated that the call may have been about someone else's stereo. During this visit, and unlike the first, the officer had a full view of the wall that faces Brown's front doorway, a detail that would become relevant two days later: On that wall hung The Poster. Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C. Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush holding a length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and reads: "We hang on your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152 Dead"--a reference to the number of people executed by the state of Texas while Bush was governor. Brown believes that the message caused the Durham policeman who paid the second visit to her apartment to recommend a third. On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham police investigator Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special Agent Paul Lalley, who did most of the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material, or something like that, in your apartment," he said, according to Brown. Then the female agent asked if they could come inside. When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them in, she says, "They started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here to take you away or put you in jail.' They were like, 'We need to follow up on every report we get.' I said, 'That's understandable, but how would you even know what's in my apartment?' "They just said they had gotten information from some place," she says. She speculates that it was from the police officer who visited for the second noise complaint. Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the authorities got their tip about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell you is that we were assisting the Secret Service on one of their cases," he says. Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig Ulmer, who heads the Secret Service office in Raleigh. "We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat against the president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of the tip, except to say that it was a "concerned citizen" and not a law enforcement officer. It's Secret Service policy to keep such sources confidential. "We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we want people to bring us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our bridges, so to speak, we're not going to get help from the public." Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the window, so anyone could have tipped us off." The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the apartment. "They were being friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown says. After a while, Brown called her mother, an IBM employee who is in the Army Reserve. "She said to absolutely not let them in," Brown says. Not sure what else to do, Brown passed the phone--with her mother still on the line--to one of the agents. The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they had come by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one of them said, according to Brown--apparently a reference to the poster. She informed them it was no such thing. They then said, "Well, it's Bush hanging himself." Nope, she told them. Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show them her poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh, that's not that bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse." Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they were just gawking at my wall, I decided to explain it." The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school photo project showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd poster ("It has that phrase, 'Mother should I trust the government,' so I had to get it"); posters for two Japanese cartoon shows; several pictures she took at protests and rallies; and a headband with "Democracy" on it. And, of course, the Bush-as-hangman poster. Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her further, asking: "Do you have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment, or anything pertaining to that? Any pro-Taliban stuff?" "I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think the Taliban are a bunch of assholes." With that, the investigator and the agents bid her adieu. Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service, she says, but the poster's still up, and she's still committed to her activism. "I'm definitely going to be vocal," she says. "If things get really hairy and they decide to come after activists, then I'd have to just grit my teeth and go through it." Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her politics, and he insists that the Secret Service would have checked this tip out even if it had come in before the events of Sept. 11. "We were doing our job in this particular case," he says, "and I don't think we could have done it any better." "The Secret Service takes all threats against the president seriously, and we go out to check on every one. A citizen thought that there was a threat, and we went and talked to Ms. Brown and we found that there was not a threat." The poster, he says, was "misconstrued" by the tipster. "So it's not a big issue. The issue is that someone misinterpreted some writing." But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal authorities, constitutional issues come into play. Some legal analysts are warning that the new national security vigilance, and new laws passed to counter terrorism, might impinge on free speech in big and small ways. "A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech during wartime or peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who specializes in civil rights. Such speech is all the more protected, he points out, when it's displayed within a person's home. "If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between political speech and a threat to the president, then we're all in trouble," Charns says. "If the Secret Service has nothing better to do than check on political posters, that's a bad sign." The Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org) and the National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org) offer analysis of the changing legal climate and advice for what to do if local or federal authorities come knocking.

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Rushkoff and buy this free market special.
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

When I was a kid, we lived in a relatively modest neighborhood and shared one barbecue pit at the end of the block. Every weekend, anyone could go down there and make some hotdogs. Parents would even cook for one another's kids. When we got a bit wealthier, we moved out to the suburbs. There, each family had its own barbecue in the backyard. Instead of barbecuing with the neighbors, we competed with them. "The Jones's have sirloin, so we better get filet mignon!" Sure, in the suburban sprawl schema, the Weber Grill company gets to sell a whole lot more barbecues, but our experience of community is surrendered to the needs of the marketplace. I've been making this argument for the past couple of years in articles and speeches around the US. Then, just last month, a libertarian magazine made a fascinating critique of my work that they believed neutralized such anti-corporate sentiments: those of us taking a stand against the marketplace as the dominant social paradigm are only doing so in order to make money! That's right the whole 'lefty' thing is a disingenuous scam to sell books, posters, and magazines like this one. We're actually in it for the profit. What makes this argument particularly perplexing is that, if it were true, shouldn't the libertarians praise us? We would be adhering, after all, to the very principles they espouse! We are simply providing a product that meets consumer demand, and because we don't really believe the rhetoric we spew we are doing so without prejudice or forethought. We are as blameless as corporations selflessly catering to the will of the all-powerful consumer. Just like global conglomerates, we the merchants of Marx are simply appealing to a target market. In our case, we sell a hip, anti-consumerist aesthetic to people who fall into the Seattle Demonstrator psychographic. This kind of circular, self-perpetuating analysis is symptomatic of a society getting itself into some serious ideological trouble. We are so inundated by the free market's rhetorical whitewash that we are fast approaching what can only be labeled "market fascism": a social contract that can no longer tolerate any opinion or event that doesn't serve the speculative economy. Its adherents can't understand motivation in any other terms than profit-mindedness; they can't imagine alternatives to the logic of capitalism. Those who can conceive of counter-currents become the latest-variety "enemy of the state." The state itself, of course, is to be reduced to the barest regulation required for the free flow of capital and protection of property. Market opponents must be eliminated or, better, assimilated. The bottom line really does become the bottom line. Currently, trillions of dollars and man-hours are being spent to lock down just such a reality template. Through intimidation, reward, and an odd scheme of justifications, the market is yearning towards the status of sacred doctrine. While it's still permitted, let's deconstruct some of its sacred cows before they become our only source of milk. The first faulty premise of market fascism is that consumption invariably leads to an expression of democratic will that we vote with our dollars. In this sense, corporations conduct focus groups, polling, and other forms of cultural anthropology, and justify this information gathering as an effort to get to the heart of what people really want. In reality, the results of such studies are divided into two categories: desires that can be monetized, and those that can't. If focus groups conducted by the music industry, for example, determine that kids want to hear songs made by their own neighbors, record labels do not rush to market songs by anon-ymous teens. Instead, they use this information to construct publicity campaigns for the groups they have already decided to back. No, the reduction of the role of citizens to that of consumers does not translate into cash-register democracy. It means that the scope of our influence has been reduced to very limited conversation with our marketers. Market fascists dismiss such arguments, claiming that we are paranoid leftists, imagining a conspiracy between a group of fictitious marketers and corporate chiefs that such people do not really exist. In a sense, they are right. In the corporate reality, no one is in charge. When you walk into the gap, a young clerk will initiate a well-researched sales technique called gapact (Greet Approach Provide Add-on Close Thank). Should we be mad at her? Of course not. She's just doing what her manager has told her to do. If she doesn't end the day with a certain quota of multiple-item sales, she'll get in trouble. So do we blame her manager? No. He's got to meet a quota, too, set by corporate headquarters. Do we blame the marketing department? Well, they're just taking their orders from the ceo. And he's just taking his from the Board of Directors. And they're just listening to their shareholders. And those shareholders, well, they're some of the same people walking in the door as customers, who happen to have gap stock in the mutual funds of their retirement plans. The whole thing is on automatic. Although corporations may have the legal rights of human beings, they aren't human at all. A corporation is just a set of code like a computer program a recipe for making money. The human beings enacting the code, from executives to customers to marketers, become part of the machine. Worse still, today we are empowering our corporations with the most advanced techniques of persuasion known to science. I'm not talking about discredited notions like subliminal advertising, but much more pernicious forms of influence, like neurolinguistic programming, regression and transference, pacing and leading, and other forms of hypnosis. Sure, marketers and advertisers have always used versions of these techniques, but never have we extended and automated them through computers and onto the Internet. The Internet gives the formerly abstract corporate entity its eyes and ears. Consumer feedback is instantaneously recorded, compiled, shared, and acted upon. There is no need for human intervention, or, of course, the conscience or ethical considerations that might slow any of this down. Sell more stuff in less time with higher profit is the only corporate command set. Like most Adbusters readers, I've spent a good deal of time examining how these techniques work. Suffice to say, the way to make people buy things they don't really want is by making them tense. In order to sell unnecessary goods, you must convince people they are unhappy so that they yearn to make their lives better to fill in that sad vacuum. The plain truth is rarely put this plainly: a marketer's job is to make people unhappy. And that gets us back to the oldest trick in the book for keeping people in line: take intimacy away from them. If a teenage boy is sitting on the couch next to his girlfriend, he's less likely to be persuaded to buy those jeans in the TV commercial. He's already getting laid! So what are the marketer's alternatives? Get the girl to worry about how her boyfriend's clothes reflect on her, or, better, find a way to keep the kids from having sex at all. This all became stridently clear to me a few months ago, when I was asked to appear in a debate on cnn about censorship online. They had me up against a "family values" advocate. I was supposed to argue that the right to free speech outweighed the concerns of parents about what sorts of pornography their kids might stumble upon while surfing the web. As the debate went on, I realized we were all accepting the premise that kids should be protected from sexual imagery. What studies have ever been done to prove it's dangerous for kids to see pictures of people having sex? We let kids watch sitcoms in which parents regularly lie to one another but we fear what will happen if they see people making love? My point is not that kids should be exposed to porn. Rather, it is that the sacred truths we hold as self-evident are, in fact, blasphemous distortions of social reality intended to reduce thinking human beings into compliant consumers. This, combined with marketing techniques designed to limit human agency to impulsive Pavlovian responses, leads to an unthinking, unquestioning, and absolutely unfulfilled population, ripe for market fascism. The irony here is that religion might actually serve as a last line of defense against this branded cultural imperialism. Adbusters' annual "Buy Nothing Day" used to occur once a week as a long-forgotten ritual called "Sabbath." Once every seven days, the Judeo-Christian founders concluded a few millennia ago, people should take a break from the cycle of consumption and production. Imagine trying to practice Sabbath today. What's left to do that doesn't involve paying for admission? Are there any public spaces left other than the mall? Though the Sabbath was widely celebrated even 10 years ago, it now falls outside the imaginable for the market fascists: wouldn't it throw the economy into a recession? Perhaps, but it would also give us 24 hours each week to restore a bit of autonomy into our own affairs. The hard right has claimed the spiritual high ground (as a way of promoting market values) but it may actually belong to us. It's our way of disengaging from the corporate machine, unplugging from the matrix, and considering whether we would rather have a communal barbecue pit at the end of the block. It's not time off; it's time "on." It's a sacred space for the living. We might even use it to have sex. www.rushkoff.com

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End-to-end encrypting US GSM phones?
by Trei, Peter 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

Are there any existing, available US type GSM cell phones which provide good end-to-end voice encryption (ie, something better than the broken GSM crypto). thanks, Peter Trei ============================================================================ ================ This e-mail, its content and any files transmitted with it are intended solely for the addressee(s) and are PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL. Access by any other party is unauthorized without the express prior written permission of the sender. If you have received this e-mail in error you may not copy, disclose to any third party or use the contents, attachments or information in any way, Please delete all copies of the e-mail and the attachment(s), if any and notify the sender. Thank You. ============================================================================ ================

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Re: End-to-end encrypting US GSM phones?
by Peter Kuhm 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

At 16:01 28.12.01 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: >Are there any existing, available US type >GSM cell phones which provide good >end-to-end voice encryption (ie, something >better than the broken GSM crypto). don't know, but you may have a look at <http://crypto.mchh.siemens.de/produkte/hardware/topsecgsm/topsecgsm.asp?lan…> Rohde & Schwarz <http://www.rohde-schwarz.com/> upgrades a standard SIEMENS S35i with a cryptochip. According to a article in German language it costs appr. EUR 2,300.-- and they should have sold already 500 pcs to governments. <http://news.zdnet.de/zdnetde/news/story/0,,t390-s2097404,00.html> Peter

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Faustines anal urges
by mattd 29 Dec '01

29 Dec '01

Subject: Faustines anal urges,your yukon donkeys calling,fau baby. >>bringing up the idea of simultaneous detonation of suitcase nukes in multiple metropolitan areas. << Innerestin you bring that up Justine,zat wots worryn them down at NSA central? Why not simple OK Ryders with added homer Simpson fuel rods on top? Id love to slide one of those up your cute little sewer rats ass BTW. Any thoughts on A DC net with envelopes containing pledges all snail,all meatspace,all APster,all the time? I am waiting for my case to come up & I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder & I am waiting for someone to really discover America Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

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