Author: Matthew G. Saroff

AT&T/NSA Hoovered the Entire Bloody Internet

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Mark Klein is an American hero.

For those of you who don’t know, Mark Klein is a retired technician at AT&T, and he was responsible for running wires to a splitter for the benefit of Room 641A of 611 Folsom Street, the secret room set up by the NSA at AT&T’s offices in San Francisco. He is Now lobbying congress not to grant retroactive immunity to the Telcos over the illegal NSA spying.

“That was my ‘aha!’ moment,” Klein said. “They’re sending the entire Internet to the secret room.”

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

“This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.”

The illegal wiretapping that most telcos did on behalf of the NSA was far more extensive than previously revealed.

This was not targeted at foreign calls routed through the US. Nor was it calls where one party was overseas. The NSA is actively collecting ALL THE DATA going through AT&T internet exchange point. Everything. Every email, every google query, every music download, every IP telephone call (and BTW, pretty much all long distance telephone calls at some point use TCP/IP these days.)

They took everything.

The telcos are claiming that they need immunity, because they were just being good citizens, and that they were not clear on the law.

There is one problem with argument, as Mr. Klein noted on Olbermann, THESE ENTITIES WROTE THE LAWS INVOLVED. They were heavily involved in drafting the laws at every step of the way.

They knowingly broke the laws, and they did because they saw the example of Qwest, where the government retaliated by denying and pulling contracts, and they chose to break the law because it was profitable.

Kevin Drum is Correct, of Course

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He was wondering as to what arguments would be made by the blogosphere might make to explain the Democratic Party successes in Virginia.

He list 9 alternatives, and finishes with this bon mot, which is one of the wisest things I’ve read this year:

Whatever the consensus turns out to be, I’m declaring right now that I think it’s wrong. And somewhere in my archives there will be a post to prove that I thought this all along.

This man is a Regular Nostradamus. I gotta make more predictions like this. Curmudgeons get all the prognostic props, you know.

Worse than Nixon

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In an otherwise completely conventional story from USA Today, I found this little gem at the end:

Meanwhile, Bush reached an unwelcome record. By 64%-31%, Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. For the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50% say they “strongly disapprove” of the president. Richard Nixon had reached the previous high, 48%, just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974.

I must resist urge to rub hands together and say, “Excellent”, like Monty Burns.”

Too late….

Right Wing Regenry Press Cheats Authors Out of Royalties

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It appears that Regenry Press, incubator of right wing nutjobs who can’t write*, is getting sued for cheating authors out of royalties. The claim is that Regenry, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

I love that last quote. FWIW, they are not acting like a “Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company“, they are acting like a Harvard Business School professor.

As a matter of law, I am not a lawyer. As a matter of the facts, this is rather complicated. Regenery has a long history of basically giving its books away to boost numbers, you see it all the time at places like Newsmax, where if you subscribe, they’ll throw in a bloody library of conservative hardcover tripe. This way, someone who writes a book that might sell 3,000 copies gets to do the pundit circuit as a someone who has sold 100,000 copies,

I’d love to be a part of the legal discovery process, but right now I’m basking in the Schadenfreude.

*Yeah, like I’m one to talk, but at least I don’t think that I’m the next Hemingway.

Radiohead $2.26 on every album download

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Remember when I commented on Radiohead making their album available online and allowing their fans to pay whatever they wanted?

After 29 days, some numbers are in, $2.26/album, with about $2.7 million in total sales. The coverage, of coursee, is that this is a pittance compared to the $19.95 for a CD, but that’s not what the band gets, that’s what the studio, retailer, record executive’s coke dealer and worthless brother-in-law, etc. get, not the artists.

Radiohead mad a lot more money in a few weeks than than they would in a few decades doing this. I recall hearing an interview with Aimee Man, formerly of ‘Til Tuesday, and she releases under her own label now, but her old stuff, the stuff that made the top ten and hit MTV forever, it was still “not recouped”, i.e. she had gotten no royalties.

The phenomenon is going to move down the chain, and I won’t shed a tear to see the demise of the record distributor paracites.

Russian Votes to Leave CFE

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It’s not much of a surprise that the lower house of the Duma has voted to leave the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

No surprise. What is a surprise, at least to me, is that the Duma voted 418 to 0 to do so.

While the Duma is weak, and largely populated by Putin lapdogs, the unanimity shows something: That the Russians believe, accurately in my opinion, that the missile defense installations are directed at them.

I agree. Bush and His Evil Minions™ wanted to show Russia who was boss, out of the same sort of dick swinging that got us into Iraq.

Bad move.

Pat Robertson Endorses Rudy Guiliani; Brownback to Endorse McCain

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For anyone else, I’d call it a sign of the apocalypse, but for Pat Robertson, I just ask how much he got for selling his endorsment. There are very few more venal and self serving creatures on this planet.

As to Brownback and McCain, it’s no big. They are both Senators, and far closer on issues than most people recognize. Additionally, I could not see him endorsing Romney, he’s a Mormon from Massachusetts, and Huckabee and he were gunning for the place in the campaign, so he was an unlikely choice.

Of course, I pegged Brownback as the Republican nominee, which goes to show that my powers of prognostication stink.

Economic Avalance Update: November 7 Edition

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The Dollar hit another all time low, it’s currently at $1.4645:1.0000€, oil peaked at $98.62/bbl, the Canadian Dollar briefly broke $1.10 US today and the Dow dropped 361 points.

Not only do I expect to be right on the Euro breaking $1.50 and oil breaking $100/bbl before year’s end, we may see significant moves toward moving oil to Euro denomination by next June. Iran and Venezuela are already pushing for this for political reasons, and the dollar’s decline will likely put pressure on other petro economies to go a similar way.

To quote Paul Krugman (PDF):

Almost everyone believes that the US current account deficit must eventually end, and that this end will involve dollar depreciation. However, many believe that this depreciation will take place gradually. This paper shows that any process of gradual dollar decline fast enough to prevent the accumulation of implausible levels of US external debt would impose capital losses on investors much larger than they currently expect. As a result, there will at some point have to be a ‘Wile E. Coyote moment’ – a point at which expectations are revised, and the dollar drops sharply. …..

You have to love an economist who can invoke the Warner Brothers.

Bush Water Bill Veto Overriden

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The vote was 361-54, and the Senate is expected to override too.

This bill has broad bipartisan support, and big spender Bush vetoed it because he is having to pretend that he gives a damn about the budget to reinforce his own delusions of manhood.

Why this is significant is because once he is overridden, it will become progressively easier for it to happen in the future.

There are already reports that there is an S-Chip bill that will get a veto proof majority in the works. It gets much harder for the Republicans to whip the vote when they have already helped override a veto.

Yesterday’s Election Results

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Great Smackdown of Tim Russert: Stop the Inanity | The American Prospect

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Paul Waldman has the same fantasy that I do:

I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a candidate will say, “You know what, Tim, I’m not going to answer that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a disgrace. You have in front of you a group of accomplished, talented leaders, one of whom will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States. You can ask them whatever you want. And you choose to engage in this ridiculous gotcha game, thinking up inane questions you hope will trick us into saying something controversial or stupid. Your fondest hope is that the answer to your question will destroy someone’s campaign. You’re not a journalist, you’re the worst kind of hack, someone whose efforts not only don’t contribute to a better informed electorate, they make everyone dumber. So no, I’m not going to stand here and try to come up with the most politically safe Bible verse to cite. Is that the best you can do?”

It is a mark of the hacktacular nature of the Washington Punditocracy* that this man is treated with any respect.

*Which might be better described as a Kakistocracy.

Hey, I Know, If I’m Offensive Enough, then I’ll Get Attacked by the Right Wing Blogs, and My Readership Will Skyrocket!!!

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On a more serious note it is true that religion defies logic. In fact the definition of religious faith is that it defies logic.

Religion is about knowing the unknowable, and as such, whether you take the tales literally, or as metaphor, the stories, narrative, and cosmology of any religion are supposed to be intellectually absurd. Religion is supposed to transcend the intellect on some level

This is why, for example, Talmudic discussions of exactly what substance the 10 commandments were supposed to be made of* hold little interest for me, except to the degree that they can be shown to be allegories that show us how to live our lives.

But for those of you who simply want to be offended, there is this (Praise be to Tshirthell.com):

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*Sapphire. What’s more the first set, the ones Moses smashed, were supposed to be carved entirely by God, while the second set are supposed to have been cut into tablets by Moses, and then God carved the words on them. It’s supposed to indicate that God was displeased at that whole Golden Calf thing.

Free Market Gets Us Slower More Expensive Internet

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No surprise, the U.S. is lagging in broadband penetration, performance and price, and it is falling further behind. The free market shills claim that it’s bad data, but every study confirms this.

This is not surprising. Telcos are not in the business of providing good service. They are in the business of making money, and it is far more profitable to use their natural monopoly, the ownership of the last mile of wire to the home, to keep competitors out than it is for them to invest in new equipment.

Given recent deregulatory decisions by the FCC, the level of competition, and hence the level of innovation are low, and prices are high. They will remain that way until the government steps in.

What Chris Bowers Says

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The media in general, and the Washington punditocracy* protray the “Blue Dog Democrats” as brave people standing up to the extremists in their party. Chris Bowers makes a convincing argument that the opposite is true, that these are folks who are the most extreme sort of hysterical fear.

The concluding ‘graph:

Blue Dogs actually seem like the most scared people in all of Washington, D.C. as a result of this article. They are afraid of Republican attacks. They are afraid of conservative pundits. They are afraid of their constituents. They are afraid of motions to recommit that are meaningless in terms of actual policy. And they are protected by Emanuel and Hoyer, who seem petrified of all the same things. They seem to all operate in a perpetual state of fear, despite their surface machismo. And yes, it does seem like fear, rather than simply conservative beliefs in this case, because otherwise why would they be in favor of a meaningless procedural motion that has nothing to do with policy? The widespread fear in the tough guy wing of the Democratic Party is one of the great ironies of modern American politics.

I would add that not only does this make it more difficult to accomplish things, their behavior reinforces Republican attacks against the Democrats as without principle, or guts, and never willing to take a step to do the right thing.

It is a tragedy of the commons. By acting in their own perceived (and only perceived, look at Ron Paul, whose support is driven by his forthrightness, not the policies involved) best interest, they destroy the common resource of productive political discourse.

*Which might be better described as a Kakistocracy.

A Spammer and A Genius

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It appears that spammers are using sex to enlist human brain power to foil Captchas.

This is a Captcha:

Basically, the spammers have, “created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image”.

The Captcha comes from a site that uses them to prevent spam, Yahoo comes to mind as a prominent example.

This is brilliant. Evil, but brilliant. If only this man could use his powers of technology and psychology for good, instead of evil.

Iraqi Inspector General will Audit Iraqi Security Forces

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When the IG turns over these rocks, it will not be pretty.

IG to audit Iraqi security forces

By Megan Scully CongressDaily November 5, 2007

At the urging of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction plans to review how many trained Iraqi personnel are actually serving in the nation’s security forces. The audit was sparked by an Oct. 31 letter to Stuart Bowen, the U.S. inspector in charge of investigating Iraq reconstruction, in which Dorgan expressed frustrations at the Bush administration’s inability to provide reliable statistics on the size of the nascent security forces.

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