Wampum

This from Eloise Cobell:

On Monday, May 11, the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia will hold an important hearing on our case. We will be challenging the Aug. 7 ruling of U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson. He has held that the Indian Trust beneficiaries are not entitled to any interest on the $455 million that he believes the government failed to place in our individual trust accounts.

We will argue that we are entitled to interest on that money and say that his method of calculating how much money was not properly credited was inaccurate. The government has indicated it will argue that you, the trust account holders, are not entitled to any money at all. They will say that the government believes it has properly credited the accounts of all trust beneficiaries.

That is why this promises to be an important day our 13-year-old lawsuit. As you could imagine, hearings like this typically attract only the lawyers and government bureaucrats who have been following this case.

I hope you can join me in the courtroom in Washington so that it will be clear that a lot of Native Americans are deeply interested in this case.

"All oral arguments are open to the public, but seating is limited and on a first-come, first-serve basis," the court's website says. "Doors of the courtroom usually open around 9:10 a.m. The first argument begins at 9:30 a.m. Visitors should be aware that certain cases may attract large crowds, with lines forming before the courtroom doors open."

If you can attend, please come early as the courtroom has filled quickly in the past. You will have to pass through the courthouse's strict security, so allow extra time. Cameras and recording devices are not allowed in the courtroom.

The federal courthouse is located at 333 Constitution Ave., NW.

Thank you for your support.

Elouise Cobell
Lead Plaintiff
Cobell vs Salazar

Posted by EBW at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MB and I took the kids to Mud Island to walk the River Walk, and midway down the river from Cairo to New Orleans Jonah broke off towards a steep mound, followed by Sam. They climbed to the top of the mound, sat down, and slid down the grassy face of the mound.

Jonah sitting at the brink, with Sam barely visible giving him a push off.

Jonah, followed by Sam, sliding like mad over the grass, grinning like loons.

So now we know. Yes, there were wedgies.

I have to say, I think the idea that elders were living atop mounds slightly reality challenged. What elder wants to slip down a mound to make a call of nature? K-12 works, with the primary grades concentrating on grass sliding technique, and the upper grades playing inter-mural chunky on the platform.

It was a good idea, so they repeated it several more times.

Posted by EBW at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In Iceland car sales have fallen 92%. The stock market has lost 94% of its value. Travel abroad has fallen 40%. Furniture and appliance sales have fallen 50%, and housing sales have fallen to the point that classified ads no longer are published.

Yesterday's election was won by the Social Democrat Party and the Left-Green Movement, which won 20 and 14 of the 63 seats, respectively.

The Independence Party, in power for 18 years, managed only 23%, its lowest ever.

Posted by EBW at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its been 100 days, and there's been no charges brought, so we're not at the end of something, just a lull in the practice of it. On September 19th, 1692, during the Salem Witch Trials, Samuel Sewall wrote "About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press'd to death for standing mute." Giles Corey's last words were More weight.

We don't know how many times Khalid Sheik Mohammed was drowned and revived, nor how many times Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein too was drowned and revived, but we do know what their torturers, officials of the government of the United States, sought from them, between March 2002 and March 2003 -- a "confession" that linked Iraq to the Atta Gang attack.

Not a lot has changed in Gaza either in the same span of time. Tsahal's offensive operations were brought to a close hours before the end of the Bush/Cheney Regime, and since then ... according to today's Le Monde, nothing's happened.

There is no Joseph Nye Welch in this administration, no one who has already said "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

And since everyone's had flu prior to next week, long before their current employer waved the magic wand and granted the co-pay benefit as a condition of hire, well, its a pre-existing condition and therefore not covered by any private, for-profit, plan in the competitive market for ... keeping a for-profit market for illness.

Posted by EBW at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The guy is running around waving vacuum tubes to justify budget, the gory details are at Arms Control Wonk. Next he may go forth with paper tape and speak in tongues about Information Operations. Urk!

He runs United States Strategic Command, so if he's off the rails its Dr. Strangelove on every screen near everyone.

Posted by EBW at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One answer of course is the form is that of Verisign's .com, and the function is to make its operator money. Another answer is that the form is that of NeuStar's city.county.state.us taxa, and the function is to flatten that tree to a .com-like .us in order to ... make its operator money. Yet another answer is that the form is that of Afilias' purchase of India, and the function is to flatten a country to a .com-like .in in order to ... make its operator money.

Each of these are predicated on the $6/yr, first-come-first-serve model, which naturally includes the typo-squatting and ad sense "features", and criminal economic models, spam, phish, and so on, and the major economic engine, the buyer who drives all other buyers, are trademark portfolio managers, who pay much, much more than six-dollars-and-change.

Note Well: <CORE-CTO-HAT="on">

We have another answer. We're guided by Jon Postel's sense of the DNS community in the mid-90's published as RFC 1591 Domain Name System Structure and Delegation, that the operators of the registry for a delegated domain are trustees for the delegated domain, and have a duty to serve the community.

Suppose we intend to submit a response to the Request for Information published April 15th by the Department of Information Telecommunications and Technology of the City of New York concerning a top-level domain -- .nyc

Of course we have just this intent. We started working on a Berlin project shortly after getting the first linguistic and cultural application approved for Catalan, and three years ago we started working on a Barcelona project, and two years ago we started working on a Paris project. In each we have proposed, and the local governments have accepted, that the basic purpose is to serve the needs of "civil society".

We will submit an application to operate a registry for New York to ICANN, when ever ICANN deigns to accept applications, as will, in all likelihood, Verisign, NeuStar and Afilias.

So the question is, what is the form and function that New Yorkers want for .nyc?

I'll be writing about policy issues specific to cities as top-level domains, and in honor of James Blish who wrote Cities in Flight, which I was fortunate to read in Analog, I've selected that work to be the name of this category.

Posted by EBW at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can't get over the fact that someone fed my children scrambled eggs and bacon and wouldn't take anything in payment. I spent the post-coffee hours first on a conference wearing the CTO hat with my co-workers, all in Europe, on our regular agenda, then wearing a "group of cites seeking constituency status" hat in a conference call with the ICANN GNSO-OSC-OPS list, discussing the charter. Midway through the second call, mostly listening on mute as the VOIP link quality was listen-only, Sam and Jonah, followed by Grace and Kezzie, came back as I packed up while listening with one ear. They had bacon and eggs at the snack bar, and Gracie offered $10, but the people there wouldn't take her money.

I really can't get over the fact that someone fed my children breakfast this morning and asked for nothing in return.

At a nearly vacant state park hard by the Mississippi River in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest places in the United States, where the park labor is prisoners.

We stopped to snap a pic at "the crossroads" and made Memphis before sundown. No point cooking, there's barbecue. During the day we visited the mounds at Winterville, from which this effigy of a bound prisoner is taken.

Posted by EBW at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We camped about a mile from the great mound, and after breakfast we drove over and were astonished. We couldn't ask for a better guide than MB.

We went north-east along the Trace, then cut north-west to the river, and night found us in the middle of the delta, not far from where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil for immortal glory playing the blues.

An unbelievable chorus of owls punctuates the cricket filled night.

Posted by EBW at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The odd guy out, kneeling pointlessly to the right, is someone's future Dick Cheney, all costume and no sense or skin.

It is beyond belief that the Obama bots aren't prosecuting anyone from the prior regime as the First 100 Days draws to a close.

Posted by EBW at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From her website:

April 21, 2009

The Honorable Eric Holder
Attorney General
Department of Justice
Washington, DC 20530

Dear General Holder:

I am outraged to learn from reports leaked to the media over the last several days that the FBI or NSA secretly wiretapped my conversations in 2005 or 2006 while I was Ranking Member on the House Intelligence Committee.

This abuse of power is outrageous and I call on your Department to release all transcripts and other investigative material involving me in an unredacted form. It is my intention to make this material available to the public.

I also urge you to take appropriate steps to investigate possible wiretapping of other Members of Congress and selective leaks of investigative material which can be used for political purposes. As you know, it is entirely appropriate to converse with advocacy organizations and constituent groups, and I am concerned about a chilling effect on other elected officials who may find themselves in my situation.

Let me be absolutely clear: I never contacted the Department of Justice, the White House or anyone else to seek favorable treatment regarding the national security cases on which I was briefed, or any other cases. You may be aware that David Szady, the FBI's former top counterintelligence official, is quoted in the media saying of me "…in all my dealings with her, she was always professional and never tried to intervene or get in the way of any investigation."

Sincerely,

JANE HARMAN

She's also sort of dull on the issue of distinguishing between ordinary venality and corruption and the targets of counterintelligence, that is, between calls from, say, Jack Abramoff offering golf in Scotland and skybox tickets to games, and calls from a guy who works for Meir Dagan or Mikhail Yefimovich Fradkov, or both, offering something vastly more substantial.

There is a difference.

Oddly, she didn't mention her call to the NYTimes to ask them to hold their story on the NSA's use of warrantless wiretaps, and her defense of the program when it became public. Maybe in her next letter of outrage.

Posted by EBW at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's how the JPost characterizes a demo against the Gaza Op:

(someone) is viewed as a hard-core supporter of Palestinian interests, and was a featured speaker at an extremist anti-Israel demonstration in January to protest Operation Cast Lead.

A demo against a military operation, ignoring the fact that the operation employed disproportionate force, and met several criteria for "war crimes", is "extremist"?

So, a demo in favor of a military operation, and accepting that the operation employed disproportionate force, and met several criteria for "war crimes", would be ... moderately anti-Israel???

My hat is off to the copy editors at the JPost. I suppose, by necessity, to be "neutral towards Israel", the demo would have to urge additional states to undertake military operations, say, the Swiss for example, and increase the level and scope of violence against a mostly defenseless population. I can't imagine what the JPost copy desk thinks is "pro-Israel" ... there's just not that much crazy violence in a bottle of ink.

Here's the link: clickit. Penultimate sentence. The last one is kind of juicy too.

Posted by EBW at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jeff Stein, writing in CQ, has a four page piece on Jane Harmon, the espionage-related charges against Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, then officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and the final half-term of the Gonzales DoJ., Sources: Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Promising to Intervene for AIPAC.

Worth reading. We used to have B-1 Bomber Bob Dornan. Now we've something else.

h/t to Juan Cole.

Posted by EBW at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gracie came home holding an adult copperhead, one hand high on the neck, the other low on the tail.

It was ... vitally challenged, having apparently met a tire or two at some recent point of time. Agkistrodon contortrix, male, with hemipenes evaginated, and fangs and poison glands as expected.

We also picked up a cooter turtle which had apparently also met a tire or two, with not immediately fatal consequences. It remains with us, some first aid care and lettuce in, thus far.

Posted by EBW at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aneesh P. Chopra. Little "formal IT training" is how DotGov Spotlight has it. When I think of the people who wanted the job I just laugh. He might as well have appointed a stamp collector as SecState.

Hey, 150 for-profit hospitals pooling revenue analytics via a "business intelligence platform" sounds like behavioral targeting, a la CMGI or DoubleClick or ... . That and having no visible wins out of 18 starts burning eight figures in seed capital as a VC during the last years of the second Clinton administration and the first year of the Bush/Cheney Regime. Huzzah!!!

I'm underwhelmed. We could have had a serious person.

Posted by EBW at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm listening to moyen classical music, that is to say, 19th century European light music, in an endless loop, of the same piece -- I'm in my 3rd call to get last year's PIN, each a good half hour of muzak -- wishing the IRS of the US put (a) some variety, I could use some 20th century Russians and some 18th century Germans to go with the schmaltz I'm listening to, and (b) some American greats, and I don't care if its Gershwin or Springsteen or Muddy Waters or the Black Lodge Singers.

Posted by EBW at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was working my way throught ICANN's second draft of the guidebook for applicants "with Jonah, OK?!?" (see the previous post) and something I read by Sven Triloqvist in the European Tribune simply had to be repeated.

3.1.2.3 Morality and Public Order Objection at 3-3. Staff invites further public comment on this problem. Reluctently, we must point out that Wikileaks has published the blacklists for Thailand, Denmark, Norway, Australia and Germany, and China and the United Arab Emirates ban Wikileaks, DENIC apparently suspended wikileaks.de without notice on the 9th of this month, and wikileaks.org was temporarily disabled by a California judge following an ex-parte hearing by the Julius Baer bank.

We believe that if wikileaks submits an application that no objection arising from this section is proper.

The comment is at this page.

Posted by EBW at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jonah joined me under the canopy and played with my iPhone as the storm approached. The cloud cover was sufficient that the data rate to the satellite was too low to make remote sessions tolerable, so I did a task that relied upon the persistence of the queue service routine in sendmail -- I worked on comments on 2nd draft of the ICANN guidelines for applicants for new gTLDs. At one point when I was making tea and thinking about how loud the rain was Jonah scooched over and left me the end of the bench, and I jostled back his elbow to get back "my space". What I didn't notice is that Jonah had composed a picture, one with the lamp, the ICANN v2 draft guidebook, and the macbook, all in the dark of the canopy under heavy rain. When the power failed and we were left in the dark I noticed his photo, and I covered us with a poncho as the rain had become so heave that drops were coming through the canopy.

The thunder was continuous, and the dog's dish, partly sheltered from the rain, filled as we two sat, warm and comfortably leaning against each other, the water drops landing on our poncho, and I held Jonah, until the iPhone's charge was flat and Jonah wanted a chocolate sandwich and the rain had let up briefly so we went inside the trailer where MB was dealing with leaks coming through its roof too.

As usual, he deleted his photo, or it would be here. It was a work of art, and I wish I could look at it again. Despite, or because of the tornado watch / intense thunderstorm / heavy rain / flooding conditions, that hour of companionship is something I'd like to see an artifact of, even one as illusory as a photograph of a lamp, a book, and a laptop, in the dark.

Posted by EBW at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush/Cheney Regime, appointed by a group of lawyers on December 12, 2000, following the November 19th storming of the Miami-Dade vote-counting room by Republican congressional staffers, and returned to power in 2004 through electoral fraud in Ohio and a war over a faked nuclear threat -- the Iraqi WMDs fraud, quietly withdrew 110 B-61 "Dial-a-yield" tactical weapons from the RAF Lakenheath air base 70 miles northeast of London, and 130 B-61 weapons from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

Bush/Cheney Regime policy of reducing the US nuclear inventory in Europe is a continuation of the reversal policy initiated by Richard Nixon, from the then-peak of 7,300 weapons packages, to the present 150 to 240 weapons packages.

At the end of the first, and potentially only Obama/Biden administration, will these obsolete toys remain at air bases in Incirlik, Turkey, Aviano and Ghedi-Torre in Italy, Volkel in Holland, and Büchel in Germany?

Fundamentally, why is the US keeping obsolete tactically weaponized physics packages in Europe? What political purpose do they serve? What is the US, and the Atlantic Alliance, policy goal in retaining these, and when, and under what conditions, will those purposes or policy goals be attained, or become attainable by means other than retention of an inventory of obsoleted gravity bombs?

Its been five days, and we don't have any real numbers on programs or weapons reductions, or any follow-up on deployed weapons. I hope some of those bright-eyed and primary-ruthless boys now doing policy are working on Peace.

Posted by EBW at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

We moved camp today, and while MB and I were setting up the VSAT our former neighbor came over to ask if Grace was around. He'd found a large eastern diamondback in his site, so MB went off with him to look while I waited for Grace, who'd gone off to the bathroom a few minutes previously. In a few minutes I heard Grace call for help, then again, saying Kezzie'd been bitten on the face by a snake. Grace was carrying a crying Kezzie, who said it was a black racer, and she'd just a single puncture on the inside of her lower lip, where the snake had broken her skin.

I sent Grace off to see the large and endangered eastern diamondback and took Kezzie to some water and ice and some calming time, and when she perked up she wanted to go see the rattlesnake too.

Eventually some park employees came by with a snake grabber and a snake bag, and a buzzing snake about 4' long was extracted from its comfy spot, re-grabbed at the head, bagged, and sent about a mile away to decrement some other rodent population. Both Gracie and Kezzie were very pleased to have seen another big, though not as big as the monster we saw a month ago, eastern diamondback, and at 5pm we'd the scheduled naturalist talk about snakes, and I learned that the beautiful mystery snake I saw a few days ago was an eastern coachman.

Our new site features a resident horned owl, so "the owls are watching".

Posted by EBW at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you missed the packets, cuts proximal to 37°29'44.00"N 122°14'44.31"W and 37°15'20.79"N 121°48'9.38"W have had a significant effect on North American Network Operations.

Of course, if you don't use, and the services you do use don't use, primitives which have a dependency upon routing to the area bounded below by South San Jose and above by Redwood City, that is, "Silicon Valley", then you may not have been effected.

I was, and I'm at Cape San Blas, Florida, and I bounce my packets directly off a satellite to Reston, Virginia, and then mostly to Maine and Europe, but ... I do touch several tarbabies along the way up and down the link-to-session stack.

A few days after the Atta Gang completed their mission, and we both realized MB'd actually seen Atta plus 2 on T minus one, that is, one dangling thread, MB and I had dinner in a quite place. I explained how I thought Chellie should (then) run against Susan, on defense, "in depth". Spending money on domestic hospital beds, on domestic routers and links. It didn't happen, Chellie lost to Susan, and here we are, six years later, and Tom's lost to Susan too.

This dropped in:

Activity Type Code Desc: PROGRESS COMMENTS
Activity Type Code: PROG

OTDR readings were taken by AT&T West and a cut was located 1600 ft from
the San Jose, CA central office. AT&T West technicians are onsite
working to isolate the exact location of the cut. There are 4 cables
impacted. AT&T Mobility has 61 GSM and 45 co-located UMTS sites out of
service off of Santa Clara Base Station Controllers 15 & 23, and Santa
Clara Radio Network Controller 4. E911 has 52 Location Measuring Units
down. The AT&T West Santa Cruz 11 central office (41,803 ATNs) is
experiencing an SS7 isolation and the San Martin central office (11,904
ATNs) lost it's umbilical and is isolated at this time. The Bailey
remote site (4,973 ATNs) is also isolated. Scott's Valley has 3 out of 4
SS7 links down. The Santa Cruz 01, Aptos, Scott's Valley, Felton,
Boulder Creek, Ben Lomand, San Jose 11, San Jose 13, San Jose 21 central
offices have trunks impacted such that all lines are busy and incoming
calls are receiving trouble messages. The Santa Cruz County SO (178,040
ATNs), Scott's Valley PD (12,007 ATNs) and the UC Santa Cruz PD (14,909
ATNs) are all without ALI at this time. The Gilroy PD PSAP and the
Morgan Hill PD and CDF have been rerouted with ALI/ANI. The Felton CDF
has not been rerouted. There are 17 DSLAMS and 4 ATMS out of service
impacting DSL service. There are 3 SMDI Links down impacting voicemail
service. Verizon's Morgan Hill and Gilroy central offices are currently
isolated. There have been 224,865 blocked calls.

Someone I don't know wrote on the operator's list:

That AT&T has stopped provisioning protection fiber for automatic restoral is mind boggling.

That our crack (or on crack) govt contracting/emergency-preparedness staff didn't demand protected facilities for 911 is another mind boggling issue.

That there is no over-under wide-area back-up coverage for the cellular canopy ...

We posture and orate about being prepared for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and then events like these reveal the reality:

The emperor has no clothes.

Update: AT&T is offering six figures for information leading to the conviction of ... which of course could just be contact negotiation tactics on T's side.

Posted by EBW at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Juan Cole's book is probably something I will read, but probably not before summer. Today I started the process of getting invitation letters for the purpose of obtaining Swedish visas, necessary for participation in IETF-75 in Stockholm, for two engineers in Tehran.

With the addition of mapping to the lookup portion of the IDNAbis draft protocol, its wicked important to get the informed consent of the two major script users impacted by Unicode's script unifications -- "Han", so all the Chinese, which includes both the Mainland and Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, (Canada, the US, ...), Korea, Japan and even Vietnam, and "Arabic", so Morocco to Indonesia, less most of India, Burma, Laos, and Tehran to Kabul to Islamabad. The Axis of Wevils or something. I'm trying to dot those eyes before a mostly ASCII-centric group declares IDNAbis "done".

Posted by EBW at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I still haven't decided whether or not I'll be doing my law school blawging here or at a spin-off Wampum site, but I'll start putting things here anyway and move them if I must later.

Yesterday, I cracked open the second of the six Aspen E&Es Eric procured for me last time he was DC - this one on Civil Procedure, aka, CivPro. The first chapter introduced me to "personal jurisdiction", a clearly important issue for any legal proceeding, and one I found very interesting. In fact, I found the first fifty-some pages of Glannon so compelling that I Googled for CivPro blawgs, hoping to feed my interest. The monkeys led me to the aptly named Civil Procedure Prof Blog, where, today, this case on, you guessed it, personal jurisdiction, was reported as certified by the 11th Circuit. The case deals with critical comments made by a Washington non-commercial watchdog blogger regarding a Florida company. As the CivPro Progs reports, Florida has a long-arm statute which "authorizes jurisdiction over a defendant who commits a tortious act "within Florida.""

Not only is this case of interest due to my new-found love for CivPro, but clearly, it has implications for all political bloggers.

Posted by MB Williams at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I was in San Francisco for the IETF week before last I visited Berkeley and ritually went to Moe's (he's been dead for a decade) and picked up an atlas for Sam, which he's busy committing to memory, and then cruised by the bumper sticker tables ... many oldies and goodies where present, and there were lots of "Israel this ..." and "boycott that ..." to choose from, but there was one that simply stated the underling thing. The thing itself. Abandon "Israel".

Helena Cobban wrote something recently, Lieberman: No more 'Israbluff', concluding with this

... I think I'm with Lieberman now-- in this way: No more Israbluff, and no more Ameribluff or Eurobluff either.

Let each nation and group of nations pursue its own interests calmly and in a focused way and without participating any more in the mendacious edifice that the "peace process" has become ever since the solid principles of Madrid were transformed into the hocus-pocus of Oslo.

How much do Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton want to put Avigdor Lieberman, and Yisrael Beiteinu's 15 coalition controlling seats, and Likudnic Binyamin Netanyahu, in control of their future, to be the author of American foreign policy in the Middle East? They're not screaming, yet.

Police are likely to question Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once more as part of a corruption investigation before the start of the Pesach holiday on Wednesday evening. I could, like Uri Avnery, list the verbal sins of a minor Russian thug, which Juan Cole also enumerates, but ... unless the Israeli judicial system collapses in the next few days (there is a reason why Foreign Minister Lieberman crashed Yitzhak Aharonovitch ritual take-over of the Ministry for Internal Security, formerly Ministry of Police, and it probably wasn't to cooperate with the investigation), FM A. Lieberman will shortly be former FM AL.

It all borders on farce, with Lieberman questioned over suspicions of obstructing the probe against him, which police sources said yesterday is likely to produce charges of money laundering, fraud and breach of trust.

The most charitable rational that comes to mind for the Obama/Biden/Clinton failure to reject the foreign graft is not that their immune systems are compromised, more than the usual, but that it is more likely than not that before Summer the Trial of former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be filling the Israeli media market, and the hope of pious credulous foreigners that Yisrael Beiteinu's 15 seats of shame will be swapped for Kadima's 28 seats of ... centricism. As if!

Posted by EBW at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At 02h29 GMT (10:30 EDT) or about an hour ago, a Unha-2 carrying a Kwangmyongsong-2 telecommunications package was launched

NORAD and USNORTHCOM monitor North Korean launch http://www.northcom.mil/News/2009/040509.html April 05, 2009 PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. — North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command officials acknowledged today that North Korea launched a Taepo Dong 2 missile at 10:30 p.m. EDT Saturday which passed over the Sea of Japan/East Sea and the nation of Japan. Stage one of the missile fell into the Sea of Japan/East Sea. The remaining stages along with the payload itself landed in the Pacific Ocean. No object entered orbit and no debris fell on Japan. NORAD and USNORTHCOM assessed the space launch vehicle as not a threat to North America or Hawaii and took no action in response to this launch. This is all of the information that will be provided by NORAD and USNORTHCOM pertaining to the launch.

According to Le Monde, its broadcasting revolutionary songs, so either its singing with the fishes, or NORAD and USNORTHCOM (a command joke if ever there was one, after "Homeland Security") can't distinguish between low orbit and zero or more meters below sea level.

Posted by EBW at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

S.773
Title: A bill to ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Sen Rockefeller, John D., IV [WV] (introduced 4/1/2009)
Cosponsors (3)
Latest Major Action: 4/1/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Of some professional interest is the following:

SEC. 7. LICENSING AND CERTIFICATION OF CYBERSECURITY PROFESSIONALS.

(a) IN GENERAL. - Within 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the
Secretary of Commerce shall develop or coordinate and integrate a national
licensing, certification, and periodic recertification program for
cybersecurity professionals.

(b) MANDATORY LICENSING. - Beginning 3 years after the date of enactment of
this Act, it shall be unlawful for any individual to engage in business in the
United States, or to be employed in the United States, as a provider of
cybersecurity services to any Federal agency or an information system or
network designated by the President, or the President's designee, as a critical
infrastructure information system or network, who is not licensed and certified
under the program.

Here's the current public key for .gov:

gov. 257 3 7 "AwEAAZ1OCt7zZxeaROvz XNCNlqQWIi++p5ABXSox qJ65WQko6xrI9RImK7IB T5roFhXjBDGJ8ld9CYIE N94kK83K/QwUGCJ+v3vI QFi09IqsPeRdHTQyghWW bhzAZpnlZ16imXB4yFZj dbV2iM66KcgsESQMPEcI ayDQJh6JEi1wmslrYvRR J6YPOWrlLD0RmdtCaRuz lUE0RiWSem/i8vDFdmsS wChRMcORklKqjqt1+RBI iEFJGKIz7lGc9DXRwkBf b+halii+jrELiZAPzfO7 rf08l3QlgHEuxclTTdEa xctPd2O2U/Hl9tRgkxRL /Zv1i0sEx2mOJGcUCeVm 4Hf2aM8=";

S.778
Title: A bill to establish, within the Executive Office of the President, the Office of National Cybersecurity Advisor.
Sponsor: Sen Rockefeller, John D., IV [WV] (introduced 4/1/2009)
Cosponsors (3)
Latest Major Action: 4/1/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

This is probably the job a Republican friend of mine is angling for, not that his politics matter much to the mission ... but perhaps politics matters more to "security" than meets the eye. Is Microsoft's monopoly litigation and settlement history relevant to host system monoculture, in the governmental as well as the business and residential computing markets? Are race-to-the-bottom network management operational practices fundamental to the lack of admission control policies on access networks? If "network" is defined to exclude the demographic unwilling or unable to expend $600/year for residential broadband (dsl or cable), and rural demographic, are the security properties of a video delivery system "national"?

Obviously I've thought too much about this.

Posted by EBW at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This appeared in today's Denver Post. I think it is a useful piece of writing. I'm more tolerant about Ward's efforts than his AIM inter-factional critics, if only because it is possible, in theory at least, for a German or an Englishman, who has never left Berlin or London, to write critically about the European colonial project in the Americas, and Ward is colorably more Indian than a never-took-the-boat citizen of Berlin or London. ebw.

The jury got it exactly right. In fact, the jury, six men and women, tried and true — clearly understood what the leaders of our state's flagship university could never quite grasp.

The jurors figured out that this case was not really about Ward Churchill. The case was, from the very beginning, about the University of Colorado and its unwillingness to do the right thing, meaning the hard thing, when it mattered most.

The case was about what happens when the mob wins, when a grandstanding governor trumps academic freedom, when talk-radio noise gets mistaken for the sound of truth, when university leaders cower in fear.

The jurors sat for weeks in Denver District Courtroom 6, and, after hearing all the testimony, they got it. Yes, they got it exactly right.

They didn't care about Churchill. They gave him a dollar. Churchill pulled out a dollar bill and waved it around the courtroom because he didn't care about the money either. For Churchill — and for CU — what will matter is when he walks back into a classroom (once the judge presumably rules that Churchill gets his job back), followed by TV cameras that will record yet another public CU humiliation.

After the trial, Churchill's lawyer, David Lane — who may get hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees from CU — said that CU's leaders had hidden under their desks while the mob howled outside the campus gates.

The jury agreed. The jury didn't, however, buy Lane's concept that Churchill was a martyr. That may have been why Lane never made a real case about money to the jury. He didn't want to confuse things. The remedy here wasn't to make Chur chill rich; it was to make CU pay, but in more essential ways.

And so we went back to 2005, when Churchill hysteria was in full bloom, when we were arguing not only whether the essay was protected speech but whether Churchill's speech was inciting violence wherever he went. Nobody at CU had seemed to notice these violence-inciting tendencies before the world of talk radio took them up, but, by then, every word Churchill had said or written needed investigating.

And it was only coincidence — this was essentially CU's case — that eventually entirely unrelated charges would be brought against Churchill.

Give the jurors credit. They saw through it all. There's the great line about juries, that we are tried by people not smart enough to get out of jury duty. But this jury had to pass several difficult tests.

The jurors had to fight through all the minutiae. They had to fight through some brain-numbing testimony. They had to stifle yawns, and laughter, when the CU regents — who represent a great testament to our democracy — mostly testified that, whatever they might have said at some earlier point, they really cared only about protecting the sanctity of academia from the likes of Ward Churchill.

For those who now blame CU attorney Pat O'Rourke for not being tough enough on Churchill, I wish they had seen what he had to work with. For example, he had a regent, Tillie Bishop, who, remarkably, testified that he didn't know what the "Little Eichmanns" essay had to say about 9/11 victims.

Lane asked if Bishop meant that, for all he knew, Churchill had compared the victims to Boy Scouts. Bishop's answer: "Yes."

Case closed. Game over. OK, I guess former CU president Betsy Hoffman's testimony that Bill Owens had threatened to cut off state funds from the university if she didn't fire Churchill immediately was even more damning, but it wasn't nearly as entertaining.

And when the jurors heard the case against Churchill, they must have been surprised by how underwhelming — and less than entertaining — it all seemed. Let's agree, Churchill broke rules, stretched the truth, was a fabricator and at least a minor-league plagiarist.

But I'm guessing the jurors — who didn't speak to the media after the verdict — had to wonder whether all those years spent chasing Churchill weren't just a little disproportionate. Was this, as Lane said during the trial, all you got?

I kept waiting for CU to come up with a list of tenured professors who had been fired for similar misdeeds. Maybe no one ever committed Chur chill-like misdeeds. Or maybe CU just doesn't often (or ever) fire professors for academic misconduct.

I kept waiting to hear why CU never seemed to care about Churchill's transgressions before his essay on Sept. 11. There had been longstanding complaints about Churchill's research, but no one had ever acted on them. CU officials say they had never heard them, which, of course, would be damning enough.

And so you had a trial in which CU had to make the case that, say, an unsupported Churchill footnote — alleging that John Smith had tried to kill off Indians with smallpox — was the reason it fired him.

Churchill wrote his controversial essay the day after 9/11. Nobody seemed to notice it for three years. And when the public did notice, the outcry was only, in part, about comparing some victims to Adolf Eichmann — and what Churchill meant by that. The essay also came at a time when the "liberal" professoriate was a hot issue. Although Churchill, a radical, scoffs at mere liberals, he was a ready symbol in what would be one more battle of the recent culture wars.

If you want to take anything from the verdict, something worth more than a buck, anyway, it's that six jurors decided this: However hard academic freedom is, if you want to be a real flagship university, you can't hide from it — under a desk or anywhere else.

Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.

Posted by EBW at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On March 29th, just five days ago, the Cobell legal team obtained a report written in May 2008 by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney and finalized on the eve of the June 2008 trial. The report is here.

I'll write follow-ups when I'm not behind on work, paid and volunteer. The category will be "behind the cshell curtain", as its technical, rather than one of our Indian or DOI/DOJ corruption categories.

Starting from a packet capture on egress traffic (from the DOI border router) showed SSN's in plain text is pretty good for an attorney trying to bring the existences of, and the concealment of, the IG's report, to the attention of the court as evidence in support of the plaintiff's specific claims as to the integrity of the DOI's Individual Indian Trust (IIT, not "IT") fund accounting infrastructure is OK.

After I read the whole report a couple of times I may come up with an even more "your hair is on fire" motivation for the importance of the IG's report to the fact situation. As to the concealment by one Secretary, that's why we have courts and elections, though both premises appear to be profoundly compromised -- first, the removal of Judge Royce Lamberth and the afactual reversal of his order to protect the integrity of the IIT infrastructure by department-level security measures (aka "the DOI internet quarantine"), and second, the continued position of the administration, independent of Party, to litigate rather than settle the IIT case.

I once had to go on an "Acker's Letter" mission for IBM Research, and my packet capture (to show that in fact IBM's Academic Unix product did do class C routing correctly) netted me a final exam in networking, also in plain text. I thought that was rather amusing at the time and just last week I was mentioning that to Radia Perlman as we discussed how networking is taught -- usually as if either the IP stack, or the ISO stack, were as natural as gravity and not the result of a lot of engineering design compromises and dead ends.

Posted by EBW at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)