March 31st, 2008
As if I didn’t have sufficient cause to worry about all the private info I’ve willingly handed over to Google (oh, how I love Gmail and Google calendar and Google Docs and Google Apps and Google sitemaps and Google Analytics and… and …), I now have to wonder about this match that’s straight out of 1984:
Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.
Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
All right, let’s set my paranoia aside, and admit that organizing and building a wiki-style tool for the intelligence community is pretty cool and, too, one of those, “Shit, why weren’t they doing that already?” kind of moments.
And now, back to dealing with my paranoia, Shit, just what else will Google, NSA, CIA and the Telecomms collaborate on next, and just how badly will we get screwed?
March 23rd, 2008
Well, it’s clear that the finger prints of republican operatives can be found in Eliot Spitzer’s fall, just like it’s clear that the now former governor of New York was just plain stupid for leaving himself so exposed:
Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ”used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida.
[...]
Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.
Allegations of republican involvement in Eliot Spitzer’s fall surfaced earlier, as discussed here.
March 22nd, 2008
Paul Krugman reminds us of the lessons we’ve forgotten since 1929 — the time of the “Great Depression”:
The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.
Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are doing all they can to end that vicious circle. We can only hope that they succeed. Otherwise, the next few years will be very unpleasant — not another Great Depression, hopefully, but surely the worst slump we’ve seen in decades.
