Later On

Shredding your credit card bill doesn’t matter much when data thieves steal millions of credit card numbers at a time. Associated Press’s Devlin Barrett reports:

Federal prosecutors on Monday charged a Miami man with the largest case of credit and debit card data theft ever in the United States, accusing the one-time government informant of swiping 130 million accounts on top of 40 million he stole previously.

Albert Gonzalez, 28, broke his own record for identity theft by hacking into retail networks, according to prosecutors, though they say his illicit computer exploits ended when he went to jail on charges stemming from an earlier case.

Gonzalez is a former informant for the U.S. Secret Service who helped the agency hunt hackers, authorities say. The agency later found out that he had also been working with criminals and feeding them information on ongoing investigations, even warning off at least one individual, according to authorities.

Gonzalez, who is already in jail awaiting trial in a hacking case, was indicted Monday in New Jersey and charged with conspiring with two other unnamed suspects to steal the private information. Prosecutors say the goal was to sell the stolen data to others.

How much of the data was sold and then used to make fraudulent charges is unclear. Investigators in such cases say it is usually impossible to quantify the impact of such thefts on account holders.

Prosecutors say Gonzalez, who is known online as “soupnazi,” targeted customers of convenience store giant 7-Eleven Inc. and supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers, Co. Inc. He also targeted Heartland Payment Systems, a New Jersey-based card payment processor.

According to the indictment, Gonzalez and his two Russian coconspirators would hack into corporate computer networks and secretly place “malware,” or malicious software, that would allow them backdoor access to the networks later to steal data…

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No surprise, but a clear example of business having zero interest in the common welfare. From the Center for American Progress:

The Chamber of Commerce and its allies are planning to mount an "all-out lobbying effort" to scuttle new reforms proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that would increase corporate accountability. The SEC is proposing the implementation of what is known as "proxy access," which would make it easier for shareholders to replace a company’s board of directors. The Chamber has decided to oppose these reforms, and it plans to mount an enormous lobbying effort that it will ramp up after Labor Day. As it stands now, only five of the 4,000 public companies that the data service FactSet SharkWatch tracks allow proxy access. By opposing the SEC’s reform effort, the Chamber is positioning itself to block the rights of shareholders who want to hold managers more accountable for their actions. As Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk writes, "The proxy rules have been intended by Congress, the courts have stated, "to give true vitality to the concept of corporate democracy." Adopting the SEC proposal, and the additional reforms I discussed, would advance this important goal.

Here’s an excellent reminder of the Cornel note-taking system, along with links to a free note-taking application for the Cornell system and a PDF generator to make your own templates if you prefer to take notes by hand.

This is the second shave for the little Omega 21047 boar brush (or mixed boar-and-badger—it’s not clear, but seems likely). (First use here.) Figaro shaving soap (a soft soap) seems the ideal pairing: I got fulsome lather, easily enough for four or five passes: the little guy has great capacity.

The Gillette English open-comb Aristocrat with an Astra Superior blade of multiple uses was totally comfortable and effective, leaving a perfectly smooth face after the third pass. And Lustry Spice was a very pleasant finish indeed.

A great shave, if I say it myself.

If you think about a romantic comedy built around, say, curling, you can pretty much scope it out—lots of kids if made by Disney, more about adults if made by Miramax, say. It wouldn’t have much complexity—say, a challenge on the sports front, and two romantic struggles, the lead pair and the sidekick pair. If it’s a pilot of a series, it will have more, of course—something mildly serious (job crisis) to provide an on-going excuse for drama as needed, and character’s problems will not quite be neatly resolved so that they can fray again later in the series if needed. And if Leslie Nielsen is in it, you know just how goofy it will be, and what a dunderhead he will be.

But whatever you dream up, you won’t come close to the excellent  movie Men With Brooms. The title sounds Mel Brooks, but it’s not that sort of outrageous, over-the-top comedy. Indeed, it’s a fairly serious and straightforward comedy about curling (which is treated with significant knowledge and respect, not as a source of humor) with a lot about daily life and characters who have the sorts of flaws that real people do. It may help that the same guy co-wrote, directed, and stars in the move, playing the lead male role. Leslie Nielsen plays a role as an admirable character and plays it well. And for you Molly Parker fans, she’s in the movie, too.

In fact, as you watch it, start counting all the things that would never appear if this movie had been made in the US. Based on this movie alone, I would have to conclude that the popular culture of Canada is far more mature and far more multi-layered and intriguing (and more comfortable with complexity) than that of the US, which seems to take a naïve and simplistic view of life, ignoring any aspects of reality unsuited to a Disney family movie.

And I didn’t know beavers made those sounds.

Don Colman:

If you haven’t heard the news… Sony is releasing a new e-book reader, its answer to Amazon’s Kindle. Retailing at $399, the Sony reader will feature a touch screen (something the Kindle doesn’t have) and the ability to download books wirelessly (something the Kindle does have). It will also provide access to thousands of free (public domain) books & documents provided by Google Book Search. A nice touch.

But I’m wondering whether …

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This seems much more like Bush’s line of country, but I guess Obama likes it, too. Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

On Monday a federal court judge ordered the Department of Defense to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who it has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification. But like the other Yemeni men cleared for release but still held at the detention facility, it’s not clear when or even if Mohammed al-Adahi will get to go free.

Obama administration officials on Wednesday boasted that they’d secured agreements from six European countries to accept Guantanamo detainees, although the United States itself has still refused to free any Guantanamo prisoners on U.S. soil. But since President Obama’s inauguration in January, the administration has not released a single prisoner to Yemen, although that country is willing to have them back and many would be happy to go there. (Some prisoners from other countries, such as the Uighurs from China, cannot be returned to their home countries for fear of persecution.) The administration has not stated its reasons, but said only that the State Department is negotiating with the Yemeni government over the prisoners’ return. At least three Yemeni prisoners since April have won their petitions for habeas corpus in federal court — meaning a judge has ordered that the government must let them go. (The government has cleared for release an unknown number of others.) So far, though, the Obama administration has not complied with those court rulings.

The United States has long been reluctant to return Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, where al-Qaeda is believed to be active. As a result, of about 550 prisoners released from Guantanamo by Bush officials, only 14 were from Yemen. But that trickle has slowed to a complete halt under the Obama administration, despite court rulings that the government hasn’t shown the men have done anything wrong or present any security risk.

Nearly 100 of the remaining 223 detainees at Guantanamo Bay are from Yemen. A government official on Wednesday said that negotiations are ongoing. Now that two U.S. federal courts have ordered at least three Yemeni prisoners freed, however, it’s not clear under what power the United States can continue to hold them.

“We appreciate that the United States has security concerns about Yemen, but continuing to hold these men without charge is morally wrong, is in violation of court orders, and it’s handing al-Qaeda a recruiting tool,” said Letta Taylor, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who wrote a report on the Yemeni detainees’ situation in March. “It creates its own sets of risks.”

The standoff between the court and the president in the Yemeni prisoner cases is another example of the executive branch ignoring the orders of the federal judiciary. In previous court cases, the government has refused to turn over evidence that it deemed a “state secret,” for example, even after a federal judge ordered the evidence be disclosed.

“The way our system is supposed to work is that if a federal district court orders that a branch of the government do something, they’re supposed to do it,” said John Chandler, a lawyer in Atlanta who represents al-Adahi in his court case and won his order of release on Monday. “I have every hope that they will. But they haven’t done anything yet. And he’s not the first one to be ordered released.” …

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Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

On Monday, the CIA released two memos from 2004 and 2005, which Vice President Cheney said would “show specifically what we gained” from the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. As people like Spencer Ackerman noted, those documents didn’t end up showing that at all, however:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Despite the fact that they devoted heavy coverage to Cheney’s initial claims, major media outlets have largely buried these new facts. But as Greg Sargent notes, last night on CNN, even former Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend had to admit that Cheney still hasn’t been vindicated:

It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.

Watch it:

Cheney, of course, refuses to back down from his initial claims. Earlier this week he put out a statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, there is still no evidence that the torture techniques were responsible and necessary for producing the intelligence.

The phenomenon can be expected to occur worldwide, despite Dana Perino’s prediction that global warming would actually be a health benefit. (I’m beginning to think that Ms. Perino did not know what she was talking about.) Here’s what’s happening in my state:

From mid July to early August 2006, a heat wave swept through the southwestern United States. Temperature records were broken at many locations and unusually high humidity levels for this typically arid region led to the deaths of more than 600 people, 25,000 cattle and 70,000 poultry in California alone. An analysis of this extreme episode carried out by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, put this heat wave in the context of six decades of observed heat waves. Their results suggest that such regional extremes are becoming more and more likely as climate change trends continue.

The team, led by climate scientist Alexander Gershunov, examined meteorological conditions that lead to this and other recorded heat waves, when temperatures rose into the hottest one percent of historical summertime daily and nightly temperatures recorded in California and Nevada since 1948. The scientists found that heat waves in the region often fall into either of two types: the typical "daytime" events characterized by dry daytime heat and rejuvenating nighttime cooling, or the less typical "nighttime" heat waves characterized additionally by high humidity and hot muggy days and nights. Since the early 1990s, nighttime heat wave events in California, which historically had been less common, have become more prevalent, increasing in both frequency and intensity. The pinnacle of nighttime heat waves occurred in a 17-day episode during July 2006 when a persistent warm pattern was aggravated by unusually humid conditions, associated with warm ocean waters off Baja California, Mexico.

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Take a look. (This is the 10th year in a row that Jacob was the most popular name for boys.)

An email received this morning:

We’re in a new era.

In March, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government will defer to state governments on medical marijuana — a 180-degree reversal of the previous administration’s anti-democratic policies.

And the question of taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol has appeared as the number one question for the president on his official government Web sites, change.gov and whitehouse.gov — forcing Pres. Obama to deal with the issue twice.

The indications we’re receiving from the White House constitute the most positive marijuana-related developments on the federal level since 1978, when the Carter administration created the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program — a little-known federal government program that supplies medical marijuana to a handful of patients.

MPP is making a difference where it counts the most … on Capitol Hill:

• Thanks to MPP’s lobbying efforts, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee called on the Department of Justice to issue a written policy on its federal medical marijuana position, so we’ll be working to make that policy as good as possible. This is the best opportunity we’ve had since the 1970s to get the federal government to issue a positive statement in writing regarding medical marijuana.
• Last month, the U.S. House passed the D.C. spending bill without the “Barr Amendment,” which for more than a decade has prevented the District from implementing a medical marijuana law that 69% of residents approved. We might have legal medical marijuana in our nation’s capital near the end of this year, after 11 years of trying!
• For the last few years, MPP has been making steady progress toward getting a coalition of U.S. House members to introduce a bill to de-federalize all marijuana laws, for the purpose of allowing states to determine their own marijuana policies without federal interference. This measure is the end-of-the-line, everything-we-have-ever-wanted-to-pass bill on the federal level.
• U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has reintroduced the states’ rights medical marijuana bill, with a dozen co-sponsors. Similarly to the federal decriminalization bill, Congressman Frank’s medical marijuana bill would give states the right to determine their own medical marijuana policies without federal interference.
• In March, U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) introduced a bill to establish a commission to analyze the over-incarceration problem in the U.S.; the measure already has at least 32 co-sponsors in a Senate that only requires 51 votes for passage. This is the marijuana-related bill that has the best chance of passing either chamber during this congressional session.

If you like what you’re reading, will you join forces with MPP in this new era and make a donation today toward MPP’s federal projects?

Thank you for your support. This change has been a long time coming, and I am thrilled that you are a part of it.

This post by Lloyd Kahn at Cool Tools has some very useful information for urban chicken fanciers:

We’ve been buying baby chicks by U.S. mail from Murray McMurray Hatchery for 30-plus years. We’ll get a call from the postmaster, sometimes a bit flustered, because there’s a box there with peeping chicks awaiting pick-up. We’ll go get them and set them up with a light and feed and water, and lo and behold in three months we’ll have laying hens.

Minimum order is 25, so the chicks can warm each other in transit. We raise all of them and when they are teenaged, give or sell to neighbors. Raising 25 is no sweat.

Why get chickens by mail and not from your local feed store? McMurray has been in business for 90 years and their birds are of excellent stock. Lots of varieties to choose from. We’ve had not only Rhode Island Reds, Partridge Rocks and Auracanas for steady egg production, but exotics such as Cochins and Polish, as well as meat birds. They’ve all been top quality.

Get Murray’s hard copy catalog if you want to start a flock. Wonderful to look through. A few tips:

1. A dozen hens will give you plenty of eggs for you and your neighbors.
2. If you want fertile eggs, plan on ending up with one rooster for every dozen hens.
3. In more urban areas, get 4 or 5 hens, no rooster.

Once you have your own fresh eggs, you’ll never want store eggs again.

At the link, some extracts from the catalog.

Rose is the theme this morning—and that’s a fragrance I can identify. I decided to try my most-broken-in boar brush, the Omega 48, and I did get enough lather for three passes. The rose version of Kell’s Original has a solid rose fragrance and makes the usual fine Kell’s lather. The gold-laced ebony Elite Razor (a Merkur HD all dressed up) did a fine job with the Astra Keramik blade, and Thayers Rose Petal Witch Hazel with Aloe Vera was a nice finish. Very fine shave.

I really enjoy watching Megs go to sleep in her nest. First she turns about to (I presume) pick the direction to face, then she settles down and arranges herself, moving a leg up, an arm under, curling herself a little tighter, lifting herself up a little to adjust the position of the arm under her a bit, then a pause and a deep sigh. it’s quite a process.

On my lap it’s different: She may or may not circle once. In either event, she settles to a majestic, library-lion pose with her front paws tucked neatly under her chest, settling flat with her head erect and facing away. This lasts a minute or so, then she slowly falls to her side, lying there briefly. The she stretches her neck and places her throat across my leg. Her throat’s warm, and I can feel her swallow once or twice. The she pulls her feet up to a more comfortable position, pauses, and emits the same deep sigh.

In this position I can readily detect changes in her level of alertness by the pressure of her throat on my leg: that lessens as her alertness increases, and increases as she leaves alert mode to return to sleep. Also, the tail-twitch rate varies directly with her level of alertness.

Click to enlarge, click again to enlarge more.

Glenn Greenwald:

GOP Congressman Peter King — the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee — had this rancid outburst today in Politico regarding Eric Holder’s decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration’s torture:

"It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It's' a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense. . . . When Holder was talking about being ‘shocked’ [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys’ fingers off or something — or that they actually used the power drill. . . "

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists."

Never mind that the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled exactly the opposite:  that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists.  Never mind that the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . ."  and that these acts are therefore criminal whether or not King likes them.

Never mind that scores of people have died — not merely been threatened with death — in American custody as a result of "interrogation tactics."  Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture which compels the U.S. to prosecute anyone authorizing torture; that the Treaty proclaims that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture"; and that Reagan himself said the Treaty "will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today."  And most of all, never mind that King has no idea whether these people are actually "terrorists" because the people we tortured were never given trials, never proven to have done anything wrong, and in many cases were — as federal courts have repeatedly found and as the CIA IG Report itself recognized — completely innocent.

My email inbox and comment section are filled with King-like accusatory sentiments that to oppose Torture is to defend Terrorists, because Terrorists deserve to be tortured, and that to oppose their abuse is to be treasonous because it’s terrible to care if Terrorists are abused, etc. etc.  In his 1795 essay, which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Can that be any clearer?  Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that …

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Amanda Terkel in ThinkProgress:

In April, Vice President Cheney received extensive media coverage when he called on the Obama administration to release two CIA memos allegedly showing evidence that the Bush-era interrogation policies saved lives. His request came in response to critics who lambasted the Bush administration’s program and said it actually hurt U.S. efforts. From Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on April 20:

HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]

CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

This finding is big news. You’d think that since the media reported so much on Cheney’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Cheney was wrong. Not so. Greg Sargent notes that in the major newspapers, this fact was “either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.”

ThinkProgress went through the coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC and found that television outlets are performing as poorly as their print counterparts. Most of the networks’ reports omitted the Cheney angle. When they did address it, they tended to give Cheney the benefit of the doubt by saying that it was “not clear” from the heavily-redacted documents. The only individuals to note Cheney’s lie were guest commentators. Watch a few of the segments here:

Cheney has since put out a carefully worded statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, the fact remains that there is still no public evidence that those techniques actually saved lives.

The Abu Ghraib model—prosecuting those at the lowest levels, while absolving everyone above enlisted rank—seems to fit Eric Holder’s idea of how to conduct the CIA investigation: always go after the underlings, and let the bosses go free. This is a cover-up, no doubt about it. More here from Glenn Greenwald. And even more here.

In the long view, one priority for any nation is the nurturing and education of its children: tomorrow’s citizens, leaders, and innovators. If we ensure that our children are well nourished, healthy, strong, and well educated, we have taken a great step toward ensuring the nation’s prosperity. The US falls short in this area, as do most nations. A NY Times editorial today:

The Justice Department has sued several state juvenile detention systems for subjecting children to neglect and abuse. The department is now threatening to sue New York for the same reasons, and rightly so. A recently completed federal investigation has documented unsafe and, in some cases, heartbreaking conditions in several New York state detention facilities.

This problem has been festering for decades. Elected officials who have ignored it will need to clean house as swiftly as possible, closing down the worst institutions and ensuring that children in custody are protected from abuse in compliance with federal law.

In an angry letter to Gov. David Paterson, the department describes a hellish environment where excessive force is commonplace and children risk serious injury — concussions, knocked-out teeth and fractured bones — for minor offenses like laughing too loudly, getting into fistfights or “sneaking an extra cookie” at snack time.

The investigators focused on four facilities — including the infamous Tryon Boys Residential Center, in upstate Fulton County, where an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old named Darryl Thompson died in 2006 after being pinned face down on the floor and held there by two grown men. Three staff members who were trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and required to administer it failed to do so. The medical examiner labeled the death a homicide, but the grand jury declined to indict the two men involved.

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