The mask slips

"Last week, at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, Mr. Lott recalled Mr. Thurmond's 1948 race for the presidency. 'I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.'

What, exactly, did Mr. Lott mean by 'all these problems'? Mr. Thurmond ran a one-issue campaign: 'We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race,' declared his platform.

Is it possible that a major modern political figure has sympathy for such views? After all, the Bush administration includes figures like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; some of Mr. Lott's best friends . . . Yet during the 1990's he was extensively involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens — a descendant of the White Citizens Council — telling them at one point that they 'stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.' When this came to light in 1998, Mr. Lott declared himself ignorant of the group's aims. Was he also ignorant of the aims of the 1948 Thurmond campaign? Or was he just, in the excitement of the moment, blurting out his real views?"

There's been quite a furor over Lott's remarks, and rightly so, and there have also been far too many comments from the right about how people are just overreacting. Paul Krugman's piece [registration required] in the New York Times is one of the best I've read on the topic, but check out more commentary here and here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:00 PM

Language is still a virus

In case you were wondering just how some political ideas get accepted as being "mainstream" these days, check out this week's This Modern World here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:46 PM

It's a secret

"A judge in the US has ruled that Vice-President Dick Cheney does not have to release details of meetings with oil executives to the investigative arm of Congress. The General Accounting Office sued the White House for names of people consulted over energy policy as part of its remit to ensure the government's accountability."

The court ruled that, because the GAO was asked to investigate by only a few elected representatives, rather than as a result of some sort of resolution passed by either the Senate or the House, it didn't have the authority to conduct the investigation. It's another win for the forces of secrecy in the Bush administration, who definitely don't want you to know that the now bankrupt Enron and its ilk played a major part in formulating the nation's pathetic excuse for an energy policy. Let's hope that the lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch is able to do a better job of bringing the details to light.

Read the BBC article here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:43 PM

The Nobel Peace Prize

"Former US president Jimmy Carter has warned of the potentially 'catastrophic consequences' of a pre-emptive US war on Iraq. The comments came in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo. Mr Carter did not mention either country by name, but said: 'For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventative war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences.'"

That was just one of the great remarks made by ex-President Jimmy Carter during his acceptance speech. As Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Prize committee, put it, "Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president, but he is certainly the best ex-president the country has ever had."

Read the first article here, more excerpts from his speech here, and other articles here and here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:23 PM

Taking the cheap shots

"In North Carolina last month, a woman attending a lecture I was giving asked me when America would go to war in Iraq. I told her to watch the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post for the first smear campaigns against the UN inspectors. And bingo, right on time, the smears have begun."

A great piece by Robert Fisk about how the War Party is trying to sabotage the UN inspections in Iraq with a smear campaign, and how they intend to push the US into war no matter what the inspectors find (or don't find).

Read the whole piece here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:01 PM

Told you so

Posted anonymously to both the cypherpunks and cryptography mailing lists:

"For years we cypherpunks have been telling you people that you are responsible for protecting your own privacy. Use cash for purchases, look into offshore accounts, protect your online privacy with cryptography and anonymizing proxies. But did you listen? No. You thought to trust the government. You believed in transparency. You passed laws, for Freedom of Information, and Protection of Privacy, and Insurance Accountability, and Fair Lending Practices.

And now the government has turned against you. It's Total Information Awareness program is being set up to collect data from every database possible. Medical records, financial data, favorite web sites and email addresses, all will be brought together into a centralized office where every detail can be studied in order to build a profile about you. All those laws you passed, those government regulations, are being bypassed, ignored, flushed away, all in the name of National Security.

Well, we fucking told you so.

And don't try blaming the people in charge. You liberals are cursing Bush, and Ashcroft, and Poindexter. These laws were passed by the entire U.S. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike. Representatives have the full support of the American people; most were re-elected with large margins. It's not Bush and company who are at fault, it's the whole idea that you can trust government to protect your privacy.

All that data out there has been begging to be used. It was only a matter of time.

And you know what? It's good that this has happened. Not only has it shown the intellectual bankruptcy of trust-the-government privacy advocates, it proves what cypherpunks have been saying all along, that people must protect their own privacy. The only way to keep your privacy safe is to keep the data from getting out there in the first place.

Cypherpunks have consistently promoted two seemingly contradictory ideas. The first is that people should protect data about themselves. The second is that they should have full access and usability for data they acquire about others. Cypherpunks have supported ideas like Blacknet, and offshore data havens, places where data could be collected, consolidated and sold irrespective of government regulations. The same encryption technologies which help people protect their privacy can be used to bypass attempts by government to control the flow of data.

This two-pronged approach to the problem produces a sort of Darwinian competition between privacy protectors and data collectors. It's not unlike the competition between code makers and code breakers, which has led to amazing enhancements in cryptography technology over the past few decades. There is every reason to expect that a similar level of improvement and innovation can and will eventually develop in privacy protection and data management as these technologies continue to be deployed.

But in the mean time, three cheers for TIA. It's too bad that it's the government doing it rather than a shadowy offshore agency with virtual tentacles into the net, but the point is being made all the same. Now more than ever, people need privacy technology. Government is not the answer. It's time to start protecting ourselves, because nobody else is going to do it for us."

posted by Michael Curry at 8:23 PM