Unintended results

The police in Pandeborn, Germany, report that a 20-year old man there turned himself in for child pornography charges to the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA - this is the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations).

Was it a belated sense of what he was doing was wrong?

Was it a result of an impassioned plea by a victim?

Was it an epiphany caused by a minister's sermon?

No, it was a computer virus "made him do it."

One of the constellation of viruses currently circulating is an e-mail virus called "Sober Y."

One of the German-language variants of this is an e-mail that states that "an initial investigation has been started" and that evidence on his hard drive was found, and that the e-mail was from the BKA.

Of course, this is patent nonsense, but it appears that this user is not very PC-savvy.

The e-mail so unnerved him that he turned himself in to police, who investigated, and found child porn on his PC, and also found evidence that he has sent some of the porn to others via e-mail.

An *actual* criminal proceeding has been opened.

{The path that led me to the blog entry that led me to the report itself is too convoluted to bother recounting.}

(in German) - POL-PB: ++ Schädlicher Computerwurm hilfreich - Sexualtäter stellte sich der Polizei -- http://www.presseportal.de/polizeipresse/p_story.htx?nr=764168&firmaid=55625&keygroup

Whatever /L/o/l/a/ Gojira Wants..

I'm at home today.

It's grey, cold and wet outside.

I've got a laundry list of things I need to research for articles for the blog.

There are various "counting games" being bruited about (the "meme(s)" of four and another of seven)

The Heretik has a link to the call for a list of the "ten worst Americans."

I have articles I should be working on on approval of torture by the U.S. government, directly and indirectly (by "extraordinary rendition")

I have another article about some of the media concentration in the brick-and-mortar MSM I want to work on.

So why aren't I?

Well, it'c difficult to keep a sense of continuity going, or do any research, when you are being insisted upon by a three-year old (the afore named Gojira) for reading of Goodnight Moon, Pigion Found A Hot Dog, the Curious George alphabet book, and Green Eggs And Ham.

Over.

And over.

And over.

OK, I'm a sucker.

And later on I'm going to take the elder (eight-year old) Gojira off to the Museum of Science.

So There! (I know, I'll pay for the deadlines later)

Was Bush upset that FISA Court Actually Wanted To Comply With Law?

It appears that the reasoning behind the Bush administration decision to bypass the FISA courts and use warrantless wiretaps was, simply, they were frustrated at not getting their own way.

Faced with the FISA court's refusal to simply rubber-stamp the applications, and realizing that the chances of getting congress to expand surveillance powers over U.S. citizens were slim, the Bush/Cheney White House apparently decided that they did not need to bother with compliance with the existing law, enacted in response to abuse of the federal government's surveillance powers by the Nixon White House.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Washington Bureau has an article that details some of the statistics from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court requests over the 26 years the secret court, charged with oversight and authorizations for wiretaps and communications intercepts, has been in existence. ( "Secret court modified wiretap requests" ) .

Since the FISA Court was first seated in 1979, through 2004, it has approved 18,742 requests for warrants, and denied 4 (all 4 were denied in 2003 - obviously numbers are not yet available for the year 2005). Of those, 6,652 of those approvals have been during the time span of 2000 through 2004. This is a little over 35% of the total. (For a table showing the annual count, see "EPIC: FISA orders 1979-2004" ).

During the years before 1995, the average (unweighted) number of annual approvals was 503, In 1996, there were 697 FISA approvals, and the numbers have gone up each year. Again, there have only been 4 outright rejections of FISA requests in the entire history of this court.

So why would the Bush/Cheney White House choose to by-pass the FISA Court? It would not be that there was insufficient time to get a warrant before starting surveillance -- the original FISA legislation allowed for a 24-hour period in which to seek a retroactive warrant, and this time period was lengthened to 72 hours by the PATRIOT Act.

However, the FISA Court may also make changes to the applications, in order to make these requests acceptable under the law, rather than simply deny the request. This may be the bone of contention for the Bush/Cheney White House. From the Seattle P-I article:

... A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an acknowledged authority on the supersecret NSA, which intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications.

"They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration..."

//snip//

To win a court-approved wiretap, the government must show "probable cause" that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that "may" involve a violation of criminal law.

Faced with that standard, Bamford said, the Bush administration had difficulty obtaining FISA court-approved wiretaps on dozens of people within the United States who were communicating with targeted al-Qaida suspects inside the United States.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps has approved at least 18,740 applications for electronic surveillance or physical searches from five presidential administrations since 1979.

The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004 -- the most recent years for which public records are available.

The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection in the court's history.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said last week that Bush authorized NSA surveillance of overseas communications by U.S.-based terror suspects because the FISA court's approval process was too cumbersome...

"Too cumbersome" to show probable cause.

I guess that translates to "You *never* let me have any fun! I'm gonna play and not let you know where. So there!"
-------------------------------------------
EPIC is the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation. From their annual report: "The ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, freedom of expression and constitutional values in the information age"

The table chronicling the FISA requests is exerpted from the list of FISA annual reports, as compiled by the Federation of American Scientists (see "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act")

Text of FISA - "US CODE: Title 50,CHAPTER 36;FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE"

Just a passing thought...

The same commentators who decry that "the right to privacy" and "separation of Church and State" are not found in the original construction of the U.S. Constitution have absolutely no qualms about finding some inherent absolute power for the Presidency in foreign affairs, even onto, it seems, the ability to assume full powers of a war-time CiC without the U.S. Congress having actually declared a war.

Indeed, these same supporters of the imperial presidency seem to find implications in the Constitution's text that the presidency is not bound by law at all -- yet the text cannot be construed to say such without contortions that a Byzantine theologian would blush at.

Sharing our Heritage

Susie, at Suburban Guerrilla, has a great article about her bone-deep passion brought out by a visit to Independence Hall ("History")

Her last paragraphs show her passion:

I probably wrote about this before, but one of the most amazing moments of my life was when, maybe seven or eight years ago, they removed all the furniture from the Assembly Room during an asbestos cleanup. As a consolation prize, they allowed the visitors to walk up onto the platform where they signed the Declaration and the Constitution.

I was so excited, I could hardly breathe. Imagine, walking in those same footsteps of history. And now, the whole place is on lockdown and crawling with guards. I was so lucky to be there for that moment.

I love this country in my gut, all the way down to my bones. I am proud to call myself a patriot, and I won’t let any right-wing stooge take that away from me. This country belongs to us all, and don’t you forget it.

Happy Boxing Day

Well, I was a good fella and kept away from the news cycle yesterday and today, just hangin' round the house.

Christmas Eve the elder boy and I went to 4:00 PM mass and caught the annual Christmas Pageant, presented in place of the Gospel reading. Actually, attendance was mandatory for me -- I was doing one of the scripture readings from the pulpit. And I thought I had stage fright during sales calls...

Comes The Day, we handed gifts to both boys for unwrapping before my trundling off to Sunday morning services. There were only about a dozen people at the service, and, as usual when attendance is that small (usually only on days like Thanksgiving or Christmas (because of the attendance at Christmas Eve services) or Epiphany) Fr. Paul has the attending congregation migrate from the main pews to the choir pews on either side of the altar, making for a much more intimate service.

Back home, we were trying to decide if we should call my sister and mother to call off our visit, in deference to my wife's getting-more-miserable-cold and mine own return of The Evil Scourge Of Gout, when my sister calls and tells us that both of *them* are In The Throws Of Something That Is Probably Catching and that we should not drive out there.

Cue to the Better Half doing (as she puts it) The Happy Dance across the kitchen -- we have successfully dodged the Bullet of Guilt.

However, her cold is more miserable, and the recurring marathon on TNT of Jean Sheperd's "A Christmas Story" gave us the idea of Chinese Food! for supper. The local place we like to go to is, indeed, open until 10:00 PM, so I happily went down and got Take Out, including extra orders of Chinese Dumplings for each of the Godzillas.

No, we did not order duck, so the Chinese Turkey did not need to be ritually beheaded.

And the nearest I'm coming to news today, as well, is looking at blogs -- no newspapers, no TV news, no C-SPAN, no CNN. Any TV will be purely Entertainment Purposes Only.

Your regular blogging and fire-breathing will resume tomorrow.

"Santa Clause is...Tapping your phone?"

The following ditty was supposedly sung at a rollicking U.S. Department of Justice Christmas party during the Carter administration.

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
Santa Claus is tapping
Your phone.

He's buggin' your room,
He's reading your mail,
He's keeping a file
And runnin' a tail
Santa Claus is tapping
Your phone.

He hears you in the bedroom
Surveils you out of doors
And if that doesn't get the goods
Then he'll use provocateurs.

So you mustn't assume
That you are secure,
On Christmas Eve
He'll kick in your door
Santa Claus is tapping
Your phone.

from: http://www.drugwarprisoners.org/2santa.htm
Courtesy of The Committee on Unjust Sentencing ("Drug War Prisoners")