Getting drafty in here

According to the Internet Web site www.sss.gov, officials at the Pentagon have begun a campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board posi­tions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide and $28 million has been added to the Selective Service System budget.

And of course the only reason the draft board needs more money and greatly increased staffing is because the draft is coming back.

The return of the Draft, a bipartisan production

Barring a sudden reversal in the direction of US foreign policy, a strong bipartisan push to reinstate the draft can be expected soon after the November elections. Whether or not Bush wins is irrelevant. The logic of empire requires more boots on the ground, and conscription looks like the only way to get them.

Resources

People Against The Draft

SNAFU (Support Network for a Armed Forces Union)

Military recruiter myths (pdf)

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

Primer on draft resistance

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Torture investigations

Salah Edine Sallat puts the final touches to a wall painting
based on the US Statue of Liberty and a widely published photograph of
an abused detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad’s Shiite
neighborhood of Sadr City.

Memo says Bush not restricted by torture bans

President
Bush, as commander-in-chief, is not restricted by U.S. and
international laws barring torture, Bush administration lawyers stated
in a March 2003 memorandum.

Lawmakers grill Ashcroft on memo justifying torture

U.S. tried to curb Red Cross inspections

An open letter to President George W. Bush on the question of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment

Rights groups sue US government over prison abuse records

“Following orders” defense likely in abuse cases

Thanks
to Miss Monica for the links! And y’know, Dubya really tried to push
this off the front pages with his canonization of Ronald Reagan, but
was less than successful, as the story is still all over mainstream
media.

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Does the Internet need its own police?

“Disorder and corruption are winning on the Internet, and computer users need the U.S. government to crack down on the thieves preying on the Net, said <Bruce> Sterling, author of futuristic novels

Most of the advancements in Internet commerce since the dot-com bust have been illegal, Sterling noted, including spamming, identity theft, and “phishing,” which is theft of credit card numbers or other personal information by directing customers to bogus Web sites to change their account settings. “If you advance into mayhem, that’s not advancement, that’s driving into a ditch”

Sterling said. “Bagel and Mydoom are the future of virus-writing because they have a business model,” he said. “Those are organized crime activities…. These are crooks.”

Virus and worm writing will grow as a weapon for terrorists and warring nations, Sterling predicted. Terrorists operating in places with little central government control will begin to see cyberterrorism as an effective weapon because of a lack of international cooperation on cybersecurity enforcement, he said. He listed a dozen such countries, including Somalia, Bosnia, and the Philippines.

“This is the birth of a genuine, no-kidding, for-profit… multinational criminal underworld,” he said. “I don’t see any way it can’t happen. We’re going to end up getting pushed around by bands of international electronic thieves in a very similar way to the way we’ve been pushed around by gangs of international Mafia and international Mujahideen terrorists.”

Indeed, it’s getting nasty out there. New increasingly sophisticated scams appear every day. Some are very hard to detect. 

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Big Brother is listening to your cell phone calls

You’re on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.

But, as usual, they just aren’t real bright.

Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis, agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren’t very good at it.

“It’s the Three Stooges go to data mining school,” says Hawken. “Even worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors.”

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