Slurredspeech

Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has compiled an extensive database of all terrorist attacks from around the world since 1980. What he found is quite contrary to the current administration’s postulate that suicidal terrorism is driven by religious extremists.

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign-over 95 percent of all the incidents-has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

(Source The American Conservative)

I wonder if the government agency that brokered the deal with the printer manufacturers also tried to broker a deal with digital camera manufacturers. I could easily see digital cameras being programmed to produce a digital photograph with hidden tracking artifacts, both in the underlying digital file, as well as in the photo itself. It would be the color printer dots meet stenography marriage, a governmental watermark, if you will. What about embedding tracking artifacts in PDFs, Word docs, or Excel spreadsheets (other than what is already available)? What about tracking iTunes or other mp3 rippers to catch copyright infringement? The list of tracking possibilities is really endless.

It is funny because I have always thought about the use of stenography (or encryption in general) to hide things from the government and never for the government to hide things from me. So the question now is, how can we detect these artifacts and how can we sanitize our digital files?

What are the political ramifications? The corporations involved are multinational which could pose a threat to American intelligence agents who unwittingly passed a tracked document to a foreign agency in the know. I wonder how the world of espionage has changed since the introduction of these tracking dots? It seems that this “secret” would have been let out of the bag a long time ago had the general intelligence community known about it. So really how “secret” was it?

The last thing on my drunken mind is have the dots actually been used to track or capture a criminal? Is it mostly be used in counterfeiting cases? Could a FOIA request be made asking for information about use of the dots? Are they being used by intelligence officials in Iraq and Afghanistan? When we regularly hear about the piles of confiscated documents that go unread, I wonder if there is an automated device that is used to decode the tracking information quickly and flag “hot” documents? Have the dots been used in counter-intelligence? Has fake tracking dots been fabricated to throw a would be tracker off? Well if nothing comes of this, at least we have the start of a good spy novel.

This is one of the reasons why I donate regularly to the EFF; they truly do amazing work.

San Francisco – A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

Read the whole thing here – http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_10.php#004063

I recently stumbled on SpamStockTracker.com, a site dedicated to tracking the charts of the stocks from spam emails we all get. He found out over a two week period that the stocks lost on average 50%. Now if we can just figure out a way to short a penny stock we would all be millionaires.

A three-part documentary on peace in the Middle East airs next week in Britain. In it high-level Palestinian leaders quote Bush as taking his foreign policy direction from God. Nabil Shaath, Palestinian prime minister and now the Palestinian Authority president recalls what Bush said to him in a high-level meeting in June 2003,

I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God I’m gonna do it.

The White House denies the quote. I wonder if the CIA is getting their intelligence from God too?
(Source San Francisco Chronical – “Bush said God told him to invade Iraq”)
(Source BBC – “White House denies Bush God claim”)

The runs went rather well, Erin and I both finished… some people just call me the 2 second guy since my chip time was 3:59:58. Seriously, talk about cutting it close. My legs are still very sore and I grimace every time I stand up. Hopefully the lactic acid goes away soon. I have some video footage of the death trot that I would like to post in the upcoming days. It is pretty funny to see such a fatty running next to all the skinny little “professional” runners. I’m sure you will all get a kick out of it.

Today I run the Twin Cities Marathon. I was thinking that I should write on my shirt, “If found, please return to 1201 Yale Place,” just in case things don’t go as well as I hope they will. Last year I ran Grandma’s Marathon in just under four hours and am trying to better that this year. Erin is running the 10 miler this year and is very nervous, so if you see her on the trail, shout some words of encouragement.

You can track me on the results page using bib #3398.

Wish us luck!!!