Monday, 26 May, 2003

4 days in May The best story from last week was the flight of the renegade outlaw democrat state legislators from Texas. The story began on the previous weekend, and was over by midnight last Friday. In time to be well and fully commented on by the weekend talk shows. I was looking over some news stories I had saved into my temp file from last week, along with trying to remember why I saved them in the first place. There were three that I saved to read again simply out of the mere congruence they formed. One was a story emanating out of the fall-out from the renegade Texas state senators story. This was the story of process-by-which part of the federal government found itself looking for the plane of Pete Laney, one of the 'outlaw' publicans, in the belief that the plane was missing and perhaps crashed. The significant angle of that story by midweek was that this story was likely permanently obscured by the decision of the Texas Department of Public Safety shred all documents associated with that incident within days, and notably before any request analogous to a FOIA request could be filed on them. In the Washington post the same day a story on the DARPA data mining project, formerly known as the Office of Total Information Awareness, now with "Terrorism" suiting up and going in for "Total". That article produced this quote: "The program's previous name, 'Total Information Awareness' program, created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, said in a statement. Well, I can't imagine where people could have got that idea from. It certainly couldn't have been from ideas like individual identification through gait pattern recognition, or that overwhelmingly creepy logo . A few pages over another story ran under the headline Anti-Terror Power Used Broadly summarizing a report (pdf) by sent by the Justice Department to the House Judiciary Committee which details widespread general and non-Al-Quada related uses by the government of the powers given them by patriot act one (of at least two). Seeing this and noting that these powers have also been used by Tom Delay (R-TX) to try to enforce a shotgun quorum in a political battle back on his home turf. I think that, protestations to the contrary aside, it would be allowable to view these new powers as 'abused as they came out of the box.' pb ._._. Addendum 27 May 03: a couple of tweaks to the above, I came up with Justice dept's letter to the House Judiciary Committee, so I made that reference a link. Also the picture of OIA's logo (sadly, no longer prominently displayed on their front page) functions as a link to their site. Which was the original intent until I forgot. 12:52:13 PM    comment [];

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 6/02/03; 10:10:46.