The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the US Department of Justice to learn more about the FBI’s new monster database, called the Investigative Data Warehouse, or IDW.

The Bureau has been eager to showcase its new counterterrorist gimmick, after expensive and largely humiliating efforts to launch its Trilogy and Virtual Case File gimmicks, which have produced nothing except the squandering of over $170 million in taxpayer money. The IDW system, in contrast, can at least be made to work well enough to dazzle reporters in a series of controlled demonstrations, which the FBI enacted around the fifth anniversary of 9/11, to highlight the Bureau’s supposed progress as a counterterrorist outfit, and, of course, its first working computer system. (more…)

Identity cards. Number-plate surveillance. CCTV. Control orders. The list of ways in which the Government has sought to manipulate and define the limits of our liberty grows ever longer. Ten years ago, the novelist and polemicist Henry Porter would have felt silly speaking out about human rights in Britain. But that was before the most fundamental assault on personal freedom ever undertaken. Now, he argues, it’s time we woke up to reality

On new year’s day 1990, three days after becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel looked his people in the eye and spoke to them as no one had done before. It is difficult to read his words without feeling the vibration of history of both the liberation and the horrors of the regime that had just expired, leaving the Czech people blinking in the cold sunlight of that extraordinary winter.

This is what he said. “The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly and inexorably wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too.” (more…)

At least 41 people have been killed in a series of bomb blasts across Iraq.

Most of the deaths occurred in Mosul, where a suicide bomber blew up a lorry at a police station.

A suicide car bomber killed another 12 people in Kirkuk, while bombers also struck in Khalis and Baghdad.

US military spokesman Maj Gen William Caldwell said there was a 22% rise in attacks in the capital during the Muslim festival of Ramadan. (more…)

Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it can keep a secret. YouTube fans–and everybody else–beware.

Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages. (more…)

A poll released by the Wall Street Journal this morning found that 66 percent of Americans believe there is a civil war in Iraq. Here is the question and the results:

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Four U.S. soldiers accused of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl and slaying her sister and their parents will face courts-martial on murder charges, military officials say.

The commander of the 101st Airborne Division has referred murder charges against the soldiers for the alleged crimes that occurred in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, in March. Two of the soldiers could face the death penalty if convicted. (more…)

The international community must draw a “red line” beyond which Iran must not be allowed to develop its nuclear programme, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday.

“There is a limited range for compromises with Iran,” Olmert said. “I am not against a reasonable agreement with Iran but a red line should be drawn beyond which it is not allowed to proceed.” (more…)

Scientists have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. To creatures or machines that see only in microwave light, the cloaked object would appear nearly invisible.

“The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region,” said study team member David Smith at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. “So it looks as if they just passed through free space.” (more…)

We’re all supposed to switch to biometrics WHY again? You can’t pick locks this fast.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday the United States would stop North Korea from transferring nuclear weapons to Iran or al-Qaida and that the communist regime would then face “a grave consequence.”

Bush refused to spell out how the United States would retaliate. “They’d be held to account,” the president said in an ABC News interview. (more…)

President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.” (more…)

If President Bush continues to ask North Korea to “kneel,” war “will be inevitable,” and it would begin on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean Gen. Ri. (more…)

In the mid-80s, I was a BBS junkie. BBS is short for Bulletin Board System. It was a terminal program hosted on computers over analog phone lines. It was primitive, slow, and often frustrating, with plenty of dropped connections and busy signals. It was non-graphical, text-based. By the late 1980s, I had an internet email account, surfed gopherspace, participated in message boards, and read newsgroups, thanks to an ISP in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the early 1990s, all of this changed when CERN introduced the World Wide Web and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications released the first browser, Mosaic. I soon left the text-based BBS universe behind.

If telecoms and massive cable corporations have their way, it may not be long before I am dusting off the old BBS software and once again surfing over ancient copper telephone lines. “There’s a battle going on for control of the Internet, and if consumers don’t watch out they’re going to be playing second modem to the captains of industry,” writes Bloomberg. “The black hats are worn by a handful of media conglomerates who hope to build a two-tiered Internet, with the fastest tier going at premium prices. Everyone else will surf at reduced speeds, which can be the fast track to Net oblivion.” (more…)

If you catch someone smoking in a non-smoking area in Omaha, Neb., call the police. The Omaha Police Department (OPD) is encouraging city residents to call 911 in the wake of the citywide ban on smoking that went into effect on Oct. 2.

Teresa Negron, sergeant in charge of public information of the OPD, explained that the department encourages observers of infractions to pick up the phone to report the infraction — just like they would for any other crime they observe being committed. (more…)

The U.S. military acted legally when it hired a contractor to pay Iraqi news organizations to run pro-American stories, the Pentagon’s inspector general has found.

An unclassified summary of results of the inspector general’s probe, released on Thursday, said:

“We concluded that the Multi-National Force-Iraq and Multi-National Corps-Iraq complied with applicable laws and regulations in their use of a contractor to conduct Psychological Operations and their use of newspapers as a way to disseminate information.”

The controversial propaganda program was made public in a Los Angeles Times report in November. (more…)