Be Muslim and criticize US policies? Lose your clearance

It seems the Bush administration has this hard time with this “constructive criticism” idea. As Al Franken once said, some people see their country as a child sees their mother – criticize them, and you must be bad. Others see their country as an adult sees their mother – criticize them, and if you’re being accurate (note I didn’t say “balanced”), then you may have a point.

So, when Abdul Moniem El-Ganayni who has worked as a physicist with a US security clearance for years started criticizing the US governments actions towards Muslims, he started to find his practices as a Muslim challenged until he lost his security clearance. And why did he lose his clearance?

The Egyptian-born physicist, a U.S. citizen since 1988, lost his security clearance late last year, along with his job at the Bettis nuclear propulsion lab in West Mifflin, where he’d worked since 1990.

The clearance was revoked by order of Jeffrey Kupfer, acting deputy energy secretary. He said he had “reliable information” that Dr. El-Ganayni was a security risk but refused to let him see any evidence or defend himself.

Translation from Bush officials: “because we said so. And we don’t have to show you, because it’s super secret. Just trust us.”

I think it’s the last part that turns my Bullshit-O-Meter on.

More voter signatures challenged – the latest voter supression tactic

Just when I posted the last story, here’s a new one of a 74 year old woman in South Carolina being challenged on her right to vote because the poll worker thought her signature didn’t match.

Asshats – the signature isn’t there to prove identity, it’s there to validate that the person voted. Knock that shit off!

A hash of files is still protected from search and seizure

Most people know that when the police come by knocking on your door, they have to show a warrant before they can start poking around your house.

At least, that’s what I learned from watching “Law and Order: Special Dishwasher’s Unit.”

Turns out, hard drives aren’t much different. In fact, not only can police not just grab your hard drive and start scanning it, but it turns out the police can’t just do a hash analysis of your files without a warrant.

I can see why this is an issue. A hash is information created by a one way equation – you put information in, and some string of data is spit out. The good news is that you can’t figure out what the original information was based on the hash, and – for the most part – you can only recreate the hash using the original information. The theory – for the police, anyway – is if you downloaded a kiddie porn file, that file will have a unique “hash value”. The police can argue they didn’t look at your files – they just looked at the hashes your files generate, and if one of those files just happens to create the hash for known kiddie porn, or perhaps files taken in the raid of a Mob office, or perhaps that MP3 song of “Oingo Boingo” you stole from the Internet – if the hash fits, then the police won’t acquit. And they didn’t look at the file, so it’s not a “search” that requires a warrant!

Turns out the courts think “No – you need a warrant.” According to the courts, it would be like the police sitting outside your house with a boom mike pointed at your house, then claimed that because they could hear your conversations without going inside, that counted as evidence (by the way – the courts think that’s pretty bad too without a warrant).

But don’t hold your breath, oh down loaders of “illegal” information! There’s an appeal pending, so perhaps some other judge will say “Hooray for hash!”

Today’s voter fraud watch – fake voting notices

I believe there is a special place in Hell (if it exists) for liars. If I recall, Dante placed lying as a lower, more painful level of Hell than most others, and I don’t blame him.

Which is why I think that people who send out fake voting notices to send people to the wrong place, the wrong time, or even the wrong date can have the level of Hell that is full of nothing but paper cuts and lemon juice.

What kind of a person does that? What, you think your ideas are so weak and pathetic, you can’t win an honest election – so you have to cheat? Take people off of the voter roles because they’ve been foreclosed upon, or because there was a typo in their application, or because their name is “similar” to a convicted felons? You can’t win honestly, so you have to lie about when and where voting is in the hopes that only the “right kind of people” actually get to vote?

Is there any shame left in the hearts of people that would do that?

There are constutition free zones? Well – crap.

Turns out there is a provision in the Constitution that allows an immunity to the “unreasonable search and seizure laws” – at the border. After all, you wouldn’t want someone bad coming into the country with whatever the revolutionary war version of the atomic bomb was. (Ben Franklin’s extra spicy chili recipe?)

But thanks to some statues, the definition of “border” is 100 miles of where the border ends. And because of that, 2/3 of the population of the United States lives in a “Constutition free zone” – where the border agents can perform unreasonable search and seizure – and the courts couldn’t say boo.

Hope you can sleep tonight with that one, kids.