More scary gov’t agencies

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Information Awareness Office logoHere’s a good one — let’s make the logo of the Information Awareness Office the beloved all-seeing eye of the Illuminati overseeing the entire globe.

Then, just to make things creepier, we’ll toss out two pieces of information. First off, the IAO Mission Statement:

The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.

Secondly, information about John Poindexter, the man in charge of the IAO:

A retired Navy Admiral, John Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan, and was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal.

Eeek.

(via Boing Boing)

(On a random side note, why does IOCOM come up first on a Google search for ‘illuminati’? I’m guessing they got Googlebombed.)

Advice to Ashley

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don’t be fooled by guys who have great sex with you. the sex will always be great.

don’t be fooled by guys who can write well. it just means that when they’re mad at you you’ll get the most hateful terrible emails. you deserve better.

don’t be fooled by guys who are terribly handsome, or charming, or cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce. those guys, especially in LA are a dime a dozen.

what you need is a nerdy guy who’d do anything for you. who would leave you presents at your door and make web sites for you in your image: beautiful and grand, lyrical and edgy. you need a geek who would wait years for you, secretly, despite his own welfare. you need someone who wont make fun of the bad music kids these days love.

instead of trolling the skate parks and beaches, you should sit outside a cyber cafe or an engineering department, browse through the aisles of fry’s electronics, become a member of the battery club at radio shack.

go geek, not greek.

your whole life you’re going to be pursued and eventually conquered and dominated by a variety of well-meaning men, take this opportunity to turn the tables and you be the one who does the corruption. and trust me when i tell you that you’ve got all the tools.

go to tower records and smile at the boys with the dyed hair and the unoriginal punk rock wear, but give your number to the guy in the back wearing the weezer tshirt who would never think that in a million years you’d say hi to him.

then get his number, tell him to ride his scooter over, kiss his neck, watch him shake, get him stoned, put in jane’s addiction, and go where the music takes you.

I don’t know who Ashley is, but I have to say, I like the advice she’s getting from Tony Pierce. Now I just need to meet her….

(via Doc)

Even more on TIPS

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A good article from the Washington Post asking questions about TIPS:

Public vigilance is a good thing, and so is encouraging citizens to alert authorities to terrorist activity. It makes sense to educate people who work at potential targets or at places where lethal cargo may be smuggled. But having the government recruit informants among letter carriers and utility workers — people who enter the homes of Americans for reasons unrelated to law enforcement — is an entirely different matter. Americans should not be subjecting themselves to law enforcement scrutiny merely by having cable lines installed, mail delivered or meters read. Police cannot routinely enter people’s houses without either permission or a warrant. They should not be using utility workers to conduct surveillance they could not lawfully conduct themselves.

(via MeFi)

Preliminary WTC plans unveiled

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Well, the cleanup from the Sept. 11th attacks has been finished, the authorities are working on identifying as many casualties as possible and returning what personal belongings can be returned, and today the first preliminary plans for rebuilding on the WTC site were unveiled. I haven’t looked at all the plans yet, but they can be viewed at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation‘s website.

Homeless for a week

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There was an article in the Seattle PI yesterday about a couple local guys who decided to try being homeless for a week to try to get some idea of what it was like. I skimmed over the article, but a rather scathing followup editorial printed today reminded me about it, so I started reading about it again.

It turns out that one of the two guys is Scotty Weeks, who I’ve known off and on for years in Anchorage before he moved down here to Seattle a few years back. Small world, eh? In any case, he and his friend Derrick had set up a website to keep a journal of their days on the streets. After poking around on it, Scotty’s site, and the two PI articles — well, I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing.

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This doesn’t inspire confidence

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Is it just me, or does the fact that this image comes directly from a US government website looking at patents and trademarks related to ‘Homeland Security’ not make me feel comfortable?

The more I read about this, the more paranoid I get — and now we’ve got a gov’t webpage coming up with logos featuring eyes peeking through keyholes against a Stars-and-Stripes background?!? Eeeek.

(via Boing Boing)

More Amazon goodies

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I’m about to be heading to bed, but I spent a little time tonight playing around with Amazon‘s recommendation features. As you bounce through Amazon you can tell them what you own and assign ratings to items, which they then use to create recommendation pages. So far, it’s actually be fairly impressive — the more I put in, the more accurate they get. At the moment, off the top of my head, I’d say that for every 5 items they recommend, I’m likely to already own 3 of them (at least with music — the ratio for DVDs and books is somewhat less). Quite interesting.

I’ve also created an Amazon wishlist so that should anyone ever feel like spending money on me, they’ll have some suggestions. Woohoo!

More on TIPS

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One of my favorite political cartoonists, Tom Tomorrow, has some wonderfully incisive commentary on TIPS.

Facism is a term thrown about too freely, and I don’t believe we’re at a point that its use is justified — but an oppressive and intrusive government, however you want to label it, does not ride into town wearing the uniforms and waving the flags of recognizable evil. It creeps in slowly, waving the flag of your own country, and speaking the language of patriotism and duty, and at each step along the way, its actions seem plausible and defensible — until one morning you wake up and realize the gulf between the way things were and the way things are has grown so wide that there is no going back. Sinclair Lewis tried to point this out more than a half century ago, and given the current climate, It Can’t Happen Here is well worth re-reading (or reading for the first time, if you’ve never come across it before).

Another book for my reading list….

(via Wil)

Wanna join the secret police?

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Whee — just in case we weren’t paranoid enough, now our oh-so-friendly government is going to start encouraging us to report on each other. According to this report from an Austrailian news site (no big surprise that it wasn’t a US-based news site that broke the article), “…the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police.” Now there’s a happy thought.

(via Daypop)