In global news, updating this Tajikistan News Net story, Curtis Lavelle Vance got a life sentence. He was spared the death penalty because his mama didn’t raise him right. I’m okay with that. The death penalty sucks.
On the tech front, and celebrating our commitment to “slow news,” the text of Richard Bennett’s April 2009 testimony to the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet is available here (pdf). It contains some gems of disinformation couched in passive voice, a style adopted by bureaucratic tools when they want to avoid specific attribution or responsibility. For example, “It’s suspected that some botnets may be controlled by foreign intelligence services as they’ve shown up in interesting places, such as the Dalai Lama of Tibet’s offices in India;” and, “Keeping the Internet running smoothly is a difficult task in the best of times, and any practice that has a plausible connection with this goal should be seen as constructive and responsible, even if it requires accounting for usage and acting accordingly.” From the Himalayas to the secret rooms in telco facilities where Federal laws regarding privacy are broken, deep packet inspection keeps the world safe for democracy
Who has these suspicions about botnets at the ceiling of the world? Suffice it to say that THEY have eyes and ears everywhere. According to Bennett the unnamed THEY should be permitted to peek over our shoulders, to listen in on our conversations because THEY may need to account for usage in order to keep the Internet running smoothly.
Bennett is a raven wandering the halls of the House office buildings and croaking testimony rich in the forgotten lore of the 1980s. He touts concepts like Quality of Service and network management through the big central switches, larding his pitch with enough abbreviations and tech talk to impress congressional staffers. His is a corporate perspective, an establishment perspective. He sounds like a shill for Big Telco/Big Media/Big Government. His testimony wouldn’t be so damaging if he didn’t also claim to be a Democrat.
On a brighter note, according to a media release issued yesterday, EFF makes progress with its lawsuits against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice demanding information about telecommunications carriers’ efforts to get off the hook for their role in the government’s illegal electronic surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. The struggle to expose the illegal eavesdropping of NSA and the complicity of telecommunications companies has been rewarded. Thousands of pages of records documenting telecom lobbying efforts and NSA spying are available on the EFF web site. You can dip in anywhere and see the process of big government butt coverage. The documents are linked here.
(To be continued)
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