What else is new?

So we've all heard about the FBI's misuse of national security letters.
The Justice Department's inspector general came out with a report on
March 9 describing "serious misuse" of the letters, which are secret
subpoena-like documents that can be sent to businesses including banks,
telephone companies, and ISPs:
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/s0703b/final.pdf

I wrote about the inspector general's report here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6166015.html

And in fact the inspector general, Glenn Fine, is going to be testifying
about them in the Senate on Wednesday at 10am ET:
http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=2616

Fine showed up before a House committee on Tuesday and faced a hostile
audience -- not that the FBI's illegal acts are his fault, mind you, but
Bush administration officials seem oddly reluctant to testify in public
under oath nowadays:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/20/AR2007032000921.html

The odd thing is that everyone, or nearly everyone, seems to think this
is entirely unexpected. In fact, it's a natural consequence of giving
the federal government more and more power over the years (national
security letters were made much more powerful by the Patriot Act).
Incentives matter, and the FBI has plenty of incentives to expand its
power and surveillance ability and precious few incentives to preserve
Americans' constitutional liberties.

To give credit to EPIC, they realized this and sent a letter to the
Senate in June 2006 asking for more oversight:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/surveillance/sen_iob_letter.pdf

So have libertarian writers, who for years have called national security
letters "the ultimate constitutional farce," which is about right. The
letters represent FBI agents _authorizing themselves_ to seize
information without bothering to get a judge's approval, after all:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano2.html

Occasionally other evidence about illegal FBI eavesdropping comes to
light, which is what I described in an article published two days before
the DOJ's report:
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6165067.html

That article outlines how FBI agent Scott Wenther submitted a 42-page
sworn affidavit that was intentionally designed to mislead the court
into approving what a judge called an "illegal" wiretap. I've put the
some of the court documents here:
http://politechbot.com/docs/fbi.agent.scott.wenther.affidavit.030607.txt
http://politechbot.com/docs/fbi.wenther.opinion.030607.pdf
http://politechbot.com/docs/fbi.wenther.defendant.brief.030607.pdf

This is of course the same federal police agency that is using our tax
dollars to lobby Congress to mandate data retention, which should make
us think twice about how _that_ nice part of the surveillance apparatus
will be used and misused:
http://www.politechbot.com/2007/01/24/not-just-isps/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2026580,00.html

My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots

Charlie Brooker
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

It is astounding how quickly you get used to technological change. For instance, within the space of 18 months, I have gone from regarding wireless broadband as an outlandish novelty to considering it my God-given right. Cables appal me - they belong to the stone age - alongside electric typewriters, fax machines, video recorders, pagers and the plough. But there is one device I just can't get comfortable with - my mobile phone. I'm not some medieval yeoman, infuriated by mobiles full stop. Just this particular model.

The trouble started the afternoon someone from Orange rang me up to say, "Hey, valued customer - do you want a free phone?" At first I wasn't interested, but he went on and on about how popular and great the Samsung E900 was, then promised me free texts at weekends for life if I said yes. So I gave in.
The phone arrived the next day and immediately began elbowing me in the ribs. It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently - a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there - but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent "silent" mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox.

It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary "features" aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny ani- mations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word "car" is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit ("Step into the role of Bobby Carrot - the new star of cute, mind-cracking carrot action!").

When you dial a number, you have a choice of seeing said number in a gigantic, ghastly typeface, or watching it moronically scribbled on parchment by an animated quill. I can't find an option to see it in small, uniform numbers. The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high. Worst of all, it seems to have an unmarked omnipresent shortcut to Orange's internet service, which means that whether you are confused by the menu, or the typeface, or the user- confounding buttons, you are never more than one click away from accidentally plunging into an overpriced galaxy of idiocy, which, rather than politely restricting itself to news headlines and train timetables, thunders "BUFF OR ROUGH? GET VOTING!" and starts hurling cameraphone snaps of "babes and hunks" in their underwear at you, presumably because some pin-brained coven of marketing gonks discovered the average Orange internet user was teenage and incredibly stupid, so they set about mercilessly tailoring all their "content" toward priapic halfwits, thereby assuring no one outside this slim demographic will ever use their gaudy, insulting service ever again. And then they probably reached across the table and high-fived each other for skilfully delivering "targeted content" or something, even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

Anyway, over the past week, I've bumped into other people scowling at the same poxy phone as me. And in each case, the story is the same: Orange rang up and offered them one for nothing. It's spreading like a sinister virus, putting me in mind of the meteor storm at the start of Day of the Triffids - a seemingly innocent event that rapidly cripples humankind. My theory: the government is offloading these twittering handheld crapstones on to as many people as possible in a bid to whip us all into a state of perpetual, simmering anger in readiness for some kind of bare-knuckle street war. Don't say I didn't warn you.

IgnopediA

Continuing our uniquely unreliable interactive knowledge resource

Bling (requested by reader B Stephenson)

The word "bling" refers to any unnecessary accumulation of metal or jewellery which impresses the simple-minded. Examples of bling-related activity include: driving a car with shiny platinum rims, arriving at a movie premiere in a hat made of glittering diamonds, or pointing at a big block of gold and cooing away for hours on end like an unforgivable moron whose mere existence ultimately cheapens us all. Bling is the single most shallow, boring and wilfully superficial cultural phenomenon ever to excite humankind, which is saying something for a species already hooked on internet poker.

In recent months, collective guilt over the planet's future and the disparity of global wealth have exerted a cooling effect on bling's popularity, although genuine justice will never be achieved until everyone responsible for promoting, propagating, passively approving of, or even being ironically amused by any and all aspects of bling culture has been hunted down and jailed for a minimum of 37 years in a maximum security prison with no carpets, hot water or bog roll.

Submit queries to ignopedia@guardian.co.uk

Steer your mice towards charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk


And the comments are classic. To read it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2026580,00.html