A Peculiar Blog

Remember the big flap that’s been made about the National ID card that the government has been trying to foist off on us, requiring states to become “Real ID compliant”? This is the same “Real ID” that several states have refused to be part of. Well, if H.R. 5405 passes then it’s [...]

What state is nonexistant? The so-called “Palestinian state”. The very same one that President Bush is voicing optimistic opinions that the peace process will “define” that state before he leaves office.
I guess it must be that time of year or something because this Palestinian state issue keeps coming back around and every time [...]

Given the track record of federal agencies going out of their way to gain power they shouldn’t have, this news isn’t exactly a surprise. The Feds have finally managed to pull off something that I know they’ve been wanting to do for a long time. They’re planning to collect DNA samples from everybody [...]

This news isn’t exactly a surprise given the FBI’s known history of misuse of power. Including the power to issue National Security Letters.
A NSL is different that a normal subpoena in two important ways. First, they do not require probable cause and they don’t have to get a judge to sign off on [...]

I ran into another one of those pages that just leaves you with just that much more certainty that we are in fact, living in the last days. In this case The Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF found a footnote in a recently declassified Bush Administration memo which says:
‘our Office recently [in 2001] concluded [...]

Today’s society is getting more and more subject to every kind of tracking you can imagine, from GPS systems in our phones and cars to satellite maps that can be zoomed close enough to make out your house from orbit. The invasiveness of it all just keeps growing.
One of the next things coming down [...]

We can now raise a cheer for a group of a group of bright people in the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg, Germany along with colleagues from the University of Virginia have succeeded in cracking the encryption scheme used on the Mifare Classic RFID chip sold by NXP.
It turns out that the proprietary encryption scheme [...]

Not only are they snooping on the browsing habits of customers, it’s going a lot farther than that. First there’s an article on dailymail.co.uk where BT, One of the UK’s largest ISPs, admits to spying on 36,000 customers. The article tells how BT chose 36,000 of it’s users for a trial run in [...]

Anyone that knows me or has been reading my stuff for any length of time knows that I’m not now nor have I ever been a fan of the Democratic party and their goals & general way of doing things. However I’ve got to say that I’m very much in favor of the kind [...]

In the “It seems like this stuff is getting more frequent all the time” department it seems that there’s another round of the FBI admitting that they’ve once again been improperly using “Security letters” to get access to phone and Internet records of U.S. citizens. (This time they’re talking about events that happened in [...]