Eris Siva says:

The head of Homeland Security is pushing for more surveillance and the imprisonment of more innocent people in the USA - citing the 'liquid bombers' that were caught in the UK this past week. Scary stuff. He cites the fact that the British authorities were 'nimble' in their catching liquid bombers...Completely missing the fact that a neighbor was the one who betrayed them to the authorities, and that they were aware of the cell for months.

As we have seen from all the evidence, there is no decrease in this activity when we keep taking people's rights away. In fact, the terrorist activity keeps rising no matter how much they tap our phones, or check our bank account statements.

This is especially ridiculous seeing as how the 'liquid bombers' weren't even caught here in the US. So electronic surveillance and more imprisonment of innocent people here in the US isn't going to change anything.

Link

The Christian Science Monitor today released the first portion of Jill Carroll's story about her 82 days of captivity in Iraq. The 11-part series will be published chapter by chapter in the coming weeks. Snip:

We drove to the second house, which appeared to be the home of one of the kidnappers.

They took me upstairs to the master bedroom. Within a few minutes an interpreter arrived, and an interrogation began.

They wanted to know my name, the name of my newspaper, my religion, how much my computer was worth, did it have a device to signal the government or military, if I or anyone in my family drank alcohol, how many American reporters were in Baghdad, did I know reporters from other countries, and myriad other questions.

Then, in a slightly gravelly voice, the interpreter explained the situation.

“You are our sister. We have no problem with you. Our problem is with your government. We just need to keep you for some time. We want women freed from Abu Ghraib prison. Maybe four or five women. We want to ask your government for this,” the interpreter said. (At the time, it was reported that 10 Iraqi women were among 14,000 Iraqis being held by coalition forces on suspicion of insurgent activity.)

“You are to stay in this room. And this window, don’t put one hand on this window,” he continued. “I have a place underground. It is very dark and small, and cold, and if you put one hand on this window, we will put you there. Some of my friends said we should put you there, but I said, ‘No she is a woman.’ Women are very important in Islam.”

Link to main page for series. There's a video trailer about it here. Interviews with Jill, her family and colleagues (videos). Jill answers questions from readers (video). Cast of characters here. Listen to a podcast of the story (Audible.com). (thanks, Hugo K. Smoter)

Previous BoingBoing posts about Jill Carroll: Link.

Technorati Tags: video

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now has a blog, according to various reports. Good heavens, there's even an RSS feed. At first, I thought this might be more Greg Gutfeld mischief -- we have him to thank for Al Zarqawi's Mom's Blog. But no. They're saying this is the real deal.

In the Iranian president's first entry, he reminisces about his childhood in poverty, and asks readers if they think the US and Israel want to start World War Three. Reuters reports that the man...

whose speeches are riddled with anti-U.S. rhetoric, also described how he was angered by American meddling in Iran even when he was at elementary school. (...) But he admitted his opening blog [post], which runs to more than 2,300 words in the English version, was too long. 'From now onwards, I will try to make it simpler and shorter,' he wrote.

Link (Thanks, Cyrus Farivar)

Reader comment: Wagner James Au says, "Worth remembering during the yucks:"

TEHRAN, Iran, Aug. 13, 2006 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- Sayeed Habibi considers himself a marked man. The reason: his Internet blog that challenges some of the policies of Iran's theocracy. He predicts that someday _ perhaps soon _ he'll be taken to prison and his site will be shut down. "And another voice will be silenced," said Habibi, a 34-year-old postgraduate and an unofficial elder statesman for student-led activist movements. "I fully expect to see the inside of a jail cell."

He's not alone. Iranian authorities are stepping up arrests and pressure on popular bloggers as part of a wider Internet clampdown launched after hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president last year, ending years of freewheeling Web access that once made Iran among the most vibrant online locales in the Middle East.

Link

Buying large quantities of cheap consumer electronics to re-sell at a profit? If so, and you're of Middle Eastern descent, you're probably a terrorist -- according to police in Michigan.

Three men with Texas driver's licenses were arraigned yesterday on terror-related charges when police searched their minivan and found about a thousand cellphones inside. Prosecutors say the men, all of whom were of Arab descent, planned to use all of those phones to blow up a bridge in Michigan. Police stopped the men not long after they'd bought 80 phones at a Wal-Mart. Their families say they're innocent, and were wrongfully targeted because of their ethnicity.

Hey, at least they weren't reselling van-loads of hair gel. Snip:

But two of the men said they were only trying to buy and sell phones to make money, and one said the money was intended to help pay for his brother's college education. A magistrate set bond at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes. No pleas were made at the arraignment at a District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Officials have not said what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones. But Caro's police chief said cell phones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said that TracFones are often used by terrorists because they are not traceable.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. (...) "We've been checked by the FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Link to AP story. Here's an account from the local newspaper where the arrests took place: Link. Mr. Othman's wife says her husband isn't a terrorist, and that the men traveled to Michigan to buy the phones because so many people are doing the same thing in Texas, the stores there are all sold out: Link. Image: Maruan Muhareb, in photo provided by the Tuscola County (Michigan) Sheriff's Department. (Thanks, Mantari Damacy)

Reader comment: We don't know whether these men did anything more sinister than selling TracFones at higher prices than Wal-Mart. Perhaps there's evidence to support charges that they were involved in more dangerous activities. But Mantari Damacy is among readers expressing concern over the logic that [van full of cellphones] + [Arab ethnicity] = guilty 'til proven otherwise, in the present terror-phobic climate.

As for why these men were buying cell phones, it is apparent that they were buying those special pre-paid cell phones that are locked into a pre-paid network. These phones are sold below cost because the companies make back their money by selling the MINUTES. (Give away the razors, sell the blades.) Recently, companies have found out how to unlock these cell phones to work with standard cellular networks. Thus, with a little work, a very cheap cell phone can be turned into a regular cell phone. There, apparently, is some good money in this. This also explains pockets in the story, like Wal-Mart trying to enforce a vendor's desire that no more then three be sold to a person.

[I am] outraged at how completely stupid the overblown terror threat is. "They needed 1000 cell phones as a detonator to blow up a single bridge, which the batteries can be used to make drugs, and they were going to resell the phones in order to raise money for terrorism because they're Arabs."

Update: Two men of Arab descent were arrested on similar charges earlier this week in Ohio: Link, and Link. Full disclosure: Heck, I have nearly 1,000 old cellphones (some with batteries separated) in my desk drawer. But my last name is not Muhareb, and I don't drive a minivan. Ergo, I am not a terrorist.

Reader comment: minivan-commando says,

How to unlock your cellphone is Hack #7 in a recent O'Reilly jihadist instruction manual book, Nokia Smartphone Hacks. Last time I checked, it wasn't a crime.

The latest installment of Instructables is deliciously grody: make an incredibly realistic wound out of latex and pigments. Link (via Make Blog)

Sailor Martin sez, "Someone has uploaded Carlos Vilardebo's 1961 documentary of mobile-maker Alexander Calder's intricate, ingenious wire puppet circus. The flying trapeezes actually fly, the lion poops, and the belly dancer gyrates lasciviously in the mind-blowing film that shows that, had Calder not become famous as an artist, he might have been equally famous as a puppeteer. In four parts." Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 (Thanks, Sailor Martin!)

Update: Kelly sez, "For those lucky enough to be able to get to the Whitney museum in N.Y., Calder's circus is on display through September 3rd. Besides the circus display they are also playing the videos that are linked to in the main story. Ingenious stuff!"

Update 2: Dutch sez, "I originally posted the videos as part of a huge post on Calder's toy designs for my parenting blog, Sweet Juniper.

Jamie Boyle's latest Financial Times column points up a cognitive bias we seem to have against open systems -- on their face, open networks, encyclopedias, and software projects seem unlikely, even doomed. Our intuition about closed-vs-open is often wrong:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Link

Bruce Schneier tackles last week's security response to the putative hair-gel terrorists:

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes.

Link

An anonymous "senior British official knowledgeable about the [hair-gel bombers]" told NBC that there was no threat to airplanes last week, that the terrorists had been under surveillance for over a year, and that UK government didn't plan on arresting these guys until they'd surveilled them a while longer, but moved when they did because of US pressure:

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports...

The official shed light on other aspects of the case, saying that while the investigation into the bombing plot began "months ago," some suspects were known to the security services even before the London subway bombings last year.

Link (Thanks, David!)