Found him

Got their man...

Life as a fugitive is always looking over your shoulder. Or so they tell ya. You know, dear readers, how the Clarion Content feels about the reverberation, between truth and fiction, reality and Art; constant high speed turbulent bi-directional flow.

Do they stop looking for you? Arthur G. Jones disappeared from Chicago in 1979 amidst allegations of gambling debts and ties to organized crime. His silver Buick was found at O’Hare International Airport, but Jones wasn't. Authorities suspected foul play. Even though there was no body ever found, Jones was declared legally dead in 1986, and his wife collected his Social Security benefits.

But the government doesn't quit. It functions like a Leviathan glacier, slowly inching across all the terrain, aka, all the data, within its purview, grinding down all, gulping down the unruly and unwary. And the interconnections between the computers at the nodes of information are getting better all the time. Mr. Jones was arrested Tuesday in Las Vegas and charged with four felonies including identity theft and fraud.

How? Started after the man who's Social Security number had been printed on Jones's fake Nevada driver's license in 1988 kept complaining and fighting the Social Security Administration over requests to pay taxes on money he swore hadn’t earned. So that guy, no shit, named Clifton Goodenough, has a story too.

The government kept coming after him for money, demanding he pay taxes on his earnings in Nevada. Wages which Jones was collecting working for a legal bookmaking operation under the name he put on that license back in 1988, Richard Sandelli. According to Fox News, Jones says he purchased a fake Illinois driver's license, birth certificate and Social Security card for $800 in Chicago in 1979, then moved to Florida, before eventually obtaining a Nevada driver's license.

Goodenough is telling the government man, 'I never earned any money in Nevada..." Social Security Administration is saying somebody is cashing a paycheck with that Social in Nevada.

Thirty-two years after he skipped town, cross-checking between the Social Security Administration's and Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles's computers caught up with Arthur G. Jones. The Leviathan glacier of government sweeps up a man... gulp.



No telling what the guilt, complicity, life story, twists and turns composite, the man, sum total, life laid out as narrative, looks like. The Clarion Content is not defending his innocence. Nor are we prima facie indicting the government for picking him up and charging him.

The vector, the arc, the tale and its place within the archetypal tales they will tell about our era, that is what interests us. Surely the story of Mr. Arthur Gerald Jones, is at least as strange as any we might make up.

Dogs rolling with the SAS

The British Special Air Service or SAS has been a model for special forces detachments of armies throughout the Western world. The SAS traces their history to World War II. The British government has largely veiled the SAS and refuses to comment on matters concerning their missions.

It was fascinating to read then, in the British tabloid, The Sun, that SAS soldiers have been rappelling into combat raids with German Shepherds strapped to their bodies. The dogs, renown for their police work, have proven incredibly useful in commando raids, including, apparently, the one that killed Osama bin-Laden. The dogs are equipped with infrared night visions cameras and are often used by troopers to scout ahead. Our furry four-legged friends typically wear body armor to protect against knives, gunfire and grenade shrapnel. Apparently some pooches have even been trained in the use of oxygen masks and have made parachute jumps, following in the giant footsteps of their forebears.

Read more here.

One more Shuttle snafu

It was just the other day that the Clarion Content was lamenting the money pit that is NASA Space Shuttle program in all $200 billion has been poured down the drain. As if we needed one final demonstration, one more reminder of what it means to throw good money after bad, as gas creeps over $4 a gallon and more and more American children have to go hungry, NASA scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour's launch this weekend. Cost to scrub and reschedule $500,000 minimum for fuel alone!

They should have just cancelled. (the program twenty years ago...)

Not what you want to hear

Storms raged across the American South last night leaving death and destruction in their wake. (Notice how no one jokes about 2012 and Mayans any more? We have been through a lot of late.) Reports indicate 170 souls lost their lives last night across several states.

And in a phrase that may sound all too eerily familiar from Japan, the storms knocked out power to three nuclear reactors, all located in Alabama and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Fortunately, unlike Japan, there was no damage to back-up systems. Diesel generators kicked in, cooling systems were maintained and core temperatures never moved. But don't let any of these nuclear power apologists tell you, "It could never happen here."

Bullsh*t. We are one unforeseen natural disaster away from sharing Japan's circumstances. America must move away from, not toward, nuclear energy.

The Shuttle Program

Pioneer 11 approaches Saturn

The Clarion Content has not believed in the value of the manned space program since the Cold War ended. We support space exploration and experimentation. Un(hu)manned exploration is much, much, less expensive. There is still widespread world hunger, millions lack a daily source of clean water, not mention housing and disease, or America's desperate need for infrastructure investment. The Clarion Content cannot support the expenditure of the human crewed space program.

The final launch of the Shuttle program is upon us and with it some reflection on the massive waste. 133 Space Shuttle launches, which USA Today reports, NASA originally estimated $10.4 million per launch, ended up costing a hearty $1.5 billion per launch.

Want more? Those 133 shuttle missions conducted 2,300 experiments at a cost of $192 billion for the program. The cost per experiment? $83 million, 478 thousand and 260 dollars per experiment over the history of the shuttle program...

The most widely cited of those experiments according to Thomson Reuters' science information service, is a 1996 study of "anti-shock" shorts used to measure astronaut fitness. The circularity is self-evident. Human space missions yield little to nothing over uncrewed space missions other than the effects of space on humans.

USA Today quotes economist Henry Hertzfeld of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, "Economically, you can't make an argument for it."

What a tragic waste. Hopefully, this is the end of an era for such foolishness.

By contrast, the robotic space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in 1972-73 yielded so much data that it has still hardly been tapped and continues to produce valuable experimental knowledge for a combined cost of $100 million!

New spy plane?

Amateur skywatchers have tracked down America's latest spy plane the X-37B. The plane which looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle is pictured above this column. It is unmanned and flown remotely. According to Wired, "The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the twenty-nine foot ...craft... Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush."

Why it has such a cargo sized hold has been a matter of intense speculation. Space observers have tracked the plane following its second launch into orbit last week. Reportedly, "The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south." According the expert Wired talked to, Brian Weeden, a former Air Force Space Command officer, now with the Secure World Foundation, the X-37B is orbiting around the fat middle of the planet, flying over the Middle East, Africa, and much of China, giving up global coverage, but getting more frequent passes. The orbit suggests that the space plane is spying.

Twitter stands up

It has recently come to light that Twitter stood up for the privacy of folks everywhere last month. The big brothers of the United States government got a court order demanding that Twitter turn over information about a number of people connected to WikiLeaks. The feds wanted IP and e-mail addresses. They got a court order demanding them.

Twitter took a stand for the little guy. According to Wired.com, Twitter successfully challenged the gag order in court, and then told the targets their data was being requested, giving them the time to try to fight the court order themselves.

Wired notes,

"Twitter and other companies, notably Google, have a policy of notifying a user before responding to a subpoena, or a similar request for records. That gives the user a fair chance to go to court and try and quash the subpoena. That’s a great policy. But it has one fatal flaw. If the records request comes with a gag order, the company can’t notify anyone. And it’s quite routine for law enforcement to staple a gag order to a records request.

That’s what makes Twitter’s move so important. It briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves. The company’s action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow."

Wikileaks

The best take we have heard on the Wikileaks disclosures so far came from the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who said, "You should hear what we say about you."

Bomb a nuclear weapons program?

There is more than one way to bomb a nuclear weapons program, as the CIA and Mossad showed today, allegedly. Twin blasts in Iran killed a top nuclear scientist and maimed another today; unidentified motorcycle riders sped past their vehicles in different parts of the capital Tehran attaching bombs to the windows which detonated seconds later.

Right out of a movie.

Thanks to our friends at Rantburg for the heads up.

Bell Labs, an untold story

Tim Wu, the developer of Net Neutrality theory, has written a fascinatingly little article for io9.com. He documents the interplay between Bell Labs, the government and the profit motive of a corporation. Bell Labs, for some fifty plus years, was one of the preeminent research institutions and facilities in the world. Its scientists garnered seven Noble Prizes. They invented the transistor and Unix. But it was not a public facility, nor a wholly state-owned entity, it was a private actor with its own particular motives.

Wu shows what that wrought, in this brilliant nugget- here.

No more hiding behind a wall

The United States Army is deploying a revolutionary new weapon in the endless war in Central Asia. The Army's project manager for the program says it is a game changer. Naturally. It does sound to the Clarion Content like a particularly gruesome tool, as it designed to eliminate the target's ability to hide behind cover.

The weapon is called the XM-25 rifle. It is a programmable rifle that can be set so that its 25 millimeter ammunition rounds detonate either in front of or behind a target. It something like a meld between a rifle and a grenade launcher. Sounds interesting, right? In theory it works like this:

-- A patrol encounters an enemy combatant in a walled village who fires an AK-47 intermittently from behind cover, exposing himself only for a brief second to fire.

-- The patrol's leader calls for the XM25 gunman, who uses the weapon's laser range finder to calculate the distance to the target.

-- He then uses an incremental button located near the trigger to add 1 meter to the round's distance, since the enemy is hiding behind a wall.

-- The round is fired, and it explodes with a blast comparable to a hand grenade past the wall and above the enemy.

It has a range of 2,300 feet.

And somebody is making some green off of these bad boys. They reportedly cost $35,000 per rifle! According to Lt. Colonel Christopher Lehner, the Army is ordering 12,000 of them in the next year, ostensibly enough to have one per Infantry and Special Forces squad deployed in the theater of war.

The era of ducking behind a wall is ending.

Thanks to our friends at Rantburg for the heads up on this one.

Missle Launch

The media and the blogosphere are a flutter over a supposed submarine missile launch immediately off of the coast of California. Some spectacular footage was captured by a KCBS Los Angeles television crew, check it out here.

The United States Navy and Air Force both officially have no knowledge of the event. NORAD claims it did not pick up a missle launch. The Pentagon asserts it was not from a foreign source.

The comments on our old friend Rantburg's site range from the hilarious, like India test firing the nuclear missile submarine that Obama just sold them, "Kicking the tires and revving the engine? Would YOU take somebody's word that the missiles would fire?" to the skeptical, "a jet contrail viewed from a funny angle," to the conspiratorial, "a target missile for a new type anti-missile system. Probably something so classified it would make your toenails rot off...we don't know what NSA/CIA/super-secret-moose-n-squirrel-division is up to..."

Read them all here.

From the front

Technology continues to outpace the government's efforts to limit and control knowledge about what is happening on the front lines of War. These two videos are from Afghanistan today, 10/13/10, here and here.

Thanks to Rantburg for the links.

Can the Government track your movements?

Earlier today, we published a fiery invective from our small "c" conservative hearts about ridiculous government interference in the minutia of our lives. Read it here. This issue touches that same nerve, but in a much bigger picture way.

As reported by the Washington Post, "A federal appeals court ruled for the first time Friday that police cannot use a Global Positioning System device to track a person's movements for an extended time without a warrant."

This will move the issue towards the Supreme Court because federal circuit courts in New York and California have previously upheld warrantless GPS tracking of vehicles by the Man and his flunkies.

This time a D.C. Circuit court ruled that, "such surveillance technology represents a leap forward in potential government intrusion that violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches."

The Post reports, "The federal government has mandated that U.S. cellphone carriers make nearly all their phones trackable... However, companies say that the federal law that allows them to turn over data to law enforcement without subpoenas is prone to abuse."

No kidding. So, they can and already are tracking you with your phone.

Thanks a lot, King George the II!

And way to stand-up to him, you knock-kneed Democrats!

Law enforcement defends their right to use the technology as a cost savings to taxpayers. Brilliant! If it is cheaper for the cops, who needs our rights?

It is always Danger Will Robinson time when we reach the courts as the last line of defense for our freedoms.

Local Congressman in trouble

A local North Carolina Congressman is in hot water after being caught on tape grabbing an amateur videographer by the scruff of the neck. Congressman Bob Etheridge, of Lillington, NC, which is just north of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, and south of Raleigh, was leaving a fundraiser hosted by California Congressperson Nancy Pelosi.

The amateur cameraman is waiting on the street ala the paparazzi and asks, "Do you fully support the Obama agenda?"

This question irritates the Congressman and he demands to know the video cameramen are. He repeats the question several times as they refuse to answer. He attempts to swat the camera out of his face unsuccessfully, then gets even more aggressive. The tape shows Representative Etheridge, a Lillington Democrat, holding the young man by the wrist and grabbing him by the back of the neck.

Did the Congressman get ambushed? Yes. Did he overreact? Yes. This is the logical extension of what happens to public discourse when America plays gotcha politics. We can all get in the sewer together or we can all climb out of the sewer together.

Cell phone networks

Did anyone else hear anecdotal evidence of cell phone networks being strained on New Year's Eve? The Clarion Content had heard a little bit about it at the time, but over the last several months as we have asked around, more and more folks reported that their text messages lagged many, many hours behind, as everyone sent mass texts to everyone else in their phone, "Happy New Year!"

What does that tell us about the vulnerability of cell phone networks in crisis? How easily can those networks be overwhelmed? Does one need a landline or a CB?

Chinese threat

The Clarion Content reads over and over of the imminent Chinese threat to American hegemony. Even setting aside the massive distention of the reverse population pyramid, we don't buy it. Mostly because far too often we read stories like these two.

The first is from our friends over at the MEP Report. It is tragic but indicative. There is a psychological malaise from which China has yet to free itself that limits its ability to resource its potential power. There is too much gone wrong for it to harness all of its kinetic energy. An irony, insofar as this story is about the eviction of a family from their pig farm and their home. Local authorities hiding behind the rubric of the central government had ordered the family to sell their home and farm for a bargain basement price or face eviction. The ninety-two year old farmer and son refused to leave, even in the face of bulldozers and a crew of more than 100 people. In the end, they immolated themselves, lit themselves on fire, in protest. The bulldozers were delayed by no more than two hours, tearing the farm and home down with the bodies still smoldering nearby. Some reports suggest that officials there wanted to have the demolition completed before April 1, when a new relocation law would make forced relocation more difficult.

The other story is less repugnant, but no less indicative. The Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has been investigating drywall supplied by China, after thousands of health complaints have been filed.¹ Tests show the sulfuric gases being emitted by Chinese drywall are more than 100 times normal in some cases. In addition to the variety of health maladies being reported, this is causing all kinds of damage essentially to anything metal; air conditioner coils, electrical wires and outlets, as well as appliances. The CPSC says replacement is required, not just of all the drywall, but also the electrical components and wiring, outlets, switches and circuit breakers, and all gas piping and all fire alarm systems that came in contact with the drywall.

"Made in China" is not sounding so great after that paragraph.

Both of these stories are tiny examples that emblemize the massive changes that have to occur in Chinese culture before anything remotely resembling worldwide hegemony might be attained. In our view, they are a by-product of years of autocracy. The lack of consistent, real property rights in China promotes a political instability that is like building a skyscraper directly on a fault line. The lack of consumer products safety and inspection is a fundamental underminer of Chinese credibility. We have great respect for China's promise, but fears of its imminent rise to world domination are wildly overblown. Unfortunately, to this point, its implosion is equally likely.

Notes
¹Just in case one had any doubts about the insurance companies fucking one over, we would like to point out that the San Jose Mercury News reports, "Many homeowners in Florida who've sought help from their insurance companies to deal with the damage [from the drywall] say the companies not only deny their claims but also drop their policies."

The passing of a notable computer scientist

Dr. Roberts's machine

A potentially quite significant historical figure passed away quietly last week in Macon, Georgia. Dr. H. Edward Roberts was an inventor that Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen held in high regard. He was their boss and their inspiration. Many credit Dr. Roberts as the creator of the first personal computer. He had long shunned the spotlight. He left the computer industry in 1977, moved from New Mexico to Georgia, and over time became a country doctor, a general practitioner in a little town called Cochran.

Gates and Allen issued a joint statement saying that they were saddened by the death of their "friend and early mentor." Gates and Allen both followed Roberts to Albuquerque; Gates dropping out of Harvard and Allen leaving his job at Honeywell. Roberts' personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. Gates and Allen wrote Microsoft Basic to run on this machine. The rest as they say is history.

Read the whole New York Times Obituary here.

Your school did what?

This is one of those stories that is hard to believe even after one reads it. The Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pennsylvania has supplied more than 1,800 of its students with laptop computers. It didn't tell the students that the district had the ability to remotely activate webcams in the laptops and photograph students in their homes and bedrooms.

The jig was up when Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko of Harriton High School asserted publicly that student Blake Robbins had been "engaging in improper behavior in his home." Her evidence was photographs taken of the student remotely by the district's secret laptop embedded camera. Needless to say, Robbins' parents sued the school district. The lawsuit alleges, "many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stages of dress or undress."

Tech News World reports the school district has rapidly backpedaled. "The district has now deactivated the feature, however, and has no plans to reactivate it "without express written notification to all students and families," wrote Superintendent Christopher McGinley in a statement issued on Thursday."

No kidding? Suddenly it has dawned on them that it was not a good idea to be secretly photographing high school kids in their homes? Didn't anybody in the district see "American Pie?"

Privacy lawyer, Parry Aftab, told Tech News World, "I have seen Trojan horses used by stalkers so they could turn on webcams remotely, but this is the first time I've ever heard of a school with the audacity to do something like this. There are criminal trespassing laws possibly at work here, and maybe wiretapping as well. This is not Nazi Germany or Cold War Russia... They have no authority over what students do in their own homes."

It is amazing that nobody in the district saw this coming. How could it not be obvious what a bad idea this was? It just goes to show how much American's general expectations of privacy have eroded. School administrators thought that this was good policy.

Long time hacker busted

During high school, when Albert Gonzalez hacked into the computers of India’s government, as well as those of NASA, he wasn’t punished, the FBI came to his high school and basically said, “Don’t do it anymore,” according to a Wired.com story about the notorious TJX hacker. Ten years out of high school, after five years as a Secret Service informant ratting out other hackers, Gonzalez spiraled out of control.

He and his attorney are appealing his 15 year sentence for hacking into TJX, the Dave & Busters chain of restaurants and numerous other businesses. He obtained 36 million card numbers from TJX, the largest international apparel and home fashion off-price department store chain in the United States, whose brands include TJ Maxx and Marshall's.

According to Wired.com's reporting, "When the Secret Service learned of his role as an administrator on Shadowcrew (one of the underground carding community’s leading forums for selling stolen card data), they turned him into an informant. He worked undercover to help snag more than a dozen cyberthieves in an investigation dubbed Operation Firewall. Gonzalez also gave lectures to law enforcement groups and the American Banking Association about the methods and technologies used by cyberthieves."

According to information that surfaced at his trial, Gonzalez maintained his criminal contacts on the side and devised methods to hack into huge companies. He had first been arrested in 2003 in Manhattan for stealing money from ATMs using numerous cloned bank cards. He had previously worked for the industrial giant Siemens, and was only twenty-one at the time of his first arrest.

Now after being chewed up and spit out by the government, he is twenty-eight and facing fifteen years. Is prison likely to rehabilitate him? Will we hear from the TJX hacker again?