[T]he law now reverts to the old FISA statute and the Patriot Act amendments to that statute. … It means that the government, if it wants to listen in on a phone call between two people overseas, say two “evildoers” talking in Afghanistan, they can do so all they want with no legal restrictions on them whatsoever; that is the way it has always been and it still is. And if they want to listen in on a phone call or intercept an email between someone in another country and an American citizen, they can still go ahead and do it and they have three days to ask the secret FISA court for a retroactive warrant.

That’s right, they can still do it without a warrant and they can just go back and ask for one after the intercept has already taken place. And when they ask for one, they don’t have to show probable cause as the 4th amendment requires, they only have to show that the request is part of an ongoing national security investigation and, under the Patriot Act, the judge has to grant it.

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Millions of fingerprints are already kept on file by the FBI. This data ostensibly comes from criminal records. However under this new program, known as “Next Generation Identification”, the biometrics of many law-abiding citizens will end up stored indefinitely in FBI databases.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, [Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division] said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a “rap-back” service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees’ fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

There seems to be a pattern here, of our government collecting more and more information on innocent people in the name of “protecting us”. As before, I’m sure there will be apologists who claim that “you don’t have anything to worry about if you aren’t a terrorist”, but this should be a disturbing trend to anyone who says they favor a limited federal government. As we saw in the 60s and 70s pre-FISA, civil servants and politicians are not immune to the temptation to use governmental power for their own personal benefit.

Once we have the technology to reliably gather biometrics passively, from a distance, the situation gets even worse. At that point, there doesn’t even need to be an actual abuse of the system for it to affect us. As Hale Boggs was quoted in the Church Committee report, “Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of action for men in public life can be compromised quite as effectively by the fear of surveillance as by the fact of surveillance.”

By now many of you have read news accounts around iPhones and Duke’s wireless network … Cisco worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue.

Three days later, on Monday July 23, the Greensboro News and Record prints this (emphasis added, again):

Apple’s ubiquitous new iPhone can do everything but take out the trash and do the laundry, if you’re to believe the hype.

But there appears to be an unexpected side effect at Duke University, where the new devices may be interfering with the school’s wireless network.

Experts say the iPhone and Duke’s wi-fi may need to adjust how they speak to one another. A failure, ironically, to communicate.

I know they’re short-staffed over there, but really – it’s been known for three days that the problem was with the university’s network, yet they’re still implying that the iPhone was at fault. It’s extra embarrassing considering that Duke is right down the road.

Little did anyone know, there are some hidden dangers not covered in the manual. Fortunately, today at work we discovered the missing manual pages and have posted them to Flickr. Take heed.

(Oh, and you can Digg it, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

The perpetual sunshine in most of the extreme north and south means plenty of light for energy-producing solar panels; the perpetual darkness in the shadowed polar regions means a steady supply of water ice, which can be harvested for consumption …

I for one agree that harvesting water ice for consumption is a great idea.

On Saturday, the conference itself started off with Elizabeth Edwards, who laid to rest any fears that her talk would be politically partisan by barely mentioning anything even remotely partisan. She even shared the stage for part of the discussion with Mike Krempasky of RedState.com.

The next session I attended was led Robert Scoble and his wife Maryam. Their session was on “Ten ways to a killer blog”. They seemed very friendly and engaging. Here’s a photo of Sue Polinsky introducing them:

Between sessions I ate lunch with David Boyd, Fecund Stench and Gail Dunham.

After lunch, I attended Mr. Sun’s session entitled “The Big Bang”.

He outlined and explored options for dealing with online trollery and disruptive behavior. One point that came out of the discussion is that it doesn’t matter what your strategy is for dealing with disruptive behavior, the important thing is that you do come up with a strategy of some sort, make it known, and implement it. Strategies will differ between blogs depending on the disposition of the person running the blog, and the purpose of the blog, and that’s ok.

Finally, Ed Cone made some closing remarks, including mention of an impromptu after-conference talk about the “confidential” RMA report, which now seems to be on everyone’s fall reading list.

That evening I attended one of the dinners at Ganache. After we finally figured out how to arrange the tables so we could fit everyone in, I was pleased to be able to talk with some folks from Philly – Wendy Warren of The Philadelphia Daily News, and Dan Rubin, who writes the blog blinq for The Philadelphia Inquirer. I also got to meet and speak with Jim Buie, WillR, Bora Zivkovic, Zack and Elizabeth Exley, Austin Chandler, Kirk Ross, Cara Michele, and Ed Cone and his wife Lisa Scheer.

This was supposed to be the off-year – a smaller, more low-key version of the conference. Given that there were over 200 people attending, it’ll be interesting to see how large ConvergeSouth 2007 becomes.

Earlier this week, we found that our data for one of the more heavily used projects had become corrupted – strings of meaningless numbers had replaced an orderly sequence of letters and digits.

A few coworkers gathered around as my boss tried to fix the problem. Rebooting the machine had no effect, and it became clear that we would need to erase the data for that project. My boss scrolled through the operational menus and found an option that sounded like it would clear out the data.

“But can we clear out the data just for this one project, or will it clear the data for all our projects?” someone asked.

“I don’t know – we’ll have to see,” replied my boss, as he pressed the button to select the option on the screen.

“Done,” he said.

“Done?” we asked. “What’s done?”

“That’s what it says – ‘Done’.”

“No confirmation dialog? No warning or alert?” we asked incredulously.

“Nope,” he replied. “Nothing.”

Because of a poor interface design – specifically a vague menu item and the lack of any sort of confirmation or alert screen – the system had just unceremoniously erased everything we had done up to that point. Nearly six months of effort was gone.

Interface design is important stuff. We have a lot of work ahead of us to restore all the lost data. But we are dedicated employees.

Two government biologists heavily recruited by Stanford University have decided to work in Singapore instead, saying they will face fewer restrictions on stem cell research overseas.

…Copeland and Jenkins are famous for discovering a way to accelerate the identification of cancer-causing genes in mice. Scientists hope to advance this discovery by using embryonic stem-cell cultures to build models of leukemia, lymphoma and other cancers. If researchers can learn which genes are mutated in cancer, they could possibly develop drugs to block mutations.

At Singapore’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, any of the couple’s discoveries would first be patented and used in Singapore.

I can’t tell from this if their concerns are due to a lack of available government funding for research that is otherwise legal, or if the issue is that there are more legal (not necessarily ethical) options over in Singapore. Either way, this shows that thought should certainly be given to where anti-science policies and attitudes may lead us. There are consequences, such as the possibility that cures and treatments may be getting delayed, and – in this case – the U.S. losing the benefits of having researchers make their discoveries here rather than elsewhere.

A consortium of utilities has picked two sites in Alabama and Mississippi as possible locations for what could be the first nuclear power plant built in the United States in more than three decades.

The consortium emphasized that no decision had yet been made on whether to seek a license for a new plant from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The group is developing an application for advanced approval of the two sites, which would allow for quicker completion of the project if a go ahead is given.

I think it’s definitely worth taking another look at nuclear power. I only hope that some consideration is given to more safety-conscious designs, such as pebble bed reactors, and that security is taken seriously, with an eye towards the reactor as a potential terrorist target.

Tipping off the police has never been easier.

Law enforcement agencies in the Triad increasingly are using the Internet as a tool to collect and deliver information. This creates a situation where residents can more easily discover what police have found going on in their neighborhoods — or let police know what they haven’t discovered.

The Greensboro Police Department’s Web site allows residents to submit anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers.

People who are hesitant to actually speak person-to-person to tip off police about something might not be so reluctant to anonymously use a website to do so.

High Point’s department began putting incident reports and other information online. The service rapidly became popular, with more than 4,000 requests made during the first half of September.

“It’s getting a lot of use,” said Lee Hunt, a crime analyst for the department. “We hoped it would happen.”

The site allows users to map out activity, which permits residents to see what is going on in their neighborhood.

I took a look at High Point’s site — visually, it could use some love, however, functionally it’s intriguing. When we first moved down to the Triad we actually went to downtown Greensboro and spoke with the police to get similar info about areas where we were looking at apartments. An online database makes that process a lot easier. Looking at some of the reports, details are often sketchy, or altogether absent (”I responded to the above location in reference to a property related issue”), but the reports seem to be useful for getting an idea about the type of crimes or frequency of incidents in an area. It would be nice to be able to search by zip code, or neighborhood though, something in between the street and city level.