I just thought I’d take a moment to congratulate the ATF for making it 6,574 days without burning a church full of women and children to the ground.
Good job, guys. Good job.
Archive for the ‘Government Failures’ category
Kudos, ATF
April 19th, 2011Disturbing
August 8th, 2006… and disgusting.
Gunner reports that our spineless congress critters have stooped to new lows. Voting on bills that they won’t even let themselves read and debate.
Nearly all members of the House of Representatives opted out of a chance to read this year’s classified intelligence bill, and then voted on secret provisions they knew almost nothing about.The bill, which passed by 327 to 96 in April, authorized the Bush administration’s plans for fighting the war on terrorism.
Previously I presumed it was sheer laziness that the didn’t read the bills that they voted on, but this shows that they actually do it deliberately to protect themselves from prosecution.
Disgusting.
UPDATE: It looks like it was HR 5020 and Roll Call 108 will tell you how everybody voted.
Ron Paul voted for it. Looks like I better do some digging here. Nevermind that bit. I was reading the roll call wrong and Abject corrected me.
This is news?
August 6th, 2006Computer hackers get lesson on cloning passport, cash card tags
High-tech passports touted as advances in national security can be spied on remotely and their identifying radio signals cloned, computers hackers were shown at a conference.Radio frequency identification technology, referred to as RFID, used in cash cards and passports, can be copied, blocked or imitated, said Melanie Rieback, a privacy researcher at Vrije University in the Netherlands.
The RIAA, the MPAA and multiple national governments just can’t get this through their skulls, can they?
If you can read it, you can copy it!
Rieback demonstrated a device she and colleagues at Vrije built to hijack the RFID signals that manufacturers have touted as unreadable by anything other than proprietary scanners.
Emphasis mine.
Go figure. They were dead wrong.
It looks like two independent teams did this and presented them both at the Las Vegas conference. Bruce Schneier has posted his comments related to a German hacker accomplishing the same thing. It took him two weeks.
What this means is that the electronic portion of the passport cannot be trusted at all. So, everybody will have to open up the passports to verify that the data matches that is on the paper portion of it. I don’t see the gain here, only problems. It’ll cost more to make the new passports, your information can be stolen with a portable reader, and it adds a layer of complexity to the job of our security guards that, in my opinion, aren’t up the tasks already assigned to them.
Hell, the TSA shut down an airport when they found a cookie in somebody’s carry-on luggage.
Paranoid?
June 19th, 2006I honestly woke up this morning and thought to myself, “Maybe I’m just a little too worried about the government. Honestly, how bad are things? I shouldn’t worry so much. The government is made up of the people, and we aren’t sick people by nature.”
Then I checked the news.
N.Y. report denounces shock use at school
New York education officials issued a scathing report yesterday on a Massachusetts school that punishes troubled and disabled students with electric shocks, finding that they can be shocked for simply nagging the teacher and that some are forced to wear shock devices in the bathtub or shower, posing an electrocution hazard.
Yep… guess my fear is warranted. When agents of the state are willing to deliver electric shocks to children in an attempt to gain compliance we’ve got something to worry about.
I cannot ponder what kind of sick individual would use that on a child. Hell, I wouldn’t use one on a dog! About 10 years ago we put a collar like that on the family dog and the damned thing malfunctioned — made us SICK that we hurt the dog so we destroyed the whole system.
I’ve seen the collars that you just hit a button on to zap the dog too. This is probably a better solution but guess what? It is now in human control — which means a power drunk idiot can hit the button. I must say that it was not one of finer moments, but I saw some drunken yahoo zap his own dog with one once just to make the dog yelp. Not at my prompting. Rather than chew his ass out (I was a guest) I got the collar from the dog and had him zap me. I figured it didn’t hurt much. I had him dial up over the series of zap levels and let me tell you: That shit HURTS!
Pretty sick fuck that would put one on a kid! Let alone a dog.
Nice Work
June 13th, 2006Homeland Security accepts fake ID
The Department of Homeland Security allowed a man to enter its headquarters last week using a fake Matricula Consular card as identification, despite federal rules that say the Mexican-issued card is not valid ID at government buildings.Bruce DeCell, a retired New York City police officer, used his phony card — which lists his place of birth as “Tijuana, B.C.” and his address as “123 Fraud Blvd.” on an incorrectly spelled “Staton Island, N.Y.” — to enter the building Wednesday for a meeting with DHS officials.
Good to know we’re all real serious about this terrahist threat thing.
