April 03 2003 -
Do Privacy Fears Allow Terrorism?
- By Michelle Delio, WiredNews, NEW
YORK -- Privacy advocates: Quit picking on
the U.S. government. If you don't want the
government to do what it must to protect
you from terrorists, you should butt out,
said Heather MacDonald, a lawyer at the
Manhattan Institute, a conservative think
tank. She made her remarks Wednesday at
the 13th annual Computers, Freedom and
Privacy conference. And, she urged, stop
all the panic-stricken screaming, because
it's endangering human lives. Al-Qaida and
other terrorist groups wield technology as
a weapon with no worries about privacy
rights, MacDonald said. But fear and
distrust of anti-terrorism and
surveillance technology hampers the U.S.
government's ability to shore up defenses
and stop attacks before they happen. At
issue was the Pentagon's planned Total
Information Awareness program...
April 01, 2003 -
Year-round school solves problems - By L.W. Antoine Palm Bay,
Apr 1, 5:20 PM - Letters to the editor - FLORIDA TODAY Readers, The
way to resolve the three major issues confronting education today is so
simple I cannot understand why those in power haven't already thought of
and enforced it: The problems are insufficient teacher pay, insufficient
classrooms and oversized classes. By dividing all students into four
groups, with three in class at any one time, we can use all the schools
-- most of which stand empty for several months every year. Each group
of students would attend class 180 days...
April, 2003 -
I Want My TIA - Total
Information Awareness will consign
Google to the Stone Age, By Howard
Bloom, WiredMag, Issue 11.04 By now,
you've heard all about Total Information
Awareness, the Darpa program designed to
jump-start new methods of knowledge
gathering, integration, and prediction.
It's one of our high tech answers to the
terrorist menace of bin Laden and his
many Osama wannabes. But if you know the
simple facts about Total Information
Awareness, you've also heard that the
system itself is the real enemy.TIA is
at the center of a media storm that
started last summer, when the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's online newsletter
headlined an alert about the program:
"how to build a police state." The EFF
analysis became the standard line, and
by November, even The New York Times had
agreed that it was "a vast electronic
dragnet." In February, Congress put the
Pentagon on notice that it would not
tolerate the surveillance of US
citizens. Last I checked, there were
28,000 Web sites opining on TIA. The
vibe? Overwhelmingly negative...
April 23, 2003 -
At the gates of Baghdad - From The
Economist print edition, Even a very polite victory
over a reviled dictator will end up humiliating the
Arabs... IN THE second week, the cry from the
armchair generals was that the war was failing because
the plan was wrong. As it entered its third, the cry
from the armchair historians has been that the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is lighting a fuse
that will ignite Arab nationalism and blow up the
Middle East. Both lines of criticism are wildly
exaggerated, and may soon turn out to be completely
wrong. But they are connected. A fast war—and this
looks increasingly like being a fast war—will cause
much less grief to the Arabs than a prolonged one...
