Shake Improv

“Loose Change” is probably the best documentary about the 9/11 mistery: watch it online (google video) or buy it from the makers.

Detailed evidence is provided at the website. In addition, I’m linking here some additional press articles cited by the movie (link).

I just chipped in some money for the forthcoming Robert Greenwald movie, Iraq for Sale. This movie is an example of online democracy: people donate whatever they want and something unique gets done with that.

Neil Young is 61. He just made a record, “Living With War”, that has more angst, freshness, beauty, strength and significance than a lot, I mean a lot of stuff you listened to in the last 10 years. I swear. Physical age is meaningless. It’s just amazing, it has to be listened. Jim Gilliam hosts a MP3 of Restless Consumer (lyrics), but everyone can listen to the entire album online. This is no Metallica sleazy sake of profit. This is a honest, true Man doing its job, protesting, screaming as we all should, saying how shitty is the world we live in. Inviting us to unite and do something about it.

Edit:
“Living with War” is even available in vynil form!.

I think I just read the scariest thing ever.

Soon after 9/11 The National Security Agency started building a database of telephone calls records, aimed at collecting data of every call ever made within the nation’s borders [gasp!]. The agency worked with Bellsouth, Verizon and AT&T (and SBC), under a payed contract, so for these corporation it was a profitable deal. Qwest refused to collaborate.

At the time the deal was made, the cited corporations were headed by:

AT&T, by C. Michael Armstrong;
SBC, by Ed Whitacre;
BellSouth, by F. Duane Ackerman;
Verizon, by Ivan Seidenberg.

Those corporations were asked to turn over a complete listing of the calling histories of their 200+ millions of customers. This includes phone numbers and conversation times. It does not include the actual conversations, nor the people names, although that can be easily gathered with non-classified databases. In addition, the NSA also wanted the carriers to provide updates… just to keep the DB in sync with the calling habits of the nation.

This made up what is today the largest database on Earth.

I for one will try to adopt counter-measures. Qwest only provides service to 14 States (not including California) and anyway even if they are “good” now I have no way to know if they’ll continue to be good. The plan, or “a” plan could be to avoid telephone altogether, and just use VOIP. All we need is a reliable internet connection (which I don’t have right now because Earthlink sucks), good encryption software (like Zfone and others), and a VOIP hard phone (I’ll have to investigate the best choice for the latter). A solution for the cell phone use case might be harder.

There’s work to do, but we can’t live like this. I’ll try to log ideas and solutions as I think them out.

Sources:
usatoday (may 11 ’06) –
usatoday (feb 5 ’06) –
slashdot (may 11 ’06) –
beppegrillo.it (may 14 ’06

Related:
Bruce Shneier on AT&T Trillion Call DB (mar 3 ’06)
NYT story on NSA shopping for technologies in the Valley, Feb. 25 ’06)