Constant's pations

If it's more than 30 minutes old, it's not news. It's a blog.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Upcoming NSA Hearing

Added: 30 Mar 2006: Georgia10 has got some nice summaries, and a big discussion going.

Added: 29 Mar 2006, Here is the blog coverage of the judges who appeared: [Click ] [ NYT ]

Added: 27 Mar 2006, 11:07P EST Important diagrams showing phone company traffic to NSA prior to Sept 2001, and problems with DoJ story over NSA illegal activirty [ Click ]

Update 27 Mar 2006: Look who's listed at number one: [ Click ]

On Tuesday, 28 March 2006 there will a third Senate Judiciary hearing on the NSA.



Hearing annoucement, [ Click ]

Title: NSA III: War Time Executive Power and the FISA Court

Background:

A. Specter hopes to have bills passed by May. [ Click ]

B. Also, consider the DoJ responses to the House Judiciary [ Click ]


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What else is NSA doing?

Awesome Georgia10 has an important case summary of NSA violating attorney-client priviledge [Oregon, DC Lawyers] [ Click ]

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FYI, Other news on the Bush-dictatorship-watch: There is a censure related hearing this Friday, 31 March 2006 [ Click ]

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Speaking of information suppression . . . this is a heads up you're going to see some strange things on this site over the next few days -- things appearing an disappearing, this is planned and part of some testing with blogger and the publication-search tools. Here are the details on what's going on . . .

Remember that problem I had with the Eastern European Torture Archive getting suppressed? [ Workaround appears to have been related to spelling Click ] That info is Ranked #3 out of 7 Million. The information got picked up by Cryptome, and there appears to be a groundswell of concern/interest in the domestic rendition program. [ Click ]

In that light, got another one for you -- Spread the word: This information appears to have been suppressed [ Click ] -- It's not showing up on this blog archive for March. [Backup: Click ]

Someone not like public discussion and is targeting content? This is a first. It's also missing from or the other blog indexes for some reason/looks like there have been complaints about the opinions, and they've deleted public access to the information. The link is still valid.

At this end, there's no detectable problem with the HTML. Still working to make it visible in the archive: You may wan to copy this and save it to repost in the event the information is deleted by Blogger.

What's curious is that some are spoofing the content ["they pretend to search/find the content through a site, but the content isn't actually listed in the index that they say they're searching from"] with A9 searches and also through other indexes, but the content isn't listed in the indexes.

Looks like they're trying to make it appear as though the content is visible to others, when it's actually buried and not visible, unless you know where to dig. As it stands, the content doesn't appear in the monthly index. This is a first. It shows up in Google and blogger fine, just not this site index.

This will be an issue when searchers look for content on the topic in the Google Archive. Google doesn't always show the content by individual blog spots, but often only shows the monthly. In this case, if researchers are looking at the link for the content, but are taken to the Monthly cache, they won't see the content.

The way forward is:

  • Find out why the information is being suppressed

  • Detect and correct any HTML problems

  • Find another way to have the information available

  • Give fair warning to researchers that specific content may be getting suppressed -- you'll want to calibrate your official reports when you report to management your overall findings from the searches; there appear to be cases where published information is not reachable; it may be important, but not something you can easily get. This is curious in light of the philosophy of the internet and search engines: Universal access.

  • Advise you to look more broadly when you do your Google searchers: Some of the content that exists is not showing up in the Google/Blogger monthly archives; it's unclear if this is an isolated problem, or something that may be a factor when considering your tradeoff between Google, Yahoo, and others search engines. This has to do with the "footprint" a particular search engine makes when it finds content, and reports it.

    Unless it is an HTML issue, I suspect the content has been flagged. Fair notice: If you have content that someone "doesn't want others to know about" -- there may be ways they can have it suppressed. You may want to check your archives and see if they include/exclude things.

    Then again, maybe I've simply forgotten a simple HTML code. We'll see. Stay tuned. . .

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    This is going around: Saddam, WMD Joke Video Click