The British government is claiming up to 1500 white people have converted to Islam and are now part of al-Qaeda.

To the people of Britain:

Soon it won’t be just “those dodgy brown people” getting locked up without charge and tortured. This is the next logical step towards the creation of a fascist state in which all citizens live in fear of the secret police, and neighbour reports neighbour for crimes real or imagined, and thought crime is punishable by torture and death.

To the government of Britain:

If 1500 white people really are engaged in a secret war against you, has it occurred to you that maybe it’s because they don’t like having their freedoms taken away from them? Ignore a terrorist and he will fade away. Fight a terrorist and he grows powerful. If this report is really true then it’s your own bloody fault, and you get what you deserve.

You ain’t lived until you’ve tried this stunt.

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train…

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop.
3. Boot it.
4. Make sure the person who won’t leave you alone can see the screen.
5. Open your email client to this message.
6. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky.
7. Then hit this link: http://www.thecleverest.com/countdown.swf

Wake up America! The house is fucking burning already!

From The Guardian:

“From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

America’s long and painful decline into fascism is masked by a spirit of hypocrisy: Orwellian terms enter our lexicon, where “freedom” means “obedience” and “defence” means “war of aggression” and truth has become so muddled that rather than try to untwist all the lies we merely take sides with people who look like us, or who live near us, or who fall roughly into the same socio-economic background as us.

So it is that this little piece of bald-faced news escaped most people’s attention last October: Congress has given the President the right to deploy troops on American soil and to commandeer control of the National Guard from the various states’ governors. There is a word for this: it is martial law.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) wrote at the time:

“We certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders.”

He wrote further:

“The implications of changing the (Posse Comitatus) Act are enormous… There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”

And so both Liberty and Justice, like frogs in the slowly boiling pot of proverb, are cooked alive, leaving behind nothing but a fascist dictatorship, oh-so-thinly disguised as democracy.

See the full article here.

Don’t wait for the six o’clock news! Let Jesus give you his divine inspiration directly!

Everyone knows the threat levels used by the Department of Homeland Insecurity come directly from Jesus himself! With a Threat Alert Jesus in every room of your home, you too will have up-to-the-minute alerts on the political fortunes of the Republicans! (Hint: the higher the threat level, the worse their electoral prospects!)

Get yours now!

Search engines store every search and the corresponding IP address. While they may not know your name, they know every search term you’ve ever entered from the IP address that identifies your home computer.

While it’s not exactly news, this information is very tempting for people who can throw around National Security Letters like candy, and demand search engines turn over their search data.

This is very scary, and is a permanent invasion of your privacy — there is nothing to prevent search engines from saving that data for an infinite period of time, and every reason for them to do so: data mining your personal interests could be very profitable.

Enter Scroogle. Scroogle is a google scraper — hence the name — and acts as a proxy to all your search requests. That means that google only knows that scroogle is making a search request, and not you personally. Plus scroogle deletes all logs within 48 hours, which prevents the search engines from data mining you or the feds from invading and destroying your privacy.

To make things extra easy, there’s now a Firefox plugin (also here) so that you can use Scroogle instead of Google right in your browser window.

There’s no excuse for not protecting your privacy, and if you expect Google or the US government to “just do the right thing” then you’re a fool. Scroogle is a small step in the right direction. Download and install the Firefox plugin and start using it now.

Update: You may have heard that Google are now planning on anonymizing some portions of your search data. After two years. Yippee. Good article here. I draw your attention especially to this quote:

“Google should not be in the spy business. By logging IP addresses and search strings they are running the largest intelligence operation in the world.”

I finally have my bright ‘n’ shiny new Ubuntu Linux desktop all set up, plus a new DSL connection, and with the extra bandwidth and the superior operating system the question of old comes to mind: is it finally time to install and use TOR?

TOR (aka The Onion Router) is the best legal way for an ordinary user to achieve nearly complete anonymity on the net. All your http requests are encrypted and then routed through several random servers (”nodes”) around the world. This makes it impossible for your ISP to know what web pages you are viewing, and, more importantly, prevents the nasty intrusive privacy-loathing US government from knowing what you’re looking at.

(In case you were wondering, the illegal way to get even better anonymity is to buy into a bot-net or steal someone’s identity. But this essay deals with protecting your civil liberties, not engaging in computer-based organized crime.)

So it worth it to use TOR? Well, the only userland problem with TOR is its speed — even on a DSL link things can really growl along at a snail’s pace. And in order for TOR to be truly effective, you need to use it ALL the time — no exceptions, no fits of peak when you turn it off to view a particular website, it needs to be on, always. Which means unless you have a very important secret to keep — maybe you’re a dissident in a repressive regime, like Burma, North Korea, or the United States of America — it may not be worth the extra time you’ll be spending waiting for your web pages to load.

Remember, if you use a web-based email service like fastmail.fm or gmail, every email you send includes the IP address of the computer you sent it from. Unless you use TOR, anyone can look up that IP address and know exactly what chair you were sitting in at the moment you sent that email.

Another thought also comes to mind when pondering TOR. In this age of self-revelatory blogs, myspace, and other venues of the “self-confessional”, I have to wonder if the privacy-ending nature our technology is actually the collective will of our culture, the Destiny of the people of the West.

After all, what’s the point in anonymizing all your web traffic so no one knows where you are, when your blog details your exact movements, such that anyone with half a wit could trace your whereabouts?

That said, TOR is still a beautiful thing. It’s a big fat *pbthh* up the nose of people like George Bush and that fucking spic of an Attorney General who’d rape your grandmother to falsely convict Noam Chomsky of terrorism.

TOR is easy to install and configure, and is available for all major operating systems. Obviously you should know by now that Firefox is the better web browser, and you can install Torbutton, which will allow you to turn TOR off and on easily.

If you value your freedom, then you need to start paying attention to how the technology you use takes that freedom away from you. If you value your privacy — if you don’t want the government, your ISP, and large corporations knowing what you read, who you talk to, and what music you download — then you need to seriously consider downloading and using TOR.

From the website of the inimitable John Gilmore.