The Ek’s Files

… to say the least.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that those “unlawful combatants” confined at Gitmo are not completely without constitutional rights. At about the same time, Physicians for Human Rights released a report contending that physical examinations of former Abu Ghraib and Gitmo detainees showed that those detainees had suffered extensive physical and mental torture and abuse. We already knew about waterboarding, of course. But now we hear reports of electric shock, sodomization, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and other physical and mental abuses. The Supreme Court ruling, and the reports of torture and abuses, leave me somewhat conflicted. My sympathy for those intent on destroying the USA is severely limited. Yet, the humanity and compassion expressed in our constitution through such concepts as innocence until proven guilty, the right to a speedy trial, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment leads me to a certain level of discomfort when I learn that my own country employs torture in the name of national security.

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I’m shocked and amazed. The liberal media (well, one person, anyway) has spoken out against gun control.

John Stossel, an ABC News correspondent and co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20, wrote in the Appeal-Democrat that people still die in a ‘gunless utopia’, and that we shouldn’t confuse gun control for crime control. Stossel cites studies that show that various gun laws around the country have completely failed to dent the gun crime rate, and points out that violent crime has actually risen since Washington, DC completely banned handgun ownership. To John Stossel I say, “Bravo!”

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We had a little episode of insanity at my workplace yesterday. Mind you, this is a large company (over 100,000 employees), so insanity is probably more prevalent here than in other places. For obvious reasons, the identity of my employer shall not be revealed here.

It all began when someone sent an email regarding the status of one of our HR systems to the wrong email distribution list. Unfortunately, the distribution list that was chosen was a large one, and the contents of the email didn’t pertain to the vast majority of its recipients. My coworkers and I were among those recipients, of course. Those of you who work in the corporate world (i.e. Dilbert’s World) can probably guess what happened next.

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ars technica has an interesting review of an IEEE Security & Privacy article that argues that the massive electronic surveillance being drooled over by U.S. security agencies in the name of national security has the very real potential for making us less secure rather than safer. The issue is that, as massive amounts of data are accumulated and mined by our own intelligence forces, that same data becomes an attractive target for hostile intelligence agencies to use against us if they can compromise it. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I wrote about how efforts to increase the security of U.S. citizens have generally come at the expense of personal privacy. The government feels that collecting large amounts of data on its citizens as well as foreign nationals will allow them to better ferret out terrorists, making our nation safer. But over on ars technica, Jon Stokes makes some pretty convincing arguments that the existence of large amounts of personal data just makes it that much more likely that the data will be used against us.

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If you’ve been following the news at all lately, you’re aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller concerning the ban on handguns in DC. This case is expected to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which gun rights activists believe guarantees the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms, and which gun control advocates argue only addresses the right of the states to arm a militia. This case has reached the Supreme Court because a federal appeals court in March 2007 struck down DC’s ban on handgun ownership as a violation of the Second Amendment.

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There’s an interesting article at The Raw Story about how the U.S. government is drafting plans for surveillance of pretty much everything on the internet. Nobody who’s been following what the Bush administration has been doing in the name of homeland security would be surprised. Perhaps one of the most compelling statements in the whole article is that “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” In other words, any policy or action that favors individual privacy has a negative impact on national security, and vice versa.

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Jim Duffey, KK6MC/5, also known as “Dr. Megacycle” on the QRP-L email reflector, was quoted a couple of times in a recent digest:

- “Better is the enemy of good enough.”

- “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

Truer words were never spoken…

I walked into a Target store the other day to purchase some cold medicine for one of the kids. In the cold medicine aisle I was greeted with shelves filled not with cold medicine, but rather filled with little cards depicting the medications. I had to take a card off the shelf and take it to the pharmacy counter, where I had to show identification and give my signature before I could have my chosen medication. It seems that the medicine I chose contained ephedrine, and our concerned lawmakers had recently passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 in an attempt to make it harder for criminals to purchase ephedrine-containing medications and turn them into meth. Law-abiding citizens are thus treated as potential criminals whenever they purchase something that has a perfectly legitimate and legal use simply because it’s also possible to use it to make an illegal substance.

After the Dec 2007 shootings at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, I learned that security guards in Colorado Springs were only allowed by city ordinance to carry revolvers, not semiautomatic handguns. I cannot fathom a reason for such an ordinance, other than that it was somehow felt that a semiauto held too many rounds and was therefore a menace to public safety (never mind that people with concealed-carry permits can carry semiautos legally). Thus, we place the security guard at a disadvantage to the gun-toting criminal. That’s so like California, which prohibits weapon magazines that can hold more than ten rounds. So once again, the honest, law-abiding citizen will obey this law and put himself at a disadvantage to criminals who have no regard for the law.

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