Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Senate Chairman Refuses to Release Richard Clarke’s Testimony
OMB Watch
Published: 10/18/2004.

For almost four months Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to release declassified testimony related to the 9/11 investigation from former White House Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. Given the critical nature of Clarke’s public statements and the proximity of elections, political motivations for the repression are strongly suspected.

Florida 2000: The Sequel - Five ways the election could end up in court, again. By Richard L. Hasen

With all the uproar about voting irregularities (paper thickness issues in Ohio, companies paid to register voters actually throwing out democratic registrations in OR, FL once again trying to dump voters off the rolls and intimidating black voters…) and truly nasty ads on both sides in the swing states, here’s an interesting article that surmises 5 nightmare scenarios on November 3rd.

–Voting glitches involving electronic or other voting machines
–Litigation over which provisional ballots are valid
–A fight over the Colorado amendment to split the electoral vote
–A tie in the electoral college or a faithless elector
–A terrorist attack that disrupts voting in a swing state

Arts > Frank Rich: Will We Need a New ‘All the President’s Men’?” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/17rich.html?ex=1255492800&en=8c2a594add800736&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>Frank Rich: Will We Need a New ‘All the President’s Men’? (NYT: 10/17/04 Arts section)

“The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before,” wrote William Safire last month.

Wow, you know it’s getting scary if Safire, once a Nixon speechwriter, is getting nervous.

This is an interesting study where the combination of uber secrecy in the Whitehouse combines with media consolidation to create the situation where Sinclair broadcasting can air an anti-Kerry infomercial disguised as “documentary” days before the election and Fox News can pander to the republican party in return for favorable rules changes by the FCC. Read on.

Poll reveals world anger at Bush

According to the Guardian poll, Eight out of 10 countries favour Kerry for president.

XML.com: Stuck in the Senate.
by Paul Ford, XML.com,
October 13, 2004.

In this second article in a series, Ford looks at how to use
RDF (Resource Description Framework) to describe people (in this case, Senators), their roles, and their offices using XML. Why, you ask?

…[T]here is, I think, an important distinction between the Semantic Web and the Web As We Know It (WAWKI). The Semantic Web is about defining data in a consistent, accurate way, so that it can be shared by machines and by humans. The WAWKI is about moving human-friendly representations of resources from one place to another, and the focus on semantic consistency (in the form of XML, XHTML, and related standards) came after the basic architecture was established. The goal of this column is not to build a “Semantic Web site” because such a thing doesn’t really exist. Rather, we’re aiming to build a useful knowledge base of information about a specific domain, to publish that knowledge base on the Web, so that agents, both human and machine, can use the data in ways that aids them in accomplishing their goals and plans.

Bad Protocol.
Edward W. Felten. Freedom to Tinker,
October 13, 2004.

Felton reports from a talk by Dan Wallach from Rice University.
One of Wallach’s example concerns the
Diebold AccuVote-TS system, which uses “smartcards” that validate a electronic vote and only let a voter vote once. Unfortunately, it is
“an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design of their voting system” because it makes
it very easy to vote more than once!

Letter from American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge to The Senate Judiciary Committee regarding negotiations on S.2560.

Public Knowledge is a new public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons. This Washington, D.C. based group works with wide spectrum of stakeholdersÑlibraries, educators, scientists, artists, musicians, journalists, consumers, software programmers, civic groups and enlightened businessesÑto promote the core conviction that some fundamental democratic principles and cultural valuesÑopenness, access, and the capacity to create and competeÑmust be given new embodiment in the digital age.

Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy

Over 650 foreign affairs specialists in the United States and allied countries have signed an open letter opposing the Bush administration’s foreign policy and calling urgently for a change of course.

The letter was released today by “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy,” a nonpartisan group of experts in the field of national security and international politics.

E-Voting Research Delayed, Experts Say
Yahoo! News / AP
By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN and RACHEL KONRAD.
Sun Oct 10, 2004

After nearly 50,000 Michigan Democrats cast ballots over the Internet in February, academics eagerly sought election data that would help them determine what types of people voted online. But scholars around the country complain that they haven’t been able to get statistics from the Feb. 7 caucus….

Researchers and civil rights experts say Michigan’s Democratic Party is merely one of a number of organizations that are stingy with voting data Ñ even though computerized balloting systems and registration databases make such information relatively easy to share.

The Importance of… > Copyright Shenanigans Not Over in Congress - Piracy Education Act Dangerous” href=”http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/026477.php”>Copyright Shenanigans Not Over in Congress - Piracy Education Act Dangerous
Ernest Miller, Corante, The Importance of… October 08, 2004.

Miller Reports on a bill possibly worse than the INDUCE act. Among other things it
wants to write into law a prohibition on skipping commercial or promotional ads when you are watching a movie at home on your own movie player.

This is an informative artice that refers to other information on this bill, revealing very very bad policy initiatives.