Going to downtown Boston soon? Don’t forget to smile for the cameras:

An unprecedented number of video cameras will be trained on Boston during the Democratic National Convention, with Boston police installing some 30 cameras near the FleetCenter, the Coast Guard using infrared devices and night-vision cameras in the harbor, and dozens of pieces of surveillance equipment mounted on downtown buildings to monitor crowds for terrorists, unruly demonstrators, and ordinary street crime.
For the first time, 75 high-tech video cameras . . . will be linked into a surveillance network to monitor the Central Artery, City Hall Plaza, the FleetCenter, and other sensitive sites.

Of course the authorities need this spyware to deal with any incidents that may arise during the convention. That’s why the video feeds are being piped to a central facility . . . in Washington D.C.?

Their feeds from cameras mounted on various downtown buildings will be piped to monitoring stations in the Boston area and in Washington, D.C., and officials will be able to zoom in from their work stations to gather details of facial descriptions or read license plates.

This is a great opportunity for Senator Kerry to at least make a token statement against the exponential growth of government intrusion. But thanks to the media-fueled “war on terror” hype we rarely hear such statements from politicians, regardless of how ineffectual a measure actually is preventing terrorism. Fortunately, not everyone is so constrained:

”What this demonstrates is that ‘1984’ is now technologically possible,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program, referring to George Orwell’s vision of an all-seeing totalitarian state. ”This is really a situation where we are really being asked to blindly trust the government. There is no oversight of this. There are no safeguards.”

Good point. Who is watching the watchers here? How about some publicly-accessible surveillance cameras in the surveillance rooms?

Hey, I didn’t realize Bill Clinton had assumed the presidency again:

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, a key U.S. center for nuclear weapons research, has suspended virtually all its operations after an intern sustained a serious eye injury while working with a laser, a spokesman said on Saturday.
The Friday accident, capping a series of embarrassing security and safety lapses for the lab, led new director Peter Nanos to determine that a lab-wide assessment of all operations was needed, spokesman Jim Fallin said. Nanos on Thursday had suspended all classified research.

I’m sure Clinton and the University of California are in cahoots with this somehow. But the show will go on. After all, we’ve got the “war on terror”:

“We are not going to hamper national security needs,” said Fallin. “We understand that the nation is at war.”

Uh, how is it that we need the work of a nuclear research lab to fight shadowy warriors welding box cutters and suicide bombs? Are we going to nuke Fallujah?

We’ve found another leader for the ages:

I have chosen to support his President because, for my countrymen, President Bush is our Lincoln. He has freed our people from oppression, slavery and injustice. Therefore, I thought the NAACP would be in favor of our country’s actions.
Notice the parallels: Both men chose to defend those who had no rights and very few freedoms. Both men took a highly unpopular stand, regardless of public opinion, in the midst of their first term, not because it was politically expedient, but because it was right. Both men extended the rights of education, equality and the freedom of speech and vote to a people who had lived under oppression for years. In the South, slave owners would whip, maim and kill those slaves who disobeyed them. Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, the Shi’a in the southern part of Iraq.
Neither man initiated any war. President Lincoln did not take action until the provisional Confederate army captured Fort Sumpter, three months after his inauguration. President Bush responded to the war brought to our shores only after the bombing of 9/11, eight months after his inauguration. Both men fully understood that taking such action endangered the chance they had for a second term. Both still acted, because it was the right thing to do.

When people talk about how Americans don’t know history these days, I have to agree. George W. Bush is like Abraham Lincoln as president the way I am to Lance Armstrong in bicycling.

It took outside pressure, but this is a good move by the Bush administration:

The State Department announced that $18 million in military and economic aid to Uzbekistan, a Muslim country in Central Asia, would be suspended because of its failure to carry out a promised political liberalization or improve its human rights record. Driven in part by congressional pressure, the cutoff should send a message to Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president, Islam Karimov, as well as several of his neighbors in a region where oil, gas and military bases have recently become important: The old formula for partnership with Washington may no longer work.

Nice that we aren’t completely ignoring human rights abusers. But it remains to be seen how committed we are to this cause over the long term.

I think if I had this I’d be able to generate some decent site traffic:

A rough cut of a new album by U2 has gone missing from a photo shoot – prompting fears it may be posted on the internet months before its release.
. . .
The rough cut does not have any great financial value but could be published on the internet in advance of the official release date, he said.

I would think the potential Internet release clearly does have financial value to the band, and that’s why they went to the police.
Anyway, yes, I resisted the urge to throw in the obligatory “Still Haven’t Found” title.