That rumor turns out to not be true. But it is a fact that, whenever disaster strikes, it becomes difficult to reach the people you care about. Right at the moment when you really need to hear a familiar voice, you often can't. So what gives?

To find out why it's frequently so difficult to successfully place a call during emergencies, I spoke with Brough Turner, an entrepreneur, engineer, and writer who has been been working with phone systems (both wired and wireless) for 25 years. Turner helped me understand how the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of cell phones works, and why that infrastructure gets bogged down when lots of people are suddenly trying to make calls all at once from a single place. He says there are some things that can be done to fix this issue, but, ultimately, it's more complicated than just asking what the technology can and cannot do. In some ways, service failures like this are a price we pay for having a choice and not being subject to a total monopoly.

Brough Turner: Well, say you'd have an earthquake in California. This was for the old Bell system. The national long distance routing has a set of standard, predefined routes and it had network control centers in New Jersey and other places. Things would get overloaded and they would manually intervene by putting access restrictions on new calls coming into the area that was congested. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s they would let through one out of every five call attempts. They were doing that manually and just arbitrarily to reduce congestion. Over time things got more automated. During the long-distance competition of the 1990s, AT&T introduced computerized routing and started using automated rate limiting. It all really got quite sophisticated before the whole industry went away.

BT: First off, different cell phone providers use different technologies, different systems. I'm talking about the GSM system used by AT&T and T-Mobile. I know less about the Qualcomm version that's used by Verizon and Sprint. They evolved in different ways and the details are different, but the same basic principles are the same for all. With 4G, by the way, that's changing. Everybody is converging on the technology that comes from that GSM tradition.

In general, though, there are a bunch of different places where congestion can happen. Networks consist of different technologies, and different levels. You start with the mobile switching center that may cover a large area. There are only one or two mobile switches for Eastern Massachusetts. We're talking about a room full of racks, full of computers and other switching elements. The densest switch is in China, and they have something that will serve more than several million customers at a time.

So you have the mobile switching center. Then you have groups referred to as radio node controllers. There are dozens to hundreds of these conrolled by one switch. They're located closer to the radios and they deal with handoffs between different radios.

Then, of course, you have the individual radios and that's where you see antennas on top of and on sides of buildings. Those are everywhere. Each of those is a cell, and in each cell you have users who are connected to the network.

BT: Yup. The other thing about the radios is that they have different sizes of cells. You've got regular cells and then smaller sub-cells. You also have larger overlay macro-cells that are really big. They try to handle you within the small cell you're closest to. But it's a trade off between capacity — they'd like to have lots of small cells for that — and coverage — they don't want to put 100k small cells everywhere. So you might have a cell that covers a mile ara and then smaller cells within that that handle most of the traffic.

Interesting thing is that most people are actually stationary, sitting on their butts. For most people, calls originate from one or two locations and they stay there the whole time. But we have to have this incredibly complicated system to deal with the 5-8% of people who move around. Maybe less than that.

BT:They can offload some of that to a macro-cell. When it's a planned event — the Boston Marathon, for instance, before the bombings — they can bring in aditional mobile cells. They park little trucks around the edge of the event. All those radios, though, have to connect back to the radio network controller. If it's an installed radio it's probably a wired connection — copper or fiber. But when you can't get that, then they use point-to-point wireless. Either way, they call that the backhaul.

In different parts of the system different things will get congested. In some cases, the specific cell site might be overloaded and macros are also overloaded. In other cases, it's the backhaul that gets overloaded. And that doesn't even have to be an emergency to cause that. There's this great story where [telecommunications expert] David Reed was driving from New York to Boston in the middle of the night. His wife was driving and he was sitting there with one of the first iPads that had 3G service, and has they drove through Connecticut he was running speed tests along the way. Just to see the different responses in different cells. And at one point, he was limited to, like, 3 mbps. It was 3:00 am, so it wasn't about lots of people using the system. It was just that he was driving through a cell where the only backhaul was two T1 lines. So 3 mbps was the maximum anybody in that cell could ever get. And this was like a 20 mile stretch of highway.

BT: There are a bunch of separate channels in the wireless system. But the big division is between a control channel and all of these traffic carrying channels. Control channels are used for a lot of different things. For instance, they're used for call set-up and call tear-down. Your handset looks on a particular control channel for permission to make a request. It uses the control channel to request to make a call, like, "I need enough capacity to set up call," so then the system can find the traffic channel with enough free space. But they're also used for sms messages. Which is interesting.

BT: Yes. It's much better. The SMS messages have a relatively light footprint, first of all. The second thing is that they're asynchronous. If they can't get through this instant, they keep trying. If it gets over the radio to the cell site, it will get through. Even if it's delayed for 30 seconds or something. With voice you're either connected or you're not, and when you are that means that the traffic channel is tied up until you're done talking. More likely, it means you never get connected because traffic channels are already saturated.

BT: Yes. Now this is a piece where I know what equipment these large carriers have, but I don't know how they've chosen to implement capabilities that are there. So one way they can do this is they can bar new traffic being originated by people based on "class". There are typically 10 classes for regular subscribers and another six classes that handle things like 911 calls and emergency services. They can control which classes have access at the level of cells, or by groups of cells, or all of Eastern Massachusetts if they wish.

I'm not clear on how automated all of this is. They definitely have the ability to have it totally automated. There's technology you can buy from Ericsson that features call-load-triggered access class barring, so it automatically invokes certain policies about who can place calls in an area if the traffic there exceeds a pre-determined threshold. But that's an extra feature and you have to pay extra for it ... I guarantee it's in the range of 10s of thousands of dollars per mobile switch. So who knows what decision the carriers made about that. It might have been automated and it might not be.

What I am sure of is that they set up priorities for people with fire and safety access classes. And I think it's also clear that the Verizon mobile switching center was overloaded on Monday. The effect I observed in Massachusetts was you could not place a call from a landline into the Verizon mobile network for some period of time. They blocked all incoming calls for some period of time. But within the network [Verizon to Verizon] some number of calls were getting through. I didn't succeed, but some friends did after trying for 5 or 10 minutes. In overload cases they won't turn off everything. They'll say fire and safety get through immediately and maybe 10% of the other calls get to go through. They don't throttle down to zero, though, because you don't know if somebody desperately needs to make that connection.

BT: In the end, it does come down to trade-offs. That's true of any network. You're interested in coverage first and then capacity. If you wanted to guarantee that a network never had an outage your capital investment would have to go up orders of magnitude beyond anything that is rational. So each network is trying to invest their budget in ways that make network appear to perform better.

The cost of providing temporary extra capacity for the Boston Marathon, that's something that's in the budget and they plan for that event. But when you get something unexpected like a terrorist event, or an earthquake, or damage from a hurricane or tornado, then you have trade offs between capital and how robust your network is. Every time you have an event people say, "Oh, they didn't invest enough." But you look at New York City after Hurricane Sandy and Southern Manhattan was under 6 feet of water — all the buried infrastructure was lost. Meanwhile, in other places, a significant number of cell sites were knocked out because connections ran on overhead poles and got knocked down by trees. The antenna site literally got destroyed. Interestingly, you can lose 30% of your cells and stil get coverage. Coverage was there in New Jersey after Sandy, even with 1/3 of the network out. The catch is there wasn't much capacity.

BT: I honestly don't know how you could regulate it to work the way you wanted it to all the time. Reliability on the old Bell system was relatively high ... and we paid the a high price for that as consumers because to get that level of service they got to be a monopoly and they got to charge us a rate that allowed them to make a return on their investments.

With cellular systems, competition seems to drive more optimal decisions. We don't have as much competition as we used to, but there's still some. You really want at least four-to-six carriers, and most places it's really only like three or three-and-a-half. For the public, we have to have a trade-off between getting coverage we want and being stuck with a monopoly. You look at electricity or fixed-line phone systems, and there are regulations on those industries about how much coverage and capacity they have to have because it has to be a good system — you as the consumer have no other choice. They're monopolies.

When bombs explode in a crowded city street, individuals and governments naturally ask themselves, "Could we have prevented this if we had been paying better attention to people and things that were out of place?" Trouble is, that question leads to a whole cascade of other questions — covering everything from personal privacy to racism.

M. Neelika Jayawardane is associate professor of English at SUNY-Oswego. She's giving a talk this afternoon on "If you see something, say something" and other campaigns aimed at getting average people involved in public security. I happened to be here on campus for a separate speaking engagement and thought this was something that BoingBoing readers would be interested in "sitting in" on, given the recent tragedy in Boston.

I'll be liveblogging this, updating regularly with key points and ideas from Jayawardane's talk. It's worth noting that her perspective is not the only way to think about these issues. I'm posting this in hopes that it will present some interesting information and spark good conversations. If you're interested in engaging with Jayawardane afterwards, she said that you can reach her via Twitter. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing what she has to say — and what you all have to say about that.

First thing worth noting: The actual title of this talk — "Extraordinary renditions: imaging, mapping, and immobilizing the lives of others."

"I was trained in literary studies, but I'm really interested in how we read our environments as well as books"

She's particularly interested in the ways that race, ethnicity, and culture play into those readings. Jayawardane is Sri Lankan, but grew up in South Africa. She's never been a part of a dominant culture. Talks about the strange experience of visiting Sri Lanka for the first time as an adult and being, suddenly, the privileged ethnic group.

Advertisements and media make marginal societies more visible. In the wake of 9/11 media created a new fact for terror and gave us all physical signals that we now associate with our own fear of bodily injury.

The image of the "classic terrorist" now means that people monitor their environments for people who fit that image — an action that affects how the people who, inadvertently, look like "terrorists" can move around and engage in their own communities.

Jayawardane sees an increase in "oriental" stereotypes and security-inspired images in fashion magazines happening at the same time. She's showing a Vogue spread that shows a model stripping out of her skirt in front of the TSA.

The images of terror and terrorism have become saturated throughout Western media since 9/11, even in places where you don't expect them, life fashion. Another fashion spread shows riot police groping models who have been thrown up against a cop car in stress positions.

She believes these images have been crucial to incorporating us (the public) into the discourse and process of security and terror post-9/11.

The use of this imagery highlights and encourages our fears and normalizes oppressive levels of security routine.

After 9/11, friends of Jayawardane encouraged her to look "less threatening" in airports, by wearing big hoop earrings and trying to "look more like you're Puerto Rican."

Moustafa Hassan Nasr was abducted by the CIA off the streets of Milan in February 2003. He reports being tortured and was eventually released when the CIA realized he wasn't actually a bad guy. Americans were tried for this crime in absentia in Italy in 2007. Rarely did American newspapers report on this and similar incidents, Jayawardane says.

Visual arts do a better job of shaping our ideas and building propaganda than language does, she says. Human beings are very savvy readers of images. We're being sent these visual signals about who is dangerous, and who is the other. And that ends up controlling the mobility and lives of people the West considers "threatening".

You see a picture of Nasr now, and you create a narrative for him that doesn't necessarily fit with what really happened to him.

The idea of putting a photo on an identity document began with methods of tracking criminals, and cataloging people into ethnic groups for the purpose of apartheid, Jayawardane says.

The more your body is considered "threatening" the more mapping and documenting of your body happens to you as you enter and leave and move about countries. The more you are under public surveillance.

But, at the same time, threatening bodies are "disappeared" into a symbolic, rather than individual existence. Think of the parade of hooded figures in Guantanamo. Those individuals becomes representations of threats to the state, or proof that the state is making you safe, or symbolic representations of the failures and excesses of the security apparatus. Either way, their private selves get erased, she says.

Individual characteristics are lost as they merge into this this strange, threatening, brownish man. "My partner, on a certain day and certain look, could look like one of the 9/11 bombers. And we now conflate that look with danger," Jayawardane says.

Photography and image banks of wanted posters are our sort of medieval stained glass, giving us symbolic understandings of what we should fear and who we should think of as "out of place".

Which brings us to campaigns like "If you see something, say something" that turn up in transport hubs like bus stations, trains, and airports. These turn up more in bus stations and trains than in airports, she says.

Posters encourage you to ask "What's wrong with this picture". They ask you to seek out what you might think of as threatening. To be a good citizen, you have to be a part of surveillance.

None of these things ever tell you what you should be on alert for. So what do we fall back on? What becomes "threatening" to us? Not the big guy with a gun patrolling the Amtrak station, she says. That's the cop. And we've been taught to not fear him. Instead, we revert to the visual training we've been getting from the media for the last decade.

Very similar messages were disseminated in South Africa during apartheid, she says. And it's nothing new in the United States, either. "I got interested because so much of these rules and images affect my mobility and how my identity shifts and changes in the minds of other people."

Now a response from Craig Warkentin, political science professor.

His question: So what? Well, he says, we become unwitting participants in a surveillance state. It does matter, even if you aren't the subject of the othering.

This idea of framing a topic — how we discuss a topic or conceptualize it for ourselves — isn't something outside the norm for political science. People have used framing to help make political change, the same way the visual framing is training us to think of certain people as threatening, but in different ways. For instance, using media and images and story telling to start getting people to think about land mines as things that violate human rights, rather than things that make us safe.

The downside of effective framing: If you can get people to think in a certain way it becomes normal after a while. At that point it becomes something we think of as "natural" and we take it for granted. And people stop questioning it.

To create change, you have to do more than point out that this isn't normal. You have to get people to be willing to accept that it's not normal. "The extent to which othering certain bodies and accepting security state is normal is the degree to which I am concerned about it," he says.

People who are aware this isn't normal will use the people who think this is normal to implement their goals. As long as we believe it's natural, we'll go along with it.

"Be aware of why you do the things you do. Why you think the way you think. That will help you avoid being manipulated."

And now the Q&A.

It is now 4:56 p.m. Eastern, if you have questions about this, post them, and I'll ask for you in the Q&A session.

Jayawardane says she doesn't blame people who look at her and partner in an airport and express fear. They're responding to what they have learned. Interestingly, strangers ask them kind of obtrusive questions about their relationship, and gender roles.

Comment from the audience: "Craig, you're making an assumption I don't think I can accept. Whoever it is who is arranging PR campaign is aware of the fact that it isn't normal. I don't think you can safely say that we are being manipulated."

Warkentin replies: In the case of the land mines for example, we had historical legacy for how those devices were talked about. It was a case of private citizens organizing and intentionally changing the way we talk about it. Political leaders do have an idea of what normal should be — i.e., what normal will help them reach their objectives. There's different interpretations of the war on terror. Normal way to respond to terror before 9/11 was to treat it as a criminal act. You arrest somebody, you put them on trial. U.S. chose to address it in a different way and got us to start talking about it in terms of a war. And that has lots of other baggage that goes along with it. But historically we KNOW that's not the only way to talk about. There can be more than one normal and leaders can choose which normal they push to make their point.

That said, he says, those leaders do sometimes genuinely believe that the "normal" they want us to believe in is the actual "normal".

Question: "I kind of want to flip your normal. As the talk has been going, I've been thinking that it's more an abnormal discourse than anything. We're being shamed into loving our safety. We're told it's abnormal to not be afraid of these people. War was framed as an extreme act of love. Rather than thinking in terms of normalizing, if what goes out is an abnormalizing, is it that much more powerful?"

Warkentin: There are multiple layers to this. Part of the framing thing is that it only works if it doesn't ring true with people. Land mind thing wouldn't have worked if it wasn't something people believed in. You have to use things that connect to people's experience and predispositions.

Jayawardane asks: As you walk through our modern American landscape, how do you experience this? Is it normal for you? Do you question?

Audience question: "I struggle with wondering how people can believe in something that looks so doubtful. Is it not part of the packaging of democracy that you must trust ... even things that become empty? To me, coming from a Soviet background, it's more natural not to trust anything. Marx had the idea that ideology becomes naturalized and that's why you don't question. It's packaged as something sweet and trustworthy the way it is."

Jayawardane: I started reading a book about how conspiracy theories come about and it has to do with knowing that there are things you're not privy to. But you don't know it. But you know something is wrong. That general sense of feeling unbalanced leads people to create platforms on which you can feel like you are stable. Even if it's a false platform, it feels more stable than the place where you know things aren't stable.

There is a place in a classroom to be able to have these conversations. To be able to voice your fears and debate them. To be able to talk about and educate each other on things that could be seen as racist. There are places where you can have productive conversations. But, on the other hand, I don't want to do that job at a faculty picnic or with a stranger in the airport.

Audience member makes an interesting point: When you indoctrinate people to see themselves as an arm of the law or a part of the security state, you create situations like what happened in the Trayvon Martin case.

• If you'd like to see Jayawardane's slides, including samples of the fashion shoots she discussed in her talk, you can view her PowerPoint through Google Docs.
• You can also read the full notes from her talk.

Two days after a group of Somali islamist militants vowed to execute Kenyan hostages, and tweeted a video of a captive pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them, the Al-Shabaab Twitter account @HSMPress was suspended. A Google cache is visible here. Warning: includes gruesome photos. The group took a French intelligence officer hostage, then apparently murdered him after an unsuccessful attempted raid by the French military which the US assisted). An @HSMPress press release about that killing is available on Twitlonger.

The Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Twitter account has been around since 2011, promoting the group's vision of strict sharia law in Somalia, 140 characters at a time. The US State Department was reportedly looking in to shutting it down ages ago. Wonder what took them so long?

For its part, Al Shabaab blames its "Christian enemies" for suspending its Twitter account. And they do sound rather miffed about being blocked on the popular social networking platform.

From Reuters:

"The enemies have shut down our Twitter account," al Shabaab's most senior media officer, who refused to be named, told Reuters. "They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians' mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online)."

No, what's weirdest are the tweets that sound like they were lifted from a j-school ethics debate.

How much of the gruesome details of war should be published without detracting from the accurancy and credibility of the event?

Why is it that questions and ethical concerns are usually raised only when the Mujahideen publish images of their enemy combatants?.

A photojournalist wins the Pulitzer Prize for a blood-spattered shot of an Afghan girl, but the fairly clean shot of the French is "graphic"

Noted.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/25/twitter-suspends-account-of-so.html/feed 33 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/23/the-zero-dark-thirty-files.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/23/the-zero-dark-thirty-files.html#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:38:02 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=207874

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit founded by journalists and scholars in 1985 "to check rising government secrecy," has published all of the available official government documents about the mission to kill the leader of al-Qaeda.

The poster for the blockbuster movie Zero Dark Thirty features black lines of redaction over the title, which unintentionally illustrate the most accurate take-away from the film - that most of the official record of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still shrouded in secrecy, according to the National Security Archive's ZD30 briefing book, posted today at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S. government's recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the twenty-first century's most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film's producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public's "account of record" for Operation Neptune Spear.

As often happens when the government declines on secrecy grounds to provide an authoritative account of a controversial event, leaked, unauthorized and untrustworthy versions rush to fill the void. In this extraordinary case, a Hollywood motion picture, with apparent White House, CIA, and Pentagon blessing and despite its historical inaccuracies, is now the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.

"Death of a Prisoner: The Tragic Return Home of a Guantánamo Bay Detainee" follows a journey to Yemen, to return the body of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif to his family. In 2012, he "died in solitary confinement at Guantánamo at age 36, after nearly 11 years of imprisonment there, despite never having been charged with a crime."

Mr. Latif’s death is under investigation by the United States military, which claims he committed suicide from an overdose of prescription medication complicated by acute pneumonia. But that’s hard to take at face value. Why was he placed in solitary confinement when he was suffering from acute pneumonia? How could he have overdosed on medication, given the strict protocols at Guantánamo? Why did it take three months for the body to be returned to Yemen? And finally, why are his autopsy and toxicology report classified and being withheld from his family?

These questions are not just about Adnan Latif. They also address the injustices that our government has instituted and normalized in the war on terror.

Read the rest of Poitras' account here.

And the video is also here on YouTube.

Today, it should be noted, is the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo as a terror detainee facility. What irony that Poitras' film was published by the Times on the same day as this pathetic op-ed arguing Gitmo should remain open.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/death-of-a-prisoner-the-tra.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/nsa-to-att-customers-who-beli.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/nsa-to-att-customers-who-beli.html#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:52:31 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=181661 Courthouse News Service has an extensive explainer on the state of a legal battle between The National Security Agency and a group of non-terrorist AT&T customers who claim that warrantless wiretapping violates their rights. The short version: NSA argues it is immune from their federal lawsuit because REASONS. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/nsa-to-att-customers-who-beli.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/mitt-romney-does-not-understan.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/mitt-romney-does-not-understan.html#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:53:23 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=181620

Mother Jones today published a second part of the video secretly recorded at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton. The first bombshell will forever be known as "47 percent," but the portion getting attention today focuses on a response the Republican presidential candidate gave to a question about the Israel/Palestine peace process. The tl;dr there: he doesn't believe it'll happen, and intends to "kick the ball down the road" and let the next administration deal with it, or something like that.

But here's a derpworthy moment in the video that may be of interest to science fans, and people who have actually done some reporting on how so-called "dirty bombs" work.

Here's a transcript for the relevant portion of the video:

If I were Iran, if I were Iran—a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

But you don't need "fissile material" to create a dirty bomb. David Corn at Mother Jones writes:

Romney didn't appear to understand that a dirty bomb—an explosive device that spreads radioactive substances—does not require fissile material from a nuclear weapons program. Such a bomb can be produced with, say, radioactive medical waste. If Iran's nuclear program poses a threat, it is not because this project will yield a dirty bomb.

Someone on Romney's staff should sit the guy down and force him to watch this PBS NewsHour story by Miles O'Brien from last year, a straightforward explainer on how dirty bombs work, and how it's not necessary to have a "nuclear program" in place to create one.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/mitt-romney-does-not-understan.html/feed 73 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/17/police-chief-in-ma-illicit.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/17/police-chief-in-ma-illicit.html#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:35:26 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=181435 Michael Begonis said today. “It is preying on folks who are more susceptible and who need a better life. And it’s something that we need to deal with head on.” Like hell, writes Mike Riggs at Reason.com. (via @radleybalko)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/17/police-chief-in-ma-illicit.html/feed 41 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/something-new-under-the-sea.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/something-new-under-the-sea.html#comments Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:44:29 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=180560 Drug cartels are building their own diesel submarines in the jungles of South America. A recently caught version wasn't fully submersible—the engine needed to bring in air via a snorkel that stuck out above the waterline—but it did have a range of 3000 miles. (Via Mo Costandi)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/12/something-new-under-the-sea.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/07/designer-takeshi-miyakawa-out.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/07/designer-takeshi-miyakawa-out.html#comments Thu, 07 Jun 2012 21:38:32 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=165421

The NYT has an update on the case of designer Takeshi Miyakawa. The 50-year-old Japanese artist, who lives in New York City, was arrested last month while he draped plastic “I ♥ NY” bags stuffed with LEDs and batteries from trees in Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The act frightened some observers who thought "his art installation, timed to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, was a series of bombs." He was charged with reckless endangerment, criminal nuisance and “planting a false bomb,” then imprisoned on Rikers Island and ordered to undergo a mental evaluation. He's out now. Maybe he should have a conversation with Star Simpson.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/07/designer-takeshi-miyakawa-out.html/feed 41 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-lil-bar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-lil-bar.html#comments Wed, 06 Jun 2012 17:00:29 +0000 Ruben Bolling http://boingboing.net/?p=165005

SUPPORT Tom the Dancing Bug and receive untold BENEFITS and PRIVILEGES by joining the new INNER HIVE right now! It's easy! And fun! And has other positive attributes!

CLICK NOW!]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-lil-bar.html/feed 33 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/01/anarchist-group-targets-scient.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/01/anarchist-group-targets-scient.html#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 20:55:06 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=164286 Last year, I told you about Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, a terrorist group that has mailed bombs to nanotechnology researchers in Mexico, Chile, France, and Spain. Their stated goal: Stop technological innovation. And they aren't alone.

At Nature News Leigh Phillips reports on a group called the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation, which is dedicated to the suppression of science in general and technological innovation in particular. The group is behind several bombings and shootings, mostly targeting nuclear scientists and nuclear energy advocacy groups. Now, the Olga Cell says that it's joining forces with other anti-science terrorist groups around the world. This group is apparently communicating with Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, though it's not clear how close the collaboration is.

On 11 May, the cell sent a four-page letter to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera claiming responsibility for the shooting of Roberto Adinolfi, the chief executive of Ansaldo Nucleare, the nuclear-engineering subsidiary of aerospace and defence giant Finmeccanica. Believed by authorities to be genuine, the letter is riddled with anti-science rhetoric. The group targeted Adinolfi because he is a “sorcerer of the atom”, it wrote. “Adinolfi knows well that it is only a matter of time before a European Fukushima kills on our continent.”

“Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self-destruction and total slavery,” the letter continues. “With this action of ours, we return to you a tiny part of the suffering that you, man of science, are pouring into this world.” The group also threatened to carry out further attacks.

Read the rest of the story at Nature News

A styrofoam-and-acrylic model of Osama bin Laden's compound that was used to plan the May 2011 raid that killed the al Qaeda leader has been declassified by the Pentagon.

CNN reports that the model of OBL's building and surrounding farmland in Abbotabad, Pakistan was built over a six-week period, and then was taken to the White House to brief President Obama on plans. After the raid, it sat on display in the lobby of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Until last week, the model was considered classified and only those working or visiting the building could see it.

Now it is declassified, and agency officials wanted to bring it over to the Pentagon for a brief time to show it off to Department of Defense "customers" to highlight what the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency can do for them, according to an agency information sheet.

The to-scale diorama helped the Navy Seals literally measure the steps it would take to get to bin Laden.

More photos and background here: The very model of a successful bin Laden raid

(CNN.com, via Kristie LuStout).

As for why KSM dyed his beard? Former State Department counterterrorism adviser Will McCants says that KSM is probably trying to emphasize his commitment to Islam. KSM grew his long, flowing beard only after he was imprisoned at Guantanamo—previous photographs show him with a trim beard or a thick mustache.

"KSM is following the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, who recommended dyeing a grey beard red," McCants says, calling it "a sign of devotion, particularly after looking like Ron Jeremy all those years." But how did KSM go from the porn-star look to more of a Gimli? Apparently, it would damage national security if we knew.

More here.

PHOTOS: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who claims to have organized the 9/11 attacks, shown at left in a Red Cross photo taken at Guantanamo Bay, and at right in a snapshot by US forces shortly after his 2003 capture.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/11/how-did-alleged-911-mastermin.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/08/tsa-saves-america-from-16yo-gi.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/08/tsa-saves-america-from-16yo-gi.html#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 01:26:38 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=159529

You probably thought we covered all possible scenarios of TSA stupidity in our recent round-up post.

You thought wrong.

Via MSNBC today, the story of Savannah Barry, a 16-year-old diabetic girl who says the TSA broke her insulin pump. Savannah was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes four years ago, and her pump is a specialized medical device that can cost up to $10,000 to replace, according to MSNBC.

Snip:

The Colorado teenager says TSA screeners forced her to go through a full-body scanner in Salt Lake City last week, breaking her $10,000 insulin pump in the process. According to Sandra Barry, Savannah’s mother, her daughter was coming home from a school trip when screeners required to her to go through a full-body scanner despite the fact that the girl had a doctor’s note describing her condition and stating that she should be given a pat-down rather than subjected to screening machines.

“Believe me, being 16 and female, she probably doesn’t want the pat-down but she knows that this is what’s required,” Sandra Barry told msnbc.com. “She tried to advocate for herself and they just shut her down.”

Full story here.

Her pump, which MSNBC reports is made by Animas, has since been replaced.

The local ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City has more, including a larger version of the photo above of Savannah with her wearable medical device. From the interview, she sounds like a smart, articulate young woman who is aware of her rights, and rightly pissed.

The scientist, Adlène Hicheur, 35, did not deny the exchange of messages, in which he suggested targets for terrorist strikes in France, but maintains that he never intended to act on his words. The trial has raised difficult questions about the possible excesses of French antiterrorism law, which in effect treats intent as a criminal act. A researcher at the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, Dr. Hicheur met his interlocutor on an Internet forum dedicated to radical Islam while on sick leave, nursing a herniated disk at his parents’ home in southeastern France.

A related story at the BBC. Not everyone believes he is guilty.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/cern-scientist-sentenced-to-5.html/feed 23 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/us-doxes-bin-laden-always-use.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/us-doxes-bin-laden-always-use.html#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 23:53:37 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=158749 CNET's Emil Protalinski reports that Osama bin Laden did not encrypt the thousands of files stored in the Pakistani compound where he was killed, and "17 of the 6,000 documents have now been publicly released." (via @ioerror)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/us-doxes-bin-laden-always-use.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/in-veracruz-mexico-renewed-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/in-veracruz-mexico-renewed-a.html#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 21:52:48 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=158681 Three journalists were killed this week in the Mexican state of Veracruz, just a week after another reporter was murdered. More on the latest violence at SouthNotes. (via Shannon Young)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/04/in-veracruz-mexico-renewed-a.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/02/this-week-in-tsa-awfulness-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/02/this-week-in-tsa-awfulness-a.html#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 23:35:40 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=158148

Cue up the Yakity Sax! In case you missed it, there have been a number of Boing Boing posts of late documenting outrageous TSA incidents:

• A terminal in Newark airport was evacuated because the TSA forgot to screen a tiny baby.
• TSA agents discovered an "anomaly in the crotchital area" of a 79-year-old woman.
• TSA agents at JFK harassed the family of a 7-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and developmental disability.
• TSA screeners in LA ran a drug ring and took bribes from drug dealers.
• The TSA's anti-hugging squad caught a terrorist masquerading as a 4-year-old girl who loves her grandma.
• A 95-year-old US Air Force veteran from World War II and his 85-year-old friend were humiliated, searched and robbed at a San Diego TSA checkpoint.

Did we miss anything else in the past week or so? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: Carolina K. Smith, M.D. / Shutterstock.com]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/02/this-week-in-tsa-awfulness-a.html/feed 55 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/tsa-security-screeners-in-la.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/tsa-security-screeners-in-la.html#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:10:09 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=156776
Photo: Reuters. A man is screened with a backscatter x-ray machine at an LAX TSA checkpoint.

Four present and past security screeners at LAX took 22 payments of up to $2400 each to let large shipments of coke, meth, and pot slip through baggage X-ray machines. Oh, we are so very, very shocked.

In one incident detailed in the 40-page indictment (Link), screeners plotted to allow eight pounds of crystal meth to get through—then one of them ducked into an airport men's room where he was handed $600, the second payment for that delivery.

Just think! If you've flown out of LA recently, you law-abiding person, one of these very dirtbags may have harassed you over your terror-toothpaste.

More: LA Times, BBC News, Wired, WSJ.

Related:
• Who did the TSA terrorize today? A 4-year-old girl. Why? She hugged her grandma.
• 95-year-old Air Force veteran robbed of $300]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/tsa-security-screeners-in-la.html/feed 21 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/who-did-the-tsa-terrorize-toda.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/who-did-the-tsa-terrorize-toda.html#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 02:50:24 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=156760

PHOTO: Snapshot by Lori Croft of her 4-year-old granddaughter Isabella Brademeyer, in Wichita, Kan., where she was a flower girl at her uncle’s wedding. The child was harassed by TSA goons on the way back from that family event, for the crime of hugging her granny.

Earlier this week on Boing Boing, Cory blogged about a 95-year-old Air Force veteran who was robbed of $300 at a TSA checkpoint. After picking on the elderly, today the TSA is bullying children. A 4-year-old girl who was upset during a TSA screening at the Wichita, KS airport was forced to undergo a manual pat-down after hugging her grandmother. Agents yelled at the child, and called her an uncooperative suspect.

Nope, we're not making this up.

The child's mom, Michelle Brademeyer of Montana, shared the incident in a public Facebook post last week, and the story has since spread widely.

“They didn’t explain anything and she did not know what was going on,” the grandmother told the Associated Press. “She saw people grabbing at her and raising their voices. To her, someone was trying to kidnap her or harm her in some way.”

Think the TSA has apologized? Nah. The agency is defending its agents, despite promised changes in operational standards to "reduce pat-downs of children."

Snip from AP report:

The child’s grandmother, Lori Croft, told The Associated Press that Brademeyer and her daughter, Isabella, initially passed through security at the Wichita airport without incident. The girl then ran over to briefly hug Croft, who was awaiting a pat-down after tripping the alarm, and that’s when TSA agents insisted the girl undergo a physical pat-down. Isabella had just learned about “stranger danger” at school, her grandmother said, adding that the girl was afraid and unsure about what was going on.

“She started to cry, saying ‘No I don’t want to,’ and when we tried talking to her she ran,” Croft said. “They yelled, ‘We are going to shut down the airport if you don’t grab her.’”

But she said the family’s main concern was the lack of understanding from TSA agents that they were dealing with a 4-year-old child, not a terror suspect.

Right! "Lack of understanding." Because at first glance, a crying 4-year-old girl could absolutely be confused with a hardened terrorist.

Read the full article here.

At the New York Times, a story by Charlie Savage on new guidelines signed into law Thursday by US Attorney General Eric H. Holder for the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to "improve intelligence sharing and serve as a terrorism threat clearinghouse."

The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat.

This can only be good for democracy and freedom!

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Mr. “underwear bomber,” is the straw man to thank. Intelligence officials said the new rules relaxing data restrictions have been under way for a year and a half, and emerged from reviews launched after the failure to "connect the dots" before the tightie whitie terrorist tried to bomb a plane in 2009.

One specific point of concern for privacy advocates is that the new rules make no mention of how commercial data (credit card records, airline ticket logs) can be used. Again, from Savage's NYT piece:

In 2009, Wired Magazine obtained a list of databases acquired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one of the agencies that shares information with the center. It included nearly 200 million records transferred from private data brokers like ChoicePoint, 55,000 entries on customers of Wyndham hotels, and numerous other travel and commercial records.

Here's that Wired News report from 2009.

(photo: Shutterstock/Yuri Arcurs)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/23/us-loosens-limits-on-how-data.html/feed 35 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/21/how-a-cult-created-a-chemical.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/21/how-a-cult-created-a-chemical.html#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:20:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=150544 A really, really interesting report from The Center for a New American Security about how Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo developed its own chemical weapons program, and what factors enabled it to successfully attack a Tokyo subway with sarin gas. I'm still reading through this and will probably have something longer to say later. But it's got some very interesting examples of things I've noticed in other analyses of successful terrorist attacks: Groups can do things that make them seem comically inept, and they can fail over and over, and still end up pulling off a successful attack. In the end, some of this is about simple, single-minded perseverance. You don't have to be a criminal mastermind. You just have to be willing to keep trying long after most people would have given up. (Via Rowan Hooper)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/21/how-a-cult-created-a-chemical.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-hello.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-hello.html#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:20:02 +0000 Ruben Bolling http://boingboing.net/?p=148908

Please always be visiting the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and when you are not, please always be following RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.

An October, 2011 Department of Homeland Security memo on Occupy Wall Street warned of the potential for violence posed by the "leaderless resistance movement." (via @producermatthew).

Update: Looks like there's a larger Rolling Stone feature on this document:

As Occupy Wall Street spread across the nation last fall, sparking protests in more than 70 cities, the Department of Homeland Security began keeping tabs on the movement. An internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street [PDF]," dated October of last year, opens with the observation that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." While acknowledging the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of OWS, the report notes darkly that "large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement."

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/28/homeland-security-memo-warned.html/feed 22