DeCSS Allies Ganging Up The federal court ruling in a suit brought by eight movie studios against 2600 Magazine that restricted its right to publish a decryption program for DVDs “ignores free speech rights and should be
overturned, eight different coalitions claim.

The groups, representing everyone from cryptographers to journalists, have ganged up to attack the ruling in separate amicus
briefs scheduled to be sent to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.” Wired

The killer illness for a new world order: “Mad cow fits the classic profile of a disease likely to cause
hysteria. Ebola, AIDS, and polio—three of the most
flamboyant illnesses of the century—overshadowed deadlier
but less flashy plagues, such as malaria, for several reasons.
First, the hysteria-inducing illnesses usually affect young
people and strike in particularly gruesome ways. Ebola causes
massive bleeding from every orifice. AIDS is responsible for
grotesque cancers and infections. Polio paralyzed young
children.

Second, at the moment of the panic—before much is learned
about the disease’s origin—everyone seems vulnerable, and
it’s not clear that prevention is possible. Maybe an Ebola
victim flew in from the Congo and breathed on you! Maybe
your dentist is HIV-positive! And finally, the disease
organism is new and weird and seems to have sprung from a
dark, mysterious place. AIDS is a creepy mutating monkey
virus. Ebola remains a riddle: The Hot Zone traces it to the
bats in a spooky East African cave.” Slate

Telling the Truth About “False” Memory: ‘Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia
now can distinguish between true and “false” memories, which could lead to further discoveries about the human mind.

“Although people believe they remember events accurately, the human memory is error prone, creating memories of events that never happened,” said
(one of the researchers). “Learning how true and false memories differ will allow us to better understand how memory works
and fails, and how memories are stored and processed.”

“Memory retrieval involves the reactivation of sensory information present during an event…However, memories of events that never
occurred have no sensory information to reactivate. By detecting this brain activity, we can differentiate between true and false memories.” ‘ Although this research technique is not soon likely to become a clinically useful test, this has enormous implications for the polarizing and seemingly insoluble debate — kind of like arguing about religion — about the falsity or reality of “recovered memories” of early abuse (zealously defended and sometimes zealously encouraged by some therapists, and met with contempt by others) that has been ripping through the mental health field and the popular culture over the last decade. This link should take you to the abstract of the study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The 2001 US Big Brother Awards. Call for nominations for the four awards, which will be given at the March 7 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in Cambridge, MA:

Worst Government Official/Most Heinous Government Organization:

A government department, ministry, or agency which has unreasonably invaded privacy
and established comprehensive programmes of surveillance. Or a government official
who has a particularlly bad record in promoting or encouraging privacy invasions.
Previous winners were the US Department of Commerce and Rep. Bill McCollum
(R-FL)

Most invasive company:

A company or other private organization based in the United States which has
demonstrated profound disregard for the privacy of either its own personnel or the
general public. The previous winners were Elensys Inc and DoubleClick.

Most Appalling Project —

private, government or a partnership — that has reached an advanced stage of
development or implementation, and which will achieve substantial intrusion into
privacy. Winners have included the FDIC’s ‘Know Your Customer and the Federal
Aviation Administration’s BodyScan system.

Lifetime Menace:

A person or organization (government or non-governmental) that has made an
extraordinary contribution to the destruction of privacy. The previous winners have been
TransUnion and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

‘ “Winners” are encouraged to attend and accept their awards.’ [via Red Rock Eaters]

Big Bang Scientists Get Dense More than 700 scientists convened last week at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Stony Brook NY, the site of the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator, to discuss its preliminary success in creating the highest density of matter ever made. The point of producing such exotic matter composed of pure quarks held together by gluons is to approach on a small scale the conditions in the universe microseconds after it came into existence in the Big Bang, “an explosion from a single point of nearly infinite energy density.” Wired [Is anyone wondering: if they can get back all the way to the singularity, any chance they could create a new universe, microscopic or otherwise? What effects might that have on our own,”inside” which it was created?]

At least Dubya’s accession is likely to lead to a resurgence of clever sloganeering on the nation’s rear bumpers.

In what at least has the appearance of impropriety, according to the New York Post the inclusion on Clinton’s Presidential pardon list of four members of a New York Hasidic community (convicted in 1999 of a $40 million swindling scheme) may have been the price for delivering their community’s votes to Hilary Clinton in her recent successful bid for a New York Senate seat. Her near-unanimous vote in the neighborhood was in marked contrst to the Republican majorities polled in two adjacent but unrelated Hasidic districts. Ms Clinton’s denials sound disingenuous in the same way as her husband’s denials about having sex with Monica Lewinsky, master wordsmiths that they both are.

Annals of the Age of the Clown Prince: Dubya Exits the Information Superhighway. “Never much of a cyber-cowboy, President Bush
has now exited the information superhighway altogether to
avoid having his e-mail become public. Before he came to
Washington, Bush said he wasn’t much of an Internet surfer but
did like to e-mail family members, especially his mother and
brother Jeb, Florida’s governor.”

An Inside Look at the First United Nations Prison, located in Tanzania to hold detainees being tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. If convicted and sentenced, African countries have agreed to imprison them; the United Nations is exerting pressure for these countries — so far Mali, Swaziland and Benin — to bring conditions in their prisons up to acceptable standards to host those convicted of some of the most heinous genocidal atrocities known. Internews, which got this ‘scoop’, is a US-funded organization that provides support to worldwide independent media; I wasn’t aware that they appear to do their own reporting as well.

And in other war crimes news, a US Report Says Serbs Burned Ethnic Albanian Bodies: “Serbian security forces
incinerated the remains of hundreds of ethnic Albanians in a lead refinery during the 1999
hostilities in the Yugoslav province, a U.S. radio reporting team said on Thursday.” An explicit
aim appears to have been to destroy evidence that might lead to war crimes prosecution,
according to a Serbian source close to the operation.

A Living Hell or a Life Saved? Attorneys for Russell Weston, a man with paranoid schizophrenia who killed two U.S. Capitol Police officers in July 1998, have fought a successful battle since to prevent his forcible medication in the federal psychiatric hospital where he has been detained since. They argue that treating his psychosis and making him competent to stand trial on charges for which he could face the death penalty if convicted is unethical and illegal. In the meanwhile, he remains tortured by his illness and, potentially dangerous, has been kept in seclusion for an unheard-of two years. But which is the greater cruelty? Washington Post

Wrong response to energy mess could be recipe for environmental ruin: “At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which opens here Thursday, the conversations among
corporate, political and academic leaders will be more about bringing Western-style economic progress to
developing economies than about finding ways to save the planet. Oh, the program pays some attention to the
issues. For example, there’s a session titled “Whatever Happened to Sustainable Development?” and
non-governmental organizations, including environmental groups, were invited to be part of the conversation. But
the bulk of the talk will be about sustaining growth in the rich nations, and bringing growth to the places where so
many people live in hopeless deprivation.” San Jose Mercury News

Dalai Lama Criticizes Proselytizing. “Stepping into one of the hottest religious
controversies in South Asia, the Dalai Lama today joined Hindu leaders in
condemning the Muslim and Christian practice of proselytizing.” As a sometime student of comparative religion, I have long felt that the worth of a religion is inversely proportional to the degree to which its devotees actively seek converts. ABC News And, while we’re on the topic of religion without prescription,
“Killing the Buddha is a
religion magazine for
people made anxious by
churches, people
embarrassed to be
caught in the ‘spirituality’
section of a bookstore,
people both hostile and
drawn to talk of God. It is
for people who somehow
want to be religious, who
want to know what it
means to know the
divine, but for good
reasons are not and do
not. “