What Bush Said And When He Said It. Journalists dependent on Dubya’s inner circle for backstage details are being fed the unmistakeable message that the president is firmly at the helm. “The fewer people who were in the room, the less likely you are to get a complete picture of what was actually said,” Carney says. “Obviously, like any White House, this White House has come to understand that the telling of the inside story can be useful to them. It’s our job, without being too cynical, to look at what we get with a certain amount of skepticism.” Washington Post

U.S. Believes More Attacks Are Planned: “Federal law enforcement authorities confirmed Saturday that they have received classified briefings dealing with … a situation in which retaliatory strikes are launched by terrorists once the United States begins a military operation aimed at getting Bin Laden, his network and other terrorists.” LA Times

Jerry Ehman wrote me back to say that the Flag of Earth is available here.

Disinformation Dep’t.: George Monbiot shares my skepticism about the documents the investigators are coming up with to build their case — and it’s not just the five pages of notes about which I wrote yesterday. “It’s partly, I think, because they need to show that they are not as clueless as their failure to predict the atrocity suggests. But it’s also because, understandably enough, they want a discrete and discernable enemy to confront, a structure they can penetrate, a membership they can round up, and a figure whose personal evil is commensurate with the crime.

Partly as a result of this wishful thinking, the West found itself in a curious position last week. The Taliban, possibly the most brutal and barbaric regime on earth, was requesting evidence before considering Osama Bin Laden’s extradition: they insisted that he was innocent until proven guilty. The West, in the name of civilisation, was insisting that Bin Laden was guilty, and it would find the evidence later.

For these reasons and many others (such as the initial false certainties about the Oklahoma bombing and the Sudanese medicine factory, and the identification of live innocents as dead terrorists), I think we have some cause to regard the new evidence against Bin Laden with a measure of scepticism. There’s no question that he’s dangerous, and there’s convincing evidence connecting him to previous attacks, but if the West starts chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real terrorists are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees our security.” [via Rebecca Blood] Here‘s more about who Monbiot is.

From Making Light: ‘My friend Beth Friedman has a new quote in her .sig: Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, lbh’er va ivbyngvba bs gur Qvtvgny Zvyyraavhz Pbclevtug Npg. It means, “If you can read this, you’re in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” I dropped her a note saying “What do you do if you can read that without a ROT13 translator?” and she said, “Turn yourself in as a dangerous munition, I guess.” ‘

I like Chuck Taggart’s idea, if we’re going to be flag-wavers, of waving a Whole Earth flag (left), which I’ve always found to be awe-inspiring. Looka!

Taggart also points to this Earth Flag (right), which flies over various SETI Project sites. It is more stylized (that’s the sun, the earth, and the moon, if you hadn’t noticed) and, I think, equally inspiring in its way. I’ve written to see if these are available; if anyone’s interested, I’ll let you know.

India moves to measure its average penis size. “The study is being ordered by the Health Ministry following increasing reports of condoms getting torn during use.

Scientists say condom size could be tailored to requirements if variations in penis size in different regions become apparent.” Ananova

Windows guru Brian Livingston: Your Passport, please: “Windows 9x and Me store your user name and password as plain text in memory every time you dial an ISP and store the text for 10 minutes after you’ve disconnected. Many PCs are silently infected with Trojan horses that can easily read this information. People who use Microsoft’s Passport authentication system, as all Hotmail customers are required to do, are likely to choose the same password for Passport and their dial-up account. With this password, a hacker can access any credit card numbers or other accounts that Passport has recorded.

(Microsoft) apparently decided not to issue a patch because users can upgrade to Windows NT/2000/XP, all of which correctly encrypt the sensitive information.” InfoWorld

From T-Shirts to Terrorism: Roslyn Mazur, former Clinton DOJ appointee, links traffic in counterfeit CDs, movies, computer software (but, also, counterfeit Nike swoosh teeshirts!) to terrorist funding in this Washington Post op-ed piece.

While serving in the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice from 1998 to 2001, I helped catalogue disturbing trends in this area. With cooperation from our copyright and trademark industries — theproducers of software, music, film, books, apparel, pharmaceuticals and other highly sought-after American products — we documented the links between intellectual property (IP) crimes and the even more nefarious crimes they pay for. We found that the post-Cold War landscape of open borders has combined with the anonymity and speed of the Internet, as well as modern telecommunications and the lure of huge, risk-free profits, to give rise to some startling developments.

Supreme Court Suspends Bill Clinton. They didn’t wait long after returning to begin their new session today. “If Bill Clinton ever returns to private law practice — the doors to the Supreme Court may be closed to him.

The justices today suspended the former president from practicing law before the high court. And they gave him 40 days to say why he shouldn’t be permanently kept out.

… The justices didn’t give a reason for today’s action. But disbarment before the Supreme Court often follows a disbarment in lower courts.

And the court action came after it was notified by the Arkansas Supreme Court that Clinton’s Arkansas law license was suspended for five years.” The Boston Channel