Daily Archives: 5 Apr 06

A Pretty Good Way to Foil the NSA

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“How easy is it for the average internet user to make a phone call secure enough to frustrate the NSA’s extrajudicial surveillance program?

Wired News took Phil Zimmermann’s newest encryption software, Zfone, for a test drive and found it’s actually quite easy, even if the program is still in beta.

Zimmermann, the man who released the PGP e-mail encryption program to the world in 1991 — only to face an abortive criminal prosecution from the government — has been trying for 10 years to give the world easy-to-use software to cloak internet phone calls.” (Wired News)

The tethered goat strategy

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Sidney Blumenthal: ‘Condoleezza Rice washes her hands…’ “Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush’s strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces – ‘when they stand up, we’ll stand down’ – is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.” (Guardian.UK)

It’s all Roger Moore’s Fault

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“Being Scottish, I am easily insulted. Scotland was recently selected by a group of so-called European experts as ‘the worst small country to live in.’ It’s top of the charts for manic depression, alcoholism, lung cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, heart disease and yellow, plaque-infected teeth. The end of the Scottish race seems guaranteed. We are the national equivalent of the dodo. And who is to blame for this?” (Salon)

The man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years

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Mind Hacks comments on a strange Guardian story of a man who is still ‘a wreck’ seven years after he stopped his nine-year binge on MDMA (XTC; Ecstasy).

It reveals some of the methodological problems in establishing how harmful MDMA is, since (a) we may not be entitled to extrapolate from extreme use to more moderate recreational use; (b) one has to rule out that observed effects are from the MDMA rather than any concurrent use of other substances. But the most telling point is their last one — “what kind of man would take 40,000 ecstasy pills?”

And so, again, we face the age-old psychiatric equivalent of the chicken and the egg question. Does drug use per se cause the psychopathology (on any of a number of measures) found in substance abusers; or does the psychopathology come first? Durng my residency, I remember one year during which I was supervised by two senior luminaries of psychiatry whose offices were at opposite ends of the corridor I inhabited. The late Norm Zinberg claimed that the psychological alterations were results of the ‘drug, set and setting’ of the drug user; and Ed Khantzian claimed that much of drug abuse was ‘self-medication’, knowingly or unknowingly, of an underlying mental disorder, and thus that the drug abuse could be stabilized or prevented by treatment of the underlying condition. A corollary of this was the ‘drug of choice’ hypothesis, which said that one gravitated to a particular preferred drug in accordance with the nature of one’s underlying diagnosis. Being literally (and memorably) caught in the middle, I sometimes think that my real psychiatric training that year consisted in learning how to be diplomatic, synthetic and integrative in the face of these insistent, and mutually incompatible, didactic stances…. [Here, by the way, Khantzian writes a brief remembrance of Zinberg…]

Related: The Trip of a Lifetime: a new generation researches the medical benefits of the deprecated hallucinogenic drug LSD. (BBC)

Downloading to Dodge Pledge Drives

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Podcasting Roils NPR Fund Raising: “While most NPR programming has been streamed online for several years, the portable, time-shifted, on-demand nature of podcasting affords a new level of convenience and access. Yet, at the same time, it can turn ears away from local stations — possibly for good — which could be a problem for affiliates that rely heavily upon member donations to pay the dues to air some of the same programming listeners can now get free as MP3s.” (Wired News)
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Antisocial Networking Gets Hip

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“Software engineer Bryant Choung intended to satirize social discovery services when he launched his beta site, Snubster, last month. The site lets members create public lists of people and things that rankle them.

‘The whole concept of online social networking was really starting to irk me,’ said Choung, who initially envisioned Snubster as a way to stem the often irritating flow of invitations to join networking sites like Friendster and LinkedIn. While such sites seemed like a good idea at first, their usage too often devolves into ‘an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.’

Snubster members, by contrast, focus on what irritates them.” (Wired News)