sorrowmonkey

After browsing the headlines this morning, I feel I'm entitled to an opinion. So, here it is:

Hamas, Palestinian Economics, and U.S. Law

So, apparently, the Palestinian state can't find any banks willing to do business with them while Hamas is in charge. They seem both surprised and quite vexed about this.

Amusingly enough, it makes complete sense in retrospect. There are three components to this, which should have been evident (if I was the PLO, I would have campaigned on this):

The United States has very firm rules about doing business with terrorists and terrorist supporting states. Basically, if you want to do business with the United States, you can't have anything whatsoever to do with terrorist organizations. Really, you can't even look like you might be sympathetic with terrorist organizations. In the post-9/11 world, the U.S. has no patience with any of this. Hamas has been on the prohibited terrorist groups lists for a long, long time.
Companies forced to choose, even in the Arab world, would much rather do business with the United States than with Palestine. The economics of this situation speak for themselves. If you want to be a big player, you go where the money is.
Hamas is a terrorist organization, with a stated goal of the destruction of Israel and a history of suicide bombings and other terroristic violence. The citizens of Palestine voted these criminals into office in free elections.

So, the Palestinians voted themselves into a corner, and in doing so, they've basically handed the United States control of their banking. Unless we decide to relent on Hamas, no bank in the world (except perhaps Iran, North Korea, and the other terrorist states) is going have anything to do with the Palestinian government. I think we will have to see what sort of rhetoric will have to come out of Palestine before the U.S. is willing to cave.

AT&T and NSA wiretaps

I got into a huge fight with a high-ranking FBI official (who is actually a really cool guy) a couple of years ago about government monitoring in telecommunications. He kept repeating this mantra of what was legal and what wasn't. Unfortunately, we were unable to resolve our differences of opinion on this matter. I'd seen the equipment in our datacenters and the guys who brought it in, and no amount of chanting from the FBI was going to change any of that.

Unlike a lot of Americans though, I really don't have a problem with it. Monitoring all the telecommunications trafffic in this country is a "hard problem" which is not solvable using current technology. Filtering out the important telecommunications traffic for monitoring is "hard" enough, and I really doubt we're that good at it. I think there are a lot of people that would like a privacy amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but I think everybody needs to accept that without an amendment, it's not there. In the telecommunications sector "unreasonable searches and seizures" is just too vague, and the courts have done an excellent job of muddying the waters.

I think we're in the middle of a consitutional crisis here, but people largely have not noticed. All three branches of our government have been negligent in their own duties in their attempts to overpower the other two, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. The FISA courts were a terrible mistake in the first place, a compromise of the worst sort, and they should be scrapped. All of the rest of this is a complete non-issue and is pure politicing and scare-mongering.

Myspace.com hires Microsoft child-safety czar

Based on Microsoft's track record of computer security and its general disregard for the value of human life, I simply refuse to believe that hiring child-safety advocates from them is a good idea. I disbelieve that the Internet can be made safe for children anyhow; children must be made safe from the Internet. If this seems familiar, don't be surprised: I've cribbed it from the NRA's statement on children and guns. Parenting is the key to keeping your children safe from predators of all kinds.