Padilla Brought to Face Civilian Charges: Jose Padilla is in Miami.
For a place so far, physically and psychologically, from the centers of financial and political power in this nation, we really are at the epicenter of all kinds of interesting things here in Miami.
It used to be that having the NSA spy domestically was one of the unthinkable acts that one believed administrations understood were out of bounds. Sort of like the indefinite detention of US citizens in military prisons, or the torturing and killing of prisoners, or ‘rendering’ them to countries that torture.
Well, all bets, gloves, illusions are off.
It is time, therefore, to start asking if this administration is doing other things that were previously ‘unthinkable’.
Today brings suggestions that the administration spied on one or more journalists, and perhaps also on an occasional Democratic candidate and party operative. But don’t stop there. For example, someone should ask whether the new ‘anything goes without a warrant if it’s important enough’ standard for snooping extends to tax returns and to census data. It’s hard, after all, to imagine a legal theory that would allow the NSA to ignore FISA that would not also apply to all that delicious data just sitting there, even if it is hedged with statutory protections. That’s just Congress, after all, nothing serious.
Suggestions for other previously unthinkable questions that should be asked — not that we can trust any statement we get from this administration — painfully welcomed.
If this video is to believed, the traditional lock and key is an obsolete security system: something called the “bump key” opens most locks in seconds. More details in this paper by Barry Wels and Rop Gonggrijp, whose abstract reads,
How to open Mul-T-Lock (pin-in-pin, interactive, 7×7), Assa (6000 Twin), DOM (ix, dimple with ball), LIPS (Octro dimple), Evva TSC, ISEO (dimple & standard), Corbin, Pfaffenhain and a variety of other expensive mechanical locks without substantial damage, usually in under 30 seconds, with little training and using only inexpensive tools.
The authors, incidentally, identify themselves as members of Toool – The Open Organization Of Lockpickers.
He’s a week old, eight days if you round up, but little Max already has 26 hits on Google. OK, seven of them are from relatives, but still.
Via TalkLeft (sporting a very nice new layout these days, by the way), a link to the LA Times’s account of the sort of real-life happy ending — horribly delayed, but still a happy ending — that you never believe when you see it in the movies.
In fact, if this isn’t going to be a major motion picture, or at least a made-for-TV movie soon, Hollywood deserves to be outsourced.
Digby thinks that GW Bush has lost face too often.
Jotwell Blenderlaw