Which door will the wm3 come out of?

Free at last...

wm3org WM3.org

Everyone's screaming in joy! It's done. 18 years too long #wm3

not_me jf

this is why you dont execute convicted murderers #wm3 cnn.com/2011/CRIME/08/…

Remember The WSJ's Unhinged Hacking Editorial?

Slate's Jack Shafer raises a good point in suggesting exeuctives at the Wall Street Journal editorial page explain themselves and the defensive essay they published last month, lashing out at Rupert Murdoch’s critics amidst the News Corp. phone-hacking meltdown. The screed also defended the Journal's former publisher, suggesting he was no way involved in the British scandal.
Additional hacking revelations this week though, now suggest almost everything in the Journal attack piece was off the mark.
Superficially, the Journal’s defense of Les Hinton, the newspaper’s former publisher, appears to have been especially wrong [emphasis added]:

In his resignation letter, Mr. Hinton said he knew nothing about wide-scale hacking and had testified truthfully to Parliament in 2007 and 2009. We have no reason to doubt him, especially based on our own experience working for him.

See, Journal editorial writers have worked with Hinton. He was their colleague. Therefore they believed Hinton’s version of hacking events.
The problem, as Shafer explains, is that a recently revealed 2007 letter from Clive Goodman, a central player in the News of the World hacking scandal, suggests Hinton, who oversaw Murdoch’s tabloid before becoming the Journal publisher, was informed about widespread hacking activities at News Corp.
We eagerly await a follow-up editorial from the Journal.
Eric Boehlert @'Media Matters'

Operation Weeting officer arrested

Officers from the MPS Directorate of Professional Standards Anti Corruption Unit have arrested a serving MPS officer from Operation Weeting on suspicion of misconduct in a public office relating to unauthorised disclosure of information as a result of a proactive operation.
The male Detective Constable, aged 51 years, was arrested at work yesterday afternoon (Thursday 18 August 2011).

He has been bailed to return on 29 September 2011 pending further inquiries. He has today (19 August) been suspended.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, in charge of Operation Weeting, said: "I made it very clear when I took on this investigation the need for operational and information security. It is hugely disappointing that this may not have been adhered to.
"The MPS takes the un-authorised disclosure of information extremely seriously and has acted swiftly in making this arrest."
@'Metropolitan Police'

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

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ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

Need Drug War debate MT @andyrNYT Is there a limit to NYPDs abuse of marijuana busts to harrass & persecute minorities? is.gd/wIzL73

For Kaggsy XXX

Mal Mixing

Mal (Steven Mallinder) came round yesterday to work on an idea for a Wrangler remix of Shatterproof (by John Foxx and The Maths). Mal co-founded Caberet Voltaire in 1973, and they are one of my favorite electronic bands ever. We had a great day playing with the VP330 vocoder and the Linn
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'If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.' - Dorothy Parker

WikiLeaks: Fissures Over South American Left Integration

Over the past few years, the international left has derived much satisfaction from the course of South American political and economic integration. The novelty of such integration is that it has proceeded along progressive lines and has been pushed by regional leaders associated with the so-called "Pink Tide." With so many leftist leaders in power, it is plausible to surmise that a left bloc of countries might challenge Washington's long-term hemispheric agenda. Yet, behind all of the lofty rhetoric and idealism, serious fissures remain within South America's leftist movement, both within individual countries and within the larger regional milieu.
That, at least, is the impression I got from reading U.S. State Department cables recently declassified by whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks. Take, for example, the Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva administration in Brazil, which at times encouraged a "hostile" climate against the Free Trade Area of the Americas or FTAA, a corporately-sponsored plan backed by Washington, while on other occasions encouraging "public doubt and confusion through its own often-conflicting statements" about the accord. Behind the scenes, the Brazilian government was much more divided on the matter than commonly portrayed, torn between its South American loyalties on the one hand and the desire to gain access to the lucrative U.S. market for agricultural and industrial goods on the other.
In 2003, the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia noted that "Brazil's political goals, which include a leadership role in South America along with a strong focus on development and the social agenda, sometimes clash in its pursuit of certain national economic interests." Cautiously, Brazil conducted sensitive negotiations with Washington over the FTAA. Lula's position was somewhat delicate: while the president needed a substantial export boost to fund his social agenda, producers were fearful about facing increased competition.
Across the border in Argentina, Lula could count on political ally Néstor Kirchner, and as a result the prospects for further integration through South American trade bloc Mercosur looked bright. On the other hand, however, Mercosur remained "more important as a political project than an economic one," and virtually all Brazilians recognized that, in the long term, Mercosur would not offer a viable long-term solution to Brazil's export needs...

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Nikolas Kozloff @'HuffPo'

Politics: Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – $8,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – have apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI."
Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.
The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties.
As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to investigate an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division – whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating. In another case, the agency farmed out its inquiry to a private law firm – one hired by the company under investigation. The outside firm, unsurprisingly, concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. To complete the bureaucratic laundering process, Flynn says, the SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files...

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Matt Taibbi @'Rolling Stone'

'We have a policy of extracting a very high price from anyone who causes us harm, and this policy is acted upon'

Netanyahu: Killing of PRC heads 'only beginning' of Israel retaliation

Jeff Tweedy on 'Nevermind'

When Nevermind came out, somebody gave us a cassette and we thought it sounded so slick -- like a Whitney Houston record. I think Kurt Cobain was a  really great pop songwriter. But you have to understand, Uncle Tupelo [my band at the time] hated everything that wasn’t a field recording from Appalachia, anything that wasn’t raw and amateur-sounding. I liked a lot of the music that influenced Nevermind: the Replacements, punk rock from the ’80s. Whenever I hear it now, I think it sounds great. But it really was produced compared to other records at the time. For a band that had an image of being super punk rock and dangerous, from our perspective, it was like, “That’s the opposite!”
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