How very dare you, Canada

Posted by Polly at 4:36pm
Jul 242009

The Star has just published the following article about Benamar’s case.

Shrugging Off Torture

He’s the only known case of Extraordinary Rendition in Canada. What I’m mad about is that they still have not apologized for what they put him through. Stephen Harper came back saying that after they investigated themselves they found themselves to be innocent of all wrongdoing. (I will believe an investigation took place when I see proof of it, I don’t know if they had an investigation or an “investigation”. Or if they skipped the whole kerfuffle entirely and said, “Let’s don’t and say we did”.)

But it seems to me that they still have to explain HOW—and via WHOSE authorization—did he end up being delivered in the middle of the night in the back seat of a car and into the hands of his torturers in a Brooklyn jail in the first place! Don’t you guys know we torture people here?

Not only have they deeply affected Ben’s life forever, but we may not know how many other cases of Extraordinary Rendition there might have been. And why the fuck am I capitalizing that euphemism? Somebody please, slap the shit out of me. It’s kidnapping! Oh, excuse me: Kidnapping. (The truth is always worth capitalizing.)

Anyway, I’m very glad that the Star published the article. The story needs to be kept alive. When all the proceedings are done and the crowds go home, he still has to live with what they put him through.

How very dare you, Canada.

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Insecurity of social security cards

Posted by Polly at 1:18pm
Jul 072009

The insecurity of social security cards. And also here.

I was born before the “Enumeration at Birth” program, which meant that my parents weren’t made to get a ss# for me. The study linked to above confirms my thinking that they’re not secure. I didn’t know there was a pattern at all until a few years ago. I learned that you can tell which state a person is from by the first three digits of their social security number. I figured the other two groups of numbers probably also had such a pattern; I just didn’t know what it was.

Not earth-shattering but interesting none-the-less.

I’ve always been very conscious of how and in what way I exist on paper. Which is strange because I’ve never been paranoid. But—I don’t even like vanity plates. What if my future self wanted to commit a crime? What if I felt had to? How am I going to get to where I’m going safely if they’ve got an APB out on a car with plates that read MDLFNGR?

This is tagged military and science because the National Science Foundation and the Army’s Research Office, among others, also funded the study.

I’m off. For now.

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Project Honey Pot

Posted by Polly at 3:24pm
Nov 202008

Project Honey Pot.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website…

…We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software…

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