rant: June 2006 Archives

Last October, when I wrote about Time magazine's story How To Spend $1 Billion A Day, I had no idea they meant spending it on strip clubs and Girls Gone Wild videos.

The Government Accountability Office (how's that for an oxymoron?) hasn't even finished its audit yet, so stand by for all of the instances of contractual fraud that are no doubt on their way. Waste, fraud, and abuse. That is all government is good for.

There's been quite a bit of chatter in the blogosphere recently about
numbers stations (Slashdot, Homeland Stupidity). Hell, you can even order CDs of these stations and listen to them all the time, if you are so inclined.

No one really knows what these stations are for, or who runs them. Conspiracies abound -- everything from government spooks communicating with their agents in the field, to young geeks in love. But their significance to me has little to do with why or how they are run, but simply that they exist.

Despite all of the recent media frenzy over government intrusion into our private communications, it is nice to know that the technology still exists for all of us to communicate with whomever, about whatever, we want, using an uncrackable code, and the government is powerless to stop us.

It makes all of the furor over the communications habits of terrorist sleeper cells seem rather pointless, doesn't it?