Blame the Computer

"A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy - or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

-- James Madison

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed in 1966, in order to avoid Madison's "Farce and Tragedy". Under the FOIA, the records of all federal agencies are to be made available to any person who makes a written request for records on a specific topic.

There are some common-sense exclusions and exemptions, but in general, the FOIA ensures that you have full access to your government's knowledge.

"There ought to be limits to freedom"

-- George W. Bush

Today, the Justice Department denied a FOIA request seeking information on foreign lobbyists. What's interesting is the reason they gave for denying the request: that "implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating". That's Thomas J. McIntyre, the DoJ's chief officer in charge of information requests.

It's truly bizarre for them to claim that a database query would produce an unfixable crash in their computer system, resulting in devastating data loss. Do they not make backups? What kind of database are they using that it is not possible to extract data from it? Perhaps I'm naive, but I was under the impression that data retrieval was, in fact, the raison d'etre of a database.

Or, as Stephen Doig put it: "It sounds like incredible negligence for an agency that is keeping public records to keep them in such a precarious condition. I've never heard the excuse that making the equivalent of a backup copy would somehow cause steam to rise
out of the computer."

Indeed, it would be incredible negligence, if it were true. It's far more likely just a convenient excuse for the Bush administration to avoid embarassment on a subject that lots of Americans recently became suddenly aware.

DoJ offers their apologies, and the consolation that their computer system is going to be overhauled, and that this request can and will be answered promptly after the system upgrade is complete.

Well, that's a relief. So, when is the upgrade scheduled to be completed? In December 2004, one month after the U. S. presidential election. How convenient.

Propaganda Trumps Reality

Unbelievable. Just goes to show, once again, that people will believe the Big Lie, if it is repeated to them often enough.

27 more people who "hate America"

If anyone who questions the actions and policies of the Bush administration is someone who "hates America", then we'd better add these 27 four-star Generals and diplomats to that list (including Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan).

Choice quote from their statement: "Never in the 2 1/4 centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted."

Also mentioned in that article is the fact that the 911 Panel announced that they could find "no credible evidence" for any cooperation between Sadaam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In fact, Hussein rebuffed or ignored Al Qaeda's offers of partnership. No suprise, since for all his brutality, he led a secular state, and they are a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs who denounced his regime whenever they took a break from calling for jihad against their "Great Satan".

This means that *both* of the stated justifications for our invasion (that Sadaam had WMD, and that he was actively partnered with Al Qaeda) have now been shown to be flatly untrue. Our country has perpetrated an unnecessary war against another sovereign state, and it was all based on a series of exaggerations and lies. We have committed violence, not only against the Hussein regime, but increasingly, against the innocent (and increasingly outraged) Iraqi people. We have no credible exit strategy. The deadline for handing power over to an Iraqi government looms ominously near, yet no viable potential leader has emerged (no suprise, given all of our clumsy attempts to subvert that process). The hawks thought Iraq would be a cake walk; they could not have been more wrong. Every week, more coffins return from Iraq, filled with the corpses of our soldiers (and of course, anyone who dares to publish pictures showing this real cost of the war also "hates America"). Meanwhile, far from making us safer from international terrorists, our little adventure in Iraq is distilling hatred for us all over the mideast and elsewhere into an extremely volatile cocktail just waiting to blow up in our faces.

Time to wake up. Al Gore is mad as hell. Are you?

SCO: Portrait of a loser

So, SCO. Where to begin? It is now such a twisted, tangled, jumbled mess, that if you haven't been following the situation since it broke last year, it is going to seem extremely confusing now. As The Dude would say, "this is a complicated situation; lotta ins, lotta outs".

The situation is the latest shining example of corporate "Intellectual Property" claims gone stark, raving mad. Here's the short version: SCO is a washed-up company that backed the wrong horse a few years ago. They essentially own no concrete intellectual property, but they do have a financial interest in UNIX that they have been attepting to finesse into an impression of something resembling ownership control over all things UNIX and UNIX-like, including especially GNU/Linux, the popular Free Software OS. They are attempting this both in the courts, and in the court of public opinion. They've had a pretty wild ride, but the endgame is near, and it appears that it's going to be checkmate for dear old SCO.

Let's start with a little history. SCO is short for "The SCO Group", a company based in Lindon, Utah. They were formerly known as Caldera Systems. There was another company named "The Santa Cruz Operation" (SCO for short) that did some very nice UNIX work, developing their UnixWare OS for Intel hardware (i.e., PC's). At some point, this "old" SCO renamed itself "Tarantella" and sold the SCO brand and UnixWare to Caldera. Shortly after that, Caldera hired a new CEO named Darl McBride, and renamed itself The SCO Group.

Confused yet? Caldera Systems was a Linux company. Let's be very clear about that. They had their own version of Linux which they distributed for years, under the terms of the GPL. When Caldera purchased UnixWare from oldSCO, they did so with the publically proclaimed intention of bringing some enterprise-level functionality from UnixWare, into Linux. Let's also be quite clear about that.

Unfortunately for Caldera, the tech bubble burst just as their little UnixWare/Linux mind-meld was getting underway. Their Linux business tanked, and they were forced to reinvent themselves. That's when this guy Darl McBride took the helm. Charged with turning the company around, he examined their list of assets. Now I can't claim to know what McBride's train of thought was, but I like to think it went something like this:

"Okay. We own UnixWare, but nobody seems to want it anymore because of this darned Linux thing, which is now way better than UnixWare, and --get this-- it's free! What the hell? Whatever happened to 'you get what you pay for'? How is it possible that a bunch of hobbyists are kicking our butts? Anyway, I can't wrap my Econ-101 mind around that, so I'll just set it aside for now. What else do we own? Well, we have this contract with Novell (who now own the copyrights to the original Unix developed by AT&T). It says that we get to help them license UNIX to people in return for 5% of the licensing revenue. Hmm, not much of a deal for us, since nobody wants to buy UNIX anymore! Gah, that Linux thing strikes again! I don't get it, how can it develop so quickly if most people working on it aren't paid? How can it be such a stupendous badass? Ah, nevermind. Focus, McBride! We need options here!

"Could ride the Linux train. I bet there's some good gravy there; all those fools develop it for nothing, then we get to rake in the profits! Nah, I guess they tried that already when Ransom Love was in charge. Didn't work out for some reason. Anyway, I need something bold. A new page. Something that will really shake things up...

"Wait a minute, wait a minute! This Linux, it's kind of like UNIX, right? Well, Novell put us in charge of licensing UNIX to people, and we never licensed anything to those damned hippies! I bet Novell is going to be pissed when they figure it out! Better yet, let's have a look at this contract. Ah ha. If you close one eye, squint the other, and read it backwards in a darkened room, it almost seems like Novell granted us ownership rights over UNIX, and didn't just outsource licensing duties to us! Heck, that means all these Linux weirdos owe us big time! But they'll never go for it. It's too flimsy. But it's all we have. We need to start yammering to the press about how we own all things UNIX, and how Linux probably, like, copied all of their good stuff from us. It's like what's-his-name said, if you want people to believe your lies, you just repeat them over and over, right? Who said that again? Anyway, some smart guy. Then, once the idea gets a toe-hold, we send out invoices to known Linux users. Hundreds of them. Heck, thousands! Some sucker will bite. Then we'll use that sucker as leverage against the rest. Like dominos, they'll all cave in eventually! That's so crazy, it just might work!

"And what's this here about 'Project Monterey'. Some thing Caldera did with IBM. Looks like they were trying to unify their two versions of UNIX, to make it easier for businesses to interoperate. Hey, but wait a minute! IBM has since gone on to develop enterprise features for Linux (God, who woulda pegged Big Blue as a hippie-hugger?); I bet they probably definitely stole some of our junk from Project Monterey and stuck it right into Linux! Ha! That's it! The 'Piece of Resistance', as the French say! WE'LL SUE IBM!!!!11one1"

And the rest, as they say, is history. Ever since, SCO has been tap-dancing in court, trying to delay the inevitable clock-cleaning that they are going to receive from IBM's legendary lawyers. In the public eye, they have been very actively shouting their outlandish "Linux copied everything from us!" claims, and even more actively not showing any evidence whatsoever to back it up.

Here's another account of this history, which is extremely clever IMO, but if you aren't pretty familiar with IRC, you might not get it.

Thee's a lot more to the story, but I think I'll just leave it here for now. For more information, I highly recommend Groklaw, which is bringing the concept of Open Source to the world of the Law. When the story of SCO's destruction is told, the tireless efforts of PJ and the other Groklawyers will be a crucial component.