cryptogon.com

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically – thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq – that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

…

America’s fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

Speaking at a presentation to potential investors in London, chief executive Dr Lew Brown said that the new chip is small, lightweight, quiet and capable of producing up to 20 amps of current. “It’ll suit any portable device and is also very scalable and long lived as there are no moving parts,” he added

He added that both Dell and Apple are interested in using the chip in their laptops to extract heat generated by microprocessors, convert it to electricity and use it to power cooling fans. Harnessing waste electricity in this manner could help improve battery life and enhance processor performance, according to Brown.

The lawsuit was brought by lawyers defending Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The lawyers and others alleged the threat of surveillance is chilling their First Amendment rights of speech, and their clients’ right to legal representation.

The Federal Reserve, in a second day of action in concert with the European Central Bank, provided $38 billion of reserves and pledged more “as necessary,” in a statement unprecedented since after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Money market rates rose worldwide the past two days on evidence the subprime crisis is spreading after global investors piled into U.S. securities backed by mortgages. By the end of the day, the central bank actions helped spark a turnaround in American stocks and drive the U.S. overnight bank lending rate below the Fed’s target.

“They accomplished their short-term mission to make sure the market stabilized ahead of the weekend,” said David Resler, chief economist in New York at Nomura Securities International Inc. “It remains to be seen how much more they’ll have to do.”

The U.S. federal funds rate opened at 6 percent, a six-year high. It sank as low as 1 percent in late trading, according to ICAP Plc, after the New York Fed staged three repurchase operations, buying assets including mortgage-backed securities. The total of $38 billion, following $24 billion yesterday, was the highest amount of temporary funds since Sept. 12, 2001.

`Unlimited’ Ability

Here’s a little secret I don’t think I’ve ever written about: But in 2001, I was unemployed, underemployed, unemployed. You know I was in that . . You all have been there “dot com” people? Kinda like, in between jobs, doin’ a little contract work and . . . kinda. So, you know. That’s where I was: in this really horrible netherworld of ‘will I make rent next month’ and . . .

So, I applied to the CIA and I went all the way to the end, I mean it was to the point where I was going to sign papers to become Clandestine Services. And it was at that point that the Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision whether I was gonna kinda join the Howard Dean campaign, that whole process, or was I was going to become a spy. (Laughter in the audience.) It was going to be a tough decision at first, but then the CIA insisted that if, if I joined that, they’d want me to do the first duty assignment in Washington, DC, and I hate Washington, DC. Six years in Washington, DC [inaudible] that makes the decision a lot easier.

[ . . .] This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place . . . Of course, they’ve got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That’s what they’re interested in. And stable worlds aren’t created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars. Their done so by other means. Assassination labor leaders . . . I’m kidding!

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

The stock market, which has been gyrating for weeks over fears that credit is drying up, pared its losses after the Fed’s injections of cash and following morning comments from the central bank that it would do all it can to “facilitate the orderly functioning of financial markets.” The steep declines seen at times during the session and persistent volatility, however, showed the depths of fear that had some investors yanking money out of stocks.

The level of funds markedly exceeded the ECB’s only previous major intervention on the day after 9/11 when it lent €69bn followed by €40bn over subsequent days. Even more striking was its one-day pledge to meet 100 per cent of all funding requests from financial institutions.

This liquidity injection was designed to ensure that money markets continued to function and did not succumb to a credit freeze. The Federal Reserve followed suit although in far less dramatic fashion.

The ECB did not offer any detailed explanation for its move, which caught markets by surprise, but simply said it was now seeking to “assure orderly conditions in the euro money market”. However, it came as several financial institutions, such as BNP Paribas, admitted they had suffered significant losses as a result of investments linked to the credit markets. Many of these are linked to problems in the US subprime mortgage sector.