Packaged with the Anti-terrorism Act being proposed by the Department of Justice is a provision which would classify some computer criminals as terrorists. This means that they would face mandatory sentences of life in prison for things like breaking into computers and releasing viruses. Read the whole article, there are plenty of other chilling provisions in the proposed legislation as well.

More attack URLs from RRE.

The BBC has the best article I’ve yet seen on President Bush’s order to freeze the assets of 27 individuals and organizations. The article also has a list of the 27 parties involved.

I transferred all of the links in the weblog to a different database server at pair.com. Please send email if you get any of the database errors that have plagued this site in the past. As far as I can tell, the site is significantly faster now.

John Ashcroft testified before the House Judiciary committee today and asked that they throw out the Constitution. He requested 51 changes to existing law that would allow the Justice Department to do things like deport aliens who unknowingly contribute to organizations which support terrorism and detain aliens (legal or illegal) indefinitely without charging them if they’re suspected of terrorism. I’m still looking for a list of the 51 specific items, but haven’t had much luck in finding them.

Life is already getting a lot worse for regular people in Afghanistan. Not only are thousands of them abandoning their homes and heading for the nearest border in anticipation of an American attack, but the Taliban raided a UN aid office in Kaldahar, siezed all of the communications equipment, and took 1,400 tons of food. They’re shutting down all of the UN relief work as well, which means that even more Afghanis are going to go hungry.

Slate has a report from Peshawar, Pakistan on public demonstrations there. In the report he discusses the theory common among the Pakistanis that Israel was behind the attacks. Several Muslims I’ve spoken with have also theorized that Israel was behind the attacks, and one person told me that they thought Serbia might be responsible.

Did you know that the first President Bush used the rhetorical flourish of holding up a dead cop’s badge during his campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988?

Here’s a post from the cypherpunk archive elaborating on the Phil Zimmerman article I posted a link to on Saturday.

Bush is looking for carte blanche to give money to foreign regimes regardless of their human rights record or past military misdeeds. On one hand, I think that we should give governments the opportunity to turn over a new leaf, but on the other hand I don’t want to see us selling guns and ammo to repressive regimes that they can use to murder their own citizens. Let’s not forget that one of the reasons we’re widely despised in the Middle East is that we provide military aid to Israel and that many of the weapons used against the Palestinians are made in the USA. By the way, let me just say that Patrick Leahy has been the most statesmanlike figure in the US government since the attack.