Another thing that’s not changing in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East is that new settlements keep going up. Ariel Sharon demands that the Palestinians alter their behavior with no guarantee of anything in return, and yet Israel refuses to change its behavior. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of good faith gesture on either side at this point?

I’m going to be out of town until June 3, there probabably won’t be any updates until Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy the World Cup.

A data point: Palestinian Woman Bomber Bows Out of Suicide Attack.

I just discovered Greplaw, a weblog run by the Berkman Center that covers cyberlaw.

The Most Dangerous Place in the World: Salman Rushdie on the current round of brinkmanship between India and Pakistan.

FBI director Robert Mueller admitted yesterday that if the FBI had put all the available clues together, it’s possible that the attacks on 9/11 could possibly have been thwarted. I think that’s an accurate statement, and I think it’s important for the government to acknowledge that fact at all levels, because it says something about what we can do in the future to stop more attacks. It’s important to gather as much information as possible, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the fundamental problem was not information gathering, nor was it analysis, rather it was a failure of communication between field offices and the headquarters. It seems that every week more and more field reports speculating that Middle Eastern students at flight schools might be terrorists are unearthed. The question is, why wasn’t anyone consolidating all of these reports and assigning people to follow up?

Today the Washington Post has a disturbing update from the war on terror. As many people already figured, many al Qaeda members have set up shop in Pakistan, and are now working with existing Pakistani militant groups. The article reports that al Qaeda members have been involved in every major anti-Western attack this year in Pakistan.

Jonathan Alter: Who Let the Terrorists Succeed? I haven’t followed the story of FBI incompetence that closely, mainly because it doesn’t surprise me at all. However, the story of Coleen Rowley, whose efforts to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui were thwarted by her higher ups, is particularly stinging. Now she has emerged as the Sherron Watkins of the FBI, calling out her superiors for theiir incompetence. In the meantime, the FBI announced a reorganization today, which will likely be about as effective as the typical corporate reorg. (Thanks, Jenny.)

A couple of days ago Phil Agre sent out a list of pointers that included a roundup of intelligence failure-related links, for those of you who are keeping track at home.

So I was all set to write about this decision by the Supreme Court, which once again shows just how far afield the current court is on constitutional issues. The details of the case are uninteresting, it’s only worth noting because it shows the lengths that “Justices” Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas are willing to go to torture the poor old Constitution.

Then I heard on the radio about this decision (in Festo v. SMC), which deals with patents. To oversimplify, there’s a rule that says that you can’t avoid violating a patent by making trivial changes to the patented invention. An appeals court ruled that this rule did not apply to patents that had been amended during the application process. Because most patents are amended during the application process, this decision basically eliminated the “doctrine of equivalents” for the majority of the patents that are currently in force. I’m honestly not sure how the ruling will affect the intellectual property landscape, but it bears watching.