Declan McCullagh has been subpoenaed to testify in the criminal trial of David Bell, the cypherpunk who came up with the “assassination politics” scheme whereby people would anonymously post bounties to have politicians (or others) assasinated.
Microsoft’s Hailstorm is something that would be very interesting to me if it were offered by someone other than Microsoft.
Declan has also written up the story of his subpoena for Wired News.
The New Republic has an interesting article in favor of national missile defense by Lawrence F. Kaplan. He criticizes the preprogrammed Democratic and Republican positions on NMD and makes a pretty compelling argument in favor of a shipboard system designed to address states with few ballistic missiles. I think that his position is more strategically sound than most, but I don’t agree with his strategy on many points, and don’t share his optimism on the technical feasability of the system. For his strategy to be implemented optimally, not only must the system work very reliably, but all of the states with missile capability must be sure that it works very reliably.
Ars Technica: The Great Hack Attack. The guys at Ars provide the technical lowdown on the mass exploit of Windows NT servers by Eastern European crooks.
Joshua Micah Marshall says that Dick Armey is a big, fat liar, but we already knew that, right? The cool thing is that Armey might actually be the one to torpedo Bush’s big plans for the tax cut because he insists on asking for a larger tax cut than Bush himself wants. If the Republicans start blowing out the tax cut to pay off their corporate patrons, it could all be over in a flash.