It's not just anti-war sites receiving house calls from the FBI. At least one software engineer has also, one with a connection to the electronic voting machine issue. A software engineer named Jonathan Inskeep of CASE Consulting writes on a Yahoo electronic voting message board:

Jonathan Inskeep here, from Crofton, Maryland which is approximately in
the middle of the triangle formed by Washington, DC, Baltimore, and
Annapolis. I'm a software engineer. My personal view is that every line of computer code used in any capacity to count votes should be made public. Any company that intends to claim their software as proprietary or a trade secret should be prohibited from bidding on contracts. Once the system is complete,
it should be put up and hackers worldwide should be invited to break it. As each flaw is exposed, it should be corrected and the process begun again.

The toughest issue I see, other than the fact that the Republicans have been and currently are actively cheating, is privacy versus verification. How can an individual make sure his or her vote is counted while maintaining a "secret" ballot? I would like to see some sort of paper trail.

He goes on about problems with the machines in his precinct, then says,

This system is about to be replaced by our Republican governor with
some sort of paperless touch screen system based on untested software
that has no audit trail.

Also, two FBI agents came by my house last week asking for names of radicals and organizations. My email is being monitored. Anyone on
this board should assume the same.

Is this an anomoly or does this mean that if you dig too far into the problems with electronic voting systems you might get a visit from the FBI?

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Charges dropped.

The Army dismissed a cowardice charge but filed another count against an Army interrogator who sought counseling after he saw the body of an Iraqi man cut in half by American fire.

...After seeing the mangled corpse, Pogany says he began shaking and vomiting and feared for his life. Soon, Pogany says, he had trouble sleeping and started suffering what he thought were panic attacks.

Now he faces another charge: Dereliction of Duty.

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Bush judicial nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Calif. Justice Janice Rogers Brown, was approved by a 10-9 vote of the Judiciary Committee Thursday.

A filibuster is expected when the nomination comes to a full Senate vote. This is an important nomination to block because Brown is frequently mentioned as a possible Supreme Court replacement. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is considered the most influential appeals court in the nation.

Call your Senators today and tell them you want a filibuster. Here's the phone list with their individual office numbers. Or call the toll free Congressional switchboard, 1- 800-839-5276. For some reasons why, go here and here. Here's some of the latest news on the planned filibuster.

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Lea Fastow, indicted wife of Enron's former financial chief Andrew Fastow, may be seeking a plea deal. Speculation has it she would agree to serve five months, so she could be out and home with the kids by the time her husband's trial begins.

There was a hearing today in the case on Mrs. Fastow's motion to change venue outside of Houston. Mrs. Fastow is represented by one of the country's finest defense lawyers, Mike DeGeurin of Houston.

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Across town today, Mike's brother, Dick DeGuerin, another of this country's stellar criminal defense lawyers, is waiting out a verdict in the murder trial of NY real estate heir Robert Durtz.

No, we didn't spell their names wrong. They spell their last names differently. Both used to practice with the late, legendary Texas lawyer, Percy Foreman. They are two of our all-time defense heros.

Atrios thanks his lawyer who helped him with the Donald Luskin threat to expose his identity and sue him. It is none other than Alabama lawyer Sam Heldman, who writes the blog Ignatz, currently on hiatus. Great job, Sam.

Atrios will be donating his paypal donations for six weeks to a very worthy organization--the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, which provides quality legal representation to those on death row and those without funds to retain counsel. Alabama is a nasty Southern state when it comes to the rights of the accused. Give all you can. You can give directly to EJI by mailing a check to them (let Atrios know because he's keeping a tally):

Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama
122 Commerce Street
Montgomery, AL 36104

Atrios, you're a mensch. And, of course, so is Sam.

Excellent profiles on the two run-off candidates for the San Francisco Mayor's race. Both are in their 30's.

Newsom, a liberal Democrat by the standards of most other cities, has been cast by opponents here as a socialite "Republocrat." He is allied with billionaire Gordon Getty and lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion in Pacific Heights, one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods, with his wife, a prosecutor and CNN commentator who is a former lingerie model.

By contrast, Gonzalez, an arts aficionado and poetry buff, doesn't own a car and rents an apartment in the considerably less fashionable Western Addition neighborhood. Newsom's supporters portray Gonzalez as an ultra-left "cafe brat" whose support won't extend beyond the city's young hipsters.

A new British scientific studyshows that a marijuana pill helps relieve pain from MS. Our clients have told us this for some time. But a pill available in the U.S., Marinol, according to our clients, has a tolerance factor. After a few months, the pill doesn't work as well. Smoking marijuana, on the other hand, we're told, doesn't lose its pain-relieving effect over time. Marinol is available with a doctor's prescription in the U.S.

The British study has been published in the Lancet medical journal. We don't know if the pill referred to is the same as Marinol.

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On the subject of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and his allegations of torture at the hands of the Syrians after being deported there by the U.S.....Check out this page from Human Rights Watch. It has a list of countries we have deported people to that practice torture. Among them, Syria:

Syria : Administration of electric shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beatings; bending detainees into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts.

Here's more from the same page:

The December 26 Washington Post article also discussed the rendition, or transfer, of suspected members of Al Qaeda to third countries that not only use the "stress and duress" techniques described above, but other, more brutal methods of interrogation. According to the article, U.S. officials defended renditions by saying interrogators with a greater cultural, religious and language affinity would be more successful in obtaining information. However, other comments from anonymous officials suggested that detainees were deliberately moved to countries known for their use of torture because the officers of the third countries face fewer constraints on their interrogations. One unnamed official was quoted as saying, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." The various methods of torture used in the third countries, like the "stress and duress" techniques, are also described and condemned in the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights. Listed below are the descriptions of the torture techniques used in reported countries of rendition, as reported by the State Department.

Here's Mr. Arar's account of his torture:

A new Zogby poll has Howard Dean expanding his lead. Clark is slipping.

Felony disenfranchisement is a major issue to us. Al Gore would be our President today if Floridian felons had the vote back then. Rebecca Perl of the Center for Investigative Reporting has a new article in the Nation on this single largest group of citizens banned from voting.

Felons and former felons are the single largest group barred by law from voting in the US. Most states passed disenfranchisement laws after the Civil War when blacks were first gaining the right to vote. Prisoners never lose their right to vote in twenty countries across Europe. Eighty percent of Americans favor restoring the right to vote to ex-prisoners who have completed their sentences. If felons had the vote in 2000, Al Gore would have won the popular vote by more than a million votes.

....Civil rights advocates predict that voting rights for prisoners and ex-prisoners will be the next US suffrage movement, as lawyers, prison advocates, voting rights groups and foundations have recently begun to join forces and take up the cause. "The United States, this great democracy, was founded as this experiment, and it was a great experiment. But it was a very limited one as well," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a prison advocacy group in Washington, DC. "At the time the country was founded, essentially a group of wealthy white men granted themselves the right to vote." Mauer says that today, we look back on that decision with some degree of national embarrassment, and our history since then has been one of trying to open the franchise.

For more, see Whose Vote Counts? Our prior writings on the topic are accessible here.

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If you've got an anti-war website, don't be surprised to get a knock at your door. The FBI is making in person visits to anti-war websites.

Cryptome received a visit today from FBI Special Agents TR and CK from the FBI Counterterrorism Office in New York, 26 Federal Plaza, telephone (212) 384-1000. Both agents presented official ID and business cards. SA Renner said that a person had reported Cryptome as a source of information that could be used to harm the United States. He said Cryptome website had been examined and nothing on the site was illegal but information there might be used for harmful purposes. He noted that information in the Cryptome CDs might wind up in the wrong hands.

SA TR said there is no investigation of Cryptome, that the purpose of the visit was to ask Cryptome to report to the FBI any information which Cryptome "had a gut feeling" could be a threat to the nation.

Terry at Nitpicker is being called to Iraq. He's looking for someone to take over writing his blog for a year. You can e-mail him at nitpickerblog@hotmail.com. It's really a good blog. We hope someone keeps it going for him.