Sunday, December 30, 2007

Ketchum, Idaho: A Five-Star Dilemma

http://www.newwest.net/snow_blog/article/a_five_star_dilemma/C458/L41/

Monday, December 10, 2007

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

http://teamsugar.com/group/30094/blog/277652

"So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market.""

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Frederick Wells at ISU

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs/printIn

"October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. "Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight or nine years.""