Defined From Without – Moon of Alabama

January 20, 2006

Defined From Without

defined from without (detail)
by anna missed

paint on wood, 12"x12"
2004-5
full size (100kb)

—

The NSA activities are supported by the President’s well-recognized inherent constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs
Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described by the President; (PDF); Jan. 19, 2006

Posted by b on January 20, 2006 at 19:11 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Hey all —
These pictures and a bunch more will be on public view at:
Linda Hodges Gallery
316 First Ave South
Seattle WA 98104
Opening: Feb 2 5:00 > 8:00, runs through Feb 28
If any of you are in the Seattle area then stop by
I’d love to meet you!

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 20 2006 20:36 utc | 1

Anna Missed, how do you do it? I’m way to literal-minded to imagine a visual image like this. Thank you, because this graphically signals something that MOA has paid a great deal of attention to, but which I think deserves even more. In fact, I will go so far as to say that this is the most pressing issue we’ve ever confronted — President Bush’s claims to unlimited powers.
It is vital that we understand precisely what Bush is claiming he can do. According to his minions at the so-called Department of Justice, the President can declare that the United States is at war, without any body reviewing that decision. Having so declared, he can imprison me, a U.S. citizen, indefinitely, without a warrant, and without ever bringing charges against me or even telling me what I’ve done. He can order me held indefinitely, without being able to consult a lawyer, without any access to a court, without even being able to tell my family what has happened. This is of course directly, even hilariously contrary to the Fifth Amendment, which provides that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger” “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The President is in effect claiming the right to issue lettres de cachet. The Wikipedia describes the lettres de cachet as:

letters signed by the king of France, countersigned by one of his ministers, and closed with the royal seal, or cachet. They contained orders directly from the king, often to enforce arbitrary actions and judgements that could not be appealed….The best-known lettres de cachet, however, were penal, by which a subject was sentenced without trial and without an opportunity of defense to imprisonment in a state prison or an ordinary jail, confinement in a convent or a hospital, transportation to the colonies, or expulsion to another part of the realm. The wealthy sometimes bought such lettres to dispose of unwanted individuals.In this respect, the lettres de cachet were a prominent symbol of the abuses of the ancien régime monarchy, and as such were suppressed during the French Revolution.

President Bush is also claiming the right to listen to my son’s telephone conversations and to read his e-mails and instant messages without having obtained a warrant from a court — in other words, precisely the sort of thing the Fourth Amendment prohibits. He has the right to order my wife seized, removed from the United States, and tortured, even though U.S. law does not and has never contained any provision for exile as a legal penalty, and even though the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”
The U.S. MiniLove (otherwise known as the Department of Justice) has released a 41-page screed that essentially says “fuck the Constitution, the President can do whatever he wants.” Bush and Cheney could hardly have made it clearer. They are out for nothing less than full, unrestricted power to do anything they damned well please. Al Gore was exactly right — if the President’s powers in wartime are unlimited, then what can he not do? The answer, according to Torturer-General Gonzalez, is, apparently, nothing.
What is their ultimate aim? If accepted, these powers would accrue to any future Presidents, including Democratic ones. Is it possible that they intend for Wesley Clark, Al Gore, or, heaven forbid, Hillary Clinton to have these powers? Given the rabid partisanship of the Bush Administration, its willingness to lie, slander, and bribe, I can’t believe this is true. As a friend of mine pointed out, if the President can do whatever is necessary to protect the United States from attack (a duty and a power nowhere enumerated in the Constitution), permissible actions would include postponing or cancelling elections. Anyone with eyes can see how utterly corrupt and incompetent the Republicans are. The combination of Hurricane Katrina and the heroically stupid prescription drug bill are convincing even those who might normally vote Republican that these people are actively dangerous. But a nice little terrorist attack, and who can afford the luxury of elections?
Can anyone say Law to remedy the need of the people and the Reich?
This isn’t just a matter of urgency for Americans. A United States run by a rightwing fundamentalist dictatorship of the type Bush is trying to create will endanger the entire world.
It’s time to raise the rattlesnake flag and put on our ghost shirts.

Posted by: Aigin | Jan 20 2006 20:48 utc | 2

@ anna missed
I get out to seattle a couple of times a year, unfortunately, I will miss this.However, if you have any more showings I’d love to know about em as I live in Montana and seattle is only 10 hours away…
Spread the word about illegal surveillance
The Impeach Bush Coalitionis asking people to add this message to their e-mail signatures, as a means of raising awareness about the Administration’s illegal domestic surveillance programs:

NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 20 2006 22:28 utc | 3

anna missed
i wish your exhibition well. they are might things full of grace power & wonderment
they have a force & a vibrancy directly related to your political awareness & in that sense they are ‘political art’ – that is they speak – to us who are living – to us who are condemned
you work & that of beq’s posess sensulaity & a sensuality is aalso derived from its political conciousness. how could it be otherwise
the oafs have always spoken of political art as reduced art but the contrary is the truth – because it is only in its wider humnity can the real mysteries be revealed & the artist able to live with the absorbed hells, passsions & lives inside them
again i thank you & b for allowing these frames of your moments to exist

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 20 2006 23:43 utc | 4

How NSA access was built into Windows
More here.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 21 2006 0:08 utc | 5

anna missed, when i first view define from without i wondered when you were going to have your next show! imagine the syncronicity when i immediately read your post. i will try to make the opening.
uncle, this is frightening, glad i use a mac. i never keep financial records etc on a computer, i am much too paranoid.
we are all in this together

Posted by: annie | Jan 21 2006 1:34 utc | 6

@Aigin
“Der Führer schützt das Recht”
Legal theorist Carl Schmitt argued that Hitler, by committing murder in the 1934 Röhm Blood Putsch, was defending a higher law.
Unitary executive theory = Führerprinzip.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 21 2006 2:55 utc | 7

Okay, Uncle $cam — I followed your link about the 2 secret keys built into Windows 98 and newer Windows operating systems, in the part of the system that is responsible for encryption — for example, when you put your credit card number into Amazon.com, that is encrypted between your computer and Amazon so no one else can read the card number.
Anyway, it is amazing that there are secrets put in there. But this is not a new discovery, although the second key has been recently discovered to be called NSAkey — setting off alarm bells.
However, Bruce Schneier, one of the top writers in the field, and an actual non-government computer encryption specialist, wrote about this back in 1999. he says,

Second, NSA doesn’t need a key to compromise security in Windows. Programs like Back Orifice can do it without any keys. Attacking the Crypto API still requires that the victim run an executable (even a Word macro) on his computer. If you can convince a victim to run an untrusted macro, there are a zillion smarter ways to compromise security.
Third, why in the world would anyone call a secret NSA key “NSAKEY”? Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft; a conspiracy like this would only be known by a few people. Anyone with a debugger could have found this “NSAKEY.” If this is a covert mechanism, it’s not very covert.

Uncle you have delivered loads of fruitful links and I thank you for them, but I felt the need to speak up to debunk the paranoia of “Windows is being tapped by the NSA.”
We all should know that anything we say on the phone or in email or post on the Internet is not only most likely recorded forever, it is also subject to analysis by not only our governments but also by our telephone or email provider:
How many calls come from Nome Alaska to Berkely California and should we buy more or less wires to connect the two?
And competitive analysis by other commercial interests:
Maybe we should put in more wires to Alaska? The public data says there are a lot of calls and emails … let’s set one of our junior financial analysts to see if we can make any money here …
And of course our government and other governments allowed to spy on us — that apparently is an old trick, Britons can’t spy on Britain, Americans can’t spy on America, let’s let each other do the spying and we’ll trade information.
“You and me are the only ones I can trust. And I’m not too sure about you!”
Act accordingly, but let’s not go overboard. Schneier above basically says that our systems are so insecure it is irrelevant whether or not backdoors have been built in … anyone who cares enough to spend time or money can monitor our behavior and communications no matter what the law says.

Posted by: jonku | Jan 21 2006 8:19 utc | 8

I apologize, anna missed, for hijacking this thread about the painting and your show.
I want to visit the gallery although I’m going to be out of town during the first week of the show — but it’s not too far to drive down from here (roughly Vancouver, BC) and I will try.
Since I can’t make the opening, please accept my congratulations and best wishes. Believe it or not, I am interested in seeing what your paintings smell like!
Not so crazy since they are on a substrate of wood — did you say it is red cedar? They are so tactile they practically demand to be seen, smelled and touched.

Posted by: jonku | Jan 21 2006 8:28 utc | 9

@jonku
Microsoft has been dirty for a while and will continue to be even more so in the future:
There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two major things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft’s Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you’ve erased them from your Deleted Items bin. And believe me, that’s not even the half of it. When I say these files are hidden well, I really mean it. If you don’t have any knowledge of DOS then don’t plan on finding these files on your own. I say this because these files/folders won’t be displayed in Windows Explorer at all — only DOS. (Even after you have enabled Windows Explorer to “show all files.”) And to top it off, the only way to find them in DOS is if you knew the exact location of them. Basically, what I’m saying is if you didn’t know the files existed then the chances of you running across them is slim to slimmer.
I suspect the ms anti-trust laws gave the doj blackmail power over ms. Of course, that is just my opinion, but this is not:
Microsoft’s Really Hidden Files

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 21 2006 8:42 utc | 10

I wasn’t going to buy into this discussion since we’ve had it a coupla times before in one form or another and I sort of took it for granted everyone knew that their computers were compromised. Apple Macs as well sorry Annie.
Since the Clinton years when the IT industry needed to get the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) up and running to guarantee their business models would work the federales in particular DoJ under Janet Reno, have been pushing for a contra deal. That is a hardware solution for accessing everyone’s computer as well as a software one.
Some of you may remember “the Clipper chip” suggested first in 1993 and fully supported by the recently converted to keeping the government out of people’s business, the one the only Al Gore.
For various reasons mainly public outcry the clipper chip didn’t get up. But that didn’t stop them. next time was going to be more surreptitious and better planned.
I’m in the middle of family business so I can’t find alla the links toNight.
Pretty Good Privacy (a HREF=”http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/PGP.htm”>(PGP) invented by by M.I.T. professoer Phil Zimmerman had the feds freaking. The FBI had him charged with illegal export of defence secrets when he published the source code to his own invention on the internet, available for anyone to download anywhere in the world.
PGP is public key encryption and it is unlikely that even now the feds have the power to brute force break it or much of it esp not the 128 bit and you can build keys up to 1024 bits although it is doubtful they are that much more secure.
Zimmerman won on freedom of speech grounds and from then on he published the source code for each new version of PGP as it was released. That way it could be and was assembled and de-bugged by many independant cypherphreaks to ensure that it was back door free.
However the pressure on Zimmerman was enormous and right at the time of the dot.com boom when all his colleagues at Sun and so on were becoming billionaires he had a product which had a high profile and was in great demand but it could only be released outside the US as assembled freeware source code.
He sold the program to Network Associates the MacAfee people and although during the 18 months or so he stayed on at PGP the source code continued to be released some really bad innovations were made. Like different levels of security. The new owners were after corporate business and wanted the boss to be able to read their minions communications.
The Feds stayed staunch no lifting of the export restriction until a backdoor was built in. Zimmerman resigned told the world that he could only guarantee the security up until that point. The the feds lifted the restriction, PGP has been sold world wide and the source code for the new versions has never been publically available.
Then China announced that it was concerned about the security of the commercial operating systems available and decided that neither windows nor mac would do them. Instead they chose a special release of linux.
I can’t find a link to that but I found a link to this from a few years later:
” Bill Gates was in Beijing last week, meeting with President Jiang Zemin and other government officials and promising to give the Chinese access to one of most zealously guarded industrial secrets in Corporate America: the Windows source code. That’s a big step for Microsoft (MSFT ) in any country. In China, where piracy is rampant, it’s a huge leap (see BW Online, 2/10/03″
And this
“Plans for the governments and private sector companies of Japan, South Korea, and China to jointly work together on the development of a new operating system to rival Microsoft Corp.’s Windows will be unveiled later this week, according to two Japanese newspaper reports.”
I leave it up to MoA readers to draw their own conclusions cause I really have to be somewhere else.. Sorry about grammar poor spelling and typo which will abound since this won’t have been proofed.
ps NSAKey is a payback by a resentful software engineer and back orifice and the other types of spyware that are added on to the existing OS, up to and including ‘root kits’ are detectable.
Without having access to the the sourcecode, backdoors engineered directly into the os code pre assembling are much more difficult to find.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 21 2006 10:24 utc | 11

Annie,
Though I know very little about Macs, I do know that Microsoft is a minority partner and produces Office for Mac. So if there is a Microsoft only agreement with the NSA (and I seriously doubt that) you would not be any better off than those of us who for one reason or another use windoze.
I seriously doubt there is any operating system commercially available or not that does not have back doors built in. What would you do if you were Novell, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft or any other manufacturer fo software? A nice gentleman shows up one day and asks you to insert a few lines of code into the kernel…he says it is for national security and will only be used to track criminals. How could you refuse? What would be the price of refusal?
I have heard of backdoors so well done that they do not even generate a visible process. If you desire or need privacy the only option left is to gently whisper in another’s ear and that should be done in a noisy environment.
So, check your six.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 21 2006 10:43 utc | 12

I wish I could see the exhibit, anna missed. I’d love to look long at real size.
Best of luck.
-Ana

Posted by: Noisette | Jan 21 2006 16:29 utc | 13

Is there not something in the Constitution about being able to “petition for the redress of grievances”? Of yourse, if you are unaware that there is anything to aggrieve, you cannot petition.
No matter how noble the cause, any human undertaking is subject to errors and even abuse. That is the point of the constitution. Our President is trying to put himself above that.
He is right, it is more convenient. He misses the point: democracy is often a tedious and costly undertaking.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Jan 21 2006 16:41 utc | 14

@anna – I`d love to see that exhibition, but I don´t make private pleasure trips to the U.S. anymore like I did before Iraq.
Stupid principle may be, but that’s my current stand.
Anyhow – good luck and lots of sales on that exhibitions. I love your art especially on wood and the guts to transform one piece into the another.

Posted by: b | Jan 21 2006 19:57 utc | 15

@ anna missed: Oh to live on the left coast. [the right one as far as I’m concerned] I wish I could be there. I wish I could be there. I wish I could be there. I don’t have the ruby slippers but best of luck to you. Yeah, jonku, I’d like to smell them too. While I thumb my nose and say “neener neener” you have tapped the elemental and I kiss your feet. Thank you.

Posted by: beq | Jan 22 2006 23:18 utc | 16

Thanks for the encouragement MoA. We’ll see how this plays out, and while my artwork, in the past. has occasionally played some political chords, this particular “show” will be 100%. And while I dont follow the “art scene” much anymore, I dont think anything political has been shown around here (at all), so its anything goes — as far as what to expect — and I have no idea — and neither does my dealer….hoping for a shot in the dark, with an echo.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 23 2006 10:52 utc | 17

Goodluck w/ your show, anna.
Would love to see
it but Seattle is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe another time, another place.

Posted by: hanshan | Jan 23 2006 23:22 utc | 18

If you desire or need privacy the only option left is to gently whisper in another’s ear and that should be done in a noisy environment.
this reminds me of a story an australian friend told me about this huge fountain outside the parliament @canberra. good idea

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 7:21 utc | 19

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