February 28, 2005
John Gilmore Fights Internal Passports - Secret Laws
My friend John Gillmore makes the news again with his fight against the Nazifying of America. A freedom loving patriot who is fighting secret laws and what is becoming internal passports to travel within the United Stated. Here's the article. Red text is my emphasis.
Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy
He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a government-approved ID
Sunday, February 27, 2005
By Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
SAN FRANCISCO -- John Gilmore's splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket.
Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette
John Gilmore, beside a graffiti-covered wall, has his morning coffee at a shop that's one block from his San Francisco home. The Bradford native doesn't drive and has other travel restrictions, thanks to his challenge of a law that the government won't allow him to see.
The gate agent asked for his ID.
Gilmore asked her why.
It is the law, she said.
Gilmore asked to see the law.
Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection.
What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore's question: Why?
In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S. Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play havoc with the Department of Homeland Security.
At the heart of Gilmore's stubbornness is the worry about
"Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity papers?
As happens to the disobedient, Gilmore is grounded. He is rich -- he estimates his net worth at $30 million -- and cannot fly inside the United States. Nor can he ride Amtrak, rent a room at most major hotels, or easily clear security in the courthouses where his case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, is to be heard. In a time when more and more people and places demand some form of government-issued identification, John Gilmore offers only his 49-year-old face: a study in stringy hair, high forehead, wire-rimmed glasses, Ho Chi Minh beard and the contrariness for which the dot.com culture is renowned.
"I think of myself as being under regional arrest," he said. Even with $30 million in the bank, regional arrest can be hard. He takes the bus to and from events at which he is applauded by less well-heeled computer techies who flew in from around the country after showing a boarding pass and one form of government-issued photo ID and arrived in rental cars that required a valid driver's license and one major credit card.
He was employee No. 5 at Sun Microsystems, which made Unix, the free software of the Web, the world standard. He japed the government by cracking its premier security code. He campaigned to keep the software that runs the Internet free of charge. After he left Sun, Gilmore started his own firm, sold it for more money than he seems to have bothered to count and has since devoted his time to giving it away to favored causes: drug law reform, a campaign to standardize computer voting machines and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, something of an ACLU for the Information Age.
To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd.
"That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read.
Gilmore will show ID for an international flight because he doesn't expect to set the rules for other nations.
"I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," Gilmore said. "I used to laugh at countries that had internal passports. And it's happened here and people don't even seem to know about it."
From geek to riches
The passage of John Gilmore from a bespectacled proto-nerd from Bradford, Pa., to the twice-wealthy privacy-rights pioneer of the dot.com West Coast started in his father's living room, where he first suspected authority is used simply because someone has it.
When something was found broken or spilled or some other evidence of a fractured rule surfaced, and the guilty party unknown, the elder Gilmore would summon his four children to the living room.
"He'd line us all up in the living room. Until one of us confessed, we wouldn't get to leave. Eventually one of my younger brothers started confessing to things he didn't do just so we could get out of there," Gilmore said.
Gilmore's father was a mechanical engineer. John was born in York and the family moved to Bradford, near the state's northern border with New York, when he was small. Today, at his home in Haight-Ashbury, a place he named Toad Hall, after the character from "The Wind in the Willows," Gilmore keeps a small school photo. It shows him with a little-boy crew cut and thick, half-rim eyeglasses, the kind that have been in and out of fashion twice since the photo was taken in the mid-1960s.
The young Gilmore was a strong student at the schools in Bradford. He took to math. In high school, he became curious about computers. The 1960s were an era in which computers enjoyed an almost mystical reputation; imputed by popular culture with the power to deduce anything. One year, a team of scientists entered data for the 1927 New York Yankees and the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers to see who would win -- an early "computer match." Babe Ruth was even credited with a home run.
It was easy for a bright boy to become curious about how something so all-knowing worked.
"When he was 12, for his birthday, he asked for an IBM manual," said his mother, Pat Woodruff, who remarried after she and Gilmore's father divorced 20 years ago and returned to live in Bradford. "His floor used to be littered with papers. I had no idea what he was doing."
The University of Pittsburgh opened a branch campus in a building across the street from his high school. In it, they placed a desk-sized IBM 360. Gilmore started wandering over to learn FORTRAN, the punch-card programming language that made the computer do complex mathematical calculations.
The Pitt-Bradford library had a few computer books, and one of his high school teachers got John a card.
The family was about to move to Alabama when John began writing to the company that printed up a $3 manual for computer use. The firm, Scientific Time Sharing Corp., in Bethesda, Md., rented out computer time to companies such as Arbitron and ABC News, which needed storage for vast databases.
After the third or fourth correspondence, they wrote back to ask if he was a customer. Gilmore wrote back that he was a high school student and he was moving to Alabama.
After completing high school in Alabama, Gilmore had two summer internships behind him and a full-time job as the youngest geek in Bethesda.
He had a few dollars in his pocket and a letter of acceptance from Michigan State University. He used the money. The letter was of little use. Computer science had not yet come into its own as an academic discipline.
"Why pay someone to teach me computers when I can get someone to pay me to learn them?" he reasoned.
Road trip
When techies burn out, they tend not to do strange things. They are, by nature, already a few degrees off plumb. So they revert to the ordinary. Gilmore burned out in the late '70s. He got on a motorcycle and rode west.
"He just packed up his stuff and moved off," Pat Woodruff said. "I don't know where he went at this time."
He went to New Mexico. Gilmore worked for a while in the lowest of mechanical technologies: a traveling carnival. He ran the Tilt-A-Whirl.
"You have to watch the thing closely and know when someone's going to lose it, so you move back," he said.
Dodging stomach contents kept him employed for a while. At one point he moved in with New Mexico's most dysfunctional couple. The male in the relationship found out the female was pregnant. An argument broke out. A gun was produced. Gilmore forgot his lesson from the Tilt-A-Whirl. He didn't duck. A bullet caught him in the hand. He finished his New Mexico stay sleeping under a stairwell at the local college.
He knocked around the country a bit more. Staying with a relative in Jacksonville, Fla., Gilmore looked for a job at a local bank. "They said they wouldn't hire me as a teller, but they'd be glad to hire me to run their computer," he said.
Eventually, Gilmore moved to San Francisco and took up computer consulting. One day, a friend called. He'd gone to work for a startup firm called Microsoft. The company's founder, a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates, was selling Unix, a universal software on which the Internet would be based, and he wanted Gilmore to find a way to make Unix work on the computers of a prospective customer based at Stanford University. After a job interview, Gilmore called the people at Stanford. They were starting a company to be called Sun, short for Stanford University Network, and would Gilmore like to be their first software employee.
"I hired on at Sun because the work was interesting," he said. The pay was just short of marginal.
Thus did John Gilmore get rich by accident. Because he was on the ground floor, his stock was worth more. Sun went public in 1986 and suddenly John Gilmore was rich. He stayed on at Sun as a consultant until 1989, then started his own company, Cygnus. A few years later, when he sold Cygnus, he was, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, "loaded." That is to say he is not ridiculously rich -- just wealthy enough to make trouble.
He did.
Gilmore, for instance, is blocked from most e-mail servers because he runs what the industry calls an "open relay" on his computer server, tucked into the basement of his house. People are able to send e-mail through it without identifying themselves, raising the ire of the anti-spam movement.
His server sits next to the remnants of what is known in the industry as the "DES Cracker." It is a collection of computer chips, connected by a spider web of circuitry that he built to overpower the most widely used encryption system -- the same one used on ATMs and satellite dishes.
"The government was recommending everybody use it. We did that to show it wasn't worth relying on," Gilmore said. His own theory was that a privacy program offered by the government isn't, by nature, likely to remain private.
By 1996, Gilmore's dislike of authority was in full bloom. At San Francisco Airport, he refused to produce a driver's license for security police.
"The cop said, 'You want me to arrest you?' I said, 'I'd consider it an honor.' " They honored him with an arrest. The district attorney dropped the case.
Gilmore has epilepsy, and because of that his driver's license was suspended five years ago. He decided not to reapply because it is now easier, when asked for a photo ID, to be able to say forthrightly that he has none.
More than $1 million of his money has gone to house and feed the Electronic Frontier Foundation. On a given day, visitors can find a team of lawyers meeting with young men and women, still pale from too much time indoors, seeking counsel to protect them from the wrath of everyone from the Recording Industry Association of America, which is trying to shut down music file sharers, to federal regulators worried about the latest software for encrypting e-mail communications.
"He cares a great deal about privacy," said Lee Tien, a full-time litigator at EEF. Because privacy is one of those things that disappears without always being noticed right away, Tien and other EFF lawyers find themselves fighting regulations nobody gets excited about right away.
"Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said.
"If John Gilmore were a country," adds his personal publicist, Bill Scannell, "his motto would be 'Let Me Alone.' "
Conscious objection
Rosa Parks did not ride that bus in Montgomery by accident. Several strategy meetings preceded the famous ride in which the founding mother of the civil rights movement boarded a bus and declined to sit in the back.
Gilmore's famous visit to two airline ticket counters in the Bay Area was charted out. He checked in with his lawyer. He kept notes. He booked a flight from Oakland, with its slightly cheaper fares, to Washington, D.C., where he planned to drop in on the offices of his member of congress, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, to convey his growing concern about the amount of data the government is gathering from and about its citizens.
His reason for travel, he would later say, was "to petition the government for redress." That added First Amendment issues to a Constitutional exercise that would also turn on the amendments against unreasonable search and seizure and the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.
Everything went pretty much according to expectations. That is to say, everything went to hell in a hurry.
As Gilmore tells it, he arrived at the gate two hours early, a paper ticket purchased through a travel agent in his hand. A Southwest agent asked for his ID. Gilmore, in turn, asked her if the ID requirement was an airline rule or a government rule. She didn't seem to know. Gilmore argued that if nobody could show him the law, he wasn't showing them an ID.
They reached a strange agreement for an argument about personal privacy: In lieu of showing ID, Gilmore would consent to an extra-close search, putting up with a pat-down in order to keep his personal identity to himself. He was wanded, patted down and sent along.
As Gilmore headed up the boarding ramp a security guard yanked him from line. According to court papers, a security agent named Reggie Wauls informed Gilmore he would not be flying that day.
"He said, 'I didn't let you fly because you said you had an ID and wouldn't show it,' " Gilmore said. "I asked, 'Does that mean if I'd left it at home I'd be on the plane?' He said, 'I didn't say that.' "
The Gilmore case is, if anything, about things unsaid. Gilmore -- and millions of other people -- are daily instructed to produce some manner of ID: a driver's license, a Social Security number, a phone number, date of birth. When Gilmore asked to see the rules explaining why his photo ID is necessary for airline security, his request was denied. The regulation under which the Transportation Safety Administration, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, instructs the airlines to collect such identification is classified as "Sensitive Security Information."
When Congress passes a law, it is as often as not up to some agency to decide what that law means and how to enforce it. Usually, those regulations are available for people to examine, even challenge if they conflict with the Constitution.
This wasn't the case when Congress passed the Air Transportation Security Act of 1974. The Department of Transportation was instructed to hold close information that would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" or "reveal trade secrets" or "be detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation."
The Federal Aviation Administration, then a branch of the transportation department, drew up regulations that established the category now known as Sensitive Security Information.
When the responsibility for air travel safety was transferred to the newly created Transportation Safety Administration, which was in turn made a branch of the new Department of Homeland Security, the oversight for Sensitive Security Information went with it. The language in the Homeland Security Act was broadened, subtly but unmistakably, where SSI was concerned.
It could not be divulged if it would "be detrimental to the security of transportation."
"By removing any reference to persons or passengers, Congress has significantly broadened the scope of SSI authority," wrote Todd B. Tatelman, an attorney for the Congressional Research Office. Tatelman was asked by Congress last year to look at the implications of Gilmore's case.
Tatelman's report found that the broadened language essentially put a cocoon of secrecy around 16 categories of information, such as security programs, security directives, security measures, security screening information "and a general category consisting of 'other information.' "
The government has been so unyielding on disclosure that men with the name David Nelson suddenly found themselves ejected from flights. Somewhere in the system, the name came up on the newly created "No Fly" list. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., found himself in the same dilemma. When baggage screeners were caught pilfering, prosecutions were dropped because a trial would require a discussion of "Sensitive Security Information."
When John Gilmore demanded proof that the airport ID rule met Constitutional muster, the government at first declined to acknowledge it even existed.
Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for TSA, tacitly acknowledged the strange rabbit hole into which Gilmore has fallen. The Department of Justice, in its first response to Gilmore's suit two years ago, declined to acknowledge whether such an instruction existed. Later, it admitted its existence. Then the government asked a judge to hold a hearing in secret and preclude Gilmore's lawyers from seeing the regulation they sought to challenge, the contents of which seem to be pretty widely known.
"It's a rubber stamp. TSA security directives are -- plural -- sensitive security information and not subject to public disclosure," Davis said.
How, then, is someone to challenge in court a law he's not allowed to see?
"I have no idea," Davis said. "If a passenger doesn't wish to show ID prior to getting a boarding pass, that's something they're going to have to take up with the air carrier. And the air carrier is required to obtain government-issued identification."
That, says Gilmore's lawyer, Jim Harrison, is the enigma of the case: "It's about the ability of the citizens of this country to be able to move about the country, to move about freely, without being subject to laws they can't see."
The legal cul-de-sac erected around airport security is not limited to Gimore's deliberately chosen fight. In October 2001, at San Francisco Airport, Arshad Chowdhury, born and raised in the United States, was surrounded by security agents and kept off a Northwest Airlines flight. He was trying to get back to Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a graduate student.
Chowdhury's last name sounded somewhat like another name on the no-fly list. He could never get an explanation. He filed suit against Northwest, but, to date, his court fight has been with the government, which has pleaded Sensitive Security Information.
To sue Northwest for racial profiling, Chowdhury must first sue his own government for the rules Northwest will plead it was enforcing.
High-tech togetherness
Code Con is one of those technological events so deep that ordinary conversation requires an English-to-English translator. A young woman was onstage explaining a system she had developed to, as it turns out, automate trust in discussion groups by assigning a ranking of credibility to participants based on past messages and reactions. Discussion boards must either be moderated, to keep the wackos from disrupting them, or wide open, in which case postings can take unreasonably long times.
As she spoke, half the audience inside a darkened nightclub rented for the event stared into the blue glow of laptop computers. Some were following the PowerPoint presentation on a Web site set up for the affair.
Dan Klein, a Pittsburgh computer consultant, was in the back of the room. He has known Gilmore for years, and to know Gilmore is to know the room. Computer programmers, the really good ones, combine an artistic temperament with a conviction that intuitive reasoning can lead to mathematical certainty.
"It's elegant thinking," Klein said. "We are most of us white hats, but we think like black hats."
The elegance of Gilmore's thinking is that knowing someone's ID does not prevent the person from committing a terrorist act. The 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses. Knowing someone's identity, as Gilmore argues it, adds less to a security than it takes away from a traveler's protection from authority that might oppress simply because it can.
"It's just rebellion against oppression," Klein said. "Part of it is this sense of 'Why do I have to follow all these rules when they don't make any sense?'"
The young woman finished her speech, took a few questions and, just as everyone was about to rise for lunch, Scannell, a peripatetic man who orbits around both the techies and the world of PR, was on the stage. He had a special request. He had just become a parent and wanted to put in a wireless baby monitor. Could someone come up with a way to encrypt a baby monitor so outsiders couldn't pick up the signal?
By day's end a few people had approached with ideas. It is doubtful anyone would bother to listen in on a baby gurgling, but this was the principle of the thing: meeting the people who know the math to make it work.
Soon afterward, 14 Code Con attendees flooded into a nearby Italian restaurant. Gilmore sat at one end of the table, chatted privacy, travel and whether the drug called Ecstasy has a medicinal application. Then, to save time, he picked up everyone's check. In cash. No credit cards. Why leave a paper trail?
That night, he caught a ride home with a friend. The night before was more to his liking. On a bus running through San Francisco to Haight-Ashbury, a multimillionaire sat alone in a seat next to a woman who appeared to be homeless. Neither knew who the other one was. All John Gilmore had to show to get on board was a $1.25 fare. That's how he likes it.
February 23, 2005
Bush Plan - 70% Tax on Social Security Benifits
So - under the Bush stock market plan - you invest you money in the market and when you retire you get to live on the profits - right? Wrong!
They aren't telling you that Bush plans to tax 70% of your earnings against your Social Security income. That means for ever dollar you make on your Social Security investment - you get a 70 cent cut in the amount of money the government gives you. And if you lose money --- you're just plain fucked.
But - you won't hear this story from the Republican owned media puppets to want to eliminate social security. To find that out you have to go to the town hall metting with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and find out what is really on the table.
Only on the web can you find the real news that is unfiltered by the Washington press.
February 22, 2005
Government Control of the Stock Market Coming
It's called "privatizing Social Security" - but that's not what it really is. A side effect of Bush's plan is the government takeover of the stock market.
Think about it. With two trillion dollars of buying and selling power the federal government - or the private parties who are doing the government's investing - become, by a factor of 100, the biggest single investor in the world. And I doubt that anyone will ever make a stock decision without wondering what move the government is going to make.
Besides - who is going to enforce laws and ethical standards against the government? The government? The possibilities for insider trading are endless. And how do you feel about the idea that the single biggest owner of "free enterprise" is the government? Isn't that an oxymoron?
Because the market goes up over time doesn't mean all investors make money. There are winners and there are losers. There is nothing out there that will ensure that the government doesn't lose it all. The market is a gamble and if you don't understand that - you don't understand the market.
Bush proposes that we are going to borrow two trillion dollars to gamble in a market that will be completely changed by this new super investor. And we are going to borrow that money from Muslin Saudi oil barons - some of whom are members of the family of Osama bin Laden - and the rest is going to be borrowed from the Communist Chinese.
This merger through the market of the government and private industry is like an elephant merging with a fly. The government is going to own or at least control the purchasing of huge amounts of private sector stock and become significant owners of many large free enterprise organization. Will the government end up picking members of the board of directors - or influence who is picked, perhaps even innocently? After all - companies are going to want to attract Uncle Sam as an investor and structure their organization in a way that the government likes. It make me wonder how these corporations will change once Uncle Sam becomes the company's biggest share holder.
And the insider trading ... what will that be like. If the FDA decides not to approve a new drug - will the FDA tip off the Social Security Fund? Or - will they keep the secret and let the government lose billions of dollars of our retirement money?
The stock market creates competition, and some people win and some people lose. In this case it pits the government against all other private investors and someone is going to win and someone is going to lose, and guess who has the advantage?
And let's suppose the government does well in the market and makes a big profit on our social security money. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Not necessarily. It might mean that investor lost a lot of money and the same old people who benefit from social security would lose their private investment to make up for it. Government wins - private industry loses - hardly sound like free enterprise to me.
But what if the Government loses? Then you have private investors getting rich at the expense of the taxpayers. If the government blows it's wad on the market - the still have to pay back the Muslim terrorists and the Communists who loaned them the money in the first place. They will probably have to borrow the money from the investors who screwed them out of it.
To me the very definition of "free enterprise" means free from the government. After all - what else does the word "free" mean? If the government is your owner you are not free. You are in fact a slave. And the government server as owner, employer, and pickpocket all at once. They have your credit card and are running up the bill. We now have a $36,000 birth tax in this country. That's your share of the debt from the moment you are born. Thanks Bush!
What I can't understand is - where the hell are the conservatives? Doesn't this debt make your skin crawl? The government is everywhere and they are expanding and taking over. They are already in your churches and now they want to own the company where you work? Why the hell aren't you freaking out?
It's a never ending cycle and it reminds me of the song "Sixteen Tons" by Frankie Lane that ends in, " St Peter don't you call me I cause can't go: I owe my soul to the company store."
It's the hottest story in the Blogosphere
Blogger John Aravosis of AmericaBlog.org is exposing the truth about former White House "reporter" Jim Guckert, a.k.a. "John Gannon."
The basic question underlying this scandal is simple: How on earth did a $200/hour gay male prostitute get past post-9/11 White House security nearly every day for two years to get within spitball distance of George W. Bush?
Is the Secret Service completely incompetent - or does Guckert have "friends" in the highest places? Who specifically waved Guckert into the White House each day, starting when Guckert worked for the rightwing propaganda site GOPUSA.com?
And how "deep" were Guckert's White House connections? Did he actually see the secret CIA memo outing Valerie Plame? Did he actually know Bush was going to declare war against Iraq on TV 4 hours before anyone else knew? How did Guckert's boss Bobby Eberle get a rare and coveted interview with Karl Rove himself?
Finally, who was actually paying Guckert? Was he paid by the White House out of a propaganda slush fund? Was he paid by the GOP to spread lies about Democrats? Did Guckert's lies cost Tom Daschle his Senate seat?
This hot story was literally right under the noses of the White House press corps, who sat side-by-side with Guckert for two years. Yet none of them ever investigated Guckert - and many continue to defend him and criticize Aravosis for pursuing the truth.
Where will this expose lead? How can progressive bloggers help Aravosis get to the bottom of this scandal? How can we persuade the mainstream media to pursue its own investigations?
February 21, 2005
News Media Knew for 2 Years Jeff Gannon was a Fraud
The news media knew for the last two years the Gannon was a fraud and they covered it up. That's the real story here. They all know who each other are and Gannan was clearly not one of them. For 2 years Gannon pretended to be part of the group of Washington press corps reporters and - more importantly - the Washington press corps pretended Gannon was one of them. This fraud isn't limited to just Bush trying to pull the wool over the reporters eyes here as the "legitimate" news media acts surpirsed as that try to bury this story as fast as they possibly can. They were and active part of the ploy.
Everything you see in television news is staged - it is a lie - and they are all part of the lie. And I am just not going to buy into it.
Bush making out with male prostitute!
This guy is as phony as Bush is!
Welcome to the simulation of a free country
Here's a story that the mainstream press is running from. The guy Bush is making out with here is a gay male prostitute. His fake name is Jeff Cannon and he's a fake White House corrispondent who pretends to be a reporter in Bush's press conferences and asks softball questions.
Check out the details on Comedy Central
This gay male whore visits the Whitehouse on a daily basis - more often than Monica was visiting Clinton. And just look at the way Bush looks at him. Looks to me like they definitely have chemistry going.
What ammuses me is that this has to drive the Christian Right nuts because there's nothing more hated than the gay man - and here he is in the arms of the president.
Here's an example of what the Washington Post says about it. Do you think that would go this easy on Clinton if he were kissing a gay male prostitute? I don't think so.
Jeff Gannon, the former White House reporter whose naked pictures have appeared on a number of gay escort sites, says that he has "regrets" about his past but that White House officials knew nothing about his salacious activities.
"I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"
Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"
As for his critics, Gannon said: "People have said some of my writing expressed a hostile point of view" toward gays. "These people are willing to abandon their principles on the basis of trying to make me out to be a hypocrite. These are the same groups that cherish free speech and privacy."
John Aravosis, a gay activist who posted the pictures of Gannon on his Americablog.org, said the issue is not Gannon's right to be a journalist but his "White House access. . . . The White House wouldn't let him in the door right now, knowing of his background."
Aravosis said Gannon is guilty of "what I call family-values hypocrisy. Basically, he's asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us."
Gannon resigned earlier this month as a reporter for two conservative Web sites, Talon News and GOPUSA, both owned by a Texas Republican activist. Gannon became a target after asking President Bush a question that slammed Senate Democrats and contained false information about Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
In the interview, Gannon did not dispute evidence that he has advertised himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort but would not specifically address such questions.
Dismissing speculation that he had a permanent White House press pass, which requires a full-blown FBI background check that usually takes months, Gannon said he could not get one because he was required to first get a pass from the Senate press gallery, which did not consider him to be working for a legitimate news organization. Instead, he said he was admitted on a day-to-day basis after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number. He said he did not use a pseudonym to hide his past but because his real last name is hard to spell and pronounce.
Gannon said he began covering the White House in February 2003, at least a month before Talon News was created. He said he was then working for GOPUSA. Talon was launched as "a marketing consideration to separate the news division from something that could be viewed as partisan," he said.
Suggestions that White House officials coddled him or gave him special access are "absolutely, completely, totally untrue," Gannon said, adding that he was often among the last to be called on at press briefings and sometimes could not ask a question at all. "I have no friendships with anyone there. . . . The White House, as far as I know, was never aware of the questions about my past."
Asked how recently he was putting his photo on escort sites, Gannon said that "so much of this stuff" was "years in the past. . . . Anything that goes on the Internet is there forever," he said. "Every day I learn about another site where there are allegedly pictures of me."
Gannon says he was questioned by the FBI in the Valerie Plame leak investigation after referring to a classified CIA document when he interviewed the outed CIA operative's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson.
But he said yesterday: "I didn't have the document. I never saw the document. It was written about in the Wall Street Journal a week before. I had no special access to classified information."
Aravosis and other critics cite several examples of what they view as Gannon's anti-gay writing. Gannon wrote last year that John Kerry "might someday be known as 'the first gay president,' citing his "100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign" for backing a "pro-gay agenda." Gannon said he was just reporting the facts and playing off suggestions that Bill Clinton was the first black president.
In reporting on comments by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) that legalizing gay marriage could lead to judicial approval of bestiality, Gannon made an issue of the fact that the Associated Press reporter who interviewed Santorum was married to a top Kerry aide and described the comments of gay activists as "predictable responses." Gannon said he was not taking a stand on the issue.
Other allegations, meanwhile, keep surfacing.
Aravosis wrote yesterday on his blog that an unnamed television producer says Gannon told him the Iraq war was going to begin four hours before Bush announced it.
Gannon chuckled at that, saying many reporters sensed an attack was imminent because the White House kept delaying the routine announcement that no more news would be made that day. "You could feel it in the air," he said.
Despite the battering he has taken, Gannon hasn't abandoned plans to work in journalism and hopes to generate sympathy by speaking out.
"People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past," he said. "I believe in a God of forgiveness."
It's just a week later and the press is defending this guy and running from the story. But here on the internet we aren't censored by the Bush administration like like the official press are. The "ligitimate" news media has all their stories written by the GOP and this guy is the guy who writes the script for the networks.
I remember how they went after Clinton for every little thing. How awful it was that Clinton's fifth cousin was working in the travel office. They went on about that for YEARS! But when one of their Republican owners gets caught with a male whore - well - look how low the liberals are stooping to smear the good name of a great man!
Here's what Accuracy in the Media covers the story!
The Destruction of Jeff Gannon
By Cliff Kincaid | February 10, 2005
The campaign against Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left.
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Conservative bloggers made a name for themselves by starting the process that led to the "Rathergate" scandal. They questioned the authenticity of some alleged National Guard documents that CBS used in a campaign to smear the President's military service. This was a real scandal, in which CBS backed away from the documents, an investigation was launched, and four people were fired from the network for their work on the story.
Left-wing bloggers have now made a name for themselves, and it is not pretty. They have taken the scalp of an on-line conservative journalist by the name of Jeff Gannon, who was virtually unknown until about three weeks ago. His crimes were that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats. This became, for a group called Media Matters, the "White House press room scandal." Never mind that "journalist" Helen Thomas has been giving anti-Bush political diatribes disguised as questions at these briefings for years.
A massive left-wing investigation of Gannon's personal and business affairs was launched and was said to reveal that he was associated with some homosexual-sounding website addresses. Ironically, the Media Matters group is run by former conservative and once-closeted homosexual David Brock.
The Gannon "scandal" would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Gannon's personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s, had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political left trying to dig up dirt.
The campaign against Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left.
But the mainstream media did their dirty work, too. Liberal journalists at The Boston Globe, using material from Brock, weighed in with their own account of this controversial journalist and his employer, Talon News, owned by a Texas Republican activist named Bobby Eberle. Despite all the innuendo and controversy, the fact remains that Gannon had done some excellent political stories on a wide range of subjects, including the CIA and former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Gannon could have survived the charge of having a conservative bias but when his personal life and family became targets, he decided to call it quits.
It all started when Gannon's writings were "exposed" for having too many statements taken directly out of White House press releases. Gannon apparently believed that covering the White House meant that he should actually report, in long and complete sentences, what the White House actually said on various public policy issues. He was also accused of tossing softball questions to White House spokesman Scott McClellan and the President himself.
You could see the imaginations working overtime on the left. They suspected that Gannon was another Armstrong Williams¯someone secretly getting federal money to promote the Bush line. Gannon had to be either a paid agent of the Bush administration or a phony journalist or both. In any case, in their view, he had to be exposed and discredited.
Was Gannon a Bush plant? Was he secretly on the White House payroll? The conspiracy theories were fed by the fact that Jeff Gannon wasn't his real name; he used a professional name because he didn't like the sound of his real name¯James Guckert.
"The left's whole focus is wrong in this case," Eberle told AIM. "This is a private company owned by me, with no ties to the Republican Party. We're on no one's payroll, except what I choose to pay people." Eberle has been running Talon News and GOPUSA for over four years. They send out news and commentary and "the conservative message" to about half-a-million subscribers a day.
Despite the Republican-sounding name, GOPUSA, no accusations of direct links to the GOP establishment or President Bush have turned out to be true. Brock and his allies eventually got Gannon's scalp because of the sex charges. These had nothing to do with his work for Talon News and reporting from the White House, and Eberle never conducted an investigation of Gannon's financial or personal business before hiring him. But the charges were embarrassing and apparently concerned some private issues that Gannon didn't want to discuss publicly. And despite what has been implied, he rarely wrote about anything related to the homosexual issue.
Eberle, a major practitioner of the "new media," apparently didn't realize that he was threatening the dwindling power of the old media. Gannon didn't realize that the purpose of the White House press corps is to make Republicans look bad. And when the left-wing media see their power slipping away, they go for blood and nothing is out of bounds. The political left doesn't respect personal privacy when the potential victims are conservatives.
Faced with criticism that the campaign may have had gone "too far" in personally attacking Gannon, as noted by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, some of the left-wing bloggers are saying that they were just concerned about security at the White House. How could the White House allow access to news briefings to someone using a pseudonym? Assuming this concern is genuine¯and that's a big "if"¯Eberle says that Gannon used his real name and Social Security number when applying for White House press passes. "There was never a deception," he said.
So the case against Gannon boils down to being too pro-Republican, writing stories with a conservative slant, and being linked to conduct, homosexuality, that is accepted and celebrated by those who were going after Gannon in the first place. The standard of the liberal thought police is evidently that someone's private life should be protected¯except when the accused is a conservative. The old media and their new found friends in the left-wing blogging community will stop at nothing to maintain their political power.
Getting bach to the "straight media" - Microsoft NBC - Newsweek covers the story as follows:
Feb. 28 issue - Jeff Gannon is considering suing liberal interest groups, bloggers and others for a "political assassination" that drove him from his job as a reporter for a conservative news outfit called Talon News, he told NEWSWEEK. Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, singled out Media Matters—a "well-funded" liberal group headed by longtime "attack dog" David Brock. ("Everything we wrote about him came from the public record," Brock replied.)
It remains unclear how Gannon got routine White House press access for nearly two years; he acknowledged he first began getting clearance to White House press briefings in early 2003 as a representative of GOPUSA, a group headed by Texas GOP activist Bobby Eberle—months before Eberle even created Talon News. Gannon said he had no access to White House aides outside the press room, nor did he try to interview any. When President Bush called on him at a press conference last month—during which he asked a question with false info about Sen. Harry Reid—"nobody was more surprised than myself," said Gannon.
—Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey
Michael Isikoff - where have we heard that name before? He's the one who invested the Kathleen Willy scandal who was Kenneth Starr's puppet during the Clinton Impeachment. He made life a living hell for Julie Steele who refused to support the lie. And Dsvid Brock is mentioned. David used to be a Republican attack dog until he finally developed a conscience after he got tired of the GOP hating gay people - being that he is one - and now he's cashing in writing books on the other side.
No wonder what they are singling him out to sue. Nothing worse than a Gay Republican turncoat.
February 18, 2005
Public Prayer for Jews and Christians Only
RICHMOND, Va. The federal appeals court in Richmond will hear arguments today on whether Chesterfield County should allow a Wiccan priestess to give the opening prayer at Board of Supervisors meetings.
The county refused to put Cynthia Simpson on the list of religious leaders invited to pray at board meetings. The board told her the invocations "are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition."
A federal judge called the county's invocation policy unconstitutional, saying that Chesterfield County officials cannot endorse an official religious preference while excluding other religions from opening board meetings with a prayer.
The county is challenging the judge's ruling before the U-S Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
February 12, 2005
War with Iran soon to come
Letter to the Editor
The war with Iran will happen because the Republicans need a new war for political cover for the 2006 elections. With the Republican Party poised to destroy social security they will need a serious distraction in order to hold onto power in the next election. How will the Republicans distract America from putting old people out on the street and record borrowing and deficits? They need a new fresh war. And since war seems to be necessary for Republicans to get elected on a record of failure - they will have to start another war for their political survival. And Iran is next on their list.
What does "Privatizing" really mean?
Letter to the Editor
When Bush talks about "privatizing" social security - what does that really mean? Doesn't that really mean that he's going to take our public tax dollars that we pay to help the elderly and put it in the pockets of private people (his friends) instead? Just like "protecting" Social Security is really a code name for destroying it. We're supposed to borrow money from the Communists in China to gamble it in the stock market and use those funds to make the government the biggest stock holder in the private US economy? I think someone has their head in a place where the sun don't shine. We are really in trouble.
February 07, 2005
Free Spam Filtering for Progressive Nonprofit Organizations
I have been working with nonprofit organizations for years. I have what may be the best spam filter on the planet and it costs me very little to run it. I'm not rich - but I can afford to give this service away.
Nonprofit orgs waste a lot of time and money every year deleting spam and viruses.Most solutions are expensive and just plain don't work. The way I see it - I'd rather nonprofit employees spend their time doing good work rather than spending hours every week deleting unwanted email. And - I have a system that solves the problem.
The way it works is that your email comes from the internet into my servers. I process it - and send the good email onto your existing email server. So - nothing on your end has to change. Once this is set up - everything is the same - except the spam and viruses are gone.
The setup is simple. Once you decide to do it all I do is make an entry in a table on my servers telling the system what domains get forwarded to what servers. Then - you change your MX record from pointing to your email server to pointing to my server network. The email comes to me - I clean it - and then you get it. It really is that easy.
What does it cost you? Nothing! All I ask is a thank you on your thank you page and a link to my service. That's all I want - and that you spend your time accomplishing great things. To me - this is a way that I can donate what is equivalent of millions of dollars in your savings at a cost to me of almost nothing. It's an extremely efficient form of giving to me.
What is a "progressive" nonprofit? As the name progressive implies - progress. The word progressive to me means that the stated purpose of your organization is something that advances the good of humanity in the real world. And although this is a fuzzy line some example of what I consider progressive would be organizations that feed hungry children, provide medical assistance, legal aid, human rights, peace, freedom, and things like that.
As to what is not "progressive" in relation to this free offer are most religions in general, front organization for cults, organizations that are harmful to the good of society, organizations that are mostly self serving or hobby related. Not that all these things are bad - just not in the class that I'm offering free service to.
Bush is coming to kill your children
As you know the mid term elections are just two years away and by then people are going to be tired of Iraq. Republicans need a fresh new war to keep up the momentum - and that fresh new war will be Iran.
Of course by then the number of idiots who volunteer will have dropped off so the draft is coming back. Bush will need to harvest your children as props in his illusion of "America - a nation at War" theme.
The sad part is that American are stupid enough that it's going to work. But - when they start saying "who would have known?" - I did - and a lot of others see this coming. It's just too bad that the only opposition to this would be the Democrats who are generally spineless. There's no voice for reality in the government these days.
February 06, 2005
Bush to cut law enforcement
Letter to the Editor
Bush is cutting law enforcement so that he can make up for the funds he spent to give huge tax breaks to the rich. This on the heals of his proposal to destroy social security. The term "privatize" is a code word that really means give the money to rich private individuals instead of the public. We need to quit gutting society and go back to taxing the rich. I'm tired of rich people paying a lower tax rate than the middle class. We are a nation in decline and going down fast. Terrorist don't need to attack us. They can just sit back and watch as we destroy ourselves.
February 03, 2005
The End of Social Security
Letter to the Editor
Bush is reforming social security the same way he reformed the economy and everything else he's done as president. He's changing it from working to broken. We went for the biggest surplus in the history of the world to the biggest deficit in the history of the world. Now he's going to destroy social security the same way. It's all about giving tax cuts to the rich while old people live in poverty and eat dog food.