More rumblings about net privacy

Rense

Once again, an online news outlet has published details about secret rooms in AT&T buildings where government spies are said to be gaining access to millions of private e-mail messages and other Internet traffic. This time, it’s Salon, which on Wednesday published an article featuring two former AT&T employees who asserted that the company had maintained a secured room in its network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo., near St. Louis, since 2002 (salon.com).

The article’s author, Kim Zetter, was careful to note that there was no proof that the National Security Agency was using the room to monitor Internet traffic. But the article, through interviews with the employees and various intelligence experts, builds a case for just that. AT&T declined to comment, as did the government, citing national security.

The Bridgeton site houses systems for managing all of AT&T’s Internet traffic, Salon said.

Matthew Aid, a specialist on the National Security Agency, told Salon that the Bridgeton operation bore all the marks of an NSA operation.

Then on Thursday, NewScientist.com reported that the NSA was financing research into “the mass harvesting of information that people post about themselves on social networks” like MySpace.

The resulting data, the site reported, could be combined with “details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”

CRAMER’S FOLLIES

For the MarketWatch media critic Jon Friedman, watching CNBC’s wild man “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer use a box of Uncle Ben’s converted rice as a prop to make a point about the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, was just too much. It “crossed a line,” Friedman wrote, and amounted to “preening gone amok” (marketwatch.com).

Friedman doesn’t quite explain why this, and not Cramer’s history of screaming, jumping up and down, and throwing chairs around the set, is what set him off.

Frank Barnako, a MarketWatch colleague, disagreed. “What did Friedman want?” he asks. “A talking-heads thing with so-called experts talking what Jimbo calls Wall Street gibberish?”

Is there not a happy medium between financial reporting as a sleep aid and financial reporting as a circus act?

ARTISTIC PET LICENSE

Bio-Genica, a bioengineering and manufacturing concern, is selling Genpets, which come in clamshell packaging and look a bit like shrunken monkeys. “They are not toys or robots,” according to the company’s Web site. “They are living, breathing genetic animals.”

Of course, it’s all a hoax. But the Web site is so believable and professional looking, that a lot of people have been fooled.

The Museum of Hoaxes reports: “The Genpets site is the creation of artist Adam Brandejs. Apparently he’s actually been hanging these things in store windows” (museumofhoaxes.com).

On his Web site, Brandejs reports that people have been banging on those store windows — some in protest, some demanding to buy a Genpet (brandejs.ca).