Mark Forscher

Bruce Schneier writes on security and our response to terrorism:

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

The whole piece is definitely worth a read. Schneier is insightful and as refreshingly candid as usual.

Vanity Fair’s literary editor, research, and copy departments edit Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. It’s hilarious and reminiscent of when Colbert edited a letter from Newsweek’s Jon Meacham a few weeks ago, minus the Cheetos of course.

I’m not a big advocate of awards shows, particularly in advertising, but the Outdoor Grand Prix winner the 56th Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival this year is noteworthy. From AdAge:

The “Trillion Dollar Campaign” for the newspaper The Zimbabwean from TBWA Hunt Lascaris, Johannesburg, South Africa, plastered real Zimbabwean trillion-dollar banknotes onto billboards, murals and fliers, serving as a real-life symbol of the country’s record inflation and economic collapse. The campaign ultimately aimed to raise awareness of Zimbabwe’s suffering under the Mugabe regime and increase the newspaper’s customer base elsewhere in the hopes of getting it back into the hands of Zimbabwe people.

The paper was exiled from the country for exposing the corruption of its government, which subsequently imposed a 55% luxury import tax on the publication, making it unaffordable for the average citizen.

I’m glad the campaign is getting recognition outside of Zimbabwe.

[via waxy.org]

I can’t say that I laughed at any of these, but http://www.otherthingsidliketodelay.com/ gets points for simplicity and timeliness.

The context: earlier this week, McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and he would like to delay Friday’s presidential debate in order to focus on the financial crisis.

Wednesday, McCain also cancelled his appearance on Letterman, supposedly to go back to Washington to work on getting the $700 billion bailout bill passed. But instead, McCain did an interview with Katie Couric. Letterman found out McCain lied to him and played live video from the interview with Couric as it was happening.

The clip below of Letterman’s reaction to it all is incredible. This will definitely be one the key turning points in the campaign when we look back forty days from now:

I’m looking forward to the debate tonight with or without McCain’s appearance.

Google’s In Quotes recently launched. The site allows users to cycle between quotes from 20 politicians on an array of issues. The interface promotes a head to head style comparison of quotes from two politicians on the same issue. Above is a screenshot of McCain versus McCain on the economy.

While the UI is fairly intuitive, the limitation of the project’s implementation is the content and the lack of an API. I know the election is coming up, but why am I limited to quotes from twenty politicians when services like Daylife pull timely quotes from everything that’s newsworthy? And why are there only a handful of quotes on these major policy issues from the candidates?

I guess this works as a proof of concept, but it’s not very useful until there’s a lot more content surfaced and it’s opened up with an API.

Like many Bush administration officials, Sarah Palin used private email addresses for public communications, potentially to avoid document release requests. In her case, she used the addresses gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com.

Well today an anonymous poster claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin’s email account. Here’s a timeline of the incident. Supposedly there are screenshots of the inbox on wikileaks but the url isn’t loading for me.

While the hack and invasion of privacy is obviously not commendable, this incident highlights the gaping security hole and dangers of public officials using private email addresses for official communication.