That’s what I get for relying on mainstream media’s reporting of the White House email scandal.

In a prior post, I erroneously wrote that the email scandal was solely about the use of the RNC’s email system that resulted in the loss of millions of emails.

Well, I’ll say it again: this is wrong.

You see, there are actually two branches to this scandal:

1. Missing White House emails: one of the things I got right in my previous post was that the White House is supposed to adequately archive all of its communications. Last week, White House spokesperson Dana Perrino said that the White House “screwed up” and “lost” roughly 5 million emails for the period between March 2003 and October 2005. This is a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act, which was clarified by the Clinton administration to include emails.
2. The use of RNC accounts for conducting official business: As stated in the previous post, certain White House staff were issued laptops by the Republican National Committee for any campaign-related activity. The idea, according to the RNC, was to avoid any Hatch Act violations, as a federal employee may not engage in any campaign-related activities while on duty or use any federal resources towards that end. Instead, they seem to have done something worse. It appears that certain White House staff were using the RNC email system for official business. Follow me here. It would be like sending out work-related emails over your Yahoo account so, for example, you wouldn’t have to worry about scrutiny from your employer. Even worse, Karl Rove was given the ability to delete emails so, about 4 year’s worth of the emails he sent out over this system have conveniently gone missing. This also violates the Presidential Records Act because they were supposed to use the official system for official business.

It’s no small wonder that the press got this confused. The Bushies have managed to create two scandals in one. So, as you can tell, this is a big deal because, in this time, you had the issues around the Iraq War, which included the outing of an covert CIA agent (the cover-up which landed Scooter Libby a conviction). In that time, you also have the attorney scandal, in which conversations may have gone back to these time periods. Honestly, who knows what was “lost”. What I do know is that it’s highly suspicious that these emails go missing when the Democrats are in charge and can subpoena these documents.

So, honestly, I am led to believe that this “accident” was more intentional than anyone wants to say.

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Did you hear the latest controversy about Google? If you are familiar with Google Earth, it is a way of seeing satellite photos of various cities all over the planet. However, the photos of one city have some hot under the collar.

Google is no longer using satellite images of how New Orleans currently looks. Instead, the company is now using photos from New Orleans, pre-Katrina. Some are accusing Google of trying to rewrite history.

This is not just arousing the anger of some in New Orleans. It is also garnering some attention from Congress:

Meanwhile, Google is expected to brief the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight on the changes. Edith Holleman, the subcommittee’s staff counsel, said that briefing has not been scheduled yet.

The subcommittee chairman, Democratic Rep. Brad Miller, wrote Google CEO Eric Schmidt to say that “Google’s use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history.”

With all the people who are trying to put their lives together and don’t want America to forget what they are dealing with, this is a kind of slap in the face. The truth is not pretty but, it’s still the truth. Shame on Google for making this change.

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Growing up in Hamilton, Ohio, Diebold was a company with a good reputation. They were know for building safes and ATM machines at, at times of war, they built tanks.

So, what do you think when you hear words like “safe”, “ATM” and “tank”? You think safety and security.

Now, when you hear e-vote, you likely think the opposite. You have machines, for the most part, that don’t have a paper trail, don’t offer the ability to perform a recount and use closed-source code that means that the individual states using them can’t have their own computer experts examine the code for flaws. In the end, these voting machines are the very definition of a “black box.”

So, does it look good for a company that built its 150-year reputation on safety and security to offer a product line that exemplifies the polar opposite? Investment analysts think not and believe that the company may be looking to dump this segment of their business.

Honestly, why people think that privatizing something as important as elections is a good idea is beyond me but, let’s hope that a tide of change is coming.

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Video games, just like other media, are not usually the places to find positive imagery for black folks. As a person who grew up on video games (and I still play them), I find my pool of options dwindling. I am now the father of a black boy and I have become much more sensitive to the imagery he sees. Often, black people are flat-out nonexistent or we, more often than not, show up as either athletes or criminals.

Richard O. Jones, in a piece for Black Voice News Online, has stirred up a minor controversy in his criticism of the role of race in video games. However, Jones takes it a step further. He doesn’t see the continual portrayal as just a cause for alarm but, also as a challenge to black gamers to not just play games but, become insiders and game developers (currently, on 4% of developers are Latino and less than 3% are Black).

While this is a concern for me, I also see a big opportunity out there for some industrious black game developer(s) out there.

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As a computer geek (yeah, I said it), I really don’t care too much for Microsoft. However, I do have to admit that, when it comes to helping enriching the lives of average people, the company puts its money where its mouth is.

This was evidenced most recently with its $5 million technology grant to the Urban League to help the Urban League enhance the services it offers. According to Urban League President and CEO, Mark Morial:

“..the National Urban League and our affiliates will have the technology needed to enhance our wide array of programs from education assistance and job training to home ownership and business development initiatives. In turn, we’ll be able to better assist the over 600,000 African-American children and families we serve nationwide and help them to acquire the necessary skills to close the digital divide that still exists in America today.”

While $5 million doesn’t fix the problem, it certainly goes a long way towards helping. So, despite the geek in me, I have to give kudos to Microsoft on this move.

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Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me!

That’s the first thing that came to mind for me when I read this story. Despite the naysayers, a state legislator in Colorado has proposed a bill to make implanting a chip under a humans skin a misdemeanor. The motivation is to insure the privacy of people from having their every movement tracked, particularly by employers.

The first I had heard of the implanting of such chips was right here in Cincinnati where a local company (owned by a brother, no less — groan) implanted chips under the skin of some of its employees so that they could wave their hands over a reader to get access to certain areas of the building. While, according to the company, they are only used for this single use, I see this a scary foreshadowing of things to come.
Of course, some are mocking the Colorado measure as something that comes from the tin foil hat/black helicopter crowd. But, why is this fear so far-fetched?

Right now, we have the Patriot Act, we just went through 5 years of the National Security Agency being able to spy on U.S. citizens (which is illegal), the President wanting authority to open private mail and, looming in the background, a desire for a national ID. Why are chips under the skin so out of the question. All that would be needed is someone to argue that it would be an effective tool in fighting terrorism or, better yet, a way for parents to keep track of their children and, we’re off to the races.

So, I hope this measure does gain approval in Colorado. I, for one, don’t want to be tagged like a pet.

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Gregory D. Evans is, no doubt, an incredibly smart brother. He is a former computer hacker and current CEO of LIGATT Security. Mr. Evans has come up with a new service that people with overdue bills might hate. Evans is the creator of SPOOFEM.COM, an online service that allows users to change the number being sent to a person’s caller ID. So, imagine bill collectors or telemarketers (they still call me from time to time and I’m on the “do not call” list) being able to fake you out with a number that you might pick up.

Evans originally created this for himself to collect money from someone who would not take his calls. Now, he is making this service publicly available.

Again, I have to go on the record — the brother is smart but, any product that makes it easier for telemarketers to call me, I hate.

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If you check some of my past posts, you’ll see that I am no fan of electronic voting as it is today. For the last few years, I have been telling friends, family and whoever else would listen about my concerns with this technology. The concept of e-voting is great but the implementation, as it stands today, leaves the door wide open for elections to be stolen (and, I believe this has already been done).

My concerns came to a head when Walden O’Dell, for CEO of Diebold, the largest vendor of voting machines, stated in an August 2003 fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Call me paranoid but, when the guy making the voting machines is also so boldly partisan, you could easily question his actions.

So, I was heartened to get this piece of information on RawStory.com. They say that the New York Times will be reporting, today, that changes and legislation from the new incoming Congress may bring an end to paperless electronic voting.

“By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted,” write Ian Urbina and Christopher Drew, “including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail.”

Quoting federal voting officials and legislators, the Urbina and Drew report that new government guidelines and bills in Congress “will probably combine to make paperless voting machines obsolete.”

For the first time, the article states, vote-counting software will also be inspected by government authorities, and “the code could be made public.” Additionally, “states and counties that bought [voting] machines will have to modify them to hook them up to printers … while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.”

The article quotes the director of an elections website as saying, “In the next two years … we’ll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election. The difference now is that we have moved from politics down to policies.”

I, for one, would welcome such a change. However, I often wonder if brother Athan Gibbs were alive today, would we even be in this mess? His idea for electronic voting might just have been the remedy to what ails us today.

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There are some things that I am almost embarrassed to admit exist on the internet but, I can’t deny that they do. A new website called, get this, niggaspace.com, was launched a short while back.

By name alone, it is already sparking controversy.

It is modeled after the popular MySpace.com and its slogan is, “A place fo’ niggas”.

What’s even more interesting is that, on a recent radio interview, the site’s proprietor, “Tyrone”, refused to identify his race. Now, he may be black (still no pass from me) but, my suspicions are aroused.

However, Dr. Francis Cress Welsing, author of The Isis Papers (a must-read, in my opinion) provides some great perspective on this issue:

When it is used by black people, it is an indication that they do not understand the system of racism/white supremacy, according to Welsing, where the word evolved from.

Welsing compared Black people calling themselves “niggas” to the Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological response to being held captive. As a defensive mechanism, the captives develop loyalty for their captors, according to Welsing. This is parallel to the relationship between Blacks and Whites, Welsing said.

“It is essential for Black people to understand the system that is oppressing them,” Welsing said.

Needless to say, while the site has some 10,000 members, I will not be one of them.

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Athan Gibbs was a brother who had seen enough. He saw what happened in Florida in 2000, with a lot of folks being disenfranchised. If you remember, this is what really spurned the electronic voting push. To remedy this, Mr. Gibbs came up with the TruVote electronic voting system. Unlike the voting machines that were being created by much larger companies, Athan Gibbs’ machine offered something decidedly different — a secure, verifiable system with a paper trail. On the verge of introducing this system to the public, Gibbs died in a mysterious car accident in March 2004.

Here’s an excerpt of an article that appeared in the Summer 2004 edition of Global Outlook Magazine:

Athan Gibbs devoted his life “to making sure voters in future elections would know their votes mattered”. He died in a mysterious car crash on Interstate highway 65 in Tennessee in March 2004

Athan Gibbs’ TruVote system was described as ”one of the most promising technologies in the world for fixing democracies”. In the wake of the 2000 presidential elections, where than 1 million votes went uncounted for Athan Gibbs invented the TruVote vote-casting system:

“TruVote allows voters to touch their candidates’ names on a computer screen and receive receipts of their vote at the end of the process. They can then go to a Web site, punch in their voter validation number and make sure their vote was recorded.” (The Tennessean.com, 14 March 2004).

Bob Fitrakis writing in the Global Free Press (17 March 2004), describes Gibb’s TruVote as a Marvel:

“After voters touch the screen, a paper ballot prints out under plexiglass and once the voter compares it to his actual vote and approves it, the ballot drops into a lockbox and is issued a numbered receipt. The voter’s receipt allows the track his particular vote to make sure that it was transferred from the polling place to the election tabulation center.”

Police reports state that “Mr. Gibbs lost control of his Chevy Blazer after he cut in front of an 18-wheeler and the two vehicles collided.” Fitrakis seriously doubts that Gibbs’ untimely death was an accident:

“Coincidence theorists will simply dismiss the death of Gibbs as a tragic accident – the same conclusion these coincidence theorists came to when anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood died in November 1974 when her car struck a concrete embankment en route to a meeting with New York Times reporter David Burnham. Prominent independent investigators concluded that Silkwood’s car was hit from behind and forced off the road… Gibbs’ death bears heightened scrutiny because of the way he lived his life after the 2000 Florida election debacle”

Who knows…if Brother Gibbs had lived, we may not be worrying about electronic voting today. This is something to truly ponder. When I think about people who died trying to secure my right to vote, I’ll have to add Athan Gibbs to that list.

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