InformationWeek published an interesting review of Google’s desktop search tool:

By using Search Across Computers, employees are transmitting confidential company documents outside existing security systems. The means of transmission and storage (for the limited time documents are on its servers) aren’t understood, because Google hasn’t explained them. Additionally, the Google Desktop software provides no mechanism for indicating when data is uploaded to a server, when it’s accessed by your second computer and when it’s deleted from Google’s servers. We just don’t know.

If Google is going to play in the software market, it needs to take responsibility for communicating what its software does and does not do, in conjunction with the software release. It needs to be more respectful of the burden on security/IT professionals and enable features that help them protect their data. We all know that Google will do no evil, but they need to help make sure that they don’t enable it either.

Ouch. One would think they might be headed more in the direction of greater privacy, not less, given a brewing backlash from consumers and the gov’t. In fact, I’ve been working diligently with some folks to scan and uncover Google code on enterprise systems in order to cleanly remove it from afar. It surprises me how many admins are starting to categorize the Googley software in the same context as Kazaa, Gator, and other infamous and rather misleading “helper” applications. As the value of privacy goes up will the value of Google, which seems to rely on others’ openness, go down?

The Cult of the Dead Cow “Goolag” t-shirt campaign is quite harsh:

Thad Anderson, a law school grad student who runs outragedmoderates.org, has posted some interesting documents that show the Bush administration immediately started looking for ways to link Saddam Hussein to the attack on September 11th, 2001:

On July 23, 2005, I submitted an electronic Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense seeking DoD staffer Stephen Cambone’s notes from meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Cambone’s notes were cited heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report’s reconstruction of the day’s events. On February 10, 2006, I received a response from the DoD which includes partially-redacted copies of Cambone’s notes. The documents can be viewed as a photo set on Flickr.

The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld’s 2:40 PM instructions to General Myers to find the “[b]est info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time – not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]” (as discussed on p. 334-335 of the 9/11 Commission Report and in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack).

Sometimes, in an investigation, it is handy to start off with a hypothesis and look for supporting evidence. On the other hand, in most situations it is usually best to keep an open mind and let the facts speak for themselves, in order to avoid hasty or false conclusions or wrongful associations. It is always hard in a crisis to move quickly and yet practice caution. According to these notes Rumsfeld not only started with a hypothesis, but he seems to actually have ordered his staff to work under a foregone conclusion and find facts to support it/him.

Finally, these documents unveil a previously undisclosed part of the 2:40 PM discussion. Several lines below the “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at same time” line, Cambone’s notes from the conversation read: “Hard to get a good case.”

The Guardian has picked up the story here, with the obvious conclusion:

…these notes confirm that Baghdad was in the Pentagon’s sights almost as soon as the hijackers struck.