Motley Moose – Archive

The Medicare+5 public option is apparently eight votes short of passage in the house according to Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ):

The robust public option is eight votes short of the 218 it needs to pass the House, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) tells HuffPost.

Grijalva, as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been counting support for a public option tied to Medicare rates — the so-called Medicare plus five — over the last few weeks.

“We anticipate that we’re at 210,” he said. “We feel that the momentum is all on the robust Medicare plus five public option.”

Grijalva said that “25-plus” Democrats have said they will vote no. “Some of those no’s are no regardless. It has nothing to do with the public option,” he said, putting the number of those firm no-votes at 18 or 19.

There are 256 Democrats in the House. With 25 or 30 no votes, that leaves only about 15 to 20 members still to decide. Progressives need roughly half of them.

He says that backers of the public option are focusing on those persuadable Democrats rather than negotiating with members who will vote no.

Ryan Grim – Public Option Within Eight Votes Of House Passage, Says Rep. Grijalva Huffington Post 21 Oct 09

If you favour a public option it’s probably time to do a little homework on your local representative and exert some political will if necessary.

I’ll keep this short and in the vein of our beloved ‘daily tubes’ but I reckon we have a winner here, h/t to TheUnknown285 and Tarheel74 over at MyDD.  Ever wonder what you might do with five minutes of floor time in the House?  Just watch this:

As the USA PATRIOT Act comes under review for expiring provisions by the Senate Judiciary Committee an interesting exchange took place between recently seated Senator Al Franken (D-Minn) and assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, David Kris:

Franken, who opened by acknowledging that unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, he’s not a lawyer, but according to his research “most Americans aren’t lawyers” either, said he’d also done research on the Patriot Act and in particular, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to get a warrant to wiretap an unnamed target and his or her various and changing cell phones, computers and other communication devices.

The Iranian regime has crossed the Rubicon in its reaction to nonviolent protest and citizen dissent and is currently executing a slow-motion coup d’état which may usher in a new leadership dedicated to exercising the totalitarian power of the state.

In spite of the role played by connectivity in reporting the abuses of power and the violent repression of its citizens, the West seems unable to exercise any meaningful influence on the perpetrators of murderous violence.  Opposing them merely exacerbates the propaganda of the autocratic authors of this repression.  Web-based repositories hosted in the US and the world at large have become targets of the Iranian security establishment seeking to identify individuals who have opposed the state, a matter of arguably life-threatening urgency for those involved.  If they want to act like a military junta then they should be treated as such.  They clearly are using the Western infrastructure of the Internet for their own doubtful, and internationally criminal, purposes.

Cut Off the Internet

From the network map illustrated it appears, as confirmed by RIS database searches, that the primary Internet provider in Iran, DCI Autonomous Systems, owned and operated by the state and the source of all filtering and censorship, has worldwide connectivity through six transit providers, Turk Telecom (TTNet, AS9121), FLAG (AS15412), Singapore Telecom (AS7473), PCCW (AS3491), Telia (AS1299), and Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762).  The regime itself blocked access to five out of six of these providers as part of their premeditated communications blackout on the eve of the announcement of the election results, as shown.  The connectivity through TTnet at the time may have been an oversight.  This demonstrates the ease with which a total Internet blackout can be accomplished either overtly or covertly on either side of the Internet Exchange Point.

If they seek to use the Internet as cultural candy for their population, to be dialed up, down or off at will, it seems that our infrastructure is being used by the regime to relieve a tension which they are incapable and unwilling to manage themselves.  There is also the issue of the economic impact of such a blockade, which would render the economic sanctions the UN seems unwilling to impose irrelevant by interdicting the normal flow of inbound and outbound business related traffic.  The Internet is a development of the enlightened and pluralistic culture which the Iranian leadership has consistently defined as their ideological enemy.  One wonders why they should be permitted to utilise it for their own totalitarian purposes, both domestically and internationally.

It’s interesting to note that in spite of legality issues regarding cyber-warfare there seem to be no international conventions regarding the manipulation of routing information and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) database management.  This is evidenced by recent incidents:

In early 2008, at least eight US Universities had their traffic diverted to Indonesia for about 90 minutes one morning in an attack kept mostly quiet by those involved. Also, in February 2008, a large portion of YouTube’s address space was redirected to Pakistan when the PTA decided to block access to the site from inside the country, but accidentally blackholed the route in the global BGP table.

BGP hijacking and transit-AS problems Wikipedia

Obviously this would also restrict international access to PressTV, IRNA and IRIB websites hosted domestically in Iran, thereby cutting off the flow of regime propaganda to the rest of the world.  Shucks.

Whether this is something which could or should be done formally or covertly, either by international convention, unilateral action or at a grass-roots level along the lines of the DDoS attacks on Iran in recent weeks is an open question.  But it’s fair to say that international law is several decades behind the technology at this point, creating an opportunity for direct action.  Whether this is done uniformly, sporadically or as a sequence of ‘rolling blackouts’ in response to Iranian intransigence and behaviour are all options to be considered.  It’s times like these when one wishes that in a parallel universe there was an IWW local worldwide of Internet traffic engineers, network administrators and security professionals willing to embark on such an activity.

It’s now 9:30AM in the morning in Iran and the Iranian people are awakening to a nation in which the political landscape, though superficially unchanged, is indeliably altered.  Overnight a sensational result has emerged in the Iranian elections for the presidency.  Sensational in the magnitude of the result, close to 65% of the vote for the incumbent, firebrand Mahmud Ahmadinejad and a crushing defeat for his opponent Mousavi.

And it’s unlikely to be merely that a populist ‘green revolution’ has been nipped in the bud by the forces of reaction in Iran’s heirarchy, though that in itself is clearly true:

[MARGARET WARNER:] So, you think that the possibility is that you have — you have seen some government interference here?

CLIFF KUPCHAN: I think, so far, not so good. Now, it’s really early, and we don’t know.

But the fear is that the establishment didn’t like what they were seeing.

Margaret Warner – Iran’s Future Unclear Following Presidential Election PBS 12 Jun 09

Yes, interference, with an unprecedented call of the election early for Ahmadinejad, but it isn’t what you think:

MARGARET WARNER: But didn’t this also expose some fissures in the conservative class…

AFSHIN MOLAVI: Absolutely.

MARGARET WARNER: … and among the clerics?

AFSHIN MOLAVI: Absolutely.

You know, Ahmadinejad’s challenge to the old-guard revolutionary elite was absolutely very important, because it exposed this rift. Ahmadinejad comes from a second-generation revolutionary elite. They cut their political teeth in the fight against Iraq, whereas the old-guard elite cut their teeth in the fight against the shah.

These two are at each other right now. That is going to have ramifications beyond the election.

Margaret Warner – Iran’s Future Unclear Following Presidential Election PBS 12 Jun 09

As was suggested in a recent diary this election has become a contest for internal power within the oligarchy, which revealed it’s topography in unprecedented ways in the course of the presidential debates.  What we appear to be seeing is the passing of power from the old generation to the new generation of conservative revolutionary elites.

The pending election in Iran, far more than just a personality quest between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, is a sign of potentially serious ructions in the ruling oligarchy:

Mr Ahmadinejad suddenly looks vulnerable. He is being widely criticised, even ridiculed in public, in a manner the regime would normally not tolerate. Yesterday he even accused his opponents of behaving like Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels — quite an allegation from a man who denies that the Holocaust happened.

Opposition to him is growing among the ruling clergy after he publicly maligned Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful head of the Expediency Council. Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani has demanded an apology. His case has received support in an open letter from 50 clerics in the holy city of Qom.

Richard Beeston – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad goes from favourite to shaky contender The Times 11 Jun 09

Things started to go wrong for Ahmadinejad in his debate with Moussavi recently when he stepped all over his privates by accusing the past two presidents, and their cliques, of corruption.  Interestingly these included current and powerful members of Iran’s ruling oligarchy.  It would seem that there is more going on than meets the eye in an otherwise largely ceremonial election for Iran’s presidency.