If they had done this on eBay, no one would even know they were Arabs. The strange part is that they had been contacted (questioned and released?) four times before this. There must be a few details missing in this story.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/15265293.htm

Suspects linked to bridge plot

The Associated Press Posted on Sun, Aug. 13, 2006

CARO, Mich. -- The wife of a Texas man accused of amassing cellphones for terrorist purposes said Saturday that her husband traveled so far to buy phones because demand is so high in North Texas.

Lina Odeh said the men planned to sell the phones to a man in Dallas for a profit of about $5 per phone. She said they were in Michigan because so many people in the Dallas area are doing the same thing that the phones are often sold out.

"I just want everyone to know that they're innocent and they shouldn't be locked up in jail without any evidence," Odeh said.

Her husband, Louai Othman, was arraigned Saturday along with Adham Abdelhamid Othman and Maruan Awad Muhareb.

Louai and Adham Othman are brothers in their early 20s. Louai lives in Dallas, Adham in Mesquite. Muhareb, 18, is their cousin and lives in Mesquite. All are being held at the Tuscola County Jail, Caro police said.

The three were stopped before dawn Friday after purchasing 80 cellphones from a Wal-Mart in Caro.

Police said they found about 1,000 cellphones in their minivan.

A magistrate set bail at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

No pleas were made at the arraignment at the District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

The felony charges each carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Tuscola County prosecutor Mark Reene told The Saginaw News that investigators believe that the men were targeting the five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge, connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas. He declined to say what led investigators to that belief.

Officials have not said precisely what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones.

But Caro's police chief said cellphones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said terrorists use TracFones because they are not traceable.

Two of the men said they were only trying to buy and sell phones to make money, and Muhareb said the money was intended to help pay for his brother's college education.

Village and state police said they found one of the men discarding the phones' packaging and battery chargers.

The men had apparently separated the batteries from the other phones in the van.

The men told police that they were buying the phones for $20 in Michigan, then reselling them for $38 in Texas. [Sounds profitable to me. Should we assume that Arabs don't want to make money? Bob]

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Othman told the magistrate.

He said authorities had stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

"We've been checked by the FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Neither Reene nor the FBI returned phone messages Saturday from The Associated Press.

Muhareb told the magistrate, "This is a misunderstanding."

The arrests in Caro came three days after two men were arrested in Marietta, Ohio, where police said the two aroused suspicions when they acknowledged purchasing about 600 phones in recent months.

Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, both 20 and from Dearborn, near Detroit, have been charged with money laundering in support of terrorism and soliciting or providing support for acts of terrorism.

Defense lawyers said the three men were targeted only because they are of Arab descent.

www.fbi.gov

Let's make all foreigners (and anyone else we're afraid of) second class citizens!

http://jdallen.org/politics/2-out-of-5-americans-believe-muslims-should-carry-special-id/

2 out of 5 Americans believe Muslims should carry special I.D.

Aug 11th, 2006 | Politics, History, News, civil rights, religion, followup

According to a new Gallup poll, 39% of Americans believe that the government should force Muslims to carry a special form of I.D.

... You know, sometimes, I don’t even know what country I am living in anymore. Special I.D.?! While we’re at it why don’t we make the Jews wear the Star of David too?

Why would your normal terrorist group need a UAV?

http://www.janes.com/defence/air_forces/news/jdw/jdw060810_1_n.shtml

Israel shoots down Hizbullah UAV

By Alon Ben-David JDW Correspondent Israeli-Lebanese Border 09 August 2006

The Israel Air Force (IAF) intercepted an Iranian-made Ababil unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) launched by the Islamic Resistance - the armed wing of the Lebanese Shi'ite Party of God (Hizbullah) - off the northern Israeli coastline on 7 August.

"The UAV was flying south, towards central Israel," Brigadier General Yohanan Locker, IAF Head of Air Operations, told Jane's.

"I can't say for sure whether it was armed with explosives, but I believe it wasn't."

The Ababil has a maximum operational radius of 150 km, a maximum ceiling of 14,000 ft (4,268 m), the ability to travel at a maximum speed of 300 km/h and is capable of carrying a 45 kg payload. It has a surveillance configuration, carrying a camera and digital communications equipment, but also an attack configuration, carrying a high-explosive warhead that would be delivered by the UAV crashing onto a target.

144 of 359 words © 2006 Jane's Information Group [End of non-subscriber extract]

If we held patents for techniques to violate privacy, would we be sitting on the future?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/12/1415211&from=rss

New Super-sized Customer Database for Amazon?

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday August 12, @12:33PM from the watching-the-watchmen dept. Privacy Businesses

dtjohnson writes "Amazon.com has applied for a patent to create an online customer database which would allegedly contain 'massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.' From the article: "The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer. Does this cross the privacy line or is it just reasonable data gathering to make retail sales more responsive to customer needs?"

If we can't make them safe, let's at least spend a lot of time and money pretending to make them safe. Maybe the terrorists won't notice.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,71580-0.html?tw=rss.index

Bomb Threat Posed by Pants, Belts

By Randy Dotinga 14:00 PM Aug, 11, 2006

Could the next airline terrorist be wearing cargo pants?

At U.S. airports, passengers are inspected, tested and searched, and in the wake of the bomb plot foiled Thursday by British police, they can't even bring a latte on board. But terrorists armed with liquid or plastic explosives can still make it onto planes because there's little technology to stop them from smuggling bombs on their bodies or in their clothes, experts say.

"When you travel, you are not protected against terrorists who bring explosives on their person or in carry-on luggage," said Hans Weber, a San Diego aviation security consultant. "It's a bigger problem than liquids."

To make detection even more challenging, there are more than 100 types of explosives, and the actual number is higher because many come in different varieties, said James O'Bryon, an aviation security consultant in Maryland who formerly served as an official in the Department of Defense.

Why can't bombs be stopped? For one thing, ordinary metal detectors are designed to detect weapons, not explosives, and X-ray machines that expose what people are carrying aren't used because of radiation concerns. [Notice that the phrase used is “radiation concerns” not “radiation danger” Bob]

That means someone wearing cargo pants could easily smuggle in a bottle of an explosive ingredient without being detected, Weber said.

... But "if you're really good and you know what you're doing, and you've got a tightly sealed container and you've cleansed it and anything that's touched it," the machine won't detect trouble, said Terry O'Sullivan, a terrorism analyst with the University of Southern California's Homeland Security Center.

One solution would be to make the devices more sensitive, but then they'll spew out more false positives, causing even more airport delays. (False positives are a common problem: They're estimated to plague checked-baggage scanners a third of the time.)

... "As long as we are determined to handle the threat by looking for bad things, like bombs and knives, we are in a race we can't win," Weber said. "What we have to do is start looking for bad people, but that's unacceptable."

Surveil yourself?

http://digg.com/design/Famster_A_safe_way_to_upload_and_share_your_files_for_free

Famster - A safe way to upload and share your files... for free

dirtyfratboy submitted by dirtyfratboy 19 hours 39 minutes ago (via http://www.famster.com/? )

I can't believe that this site isn't widely known, even with all its features: share photos, stream videos, create a blog, upload files, keep track of RSS feeds... all in Flash? and for free? Ridiculous.

Improve your vocabulary...

http://outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

NFL's 1,159 Naughty Words

This is the list of "naughty" words not allowed on personalized jerseys at the NFL Shop. They were extracted by a reader from a java script list found on the NFL Shop site.

Update: Since our original article appeared, "Gay" is off the list and four more (Bin Laden," "Binladen," "Gay Nazi" and "gaynazi") have been added.