The absurd image of farm animals dancing the tango evokes the clash in Russia between a primarily rural culture and a growing urban life. During the years spanning the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Russia was in spiritual, social, and cultural crisis. The moral devastation of the failed 1905 revolution, the famines of 1911, the rapid influx of new technologies, and the outbreak of World War I led to disillusionment with modernity and a presentiment of apocalypse.
This exhibition explores the way Russian avant-garde poets and artists responded to this crisis through their book art.
Yesterday, in a major victory for open government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a federal judge ruled against the Bush Administration latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared the White House illegally deleted Secret Service computer records.
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At the direction of the White House, the Secret Service was deleting visitor records from the beginning of the Bush Administration until October 2004, when the deletions were discovered when open government activists attempted to get access to them.
Apparently the administration’s tactic was to drag the lawsuit out until Bush could leave office. Bush’s actions made it very tricky to tell companies to follow the law, since he had a record of doing the opposite. He was never clearly breaking them, but very very adept at finding loopholes and getting out of town before the prosecutors could catch up to him.
Identity management discussions are so much fun as they bring up all the various ways people can alter their appearances. Now these discussions can be even more fun, laced with images from Sleeveface:
I was wondering what to do with that lightsaber I was recently given as a gift…just need the Bonnie Tyler album and I’m ready for Halloween. Well, that’s assuming I don’t proceed with plans for my Davy Crockett “King of the Wild Frontier” costume.
The woman also was quoted as saying that the broker gave her the special tape with someone else’s fingerprints on, and that she slipped past the biometric recognition system by holding her taped index fingers over the scanner.
According to an analysis by the bureau, regular adhesive tape does not work, as the scanner fails to read any prints. The results have led the immigration bureau to suspect that the woman might have used a special tape bearing someone else’s fingerprints.
Although the bureau detained the woman at an immigration facility for further questioning, she did not provide information that pinpointed what the tape is made of or the South Korean broker before she was deported again in mid-September.
The bureau has compiled a report based on her statements and submitted it to the Justice Ministry. The report says it is conceivable such tape exists and that the South Korean broker might have helped a considerable number of foreigners enter Japan using it.
According to the ministry, the immigration section at Aomori Airport kept images of the woman’s fingerprints, but they were imperfect and did not match the genuine fingerprints of the woman.
This is a little confusing. Was the print database incomplete and therefore her real prints would have allowed her through anyway, or was a fake set of prints on tape the key to getting through immigration? I suspect the latter is more important since tape has to have provided a valid set of prints or she would have failed entry. Although, this assumes she really had tape on her fingers when she went through immigration. Is that a certainty? The story says her testimony is what led police to believe this tape exists. Since she was not caught in the act and is a known liar perhaps she made the whole thing up. More details hopefully will emerge when/if she tries again.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
