Military.com has an inter­view with the reclu­sive Garry Trudeau, car­toon­ist behind the pop­u­lar strip “Doonesbury.” Here’s an excerpt:

Military.com: Have mil­i­tary blogs and user-generated movies like “The War Tapes” changed the public’s view of war to the degree they might be less inclined to sup­port it in the future?

Trudeau: Well, that assumes that most blog­gers are anti­war, which I’m not sure would be a fair assump­tion. Quite a few are extremely pro-mission, which is to be expected. When you’re in the mid­dle of a war, it’s coun­ter­in­tu­itive for those fight­ing it to ques­tion its pur­pose or meaning.

Check out the entire inter­view here …

Most of you prob­a­bly know Xeni Jardin for her fun, flirty post­ings on the Boing Boing uberblog. But beneath the beneath the glam exte­rior is one bad-ass reporter.
Take the epic, five-part, mul­ti­me­dia series Xeni has put together for NPR, after spend­ing a month in dirt-poor, war-ravaged Guatemala. “An esti­mated 200,000 peo­ple were killed in Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, and another 100,000 ‘dis­ap­peared,’” she writes, to intro­duce the first install­ment. “Many sur­vivors are still search­ing for the remains of their loved ones.”

One group of foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gists is using tech­nol­ogy to help the coun­try come to terms with its past. For 12 years, the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) has been exhum­ing clan­des­tine graves that hold vic­tims killed in polit­i­cal mas­sacres.
Most of the peo­ple killed in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war were indige­nous. The army’s scorched-earth pol­icy some­times lev­eled entire vil­lages.
In tra­di­tional Mayan cul­ture, the dead and the liv­ing are believed to be in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For many thou­sands of Mayan peo­ple in Guatemala, how­ever, their dead have never been able to rest. Neither have the rel­a­tives they left behind.
Now, archae­ol­o­gists and anthro­pol­o­gists with the FAFG work to iden­tify the human remains, record evi­dence for pos­si­ble tri­als, and return the dead home for reburial.

You can lis­ten to the audio for part one of the series here or here. And be sure to check out Xeni’s nar­rated tour of the FAFG’s facil­ity here.

For weeks now, Mike DeKort, a for­mer Lockheed Martin engi­neer, has been call­ing shenani­gans on the firm for alleged ethics breaches. What started as a crude stand-up on video-sharing site YouTube has esca­lated into some­thing of a media frenzy. Now the Coast Guard and Lockheed Martin are call­ing shenani­gans right back.
Their con­tention is that DeKort, who hasn’t worked on Deepwater in 18 months, is out of touch … and cit­ing out­dated doc­u­ments to cor­rob­o­rate his claims.
The lynch­pin of DeKort’s case is his con­tention that LockMart botched a pro­gram to upgrade Coast Guard patrol boats. To back up his claim, DeKort has been cit­ing a Coast Guard Inspector General report (PDF!). But the Coast Guard says that report relies on data that are six months old. Since then, the ser­vice has addressed all the prob­lems, accord­ing to spokes­woman Mary Elder:

The report addresses chal­lenges relat­ing to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and accred­i­ta­tion of Deepwater [com­mand and con­trol] equip­ment, specif­i­cally on WPB 123 [patrol boats]. Subsequent to the audit, the Coast Guard has received class-wide Authority to Operate (ATO) these patrol boats while con­duct­ing secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This cer­ti­fi­ca­tion fol­lowed test­ing by inde­pen­dent, third-party exam­in­ers work­ing to stan­dards used and endorsed by the U.S. Navy and National Security Agency.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin spokesman Troy Scully stresses that the com­pany has inves­ti­gated each of DeKort’s issues — some more than once — and has cor­rected any faults. “I’m not sure what will make him happy,” Scully says of DeKort.
DeKort told me what would make him happy: to put his con­science at ease, he wants to see the find­ings of all inves­ti­ga­tions. But Lockheed (per­haps rightly) says those are pro­pri­etary.
–David Axe

Former Lockheed Martin engi­neer Mike DeKort, who made waves last month when he posted a video on YouTube alleg­ing seri­ous con­trac­tor fail­ures on a Coast Guard patrol boat project, is back with more.
In a sec­ond post to the video-sharing site, DeKort updates view­ers on his media cam­paign. His goal: a Congressional inves­ti­ga­tion of Lockheed Martin.
The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem, DeKort claims, is lead­er­ship, as I explain at Military.com:

DeKort had been with the com­pany for 12 years, work­ing on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent projects includ­ing train­ing sim­u­la­tions, the Aegis radar sys­tem and an upgraded com­mand cen­ter. “The only project I worked on that didn’t have seri­ous ethics issues was Aegis.”

On one project, DeKort says, he was pres­sured to use over­priced com­po­nents. His man­ager on the project even­tu­ally went to work for the man­u­fac­turer of the pricey parts, MediaTech. Lo and behold, Lockheed Martin has filed a law­suit against Mediatech, alleg­ing that it lured away Lockheed employ­ees and mined them for com­pany secrets.

DeKort claims he is just stand­ing up to an epi­demic of poor lead­er­ship at the nation’s largest defense con­trac­tor. “It’s a cul­tural thing,” he says, adding that the only time there aren’t ethics prob­lems at Lockheed Martin is when there is good lead­er­ship at the high­est lev­els. “Everything depends on the lead­er­ship capa­bil­ity and eth­i­cal stan­dards of the per­son in charge.”
Lockheed Martin spokesman Troy Scully con­tests DeKort’s alle­ga­tions: “Lockheed Martin has a solid pro­gram man­age­ment cur­ricu­lum. Our folks are very dili­gently trained. On top of that, we have a nation­ally rec­og­nized ethics pro­gram. George Mason University cited Lockheed Martin as one of best com­pa­nies for ethics. There’s no get­ting around it: Ethics is the blood that runs through our veins.”

Lockheed hasn’t been shy about all this DeKort stuff. In fact, it was Scully who alerted me to the sec­ond video. But it has always been the company’s posi­tion that that DeKort’s core com­plaint — that the Coast Guard patrol boats are unsafe — is base­less. Scully says that per­haps all the media atten­tion has granted DeKort more legit­i­macy than his alle­ga­tions war­rant.
–David Axe

The most com­mon of per­sonal elec­tron­ics — the mobile phone — is becom­ing a tool of choice for polit­i­cal orga­niz­ers. And when activists by the thou­sands gather in New York City to protest at the Republican National Convention, cell phones will get their most intense work­out yet as activist instru­ments.
Mobile-engaged masses don’t just con­nect dif­fer­ently; they act dif­fer­ently too. Short-messaging sys­tem (SMS) alerts over cell phones have enabled demon­stra­tors to shift tac­tics, deploy resources and respond to the police, just about instantly.
Law enforce­ment offi­cials con­cede they’re hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with these fast-moving, cell-connected groups.
“Now, they can actu­ally coor­di­nate tac­tics, cre­ate a feint. They’ll start a demon­stra­tion in one place to draw the police, while their true objec­tive is in another,” said Charles “Sid” Heal, a crowd-control spe­cial­ist and 29-year vet­eran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“There’s noth­ing we can do right now to counter them,” Heal said. “They’re in a dig­i­tal age, and we’re still in ana­log.”
There’s more in my Chicago Tribune story.

The place didn’t feel like a radical’s den; there were too many toys lying around. It didn’t look like an artist’s stu­dio; the wipe board was filled with schemat­ics, not sketches. And it sure didn’t seem like an engineer’s lab — espe­cially not with the impos­si­bly cute, white-furred bunny gnaw­ing at the cables. But the loft in Manhattan’s West Village was a bit of all three, really: the home to con­tro­ver­sial art and engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor Natalie Jeremijenko.
For more than a decade, Jeremijenko and her col­lec­tive of tin­ker­ers and artistes, the Bureau of Inverse Technology, have been using tech­nol­ogy to explore the lim­its of social and envi­ron­men­tal issues, from sui­cide to toxic skies. She’s won slots at top uni­ver­si­ties, like Yale and Stanford, and at pres­ti­gious art cen­ters, like the Whitney Museum, for the work. But start­ing this week­end, the machines put together here by Jeremijenko and her cohorts may get their biggest stage yet, by giv­ing a guer­rilla geek’s edge to the protests swirling around the Republican National Convention in New York City.
Months ago, it became clear that the RNC counter-demonstrations were going dig­i­tal. But most of the gad­getry involved was house­hold stuff — text mes­sages to report cops’ where­abouts, or web pages to arrange hous­ing. Jeremijenko and her group have gone beyond that, hand-crafting devices meant to level, just a bit, law enforcement’s tech­nol­ogy advan­tage over activists.
Their devices include a 10-foot bal­loon, for count­ing crowds; a set of pirate trans­mit­ters, for tak­ing over local radio sta­tions; and 1,400 face masks that mea­sure the level of pol­lu­tion in the Manhattan air. Think of the group as a kind of Darpa of dis­sent — with Jeremijenko’s loft as the head­quar­ters.
Check out my other arti­cle at Wired News today for more.

Protesters have been tar­get­ing gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate web­sites for years. But when online activists strike at Republican domains dur­ing the G.O.P.‘s con­ven­tion later this month, the dig­i­tal demon­stra­tions might turn out to be more than sym­bolic, for once.
In the past, activists have been able to shut down the web­site of, say, the World Economic Forum for a few hours. But the impact of such a take­down was neb­u­lous at best: It’s hard to argue the orga­ni­za­tion really suf­fered from a few-hour lag in post­ing its press releases online.
In this year’s pres­i­den­tial race, how­ever, cam­paign web­sites have moved beyond the mar­gins. During John Kerry’s accep­tance speech in Boston last month, for exam­ple, his web­site was vis­ited by 50,000 peo­ple an hour, accord­ing to ComScore Networks, the online traffic-measuring firm. That’s a droplet com­pared to the mil­lions who’ll watch the con­ven­tion on TV. But tak­ing down a cam­paign web­site would nev­er­the­less remove a crit­i­cal tool for reach­ing the pub­lic — and likely gen­er­ate a slew of sto­ries in the main­stream media about the crash.
So it’s no sur­prise that hard­ened elec­tronic activists are plan­ning to jam up the servers of georgewbush.com, rnc.org, and related web­sites, once the Republican National Convention gets under­way on August 29.
“We want to bom­bard (the Republican sites) with so much traf­fic that nobody can get in,” said CrimethInc, a mem­ber of the so-called Black Hat Hackers Bloc.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: Salon’s Michelle Goldberg has a super story today on how rad­i­cal pro­test­ers’ tac­tics could back­fire — and cost John Kerry the elec­tion.
AND MORE: Steve Gilliard says Michelle is full of it.

Goldberg is wor­ried about a bunch of halfwits who the cops have loudly announced that they are watch­ing.
The prob­lem with the Chicago anal­ogy is mul­ti­ple, but let’s start with the police riot and end with the dis­or­der in the hall. The anar­chists are kids who will quickly learn that if the NYPD can han­dle St. Patrick’s Day and the Puerto Rican Day parade where every­one over the age of 16 is drunk, their lit­tle street the­ater will pose no chal­lenge.
But I think she needs to harp on the anarcho-kiddies. Get the GOP nice and fright­ened of them, wor­ried about their antics.
Why?
Because the real protests, the ones that get peo­ple, includ­ing cops and fire­men into the streets will be far dif­fer­ent affairs. I don’t get why she is so obsessed with some loud talk­ing white boys from Williamsburg, who have nei­ther influ­ence nor sup­port, while ignor­ing the far more seri­ous protests on tap. If I was Rove, I would worry about the big union protests, not the anarcho-antics.

AND MORE: In my arti­cle today, I make ref­er­ence to a recent hacker con­fer­ence ses­sion promis­ing to teach folks how “to infil­trate orga­ni­za­tions like the RNC.” Defense Tech reader CL says that was wrong. “The HOPE con­fer­ence that you referred to in your arti­cle does not endorse morons such as these ‘Black Hat Hackers.’ It is, in fact, peo­ple like them who give hack­ers a bad name. It’s offen­sive that you refer to that gath­er­ing in such a detri­men­tal way only to per­pet­u­ate the hys­te­ria that comes with the word ‘hacker.’”