Ashcroft won in the Government Official category.  I can't think of a
more deserving candidate.

http://online.securityfocus.com/news/373

Ashcroft, Ellison, Win 'Big Brother' Awards
Computer privacy advocates honor foes at San Francisco conference.
By Kevin Poulsen
Apr 18 2002 10:29PM PT

Last December attorney general John Ashcroft, testifying at a Senate
hearing, accused privacy advocates and civil libertarians of aiding
terrorists by scaring "peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty."

On Thursday, a large U.S. gathering of those critics responded in their
own way: by giving Ashcroft the "Worst Government Official" nod at the
annual Big Brother Awards.

"I take this nomination seriously, because it's been 20 or 30 years
since I've been called treasonous," said ACLU associate director Barry
Steinhardt, announcing Ashcroft's win before a friendly audience of
cypherpunks, civil libertarians and electronic privacy fans at the 12th
annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.

Privacy International, a London-based non-profit advocacy group, hands
out the awards each year to honor people and organizations that have
done the most to harm personal privacy in the U.S., in the judgment of a
ten-person panel drawn from a various privacy groups. David Banisar,
Privacy International's U.S. director [and a SecurityFocus Online
columnist], acted as master of ceremonies at the tongue-in-cheek award show.

In addition to charging administration critics with helping terror,
Ashcroft was picked out for the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, and for
the increased domestic surveillance and immigration sweeps that followed
the terrorist attacks of September 11.

Like many of the heated panel discussions and debates at the four-day
conference, government and private industry's response to terrorism
drove the event.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison won "Worst Corporate Invader" for his vocal
advocacy of a national identification card backed by Oracle database
software. A proposal to pre-screen airline passengers by tying together
credit reporting systems and purchase histories won "Most Heinous
Project." Iran-Contra conspirator John Poindexter was given the
"Lifetime Menace Award." Poindexter heads DARPA's new Information
Awareness Office, created in January to develop data mining technology.

Not-surprisingly, none of the award recipients were present to accept
their trophies -- gold-colored statuettes depicting a human head being
crushed under a jackboot.

Privacy International also gave out two serious, pro-privacy Brandeis
Awards, named for the Supreme Court Justice who wrote that privacy is
"the right to be left alone." One Brandeis went to California senator
Jackie Speier for spearheading financial privacy legislation. The second
went to Warren Leech, a private citizen who played a driving role in
consumers winning the right to examine, and correct errors in, their
credit reports.

68 responses total.

wonderful!  i need to donate...

Is "cypherpunk" an independent word, or is it a misspell/mishear of
"cyberpunk"?

It's an independent word.  It refers more specifically to the hardcore
cryptography and digital privacy crowd.  

        Cyberpunks with an axe to grind about privacy and generally higher
degrees in math.

ah, ok. A portmanteau of a portmanteau. How veddy Deconstructionist.

This response has been erased.

I heard a recent story about Ashcroft on NPR.  I think it was an 
interview with an author who had written a book about Ashcroft.  They 
talked about the numerous times Ashcroft had lost an election, and come 
up a winner anyway.  (E.G., he recently lost a senate seat to a dead 
man, but got appointed attorney general, ending up with a more powerful 
position than he'd have gotten if he was elected.)  When asked in an 
interview how he had felt in these instances, he said losing felt like 
being crucified and winning was like being resurrected.  The 
interviewer thought Ashcroft was the only politician who'd publicly 
liken himself to Jesus Christ.

Ashcroft scares me.

        Ashcroft should scare everyone.

He sure scares me, too.

This is what happens when someone who is hated so much
that he loses to a dead man in an election is appointed
into a position of power.

Well, the dead man was extremely popular and he died during the campaign, 
and his wife ran as his second, and the constituency felt it would be 
really harsh to vote against her so soon after he died.

Yeah, i know that but the fact is he didn't lose by one
vote, etc..  He wasn't that well liked.

The same thing happened with our "friend" here from Michigan
who is now working for the administration in DC after he suffered
(a potentially humiliating loss)

re:  "#12 (jared)  Yeah, i know that but the fact is he didn't lose by one
vote, etc..  He wasn't that well liked."

The fact is, the election was 51% to 49%, so I guess you could say that
Carnahan "wasn't that well-liked," either.

Give him a break.  He was *dead*.  Imagine how he would have done if he was
alive.

Well, didn't he have a corner on the sympathy vote?  Especially from the
dead people who voted in St. Louis?

Could be...

Re #15: Don't be such a sore loserman!

This response has been erased.

At least it was an election, rather than an appointment by a court.

oh, you too forgot the electoral college numbers. strange.

I know them.  Unlike you, I haven't forgotten that the deciding set of votes
that made up those numbers was essentially handed to your boy by the Supreme
Court (voting along party lines, after O'Connor told her friends "Bush had
better win, I don't think I can hold out four more years and I want to go
home."

If *all* FLA votes were counted (not just the counties Gore asked to be
recounted), Gore would *probably* have won in the Electoral College. Since
TS was rather upset at the thought of military ballots not being counted, I
assume he believes every Florida voters votes should have been counted fairly.
Unfortunately, that was not the case.

This is so old.

        It hasn't been addressed by removing Bush from office, therefore people
are still annoyed.

Again, this is so old.  Sooo old.

<lumen is wishing McCain would have toned down his rhetoric; maybe he 
would have had a better shot at having been the Republican nomination>

and maybe I'm still annoyed because Clinton was never removed from 
office?  What an unprofessional cad.  Trust me, if he was in just 
about any other private (i.e., not government) profession, he'd be 
gone.

That's true.  The difference is that he was *elected*, which makes things a
bit different, because removing him is undoing the will of the majority of
voters.

You're forgetting, too, that the process was undertaken by which properly 
elected presidents ARE removed, and the process WORKED.  He wasn't 
removed because the people did not sufficiently support that outcome.

That too.

This response has been erased.

Re #26: If we're talking private corporations, George W. Bush would never
have gotten such a high position either.  His poor speaking skills alone
would have kept him out of upper management.

Re #30:  Not really.

Re #25 : "So old" huh? Are you really that clueless? Will 9/11 be "old
news"next year? How about Enron? I can't wait to see how your teenager
responds when you try to remind him of something that happened a couple of
years before.  "Don't bug me about my DUI, Dad, that's OLD NEWS!" And what
the hell does Clinton have to do with the election fiasco?!?

Comments like yours provide support for arguments that only people capable
of critical thought should be allowed to vote.

Comments like #33 provide support for arguments that there is a very powerful
elitist movement in the country that would prefer cutting out the little guy
to doing anything for them. ;)

Re #33: Enron's already old news.  When was the last time you saw it
mentioned outside of the Business page of the paper?  People have short
attention spans for complicated issues.

Just look at the OJ jury. :)  I think people let the Clinton trial drop a lot
more than angry democrats think, too.  The rumored Gore rant blaming Clinton's
scandal for the lost election doesn't seem accurate to me, for more reasons
than one.

The last sentence of #35 pretty accurately explains why entertainment and news
media is so shallow these days.

Re #34: While I don't deny the existence of an elitest movement, nothing I
said in #33 indicates I support it. It is because I oppose such movements
that I find stupid comments like lumen's to be so disturbing, since the
provide ammo for the very movement I oppose. I agree with you about #35,
though. 

Re #35: FWIW, Enron still gets passing mention in front page articles
discussing pension and accounting reform, which I guess isn't saying much.
And as far as your last sentence goes, I guess it brings us back to why I
found lumen's comment so annoying. 

        I'm not sure what you're talking about.  A successful executive that
has an affair wouldn't be removed from office;  I don't think the business
community would bat an eyelash.

What do you mean, "wouldn't be?"  Try "hasn't been."  We know this happens.

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