The latest news says the White House is claiming the CIA signed off on Bush’s claim that Iraq was attempting to buy enriched uranium, a claim which was later proven false.

Now, by their very nature, intelligence analysts know which way the wind blows. It doesn’t take a genius among them to see that questioning the Boss’s reasoning isn’t likely to help their career chances. Back in the service, we called such questioning a “CLM,” a career-limiting move.

It likewise shouldn’t take a genius to realize that intelligence is supposed to flow from the bottom up – not the other way around. The Emperor insisted on wearing his new clothes, and there was no one bold enough to call him on them.

I find it kind of sad that the office where the Buck once stopped has now taken up the game of shifting the blame. What I would do to see some accountability in public office.

That the intelligence regarding Iraq buying uranium from Nigeria was forged brings to mind all those Nigerian Bank Account scams that constantly fill my inbox. I think I’ll doctor up one of those Nigerian scams to include Uranium, just for fun.

The local Triangle Linux Users Group, of which I am a member, had a keysigning party last night after our meeting. I traded paper with dozens of members in an effort to build a GPG web of trust.

Even with my cryptography background, I feel utterly clueless as to all the ways GPG and PGP can be used. Keyservers, keysigning, and webs-of-trust are all foreign to me. Perhaps that’s why I had difficulty explaining it to Kelly last night.

I think we’re doing something right, though, since our efforts have placed us at the top of the list at Biglumber.com, one website that keeps up with this sort of thing. How to take advantage of this fact is anyone’s guess. I’m still clueless. 🙂

By the way, an effort to find Doc Searl’s GPG key in Google produced interesting results. Our of 318 pages returned, my humble website is result number two. Google works in mysterious ways.