Quoted from homegunsmith.com:

Quoted from a thread discussing the recent BATFE raid on KT Ordnance, a manufacturer of 80% finished receivers¹ from which private individuals possessing the necessary tools, knowledge and skills may lawfully build firearms at home for their own use, a practice which BATFE's own site acknowledges is fully legal:

You wanna know what's wrong with federal law enforcement?

They're all a bunch of Tim McVeighs, that's what.

They all probably start out in their careers wanting to do something good.  They want to make folks safer, defeat terrorism, defend the Constitution, whatever.  Just like Tim McVeigh, they start out wanting to do good; they maybe start out being outraged by something that they rightfully should have been outraged about.  They start out earnest.

But then they get caught up in the "us vs. them" mentality -- just like Tim McVeigh.  They are so focused on winning the game, they forget that it isn't a game.  They forget that the people they kick around are real people with real rights.  They forget that the lives they destroy are real lives, equal in worth to their own.  They forget that they themselves are human and capable of making mistakes.  They forget the presumption of innocence.

With this mentality, anything becomes justifiable. Nothing is out-of-bounds, because it's all for a good cause.

I guess, when the President himself thinks this way, how can we expect his underlings to be any better?

Other related interesting reading:  this JPFO interview with Len Savage, and this letter in which BATFE asserts with a straight face that a shoelace is, in fact, a machinegun.  On this basis, a wooden match must also be a machinegun, because there used to be a fairly well-known trick in the British armed forces which utilized a wooden matchstick to cause a British L1A1 SLR (a semi-auto-only version of the FN FAL) to fire full-auto.

For reference, I disagree with the poster quoted.  Yes, MANY agents in Federal law enforcement start out with a genuine desire to do good.  Many of them keep that desire and intention throughout their careers.  But there are also those who take the job specifically to be a jackbooted thug, to have power over people and to be beyond any legal recourse from those they use their position to intimidate and abuse.  These are the bad apples in the barrel, and there are too many of them and they have been allowed to rise into positions of too much power.

[1]  In those photos, the lower casting is the 80%-finished receiver made by KT Ordnance; the upper casting is the finished version.

Microsoft gets a clue

More than 60 percent of Windows PCs scanned by Microsoft's Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool between January 2005 and March 2006 were found to run malicious bot software, according to Microsoft.  The tool removed at least one version of the remote control software from about 3.5 million PCs, the software maker said.

"Backdoor Trojans…are a significant and tangible threat to Windows users," Microsoft said in the report.

No shit, Microsoft?  The rest of us have been saying this for HOW long now?

Here's another interesting quote from the same article:

"The Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool found a rootkit on 14 percent of the 5.7 million PCs it removed malicious software from.  This figure drops to 9 percent when excluding the Sony rootkit."

Let's reword that for a different perspective on it:  "Between January 2005 and March 2006, Sony was responsible for one third of all rootkits detected by Microsoft's malware scanner."  In other words, Sony probably r00t3d more boxes than any other single source of malware, and didn't think it was doing anything wrong by doing so.  (After all, they had a sound business case for it, with, like, memos, and even meetings.)

Maybe now that Microsoft has officially come out and said that trojans and rootkits are a problem, we'll see some changes to actually make Windows more resistant to them.  Of course, there's very little defence against the luser who reflexively clicks on anything labelled "H0T W3BC4M BABES 4 U NOW!!!" without even stopping to wonder why the file type is .exe instead of .jpg or .avi, short of just not allowing them privileged accounts.  But that's a little difficult when it's their own home computers.

(Of course, it'd help if Windows and Internet Explorer didn't make it so easy for malware pushers to hide the actual type of a file from the user.  Say, for instance, if Windows didn't DEFAULT to automatically hiding extensions for all registered file types.)