Public relations people are not all bad -- a fact that probably gets insufficient mention at PR Watch (sorry, guys). Mark Bingham was CEO of The Bingham Group, a PR firm with offices in San Francisco and New York. He was also aboard United flight 93 when it went down in Pennsylvania on September 11, and he is believed to be one of the passengers who stormed the cockpit and brought down the plane before it could hit Washington. His friends and family have established a website in his honor.

Government agencies have tried to remove sensitive information from the internet, only to discover that copies have proliferated and they're virtually impossible to eradicate. Copies of supposedly eradicated reports and documents can be found using common search engines and the Internet Archive's whimsically named Wayback Machine, a digital archive of Internet sites that makes it possible to visit web pages even after they have been deleted or changed.

"Americans are upset at the blizzard of irrational jargon that now substitutes for political discourse in the United States, and they increasingly recognize that it isn't going away until it is named and confronted," observes Philip Agre, a professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.