Category Archives: Government

Future, Government, Pirate Party, Privacy & Surveillance

The crowd-sourced panopticon comes into focus

Leave a comment

Being a Pirate, I tend to pay attention to issues about privacy and transparency an awful lot.  It is easy to oppose our increasing government surveillance state when the NSA is hoovering up our emails, Facebook posts and web searches.  We expect that those communications are private.

Likewise, we celebrate when someone whips out her mobile phone and records the police working in public spaces or her house, especially if the police decide to show her their nightsticks or tasers.  Those are spaces that are public or that an individual on the receiving end of police attention controls.

When a friend on Facebook asked her friends to share a screen shot of a Facebook conversation between a married woman and a single man that consisted of her hitting on him and his response saying that she should be ashamed for cheating on her husband and he was going to publicize their conversation my response was immediate: I would not share it as:

  • I had no way of knowing this conversation really happened, and wasn't fabricated to make her look bad;
  • and even if the conversation was real, should either she or her husband do something criminal or harmful as a result, I would feel responsible and I don't need that on my conscience.

But even those reasons were not needed since the conversation was clearly private and everyone should be entitled to personal privacy, even people who cheat on their spouses.

This image brought to mind a similar story I came across recently.  A man hit on a woman on a flight.  The woman tweeted about the encounter, and her followers dug up who he was and most importantly who he was married to.  

Clearly he is a cad and a liar, if her story is to be believed, and I can understand her being annoyed that he wouldn't take no for answer.  She was in a public place and had every right to tweet about a public conversation.  That she crowd-sourced his id and background is quite within her right to do. Everything in a public space is pubic.  Now.

Ten years ago it would have been difficult to crowd-source his id and publicize his actions.  As a result, such a conversation wouldn't seem public.  This change in our attitudes and capabilities both excites and terrifies me.

That it excites me isn't hard to understand, just look at what the Yes Men do.  Imagine anyone going up to a CEO or wealthy individual in a public place, misrepresenting themselves and getting said individual to speak far too candidly.  One need only recall the reporter who punked Gov. Walker by pretending he was one of the wealthy Koch brothers calling to praise Walker to see how that could go.

Two things terrify me.  By recording what you do in public, through your phones or future smartglasses, you are recording what others do and when you share that information, it is there for anyone to sift through, and use to publicize our actions. While it could be used to go after the BPs of the world, and I certainly applaud that use, it can also be used to shame or penalize people for legal behavior.

What terrifies more, though, is that the government will sift through and use such crowd-sourced data to target people it deems a threat without oversight.  After all the data is public.  It isn't inconceivable for the government to fund a smartphone game that gets people to record events or people at certain places and times and share the recordings publicly.  Face recognition technology as well as the quality of cameras, devices and mobile networks is certainly getting better.  No doubt the analysis could be crowd-sourced as well.

If the government's use of such technologies isn't checked, in ten years the government won't need a 1984-style surveillance network. We'll carry it around for them.

Censorship, Government, Patents & Copyrights

Are you ready for the Great Firewall of the US?

Leave a comment

Reposting an article I put up at the Massachusetts Pirate Party blog.  I did change the title though.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) bill is dead it seems. However, the entertainment industry and their lackeys supporters in Congress have introduced the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or PROTECT IP Act for short. It isn’t out on Thomas yet so we do not know who is sponsoring it, but Don’t Censor the Net obtained and released a copy of it for everyone to read in all its pro-censorship glory.

Techdirt and Torrentfreak have good write ups on what we know about it, but here is a summary of the odiousness of this bill:

  • the Attorney General of the US can obtain a court order to censor an infringing website without due process.  It can then serve the court order on specified U.S. based third-parties to censor the website or stop doing business with the website.  Third-parties include search engines, payment processors, online advertising network providers, and internet service providers.  Third-parties would now be held liable if they do not censor the specified website.  Websites could be held liable for simply linking to an infringing website;
  • additionally, the act would extend most of the tools the Attorney General has to  private copyright holders. They could obtain a court order against a website without due process.  The copyright holders could then serve the court order on specified U.S. payment processors and online advertising network providers to force them to stop doing business with the website;
  • court orders would not be limited to the specified domain, but would include all domains linked to the website that were created after the court order was issued;
  • service providers which voluntary censor websites that they deem to be infringing would be protected from liability.  Should a service provider choose to censor a website, there appears to be no recourse for the owner of the censored website;
  • the bill is directed at “Internet site dedicated to infringing activities”, a definition which is rather loose and very much in the eye of the beholder.

One of the seeming pluses of the PROTECT IP Act when compared to COICA is that it does not appear to directly target domains.  However, domain registrars would be encouraged to take down infringing domain names voluntarily.  We hope that ICE’s attempts to seize domains via Operation In Our Sites does not hold up in court.

We need your help!

The PROTECT IP Act is an enormous leap towards censoring the internet, and we need your help in fighting it.  Please join us on Sunday, May 29th, for our monthly meeting / social.  The meeting starts at 2pm.  We will start the grill around 4pm and go until 6pm.  It will be at 25 Moore St., Somerville, MA.  Please tell us whether you will attend by signing up at our Facebook event or via Tweetvite.  Thanks!

Economy, Fun, Government, News

Links of Note, 1/7/2011

Leave a comment

Quick hit: getting too close to power – Geek Feminism, sexist trolls and worse on the internet

NJ Public Pension Slugfest Reporting Omits 15 Years of Governors Stealing From Workers – Naked Capitalism, as Utah Phillips once said, The long memory is the most radical idea in America.

The Left Has Nowhere To Go – Truth Dig

Good Code– xkcd, a bit o' humor

Another Court Says It's Okay For Police To Search Your Mobile Phone Without A Warrant – Tech Dirt

US Air Force Intelligence Veteran Of Afghan War Explains Why He Supports Wikileaks – Tech Dirt

US Gov't Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked – Tech Dirt

Wikileaks: Israelis ‘Intend to Keep the Gazan Economy on the Brink of Collapse’ – Juan Cole, via Naked Capitalism

More young scientists: 8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study – Geek Feminism

Fed Plans to End Tough Sanction Against Predatory Lending – Naked Capitalism

Standard & Poor’s Triple A Ratings Collapse Again. The Question is Why? – ProPublica

Would You Be Bullish About A Country with Five Years of Negative Real ROE? – Naked Capitalism, not all is rosy in China

Living without Money | a Documentary Film via Mark Boyle

Does America really have the finest military in the world? – Salon

We Really Do Spend More Than $1 Trillion on War – Truth Dig

A War Like No Other

Feynman called a woman “worse than a whore” for not exchanging sex for sandwiches. – Geek Feminism

Economy, Government, Privacy & Surveillance, Social Justice

From Huxley to Orwell

Leave a comment

Chris Hedges over at TruthDig has a well thought out article on our transition from Huxley’s Brave New World to Orwell’s 1984.  Corporate/Governmental domination R Us.  A few exerpts:

“The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

…

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.”

On the face of it I don’t buy that high government deficits mean that the US government will be crippled.  The Fed can easily print money to pay those deficits and we could inflate our way out of our debts albeit slowly and reasonably.  A bit of inflation tends to improve the situation better than the deflation we are approaching.

That all said, the one and half parties of the wealthy will attempt to convince us otherwise, cut the deficit by imposing austerity on the poor and middle class, not the wealthy or the military.  They never willingly impose austerity on the wealthy or the military.  Chris’ suggestions of our path looks true to me.

UPDATE: A friend suggested that Chris Hedges’ article reminded her of this Barbara Ehrenreich talk, put to cartoons – Smile or Die!

Government, Privacy & Surveillance, War on Terror

What type of government surveillance do you want?

Leave a comment

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker posted a blog post entitled Times Square bombing — where were the cameras? and posits that it is better to have lots of small surveillance cameras that can only be accessed after the fact instead of fewer surveillance cameras that are centrally recorded and administered.  The comments are pretty good, but this one caught my eye:

… if we’re all soldiers in the war to defend the Constitution against terrorists, some of us are going to get killed in that defense. And some of us will be killed because ‘defending the Constitution’ means observing the limits it puts on government even when violating them might be more tactically opportune.

I’m sure cameras everywhere would be effective; it just wouldn’t be very American.

Economy, Government

Your kids’ economy is being robbed!

Leave a comment

Years ago, when I took undergraduate economics, we were taught that as a person’s income increases, their savings increase as a percentage of their income.  The rationale is that wealthier people would rein in their consumption as their incomes rose.  No doubt there more than a few Republican, supply-side boosters who parroted the line to justify why it was fine and dandy for the rich to get so much richer than everyone else.

Reality hasn’t been so accommodating to that line of thought, what with the fall in the savings rate as income inequality went through the roof.  However, i didn’t have good figures until this post by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism.  Her graphs (which she gets from a Citigroup report on Plutonomy, and why it is a good thing) sum things up nicely:

Picture 69

That is savings rate on the right and share of income claimed by the top 1%.

Picture 70

Here is the same data as a scatter plot showing the relationship even better. 

Certainly, correlation does not equal causation, but falls in the savings rate seems to lag behind rises in the share of income claimed by the top 1%.  I cannot think of a way that falls in savings rates would trigger a rise in the income of the top 1%.  However, as Yves says:

“If you are rich, you can afford to spend all your income. You don’t need
to save, because your existing wealth provides you with a more than
sufficient cushion.”

To simplify things, many folks who are poor don’t have the income to save.  Folks in the middle class have more of an ability to save and see saving for retirement as possible and so do.  The rich don’t need to save.  There is a status incentive for the middle class to spend beyond their means and emulate “their betters.”  Of course, incomes have shrunk for everyone who isn’t in the top 90%, so perhaps folks are spending to keep the status quo.

One interesting result of this condition is that as the savings rate decreases, we need to borrow more from other countries, assuming investment and government deficits are stable as a percentage of income.  Or perhaps investment could fall, leading to a future dismal economy.

On possible solution is to tax the rich and reduce the federal government’s deficit or even create a surplus.  After all, if the rich aren’t willing to save, there is no reason we cannot have the federal government do it for us.  Indeed, reversing Bush the Lessor’s tax cuts and cutting military spending would go a long way to balancing the federal government’s budget as Doug Henwood pointed out in a recent issue of the Left Business Observer.

[Yes, the title is semi-recycled.]

Economy, Government

Greenspan takes no blame, has no shame

Leave a comment

Well it seems former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is saying he saw the housing bubble, except that he wasn't able to stop it.  If his inability to fess up to his own complicity in the financial meltdown wasn't bad enough, now he wants to blame Fannie & Freddie (GSEs).  As Barry Ritholz wrote back in 2008:

  • 50% of subprime loans were made
    by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal
    supervision; another 30% were made by banks or thrifts which are not
    subject to routine
    supervision or examinations    . How was this caused by either CRA or
    GSEs ?
  • What about "No Money Down"
    Mortgages (    0% down
    payments)     ? Were they
    required by the CRA? Fannie? Freddie?
  • Did the GSEs require banks to
    not check credit scores? Assets? Income?
  • What was it about the CRA or
    GSEs that mandated fund
    managers load up on an investment product that was hard to value,
    thinly traded, and poorly understood

I expect that there will be more attempts by conservatives to blame government laws & regulation for causing the crisis and ignore the fact that a lack of government financial regulation caused the crisis.

Government, Torture, War on Terror

I just had to read one more thing …

Leave a comment

Of course I had to check my RSS feeds one last time before I went to bed and came across this piece from Boing Boing on the CIA torture memos:

Salon's Mark Benjamin went spelunking in the recently released CIA
torture memos and comes back with a stomach-churning account of the
waterboarding practiced at Gitmo. This fine-tuned torture process
repeatedly took its victims to the brink of death (one victim was
waterboarded 180+ times) until many of them simply gave up on breathing
and tried to allow themselves to drown, only to be revived by unethical
medical personnel who collaborated with the war criminals conducting
the torture.

The
documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur
in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed
to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he
inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands
to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's
mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of
liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a
detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to
keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a
session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners
were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott
Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights
at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for
Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total
departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying,
'This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going
to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of
torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

As a friend noted, waterboarding isn't simulated drowning, it is drowning.  "Enhanced interrogation techniques" are just mealy mouthed words for hiding the war crimes that our government carried out.

Of course VP Cheney was a "big supporter of waterboarding" as reported to ABC News via Andrew Sullivan & The Atlantic:

KARL: Did you more often win or lose those battles, especially as
you got to the second term?

CHENEY: Well, I suppose it depends on which battle you're talking
about. I won some; I lost some. I can't…

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your…

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big
supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…

KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away
with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

It is too late to impeach him, but there is no statute of limitations on trying war criminals.

Government, War on Terror

Obama, like Bush before, claims authority to assassinate US citizens

2 Comments

Green Change quotes a Glenn Greenwald article that states that the Obama administration has compiled a list people, including US citizens, which president Obama has authorized the military and intelligence services to kill:

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush
before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens
murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim
that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and
imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests."  They're entitled to no
charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly,
the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign
nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges —
based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists —
produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a
grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn't Obama's policy of
ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or
checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as
much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are
fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have
the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including
American citizens.  That's just the essence of war.  That's why it's
permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war
zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly
detained.  But combat is not what we're talking about here.  The people
on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in
their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a
whole array of other activities.  More critically still, the Obama
administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. 
So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed
anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities
carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his
say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks.  That's quite a
power for an American President to claim for himself.

Greenwald lays it out pretty well and it is worth the read.