As you may recall, a few months back, a big story broke involving the CIA spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who were investigating the CIA's torture program. The details revealed that in the course of their investigation, the CIA had given the staffers an internal document they didn't think they'd given them, which revealed that an internal CIA analysis more or less agreed with the Senate analysis (which has been described as "scathing"). This was a very different position than what the CIA had said publicly. After some in the Senate had asked for the "full report" rather than the draft that the staffers had been given, the CIA believed (incorrectly it appears) that the staffers had gotten access to unauthorized classified materials, and searched the special private network that had been set up just for those staffers. This happened after previous problems with the CIA doing questionable things concerning the Senate staffers network.
In the end, both sides asked the DOJ to investigate the other side. The DOJ has now said that it won't pursue either claim:
"The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation," said Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.
Perhaps this isn't too surprising. The fact that the CIA itself handed the document to the staffers made that claim a pretty clear dead end. However, the CIA searching through the staffers' computer network always seemed a lot more questionable, but perhaps not criminal. It seems likely that the DOJ realized that to pursue either side in this would create a huge political mess, and it was just easier to let the case go, and let the two sides continue to glare angrily at each other.
It's not much of a secret that broadband providers will bend over backwards to try to keep you from cancelling. In fact, many people realize that if you want to get a lower broadband bill you should just threaten to cancel. Rather than actually cancelling, you get transferred to a "retention specialist" who is paid on commission for annoying you into not cancelling. A little over a month ago, Tim Lee at Vox had some of the details, specific to Comcast:
"Everything was very commission-based," says Adam Reinardy, who worked in a Comcast call center in Minnesota until 2008. "You lost commission if you gave deals. If you retained a customer without giving them any sort of deal, you got commission on it."
That's all useful background for the following recording of Ryan Block (former editor-in-chief of Engadget and the founder of gdgt) trying to cancel his Comcast service. The recording starts approximately 10 minutes into the call, at which point Block is clearly already quite frustrated about the whole thing, and the Comcast customer service rep is clearly just trying to play his "part" of getting an answer to why Block is cancelling, so that he can then try to jump onto his big bag of tricks to try to badger and bully Block into staying. It gets more and more painful: The call is pretty much what you'd expect, but taken to a level that verges on Saturday Night Live-level parody. The customer service rep clearly has a script of how to respond to any "reason," but Block won't take the bait by giving him a reason. He just wants to cancel. Even towards the end, after he agrees to cancel the service and promises not to ask any more, he keeps on asking. Block asks when he's going to cancel the service, and the guy pretends that he's "working on it." When Block finally tells him to not speak until it's done, the guy then admits (of course) that it's done. In between all of this, the various salesy pitches get more and more ridiculous. "We're the fastest, guaranteed!" "Why not go with the company you know?" "You'll have to go to the store to return your cablecard!"
Comcast, of course, is famous for their horrible customer service. Just a few months ago, Comcast (and Time Warner Cable) were voted the absolute worst by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which is "considered the most comprehensive customer satisfaction survey in the United States." That was just a month after Comcast was voted the Worst Company in America by Consumerist. I haven't been a Comcast customer in ages following the October from hell when they cut out my internet service every day at 10am, and when I'd call, they'd tell me it was for "scheduled maintenance." And that it should "be back by 4pm." When I asked if it was "scheduled" for the next day, they'd tell me they couldn't tell me that information. Nor could they explain why I hadn't been told of this "scheduled" maintenance or why they couldn't refund me for all that broadband I'd paid for but couldn't use.
Comcast has been trying, for many years, to change that view with its "Comcast Cares" tagline: But, as a pretty long history and this call clearly demonstrate, Comcast leaves off the full version of Comcast Cares in its promo material:
Today Google plans to publicly reveal the team, known as Project Zero, a group of top Google security researchers who will be given the sole mission of finding and neutering the most insidious security flaws in the world’s software.
Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the most law-abiding person would eventually protest this treatment. In fact—they have.1
Now replace police officers with the NSA. The scenario above is what the NSA is doing with our communications, under cover of its twisted interpretation of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The Washington Post has revealed that "Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets." Additionally, “[n]early half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents.”
The thousands of pages of documents that provide that basis for the article are not raw content. Rather, as Barton Gellman, one of the authors of the article states in a follow up published several days later states: “Everything in the sample we analyzed had been evaluated by NSA analysts in Hawaii, pulled from the agency’s central repositories and minimized by hand after automated efforts to screen out U.S. identities.”
What that means is that if you’re on the Internet, you’re in the NSA’s neighborhood—whether you are in the U.S. or not. And like those who protest unjust policies like stop and frisk in their cities, you should be protesting this treatment.
This revelation is significant because it proves the point privacy and civil liberties advocates have been making for years: NSA surveillance is not narrowly targeted. EFF’s legal fight against the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance program has been ongoing since 2006, but the Washington Post’s statistics about 160,000 intercepts they have analyzed from the Snowden files indicate that even what the NSA calls “targeted” surveillance is far from narrow in scope. In fact, it is so bloated that we should all be questioning its necessity and efficacy at this point. Taken hand in hand with The Intercept’s article outlining the targeting of five civil rights and political leaders from the Muslim-American community, our outrage should be palpable.
What’s more, the report comes on the heels of a debate specifically about Section 702 that has been brewing in Congress for months, as civil liberties champions like Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Zoe Lofgren question and work to address how the NSA uses this authority. This revelation should make it clear to the Senate when it considers the USA FREEDOM Act: Section 702 needs to be reformed. Cosmetic changes to NSA spying, or even substantive changes to Section 215 bulk telephone records collection, are insufficient. Unbridled, unconstitutional collection of the contents of communications needs to end.
The Washington Post article is based on a comprehensive review of thousands of pages of documents. In fact, as the article points out: "No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects." What’s more, these are documents that government officials have repeatedly insisted Edward Snowden would never have been able to access.
Regardless of the government’s denials, Snowden did have these documents, and now we know at least some of what they contained. So does Congress. So there’s no excuse anymore for the type of maneuvering that led to the gutting of USA FREEDOM in the House. More importantly, there’s no excuse for the Senate to ignore Section 702 when it considers USA FREEDOM.
Real NSA reform from Congress will, among other things, shut the backdoor that allows the NSA to access American’s communications. It will also end collection of communications “about” a target.
Of course, none of this solves the problem of how NSA surveillance affects non-U.S. persons. One of the shocking things about the Washington Post’s article is its description of the communications intercepted:
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
We are no longer talking about statistics. We are talking about real people going about their daily lives. It is not surprising to learn that in the course of its investigations, the NSA gathers up a considerable number of communications that prove to be insignificant, irrelevant, or (as is the case with communications between US persons) outside the scope of their work. What is shocking is that the NSA keeps this enormous trove of personal data about people it should not be watching in the first place. It appears that the unspoken coda to General Alexander’s “collect it all” motto is “and never throw it away.”
The bottom line is this: The Internet is a global neighborhood. We shouldn’t feel unsafe there. But the NSA doesn’t seem to care.
The good news is, we can do something. Take action now. Go to https://www.standagainstspying.org and see how your elected representative stacks up when it comes to reforming the NSA, tweet at them, and send a letter to President Obama urging him to use his executive authority to reform the NSA now. You can also take action by contacting lawmakers here. If you are overseas, you can sign the letter to President Obama. You can also endorse the Necessary and Proportionate principles. Take back the Internet.
Note: This article is part one of two in a series. The next article will focus on the surveillance of Muslim-American leaders reported by The Intercept on July 9, 2014.
1. NYPD’s Stop and Frisk program, which has targeted people of color, has a shockingly low link to criminal charges: “Close to 90% of the stops resulted in no arrest or summons whatsoever.”
Global governments, the tech sector, and scholars are closely following a legal flap in which the US Justice Department claims that Microsoft must hand over e-mail stored in Dublin, Ireland.
In essence, President Barack Obama's administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. It's a position Microsoft and companies like Apple say is wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border.
A magistrate judge has already sided with the government's position, ruling in April that "the basic principle that an entity lawfully obligated to produce information must do so regardless of the location of that information." Microsoft appealed to a federal judge, and the case is set to be heard on July 31.
In its briefs filed last week, the US government said that content stored online doesn't enjoy the same type of Fourth Amendment protections as data stored in the physical world. The government cited (PDF) the Stored Communications Act (SCA), a President Ronald Reagan-era regulation:
Overseas records must be disclosed domestically when a valid subpoena, order, or warrant compels their production. The disclosure of records under such circumstances has never been considered tantamount to a physical search under Fourth Amendment principles, and Microsoft is mistaken to argue that the SCA provides for an overseas search here. As there is no overseas search or seizure, Microsoft’s reliance on principles of extra-territoriality and comity falls wide of the mark.
Microsoft said the decision has wide-ranging, global implications. "Congress has not authorized the issuance of warrants that reach outside US territory,” Microsoft’s attorneys wrote. “The government cannot seek and a court cannot issue a warrant allowing federal agents to break down the doors of Microsoft’s Dublin facility."
The Redmond, Washington-based company said its consumer trust is low in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. It told the US judge presiding over the case that "[t]he government's position in this case further erodes that trust and will ultimately erode the leadership of US technologies in the global market."
Companies like Apple, AT&T, Cisco, and Verizon agree. Verizon said (PDF) that a decision favoring the US would produce "dramatic conflict with foreign data protection laws." Apple and Cisco said (PDF) that the tech sector is put "at risk" of being sanctioned by foreign governments and that the US should seek cooperation with foreign nations via treaties, a position the US said is not practical.
The Justice Department said global jurisdiction is necessary in an age when "electronic communications are used extensively by criminals of all types in the United States and abroad, from fraudsters to hackers to drug dealers, in furtherance of violations of US law."
The e-mail the US authorities are seeking from Microsoft concerns a drug-trafficking investigation. Microsoft often stores e-mail on servers closest to the account holder.
The senior counsel for the Irish Supreme Court wrote in a recent filing that a US-Ireland "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" was the "efficient" avenue (PDF) for the US government to obtain the e-mail held on Microsoft's external servers.
Orin Kerr, a Fourth Amendment expert at George Washington University, said, "The scope of the privacy laws around the world is now a very important question, and this is the beginning of what may be a lot of litigation on the question. So it's a big case to watch."
In 2004, France's bookstores took the company to court over its discounts and free shipping, arguing that the online retailer was killing off local businesses. Three years later, the court emerged with a ruling that declared Amazon would have to start charging for shipping or face a 1,000 euro per day fine until it did. Amazon chose the latter option, opting to allow aggrieved merchants (and press covering the legal battle) to provide it with some very low-cost press.
Since that strategy didn't pay off, French retailers began pushing for a law aimed at all online retailers -- but most specifically Amazon -- that would make it illegal to offer free shipping to French book purchasers. This was on top of an existing law (put into force in 1981) that forbade anything more than a 5% discount on new titles. This new law forces Amazon to charge for shipping or face being banned from selling in France completely, along with stripping away the 5% discount.
No doubt this was seen as a huge victory for all the local stores that managed to weather the last 10 years of low-level, government-aided price fixing. It probably felt like one, too, right up until Amazon announced its new shipping rate.
France's "anti-Amazon" law prohibiting free shipping and discounts has now gone into effect, and Amazon quickly announced that it had conformed -- technically. Though it no longer ships books for free, it only charges 0.01 euro, conforming to the letter if not the spirit of the law (French Prime members still receive free book shipping).
Enjoy your symbolic victory, French legislators. A whopping centime per shipment "containing books" (no matter how many items are in the cart) will no doubt restore the financial glory of local retailers, especially when unaffected items start flowing into France with both discounts and cheaper shipping.
That's the sort of "victory" that's often achieved by legislating "fairness." There are others ways local retailers could have handled this problem, but they chose the long, expensive and ultimately fruitless courtroom/legislation route and the end result is 1/100th of a Euro per shipment. And this won't be the end of it. Amazon is apparently eyeing an appeal with the EU Commission, which views the new law as anti-competitive.
This is the picture of Steven Spielberg posing with the sick animatronic Triceratops from Jurassic Parksome troll posted to his timeline (links to actual post just in case you want to read all the sadness for yourself) on Facebook. The response was depressing to say the least. It's one of those times when you really hope the people responding are also trolls and just trying to trick the original poster. Like two trolls clubbing the shit out of each other under a bridge. TWO TROLLS ENTER, ONLY ONE WILL LEAVE. Wait -- why does one have to leave? I say nuke the bridge while they're going at it.
Keep going for an even longer, more depressing rant.
Thanks to Outlaw, harry and PInkLemonde, who fear these are the same people who thought Titanic was a live documentary.
"Laws are for other people." - Too many legislators to count
It's common knowledge that insider trading is illegal. In fact, we have an entire government agency in place to regulate trading and to investigate insider trading allegations. Executives have been sentenced to months (sometimes even years) in plush, well-appointed hellholes for participating in insider trading.
Members of Congress, however, were exempt from insider trading rules until 2012. An 2011 expose by 60 Minutes let millions of Americans know that members of Congress had plenty of access to market-changing information and were acting on it.
In a rare (ha!) show of self-preservation, a united House full of Congresspersons facing reelection battles passed the STOCK Act, which basically made Congress and its staffers play by the same trading rules as every other American.
In 2013, with Congressional members safely re-elected, the House decided to roll back its previous legislative effort in order to get back into the insider trading business. It tore out the stipulation demanding disclosure of trading activity -- the one thing citizens could use to verify adherence to the "no insider trading" rule -- stating that these disclosures were a "security risk." This sailed through with unanimous consent late on a Thursday afternoon (the end of the Congressional work week) and was signed by the President the following Monday.
The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and a top staff member say the panel and its employees are "absolutely immune" from having to comply with subpoenas from a federal regulator in an insider-trading probe.
The committee yesterday responded to U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe's order to explain why it hadn't complied with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's requests for documents, phone records and testimony of aide Brian Sutter for more than a year.
The SEC is investigating a suspicious spike in health insurer trading volumes and prices ahead of a report that announced government payments to insurers would be increased, rather than decreased. This investigation claims that a Green Taureg LLC lobbyist sent the information to a Height Securities LLC analyst ahead of the official government announcement and that House Ways and Means staff director Brian Sutter may have been the originating source.
The Committee's legal rep has responded by claiming Congress is above the law or, if not above, very definitely adjacent to it, but certainly not within in and subject to federal subpoenas.
Kerry W. Kircher, the top lawyer for the House, said the SEC's request should be dismissed because the information it seeks concerns legislative activities protected by the Constitution, which can't be reviewed by federal judges.
Kircher also stated that his client does not and will not (EVER) have time for the SEC's "apply the insider trading rules to everyone" bullshit.
Sutter's connection to the investigation is "tangential" Kircher said, and would also interfere with his work because his schedule is "heavily, and nearly permanently, booked."
So, if anyone thought an SEC insider trading probe would bring more accountability to the House, those thoughts may now be dismissed to make room for more cynicism. There's a slim possibility the SEC may extract damning evidence, but it will have to fight its way through a House full of people with no conceivable reason to be compliant. Insider trading was a great Congressional job perk and its uncontested run helped pad the wallets of future lobbyists, board members and consultants. No one really wants to completely end it, but they'd certainly like people to stop talking about it.
Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by... effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated §12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:
Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action.
In other words, it's a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It's pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for "aiding and abetting" the activities of others, but it's a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that "contributes to the completion" of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It's a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.
Tragically, this comes out the same day that the EFF is promoting why everyone should use Tor. While it accurately notes that no one in the US has been prosecuted for running Tor, it may want to make a note about Austria. Hopefully there is some way to fight back on this ruling and take it to a higher court -- and hopefully whoever reviews it will be better informed about how Tor works and what it means to run an exit node.
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.
Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.
But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
Robbie McClaran/Redux Pictures
Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.
What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.
It’s when I realized this that I decided I had to leave my insulated world of the super-rich and get involved in politics. Not directly, by running for office or becoming one of the big-money billionaires who back candidates in an election. Instead, I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbeslabeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal. And yet, just weeks after it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a $15 living wage. Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage. And just 350 days after my article was published, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen, you ask?
It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference. And when we got done, 74 percent of likely Seattle voters in a recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea.
The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.
The Art of the Fat Cat A century and a half of soaking the rich—with ink.
By MATT WUERKER
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it: If a worker earns $7.25 an hour, which is now the national minimum wage, what proportion of that person’s income do you think ends up in the cash registers of local small businesses? Hardly any. That person is paying rent, ideally going out to get subsistence groceries at Safeway, and, if really lucky, has a bus pass. But she’s not going out to eat at restaurants. Not browsing for new clothes. Not buying flowers on Mother’s Day.
Is this issue more complicated than I’m making out? Of course. Are there many factors at play determining the dynamics of employment? Yup. But please, please stop insisting that if we pay low-wage workers more, unemployment will skyrocket and it will destroy the economy. It’s utter nonsense. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.
I know that virtually all of you feel that compelling our businesses to pay workers more is somehow unfair, or is too much government interference. Most of you think that we should just let good examples like Costco or Gap lead the way. Or let the market set the price. But here’s the thing. When those who set bad examples, like the owners of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, pay their workers close to the minimum wage, what they’re really saying is that they’d pay even less if it weren’t illegal. (Thankfully both companies have recently said they would not oppose a hike in the minimum wage.) In any large group, some people absolutely will not do the right thing. That’s why our economy can only be safe and effective if it is governed by the same kinds of rules as, say, the transportation system, with its speed limits and stop signs.
Wal-Mart is our nation’s largest employer with some 1.4 million employees in the United States and more than $25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. Wal-Mart won’t (and shouldn’t) volunteer to pay its workers more than their competitors. In order for us to have an economy that works for everyone, we should compel all retailers to pay living wages—not just ask politely.
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.
So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford.
So why not talk about a different kind of New Deal for the American people, one that could appeal to the right as well as left—to libertarians as well as liberals? First, I’d ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially, not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight years to do it, and they failed miserably.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit.
This is, in other words, an economic approach that can unite left and right. Perhaps that’s one reason the right is beginning, inexorably, to wake up to this reality as well. Even Republicans as diverse as Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum recently came out in favor of raising the minimum wage, in defiance of the Republicans in Congress.
***
One thing we can agree on—I’m sure of this—is that the change isn’t going to start in Washington. Thinking is stale, arguments even more so. On both sides.
But the way I see it, that’s all right. Most major social movements have seen their earliest victories at the state and municipal levels. The fight over the eight-hour workday, which ended in Washington, D.C., in 1938, began in places like Illinois and Massachusetts in the late 1800s. The movement for social security began in California in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Health Care Act—Obamacare—would have been hard to imagine without Mitt Romney’s model in Massachusetts to lead the way.
Sadly, no Republicans and few Democrats get this. President Obama doesn’t seem to either, though his heart is in the right place. In his State of the Union speech this year, he mentioned the need for a higher minimum wage but failed to make the case that less inequality and a renewed middle class would promote faster economic growth. Instead, the arguments we hear from most Democrats are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype of Obama and the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats say fairness—and lose every time.
But just because the two parties in Washington haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we rich folks can just keep going. The conversation is already changing, even if the billionaires aren’t onto it. I know what you think: You think that Occupy Wall Street and all the other capitalism-is-the-problem protesters disappeared without a trace. But that’s not true. Of course, it’s hard to get people to sleep in a park in the cause of social justice. But the protests we had in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis really did help to change the debate in this country from death panels and debt ceilings to inequality.
It’s just that so many of you plutocrats didn’t get the message.
Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us.
The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.
What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?
My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.
Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.
Reminds me of Jamaica... asked why there are military walking the road "to bust people for drugs"... scary stuff
“Advocates from every corner of the political compass have produced a mountain of disinformation about the ‘militarization’ of American law enforcement.”
- Some of the countries (out of a total of 17) whose militaries have fewer helicopters than Arizona law enforcement agencies (according to statistics gathered by the CIA and posted at GlobalFirePower.com)
The ACLU's extensive report on police militarization shows a nation at war with itself. The War on Terror -- a 13-year windmill joust that has generated an excess of military equipment -- has merged with the War on Drugs, an exercise in futility seven years removed from the half-century mark.
Actual military combat, utilizing enlisted soldiers, has given birth to the same equipment now routinely being deployed to fight the crime formerly policed by normal police officers. Cell tower spoofers, surveillance drones, Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected personnel carriers (MRAPs) -- all of these were developed for use by the military. And all of these have now found homes in local law enforcement armories.
The requisition forms are littered with terrorism-related terms, but the reality of the situation is much more banal. Low-level drug dealers are being dealt with like enemy combatants. Law enforcement agencies claim with straight faces that they're falling behind in the arms and technology race, all the while acquiring the best weaponry and technology tax dollars can buy.
These are then handed over to SWAT teams, special police forces developed to take on truly dangerous situations like riots, active shooters, hostage situations and barricaded suspects. They are outfitted in military gear and sent out to perform the everyday task of serving search warrants.
These teams prefer to do this mundane task with a maximum amount of chaos and violence. Warrants are delivered with no-knock raids, ostensibly to give the police department the upper hand on the presumed-to-be-dangerous occupants. In reality, this is the sort of thing that happens far too frequently.
[B]efore 3:00am on a night in May of 2014, a team of SWAT officers armed with assault rifles burst into the room where the family was sleeping. Some of the kids’ toys were in the front yard, but the Habersham County and Cornelia police officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. One of the officers threw a flashbang grenade into the room. It landed in Baby Bou Bou’s crib.
It took several hours before Alecia and Bounkahm, the baby’s parents, were able to see their son. The 19-month-old had been taken to an intensive burn unit and placed into a medically induced coma. When the flashbang grenade exploded, it blew a hole in 19-month-old Bou Bou’s face and chest. The chest wound was so deep it exposed his ribs. The blast covered Bou Bou’s body in third degree burns.
Three weeks later, it's still unclear whether the child will survive. The SWAT predicated its warrant on a $50 drug purchase from someone who didn't even live at that residence. No drugs or guns were found. No arrests were made.
Note that the police defended their actions by claiming they had "no way of knowing" if children might be present. But that lack of crucial knowledge had zero effect on its tactics. Officers didn't throw a flashbang grenade into the house because they were sure there were no children present. Officers threw a flashbang grenade into the house because that's what SWAT teams do when they serve no-knock warrants. The question of children was never raised, at least not until their actions had placed a child in a medical coma and now needed to be defended. A safer assumption would be that nearly every house being raided has a child in it. Most houses do.
This is how law enforcement's new toys get used: to take down lowball drug dealers. A large majority of warrants served are drug-related. The ACLU has the stats.
The problem is more troubling than mere mission creep. The new armor and weapons are begging to be used. These acquisitions, often obtained over the protests of the populace under the agency's "protection" (or just as often, without their knowledge), need to be justified. The terrorism threat cited in requisition forms just isn't going to present itself. And so, law enforcement agencies deploy these against the next best thing: the neighborhood drug dealer boogeyman.
The whole report is, by turns, fascinating, brutal and deeply concerning. Some claim the militarization of the police is a misconception, an illusion generated by a handful of vocal journalists. But the ACLU has the numbers that say otherwise.
Law enforcement knows this is the truth. The government's misguided generosity has allowed local law enforcement to stockpile weapons and armor, but hasn't given it any limitations or guidance. And the stated reason -- terrorism -- simply isn't common enough to justify a one-sided arms "race," no matter how far the definition of "terrorist" is stretched. So, the weapons and armor are used to carry out search warrants, bringing unnecessary amounts of chaos and violence to something police used to handle with an authoritative knock and possibly a scuffle or two if things went south. Now, it's de rigueur. The tools can't be allowed to gather dust and the War on Drugs can't risk any more casualties -- at least not on the part of the enforcers.
At least five Muslim-Americans, including prominent lawyers, a civil rights leader and academics, were targeted for years-long surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency. This is according to new revelations contained in documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The "private security" contractor formerly known as Blackwater has often been accused of being engaged in what might normally be seen as a level of evil and depravity normally reserved for over-the-top movie villains. And yet, every time new news comes out about the company, it only seems to either live up to that reputation or take it even further. Blackwater is today known as Constellis Holdings as of a few weeks ago. Before that it was Academi. And before that it was also known as Xe Services for a while, as the company keeps trying to get further and further from its Blackwater reputation. NY Times reporter James Risen -- who the DOJ is currently trying to put in jail -- has an astounding report about how a Blackwater exec threatened to kill a State Department investigator, telling that investigator that nothing would be done if he were killed, because it happened in Iraq. Believe it or not, this was over the State Department investigator merely investigating claims of unsanitary conditions in a dining facility, rather than anything more serious:
Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.
As chilling as that is, what may be even more ridiculous was the reaction of US embassy officials in Iraq, when they were told of this threat. Rather than siding with the State Department investigator, they sided with Blackwater, and whined about the investigator "disrupting" their relationship with Blackwater:
American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.
A few weeks after the State Department investigators were kicked out of the country by the US embassy, the infamous incident with Blackwater employees shooting up civilians happened. Following that, the State Department finally "took statements" from the investigators about what happened, "but took no further action." As Risen's report notes, when an investigation happened of the shootings, it appears that the warnings about Blackwater's out of control and "above the law" nature that the investigators had sent just weeks earlier were entirely suppressed.
Patrick Kennedy, the State Department official who led the special panel, told reporters on Oct. 23, 2007, that the panel had not found any communications from the embassy in Baghdad before the Nisour Square shooting that raised concerns about contractor conduct.
“We interviewed a large number of individuals,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We did not find any, I think, significant pattern of incidents that had not �” that the embassy had suppressed in any way.”
Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, was one of the more vocal network execs leading the charge against Aereo. He was the one insisting that CBS would move its content off of the public airwaves if Aereo won -- to which many people said that sounded like a good idea, so that others could use that valuable spectrum. Of course, when talking to his investors, Moonves also admitted that an Aereo win would have no real impact on the company, revealing the truth of the matter.
Either way, it's no surprise that he'd be delighted by the victory over Aereo. What gets ridiculous is when he claims that it's a "pro-consumer thing." How, exactly, is that the case? If you look at the comments from just about any Aereo user following Aereo's decision to "pause" the service this weekend in the wake of the ruling, it certainly doesn't look particularly "pro-consumer." Aereo user and GigaOm writer Jeff Roberts has what might be the best explanation of how horrible this is for consumers:
But while CBS and ABC investors may be throwing around high fives at the sop from the Supremes, the average consumer just took a bath. Not only did the court just stick it to them by protecting the TV industry’s bundle rip-offs, consumers also lose access to a marvelous technology.
Aereo, you see, was different. It gave urban dwellers like me a cheap way to see over-the-air shows (which the broadcasters send out for free in the first place, don’t forget) on their computers and phones.
The service, to be sure, was from perfect. The show streams could be choppy, and in the case of sports, the short time delay could be frustrating �” I would sometimes learn about a goal on social media right before seeing it on Aereo. And it lacked the lazy, channel-clicking pleasure of TV.
But Aereo did point out what could be: a commonsense way to watch TV over the internet at a reasonable price. Now, we’re stuck instead with the TV industry’s over-priced bundles and, in the case of mobile, a confusing and convoluted “TV everywhere” system that seeks to replicate an out-of-date form of linear TV watching that no one wants in the first place.
You can claim that the networks' win in the Supreme Court was "good" for the broadcast industry (though I'd challenge that assertion too), but to claim in any way that it was "pro-consumer" is just clearly out and out ridiculousness by Moonves.
The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined (i.e., it can include groups or machines or just about anything). The "backdoor searches" were a special loophole added in 2011 allowing the NSA to make use of "US person names and identifiers as query terms." In the past, it had been limited (as per the NSA's mandate) to only non-US persons.
This morning, James Clapper finally responded to a request from Senator Ron Wyden concerning the number of such backdoor searches using US identifiers that were done by various government agencies. And, surprisingly, it's redaction free. The big reveal is... that it's not just the NSA doing these searches, but the CIA and FBI as well. This is especially concerning with regards to the FBI. This means that the FBI, who does surveillance on Americans, is spying on Americans communications that were collected by the NSA and that they're doing so without anything resembling a warrant. Oh, and let's make this even worse: the FBI isn't even tracking how often it does this. It's just doing it willy nilly:
The FBI does not track how many queries it conducts using U.S. person identifiers. The FBI is responsible for identifying and countering threats to the homeland, such as terrorism pilots and espionage, inside the U.S. Unlike other IC agencies, because of its domestic mission, the FBI routinely deals with information about US persons and is expected to look for domestic connections to threats emanating from abroad, including threats involving Section 702 non-US. person targets. To fulfill its mission and avoid missing connections within the information lawfully in its possession, the FBI does not distinguish between U.S. and non- U.S. persons for purposes of querying Section 702 collection. It should be noted that the FBI does not receive all of Section 702 collection; rather, the FBI only requests and receives a small percentage of total Section 702 collection and only for those selectors in which the FBI has an investigative interest.
Moreover, because the FBI stores Section 702 collection in the same database as its "traditional" FISA collection, a query of "traditional" FISA collection will also query Section 702 collection. In addition, the FBI routinely conducts queries across its databases in an effort to locate relevant information that is already in its possession when it opens new national security investigations and assessments. Therefore, the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial. However, only FBI personnel trained in the Section 702 minimization procedures are able to View any Section 702 collection that is responsive to any query.
Got that? Basically, the FBI often asks the NSA for a big chunk of data that the NSA probably shouldn't have in the first place -- including tons of Americans' communications, and the FBI gets to dump it into the same database that it is free to query. And the FBI tracks none of this, other than to say that it believes that there are a "substantial" number of such queries. This would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment, giving the FBI broad access to searching through the communications of Americans with what appears to be almost no oversight.
Yikes!
Oh, and it's not just the NSA, but the CIA as well. Remember, the CIA is not supposed to be doing any surveillance on US persons (like the NSA), but that's not what's happening at all. At least the CIA tracks some (but not all) of its abuse of backdoor searches:
In calendar year 2013, CIA conducted fewer than 1900 queries of Section 702-acquired communications using specific U.S. person identifiers as query terms or other more general query terms if they are intended to return information about a particular U.S. person. Of that total number approximately 40% were conducted as a result of requests for counterterrorism-related information from other U.S. intelligence agencies. Approximately 27% of the total number are duplicative or recurring queries conducted at different times using the same identifiers but that CIA nonetheless counts as separate queries. CIA also uses U.S. person identifiers to conduct metadata-only queries against metadata derived from the FISA Section 702 collection. However, the CIA does not track the number of metadata-only queries using U.S. person identifiers.
So, the CIA is doing these kinds of warrantless fishing expeditions into the communications of Americans as well, but at least the CIA tracks how often it's doing so. Of course, when it comes to metadata searches, the CIA doesn't bother. It's also a bit bizarre that the CIA is apparently carrying out a bunch of those searches for "other U.S. intelligence agencies," when the CIA should be especially limited in its ability to do these searches in the first place.
Senator Wyden has responded to these revelations by pointing out how "flawed" the oversight system is that these have been allowed:
When the FBI says it conducts a substantial number of searches and it has no idea of what the number is, it shows how flawed this system is and the consequences of inadequate oversight. This huge gap in oversight is a problem now, and will only grow as global communications systems become more interconnected. The findings transmitted to me raise questions about whether the FBI is exercising any internal controls over the use of backdoor searches including who and how many government employees can access the personal data of individual Americans. I intend to follow this up until it is fixed.
Hopefully, now you are starting to recognize what a big deal it was last week when the House of Representatives recently voted to defund the ability to do these kinds of backdoor searches. Still, much more needs to be done.
Oh, and in case you're wondering why Clapper finally 'fessed up to the FBI and CIA making use of these data to warrantlessly spy on Americans, it's worth noting that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is expected to come out with its report on the Section 702 surveillance program on July 2nd (7/02, get it?). It seems likely that the report will discuss these backdoor searches on Americans and how other agencies besides the NSA has been involved in the practice.
It would appear that the government's attempts to convince the public that giving up their privacy for the good of national security isn't going so well. The latest numbers from the Pew Research Center show pretty broad consensus that it's not right to diminish privacy rights in order to fight terrorism, and this was true across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, when it comes directly to the question of NSA surveillance, the research shows many on both sides of the traditional political aisle are against the NSA's practices: The various groupings seem a bit suspect to me (and I generally find "left/right" political spectrum analyzing to be a distraction), but it's still interesting. Given the details of how the groups are made up, it seems likely that many steadfast conservatives and the next generation left might flip the positions above if there were a Republican President, but it does seem notable and important that the solid liberals are now against NSA surveillance as well.
The partisan nature of views on surveillance has been a bit depressing -- because you see the very same people who hated the NSA's warrantless wiretapping under George W. Bush suddenly change their tune under Barack Obama -- and vice versa (I even had a bizarre Twitter debate with someone who dismissed all facts by saying "Well, I trust Eric Holder," which seemed like the ultimate in pure partisan faith). But it's good to see that plenty of people are ignoring the partisan pull (and whatever attempts there are by the NSA's defenders to "educate" the public) and are flat out recognizing how problematic these programs are.
So, over the weekend, the Washington Post reported on the latest bombshell from the Snowden files, showing both that the NSA is really bad at "minimizing" information on Americans that it's not supposed to hang onto and (more importantly) that, contrary to earlier claims, Snowden did in fact have access to the FISA collection database of info (suggesting that the NSA's controls over misuse of that data are not nearly as good as the agency and its defenders have claimed). Over at the Daily Beast, they figured that the various Senators in charge of oversight of the NSA would have some comments on the piece and how it shows an out of control NSA. But, that's not quite what happened. Senator after Senator insisted that they either hadn't yet read the story or were still trying to understand the details. The most ridiculous of all was kneejerk defender of the NSA, Lindsey Graham, who insisted that whatever was in the report didn't matter because we're at war:
Sen. Lindsey Graham�”who sits on the Senate’s armed services, appropriations, and judiciary committees and is one of the Republican Party’s most prominent voices on defense and intelligence issues�”wasn’t familiar with the Post piece.
“I don’t really know the details about what they’re saying in the paper. I know [NSA intelligence-gathering] is necessary. We’re at war with radical Islam,” Graham said.
Of course, that's interesting on two accounts. First, technically, we're not at war, because Congress hasn't declared war. You'd think a Senator would know that. Second, even if we were at war, does Graham honestly believe that there can be no limitations on NSA surveillance and nothing can go too far, so long as he can insist that "we're at war" (even if we're not)? If so, that's rather scary.
Other Senators similarly begged off responding to the piece, insisting they hadn't seen the details, including Intelligence Committee head Dianne Feinstein:
Nearly two days after the release of The Washington Post’s report, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who has direct oversight of the NSA, was just beginning to be fully briefed in the issue.
“I’m just in the process of looking into that,” Feinstein said.
And onto some others:
Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was in Afghanistan and hadn’t had a chance to catch up. Sen. James Inhofe, his Republican counterpart, hadn’t seen the story. Sen. Angus King, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said he didn’t know the facts behind the newest revelations yet. He wasn’t alone.
Of course, it's safe to assume that most of them are just making an excuse to avoid answering the question, but that seems even worse. Either they don't know what's happening and have taken days to find out (bad) or they do know what's happening and simply don't want to comment about it (worse). Then, of course, there's always someone who is going to insist the whole thing is bogus -- but refuses to give any explanation as to why:
Sen. Tom Coburn, a member of Feinstein’s committee, came out of the Senate’s Monday votes challenging the veracity of the report, saying the “story is not accurate.” Pressed on where it was inaccurate, Coburn said, “I can’t tell you in what way. If I could tell you in what way, I would.”
To date, there has been no indication that there is anything amiss with the story. If it were really "not accurate," you can rest assured that the NSA or James Clapper's office would have been hitting back hard already about "inaccuracies" in the report. To date, they have not. Coburn's "trust me," is not particularly convincing since he still is the only person saying that... Though, I guess that's still better than Graham's ridiculous "we're at war!" comment.
CBPIn a case eerily similar to David Eckert's
humiliating ordeal at the hands of cops in Deming, New Mexico,
a federal lawsuit
charges U.S. Border Patrol agents with subjecting a U.S.
citizen to six hours of degrading and fruitless body cavity
searches based on an alleged alert by a drug-sniffing dog. The
lawsuit, filed yesterday by the ACLU chapters in Texas and New
Mexico, says the plaintiff, a 54-year-old New Mexico resident
identified in the complaint as Jane Doe, was crossing the bridge
between Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso after visiting a family
friend last December when she was chosen at random for "additional
screening." This "secondary inspection" involved a pat-down during
which an agent "inserted her finger in the crevice of Ms. Doe's
buttocks"—a rather startling incursion inasmuch as the agents at
this point had no basis to suspect that the woman was carrying
contraband. But they were just getting started.
The agents instructed the plaintiff to stand in line with other
people who had been selected for additional screening and walked a
dog past her. According to the lawsuit, the dog handler "hit the
ground by her feet, but did not hit the ground by any of the others
in the line," and "the dog responded by lunging onto Ms. Doe and
landing its front paws on her torso." Why did the dog do that?
"Because Ms. Doe did not possess any contraband," says the
complaint, "the dog either did not alert or the response was not a
proper alert." Yet this possibly manufactured and in any event
erroneous alert was the basis for all that followed.
First the agents strip-searched the plaintiff, examining her
anus and vagina with a flashlight. Finding nothing, they took her
to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where they forced her
to take a laxative and produce a bowel movement in their presence.
Again they found no evidence of contraband. At this point one of
their accomplices, a physician named Christopher Cabanillas,
ordered an X-ray, which likewise found nothing suspicious. Then the
plaintiff "endured a forced gynecological exam" and rectal probing
at the hands of another doctor, Michael Parsa. Still nothing.
Finally, Cabanillas ordered a CT scan of the
plaintiff's abdomen and pelvis, which found no sign of illegal
drugs. "After the CT scan," the complaint says, "a CBP [Customs and
Border Patrol] agent presented Ms. Doe with a choice: she could
either sign a medical consent form, despite the fact that she had
not consented, in which case CBP would pay for the cost of the
searches; or if she refused to sign the consent form, she would be
billed for the cost of the searches." She refused, and later the
hospital sent her a bill for $5,000, apparently the going rate for
sexual assault and gratuitous radiological bombardment.
David Eckert, you may recall, also got a bill (in his case for
about $6,000) after undergoing a similar exploration of his
orifices and plumbing, which likewise continued, becoming
increasingly invasive, precisely because the cops were not finding
any evidence to substantiate their suspicions. And while the police
in his case did obtain a warrant, the main basis for it was a dog's
purported alert, which in Jane Doe's case seems to have been the
only evidence that she was smuggling drugs. Although such alerts
are
frequently wrong and can easily be faked, the Supreme Court
has said they qualify as probable cause for a search as long as
the dog is properly trained. The burden of showing a dog is not
properly trained lies with the person challenging the search.
Aside from the dangers of putting too much faith in
drug-detecting dogs, this case, like Eckert's, illustrates the
appalling complicity of doctors in waging the war on drugs, even
when it involves utterly unethical participation in dehumanizing
pseudomedical procedures performed on involuntary and audibly
protesting "patients." In addition to Border Patrol agents, the
lawsuit names the hospital, Cabanillas, and Parsa. Lest you
think the criminal malpractice described in this complaint is an
aberration, the ACLU offers evidence that it is in fact
commonplace:
During the car ride to the Medical Center, Ms. Doe asked if the
agents had awarrant. One of them responded that they did not need a
warrant....
Medical Center policy L-13 on searches by hospital personnel
does not permit an invasion of a person’s body for purposes of a
search without either consent or a search warrant. However, in
practice, the Medical Center staff and CBP agents routinely conduct
invasive cavity searches without a warrant, consent or sufficient
suspicion to justify the searches. When Ms. Doe expressed dismay
about the unreasonable searches she suffered, a Medical Center
employee responded that these procedures were routinely followed
when an individual is brought in by CBP agents. The employee also
told Ms. Doe that what happened to her was not invasive.
This kind of abuse tends to draw attention only when the victim
is "innocent," meaning he or she is not in fact smuggling drugs.
But how can any society call itself civilized when it allows human
beings to be treated this way in the name of locating arbitrarily
proscribed substances? Having arrogated to itself the authority to
regulate what people put into their own bodies, the government ends
up forcibly delving into those bodies in search of the chemicals it
has anathematized. To enforce politicians' pharmacological
prejudices, the government's agents and their medical accomplices
become kidnappers and rapists. There is nothing noble or decent
about this immoral crusade, and anyone associated with it ought to
be ashamed of himself.
EFF is in Ottawa this week for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, to influence the course of discussions over regressive digital policy provisions in this trade agreement that could lead to an increasingly restrictive Internet. But this round is different from the others—the secrecy around the talks is wholly unprecedented. The Canadian trade ministry, who is hosting this round of talks, has likely heightened the confidentiality due to the mass public opposition that is growing against this undemocratic, corporate-driven trade deal.
The trade offices from the 12 countries negotiating this deal no longer pre-announce details about the time and location of these negotiations. They don't bother releasing official statements about the negotiations because they no longer call these “negotiation rounds” but “officials' meetings.” But the seeming informality of these talks is misleading—negotiators are going to these so-called meetings to secretly pull together a deal. As far as we know, they're still discussing whether they could expand the international norm of copyright terms to make it even longer. They are negotiating provisions that could lead to users getting censored and filtered over copyright, with no judicial oversight or consideration for fair use. And trade delegates are deliberating how much of a crime they should make it if users break the DRM on their devices and content, even if users don't know it's illegal and the content they're unlocking isn't even restricted by copyright in the first place.
So for this negotiation, we had to rely on rumors and press reports to know when and where it was even happening. At first, there were confirmed reports that the next TPP meeting would take place at a certain luxury hotel in downtown Vancouver. So civil society began to mobilize, planning events in the area to engage users and members of the public about the dangers of TPP. Then seemingly out of the blue, the entire negotiating round was moved across the country to Ottawa. There's no way to confirm whether this was a deliberate misdirection, but either way it felt very fishy.
Already given this level of secrecy, it goes without saying that there will be no room for members of civil society or the public to engage directly with TPP negotiators. Towards the beginning of TPP talks, we were given 15 minutes to present to stakeholders, in addition to a stakeholder event that allowed us to hang around a big room to meet and pass information to negotiators who walked by. Then it was cut down to ten minutes (after we made some noise that it was going to be cut down to a mere eight minutes). In the following rounds, the stakeholder event was completely removed from the schedules of the official rounds. These didn't provide sufficient time to convey to negotiators about the major threats we saw in this agreement, so those events already seemed to be a superficial nod to public participation. But now, they don't even pretend to give us their ear.
As we watch TPP crawl its way towards getting finalized, signed, and eventually taint our laws with its one-sided corporate agenda, we need to continue to remember this fact: laws made in secret, with no public oversight or input, are illegitimate. That is not how law is made in democracies. If we're to defend the fundamental democratic rule that law is based on transparent, popular consensus, we need to fight back against an agreement that engages in such a secretive, corporate-captured process.
His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.
It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.
To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.
"Historical documents of long-dormant conflicts and operations." Scudder dared to ask for these documents, and the CIA cut him loose. It also sent another federal agency after him -- the FBI.
On Nov. 27, 2012, a stream of black cars pulled up in front of Scudder’s home in Ashburn, Va., at 6 a.m. FBI agents seized every computer in the house, including a laptop his daughter had brought home from college for Thanksgiving. They took cellphones, storage devices, DVDs, a Nintendo Game Boy and a journal kept by his wife, a physical therapist in the Loudoun County Schools.
To date, only his daughter has received her laptop back. Every other computer remains in the hands of the FBI, despite the fact that no charges were ever pressed and despite the fact that many of the documents Scudder asked for have been released by the CIA in the interim. More from his request list are due to be released in the near future.
The CIA avails itself of a wide array of FOIA exemptions, but its reluctance to publish historical documents is just baffling -- and is most likely a result of the agency's long-running adversarial relationship with transparency. It's been noted here before that the CIA has used the often-abused b(5) exemption to withhold documents over five decades old (dealing with the Bay of Pigs invasion), claiming that the release of the "sensitive" documents would "confuse the public."
Despite Scudder's efforts, the flow of historical CIA documents will only decrease in the future. The office charged with declassifying historical documents has been closed, deemed expendable by the agency in the face of budget cuts. This workload will be routed through the agency's FOIA office, creating even more incentive for the CIA to stonewall requests.
Scudder never did anything his superiors thought was wrong until after he attempted to free these historical documents. Everything the agency never took issue with during his previous 18 years of employment -- like personal call infractions and the possession of photos (taken by Scudder in his position as "official CIA photographer") deemed "classified" -- was suddenly yet another reason to force him out. It's been clear for a long time that the government doesn't care much for whistleblowers. It also seems to have something against transparency, even concerning documents of historical interest only.
Scudder did nothing criminal. He just did something the agency didn't like. And for that, he lost his job and clearance. So, it's not just whistleblowing that can get you destroyed. It's also holding the government to its own transparency standards -- something that isn't remotely criminal but is apparently completely unforgivable.
This is Canadian graphic designer Brennan Gleason's 'Resum-Ale', a 4-pack of blonde beer he home-brewed and packaged with his resume. The resume is printed on the box, and each bottle contains an example of his graphic design work. Pretty clever. Unless your homebrew gives potential employers diarrhea, in which case you f***ed up. Remember: never give a boss diarrhea until you've worked for them at least a month. It's common courtesy.
Thanks to El Capitan, who can steer my boat on the hunt for treasure any day.
Learning about Linux is not a crime—but don’t tell the NSA that. A story published in German on Tagesschau, and followed up by an article in English on DasErste.de today, has revealed that the NSA is scrutinizing people who visit websites such as the Tor Project’s home page and even Linux Journal. This is disturbing in a number of ways, but the bottom line is this: the procedures outlined in the articles show the NSA is adding "fingerprints"—like a scarlet letter for the information age—to activities that go hand in hand with First Amendment protected activities and freedom of expression across the globe.
What we know
The articles, based on an in-depth investigation, reveal XKeyscore source code that demonstrates how the system works. Xkeyscore is a tool which the NSA uses to sift through the vast amounts of data it obtains. This source code would be used somewhere in the NSA’s process of collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data to target certain activities. According to the Guardian, XKeyscore’s deep packet inspection software is run on collection sites all around the world, ingesting one or two billion records a day.
The code contains definitions that are used to determine whether to place a "fingerprint" on an online communication, to mark it for later. For example, the NSA marks online searches for information about certain tools for better communications security, or comsec, such as Tails.
As the code explained, "This fingerprint identifies users searching for the TAILs (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) software program, viewing documents relating to TAILs, or viewing websites that detail TAILs." Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It allows a user to leave no trace on the computer they are using, which is especially useful for people communicating on computers that they don’t trust, such as the terminals in Internet cafes.
The NSA also defines Tor directory servers (by IP number) and looks for connections to the Tor Project website. This is hardly surprising, considering the documentation of the NSA’s distaste for Tor. It is, however, deeply disappointing. Using privacy and anonymity software, like Tor and Tails, is essential to freedom of expression.
Most shocking is the code that fingerprints users who visit Linux Journal, the website of a monthly magazine for enthusiasts of the open-source operating system. The comments in the NSA’s code suggest that the NSA thinks Linux Journal is an "extremist forum," where people advocate for Tails. The only religious wars in the Linux Journal are between the devoted users of vi and emacs.
Learning about security is not suspicious
The idea that it is suspicious to install, or even simply want to learn more about, tools that might help to protect your privacy and security underlies these definitions—and it’s a problem. Everyone needs privacy and security, online and off. It isn’t suspicious to buy curtains for your home or lock your front door. So merely reading about curtains certainly shouldn’t qualify you for extra scrutiny.
Even the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recognizes this, as the FISA prohibits targeting people or conducting investigations based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment. Regardless of whether the NSA is relying on FISA to authorize this activity or conducting the spying overseas, it is deeply problematic. The U.S. Constitution still protects people outside U.S. borders, and, as a U.S. appeals court recently recognized, even non-citizens are not bereft of its protections.
Moreover, privacy is a human right, which the U.S. has recognized by signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The fingerprinting program revealed today is fundamentally inconsistent with this right.
Tor is used to circumvent Internet censorship
The code focuses a lot on the Tor Project and its anonymity software. Tor is an essential tool for circumventing Internet censorship, which is used extensively by the governments of countries such as China and Iran to control the flow of information and maintain their hold on power. In fact, Tor was developed with the help of the U.S. Navy, and currently gets funding from several sources within the U.S. government, including the State Department. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made support for anti-censorship tools a key element of her Internet policy at the State Department, declaring: "The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyberspace."
You can still use Tor and TAILs
One question that is sure to come up is whether this means people desiring anonymity should stop using Tor or Tails. Here’s the bottom line: If you’re using Tor or Tails, there is a possibility that you will be subject to greater NSA scrutiny. But we believe that the benefits outweigh the burdens.
In fact, the more people use Tor, the safer you are. That’s why we’re continuing to run the Tor Challenge. The ubiquitous use of privacy and security tools is our best hope for protecting the people who really need those tools—people for whom the consequences of being caught speaking out against their government can be imprisonment or death. The more ordinary people use Tor and Tails, the harder it is for the NSA to make the case that reading about or using these tools is de facto suspicious.
Jake Appelbaum et. al, are reporting on XKEYSCORE selection rules that target users -- and people who just visit the websites of -- Tor, Tails, and other sites. This isn't just metadata; this is "full take" content that's stored forever.
This code demonstrates the ease with which an XKeyscore rule can analyze the full content of intercepted connections. The fingerprint first checks every message using the "email_address" function to see if the message is to or from "bridges@torproject.org". Next, if the address matched, it uses the "email_body" function to search the full content of the email for a particular piece of text - in this case, "https://bridges.torproject.org/". If the "email_body" function finds what it is looking for, it passes the full email text to a C++ program which extracts the bridge addresses and stores them in a database.
[...]
It is interesting to note that this rule specifically avoids fingerprinting users believed to be located in Five Eyes countries, while other rules make no such distinction. For instance, the following fingerprint targets users visiting the Tails and Linux Journal websites, or performing certain web searches related to Tails, and makes no distinction about the country of the user.
[...]
There are also rules that target users of numerous other privacy-focused internet services, including HotSpotShield, FreeNet, Centurian, FreeProxies.org, MegaProxy, privacy.li and an anonymous email service called MixMinion as well as its predecessor MixMaster. The appid rule for MixMinion is extremely broad as it matches all traffic to or from the IP address 128.31.0.34, a server located on the MIT campus.
It's hard to tell how extensive this is. It's possible that anyone who clicked on this link -- with the embedded torproject.org URL above -- is currently being monitored by the NSA. It's possible that this only will happen to people who receive the link in e-mail, which will mean every Crypto-Gram subscriber in a couple of weeks. And I don't know what else the NSA harvests about people who it selects in this manner.
Whatever the case, this is very disturbing.
EDITED TO ADD (7/3): The BoingBoing story says that this was first published on Tagesschau. Can someone who can read German please figure out where this originated.
And, since Cory said it, I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents. I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there.
EDITED TO ADD (7/3): More newsstories. Thread on Reddit. I don't expect this to get much coverage in the US mainstream media.
// START_DEFINITION
/*
These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
extremists on extremist forums.
*/
$TAILS_terms=word('tails' or 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System') and
word('linux'
or ' USB ' or ' CD ' or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC ' or 'truecrypt' or '
tor ');
$TAILS_websites=('tails.boum.org/') or ('linuxjournal.com/content/linux*');
// END_DEFINITION
// START_DEFINITION
/*
This fingerprint identifies users searching for the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, viewing documents relating to
TAILs,
or viewing websites that detail TAILs.
*/
fingerprint('ct_mo/TAILS')=
fingerprint('documents/comsec/tails_doc') or web_search($TAILS_terms) or
url($TAILS_websites) or html_title($TAILS_websites);
// END_DEFINITION
EDITED TO ADD (7/4): EFF points out that it is illegal to target someone for surveillance solely based on their reading:
The idea that it is suspicious to install, or even simply want to learn more about, tools that might help to protect your privacy and security underlies these definitions -- and it’s a problem. Everyone needs privacy and security, online and off. It isn't suspicious to buy curtains for your home or lock your front door. So merely reading about curtains certainly shouldn’t qualify you for extra scrutiny.
Even the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recognizes this, as the FISA prohibits targeting people or conducting investigations based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment. Regardless of whether the NSA is relying on FISA to authorize this activity or conducting the spying overseas, it is deeply problematic.
It's amazing what fun we can have when we really get a culture of permission going. Trademark law, ostensibly built around the idea of consumer protection when it comes to branding, has since devolved into a platform where certain entities think they can essentially own certain common words and phrases, such as "emergency essentials", or "footlong", or "monster." However, once you've opened the door to that kind of relatively minor insanity, it lets the really crazy monsters through.
Let's take, for instance, the word "how." You can't own "how", right? Well, according to the lawsuit of Dov Seidman, who portends to be something called a "corporate virtue advisor", you damn well can.
In papers filed in Manhattan federal court, Dov Seidman, author of "HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything," says how Chobani is using "how" in its current marketing campaign is a blatant rip-off. Seidman and his company, LRN, "whose business is based on promoting ethical corporate behavior, own federal trademark registrations for word and mark HOW," the suit says.
Let's just drive this point home, shall we? A purveyor of business ethics is suing Chobani, a company that makes Greek yogurt, because they used the word "how" in a marketing campaign. Just let that sink in for a moment. The fight is over a single word, not some multi-word phrase. Hell, it's over a single syllable. And customer confusion is difficult to imagine, given that one side of the fight is a guy that talks to companies about who-knows-what and the other, you know, makes yogurt. So, how is this suit even possible? Well, it apparently falls upon a time when Chobani tweeted at Seidman to flatter and admire him.
The company has since claimed the campaign is purely coincidental, but Seidman noted that he got a Twitter message from Chobani on January 29 saying, "Thanks for inspiring the world to care about 'how.' Can you help inspire the food industry, too?" The "very next day," the suit says, the company "launched Chobani's new branding platform - which employs 'HOW' in precisely the same manner as plaintiffs employ their HOW marks: as a noun connoting responsible and ethical corporate behaviors."
And? So the hell what? Inspiration in the form of a single word does not a trademark violation make, because that would essentially lock up the courts for years as everyone fought roughly everyone. There's a reason trademarks, especially those on short phrases or common words, aren't all-encompassing throughout all of commercial use. That would break language completely.
Chobani is on record stating that this whole thing is exceptionally silly. One would hope a court will throw this out the moment it hits a bench. And how!
Tim Murray, a self-identified "human," is contesting the Republican Congressional nomination in Oklahoma City's third district, on the grounds that his opponent, the incumbent Rep. Frank Lucas, was secretly replaced with a body-double after being executed by the World Court in Ukraine "on or about jan. 11, 2011."
Read the rest
When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.
And then the EU wonders why support for even more 'Europe' is at an all-time low.
Google engineers overnight updated the company's technical infrastructure to begin implementing the removals, and Thursday began sending the first emails to individuals informing them that links they had requested were being taken down. The company has hired a dedicated "removals team" to evaluate each request, though only a small number of the initial wave of takedown requests has so far been processed.
"This week, we're starting to take action on the removals requests that we've received," a Google spokesman said. "This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually, and we're working as quickly as possible to get through the queue."
Perhaps even more troubling, is that after EU regulators got worked up about Google's plan to at least indicate that certain search results had been removed (as it does with DMCA copyright takedowns), Google has backed down on that plan:
Google, for its part, has appeared to bend to regulators' desire that the company refrain from indicating in search results when something had been removed. Google had earlier indicated it might highlight the removals, something it does when it removes links to pirated content. But EU regulators told Google in recent weeks that such a move would undermine the spirit of the decision by making it clear some individuals had wanted information about them suppressed, one regulator said.
Instead, Google on Thursday added a blanket notification that appears at the bottom of most results for individual name searches conducted on Google's European search websites, according to an explanation the company posted to its website. The notification—"Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe"—is added algorithmically to searches that appear to be for a name, a person familiar with the matter said.
Still, it seems highly likely that Google is going to face more litigation over this, since some are grumbling that Google is only removing those results on its EU pages, and that if someone sneaks over to one of Google's non-EU search engines, it can still find the (again, truthful) information.
This whole thing is a huge mess based on people totally misunderstanding the nature of public information. And, because of that, there are going to be a series of fights over just how far Google has to go in censoring such information.
Any video game producer who produces a product for which online play is a large component also has to fight an ongoing arms-race against cheaters and hackers who gain an unfair advantage in the game and threaten the gamer ecosystem. It's annoying, it sucks, and the fight is unending. For online games, that's just kind of the deal. Most companies work with programmers and 3rd party service providers, like Steam, to try to ban players who cheat. Other companies, such as Blizzard, choose to try to twist copyright law into some kind of anti-cheater pretzel. Japan, on the other hand, appears to be done screwing around.
Yomiuri Online, one of Japan's largest newspapers, reports that this is the first time gamers have had criminal liability charged against them in Japan for allegedly using cheat programs. One of the gamers is a university freshman, another is a 17 year-old vocational school student, and the last of the trio is a 17-year-old high school student. In Nexon's statement about the legal charges, the company explains that these three players allegedly used the cheat tools repeatedly in the game. IT Media reports that distribution of cheats was also allegedly involved.
Yup, things just got a little more real in the realm of pretending to shoot everyone you see. Yes, cheating is annoying. But criminal? That seems like a massive overreaction and tremendously dangerous. Cheating in online games goes back all the way to the dial-up days and companies have always taken it upon themselves to keep cheaters out of their games. They may not like the arms race, but that hardly means it should reach the level of criminal liability -- especially when the line between cheating and just gaining some kind of advantage may get blurry pretty fast. It's reasonable to argue that if the game maker allows something to happen in the game, then it's on that game maker to set things up to block actions it doesn't like. Opening it up to the criminal justice system seems like a recipe for disaster.
Cheating is wrong, but couldn't Nexon simply ban these players? Maybe the company tried, but was unsuccessful. Or maybe Nexon should've tried harder to combat the cheats. But making them a crime?
It's easy to point at cheaters and say they aren't worth defending, but nobody really wants to open up this can of worms where we can all be charged with crimes for messing around in a game.
We recently noted that former NSA boss Keith Alexander is running around asking for $600k to $1 million per month for his new "cybersecurity" consulting firm. While some people thought that the number was "low" for banks, that doesn't make any sense. You could hire a lot of really good actual security professionals for that kind of cash. So it made us wonder just what banks thought they were getting for that $1 million. Actual security professional Bruce Schneier wondered that as well, and wondered aloud if the one difference was that... Alexander could give them classified info -- such as where he hid the backdoors in their routers.
That statement apparently caught the attention of Rep. Alan Grayson, who has been a vocal opponent of NSA overreach. He's now sent a letter to the Financial Service Rountable to point out that selling classified info is a crime:
Security expert Bruce Schneier noted that this fee for Alexander's services is on its face unreasonable. "Think of how much actual security they could buy with that $600k a month. Unless he's giving them classified information." Schneier also quoted Recode.net, which headlined this news as: "For another million, I'll show you the back door we put in your router."
This arrangement with Mr. Alexander may also include additional work with the shadow regulatory firm The Promontory Group, with whom Alexander apparently will partner "on cybersecurity matters." According to Promontory spokesman Chris Winans, Mr. Alexander "and a firm he's forming will work on the technical aspects of these issues, and we on the risk-management compliance and governance elements."
Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods. Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.
Grayson also demands "all information related to your negotiations with Mr. Alexander, so that Congress can verify whether or not he is selling military or cybersecurity secrets to the financial services industry for personal gain. Sure, it's a snarky move, but there is a point behind it. Alexander can't command those sums because of his actual technical expertise. The reality, of course, is that he's selling his connections to the government. But it certainly raises the question of appearances.
I'm no conspiracy theorist, generally speaking, but I have to admit the apparent systematic militarization of domestic police forces throughout the country scares the hell out of me. You've seen it, too. Officers, once clad in powder blue uniforms, are suddenly dressed in blues that are so dark they might as well be black. Small-town police forces are gobbling up military-style equipment for god-knows-why. Regulatory agencies are sending out armed forces to rescue wildlife. Whatever your politics, it's pretty clear that there is some kind of imbalance on display here.
The good news, however, is that these are public servants we're talking about here, so they're subject to a certain degree of transparency and information requests from John Q Public. Right? Right!?! Wrong, at least according to SWAT teams in Massachusetts, which are bizarrely claiming protection from such requests due to Massachusetts SWAT teams now being part of a private corporation.
As part of the American Civil Liberties Union's recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response. As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments...Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they're private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they're immune from open records requests.
Yes sir, law enforcement just went private. It makes no sense, of course, because these LECs are in charge of oversight for local law enforcement agencies, LEC employee lists include all manner of public servants, and LEC SWAT teams are used to conduct raids on the citizenry. All of this is funded, by the way, with public money. Our money. That this money is funneled in from the public coffers of local police agencies doesn't make a lick of difference. The argument is essentially that if an LEC uses our money to set up its own oversight authority and then slapps a 501(c)(3) label on it, it no longer has to respond to public records laws. And, per the ACLU, this ain't some small-time problem we're discussing here.
Approximately 240 of the 351 police departments in Massachusetts belong to an LEC. While set up as “corporations,” LECs are funded by local and federal taxpayer money, are composed exclusively of public police officers and sheriffs, and carry out traditional law enforcement functions through specialized units such as SWAT teams. Police departments and regional SWAT teams are public institutions, working with public money, meant to protect and serve the public's interest. If these institutions do not maintain and make public comprehensive and comprehensible documents pertaining to their operations and tactics, the people cannot judge whether officials are acting appropriately or make needed policy changes when problems arise.
Which, of course, is the entire point. They're hiding from public scrutiny behind the veil of incorporation, which may rank right up there among the most cynical things a government organization has ever done. It's a move one might find in the corporate republic of some dystopian novel. I say that because it's truly not as though the police departments in question are attempting to claim some kind of exemption within public records law. They're just putting up a stone wall.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Jessie Rossman, a staff attorney for the Massachusetts ACLU, told me in a phone interview. “The same government authority that allows them to carry weapons, make arrests, and break down the doors of Massachusetts residents during dangerous raids also makes them a government agency that is subject to the open records law. “They didn’t even attempt to claim an exception,” Rossman says. “They’re simply asserting that they’re private corporations.”
Now, the ACLU is suing, claiming that these LECs have received both local and federal funding from government tax coffers, but others are suggesting this attempt to claim privatization is not without its pitfalls for those same law enforcement organizations. Pretending to be a private corporation to avoid freedom of information requests is one thing, but wouldn't that also mean giving up other things as well?
The claim by the Massachusetts LECs in response to the ACLU's demand under Freedom of Information laws is a cute attempt to twist corporate law with public authority law, but it is sheer, unadulterated nonsense. They can be one or the other. They cannot, by definition, be both.
The curious question is that if a cop claims to be exercising police authority on behalf of a private entity, does he lose qualified immunity for his actions, and subject himself to the same tort law as anyone else? It would seem so, not because he’s right about working for an LEC private corporation, but because he subjectively disavows the protections he would otherwise have if he functioned under the authority of the state. He stripped himself of immunity, as well as authority.
You can already hear the tortured back peddling that would be on display should such a situation arise, can't you? But that's just trying to get some fun out of what is clearly a claim by public institutions that cannot be allowed to stand. Allowing this move to be successful would only open the door to every other public institution that desired private oversight status to employ the same technique, the result of which would be public tax money propping up an officially private corporate government in which transparency is granted at that same corporate government's pleasure and never otherwise. It's the germination of an unholy mixture of corporatocracy and fascism and it would be the undoing of the very concept of the American government.
This is the picture of Steven Spielberg 
Thanks to Outlaw, harry and PInkLemonde, who fear these are the same people who thought Titanic was a live documentary.
CBPIn a case eerily similar to David Eckert's
This is Canadian graphic designer
Tim Murray, a self-identified "human," is contesting the Republican Congressional nomination in Oklahoma City's third district, on the grounds that his opponent, the incumbent Rep. Frank Lucas, was secretly replaced with a body-double after being executed by the World Court in Ukraine "on or about jan. 11, 2011."
