Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2013

Nonsense on stilts – Civil libertarians “caused” 9/11, so we have to curtail civil liberties

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

While some pro-surveillance folks may be content to hint that the world is a far more dangerous place if we don’t let the NSA have access to everyone’s electronic communications, there are others willing to go a lot further:

    And so, when a law enforcement task force of the FBI found out in August of 2001 that al Qaeda had sent two dangerous operatives to the United States, it did … nothing. It was told to stand down; it could not go looking for the two al Qaeda operatives because it was on the wrong side of the wall. I believe that FBI task force would have found the hijackers — who weren’t hiding — and that the attacks could have been stopped if not for a combination of bad judgment by the FISA court (whose minimization rules were later thrown out on appeal) and a climate in which national security concerns were discounted by civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle.

Got that? Anyone advocating for basic civil liberties is to blame for 9/11. Holy fuck. This kind of thinking is about as anti-American as I can think of. As we’ve discussed, protecting civil liberties is at the core of the American way of life. “Give me liberty or give me death” is the phrase that Patrick Henry chose, and apparently Stewart Baker believes the American motto should be “you’re all going to die if you fight for civil liberties!” Shameful.

[…]

    Forty years later, though, we’re still finding problems with this experiment. One of them is that law changes slowly while technology changes quickly. That usually means Congress has to change the law frequently to keep up. But in the context of intelligence, it’s often hard to explain why the law needs to be changed, let alone to write meaningful limits on collection without telling our intelligence targets a lot about our collection techniques. A freewheeling and prolonged debate — and does Congress have any other kind? — will give them enough time and knowledge to move their communications away from technologies we’ve mastered and into technologies that thwart us. The result won’t be intelligence under law; it will be law without intelligence.

Basically, shut up with the debate, just let us go back to spying on fucking everyone. If we actually have to “debate” and “protect the Constitution,” some “bad guys” might talk without us knowing about it. And then we’ll all die.

[…]

He then tries to flip the whole thing around and argue that supporters of civil liberties are actually anti-technology, because they’re trying to limit the government’s use of technology. That’s ridiculous, since many of the loudest supporters of civil liberties come from the tech and innovation communities. No one thinks the government shouldn’t make efficient use of technology — but that’s very different from saying it’s okay for the government to either convince or force companies to cough up all sorts of private data on everyone or risk the wrath of the US government. That’s not a fair fight. The government has the power to compel people and companies to do things that they would not do otherwise, though I guess an extreme authoritarian like Baker either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t see it as a problem.

At the end, he makes a bunch of claims about how it’s the US government’s job to “protect” everyone — though I’d like to see where that’s laid out in the Constitution. As mentioned above, he makes some valid points that other countries are just as bad, if not worse, but that’s hardly a compelling argument, because that just allows others to flip it around, and claim that the US has no moral high ground, since it’s ignoring the civil liberties of the public — something that Baker notes he directly supports in this testimony — for some vague and impossible promises of “safety.”

Matchbox cars at 60

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

While my childhood toys revolved more around Airfix 1/72nd scale soldiers and Lego blocks (to provide the necessary terrain for the soldiers to fight over), I had a modest collection of Matchbox cars. After reading this article, I realize that if I’d only had the foresight to keep them in their original packaging and never actually playing with them I’d have the core of an expensive collection on my hands (I’d also have completely missed the whole notion of “fun”, but that’s a separate issue):

The concept of these tiny die-cast models was the response of a father, Jack Odell, to a rule at his daughter’s school stating that pupils were only allowed to bring in toys that would fit inside a matchbox. Odell, a school dropout who later joined the Royal Army Service Corps, was by this time working for a die-casting company, Lesney Products (itself set up by two British ex-servicemen, Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith in 1947). Working out of a bombed-out Tottenham pub called The Rifleman, Lesney spent the early Fifties moving away from producing small products for industrial use towards making die-cast toys. Believing this direction to be a lost cause, Rodney Smith quit the company in 1951, leaving it in the hands of Leslie Smith and Odell, who was by then a partner.

A year later Odell had his brainwave, creating a scaled-down version of an existing Lesney toy, the model road roller, packaging it in a matchbox and sending it with his daughter to school. It was an instant hit: with his little toys, Odell was on to something big.

[…]

Matchbox, along with Corgi and Dinky, turned Britain into the dominant force in die-cast models. In the Sixties, Lesney would become the fourth largest toy company in Europe, with 14 factories in and around London producing more than 250,000 models a week. By the end of the decade Matchbox was the biggest-selling brand of small die-cast models in the world.

To date, there have been more than 12,000 individual model lines, and total production exceeds three billion. If placed bumper-to-bumper they would circle the Earth more than six times — assuming they could be prized from the possessive fingers of their owners.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

Trailer for The Fifth Estate

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:36

A dramatic thriller based on real events, THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization.

Triggering our age of high-stakes secrecy, explosive news leaks and the trafficking of classified information, WikiLeaks forever changed the game. Now, in a dramatic thriller based on real events, THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization. The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society — and what are the costs of exposing them?”

Keep calm, and don’t panic about bee-pocalypse now

Filed under: Environment, Food, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

You’ve heard about the mysterious colony collapse disorder (CCD) that has been devastating bee colonies across the world, right? This is serious, as bees are a very important part of the pollenization of many crops. As you’ll know from many media reports, this is a food disaster unfolding before us and we’re all going to starve! Or, looking at the facts, perhaps not:

In a rush to identify the culprit of the disorder, many journalists have made exaggerated claims about the impacts of CCD. Most have uncritically accepted that continued bee losses would be a disaster for America’s food supply. Others speculate about the coming of a second “silent spring.” Worse yet, many depict beekeepers as passive, unimaginative onlookers that stand idly by as their colonies vanish.

This sensational reporting has confused rather than informed discussions over CCD. Yes, honey bees are dying in above average numbers, and it is important to uncover what’s causing the losses, but it hardly spells disaster for bees or America’s food supply.

Consider the following facts about honey bees and CCD.

For starters, US honey bee colony numbers are stable, and they have been since before CCD hit the scene in 2006. In fact, colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999. How can this be? Commercial beekeepers, far from being passive victims, have actively rebuilt their colonies in response to increased mortality from CCD. Although average winter mortality rates have increased from around 15% before 2006 to more than 30%, beekeepers have been able to adapt to these changes and maintain colony numbers.

[…]

“The state of the honey bee population—numbers, vitality, and economic output — are the products of not just the impact of disease but also the economic decisions made by beekeepers and farmers,” economists Randal Rucker and Walter Thurman write in a summary of their working paper on the impacts of CCD. Searching through a number of economic measures, the researchers came to a surprising conclusion: CCD has had almost no discernible economic impact.

But you don’t need to rely on their study to see that CCD has had little economic effect. Data on colonies and honey production are publicly available from the USDA. Like honey bee numbers, US honey production has shown no pattern of decline since CCD was first detected. In 2010, honey production was 14% greater than it was in 2006. (To be clear, US honey production and colony numbers are lower today than they were 30 years ago, but as Rucker and Thurman explain, this gradual decline happened prior to 2006 and cannot be attributed to CCD).

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

World’s largest cartography class commences

Filed under: Education, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Greg Miller interviews the instructor of the biggest single cartography class … a vast online class of nearly 30,000 people:

Wired: How did you get interested in geography?

Anthony Robinson: I started my undergraduate education as an electrical engineering major. Then I just randomly took a human geography class, and it completely woke me up. Right away I knew I wanted to be a geographer.

[…]

Wired: What was the motivation for the MOOC?

Robinson: Here at Penn State I direct our online geospatial education programs. I was able to make the argument that this is needed. There isn’t one yet, and I’m sure there’s a lot of untapped interest in this stuff. When I meet someone on a plane and tell them I’m a geographer, they’re like “What?” They don’t even realize that’s a thing. Something like a MOOC, that’s free and has a high profile, might get more people interested in what we do.

Wired: Why is it just happening now?

Robinson: One thing that really helps right now is we’re past the age of having mapping software that takes you weeks and weeks to have the basics. The software I’m using in the course, ArcGIS Online, works in a browser. It’s very usable. It’s not perfect but it’s quite good. Also, there are tons of datasets that are available now and searchable. Those are things we spent weeks and weeks on even when I was an undergrad, and that wasn’t that long ago. The technology threshold that it takes to make a map and do some spatial analysis has now ratcheted down to the point where it’s possible to do this with people all over the world working on different technology platforms. I don’t think I could teach this class even two years ago.

QotD: The war on general-purpose computing

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As we wait for dessert, I ask him about his recent speeches at technology conferences discussing the “war on general purpose computing”. He runs through the argument with practised fluency. Computers are by nature general-purpose machines. It’s impossible to make a computer that does all the kinds of things we want computers to do yet is somehow disabled from making copies of copyrighted material, or viewing child pornography, or sending instructions to a 3D printer to produce a gun.

“Oh my God, that’s good,” says Doctorow after his first mouthful of crumble. My peanut butter shortbread is fantastic too, if absurdly calorific. We are interrupted only by another waiter dropping a tray of glasses.

He continues with the argument. The impossibility of making limited-purpose computers won’t stop governments or corporations trying to put on the locks, or changing laws to try to make those locks effective. But the only way these limits can possibly work is subterfuge: computers therefore tend to contain concealed software that spies on what their users are trying to do. Such software is inevitably open to abuse and has often been abused in the past.

Digital rights management systems intended to prevent copying have been hijacked by virus-writers. In one notorious case, the Federal Trade Commission acted against seven computer rental companies and the software company that supplied them, alleging that the rental companies could activate hidden software to grab passwords, bank account details and even switch on the webcam to take photos of what the FTC coyly calls “intimate activities at home”. As computers surround us — in our cars, our homes, our pacemakers — Doctorow is determined to make people realise what’s at stake.

Tim Harford, “Cory Doctorow has Lunch with the FT“, TimHarford.com (originally published at the Financial Times), 2013-07-15

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