Thanks for calling the National Security Agency. Press 1 for a blanket denial. Whatever you heard, it’s not true. Press 2 to hear a transcript of every call you’ve ever made. Press 3 to confess. If you haven’t done anything, that’s OK, the NSA treats everyone like a criminal. Press 4 to have your tax money used to violate your privacy. Press 5 to hear these options again.
Gregg Easterbrook, “Are the Chiefs real or opportunistic?”, ESPN Tuesday Morning Quarterback, 2013-10-29
February 11, 2014
QotD: The NSA voicemail greeting
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February 9, 2014
Democracy and the media
Nigel Davies looks at the uncritical admiration of the form of democracy (while actively ignoring the actual practice) among Western media people:
It is interesting to look around the world at the moment and identify the failures of democracy, and to be amused by the Western media’s complete incomprehension of what is going on and why.
Time and time again you get headlines about how people should stand back and accept the ‘democratically elected government’, despite the fact that the democratic result was a fairly evil dictator keen on persecution, mass murder, civil war and ethnic cleansing.
This is because most ignorant Western journalists believe as an absolute truth that ‘democracy’ is a good thing, despite all the evidence that democracy is as bad, or even worse, than any other form of government. (Interestingly many non-western journalists treat democracy with considerable scepticism, which baffles Western journalists even more.)
Just to be clear Robespiere, Napoleon III, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were in some form ‘democratically elected’ leaders, and every Communist dictator, ever, has regularly received about 97% of the popular vote in their countries.
[…]
Which brings us to unofficial one party states, like South Africa, where there is a popular vote which means virtually nothing. People get a say, but there is no chance of removing the party which — very largely through its dreadful economic and social policies — has kept the vast majority of the voters ignorant and poor (while flooding them with propaganda suggesting that result is an outside conspiracy, and only the people’s party can save them …) Actually some of you might recognise this more directly as being Mugabe’s very blunt approach, but the principal is the same when adopted by more weasely worded one party statists (for whom too many Western journalists have a romanticised and highly inaccurate perspective).
Most African (and many Asian and Middle Eastern … and Eastern European) ‘nations’ that pretend to democracy, are effectively one party states where the ‘opposition’ is never really going to be allowed to get anywhere.
A current example he points to is Egypt:
I am not just talking about people like Hitler who managed to manipulate 25-30% of the vote to dominate a chaotic parliament long enough to change all the rules and entrench their power. (Though that appears to be the default result for 90-95% of all Republics throughout all history, so perhaps it is worthy of some reflection.) No, I am more interested in places where a genuine majority of the population vote repeatedly for a leader who every educated and thinking (not the same thing unfortunately) person knows will lead them to disaster.
Effectively what we are talking about here is popularistic appeals to the ignorant peasantry who make up the majority of the population.
Egypt recently elected the Muslim Brotherhood. This was done by the majority votes of the ignorant peasants in the rural areas, and against the wishes of practically anyone who could be classed as educated, literate, liberal, or with an understanding of rule of law, or role of commerce and legal rights in a modern society. Ie: the traditional appeal to the ignorant to grab control of the ‘means of production’ and ‘distribute it more fairly’ — which always leads to the same results of poverty and persecution whether you call it a Fascist state (Nazi Germany) Communist state (People’s Republic), Theocratic state (Muslim republic, Hindu republic, North Korea), or just a kleptocracy.
Naturally the Western journalists believe the Muslim Brotherhood should be left to develop its ‘democratic’ course.
The inevitable result of letting the Muslim Brotherhood rewrite the constitution and entrench their powers while introducing a Muslim republic with proper Sharia laws, would be a particularly nasty form of dictatorship. Like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, future votes would have been ‘controlled’ and eventually pointless. So the intervention of the military to throw them out and try and redo the democratic project was necessary, and possibly the only (very slim) hope of making it work. However, like Fiji, it may be only the start of many interventions to stop backsliding, until the military and people give up in disgust and settle down to exactly the sort of dictatorship which, more or less, kept things together and slowly moving forward under their previous dictators.
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February 8, 2014
What happened to charities that actually concentrate on charitable works, rather than lobbying?
James Delingpole on the remarkable community of interest between charitable organizations (partly funded by governments) and the government agencies they lobby:
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical”. Thomas Jefferson, 1779.
One of the curses of modern life is the plethora of “charitable” lobbying groups demanding that the government take more regulatory action in areas where most of us believe the state has no business interfering.
Almost every day you read in the papers that some apparently grassroots movement, supposedly speaking for all of us, thinks more should be done to stop us drinking, smoking, eating sugar or salt, make us less sexist, force us to spend more on foreign aid or environmental issues. But if that wasn’t annoying enough, here’s the worst thing of all: we’re paying for these unrepresentative, mostly left-leaning lobby groups with our taxes.
This is the message of Chris Snowdon’s report for the Institute of Economic Affairs, The Sock Doctrine [PDF] — the third in his trilogy of broadsides against the lavishly state-funded “fake charities” industry. By 2007, he noted, a quarter of the UK’s 170,000 charities were receiving money from the state and approximately 27,000 received at least 75 per cent of their income from the state. If you share these charities’ predominantly liberal-Left-leaning aims you probably won’t mind so much. But if you don’t, you might be inclined to believe, as Fraser Nelson argued in these pages last year, that “Britain’s charities are nurturing a colourful, talented and efficient anti-Tory alliance.”
But, of course, there are opposing charitable organizations equally dependent on government funding and spending disproportional time and effort lobbying for their pet causes?
Well the problem is that they’re almost non-existent. The reason for this was identified in 1985 by US researchers James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
“Virtually without exception, the recipients of government grants and contracts advocate greater governmental control over and intervention in the private sector, greater limitations on rights of private property, more planning by government, income redistribution, and political rather than private decision making. Most of the tax dollars used for political advocacy are obtained by groups that are on the left of the political spectrum.”
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February 5, 2014
The Internet and the defenestration of the gatekeepers
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith talks about the recent movie The Fifth Estate, prominent whistleblowers, and how the Internet upset so many top-down information models:
The top three “whistle-blowers”, of course, in no particular order, are Assange himself, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. I’m interested in these individuals for a number of reasons, not the least of which, is that I wrote about them (actually, I anticipated them) long before most people in the world ever knew they existed.
Including me.
Eleven years ago, in a speech I delivered to the Libertarian Party of New Mexico entitled “Empire of Lies“, I asserted that every human being on Earth is swimming — drowning — in an ocean of lies, mostly told by governments of one variety or another. I pointed out that lies of that kind — for example, the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that never happened, and yet cost the lives of 60,000 Americans and 2,000,000 Vietnamese — are deadly. I proposed, therefore, that any politician, bureaucrat, or policeman caught telling a lie to any member of the public for any reason — a well as any among their ilk keeping secrets — ought to be subject to capital punishment, preferably by public hanging.
On network television.
Some time later, I stumbled on what I think is the true historical significance of the Internet. For as long as human beings have been communicating with one another, except among family and friends (and even then, sometimes) communications have been vertical and one-way, from the top down. Just to take it back to the Middle Ages, you can’t talk back to, or argue with a church bell. You either do what you are trained to do when it rings — wake, pray, eat, go to bed — or you do not, and suffer whatever consequences society has arranged for you to suffer.
This sorry situation was not improved materially by later “great” inventions like the printing press, movies, radio, or television. Such innovations only made it easier and more convenient to issue orders. The elite laid down the law to the peons (that’s us) and there was no way of contradicting them. Letters to the Editor are limited to 400 words.
But the Internet, and all of the technical, political, and social phenomena associated with it, turned this communications hierarchy sideways. Almost overnight, it was now possible for anybody on the planet to talk to anybody else, and to speak privately with a single individual, or to millions, without obtaining anyone’s permission, judged not by their power or authority, but by the cogency of their arguments.
Atlas didn’t shrug, Authority wigged.
Traditional Big Media, newspaper, magazine, and book publishers, movie studios, radio and television network executives, held onto their monopoly gatekeeper position, inherited from a more primitive era, desperately and at any cost. Only they were fit to judge what word could be sent by mere individuals to the Great Unwashed (that’s us, again). What it cost them is their very existence. They were incapable of divining that the Age of Authority, including theirs, was over.
For governments all over the world, subsisting as they all do on lies, intimidation, and violence, it was a nightmare. They have tried to fight back, but they will lose. The tide of history is against them. The idea of “peer-to-peer” communication is out there, and — short of the mass slaughter some of them seem to be preparing against us: a measure of their utter despair — it can never be called back or contained.
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February 3, 2014
If you object to anything the government does, Cass Sunstein says you’re paranoid
Justin Raimondo on the former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and his “with us or against us” views of dissent. Any dissent:
Taking up where Princeton University historian and Clintonista Sean Wilentz left off, Sunstein avers:
“It can be found on the political right, in familiar objections to gun control, progressive taxation, environmental protection and health-care reform. It can also be found on the left, in familiar objections to religious displays at public institutions and to efforts to reduce the risk of terrorism.”
In short, any objection to the Obama administration’s agenda is indicative of “paranoia” on both sides of the political spectrum. While it would be tempting to write this off as mere partisan bombast, this isn’t the case with Sunstein, an ideologue whose faith in the beneficence of government action underlies all his public pronouncements. If government sees some benefit to state-sponsored displays of religiosity, well then what’s your problem? And as for the Surveillance State – it’s just a program to “reduce the risk of terrorism,” and has absolutely nothing to do with industrial espionage, compiling dossiers on innocent Americans, and tapping Angela Merkel’s phone.
[…]
So how do you spot these libertarian subversives who deserve to be “cognitively infiltrated” and quite possibly suppressed? According to Professor Sunstein, they share five characteristics:
“The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks – a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.”
What would be a “good reason,” in Sunstein’s view? He doesn’t say, conveniently enough, but what about secrecy? Shouldn’t our suspicions be aroused by the fact that the NSA started spying on us behind our backs? Not even the author of the Patriot Act knew it was being utilized by this administration – and its predecessor – to justify scooping up all telephonic and Internet data generated within our borders and far beyond. Why was it all done in the dark, with even the court proceedings “legalizing” this anti-constitutional coup kept secret? The answer is clearly because such brazen chicanery could never stand the light of day.
And surely Sunstein’s argument can be turned around and aimed at its author: isn’t his proposal that the US government hire paid snoops to “cognitively infiltrate” so-called conspiracy theorists on the Internet (and elsewhere) using a hammer to kill a flea? In his infamous paper, he cites polls showing a good proportion of the people of New York believe the 9/11 attacks were the work of the US government, but even if this somewhat dubious statistic reflects reality what is the risk of failing to confront it with government action? Does Sunstein expect 9/11 “truthers” to take over the state of New York anytime soon? Who’s paranoid now?
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January 31, 2014
Security theatre special edition – destroying hard drives that held Snowden’s documents
It may have been pointless — and it was! — but the British government not only felt it had to do something, but that it had to be seen to be doing something:
New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.
The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian‘s London HQ was the climax of Downing Street’s fraught interactions with the Guardian in the wake of Snowden’s leak — the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book — The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man — by the Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.
In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian‘s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.
Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American’s National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: “We can do this nicely or we can go to law”. He added: “A lot of people in government think you should be closed down.”
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The maple-flavoured NSA used airport Wi-Fi to track travellers
With so much talk about the NSA and GCHQ using every electronic means at their disposal, it was inevitable that some of the documents being released by Edward Snowden would implicate Canadian intelligence in similar activities:
A top secret document retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by CBC News shows that Canada’s electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.
After reviewing the document, one of Canada’s foremost authorities on cyber-security says the clandestine operation by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) was almost certainly illegal.
Ronald Deibert told CBC News: “I can’t see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law, under our Charter, under CSEC’s mandates.”
The spy agency is supposed to be collecting primarily foreign intelligence by intercepting overseas phone and internet traffic, and is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada without a judicial warrant.
As CSEC chief John Forster recently stated: “I can tell you that we do not target Canadians at home or abroad in our foreign intelligence activities, nor do we target anyone in Canada.
“In fact, it’s prohibited by law. Protecting the privacy of Canadians is our most important principle.”
But security experts who have been apprised of the document point out the airline passengers in a Canadian airport were clearly in Canada.
CSEC said in a written statement to CBC News that it is “mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And in order to fulfill that key foreign intelligence role for the country, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata.”
Metadata reveals a trove of information including, for example, the location and telephone numbers of all calls a person makes and receives — but not the content of the call, which would legally be considered a private communication and cannot be intercepted without a warrant.
“No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used,” the agency says.
In the case of the airport tracking operation, the metadata apparently identified travelers’ wireless devices, but not the content of calls made or emails sent from them.
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January 27, 2014
The Kronies – Get konnected!
Published on 22 Jan 2014
Get Konnected at http://www.thekronies.com
The Kronies are in action…Mandating, Tarrify-ing, Inflating, and Boondoggling their way to profits powered by their special konnection to the G-Force. Watch Big-G and his team stomp out competition!
H/T to Popehat for the link.
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January 22, 2014
Thai protests trigger state of emergency declaration
BBC News on the Thai government’s attempts to deal with the ongoing protests:
The Thai government has imposed a 60-day state of emergency in the capital, Bangkok, and the surrounding provinces, from Wednesday, to cope with unrest.
The decree gives the government wide-ranging powers to deal with disorder.
Anti-government protesters have been blocking parts of the capital to try to force PM Yingluck Shinawatra to resign.
They accuse the government of being run by exiled former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, the brother of the current prime minister.
Ms Yingluck has refused to resign and has called an election on 2 February to pacify the protesters.
The state of emergency was announced after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday and comes after a spate of attacks with explosives and firearms on the anti-government protesters blockading central Bangkok for which the government and the protesters blame each other.
On Sunday, 28 people were injured when grenades were thrown at one of several protest sites set up at major road sections in the city.
“The cabinet decided to invoke the emergency decree to take care of the situation and to enforce the law,” Deputy Prime Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul said.
The emergency decree gives the government power to censor the media, ban public gatherings and detain suspects without charge.
George Talusan, a friend and former co-worker of mine was on vacation in Thailand recently and posted some brilliant photos to his Facebook feed. I’ve asked his permission to include a few of them here:
A protester stops his motorcycle and holds up a handmade sign near Lumpini Park (Jan 13)
PDRC protesters wave flags at Victory Monument (Jan 14)
Suthep Thaugsuban delivers a speech at Asok BTS (Jan 15)
PDRC protesters are offered water during a sit-in at Royal Thai Police HQ (Jan 15)
PDRC security guard poses outside Royal Thai Police HQ which had been vandalized after a sit-in (Jan 19)
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January 19, 2014
QotD: Ethics in Washington D.C.
I came across a very fine quote from a retired Marine COL Doug R., “In the perverse environment that is Washington the degrees of unethical behavior make the mere liar the most honorable man in the room. Some of the whores think they are nuns.”
Allen B. West, “Robert Gates and ‘whores who think they are nuns'”, AllenBWest.com, 2014-01-18
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January 17, 2014
The Nanny State ethos – you’re too thick, so we’ll do the thinking for you
At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Tim Worstall talks about the way regulatory agencies approach problems:
It’s claimed as one of the great victories for enlightened (sorry) regulation, the way that the EU and US have both banned the incandescent light bulb through bureaucratic action. The ban came about by raising the efficiency standards required: this meant that the traditional bulb could no longer be sold.
The argument in favour of doing things this way was, in public at least, that everyone’s too stupid (or, in a more polite manner, subject to hyperbolic discounting) to realise that the new bulbs will actually save them money in the long term by consuming less electricity. There are also the more cynical in the industry who insist that it’s actually a case of regulatory capture. The light bulb manufacturing companies managing to get us all away from using cheap as spit bulbs and onto something with a decent margin on it.
[…]
This has a number of implications in the larger world as well: for example, it means that bureaucratic regulation on car mileages (like CAFE in the US) is contra-indicated. A simple tax on petrol will drive up average mpg because we’re not all as thick as bricks. Assuming that climate change really is a problem that must be dealt with then a carbon tax is going to do the job. For we’re not all so dim that we cannot work out the utility of using fossil fuels or not given the change in prices.
That is, we don’t need to be regulated into behaviour, we can be influenced into it through the price system. Something that really shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise to us market liberals: for we’re the people who already insist that people do indeed respond to price incentives in markets.
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QotD: Forming a cabinet in a parliamentary system
The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been ‘democratically chosen’ does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by ‘the people’ — they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further ‘selection’ process is equally a nonsense: there are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all.
Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com
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January 16, 2014
A political speech you’ll never hear
Jim Geraghty‘s congressman is retiring, so some have suggested that he should run to replace him. Here’s the speech he’ll never give:
I have been asked what I am willing to do to earn the great responsibility and honor of representing you in the House of Representatives. My answer is simple and direct: Absolutely nothing.
(Nervous laughter from crowd.)
My fellow Virginians, if you elect me to Congress, I promise that I will not lift a finger for the special interests, the corporate interests, the lobbyists, Big Oil, Big Business, Big Papi, the Big Ten, the Notorious B.I.G., or The Big Bang Theory. I won’t answer to them or any other one of our public discourse’s designated villains of the week.
(Cheering)
I can make this promise with confidence because I’m pretty sure I won’t do much of anything for you, either.
(Cheering stops)
This is an area where my principled commitment to limited government and my deep disinterest in dealing with your problems will align perfectly.
Do you want a deduction or tax credit written into the tax code to benefit your business? Well, tough, because you’re not getting it. Your business is supposed to thrive because it provides quality goods and services, not because it gets some special help from the IRS.
(Murmurs of discontent.)
[…]
Have you ever considered that maybe the reason Congress is so awful is you, dear voters? I mean, you elected these clowns. But even beyond that, most of the time when members of Congress interact with the public, they’re being asked for favors. The mail they get, the phone calls they get, most of the people who show up at their town halls – everybody’s asking them for something. Get more funding for this! Help us get money to do that! Make sure this agency spends more on this local project! Look, your congressman is not Santa Claus! […] Through your behavior and expectations, you’ve conditioned our elected leaders to think of themselves as walking ATMs.
Ask not what your country can do for you … because I’m sick and tired of your whining. Do it yourself.
(The crowd is silent and not happy.)
What do you say, Virginia? Are you ready for a congressman who has nothing to offer you but … well, basically nothing to offer you?
Crowd: BOOOOOOOOOO!
Guy in crowd: Hey, doesn’t Mary Katharine Ham live in this district, too?
Another guy in crowd: Let’s nominate her!
The crowd moves on.
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