Quotulatiousness

August 6, 2013

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on reforming the NSA

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:36

The EFF has a few suggestions on how to go about reining-in the NSA:

While we still believe that the best first step is a modern Church Committee, an independent, public investigation and accounting of the government’s surveillance programs that affect Americans, members of Congress seem determined to try to enact fixes now. Almost a dozen bills have already been introduced or will be introduced in the coming weeks.

While we’re also waiting to see what the various bills will look like before endorsing anything, here’s — in broad strokes — what we’d like to see, and what should be avoided or opposed as a false response. We know full well that the devil is in the details when it comes to legislation, so these are not set in stone and they aren’t exhaustive. But as the debate continues in Congress, here are some key guideposts.

This first post focuses on surveillance law reform. In later posts we’ll discuss transparency, secret law and the FISA Court as well as other topics raised by the ongoing disclosures. In short, there’s much Congress can and should do here, but we also need to be on the lookout for phony measures dressed as reform that either don’t fix things or take us backwards.

Helping the Russians laugh … at us

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Bruce Sterling on the Edward Snowden situation:

This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean, sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials, surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being hilarious.

Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does.

If Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.

But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.

These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero.

The Russians, by contrast, know all about dissidents like Snowden. The Russians have always had lots of Snowdens, heaps. They know that Snowden is one of these high-minded, conscience-stricken, act-on-principle characters who is a total pain in the ass.

Modern Russia is run entirely by spies. It’s class rule by the “siloviki,” it’s Putin’s “managed democracy.” That’s the end game for civil society when elections mean little or nothing, and intelligence services own the media, and also the oil. And that’s groovy, sure, it’s working out for them.

When you’re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They’re a drag.

[…]

Citizens and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies! Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

Get used to seeing the term “parallel construction”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

From Zero Hedge:

Undated documents discovered by Reuters show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” is one law professor’s response to the fact that a secretive DEA unit is funneling wiretap, informant, and telephone database information to authorities across the nation in order to launch investigations of Americans (targeting common criminals, primarily drug dealers), “It is one thing to create special rules for national security, ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

Agents are instructed to use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by [the secret DEA source],” and as the documents reveal — “remember that the utilization of [data] cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function.”

Stunningly, after an arrest was made, agents then created a “parallel construction” to suggest the information secretly gathered was stumbled up during the course of the investigation — “It’s just like laundering money — you work it backwards to make it clean.” One recently retired federal gent noted, “It was an amazing tool; our big fear was that it wouldn’t stay secret.”

August 5, 2013

Political symbology

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

L. Neil Smith in the latest Libertarian Enterprise:

Author Robert A. Heinlein once observed: “The American eagle eats carrion, never picks on anything its own size, and will soon be extinct.”

Benjamin Franklin wanted our national symbol to be the turkey. He regarded it as a noble creature and didn’t mean it as a joke. It was one of the few times the good Doctor Franklin was wrong. I knew a farm family once, who tried raising turkeys. If it rained they had to get them under cover, fast. Otherwise, they’d look up, gaping, to see where all that water falling on their heads was coming from, and drown.

By the thousands.

On second thought, maybe Ben was onto something, symbolically. That turkey behavior sounds very much like the American electorate today.

The libertarian movement seems to have chosen the porcupine as a symbol. It never starts a fight but always finishes it. Problem is, the porcupine has a brain about the size of a pinto bean, and can be accurately compared to a slow-moving pointy rock. At that, I suppose it’s a lot better than the Hollow French Woman in New York Harbor that the porcupine-bright National Libertarian Party has adopted as its logo.

Personally, I’ve always rather liked the skunk as a national or party symbol. They have a negative reputation they don’t deserve at all. Skunks are highly resourceful organisms, and very, very smart. And they carry the ultimate means of self-defense, something that even wolves and mountain lions respect and give the widest possible berth to. My favorite mental picture is the little guy standing on his front paws, his back legs and tail high in the air, letting the enemy have it.

Nepotism … you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Government, Japan, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Steve Chapman makes a case against nepotism in the modern world:

It would be silly to make Caroline Kennedy the White House science adviser: She’s not a scientist. It would be silly to name her fire commissioner of New York City: She has no background in public safety.

The standards are different in other fields. Kennedy has no previous known interest in Japan, Asia or international relations and is not a diplomat. But Barack Obama has chosen her to be the next ambassador to Japan.

Liz Cheney, likewise, is not inhibited by anything she lacks. She went to high school in northern Virginia, college in Colorado and law school in Chicago, before taking up residence in the Washington, D.C. area. Under George W. Bush, she held a couple of State Department jobs for which she had no obvious qualifications. But now she’s running for the U.S. Senate from Wyoming.

You could pick a name out of the phone book and find someone with better credentials. But these names are not random. They are household names, made famous by their fathers: John F. Kennedy and Dick Cheney. So the daughters carry an aura of expertise and gravity.

They benefit from “branding” — their association with the genuine accomplishments of famous relatives. But the logic behind that appeal only goes so far. Just because you wear Nike shoes doesn’t mean you’d buy a can of Nike beans. A Cheney’s virtues, if any, may not be present in another Cheney.

Blundering into a “fragile country” can make things much worse

Filed under: Government, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Ted Galen Carpenter on a big blind spot in US policy:

U.S. officials too often succumb to the temptation to try to impose order and justice in unstable or misgoverned societies around the world. The temptation is understandable. It is hard to learn about — much less watch on the nightly news — brutality, bloodshed, and gross injustice and not want to do something about it. Some foreign policy intellectuals, including the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have become strident lobbyists for the notion of a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations.

But it is a temptation that wise policy makers should avoid. U.S. meddling has frequently caused already bad situations to deteriorate further — especially when Washington has based its humanitarian interventions on the false premise that the subject of our attentions is, or at least ought to be, a coherent nation state. As I point out in an article over at The National Interest, U.S. administrations have made that blunder in Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and other places.

In many parts of the world, the Western concept of a nation state is quite weak, and the concepts of democracy and individual rights are even less developed. The primary loyalty of an inhabitant is likely to be to a clan, tribe, ethnic group or religion. U.S. officials appear to have difficulty grasping that point, and as a result, the United States barges into fragile societies, disrupting what modest order may exist. Washington’s military interventions flail about, shattering delicate political and social connections and disrupting domestic balances of power.

August 4, 2013

New tools for the surveillance state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

James Miller on token attempts to roll back the security state by local governments and other groups:

New surveillance technology lowers the barrier of effort needed to soak the productive class of the surplus fruits of its labor. From monitoring backyards to ensure taxes are being paid on swimming pools to spying on farmers who violate agricultural regulations, states across the globe are already using new spy tools to extort more loot from the greater public.

All the while, the political class gives an assurance that the technological innovation will not be abused. Newspaper editors parrot the message and paint any critic as a tinfoil hat loon who thinks Big Brother sleeps under their bed. And then there are the television intellectuals who take great joy in making flippant remarks about conspiracy theorists. Each of these personalities pictures him or herself as sitting a few ladder rungs above the horde of bumbling mass-men.

One has to be either lying or painfully ignorant to believe government will not abuse surveillance drones. State officials have rarely failed to use their capacity to terrify the populace. Just recently, journalist Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian revealed that the National Security Agency sweeps up the internet activity of all U.S. residents absent any warrants. Prior to the leak, those politicians in charge of overseeing the government’s oversight activities claimed the snooping was done in the public good and not as widespread as suspected. The new details of the program contradict the assurance, as the NSA’s spy activity is more intrusive – and prone to abuse – than originally thought.

A sterling record of misconduct is still not enough to convince enlightened thinkers and academics of the state’s propensity to terrorize. There are still a handful of civil liberty organizations calling attention to the dangers of the widespread use of surveillance drones and data gathering. But their beef is focused more on the right to privacy rather than a usurpation of basic property rights.

Who speaks for those neither rich nor poor?

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Victor Davis Hanson on the forgotten people in the middle:

There are more than 48 million Americans on food stamps, an increase of about 12 million since the beginning of the Obama presidency.

At a time of record-high crop prices, the U.S. government still helps well-off farmers with some $20 billion in annual crop payouts and indirect subsidies.

The Left mythicizes food-stamp recipients almost as if they all must be the Cratchits of Dickensian England.

The Right romanticizes corporate agriculture as if the growers all were hardscrabble family farmers in need of a little boost to get through another tough harvest.

Those in between, who pay federal income taxes and are not on food stamps, lack the empathy of the poor and the clout of the rich. Can’t a politician say that?

Illegal immigration is likewise not a Left vs. Right or Republican vs. Democrat issue, but instead mostly one of class.

The influx of millions of illegal immigrants has ensured corporate America access to cheap labor while offering a growing constituency for political and academic elites.

Yet the earning power of poorer American workers — especially African Americans and Hispanic Americans — has stagnated.

The common bond between the agendas of La Raza activists and the corporate world is apparently a relative lack of concern for the welfare of entry-level laborers, many of them in American inner cities, who are competing against millions of illegal workers.

Given the slow-growth, high-unemployment economy, and the policies of the Federal Reserve, interest on simple passbook accounts has all but vanished.

The poor are not so affected. They are more often borrowers than lenders, and they are sometime beneficiaries of federally subsidized debt relief.

The rich have the capital and connections to find more profitable investments in real estate or the stock market that make them immune from pedestrian, underperforming savings accounts.

In other words, this administration’s loose money policy has been good for the indebted and even better for the stock-invested rich. But it is absolutely lousy for the middle class and for strapped retirees with a few dollars in conservative passbook accounts.

August 3, 2013

Obama may avoid meeting Putin at the G20 summit

Filed under: Government, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

An interesting sidelight to the suddenly more acrimonious relationship between the Russian and American leaders:

Now that Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and he has been allowed to leave the airport, things are starting to hot up between the US and Russia. Washington has expressed that they are ‘disappointed’ by the reaction of Moscow and there have been allusions to the fact that President Obama may even go as far as to snub President Vladimir Putin and refuse to meet with him in September 2013.

Russia agreed yesterday to grant Edward Snowden asylum but as a consequence this has put a strain on the relations between Russia and the USA, despite the fact that Putin said that he wanted in no way to jeopardize the relations with the US. Although, sometimes, unbelievably in politics what a politician states is neither firstly necessarily what he thinks nor secondly necessarily what he does; or neither at the same time in the majority of the cases.

But, certainly Putin is probably thinking of himself rather than Obama at the present time. Sheltering Snowden means that he will be able to publically slap Obama in the face and send a strong message of propaganda to his own citizens, telling them that he is not the only one in the world not to respect human rights. If the US does it, then anyone can do it. Secondly, there are 90% of Russians that believe that Snowden’s actions are positive, rekindling the great East-West divide of old, or at least keeping that ideological fire burning bright. There is also the added bonus of it being now possible for Putin to rally up some support in the wake of criticism for arresting opposition leader Alexey Navalny and slapping a five-year prison sentence on him. Putin also has to wage war upon the detractors of his economic policies and face criticism of the slowing down in the Russian economy, with a 30% possibility that the country will enter a recession in 2014 (up from a 20% risk last month), according to a survey by Bloomberg. This affair will help Putin rally support, but it will also galvanize his status in world affairs. He will be empowered to declare that Russia is still a force to be reckoned with and a role to play in geopolitical affairs taking place.

In a recent poll in Russia (Levada Center) there were 43% of Russians that supported Russia’s granting of asylum to Snowden towards the end of July. Only 29% were against it.

But, Putin had very little choice, didn’t he? Snowden was almost barred from leaving the country and flying elsewhere. Either Putin took the decision to hand over Snowden to the US authorities or to provide a safe haven for him in Russia. The first solution would have destroyed his public image and made it look as if he were obsequiously obeying Uncle Sam. The second was the only one that would boost the troops at home.

Now, Washington has hinted that Obama may snub a private meeting with Putin when Obama makes his first public visit to Russia since Putin was reelected in March last year, when Moscow hosts the G20 summit. According to sources at the White House, Obama is presently weighing up the “utility” of the meeting and may even cancel going all together to the summit.

“RCMP officers stopping American citizens on the Buffalo side of their border”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Where’s the outrage? Nobody seems to care! Oh, but I got the nationalities confused in that headline:

Bit by bit, agreement by agreement, Canada is giving away more and more in the name of trade. To Conservatives, none of this is a threat to our sovereignty, as if the very act of stating so makes it so.

But let us consider this fantasy scenario: RCMP officers stopping American citizens on the Buffalo side of their border. Picture the horrified expression of those resilient New Yorkers as they are forced to slow down on their Interstate highway so as to be greeted by a smiling RCMP officer who is to inspect their property, ask questions about where they live, where they’ve come from, and the like — all part of a so called “pre-clearing” program.

Of course, this scene would never occur. The United States protects, obsessively, their sovereignty. But here in Canada, armed American police officers will now be able to stop Canadians, in Canada, inspecting, checking and asking questions.

Again, the Conservatives will tell us that an armed American cop in Canada is all about trade, jobs and security, not sovereignty. If this is true, then can we not expect to see Mounties stopping Americans on the Buffalo side?

I blogged about this issue last year, too.

August 1, 2013

“That kind of grassroots power tends to make government officials jittery”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

J.D. Tuccille looks at the rise of Twitter … not so much its rise in users, but the rise in government interest and interference:

Twitter information requests 2012-13You know you’ve arrived as an online media operation when governments take an interest in who is speaking out, and make efforts to muzzle what’s published. That’s definitely the case with Twitter, the microblogging platform that started as an outlet for exhibitionist ADHD sufferers, only to become a powerful medium for sharing news and grassroots organizing. According to the company’s latest transparency report, governments around the world are issuing ever-more demands for information about the service’s users, and stepping up efforts to suppress tweeted content.

From January 1 through June 30 of this year, Twitter received 1,157 government requests for private information about users and accounts, up from 849 during the same period in 2012. Of those, authorities in the United States were responsible for 902 requests. Twitter complied in whole or part with 55 percent of all requests — 67 percent of those originating in the U.S.

Interestingly, roughly 20 percent of information requests issued by American authorities were “under seal,” meaning that Twitter was forbidden to fulfill its usual policy of informing users about requests for their private information.

BBC News Magazine features Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Non-embeddable video, so you’ll have to click here to see it.

Police officers in the US today are increasingly not only armed but heavily armoured.

The author and investigative reporter Radley Balko traces this shift in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Balko explains that race riots in the ’60s and America’s war on drugs in the subsequent decades led police departments to adopt weapons, uniforms and tactics inspired by military special forces. He writes that fears of terrorism after 9/11 accelerated the trend — even in unlikely targets such as rural Idaho.

And he argues that the military appearance of officers today makes it much harder for them to connect with civilians in communities they are policing.

Produced by the BBC’s Ashley Semler and Bill McKenna

July 31, 2013

Even police chiefs can get racially profiled

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

An absolutely fascinating story in the New York Daily News. (It’s from several years back, but brought to my attention today by Radley Balko):

At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned.

“How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don’t know,” a police source said.

Chief Douglas Zeigler, 60, head of the Community Affairs Bureau, was in his NYPD-issued vehicle near a fire hydrant when two plainclothes cops approached on May 2, sources said.

One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said.

What happened next is in dispute.

The congressional defenders of privacy

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

Jacob Sullum in Reason:

“This is not a game,” Mike Rogers angrily warned last week, urging his colleagues in the House to vote against an amendment that would have banned the mass collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency (NSA). “This is real. It will have real consequences.”

I hope Rogers is right. Despite the Michigan Republican’s best efforts to portray the amendment as a terrifying threat to national security, it failed by a surprisingly narrow margin that could signal the emergence of a bipartisan coalition willing to defend civil liberties against the compromises supported by leaders of both parties.

Rogers was not surprised by the recent revelation that the NSA routinely collects information about every phone call Americans make, just in case it may prove useful in the future. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he knew about the program for years, and he had no problem with it.

Not so two other Michigan congressmen: Justin Amash, a 33-year-old libertarian Republican serving his second term, and John Conyers, an 84-year-old progressive Democrat first elected in 1965. These two legislators, conventionally viewed as occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were outraged by the NSA’s data dragnet, especially since representatives of the Bush and Obama administrations had repeatedly denied that any such program existed.

The measure that Amash and Conyers proposed as an amendment to a military spending bill would have required that records demanded under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which authorizes secret court orders seeking “any tangible things” deemed “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, be connected to particular targets. Although it was a pretty mild reform, leaving in place the wide powers granted by Section 215 while repudiating the Obama administration’s even broader, heretofore secret interpretation of that provision, the amendment was viewed as a quixotic effort.

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings”

Filed under: Business, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

A bit of LEED debunking at The New Republic:

When the Bank of America Tower opened in 2010, the press praised it as one of the world’s “most environmentally responsible high-rise office building[s].” It wasn’t just the waterless urinals, daylight dimming controls, and rainwater harvesting. And it wasn’t only the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification — the first ever for a skyscraper — and the $947,583 in incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also had as a tenant the environmental movement’s biggest celebrity. The Bank of America Tower had Al Gore.

The former vice president wanted an office for his company, Generation Investment Management, that “represents the kind of innovation the firm is trying to advance,” his real-estate agent said at the time. The Bank of America Tower, a billion-dollar, 55-story crystal skyscraper on the northwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, seemed to fit the bill. It would be “the most sustainable in the country,” according to its developer Douglas Durst. At the Tower’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gore powwowed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and praised the building as a model for fighting climate change. “I applaud the leadership of the mayor and all of those who helped make this possible,” he said.

Gore’s applause, however, was premature. According to data released by New York City last fall, the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan. It uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building. It also performs worse than the Goldman Sachs headquarters, maybe the most similar building in New York — and one with a lower LEED rating. It’s not just an embarrassment; it symbolizes a flaw at the heart of the effort to combat climate change.

[…]

“What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want — namely, green publicity, not energy savings,” John Scofield, a professor of physics at Oberlin, testified before the House last year.

Governments, nevertheless, have been happy to rely on LEED rather than design better metrics. Which is why New York’s release of energy data last fall was significant. It provided more public-energy data for a U.S. city than has ever existed. It found the worst-performing buildings use three to five times more energy per square foot than the best ones. It also found that, if the most energy-intensive large buildings were brought up to the current seventy-fifth percentile, the city’s total greenhouse gases could be reduced by 9 percent.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress