Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2013

This month in moral panic watch – “rape porn”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

British PM David Cameron has decided that it’s the duty of his government to crack down on internet pornography. In particular, the British government will be attempting to stamp out violent pornography, aka “rape porn”. This may not be his best idea ever:

Lobby organisations like “End Violence Against Women” and sensationalist news rags like the Daily Mail repeatedly claim that watching violent pornography increases sexual abuse and rape by men.

However, the scientific evidence has stubbornly refused to play along with this view:

U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) found no evidence of a causal link between pornography and rape

“Pornography and rape: theory and practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries where pornography is easily available” (1991) B Kutchinsky

Examined what happened to the rape statistics in four countries (USA, Denmark, West Germany and Sweden) during periods where the availability of violent pornography went from extreme scarcity to relative abundance.

Quoting the report: “The results showed that in none of the countries did rape increase more than nonsexual violent crimes. This finding in itself would seem sufficient to discard the hypothesis that pornography causes rape“

There’s also the problem that pornography is actually quite popular — with both male and female users — over 40% of all internet users view pornography voluntarily. In fact, large numbers of women admit to enjoying rape fantasies:

Whether the puritans or the feminists like it or not, it is a fact that many women enjoy rape fantasies as explained by this female journalist.

Erotic literature such as Fifty Shades of Grey featuring bondage, spanking, hair pulling, fisting and pinwheeling generated sales of over £10M in six months, to a predominantly female audience.

On a more scientific level, a 1988 study by Pelletier and Herold found that over half of their female respondents had fantasies of forced sex.

Nobody (quite rightly) suggests that women who expose themselves to this sort of “violent porn” literature, or who engage in sexual fantasies of rape are more likely to go out and put themselves into situations where they will be raped.

People clearly understand that there is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent, painful reality of actual rape.

The same reasoning must logically apply to men who enjoy rape fantasy and rape porn. There is a world of difference between enjoying rape as a sexual fantasy and the violent reality of actual raping another human being.

To assert that women can enjoy rape fantasy, porn and violent BDSM literature without harm because they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but men do not is nothing more than misandry.

September 1, 2013

India moves government email away from US-based email services

Filed under: Government, India, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Vinay Mandalia discusses the quite rational response of the Indian government to the recent discovery that the US intelligence services have had full access to all email communications hosted on US email services:

The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to its half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre.

The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information after it was revealed earlier that NSA may be involved in widespread spying and surveillance activities across the globe.

In a statement to reporters here J. Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology, said that data of Indian citizens using US based email services like Gmail is residing on servers which are located outside India and for now the government is concerned about the large amount of official and critical data that may be resident on those servers.

Expect a lot of other US “allies” to suddenly discover that their internal communications have been an open book to their “friends” for the last 10-20 years and decide to take similar measures.

H/T to Techdirt for the link.

August 22, 2013

QotD: Politicians and the world of real jobs

Filed under: Business, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Whenever I hear a politician or pundit talk about a modern economy like they understand it well enough to run it, I want to burst out laughing, or cry, or both. If you can’t even keep pictures of your dick off the Intertunnel during an election cycle, I imagine being Emperor of the Economic and Social Universe is probably well above your abilities. Politicians have to take tours of factories because to them, everything and everybody in a factory might as well be alchemy performed by men from Jupiter.

“Sippican Cottage”, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” Sippican Cottage, 2013-08-21.

August 18, 2013

Rounding up the “government is spying on everyone” news

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

A linkapalooza of information at Zero Hedge:

That’s just the first few items of a long list. Read the whole thing.

August 14, 2013

The “Indie Web” is the very definition of a fringe project

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Wired‘s Klint Finley wants you to meet the indie hackers who want to jailbreak the internet (among other things):

One guy is wearing his Google Glass. Another showed up in an HTML5 t-shirt. And then there’s the dude who looks like the Mad Hatter, decked out in a top hat with an enormous white flower tucked into the brim.

At first, they look like any other gaggle of tech geeks. But then you notice that one of them is Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki, the tech that underpins Wikipedia. And there’s Kevin Marks, the former vice president of web services at British Telecom. Oh, and don’t miss Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of the seminal blogging site LiveJournal and, more recently, a coder who works in the engine room of Google’s online empire.

Packed into a small conference room, this rag-tag band of software developers has an outsized digital pedigree, and they have a mission to match. They hope to jailbreak the internet.

They call it the Indie Web movement, an effort to create a web that’s not so dependent on tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Google — a web that belongs not to one individual or one company, but to everyone. “I don’t trust myself,” says Fitzpatrick. “And I don’t trust companies.” The movement grew out of an egalitarian online project launched by Fitzpatrick, before he made the move to Google. And over the past few years, it has roped in about 100 other coders from around the world.

August 13, 2013

Master Sergeant Anonymous

Filed under: Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

Justine Sharrock talks to someone who claims that there are many members of Anonymous in the ranks of the US military:

Are there a lot of members of Anonymous in the Army?
There are more than you would think, more heavily in the techie world [of the military] — especially at Fort Huachuca, where all the intel people are. A lot of them wanted to get the job [there] because they want to learn secret stuff and have a better personal understanding of how the world actually works.

How do you know who is in Anonymous?
Initially we have the handshaking phase. The lingo is still relatively unknown. In conversation, you drop in jokes. If you are with someone on a mission, you’re like, “Man, there are over 9,000 reasons that this is a bad idea.” That initially establishes friendship. Once you feel comfortable with the person and they aren’t just posing as part of the culture, then you talk about what they’ve done and how much a part of it they are. It gets to the point where you are discussing individual operations.

What are the most popular operations amongst soldiers?
Anonymous is so distributed and leaderless that everyone has operations they love and hate. Operation Cartel, especially at Fort Bliss. Operation Dark Net was universally loved. And Operation Payback was pretty well received.

[…]

Does the military know about the Anonymous presence?
Pre-Manning, there were several academic papers put out trying to analyze it and school the leadership. Because the Army is a very top-down organization, they assume that [Anonymous] is too. Leadership wasn’t concerned with it until Manning happened. Then they read everything under the [lens] of what Manning did and it just scared them — scared them blind. They know we are in there and they assume that we are all going to do a Manning or a Snowden.

How have they addressed it?
Every six months you are mandated to get a Threat Awareness and Reporting Procedures Brief. It used to be very much like how to … spot the Iraqi contractor who is pacing off your base. Now it is, “Look at the person at your left and right. Are they espousing social beliefs that don’t line up with Army values? What websites do they go to at work?” With the caveat that it is OK to have political beliefs that are different. You get a heavy-handed feeling.

I have had more than a few officers come up to me and as we are trying to talk about [Anonymous] they are worried, like, “Are you CID [working undercover for the Central Investigative Division]?” Because you always worry about that.

August 12, 2013

Schneier to internet company executives – it’s time to fight back

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

In The Atlantic, Bruce Schneier has some advice for the executives of major internet companies:

It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.

Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy’s life? It’s going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they’re going to protect you, but they won’t. The NSA doesn’t care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it’s convenient to do so.

We’re already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They’ve lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do — and don’t do — is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don’t care.

It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they’ll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they’re sloppy. They’ll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn’t have a copy, the next whistleblower will.

Online privacy and habitual oversharing

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Cory Doctorow explains why so many of us have gotten into the habit of oversharing personal details in our social media activities:

Whenever government surveillance is debated, someone inevitably points out that it is no cause for alarm, since people already overshare sensitive personal information on Facebook. This means there’s hardly anything to be gleaned from state surveillance that isn’t already there for the taking on social media.

It’s true people overshare on social networks, providing information in ways that they later come to regret. The consequences of oversharing range widely, from losing a job to being outed for your sexual orientation. If you live in a dictatorship, intercepted social media sessions can be used by those in charge to compile enemies lists, determining whom to arrest, whom to torture, and – potentially – whom to murder.

The key reason for oversharing is that cause and effect are separated by volumes of time and space, so understanding the consequences can be difficult. Imagine practising penalty kicks by kicking the ball and then turning around before it lands; two years later, someone visits you and tells you where your kicks ended up. This is the kind of feedback loop we contend with when it comes to our privacy disclosures.

In other words, you may make a million small and large disclosures on different services, with different limits on your sharing preferences, and many years later, you lose your job. Or your marriage. Or maybe your life, if you’re unlucky enough to have your Facebook scraped by a despot who has you in his dominion.

August 11, 2013

Speculations on why Lavabit went dark

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

In The New Yorker, Michael Phillips tries to outline the legal picture around the Lavabit shutdown:

In mid-July, Tanya Lokshina, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office, wrote on her Facebook wall that she had received an e-mail from edsnowden@lavabit.com. It requested that she attend a press conference at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to discuss the N.S.A. leaker’s “situation.” This was the wider public’s introduction to Lavabit, an e-mail service prized for its security. Lavabit promised, for instance, that messages stored on the service using asymmetric encryption, which encrypts incoming e-mails before they’re saved on Lavabit’s servers, could not even be read by Lavabit itself.

Yesterday, Lavabit went dark. In a cryptic statement posted on the Web site, the service’s owner and operator, Ladar Levison, wrote, “I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.” Those experiences led him to shut down the service rather than, as he put it, “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit users reacted with consumer vitriol on the company’s Facebook page (“What about our emails?”), but the tide quickly turned toward government critique. By the end of the night, a similar service, Silent Circle, also shut down its encrypted e-mail product, calling the Lavabit affair the “writing [on] the wall.”

Which secret surveillance scheme is involved in the Lavabit case? The company may have received a national-security letter, which is a demand issued by a federal agency (typically the F.B.I.) that the recipient turn over data about other individuals. These letters often forbid recipients from discussing it with anyone. Another possibility is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have issued a warrant ordering Lavabit to participate in ongoing e-mail surveillance. We can’t be completely sure: as Judge Reggie Walton, the presiding judge of the FISA court, explained to Senator Patrick Leahy in a letter dated July 29th, FISA proceedings, decisions, and legal rationales are typically secret. America’s surveillance programs are secret, as are the court proceedings that enable them and the legal rationales that justify them; informed dissents, like those by Levison or Senator Ron Wyden, must be kept secret. The reasons for all this secrecy are also secret. That some of the secrets are out has not deterred the Obama Administration from prosecuting leakers under the Espionage Act for disclosure of classified information. Call it meta-secrecy.

August 9, 2013

Locking the (electronic) barn door

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

The encrypted email service that was reportedly used by Edward Snowden just announced that it will be shutting down:

Today, Lavabit announced that it would shut down its encrypted email service rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit did not say what it had been asked to do, only that it was legally prohibited from sharing the events leading to its decision.

Lavabit was an email provider, apparently used by Edward Snowden along with other privacy sensitive users, with an avowed mission to offer an “e-mail service that never sacrifices privacy for profits” and promised to “only release private information if legally compelled by the courts in accordance with the United States Constitution.” It backed up this claim by encrypting all emails on Lavabit servers such that Lavabit did not have the ability to access a user’s email (Lavabit’s white paper), at least without that user’s passphrase, which the email provider did not store.

Given the impressive powers of the government to obtain emails and records from service providers, both with and without legal authority, it is encouraging to see service providers take steps to limit their ability to access user data, as Lavabit had done.

[…]

Lavabit’s post indicates that there was a gag order, and that there is an ongoing appeal before the Fourth Circuit. We call on the government and the courts to unseal enough of the docket to allow, at a minimum, the public to know the legal authority asserted, both for the gag and the substance, and give Lavabit the breathing room to participate in the vibrant and critical public debates on the extent of email privacy in an age of warrantless bulk surveillance by the NSA.

August 7, 2013

Bruce Schneier – “it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs”

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

Bruce Schneier talks about the need to restore trust in government and the internet after all the proof we’ve had lately that “they” are lying to us pretty much all the time:

In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype — owned by Microsoft — was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it.

Turns out that wasn’t quite true.

Or at least he — or the company’s lawyers — carefully crafted a statement that could be defended as true while completely deceiving the reader. You see, Skype wasn’t changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users.

At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn’t even pass the laugh test.

As Edward Snowden’s documents reveal more about the NSA’s activities, it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs.

Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.

Apple says it’s never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that’s the internal name of the NSA database. Companies are publishing reports purporting to show how few requests for customer-data access they’ve received, a meaningless number when a single Verizon request can cover all of their customers. The Guardian reported that Microsoft secretly worked with the NSA to subvert the security of Outlook, something it carefully denies. Even President Obama’s justifications and denials are phrased with the intent that the listener will take his words very literally and not wonder what they really mean.

[…]

Ronald Reagan once said “trust but verify.” That works only if we can verify. In a world where everyone lies to us all the time, we have no choice but to trust blindly, and we have no reason to believe that anyone is worthy of blind trust. It’s no wonder that most people are ignoring the story; it’s just too much cognitive dissonance to try to cope with it.

This sort of thing can destroy our country. Trust is essential in our society. And if we can’t trust either our government or the corporations that have intimate access into so much of our lives, society suffers. Study after study demonstrates the value of living in a high-trust society and the costs of living in a low-trust one.

August 4, 2013

Bruce Schneier talks about security and trust

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Published on 19 Jun 2013

Human society runs on trust. We all trust millions of people, organizations, and systems every day — and we do it so easily that we barely notice. But in any system of trust, there is an alternative, parasitic, strategy that involves abusing that trust. Making sure those defectors don’t destroy the cooperative systems they’re abusing is an age-old problem, one that we’ve solved through morals and ethics, laws, and all sort of security technologies. Understanding how these all work — and fail — is essential to understanding the problems we face in today’s increasingly technological and interconnected world.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a “security guru,” he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

H/T to AVC for the link.

August 2, 2013

Forbes talks to Warren Ellis

Filed under: Books, Media, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Warren Ellis has a new novella out (that I haven’t read yet) and talks to Alex Knapp about the new work and other topics:

In Dead Pig Collector, the process of disposing of a body is fairly well detailed. How much research did you do for that?

Four or five hours. Believe it or not, a lot of people seem to spend time talking on the internet about getting rid of bodies. And now they’re all on PRISM-generated watchlists. And so am I.

One of the things that’s fascinating about your work is that it explores subcultures that seem like fantasy, but very much exist in real life. I know, for example, a lot of the cultures you explored in Crooked Little Vein are horribly true. What interests you about them?

I think one of the bigger lessons the internet has taught us is that “niche” or “subculture” are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought. And, frankly, if it’s on the internet, the biggest and widest communication and information system in the world, then it’s not really a subculture any more. If it’s accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it’s as mainstream as it gets. More people visit body modification websites than watch some tv shows, and yet we think of television as the most mainstream, monocultural thing in the world. How can you not be interested in them? They are the shape of the world to come.

[…]

Also infused in a lot of your work is what appears to me anyway to be a deep and abiding love of space travel. What is it about space that fascinates you so much?

Space is the place. We currently keep all our breeding pairs in the same place, which is kind of a stupid way to run a species. Also, it’s full of stuff we haven’t seen yet, which should be impetus enough to go and look.

What do you think about the current state of space travel, especially now with China and now private companies getting into the mix?

I find it all sadly boring. I mean, yes, the Chinese programme looks awfully promising, but it’s just re-running the prime NASA years in fast-forward — doing things we already did, all over again, in a compressed timeframe, with what is probably fairly similar technology. I’m interested to see what they do once they attain the Moon. And, again, the private stuff — Virgin is just finding a new way to replicate Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital lob. That said, Elon Musk’s projects are getting more interesting by the day. I’m starting to wonder if he doesn’t have a full-on James Bond villain long-game scheme. Wouldn’t that be great? Right up until, you know, the orbital death ray platforms.

August 1, 2013

Stereotypes of pornography consumers

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:05

James Delingpole had far too much fun writing this column:

You may be aware that David Cameron — as part of a secret, Lynton Crosby-inspired operation codenamed Suck Up Shamelessly To The Embittered Authoritarian Killjoy Harpies At Mumsnet — has decreed that as from next year the default option when you sign a contract with your new internet provider will be ‘No porn in this household, thank you. I think it’s a disgrace.’

Superficially (and does this coalition ever think any other way?) I can see this makes a lot of sense. After all, what do a growing national debt, falling living standards, rising inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, out-of-control immigration, Weimar-style money-printing, a burgeoning new housing bubble, a failed health service and a collapsing infrastructure matter when you’ve got the most important problem of our times, so to speak, in hand, viz. blokes sneaking a quick one off the wrist while their missus has popped down to Waitrose to stock up on Mabel Pearman’s Burford Brown eggs, Isigny Ste Mere unsalted butter and that Duchy Originals cider on special offer at just £1.45 a bottle?

According to James, nowadays women are about as likely to go looking for pornography on the internet as men are:

But according to some of my techie friends, this isn’t the case at all. They’re the ones who have to clear up all the viruses which you accidentally invited into your computer along when you were trying to Google the weather and mistakenly typed in ‘Romanian donkey babes xxx hardcore’ instead.

Here’s what one of them has to say: ‘The very worst I came across was a shared houseful of young ladies. It took over eight hours to do just the first pass with the antivirus software. That pass removed over 58,000 pieces of malware and spyware, and just under 2,000 viruses. It took all the next day to finish cleaning their computer. I told them it was the worst case of an infected computer I had ever come across, and one asked how it had happened for it to be so bad. Easy I said. Porn sites. They all went bright red and then the hilarity ensued, as the finger pointing started.’

[…]

I realise, of course, that there are still plenty of puritans out there who feel differently. To them I quote first Thomas Sowell: ‘What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.’ And second, Pastor Niemoller: ‘First they came for the wankers…’.

July 30, 2013

The real, long-term source of damage to American interests from the NSA revelations

Filed under: Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

In The Atlantic, James Fallows explains why the NSA’s digital overreach has likely harmed US long-term interests in many different ways:

In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet’s continued growth.

    American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance;

    American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet’s standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world’s digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world’s customers have trusted* U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world’s nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

The problem for the companies, it’s worth emphasizing, is not that they were so unduly eager to cooperate with U.S. government surveillance. Many seem to have done what they could to resist. The problem is what the U.S. government — first under Bush and Cheney, now under Obama and Biden — asked them to do. As long as they operate in U.S. territory and under U.S. laws, companies like Google or Facebook had no choice but to comply. But people around the world who have a choice about where to store their data, may understandably choose to avoid leaving it with companies subject to the way America now defines its security interests.

Update: Also in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations, you’d think that Senator Ron Wyden would get the credit he clearly has been deserving all this time:

For many, many years we’ve covered Senator Ron Wyden’s seemingly quixotic attempts to signal to the American public (and press) that the NSA was doing a hell of a lot more surveillance than most people believed, even those who were carefully reading the laws. Because secrecy rules meant that he couldn’t directly reveal what he’d learned while on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he had to issue vague statements, documents and speeches hinting at things that were going on that he couldn’t actually talk about. Of course, now that Ed Snowden leaked a bunch of documents, it’s shown that Wyden was absolutely correct in what was going on (and that the American public wouldn’t like it).

You’d think that would lead people to have a lot more respect for the incredible efforts he went through to alert people to these issues without breaking the secrecy laws. And, in fact, many more people are aware of those efforts. The Washington Post has a nice article about Wyden’s attempts to bring these issues out and to get a real debate going on them.

However, towards the end, the reporter talks to two different former top lawyers at the NSA, who both appear to be really, really angry about Wyden daring to suggest to the public that the NSA wasn’t playing straight with the American public. First up, we’ve got Stewart Baker, the former NSA General Counsel and top Homeland Security official, who is so anti-civil liberties and pro-surveillance that he’s almost a caricature of himself — including claiming that the Boston bombings prove that Americans need less privacy and that civil libertarians complaining about too much surveillance are the real cause for the September 11 attacks.

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