Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2020

CITIZENS! Report any non-socially-distanced deviationist behaviour to this number immediately!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Jen Gerson admits that she has not (yet) reported any of her neighbours for their failure to obediently follow the rules of social distancing. She must be reported to the appropriate state authorities!

Commemorative badges of the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of State Security (Stasi).
Wikimedia Commons.

Look, I know I’m going to get flak for this, but someone needs to say it: think twice before you narc on your neighbours.

Snitching may work, but the downsides to citizen-policing are grim — to say nothing of the historical antecedents.

Firstly, “you can play havoc with somebody just by snitching on them with an anonymous snitch line,” noted Sharon Polsky, the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada. In addition to the risk of malicious reports, if people of colour aren’t disproportionately subject to snitching, I’d be shocked.

Totalitarian states turned neighbour against neighbour and family against family, in order to maintain the illusion of social cohesion.

Authoritarians use this tactic because there are never enough police or soldiers to force compliance upon an entire population, not unless everyone consents to become an agent of his or her own mutual oppression.

The term “fascism” has an innocent history. It comes from the Roman term “fasces,” which means a bundle of sticks bound together. One stick breaks, but the fasces remains strong. It’s another term for unity. That’s what makes it so seductive, especially in times of uncertainty and mortal dread. We’re all in this together. Nary a stick shall stray.

“We are now living amid the very tactics that the West [once] criticized,” Polsky added. “With state controls on commerce, industry, speech, and media.”

The federal government, for example, is already considering legislation that would bar the spreading of misinformation about COVID-19 online.

“Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and it is about protecting the public,” Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc told reporters with a line that should give any student of history the creeps.

“This is not a question of freedom of speech. This is a question of people who are actually actively working to spread disinformation, whether it’s through troll bot farms, whether [it’s] state operators or whether it’s really conspiracy theorist cranks who seem to get their kicks out of creating havoc.”

No doubt LeBlanc et al are operating under the noblest of intentions. But repressive measures buy conformity at a terrible price. Snitch lines turn us against one another. They teach us to fear the people we need to survive, thus making us more dependent on the apparatus of the state.

April 17, 2020

Chris Selley – “… if John Q. Bylaw is hassling you just for taking a walk, for heaven’s sake get your smart phone out and make a righteous stink”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Our proto-surveillance society is moving rapidly toward all-surveillance, all the time and the current justification is to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

For civil libertarians, these are alarming times — but less alarming than they might be. During a pandemic, when everyone agrees life cannot go on as normal, people who place maximum value on individual freedom are liable to look rather selfish. “Trust our leaders” types get a big boost.

But if Canadian officialdom has not botched its response to this crisis, neither has it excelled. Theresa Tam’s defenders are right that official advice will naturally change over the course of a pandemic — but nothing justifies her proactive downplaying of the COVID-19 risk at a time when several Canadian governments were, we now know, woefully unprepared. The pandemic doesn’t care that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Harrington Lake, against advice from three governments including his own to stay away from any second homes — but it would have been so bloody easy for him not to go, to set an example. It’s equally inconsequential that Andrew Scheer added six more human beings than necessary to a government charter flight from Regina to Ottawa — and it would have been equally easy for him not to bring his family along.

Meanwhile, certain big Canadian cities have so obviously overstepped the mark, by cracking down on perfectly safe behaviours — walking in parks, notably — as to highlight the value of some don’t-tread-on-me pushback. An unscientific survey of social media suggests not a single real human being supports the City of Ottawa’s latest ridiculousness: Days after its bylaw officers threatened a father and son for kicking a ball around [noted here], fined a man $880 for walking his dog, and allegedly assaulted a man questioning his eviction from a park — none of which seems to be supported by the provincial emergency act they were ostensibly enforcing — a public health official now advises against exchanging properly distanced outdoor pleasantries with one’s neighbours lest it “turn into a parking lot or backyard party.” (Don’t laugh: Studio 54 was a cozy little jazz bar before Mick Jagger and Debbie Harry showed up one night with some records and a pound of blow.)

For civil libertarians who remember life before smart phones, meanwhile, the plan Google and Apple are working on to help governments control COVID-19 might as well be custom-designed to induce heebie-jeebies. The basic idea is that your phone’s operating system would reach out to other phones via Bluetooth and record the date, time, duration and location of the meeting. No personal information need be attached to those data points, just the identity of the device. When someone reports a COVID-19 diagnosis on an app, using a code provided by their public health department, devices that had been nearby would receive a warning that their owners might have been exposed, and should take such measures as local authorities advise.

It could be the stuff of dystopian sci-fi. You can just see the guy with the giant translucent computer screen shouting “magnify! Enhance!” Really, though, this comes down to a simple question: Whom do you least distrust? A co-production between Google, which is not at all known for respecting users’ privacy, and Apple, which at least seems to make an effort? Or governments?

January 30, 2020

Upgrading NORAD’s capabilities with AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar (aka “Aegis Ashore”)

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell on the need to upgrade NORAD radar installations as part of a general refurbishment of the alliance’s capabilities:

Lockheed Martin’s Solid State Radar has been designated as AN/SPY-7(V)1 by the US government.
Image from Lockheed Martin/PRNewsfoto.

One of the elements which might be considered in modernizing and enhancing the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) surveillance, warning and control system is a new radar and some people have suggested that the AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar, sometimes called Aegis Ashore, might be a useful (and proven, it is in use, on land, in Japan, and will be fitted on Canada’s new Type 26 (destroyer-frigate) combat ships) solution. This radar is eminently suitable to be part of an enhanced (conventional) NORAD and of a CANUS continental ballistic missile defence system.

There are many technical (and logistical) advantages to using that radar on both our, Canadian, warships and in a land-based role, too.

The AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar produces a lot more information than do the current AN/FPS-117 and AN/FPS-124 radars which are used in the NORAD role, today, and were built in the 1980s using 1960s and ’70s technology.

(Please don’t worry about the AN/*** designations. They are part of a very sensible American system which was designed to make it simpler to identify both Army and Navy systems (hence the AN/ at the beginning). The three letters following the AN/ describe the system:

  • The first letter describes the installation. F means Fixed, on the ground (land) and S means on a ship;
  • The second letter means the type of equipment, and P means radar; and
  • The third letter means purpose. S means search (detection and locating) and Y surveillance and control.

Thus the SPY-7 is a shipborne surveillance radar and the FPS-117 is fixed (land-based) search radar. The numbers just differentiate one system from another.)

If Canada chooses an advanced radar, like the SPY-7, two engineering problems will need to be addressed:

  • First, these things use a lot more power than do the existing radars; and
  • Second, they produce much, much more information which needs to be “transported” instantly, to control centres in places like Canadian Forces Base North Bay, where all the data from all the radars is analyzed and used to effect NORAD’s mission. If the radar sites are located below (about) 72°N, as would be the case for coastal radars in BC, NS and NL, this is not a huge problem because the station is within the “footprint” of the big, high bandwidth satellites in geostationary orbit. But if the radar site is too far North then a terrestrial (possibly microwave, maybe tropospheric scatter) network (in which each station needs electrical power, too) will have to be installed to move the data to a satellite ground station. (Or a non-geostationary, high bandwidth, satellite system will have to be deployed.)

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

November 15, 2019

Murder and Fascism – Rise of the Ustaše | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1934 Part 3 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Nov 2019

King Aleksandar has been working to forge a single Yugoslav identity in his troubled Balkan state. But ethnic nationalism still runs strong, and a shadowy fascist movement fiercely committed to destroying Yugoslavia is emerging.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel & Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations: Klimbim/Olga Shirnina: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com

Oleg M, Dememorabilia, Julius Jääskeläinen, Adrien Fillon.

Image sources: FORTEPAN / Gyöngyi, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, TH-Bibliothek Zürich: Wehrli, Leo.

Icons from the Noun Project: jail by Strongicon, Police by IconTrack, Hand by Fahmi, coin stacks by emilegraphics, Government by Adrien Coquet, president by bezier master, dots by Alexander Skowalsky, List by Gregor Cresnar, Protest by Juan Pablo Bravo, crack by Dilon Choudhury, thunder by Phonlaphat Thongsriphong, Music by sanjivini, Death by Icon Island, curtains by Bartama Graphic.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
There is a lot going on in this episode. Extreme nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism, terrorism, and so on so forth. These things are controversial enough, but they’re also taking place in one of history’s biggest minefields: the Balkans. We’ve done absolutely everything we can to stick to the facts and stay objective. It’s a tough one to research but we have used credible academic texts and know we’ve done a good job.

If you think we’ve got something wrong, then feel free to (politely!) point it out in the comments. But remember that just because you don’t like how a particular group or person has acted, it doesn’t mean that the facts are wrong. Also, try to refrain from drawing any parallels with the modern-day to support your agenda. The fact that Yugoslavia struggled with ethnic tension has nothing to do with present-day debates on immigration and multiculturalism. Let’s stick to history, not myth.

Cheers,
Francis

August 30, 2019

EFF sues Homeland Security over illegal GPS vehicle trackers

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

Kieren McCarthy on a recent lawsuit by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued the US Department of Homeland Security to find out more about a program where, it is claimed, officers secretly stick GPS trackers on vehicles they are suspicious of as they come through the border.

The EFF has made repeated freedom of information act (FoIA) requests about the program’s policies but has been stonewalled, with Homeland Security’s responses claiming any information would contain “sensitive information” that could lead to “circumvention of the law.”

The foundation’s main concern is that Homeland Security is carrying out its secret tracking without a warrant, or even anything beyond a single officer’s suspicion. And it points to a recent US Supreme Court decision where it ruled that warrantless GPS tracking was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Details of the program came to light last year when customs officers revealed in court filings that they had used GPS trackers without a warrant at the border. Since then the EFF has tried to find out what the policies and procedures are for deciding when a vehicle can be tagged. The relevant authorities have not been keen to go into any detail.

There’s another legal precedent too: a California court ruled that government officials’ use of GPS devices to track two suspected drug dealers without getting a warrant violated the Supreme Court decision, made in 2012, and was government misconduct.

August 25, 2019

QotD: Bipartisan authoritarianism

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

Hey, remember how Bill Clinton doubled down on the War on Drugs, perfecting Reagan’s haphazard and shoddily made race-war into a well-oiled incarceration machine that turned America into the world’s greatest incarcerator, a nation that imprisoned black people at a rate that exceeded Apartheid-era South Africa?

Some Democrats want to double down on their party’s shameful Drug War history. Massachusetts Rep. Stephan Hay [D-Fitchfield] has introduced House Bill 1266, which treats the existence of “a hidden compartment” in a vehicle as “prima facie evidence that the conveyance was used intended for use in and for the business of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, or distributing controlled substances.”

This means that if a cop stops you and finds no drugs or other contraband, but decides that part of your car is a “hidden compartment,” that cop can subject your car to civil asset forfeiture — that is, they can steal it, and force you to sue them to get it back.

The role of the Democratic Party is often to take the Republicans’ stupidest, red-meat-for-the-base policies, sloppily designed and doomed to collapse under their own weight, and operationalize them, putting them on the kind of sound bureaucratic footing that they need to have real staying power. Exhibit A is the drug war, but see also Obama’s perfection of GWB’s mess of a mass-surveillance apparatus, turning it into an immortal and pluripotent weapon that Donald Trump now gets to wield.

Cory Doctorow, “Proposed Massachusetts law would let cops steal your car if it had a ‘hidden compartment'”, Boing Boing, 2017-07-16.

June 30, 2019

Chipping away at Martin Luther King’s reputation with new FBI surveillance revelations

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Stephen Smith discusses the struggle of scholars specializing in the life and works of Martin Luther King, Jr. to cope with new revelations about the civil rights leader:

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.
Photo by Yoichi Okamoto via Wikimedia Commons.

These are difficult days for students of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man many of us have dedicated long months and years to researching, often out of a profound sense of respect, is facing an allegation of laughing and even offering advice while a fellow Baptist minister raped a woman in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1964.

The source of this explosive claim is a trove of newly released FBI surveillance documents unearthed by the dean of MLK historians himself, David J. Garrow, author of The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on King, Bearing the Cross.

Since the article detailing Garrow’s new findings came out at the end of May in the British magazine Standpoint, Garrow has taken more of a pounding in the press than King. No surprises there, perhaps. Like those now criticizing Garrow, I desperately want to believe that the 55-year-old allegation is a trumped-up product of the FBI’s “viciously negative attitude” toward King, as Garrow described it in “Solo” to Memphis — a book that earned him the Bureau’s enmity prior to its publication in 1981.

The record, however, is also pretty clear that King relieved the crushing stress of daily death threats and the insatiable demands of the civil rights movement with women and liquor. To his credit, King was the first to admit he was far from perfect as America’s “moral leader” — but this far?

Much of the criticism that Garrow is now facing over the article is focused on the validity of FBI evidence concerning King’s sexual activities, namely the bombshell assertion made by FBI agents spying on King in 1964 that he “looked on, laughed and offered advice” during the reported sexual assault (which, as Garrow has since underscored, the agents listening in did nothing to stop). This allegedly took place in two Washington, D.C. hotel rooms rented to King and four other Baptist ministers, although the controversial claim is made in a handwritten note appended to a summary of the FBI’s microphone surveillance.

Garrow argues that “without question” the handwritten annotation would have been added with both the original surveillance recording and a full transcript of the recording at hand. He adds that Justice Department investigators who reviewed both the tapes and transcripts in 1977 confirmed the accuracy of the FBI’s claims. The tapes and transcripts, along with the rest of the fruits of the FBI’s intensive electronic surveillance of King, were subsequently sealed by a court order until Jan. 31, 2027.

I know Garrow and I know his respect for the man he calls “Doc” runs deep, and this is not an allegation he would carelessly report. Some of his detractors have called him “irresponsible” for running with it without access to the original tapes and transcripts, but Garrow has at least 40 years of experience working with primary sources produced by the FBI’s intensive surveillance of King. If anyone can tell what smells off and what doesn’t, it’s him.

April 19, 2019

QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.

Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.

March 23, 2019

QotD: Pity the poor politicians

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

The first reason to pity them, however, is that someone, or rather some group of people, has to do politics, just as people have to do other unpleasant jobs, such as cleaning lavatories. If it were not for the politicians whom we actually have, there would only be others, not necessarily better. Politicians are like the poor: You have them with you always — except in Switzerland, that happy land where people do not even know who their president is, he being so profoundly unimportant.

But the second and more compelling reason to pity the poor politicians is that theirs is a dreadful life judged by normal standards. If it has its compensations, such as power, money, and bodyguards, they are bought at a dreadful cost. The other day I caught a glimpse of what that life must be like.

A television crew came to make a documentary about me. It will last about 45 minutes, will be watched (thank goodness) by only a small audience, and took two and a half days’ filming to make. The television crew was very nice, which is not my universal experience of television people, to put it mildly; but even so, two and a half days being followed by a camera is more than enough to last me the rest of my life.

I found the strain of it considerable, even though, really, nothing was at stake. It did not matter in the slightest, not even to me, if I made a fool of myself by what I said. There would be no consequences for my career, such as it is (it is almost over); there would be no humiliating exposures of my fatuity in the press, no nasty political cartoons as a consequence, and no insulting messages over the antisocial media. The television team was clearly not out to trip me up or perform a hatchet job on me. It was friendly and I could trust it not to distort what I said by crafty editing. But all the same, the attempt to act naturally while in the constant presence of a camera and a microphone with a furry cover was tiring. The order to be natural is a contradiction in terms. You might as well order someone to be happy.

Of course, one grows accustomed to anything in time. Just as a bad smell disappears from one’s awareness if one remains for long enough in its presence, so eventually one forgets about the presence of a camera and a microphone. No doubt politicians who live half their waking time within the field of these instruments learn to ignore their physical intrusiveness; but, of course, much more is at stake for them than it ever was for me. They are under constant surveillance; and just as the pedant reading a book pounces upon an error, even if it be only typographical, and marks it with his pen, so journalists and political enemies pounce upon a gaffe uttered by a politician and try to ruin him with it. And the more subjects come under the purview of political correctness, the easier it becomes to make a gaffe that will offend some considerable part of the eggshell population. In fact, much of that population actually wants to be offended; being offended is the new cogito that guarantees the sum. I am offended, therefore I am.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Pity the Poor Politicians”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-04-01.

September 21, 2017

“Once Obama and his allies launched their domestic surveillance operation, they crossed the Rubicon”

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Daniel Greenfield explains why the recent news on wiretapping Trump associates might yet bring about a Watergate for the 21st century, only with Obama team members in the defendant roles:

Last week, CNN revealed (and excused) one phase of the Obama spying operation on Trump. After lying about it on MSNBC, Susan Rice admitted unmasking the identities of Trump officials to Congress.

Rice was unmasking the names of Trump officials a month before leaving office. The targets may have included her own successor, General Flynn, who was forced out of office using leaked surveillance.

While Rice’s targets weren’t named, the CNN story listed a meeting with Flynn, Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon was Trump’s former campaign chief executive and a senior adviser. Kushner is a senior adviser. Those are exactly the people you spy on to get an insight into what your political opponents plan to do.

Now the latest CNN spin piece informs us that secret FISA orders were used to spy on the conversations of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The surveillance was discontinued for lack of evidence and then renewed under a new warrant. This is part of a pattern of FISA abuses by Obama Inc. which never allowed minor matters like lack of evidence to dissuade them from new FISA requests.

Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

If any of Trump’s people were talking to non-Americans, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could be used to spy on them. And then the redacted names of the Americans could be unmasked by Susan Rice, Samantha Power and other Obama allies. It was a technically legal Watergate.

If both CNN stories hold up, then Obama Inc. had spied on two Trump campaign leaders.

Furthermore the Obama espionage operation closely tracked Trump’s political progress. The first FISA request targeting Trump happened the month after he received the GOP nomination. The second one came through in October: the traditional month of political surprises meant to upend an election.

The spying ramped up after Trump’s win when the results could no longer be used to engineer a Hillary victory, but would instead have to be used to cripple and bring down President Trump. Headed out the door, Rice was still unmasking the names of Trump’s people while Obama was making it easier to pass around raw eavesdropped data to other agencies.

No matter how bad the information gets, I doubt that Trump will go after Obama personally — ex-Presidents have an unwritten constitutional privilege that way, I understand — but some of his former cabinet and sub-cabinet officers might well be sacrificed to minimize long-term damage to the Obama administration’s various legacies.

On the other hand, CNN hasn’t been having a lot of luck with their big breaking stories lately … this might be another one of those “lots of smoke, but no fire” situations. Democrats facing tough races in 2018 will be hoping that there’s no “smoking gun” there as far as criminal prosecutions are concerned.

August 12, 2017

Why The Government Shouldn’t Break WhatsApp

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 3 Jul 2017

Encryption backdoors – breaking WhatsApp and iMessage’s security to let the government stop Bad Things – sounds like a reasonable idea. Here’s why it isn’t.

A transcript of this video’s available here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tom-scott/why-the-government-shouldnt-break-whatsapp/1378434365572557/

August 1, 2017

Ontario adopts voluntary self-surveillance app from CARROT Insights

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I often joke about how inexpensive it appears to be to “influence” politicians, but it’s only fair to point out that the voters those easily influenced politicians represent are even more easy to influence:

Ontario announced earlier this month that it will become the fourth Canadian government to fund a behavioral modification application that rewards users for making “good choices” in regards to health, finance, and the environment. The Carrot Rewards smartphone app, which will receive $1.5 million from the Ontario government, credits users’ accounts with points toward the reward program of their choice in exchange for reaching step goals, taking quizzes and surveys, and engaging in government-approved messages.

The app, funded by the Canadian federal government and developed by Toronto-based company CARROT Insights in 2015, is sponsored by a number of companies offering reward points for their services as an incentive to “learn” how to improve wellness and budget finances. According to CARROT Insights, “All offers are designed by sources you can trust like the BC Ministry of Health, Newfoundland and Labrador Government, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Canadian Diabetes Association, and YMCA.” Users can choose to receive rewards for companies including SCENE, Aeroplan, Petro-Canada, or More Rewards, a loyalty program that partners with other businesses.

It’ll be interesting if they share the uptake of this new smartphone app … just how many of us are willing to let the government track just about all of our actions in exchange for “rewards”.

In order to use the app, users are giving Carrot Insights and the federal government permission to “access and collect information from your mobile device, including but not limited to, geo-location data, accelerometer/gyroscope data, your mobile device’s camera, microphone, contacts, calendar and Bluetooth connectivity in order to operate additional functionalities of the Services.”

Founder and CEO of CARROT Insights Andreas Souvaliotis launched the app in 2015 “with a focus on health but the company and its partner governments quickly realized it was effective at modifying behavior in other areas as well,” according to CTV News.

June 2, 2017

Ethiopia goes offline

Filed under: Africa, Education, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Cory Doctorow on Ethiopia’s decision to shut down access to the internet “to prevent exam cheating”:

The entire nation of Ethiopia — a corrupt, oligarchic state with the distinction of being “the world’s first turnkey surveillance state” where spy technology from the “free world” is used to spy on the whole country — just dropped off the internet.

The ruling clique says it turned off the country’s internet to prevent Ethiopian students from accessing final exam questions via Facebook groups run by the global Ethiopian diaspora, and indeed, last year’s exams were spoiled by early-circulated exam questions.

But Ethiopia routinely disappears from the world’s internet in response to dissent and protest, and these are never far from the surface in Ethiopia, so the exams might just be a convenient excuse.

It’s an interesting counter to the idea that even authoritarian regimes struggle to turn off their national internet systems, because these are vital to maintaining the elites’ business interests, as well as extractive industries like oil, or other industries like tourism. In Burma and Egypt, totalitarian regimes have wrestled with the question of when and whether to shut down the internet, often pulling the switch after it was too late (for them).

April 2, 2017

Yes, Prime Minister – The need to know

Filed under: Britain, Government, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 23 Sep 2014

Scene from season 2, episode 8.

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