Month: March 2013

You Can’t Touch This

Many people have been demanding that the state prosecute corrupt bankers. The prospects of that happening are almost zero if Eric Holder has anything to say about it:

Eric Holder made this rather startling confession in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, The Hill reports. It could be a key moment in the debate over whether to do something about the size and complexity of our biggest banks, which have only gotten bigger and more systemically important since the financial crisis.

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said, according to The Hill. “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

This statement can really be taken two ways. Either the state is so powerless and ineffective that they are unable to enforce the law or the banks and the state are on the same team. I’m going with the latter but many people seem to believe the former. One thing is certain, those who were fucked by the banks aren’t going to get justice.

This Week in Gun Control

This has been a pretty busy week for gun control at both a federal and Minnesota level. On the federal level Feinstein’s legislation that would be black rifles and standard capacity magazines was approved by the Senate Committee:

WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a measure to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, the first major Congressional vote on the issue since the ban expired in 2004.

The vote to approve the measure — now ostensibly headed for the full Senate — went firmly along party lines; the 10 Democrats on the committee voted aye, and the 8 Republicans of the committee rejected it. The legislation would also limit the size of ammunition magazines to 10 rounds.

Now the legislation will move to a floor vote, which could go either way. You can beg your masters for leniency by calling, e-mailing, and writing them but, frankly, I it’s past time for civil disobedience. Begging hasn’t gotten us very far and it doesn’t look like it will be any more effective in the future.

In Minnesota, surprising nobody, the local Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would ban private sales:

DFLers on a Senate committee gave a go-ahead to universal background checks for gun sales Thursday night.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a wide-ranging gun-violence bill on a 5-3 party-line vote, with DFLers supporting it and Republicans opposing it. It now goes to the Senate floor
It was the first recorded vote on a gun-violence bill of the Legislative session after weeks of discussion in the House and Senate.
The key issue — extending background checks to private sales — remains a political hot potato at the Capitol.

A companion bill is to be heard next week in the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, where its chances are in doubt.

Once again begging didn’t work out in our favor. While gun rights advocates flooded the hearings the Committee decided it had no reason to listen to the majority. There is a little good news, the alternative bill, which would put more information in government databases, create new criminals, and prohibit you from falsely reporting your “assault weapons” as lost in the event of a confiscation, hasn’t moved yet.

Things aren’t looking good from a political side (they never do) but for an agorist looking to make some major money a new business opportunity in the form of “assault weapon” and standard capacity magazine manufacturing appears could arise.

Another Article Claiming Gun Owners are Terrorists

Another day, another mainstream media report trying to label gun owners as terrorists:

There are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.

They’re not jihadists. They are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.

No, the greatest danger to the lives of American is the United States government. Considering the Attorney General stated that it’s legal to murder American citizens on United States soil with drones I don’t think there is any way to claim that those who oppose the state are a real danger. I do lover this excerpt:

Patriot groups are motivated by a host of anti-government attitudes, but their primary focus is guns. They are convinced that the government is out to seize their weapons, even though most legislation is focused on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals or restricting the types of weapons that can be sold.

I would say the “patriot” movement’s primary focus is to make the United States government abide by the Constitution, which is why I’m not part of the movement (I want to abolish the government entirely). What the Los Angeles Times is trying to do with that statement is isolate gun owners from the general populace, divide them from the large group so they can be easily conquered. The irony, of course, is that the Los Angeles Times is trying to make gun owners look dangerous while their city’s police department shoots up random trucks and burns a man down instead of following due process. Denizens of Los Angeles should be well aware of the fact that the state is far more dangerous than independent gun owners.

On the upside, at least they’re not blaming the anarchists this time.

The United States is Opening All Financial Data to Spy Agencies

Things are about to get even more Orwellian in this country:

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.

Welcome to the United States where your every move is watched by the state. News like this is the reason I laugh whenever I hear somebody say that the United States is the freest country in the world. The United States is a police state and like most police states most of the people living here don’t realize it’s a police state. Oh well, this is another reason to start looking into Bitcoin. There’s no reason the United States spy agencies need to know what you’re buying and selling and Bitcoin is an means of keeping those transactions private.

Nationalism on the Internet

Bruce Schneier has an interesting piece discussing the dangers of Internet nationalism:

For technology that was supposed to ignore borders, bring the world closer together, and sidestep the influence of national governments the Internet is fostering an awful lot of nationalism right now. We’ve started to see increased concern about the country of origin of IT products and services; U.S. companies are worried about hardware from China; European companies are worried about cloud services in the U.S; no one is sure whether to trust hardware and software from Israel; Russia and China might each be building their own operating systems out of concern about using foreign ones.

I see this as an effect of all the cyberwar saber-rattling that’s going on right now. The major nations of the world are in the early years of a cyberwar arms race, and we’re all being hurt by the collateral damage.

[…]

Nationalism is rife on the Internet, and it’s getting worse. We need to damp down the rhetoric and—more importantly—stop believing the propaganda from those who profit from this Internet nationalism. Those who are beating the drums of cyberwar don’t have the best interests of society, or the Internet, at heart.

Rampant nationalism online is an issue that has concerned me for some time now and it is one of the things that motivates me to push for Tor hidden services. I worry about a time when various states, in my case the United States government, being pursuing individuals who post things online that goes against the state’s desired message. If that day comes it will be important to be difficult, if not impossible, to track down. The future of the unconcealed web looks bleak but there is hope in anonymized networks such as Tor and I2P.

Don’t Fall for the False Dichotomy

It’s inevitable that a person involved in the political realm will eventually be forced to make a decision between standing up for their principles or maintaining their political alliances. Gun owners who also oppose furthering the police state now have to make that decision. Between the two primary factions two options have emerged: HF237, which attempts to prohibit private sales, or HF1323, which will advance the police state.

Both sides in this debate have adopted an “us” versus “them” methodology. In face the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) has the following to say:

Some anti-gun activists have been working to create a split among gun owners, hoping to weaken our position by making us fight among ourselves. They are trying to portray the Criminal Control bill, HF1325, as a gun control bill.

As I mentioned in my coverage of HF1323 (HF1325 is a clone of HF1323 for those who are curious) the bill contains several points that I would qualify as gun control, specifically Section 12, which would make it a felony to falsely report your firearms as lost or stolen. I consider that section a method of gun control because in the event of an “assault weapon” ban it would prohibit you from reporting your “assault weapons” as lost. With the passage of HF1323 the police would have reason to kidnap you if you reported your firearms as lost during an attempted confiscation. This, in addition with the mess of data that the bill would mandate to be entered into state or federally managed databases, makes for a frightening proposition. Things get a bit more ridiculous when the GOCRA page presents only two two options:

Don’t let the gun grabbers divide and conquer us. Call and email your Minnesota senator and representative today:

  • Ask them to support Rep. Hilstrom and Sen. Ortman’s criminal control bill.
  • Ask them to oppose Rep. Paymar’ss [sic] bill.

That’s a false dichotomy because there is a third option, oppose both bills. There is no need to pass more legislation. What’s broken in regards to gun control isn’t the absence of restrictions, it’s the number of restrictions. Gun-free zones have greatly reduced the cost of performing violence. No amount of background checks, data in police databases, or new laws will correct that problem.

What surprises me isn’t GOCRA’s advocacy of HF1323, it’s their tenacity in supporting it. I haven’t seen any suggestion that people oppose both bills. In fact, based on what I’ve seen written on their website, they seem to imply that you’re either with gun owners by supporting HF1323 or you’re against them by opposing it. It’s a ridiculous attitude to hold and it saddens me to see it posted on their website.

As I said at the beginning of this post, eventually politics will lead you to make a decision between your principles or your political alliances. My principles won’t allow me to support any legislation that creates new gun control measures or grants more power to the police state. Fortunately I’ve escaped the political realm and am now working on solutions outside of the state’s ability to control. My solution relies on mutual cooperation instead of “us” versus “them” strategies. It’s also something different, which is desperately needed since the political means has lead to a continuous erosion of gun rights. I urge everybody to oppose both bills being presented and find alternative means of advancing gun rights. The time of passively begging politicians to give us a few scraps from the table is over. We don’t need their blessing, permission, or acknowledgement and it’s time we started realizing that.

LAPD Refuse to Replace Truck They Wrongly Shot Up

During the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) hunter for Christopher Dorner they decided to shoot up random vehicles. Apparently the LAPD promised to replace the truck (how gracious of them). As it turns out what they really meant was that the truck would be replaced with a great number of strings attached:

The two newspaper delivery women who were shot at during the manhunt for Christopher Dorner will not be getting a new replacement truck as promised by the LAPD, according to their attorney Glen Jonas.

It has been more than a month since LAPD Chief Charlie Beck promised the truck to Emma Hernandez, 71, and her daughter, Margie Carranza, who had been working in Torrance, Calif. before dawn on Feb. 7.

Police said it was a “case of mistaken identity” that prompted officers to open fire on the women. Beck later apologized and promised to replace their truck, now riddled with bullet holes.

According to Jonas, LAPD and Galpin Ford wanted his clients to pose for a photo opportunity and pay income tax on the truck. The women no longer want the truck after they were told they needed to fill out a 1099 form for the donation, Jonas said Monday.

“You tried to murder the woman, now you’re telling her she can’t have a four-wheel drive, you’re telling her she can’t sell it and you’ve got to be taxed on it?” Jonas said. “How would anyone react to that?”

That’s cold. First the LAPD shoots their truck up because they failed to actually establish the identifies of the occupants and then they demand that the owners of the shot up truck participate in propaganda and pay income tax on the replacement. The officers involved in the shooting should be treated to the cages they like to inflict on the populace.

The Primary Purpose of the Police is to Extort Wealth from the Public

Stories like this still seem to shock people:

Drivers from Arizona and at least nine other states, including Utah, Iowa, Indiana, Delaware and Rhode Island, are going to jail, paying big fines and losing their licenses after having gotten driving-under-the-influence citations when blood tests prove they were not high.

“It makes no sense,” says attorney Michael Alarid III, who is representing a man charged in Arizona. “But this is how prosecutors and the courts are interpreting the law. And the legislature doesn’t appear to want to change it. So we’re hoping we can get the issue before the state Supreme Court.”

How could a person who is not high get busted for DUI? It happens when science meets politics.

Blood tests can detect two important chemical compounds that come from marijuana. One of them, THC, makes a person high and lasts for hours. The other inactive chemical, created as your body neutralizes THC, can linger in a person’s system for up to a month.

In Arizona, state law says if you have either of these compounds in your blood, you are guilty of a DUI.

Why would a state government make somebody pay a fine if they weren’t actually impaired? Why would police officers detain a person who wasn’t demonstrably under the influence of drugs? Because the state exists entirely off of expropriation and the police are one of the state’s primary expropriators. It’s unlikely these laws will be changed anytime soon since they stand to make the state a great deal of wealth.

The New York Times Admits They Can’t be Relied Upon

I think the New York Times did an excellent job admitting that they cannot be relied upon for actual journalism:

In his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything she’d have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left a message on voice mail but never got a call back. It’s puzzling to me that a skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever couldn’t figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.

But what if he had? What if he had succeeded in delivering his pilfered documents to The Times? What would be different, for Manning and the rest of us?

First of all, I can say with some confidence that The Times would have done exactly what it did with the archive when it was supplied to us via WikiLeaks: assigned journalists to search for material of genuine public interest, taken pains to omit information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed, and published our reports with a flourish. The documents would have made news — big news.

Emphasis mine. In that paragraph the New York Times basically admitted that it would have edited the received documents instead of publishing them in their entirety. As one of my friends in the National Guard said, “As though msm [mainstream media] really knows what kind of info could put troops at risk? Remember how great Geraldo’s grasp of operational security was?” There is no way for journalists to know what information might be a danger to troops in the field or could put the lives of informants at risk. For that matter there is no way for a journalist to know what material would be of genuine public interest. This demonstrates the reason why the old media is suffering. WikiLeaks puts up all the information they receive and people are free to sift through it and decide what is and isn’t of interest to them. In fact this is how the Internet works, everybody puts up what information they want and everybody else can read what interests them.

Organizations such as the New York Times either believe that they know what is best for you or that you’re too stupid to decide what information is of interest to you. If I were in charge of the New York Times I’d make all received information publicly available, while anonymizing sources that didn’t want to be identified, and allow the readers to decide if they want to read the curated story or sift through the raw information themselves.

3D Printer Firearm Manufacture Moves to Bypass Censorship and Copyright of CAD Models

Last month DEFCAD was launched to host firearm related 3D printer models after Thingverse implemented site-wide censorship. Cody Wilson, the man behind Defense Distributed, is working on a new endeavor, a commercial version of DefCAD aimed at the free distribution of 3D models and bypassing copyright laws:

Wilson said DefCAD will become a for-profit corporation that will act as a one-stop search engine for “3D printable models” of just about anything. In other words, DefCAD hopes to be an expanded version of the physibles section on the Pirate Bay.

“It maintains all the present features but we step it up a notch,” Wilson told Ars. “The Pirate Bay has the right idea with physibles, but increasingly the fight is going to be about physical copyright—we want to build one of the tools early.”

And like the Pirate Bay, which has thumbed its nose at corporations, copyright, and the legal system for digital goods, Wilson suggests DefCAD would do the same for physical objects as much as possible.

[…]

“Help us turn DefCAD into the world’s first unblockable, open-source search engine for 3D printable parts,” Wilson narrates in the video. “There will be no takedowns. Ever.”

[…]

Wilson acknowledged that like the Pirate Bay, there are “contingency plans” to incorporate or move his operations to other countries not as affected by the DMCA. He specifically mentioned Slovakia, Russia and Singapore as “places we could go.”

The commercial DefCAD site is up and looking for crowd sourced funding. While I admit that this venture may not turn out and there is always the chance that this endeavor is a scam I believe Cody had demonstrated his sincerity by setting up DefCAD.org and developing a 3D printable AR-15 lower. Due to those facts alone dropped them $50.00 because I believe in the cause. I, like Code, am a crypto-anarchist and believe a world where voluntary interactions, not coercive interactions, are the norm:

So what’s Wilson’s endgame? He describes himself as a “crypto-anarchist” who follows the teachings of 19th-century French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

“I believe in revolution—not the capital-R ‘Revolution,’ but I’m all for the next thing,” Wilson said. “No one can imagine the end of neo-liberal democracy. I don’t believe in socialism from above, but socialism from below. It doesn’t matter what it is, the point is that it’s not imposed. It will be what it needs to look like. [Society will be] based not on coercion but cooperation—I’m a desperate romantic. If any of these things are possible, I don’t want to believe in anything else. I want to see if these are real and can work.”

His viewpoint isn’t that dissimilar from my own:

The revolution won’t be violent, it won’t involve fighting in the streets, it won’t involved people rising up and overthrowing the governments of the world. What the revolution will involve is the continuous decentralization of power. Technology will continue to evolve in a manner that empowers individuals to separate themselves from their rulers. Powerful corporations who have enjoyed protection from competition through the state’s decrees will lose their power as an ever growing number of people are able to replicate their goods from the safety of their own homes. Enforcing patents and regulations will become impossible. As people begin to fabricate needed goods themselves the large corporations and the state will bring in less wealth. People will no longer be forced to buy goods from politically connected corporations or pay sales tax to the state.

3D printers stand to be one of the greatest tools ever devise for stripping power from the handful of centralized entities that currently hold it. The state’s laws become more and more irrelevant as people become less and less reliant on it and its cronies. Gun control laws would be meaningless in a world where any individual can easily fabricate whatever firearm they want. Wealth raked in through sales tax would dwindle as individuals are able to make needed goods themselves. Couple 3D printer technology with anonymizing tools such as Tor and you have a world where information cannot be censored, tied to any specific individuals, and goods can be shipped from designers to customers free of the state’s watchful eye.

We will not achieve liberty, in the firearms community or in general, through political involvement. Begging those in power to cede their power is a foolhardy strategy that is doom from the start. When you involve yourself in politics you involve yourself in a system that was designed and can be redesigned at any time by those currently in power. Playing outside of the political system allows you to play by your own set or rules. Instead of begging those in power for liberty you can develop ways to entirely bypass their tyranny. If you want to ensure the state cannot ban firearms, magazines, or other related accessories it would behoove you to do whatever is in your power to ensure 3D printer technology advances.