Month: May 2014

Minnesota Legislature and Governor Dayton Strikes a Blow Against the Boys in Blue

The Minnesota legislature just struck a blow against our heroes in blue! With a swipe of his pen Governor Dayton has made it unlawful for police to keep confiscated property without a conviction:

In a big win for property rights and due process, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill yesterday to curb an abusive—and little known—police practice called civil forfeiture. Unlike criminal forfeiture, under civil forfeiture someone does not have to be convicted of a crime, or even charged with one, to permanently lose his or her cash, car or home.

The newly signed legislation, SF 874, corrects that injustice. Now the government can only take property if it obtains a criminal conviction or its equivalent, like if a property owner pleads guilty to a crime or becomes an informant. The bill also shifts the burden of proof onto the government, where it rightfully belongs. Previously, if owners wanted to get their property back, they had to prove their property was not the instrument or proceeds of the charged drug crime. In other words, owners had to prove a negative in civil court. Being acquitted of the drug charge in criminal court did not matter to the forfeiture case in civil court.

Civil forfeiture is one of the best sources of police funding. By simply accusing an individual of wrongdoing the police could confiscate his or her property and sell it to fund their department. Now our boys in blue will be required to actually convict an accused individual in order to sell their property! It’s obvious what this will do to our fine state. Without profits from civil forfeiture the police departments won’t be able to afford as many guns, as much body armor, and an ever growing fleet of cruisers. How can we expect our heroes to keep up their record number of curb stompings, dog slayings, and no-knock raids at incorrect addresses if they can’t afford the equipment those jobs require? This is a travesty!

Sincerely,

Your friendly neighborhood statist.

John McCain Opens His Mouth and Reaffirms That He’s an A-Hole

One good thing I can say about Barack Obama winning the 2008 presidential election is that John McCain has basically faded into irrelevancy. But every so often McCain feels the need to remind America that he’s still alive (which is kind of shocking when you look at him) and to reaffirm the fact that he is still a total asshole. During one of his recent interviews McCain decided to give us his opinion on the surveillance state:

“It’s the world we’re living in. You don’t like it, but everything I say I expect to be recorded,” McCain told Patrick. He went on to defend its place in the lives of American citizens:

“It’s just the way we live. It is something you’ve got to accept. I don’t particularly like it, but it is what it is.”

McCain dismissed a poll that showed 53% of Americans believe that their phone calls are being recorded. When asked by Patrick if they are, McCain laughed, “no, no.”

“Young people aren’t particularly happy. We’ve forgotten a little bit about 9/11, and how if we’d intercepted the right communications we might have prevented 9/11,” McCain continued.

So we just have to accept it? I’ve got news for McCain, we don’t have to accept shit. Thankfully we have the tools to render his beloved surveillance apparatus impotent. And if McCain expects to be recorded I say we give him what he expects. Let’s follow him around 24/7 with cameras, tap his phones, and stream everything he does on the Internet for all to see. I guarantee that he won’t enjoy it and will sick his thugs on us for violating his privacy and harassing him.

Let’s also take a minute to talk about the 9/11 card. It has been pulled out every time the state wanted to implement some new draconian law that infringes on our supposed rights. After 12 years of infringements the card has worn thin. Especially when you consider that the vast surveillance apparatus currently in place hasn’t foiled a single terrorist attack. If the system hasn’t managed to foil a terrorist attack in 12 years it’s pretty hard to claim it could have foiled 9/11.

I can’t imagine what four years of McCain would have been like. OK, I can. It would have been exactly the same as the first four years we suffered under Obama but without Obama’s pretty bitchin’ speech writers (while the man’s policies are crap I must admit that he did hire some excellent speech writers for his first term).

I’ll Scratch Your Back If You Scratch Mine

Fascism is basically circlejerk economics. Government officials are jerking off corporate cronies while corporate cronies are jerking off government officials. This system works very well if you’re at the top but most of us aren’t at the top so we get to suffer protected monopolies, inferior products, and shitty service.

Another side effect of fascism is that government will always swoop in to protect its corporate cronies. Right now the White House is demanding that its corporate partners who hand over customer data to the National Security Agency (NSA) received legal immunity:

The White House has asked legislators crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency to provide legal immunity for telecommunications firms that provide the government with customer data, the Guardian has learned.

In a statement of principles privately delivered to lawmakers some weeks ago to guide surveillance reforms, the White House said it wanted legislation protecting “any person who complies in good faith with an order to produce records” from legal liability for complying with court orders for phone records to the government once the NSA no longer collects the data in bulk.

In other words the White House doesn’t want any actual reform. Unless entities handing over data to the NSA face consequences there’s no motivation for them to not do so even when they know a request is illegal. This is especially true when you consider how much money many companies make off of government data requests.

As an aside, it’s funny how the White House never demanded whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden received legal immunity for revealing government corruption. I guess our illegal secrets aren’t the same as the government’s illegal secrets.

Why Firearm Access Control is a Futile Effort

The issue of access control technology built into firearms (erroneously called smart gun technology by advocates of gun control) has been a hot topic as of late. Anti-gunners want it and gun owners want nothing to do with it. But the argument is irrelevant and Forbes, in an article trying to explain why gun owners should fear access control technology in their firearms, explains why:

10. Firearms must be able to be disassembled in order to be cleaned and maintained. One of the principles of information security is that someone who has physical access to a machine can undermine its security. Smartgun manufacturers need to show evidence that criminals who steal smartguns cannot modify them to work with the smart technology removed or disabled (or that preventing any components from being accessed that are accessible in conventional weapons will not impact the durability of the weapons).

Physical access is the ultimate killer of any security system. If an individual has both physical access and unlimited time they can bypass any security system. After all security systems merely buy time. An effective security system is one that takes longer to bypass than an attacker is either willing or able to invest. With access control technology on firearms both of those criteria are met since the owner necessarily has permanent physical access.

Mandating access control technology in firearms is entirely futile. The technology won’t survive even a few days once it’s introduced to market. With that said, the technology would give us something fun to play with at Defcon.

Checks and Balances

Back in junior high school we spent a lot of time in civics class discussing the system of checks and balances that exists between the three branches of government. It was a wonderful fairytale about how no single branch of the government could ever attain absolute power because the other two branches would stomp it down. What wasn’t covered was the truth, which is that all three branches are playing on the same team. When the executive branch wants a law the legislative branch writes and passes it. When the legislative branch wants a law enforce the executive branch dutifully enforces it. When either branch want somebody to back their actions up they ask the judicial branch. It’s really just one big government circle jerk.

But the judicial branch has another option available to it. Instead of ruling in favor of the actions of the other two branches it can simple opt to not hear a case:

The Supreme Court declined Monday to resolve the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, leaving intact what a lower-court judge described as an “almost-Orwellian” surveillance effort in which the metadata from every phone call to and from the United States is catalogued by US spies.

Surveillance state got you down? Are the people unhappy about being spied on? Is the executive branch demanding you rule its actions constitutional? Do you want to avoid a public relations nightmare but are stuck between a rock and a hard place? No problem, simply refuse to hear the case!

With the simple act of refusing to hear the case the Supreme Court managed to make the issue of phone surveillance somebody else’s problem, which likely saved it from the wrath of both the executive branch and the people being spied on. It’s a wonderful way to avoid being a check against abuses of power and tipping the balance of public opinion against you. Good job guys!

Brass Balls

All I have to say about this is that there are men out there with brass balls:

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.

They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

Here’s the video footage of the event:

You couldn’t pay me enough to do that.

War Criminal Claims American Gun Culture is Out of Balance

I’m still laughing about this:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday the nation’s gun culture has gotten “way out of balance” and the U.S. needs to rein in the notion that “anybody can have a gun, anywhere, anytime.”

This coming from a war criminal. Talk about hilarious!

But few people are discussing the irony of a war criminal lambasting gun owners. Instead they’re talking about supporting whatever candidate the Republican Party runs against Hillary (because Hillary is almost certainly going to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate). The fear machine is already ramping up as I’ve started seeing comments on several gun forums that claim Hillary will be even worse than Obama. Although this will fall mostly on deaf ears I might as well make an attempt to point out the game being played. I again return to Noam Chomsky’s great quote about political debate:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate

Here in the United States the oligarchs have successfully narrow the spectrum of acceptable opinions to the point where only one opinion is truly acceptable. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, if you play the Republican versus Democrat game you’re arguing in favor of the oligarchy. Within this narrow spectrum only a handful of issues are allowed to be debated. Gun rights, the legalities of abortion, how open the borders should be, whether we’ve always been at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and so on. The trick is that all of these issues are very emotional for those who are invested. And those issues are almost always argued in a manner that insinuates that our rulers have a right to make decisions about what we can and cannot do.

So long as we all continue to fall for their tricks and play their game we’re never going to be free. Unfortunately the oligarchy is good at playing the game and know exactly what buttons to push to get the results they desire. By simply referring to the gun culture as being out of balance an army of gun owners are whipped up into a Republican frenzy and not even thinking about the prospects of a society devoid of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Suicide by Cooperation

I give credit to the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) for developing a successful alternative strategy to political lobbying. But every time its founder opens his mouth about background checks I cringe:

“The gun rights lobby has to wake up and realize we need to lead, not follow,” the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and the the chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms told Guns.com in an interview at the at the NRA’s 143rd Annual Meetings and Exhibits in downtown Indianapolis last weekend.

Gottlieb’s desire to strike a deal on an enhanced background check measure that would cover private sales made over the Internet and at gun shows is based on the premise that fighting UBCs is a losing battle over the long run.

Do you know what a great way to commit suicide is? Cooperating with your enemies. Trust me, they will find a convenient way for you to die if your work with them. Gottlieb obviously has some powerful gray matter in his brainpan as his organization has lead several successful lawsuits that ended in favor of gun owners. But his belief that the gun rights movement needs to strike a deal on background checks is, to put it nicely, really fucking stupid.

Fighting universal background checks isn’t a losing battle. Private sales remain legal in many states (Minnesota being one of them). It also looks like most of those states will continue to allow private sales without mandating they go through a federally licensed dealer. There is also the fact that firearms are simple mechanical devices that can be built by small groups of people. Distributing the knowledge on home gun manufacturing would render universal background checks of any sort impotent.

The history of gun control in this country is proof that cooperating with anti-gunners is a losing strategy. First they said they only desired to control machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, suppressors, and a few other odds and ends. Then they wanted the purchase of machine guns by non-state entities to be entirely verboten (and only settled on newly manufactured machine guns being verboten). After that they wanted aesthetically offensive rifles, which they erroneously called “assault” rifles, prohibited and all magazines to only be legally allowed to hold 10 rounds. Every time the gun control advocates got what they wanted they demanded more and the same will happen with universal background checks. If gun rights activists cooperate with gun control advocates on universal background checks the initial bill may not be as bad as it would otherwise be. But then the anti-gunners will demand more. And they will likely get it because the precedence was set by the law gun rights activists initially helped pass.

[Digital] Papers Please

As the popular phrase “On the Internet nobody know that you’re a dog.” tries to explain the Internet is a bastion of anonymity. You can be whoever you want to be when posting online and if you properly utilize effective anonymity tools there is no practical way for anybody to connect your online identity to your real identify. This shield of anonymity enables truly free speech, which means the government wants to stop it. Meet the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) initiative, an attempt by the executive branch to force people to obtain a license to use the Internet. This license isn’t merely are method for the state to identify you as being qualified to use the Internet, it’s an attempt to remove the shield of anonymity that protects free speech online:

The draft NSTIC says that, instead of a national ID card, it “seeks to establish an ecosystem of interoperable identity service providers and relying parties where individuals have the choice of different credentials or a single credential for different types of online transactions,” which can be obtained “from either public or private sector identity providers.” (p. 6) In other words, the governments want a lot of different companies or organizations to be able to do the task of confirming that a person on the Internet is who he or she claims to be.

Decentralized or federated ID management systems are possible, but like all ID systems, they definitely pose significant privacy issues. 1 There’s little discussion of these issues, and in particular, there’s no attention to how multiple ID’s might be linked together under a single umbrella credential. A National Academies study, Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy, warned that multiple, separate, unlinkable credentials are better for both security and privacy (pp. 125-132). Yet the draft NSTIC doesn’t discuss in any depth how to prevent or minimize linkage of our online IDs, which would seem much easier online than offline, and fails to discuss or refer to academic work on unlinkable credentials (such as that of Stefan Brands, or Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya).

Providing a uniform online ID system could pressure providers to require more ID than necessary. The video game company Blizzard, for example, recently indicated it would implement a verified ID requirement for its forums before walking back the proposal only after widespread, outspoken criticism from users.

Pervasive online ID could likewise encourage lawmakers to enact access restrictions for online services, from paying taxes to using libraries and beyond. Website operators have argued persuasively that they cannot be expected to tell exactly who is visiting their sites, but that could change with a new online ID mechanism. Massachusetts recently adopted an overly broad online obscenity law; it takes little imagination to believe states would require NSTIC implementation individuals to be able to access content somehow deemed to be “objectionable.”

I will go so far as to argue that truly free speech isn’t possible without the availability of anonymity. We see this whenever a company sues a customer who wrote a bad review, the state kidnaps a businessman, somebody is kidnapped for holding the wrong political belief. Imagine how much easier it would be for a business to sue anybody who left a negative review of their products if the NSTIC initiative was realized. Confirming the identify of the reviewer would be simple and that would put anybody leaving a negative review at risk of a lawsuit.

The only reason I can perceive for the executive branch’s push for its NSTIC initiative is for squashing political dissidence and suppressing critics of its corporate partners. Problems of authentication, authorization, and accounting have already been solved in numerous ways that allow an individual to keep their online identity separate from their real life identity. There are even methods that allow a user’s real life identify to be verified (which is what my certificate provider does). Nothing in the NSTIC initiative solves a problem that hasn’t been solved already. It merely introduces another way to solve these problems in a manner that centralized information for easy federal and corporate access.

The State is Hindering Smart Gun Availability, Not the NRA

Today’s theme, as you can probably guess from the previous post, is putting the blame where it should be. Far too often the media attempts to blame anybody but the actual culprit for perceived wrongdoings. For example, The Verge recently ran an article accusing the National Rifle Association (NRA) of taking peoples’ smart guns. At least that’s the accusation found in the title, the article itself points out that the NRA doesn’t actually oppose smart gun technology:

Opponents counter that the technology adds an unnecessary failure point — you don’t want to fumble with a fingerprint unlock if someone is breaking into your home. They also fear the spread of laws like New Jersey’s, since similar proposals have been introduced in other states and in Congress. “The NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms,” the group writes on its website. “We are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as grips that would read your fingerprints before the gun will fire.”

And the closing paragraph finally points to the real cause of opposition to smart guns:

Many gun owners don’t object to smart guns, as long as they’re still allowed to buy regular guns. “If someone wants to buy a smart gun, that is fine,” Raymond said in his Facebook address. “When the law legislates it, that is a sin.” After the apology, he and his shop were flooded with supportive emails, calls, and visits. Members of the Maryland Shooters forum even rallied for a barbecue at Engage Armament. “It is only a matter of time before such guns are available. Acting like babies about it doesn’t make things better,” one user wrote. “Assuming of course there is an actual market for such a bad idea.”

So we come again to the real culprit, the state. As the article points out New Jersey passed legislation that would mandate smart gun technology be integrated into all firearms sold in the state within three years of the technology becoming available to consumers. That being the case it’s pretty simple to figure out why so many people oppose this unproven technology.

Smart gun technology is another victim of the gun control advocates’ policy of making everything either mandatory of verboten. If a new technology can inhibit firearms they demand it become mandatory and if the technology can enhance firearms they demand it be prohibited. Access control policies (which is what gun control advocates really mean when they say smart guns) could inhibit the reliability of firearms as none of the proposed access control methods have been rigorously tested. I don’t want a gun that will sudden cease to function because some asshole decided to jam the radio frequency being used to authenticate with my firearm. And I certainly don’t want to cut up and deface my current firearms (some of which are very valuable to me) to jerry rig some half-assed access control system into them. But that’s what the politicians in New Jersey have demanded and, as a general rule, if the politicians in New Jersey concoct a gun policy then us gun owners know it’s not to be trusted (and in this case those politicians were kind enough to make it blatantly obvious why we shouldn’t trust them).

There’s almost certainly a market for firearms with reliable access control technology. But the state doesn’t want to allow that market and the market for guns sans access control technology to coexist. So the debate necessarily becomes one of “us” versus “them”. If the state wasn’t using its monopoly on force to favor one market over the others then we could have both and everybody could be happy (except the anti-gunners but they’re never happy so there’s no point in trying to please them).