Torture Fetishism

Since the release of the summary of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture report two camps have the developed. The first camp, made up of decent human beings, opposes the use of torture. One the other side of the isle is the camp, made up by a bunch of sick fuckers who have no value to humanity whatsoever, supports the use of torture. As the debate wages on the second camp, made up primarily of neocons who often accuse “liberals” of appealing to emotion, have been appealing to emotion with meme like this:

torture-fetishism

That is a picture of somebody who jumped from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. The implication is that torture is acceptable because some terrorists crashed some planes in the towers and killed a lot of people. For those of you posting this meme and memes like it would you kindly provide me with one things? Either explain to me how torturing people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks will obtain justice for those who died in the attacks or provide me the decision from the publicly held jury trail that convicted the people being tortured of being involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Until you can provide one or the other please kindly go sodomized yourselves with retractable batons.

The Privacy Dangers of Body Camera Equipped Police

I’ve been how ineffective body cameras on police will be but after seeing some of the things posted by my friend Kurtis Hannah I am now convinced that they will also bring a new wave of surveillance and privacy violations.

We already live in a world where much of our activity is recorded by cameras. Department stores, gas stations, hospitals, and pretty much everywhere else employ security cameras. While I don’t like all being recorded at these places I also acknowledge that they won’t send men with guns after me unless I’ve done something legitimately bad in most cases (because that’s usually the only time the footage is reviewed). Police footage, especially in this day and age where the National Security Agency (NSA) already has a massive surveillance apparatus, could be employed differently. It’s not unimaginable that police departments would employ people to review all footage from body cameras to find potential criminal offenses that the officer missed. Such a large amount of footage could also enable police to track individuals by using facial recognition software against body camera footage. That wouldn’t be unprecedented since many departments already do something similar with automatic license plate scanners.

This puts us in a really bad spot. On the one hand we cannot trust the police to go about their activities unsupervised. Having their actions recorded at all times while they’re on duty and streaming that footage live for anybody to access at any point is the only way any semblance of accountability can exist. But doing that will also violate the privacy of anybody within camera shot of an officer.

What’s the solution? In my opinion the only viable solution is to toss out the entire institution of modern policing and replace it with something better. That something better will have to be decentralized by nature and not in any way associated with the state, which seems impossible to implement today due to the controlling nature of today’s state. But until that happens there will be no accountability and the only “solutions” offered to us will be ones that better enable the police to keep us under their boots.

PGP On the iPhone

I’m a big fan of OpenPGP. Not only do I use it to sign and encrypt e-mails but I also use it to sign and encrypt files that I upload to services such as Dropbox and Amazon S3. But mostly due to a lack of time I didn’t have much luck finding a decent iPhone app for OpenPGP. The main problem is that all of the OpenPGP apps aren’t free and I don’t like spending money unless I know I’m getting a good product. I finally decided to drop a whopping $1.99 and try the app that had the best reviews, iPGMail.

Due to the limitations of the iPhone, namely it doesn’t let you write plugins for other apps, iPGMail and other iOS OpenPGP solutions aren’t as slick as something like GPGTools. But iPGMail is as easy to use as you’re going to get. You can either copy the encrypted body content of an e-mail and paste it into iPGMail to decrypt it or, if the encrypted e-mail came in as an attachment (which is what I always do), you can tap and hold on the attachment icon and the option of opening it with iPGMail will appear. Additionally you can encrypt and upload or download and decrypt files from Dropbox, which is a feature I appreciate.

The app allows you to generate 4096-bit keypairs or, more importantly to me, import an already existing keypair. Because my e-mail server lies in my apartment I just e-mailed my keypair (in an encrypted format, of course). When I opened the e-mail on the iPhone and tap and held the attachment icon I was able to open it in iPGMail and import it.

I’m not saying that this app is the best thing since sliced bread because I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it. But so far I like what I see and it has done everything I’ve wanted in an OpenPGP app on my iPhone.

Turning Shame Into an Asset

The Internet is abuzz by news that Sony has cancelled the theatrical release of the latest Rogen and Franco shitfest:

ony is canceling The Interview‘s planned theatrical release in response to all major US theater chains deciding not to show the film after attacks were threatened. “In light of the decision by the majority of our exhibitors not to show the film The Interview, we have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release,” Sony says in a statement, reprinted by Variety. “We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers.”

Everybody has concluded that this is a very bad precedent. I believe that this is a very good marketing strategy. Let’s be honest, threats form the two groups that have opposed the release of this movie, hackers and North Korea, have never been taken seriously by anybody in the United States before. Hackers have traditionally been unable to inflict physical damage or pain and thus go mostly ignored and North Korea is the laughing stock of the entire world. So why would a major cinema chain suddenly back down when one of these groups makes a threat? Because it’s brilliant marketing.

There’s already plenty of people upset by this news. After all, capitulating with terrorism doesn’t set a good precedent. So people are going to demand that the movie be brought to theaters, if for not other reason than to not cooperate with terrorists. I predict that in the not too distant future Sony will reverse it’s decision due to “popular demand”. Every theater chain in the country will likewise reverse their decisions for the same reason. Then people will flock to see the “banned” movie. If I’m right it’s a goddamn brilliant strategy and would allow Sony to turn the shame of a major hack into an asset.

I’m sure some of you reading this probably think I’m joking. I’m not.

Happy Birthday Chelsea Manning

Although I know she’ll not see this on account of the fact that she’s rotting in a cage for informing us of American war crimes I still want to take a moment in joining people in wishing Chelsea Manning a happy 27th birthday.

Without her bravery we may have never learned about some of the war crimes being perpetrated by the United States military. But her plight is also a reminder that the state, not matter how transparent it claims to be, does not like it when people air its dirty laundry. Although it seems doubtful maybe someday there will be a president in office that will pardon her. Or maybe a group of people will get together and come up with a workable plan to break Chelsea out of her cage. Anybody who managed to do that would be heroes in my book.

The Impact of Edward Snowden

As if anybody had any questions about whether or not Edward Snowden’s actions resulted in a safer Internet we now have a survey with some interesting results:

There’s a new international survey on Internet security and trust, of “23,376 Internet users in 24 countries,” including “Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey and the United States.” Amongst the findings, 60% of Internet users have heard of Edward Snowden, and 39% of those “have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of his revelations.”

[…]

I ran the actual numbers country by country, combining data on Internet penetration with data from this survey. Multiplying everything out, I calculate that 706 million people have changed their behavior on the Internet because of what the NSA and GCHQ are doing. (For example, 17% of Indonesians use the Internet, 64% of them have heard of Snowden and 62% of them have taken steps to protect their privacy, which equals 17 million people out of its total 250-million population.)

After we learned about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive domestic spying program a lot of people who previously didn’t care about security suddenly began showing an interest. I saw this firsthand when participating in several local CryptoParties. Past attempts to even get enough people to bother throwing one failed miserably but after Snowden let us all in on the game interest spiked. I’m still busy assisting people interested in computer security because of Snowden. And that’s just individuals who developer a personal interest. Many companies have greatly increased their security including Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

In addition to better security Snowden’s leaks have also been good for agorism.

So I think it’s pretty clear that Snowden’s actions ended up benefiting us all greatly.

Al Fraken Suddenly Cares About Privacy

When the government is caught spying on people it’s quick to justify its actions as being necessary for national security. But when private companies, at least ones not tied to the state’s own surveillance apparatus, spy on people the state claims it’s a tragedy. I’m not a fan of spying regardless of who’s doing it but I also can’t stand hypocrisy. Al Franken, one of Minnesota’s two psychotic senators, has a bug up his ass over Uber. I can only imagine that the company hasn’t been willing to become a full member of the state’s surveillance apparatus because Franken has been coming down on it hard:

For the last month the senator has pressed the company to be more transparent and accountable in how it handles the data associated with its burgeoning number of passengers around the world.

“My biggest concern is that they seem to have no policy,” said Franken, who chairs a subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. “They have all this very sensitive data and they seem to have absolutely no real privacy policy.”

This is rich coming from a man who defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) widespread surveillance of Americans. If anybody has been collecting very sensitive data without any privacy police it’s the NSA. And while I don’t trust Uber with the data it collects I at least know it’s not collecting things like my phones calls, e-mails, and other communications. Perhaps Franken should first invest time in writing up a privacy police for the NSA and then deal with the smaller fish like Uber. At least then he wouldn’t sounds like such a hypocrite.

A Preview of How Useful Body Cameras on Cops Will Be

Body cameras are being touted as the saviors of modern policing. We told that police will behave themselves so long as they’re expected to wear body cameras. But body cameras have some major limitations. First of all they are facing away from the cop, not at him. The footage collected by the body cameras currently on the market remains in the control of the police department where it can be conveniently erased. There is also the issue that body cameras on cops are under the control of the cop, which means they can be readily disabled:

OAKLAND, Calif.—Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013, and the OPD did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison.

Not surprisingly accountability in Oakland is pretty damn low. Of the cops that did disable their body camera few suffered any meaningful consequences. It’s almost like they killed a family pet after kicking in the door of the wrong house during a drug raid!

The root of the problems facing modern policing is the lack of accountability. When cops are getting away with murdering people who sold some tax-free cigarettes then getting away with disabling body cameras or tampering with footage is a walk in the park. At this point the only solution is to tear down the entire institution and create a replacement based on the lessons we’ve learned.

Editing Sucks

The deadline for the Agorist Writers Workshop is fast approaching. After some furious banging on the keyboard I finally finished my rough draft. I’m excited about that but now comes the job of editing. Holy fuck do I hate editing (as the lack of professionalism on this site probably indicates). It is where I realize all of my hard work wasn’t hard enough.

So far the only scenes I like are the fight scenes. Since this is supposed to be a story about libertarian solutions to problem the fight scenes only make up a small part of the story. The last time I wrote a short story it was basically a long series of fight scenes. You see what the issue is. Next time I’ll return to military science fiction.

Either way the story (and the half dozen other partial stories that didn’t end up being my submission) has been a blast to write. I forgot how much fun fiction can be and really feel as though I should do more of it. But I need to hire somebody else to edit this dreck.

Oh, and I know some of my agorist buddies read this site (what can I say, they have poor taste). You better get your submissions in because I don’t want to be the only son of a bitch submitting work to this contest.

Ignorance of the Law is Not an Excuse, Unless You’re a Cop

How many times have you heard petty authoritarians and cops (but I repeat myself) say “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse”? What they really mean is that ignorance of the law is not an excuse unless you’re a cop. Cops periodically enforce nonexistent laws. A popular phrase relating to this issue is that “You can be the rap but you can’t beat the ride.” Even if a cop is enforcing a fictitious law you as an individual have little recourse. But what happens when a cop enforcing a nonexistent law finds evidence that you’re breaking an existing law? According to the Nazgûl, err, the Supreme Court it means you’re going to be a UNICOR slave for a few years:

At issue in Heien v. North Carolina was a 2009 traffic stop for a single busted brake light that led to the discovery of illegal drugs inside the vehicle. According to state law at the time, however, motor vehicles were required only to have “a stop lamp,” meaning that the officer did not have a lawful reason for the initial traffic stop because it was not a crime to drive around with a single busted brake light. Did that stop therefore violate the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure? Writing today for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts held that it did not. “Because the officer’s mistake about the brake-light law was reasonable,” Roberts declared, “the stop in this case was lawful under the Fourth Amendment.”

Roberts’ opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan. Writing alone in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues for giving the police far too much leeway.

Since the Constitution gives the Supreme Court a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution this decision means that charges stemming from cops enforcing nonexistent laws is constitutional. The Fourth Amendment, once again, proves to be ineffective at protecting our supposed right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure. But that’s just par for the statist course.