Author: Christopher Burg

You Must Guard Your Own Privacy

People often make the mistake of believing that they can control the privacy for content they post online. It’s easy to see why they fall into this trap. Facebook and YouTube both offer privacy controls. Facebook along with Twitter also provide private messaging. However, online privacy settings are only as good as the provider makes them:

Facebook disclosed a new privacy blunder on Thursday in a statement that said the site accidentally made the posts of 14 million users public even when they designated the posts to be shared with only a limited number of contacts.

The mixup was the result of a bug that automatically suggested posts be set to public, meaning the posts could be viewed by anyone, including people not logged on to Facebook. As a result, from May 18 to May 27, as many as 14 million users who intended posts to be available only to select individuals were, in fact, accessible to anyone on the Internet.

Oops.

Slip ups like this are more common than most people probably realize. Writing software is hard. Writing complex software used by billions of people is really hard. Then after the software is written, it must be administered. Administering complex software used by billions of people is also extremely difficult. Programmers and administrators are bound to make mistakes. When they do, the “confidential” content you posted online can quickly become publicly accessible.

Privacy is like anything else, if you want the job done well, you need to do it yourself. The reason services like Facebook can accidentally make your “private” content public is because they have complete access to your content. If you want to have some semblance of control over your privacy, your content must only be accessible to you. If you want that content to be available to others, you must post it in such a way where only you and them can access it.

This is the problem that public key cryptography attempts to solve. With public key cryptography each person has a private and public key. Anything encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the private key. Needless to say, as the names implies, you can post your public key to the Internet but must guard the security of your private key. When you want to make material available to somebody else, you encrypt it with their public key so hey can decrypted it with their private key. Likewise, when they want to make content available to you they must encrypt it with your public key so you can decrypt it with your private key. This setup gives you the best ability to enforce privacy controls because, assuming no party’s private key has been compromised, only specifically authorized parties have access to content. Granted, there are still a lot of ways for this setup to fall apart but a simple bad configuration isn’t going to suddenly make millions of people’s content publicly accessible.

Finding New Justifications for Harassment

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has announced that it will stop arresting people for possession of small amounts of cannabis. At least that’s what you’d think if you were going by a lot of people’s comments. What MPD actually announced is far more limited in scope:

In a series of rushed announcements Thursday, authorities said that police would no longer conduct sting operations targeting low-level marijuana sales, and charges against 47 people arrested in the first five months of 2018 would be dismissed.

[…]

But in recent years, Minneapolis police have stepped up their presence on Hennepin Avenue in response to concerns about safety downtown. Using undercover officers posing as buyers, they arrested 47 people for selling marijuana on Hennepin between 5th and 6th streets.

MPD will stop having officers posing as buyers in order to find suckers to arrest. However, that doesn’t mean that the department will stop arresting people for possession of small amounts of cannabis.

Then there is the issue of demographics. When 46 of the 47 people you’ve arrested are black, red flags are raised. This is especially true when the arrests were the result of a sting operation that involved law enforcers initiating contact. Such demographics make it look as though the law enforcers in question were almost exclusively approaching black individuals and mostly ignoring people with lighter colored skin. But now that MPD has been caught apparently red handed, the racial profiling will cease, right? Don’t get your hopes up.

Anybody who studies the history of laws and how they’re enforced in the United States quickly learns that when law enforcers are caught targeting specific individuals, law that are claimed to prohibit such targeting are quickly passed but nothing changes. This is because law enforcers simply find another way to target those individuals using a different justification. A very good case can be made for the drug war actually being a continuation of Jim Crow laws. While the laws prohibiting drugs never specifically mention race, they tend to be enforced more rigorously against black individuals. But since the laws never mention race, when questions about the demographics of those arrested are asked, law enforcers have plausible deniability. They can claim that they were enforcing the law consistently but that blacks simply break those laws more frequently.

If MPD wants to racially profile, it can find a justification to do so that gives its officers deniability.

You Have Only the Rights You Can Take and Hold

I lamented about living in a postliterate society when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips. Nobody read the fucking article so they decided that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of religious rights when it actually ruled in regards to procedural shenanigans. The American Institute for Economic Research has a good summary of what the ruling entails:

Reading this case literally, we can conclude the following. If you want to exercise property rights and behave as if you are free, according to the Supreme Court, you need to get religion right away and hope that the bureaucrats adjudicating your case put you down as a monster for that very reason. Then you can narrowly escape prosecution.

Otherwise you must comply. If you take the majority opinion on face value, had the deliberations in Colorado been undertaken with no invidious discrimination against the faith of the baker, the decision would have gone the other way.

In other words, you don’t have any rights.

I’ve discussed this matter before but it’s worth repeating. Questions regarding rights, such as whether or not you have the right to refuse to provide a good or service due to your personal religious convictions, are pointless. Why? To pull out one of my favorite George Carlin quotes, “Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but there’s no such thing as rights. They’re imaginary. We made them up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They’re just imaginary.”

You can claim that you have the right to freely express yourself or the right to own firearms or the right to not incriminate yourself but you only actually have those rights if you can exercise them. Consider Jack Phillips’s case. He believed that he had the right to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage because his religious beliefs are at odds with such a union. When he tried to exercise his perceived right, government goons came down on him. Even after his Supreme Court victory, he doesn’t have the right to refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings because he failed to convince the Supreme Court, and by extent the various levels of government in the United States, that he had such a right. When (and it will be a matter of when, not if, because it’s human nature to push boundaries) another same-sex couple comes into his bakery wanting a cake for their wedding and he refuses, he’ll find himself in court all over again.

You only have the rights you can take and hold. How you take and hold them is irrelevant. If you are able to convince a group to respect your perceived rights, then you have taken and held those rights. If you have enough firepower at hand to scare people away from infringing on your perceived rights, then you have taken and held those rights. But if you can’t take and hold them, even if they’re written down on a fancy piece of paper, they don’t exist.

Defining Evil

Anybody who has identified as a libertarian for any length of time has likely been accused of being a paid Koch brothers shill. The Koch brothers are evil incarnate who want nothing more than to kill every poor person on the planet. At least that’s what my self-proclaimed progressive friends continue to tell me. Those same friends also tell me that anybody who is working to topple Trump is doing God’s work. So now I’m left to wonder, are the Koch brothers still evil incarnate:

Powerful US billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are funding a multi-million dollar campaign against President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.

Three political groups backed by the brothers say they will use advertising, lobbying and grassroots campaigns to push the benefits of free trade.

This is an excellent illustration of the trap most politicos fall into eventually fall into. They tend to define other politicos on a binary scale. Either you’re on “their” side and therefore good or you’re on the “other” side and therefor evil. But people are complex creatures and seldom fit nicely onto a binary political spectrum. Two good examples of this are pro-gun progressives and pro-choice conservatives. Even if every other political belief an individual in either group holds agrees with their respective political label, they are considered heretics by both sides.

I honestly don’t know much about the Koch brothers other than the check they’re supposed to send me for being a libertarian shill has yet to arrive (if this is due to an address mishap, would a representative of the Koch brothers please contact me so it can be corrected). I’m sure if I dug into their beliefs I would find things that I agree with and disagree with. This is probably true for every person on the planet. If you spend the time to get to know somebody, you’ll inevitable find that there are things on which you two agree and things on which you two disagree. Needless to say, having only a binary spectrum is insufficient for judging human beings.

The Government Is Us

Worshipers of democracy continue to tell me that the government is us. I’m not sure why they try to drag me into being part of the government but they’re very adamant. Anyways, when somebody tries to claim that the government is us I like to point to stories like this one:

A young hacker reeling from the Philando Castile case and the acquittal of the officer who killed him broke into several state databases last year and boasted about his exploits.

“An innocent man is dead, while a guilty man is free,” the hacker, known as “Vigilance” tweeted in part last year.

Here’s the thing, if Vigilance is the government (because, after all, he’s part of “us”), he would have every right to access any government computer he so desired. It is, according to worshipers of democracy, his computer after all. But the fact that he’s been arrested for accessing those computers indicates that he isn’t the government, especially in the eyes of the government.

You aren’t he government. If you disagree with me, try strolling into a National Security Agency (NSA) building. You’ll be provided a free education regarding your misunderstanding.

Ensuring You’re Not Well

What do you do if a friend of family member hasn’t responded to your attempt to communicate for a while? What do you do if you think a friend of family member might be suicidal? In these cases it’s not entirely uncommon from concerned parties to call 911 and ask emergency personnel to perform a wellness check. However, most of the time when you call 911 law enforcers are dispatched and that can turn a wellness check into a very dangerous situation.

Apparently some concerned party, the law enforcers involved are being cagey about the specifics, were concerned about Chelsea Manning after she posted some tweets that sounded suicidal and called in for a wellness check. In response law enforcers officers stormed her home with guns drawn:

Shortly after Chelsea Manning posted what appeared to be two suicidal tweets on May 27, police broke into her home with their weapons drawn as if conducting a raid, in what is known as a “wellness” or “welfare check” on a person experiencing a mental health crisis. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower and U.S. Senate candidate, was not at home, but video obtained by The Intercept shows officers pointing their guns as they searched her empty apartment.

The footage, captured by a security camera, shows an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department in Bethesda, Maryland, knocking on Manning’s door. When no one responds, the officer pops the lock, and three officers enter the home with their guns drawn, while a fourth points a Taser. The Intercept is publishing this video with Manning’s permission.

Here’s a question, were the law enforcers performing a wellness check or were they using the wellness check as an excuse to burst into her home, claim that a controversial individual appeared to be holding a gun, and murder that individual? The answer you give will probably depend on your overall view of law enforcement in this country. I certainly am leaning towards the latter.

Fortunately, she wasn’t home during the incident so if it was the latter, she wasn’t around to be gunned down. However, the fact that a supposed wellness check involved four officers with weapons drawn bursting into a home should be concerned to everybody. If, for example, the home was occupied by a retired soldier who was suffering from a post-traumatic stress episode, they could have reacted violently to strangers with guns bursting into their home and end up gunned down by officers who made a bad situation worse. Moreover, the fact that the question about the law enforcers’ intentions can be seriously asked at all indicates a dangerous trend in law enforcement behavior.

I doubt we’ll hear much more about this incident. The department involved is being cagey and probably won’t be any less opaque in the comings days. This incident should be a lesson though. If you suspect somebody may be suicidal or incapacitated in some manner, don’t call 911. Check on them yourself or have a friend or family member check on them. If you call 911, the dispatcher will likely send law enforcers to perform the check and then there will be a good chance of the person you’re concerned about will end up in a body bag.

How Things Change

The big news in developer circles this week is that Microsoft acquired GitHub. I admit that the news didn’t fill me with happiness since I’m not a fan of the trend of everything being gobbled up by a handful of big companies. But Microsoft has been making a rather dramatic shift in recent years. The company has becoming far friendlier towards the open source community and has been releasing a lot of terrific developer tools. This shift has made me hopeful that Microsoft will be a good steward for GitHub. Moreover, things could have turned out far worse:

Microsoft was not alone in chasing GitHub, which it agreed to acquire for $7.5 billion on Monday. Representatives from Alphabet’s Google were also talking to the company about an acquisition in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the deal talks.

Not too long ago if you had told me that both Microsoft and Google were looking to acquire GitHub, I’d have hoped for Google. But today I’m happy that of the two companies Microsoft ended up buying GitHub.

The biggest problem I have with Google, besides its business model based on surveilling users, is its habit of abandoning products. Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Health, Google Wave, and more have been discontinued by Google. Some of the products were discontinued shortly after they were released and/or were discontinued with little notice given to users. Microsoft, on the other hand, is well-known for supporting products for a long time and giving reasonable notice when it does decide to discontinue a product. If Google had acquired GitHub, there’s no telling how long it would have been kept around. Since Microsoft acquired GitHub, it’ll probably be around for a long time.

It’s funny how things can change so rapidly. Google was the darling child of the technology industry but now its star is descending. Meanwhile, Microsoft went from the epitome of evil but is now improving its reputation.

Somebody Pilfered the Lock Box

The Ponzi schemes that is Social Security is, not surprisingly, facing some financial issues. Apparently somebody has pilfered the lock box because the program is going to be dipping into its reserves:

Medicare’s finances were downgraded in a new report from the program’s trustees Tuesday, while the projection for Social Security’s stayed the same as last year.

Medicare’s hospital insurance fund will be depleted in 2026, said the trustees who oversee the benefit program in an annual report. That is three years earlier than projected last year.

This year, like last year, Social Security’s trustees said the program’s two trust funds would be depleted in 2034.

For the first time since 1982, Social Security has to dip into the trust fund to pay for the program this year.

This shouldn’t surprise anybody. The entire idea behind Social Security, forcing employees to put money into a government account so they can withdraw from it when they reach an arbitrarily defined age (which continues to increase), is impossible to maintain with a deflationary currency. An employee who puts a dollar into an account in 1960 will only withdraw $0.12 worth of purchasing power in 2018. Under these conditions either the amount of money available to retirees has to be increased, which will deplete the account quickly, or the retiree cannot be given the same purchasing power that they deposited (which, in effect, means their purchasing power was stolen from them).

But inflation isn’t the only issue facing Social Security. Ponzi schemes require a constantly increasing number of participants. With the birth rate declining rapidly in the United States, there aren’t going to be as many workers as there once were so the number of people paying into Social Security will diminish while the number of people extracting from Social Security will increase.

The bottom line is, regardless of what politicians claim, Social Security is doomed.

Living in Postliterate America

I’m working with a dying medium. The written word has served humanity for thousands of years but it’s time, at least here in the United States, is coming to an end. Why do I think this? Because every time a piece of news involving even a tiny bit of minutia crops up, few seem able to read more than the headline.

The latest example of this involves a baker in Colorado by the name of Jack Phillips. A couple wanted him to make a cake for their wedding. He refused because the couple were both men and his Christian beliefs don’t jive with same-sex marriages. The couple decided that this was discriminatory and brought the wrath of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission upon him. Eventually the case reached the Supreme Court and yesterday the nine muumuu-clad judges announced that they sided with Phillips.

Obviously religious freedom just made a giant leap forward in the United States, right? Wrong. It turns out that everybody cheering this decision as win for religious freedom stopped reading after the headline:

In a case brought by a Colorado baker, the court ruled by a 7-2 vote that he did not get a fair hearing on his complaint because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission demonstrated a hostility to religion in its treatment of his case.

Writing for the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that while it is unexceptional that Colorado law “can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions that are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.”

He said that in this case the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, understandably had difficulty in knowing where to draw the line because the state law at the time afforded store keepers some latitude to decline creating specific messages they considered offensive. Kennedy pointed to the Colorado commission’s decision allowing a different baker to refuse to put an anti-gay message on a cake.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed hostility towards Phillips and that that hostility prevented an unbiased hearing. Basically the government failed to act as a neutral third-party mediator and that invalidated its decision. At no point did the Supreme Court rule on the law in question. The law forcing Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding wasn’t invalidated.

Knowing this literally took only a few paragraphs worth of reading but I somehow saw tons of people claiming that this decision was in regards to religious freedom. No wonder people make video blogs today. If you’re using the written word, you’re apparently making your content unavailable to 99.99 percent (this is totally a scientifically backed percentage) of the American population.