Author: Christopher Burg

Cellular Phones Aren’t the Only Way to Track People

A lot of privacy advocates have a habit of developing tunnel vision. They’ll see an obvious privacy violation and fail to see dozens of others. For example, I know a lot of privacy advocates who have developed tunnel vision for cellular phones. Some of these individuals will even leave their cellular phone at home when traveling somewhere thinking that doing so will make invisible to surveillance. However, there is more than one way to track an individual’s movements. How many people who leave their cellular phones at home then immediately get into a uniquely identifiable vehicle?

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

Every vehicle is legally required to have a uniquely identifiable license plate. Image recognition technology has advanced to the point where reading the unique identified on these plats is trivial. Now it’s trivial to create a vehicle tracking system with nothing more than strategically placed cameras that can talk to a central tracking system.

If you want to protect your privacy, you need to take public transportation, right? While this might seem like an obvious answer since public transportation mixes a lot of people together, most public transit systems include video surveillance and facial recognition is now at the point where uniquely identifying somebody’s face is pretty easy. Given enough surveillance cameras, it’s possible to track somebody walking in a city thanks to facial recognition technology.

Surveillance has always been a cat and mouse game. Right now the cat has some new tactics that give it an edge. In order to survive, the mouse must evolve too. The mouse won’t evolve if it succumbs to tunnel vision though.

War Is Good for Business

Yesterday I posted about my theory that the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan aren’t meant to be won, they’re meant to grind of perpetually in order to enrich the military-industrial complex. Less you think I’m a complete wonk I would like to take a moment to point out that war is good for business:

As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.

The nice thing about being a policy maker is that you’re in a position to make a great deal of money when your policies are enacted. If, for example, you plan to wage a perpetual war, you can invest in military contractors before you announce your policy. After you announce your policy, you can enjoy significant profits at the stock prices of those companies skyrockets. Moreover, you can buy more stock if you plan to announce a policy of increasing the war effort.

This is one of the reason political offices are magnets to corrupt individuals. It’s also one of the reasons why political reform is impossible. Do you think somebody in a position to make significant profits is going to willingly curtail their own power and thus harm their profits? Of course not.

Just Throw More Money at It

Let’s pretend for a moment that we have been tasked with managing an effort to upgrade an archaic vehicle registration system. Eight years and $93 million later the new system is still a complete mess. The developers that we hired say that they need another $43 million to make the system actually work. How do you proceed? Do you just toss more money at the developers or do you write the entire project off as a loss and try again? That’s the question currently facing the State of Minnesota:

State officials Wednesday unveiled an expensive plan for fixing the troubled computer system for vehicle licensing and registration.

They say lawmakers would need to approve another $43 million early in the 2018 session to get the system back on track this year.

One Republican lawmaker called the request “mind boggling.”

The Minnesota Licensing and Registration System, or MNLARS, has been plagued by technical problems since its launch last summer. The cost of the statewide computer system, used for tab purchases, title transfers and other transactions, has already topped $93 million over eight years.

Mind boggling is an understatement.

Vehicle registration isn’t a new problem. 49 other states have solved the problem already. Why hasn’t Minnesota been able to tap into that vast amount of knowledge?

I’m naturally cynical when it comes to politics so I’m betting that the legislators will eventually approve the addition funding, which is part of the problem with government. Government constantly falls for the sunk cost fallacy. After sinking millions or billions of dollars into a project without any meaningful gain, government goons tend to develop an aversion to admitting that the project will never bear fruit and abandoning the project. This government tendency creates an environment rife with corruption because anybody running a project can claim that they need more funding less all of the previous efforts will be for nothing and they will receive that funding.

The War Is Not Meant to Be Won

Vietnam taught the United States that fighting an asymmetrical war against an enemy willing to suffer horrendous losses is foolish. It’s too bad that the student didn’t pay attention to the teach:

Despite waging nearly 17 consecutive years of war and spending up to $1 trillion, the U.S.-led attempt to defeat the Taliban has left the insurgents openly active in up to 70 percent of Afghanistan, according to a BBC study published Tuesday. The report also found that a rival ultraconservative Sunni Muslim organization, the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), controlled more territory than ever, further complicating the beleaguered effort to stabilize the country.

Or did it? Even the simplest of strategists would realized that this war isn’t winnable with the strategy being used and would decide to either change up their strategy or cut their losses and pull out. The fact that the United States has suffered through this kind of war before and is still waging this one using the same strategy indicates that the higher ups want this war to continue as it has been.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Oceania took great care to ensure the war it was engaged in was perpetual. Oceania’s government’s goal was to use the war to destroy any surplus wealth that might otherwise empower the masses against it. I believe that the government of the United States has a slightly different goal. It is taking great care to wage a perpetual war to keep the military contractors enriched. The wars aren’t about fighting any specific enemy. There is no victory condition. Its purpose is purely economic. If the United States did manage to crush the Taliban or ISIS then it would have to find another enemy to fight just as it did once Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Plebeians Need Not Apply

Being within the blast radius of the Super Bowl this year, I’ve had an opportunity to get an up close and personal view of this yearly religious festival. What continues to fascinate me is how much the plebeians love this event even though it’s obviously not for them.

As more than 1,000 Super Bowl ticket holders descend on the Twin Cities in their private jets to attend a game that costs a median of $5,000 to attend the plebeians are expressing some outrage over the inevitable price increases:

From $65 parking to $1,000 caviar or $800 for a night in a Shakopee hotel, the laws of supply and demand are kicking into high gear around the Twin Cities as a crush of visitors descends on the region. Locals may not be willing to pay the eye-popping prices, but businesses are counting on some fervent football fans opening their wallets and purses.

One downtown restaurant, Ike’s Food and Cocktails, caused an internet uproar Monday when word leaked of a $36 guacamole and chips on its Super Bowl menu — alongside $72 beef skewers and other pricey items. A manager said the guacamole should have said $12, and the regular menu would still be available, but the restaurant is now offering a free order of guacamole to people who order something else and mention “Guac-Gate 2018.”

Some restaurants are rolling out special menus with offerings tailored to the high rollers. The Oceanaire’s Super Bowl night menu includes $1,000 Iranian gold caviar, $72 for arctic char or $99 for 24 ounces of lobster tail. Penny pinchers may want to stick to the $14 side of creamed corn.

I don’t blame these businesses. If I had a restaurant near the US Bank Stadium, I’d be jacking up my prices as well. When there is a huge influx of cash into your area, you should try to grab some of it.

However, there is some cosmic karma at work here. A lot of plebeians cheered when it was announced that the new US Bank Stadium would be built… and they would pay for it. Now that the stadium is built and hosting the biggest game of the year, they can’t afford to attend it. Not only that but they also can’t get reservations at the restaurants they like, park in the parking spots they like, or ride the government choo choo that they paid for on game day. They’re getting what they wanted and they’re getting to good and hard and I couldn’t be happier.

Is There No Low to Which the Republicans Won’t Sink

First the Republicans threw grandma off of a cliff. Now they’re running people down with trains:

A train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat hit a lorry on the track in Virginia, killing the driver of the truck, says the White House.

Six people were injured, including another truck passenger who was airlifted out with critical injures.

Is there now low to which the Republicans won’t sink?

Time Flies

Where does the time go?

For over a decade, civil libertarians have been fighting government mass surveillance of innocent Americans over the Internet. We’ve just lost an important battle. On January 18, President Trump signed the renewal of Section 702, domestic mass surveillance became effectively a permanent part of US law.

Section 702 has already been on the books for 10 years. 10 years of the opponents of this legislation failing to vote hard enough to repeal it. But I’m sure this is the year where all that will change. This is the year where the plebeians will say that they’ve had enough, flood their representatives’ offices with letters and phone calls, and rush to the polling places to vote out everybody who worked to renew this legislation.

The thing Section 702 illustrates more than anything else is the relationship between bad laws and time. Originally the surveillance powers granted by Section 702 were called illegal by its opponents. Then those powers downgraded to merely being abusive as people started becoming more comfortable with their existence. Now the powers are little more than background noise. While a handful of people still make a fuss every time Section 702 comes up for renewal, most people don’t care because the law has been on the books for a decade and hasn’t impacted their lives in any noticeable way.

Time is the ally of legislation. If a law, regardless of how abusive it may be, can be kept on the books long enough for it to become background noise to the masses, it can exist forever. And it doesn’t take long for a law to become background noise. A few months is usually enough for a controversial law to fall out of the news cycle and by extend the minds’ of the masses. Once that has happened, building up enough momentum to get the law repealed is all but impossible.

Drugs are Bad, M’kay

What would happen to you if law enforcers discovered that you were distributing a lot of opioids in your area? The most likely outcome would involve a SWAT team storming into your home at oh dark thirty, shooting your dog, and holding your family at gunpoint until they become bored with tossing your joint and decide to kidnap you so they can go home. You would receive this treatment because of a combination of two factors. First, the government had decided that there is an opioid epidemic that it needs to fight. Second, you’re not a sanctioned opioid dealer.

But things are different for sanctioned opioid dealers:

Drug companies hosed tiny towns in West Virginia with a deluge of addictive and deadly opioid pills over the last decade, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

For instance, drug companies collectively poured 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the small city of Williamson, West Virginia, between 2006 and 2016, according to a set of letters the committee released Tuesday. Williamson’s population was just 3,191 in 2010, according to US Census data.

When you’ve received a government sanction to deal drugs you don’t end up looking down the barrel of a SWAT team gun in the middle of the night. Instead some letters of inquiry are sent to you and various oversight boards. You might be dragged in front of Congress to testify on C-SPAN so the country can see that their politicians are doing something. After being grilled by two or three members of Congress you will be allowed to return home and that’s where your hardship will likely end.

Situations like this really illustrate that the war on drugs isn’t about safety, it’s about the government ensuring it and its cronies get a cut. After all, if the government was actually concerned about the opioid epidemic that it claims to be fighting, opioids wouldn’t be legally available at all or, at the very least, situations like this would result in immediate arrests.

The Freest Country on Earth

Where else besides the freest country on Earth can a sporting event turn an entire city into an open-ended military presence:

With Super Bowl festivities swinging into full gear, so have the massive security measures that have lent downtown Minneapolis a distinctly military ambience.

Police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs patrol skyways and downtown streets. Rifle-toting deputies in Army fatigues and helmets stand watch over Nicollet Mall, which has been swamped with visitors to the Super Bowl Live event. Video feeds from 2,000 cameras are monitored in a law-enforcement command center near U.S. Bank Stadium.

[…]

In the time it took Lisa Cook to walk across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to her job downtown, she had counted two “convoys” consisting of three “armored vehicles and a variety of marked and unmarked vans and trucks,” along with dozens of officers from departments around the metro, she said.

[…]

There are unseen elements, too: snipers perched on rooftops and in buildings in strategic places around downtown and plainclothes officers blending into crowds. A reporter visiting Nicollet Mall on Monday was approached by a plainclothes officer identifying himself as “NFL security,” who asked why the reporter was taking photographs and asked to see his media credentials.

It’s rather fascinating to me that so many people living here in the United States still consider themselves among the freest people on Earth. While the Bill of Rights; with its guarantee of press freedoms, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc.; certainly looks impressive, it is little more than a fiction. All of the so-called rights describe in that document can be revoked by the government at its whim. Consider the reported mentioned in the above excerpt. What if he didn’t have press credentials? My guess would be that he would have been removed. I’m also fairly certain that your right to free speech is pretty limited in Minneapolis at the moment, especially around the building hosting official Super Bowl events. Your right to bear arms isn’t going to get past the military goon squads that have setup the various checkpoints.

I’m fond of saying that your rights end where a politician’s perception of safety begins. An addendum to that is that your rights also end when a multibillion dollar organization decides to host an event in your area.

Explaining the Plebeians Love of the Games

The Super Bowl is being hosted in my neck of the woods this year. It’s not bad enough that the entire city looks like it’s hosting an open-ended military presence but it also has to keep up this appearance all week. The plebeians, even though most of them can’t afford to attend the actual game, don’t seem to mind though. In fact many of them belief it’s an honor to host such a great event.

What honor do these individuals experience as they watch the Super Bowl taking place a few miles from their home on televisions that their fellow plebeians in, say, Houston, Texas don’t get to experience as they watch the same game on their televisions?

The honor of knowing that if a sizable nuclear bomb were dropped on the US Bank Stadium, they and their house would be consumed in the exact same blast!

What greater honor could any of us experience?