Category: News You Need to Know

What Ignoring the Problem Gets You

What happens when you ignore a problem for an entire year? The problem doesn’t go away:

Despite ongoing national scrutiny of police tactics, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from last year when nearly 1,000 people were killed by police.

Through Thursday, law enforcement officers fatally shot 957 people in 2016 — close to three each day — down slightly from 2015 when 991 people were shot to death by officers, according to an ongoing project by The Washington Post to track the number of fatal shootings by police.

The Post, for two years in a row, has documented more than twice the number of fatal shootings recorded by the FBI annually on average.

Why hasn’t anything been done to reduce the number of people being shot by police? Because the politicians rely on the police to be revenue generators and too many people worship the police as heroes.

I’ve written a lot about how being revenue generators makes politicians wary of curtailing bad law enforcement behavior. To summarize that point, the politicians don’t want to risk upsetting their biggest revenue generators because they might generate less revenue. If police officers are punished for shooting an innocent person during a no-knock raid they might be less inclined to go on the next no-knock drug raid and that would cut into the State’s civil forfeiture profits.

Hero worship is another problem. Whenever an individual rises to the status of hero they get a tremendous amount of leeway. Obviously bad behavior is explained away by the hero’s worshippers. After all, the individual is a hero and therefore can do no wrong. Ever since 9/11 law enforcers have been elevated from civil servants to heroes.

We see this come into play whenever an officer is in the news for doing something questionable or outright terrible. Cop apologists crawl out of the woodwork and find any excuse to justify the officer’s actions. Did the officer shoot a carry permit holder during an otherwise routine traffic stop? While the carry permit indicates that the victim wasn’t a felon or domestic abuser the cop apologists will still cite mundane nonsense like traffic citations as justification for the officer’s actions.

This hero worship also influences the actions of those who are tasked with holding law enforcers accountable. No politician, even a lowly municipal one, wants to be the person known for going against a hero. It’s bad for their public image and reelection efforts. So most of them are willing to turn a blind eye towards any issues involving law enforcers.

I imagine 2017 will also see approximately 1,000 people killed by police. Until law enforcers stop being revenue generators and stop being viewed as heroes the motivation to curtail their bad behavior won’t exist.

The Return of the Anti-War Left

After eight years of unexplained absence the anti-war left is slowly creeping out of the woodwork!

Three days before Christmas, President-elect Trump tweeted (yes, tweeted) that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and enhance its nuclear capability” until the world “comes to its senses regarding nukes.” The world, for its part, blinked in astonishment, wondering once again what Mr. Trump might mean, and why such a momentous announcement appeared via social media. Prior presidents generally undertook any shift in nuclear policy with care, and with the advice of experts in arms control and proliferation who have made keeping us safe their life’s mission. After all, when a single person has the power to rain down nuclear fire across the world, caution might not only be warranted, but expected.

As a quick aside, I think Trump’s attempt to take credit for Obama’s $1 trillion revamp of the United States’ nuclear arsenal is pathetic.

George Takei, who was a much more pleasant fellow to follow on social media when he wasn’t championing that butcher Hillary Clinton, took Trump’s tweet about expanding the United States’ nuclear arsenal personally and penned a scathing piece on nuclear weapons in general. Let me say that I appreciate Takei’s rant against nuclear weapons and wish more people would do the same. I also appreciate the handful of other articles penned by the anti-war left in recent times. But I’m forced to ask why these article are appearing again after eight years of silence.

During the George W. Bush’s presidency there was a strong anti-war sentiment coming from the left. Neoliberals, socialists, communists, and leftist anarchists all came together to hold protests against the United States’ wars throughout the country. When Obama first ran for president he did so on an anti-war platform, which gained him the support of the anti-war left. Once he won the election he continued Bush’s reign of terror but did so without protest from the supposedly anti-war left. In fact, they stayed mostly silent for all eight years of Obama’s presidency.

Now that a Republican has regained the presidency the anti-war left is suddenly making noise again. Unfortunately, for them, they lost all legitimacy after Obama took office. By only protesting the wars when Bush was in charge the anti-war left demonstrated that they weren’t anti-war at all. They were just anti-Republican-lead-war. Once a Democrat was ordering the slaughter they were silent. Now that a Republican will be ordering the slaughter again they are suddenly making some noise.

In other words, they’re a bunch of liars. But, hey, at least we can enjoy four years of public outrage over the wars even if that outrage isn’t actually because of the wars.

Everybody Loves Discrimination

Most Americans, if asked, would probably say that they oppose discrimination. But deep down inside most Americans love discrimination, so long as it’s their form of discrimination.

Those who identify as political leftists have been very vocal about their opposition to discrimination. They’ve been taking every opportunity to state their objection to discrimination against non-whites, homosexuals, transgender individuals, poor individuals, and the mentally disabled. However, they seems to be perfectly fine with politically motivated discrimination.

Imagine if the restaurant owner from the first link put up a sign that read “If you’re black you can not eat here!” or if the person from the second link refused to help the stuck motorist because they had a gay pride bumper sticker. Most self-identified leftists would be up in arms. But the two individuals mentioned in those two links are being cheered by many of those same self-identified leftists. Why? Because those two individuals are discriminating in an approved manner.

Every one of us discriminates. When you cross the street to avoid the suspicious looking individual walking down the sidewalk you’re discriminating. When you avoid talking to your racist uncle at Christmas you’re discriminating. When you avoid the really drunk guy that won’t stop grabbing your ass at the bar you’re discriminating. Some forms of discrimination, such as the three I just mentioned, make sense. In those cases you’re discriminating to protect yourself, avoid starting a family fight, or avoid being sexually molested. But those forms of discrimination are also based on specific signals being produced by specific individuals.

Racially, sexually, and politically motivated forms of discrimination aren’t based on specific signals produced by specific individuals. They’re forms of collective discrimination where the only signal is membership in a group. Of course, everybody who discriminates against groups has a long list of reasons why their form of discrimination is proper even if they find other forms of group discrimination unacceptable.

I personally find collective discrimination, like all forms of collectivism, distasteful but fear that I’m in the minority because even the loudest opponents of collective discrimination seem to only oppose discrimination against groups that they like. When challenged they will have a long list of reasons why they’re not actually discriminating but all they’re doing is performing an act of cognitive dissonance.

Just a Slight Shortfall

What happens when a business makes more monetary promises than it can fulfill? Its assets are liquidated so that the proceeds can go towards paying off some of those promises. What happens when a government makes more monetary promises than it can fulfill? That seems like an important question to ask right now:

You can look at the financial health of Social Security in many ways.

[…]

Despite the huge numbers, there’s even a less generous way of looking at the fiscal shortfall.

A projection, known as the “infinite horizon,” takes into account all the program’s future liabilities, even those beyond the 75-year period that Social Security actuaries typically use in their calculations.

Under the infinite horizon, Social Security will have $32.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities by 2090, $6.3 trillion more than last year’s projection. (See the chart below.)

Social Security was sold as a safety net that would guarantee that retirees would have money even after they were no longer working. But like all government schemes, Social Security was just another mechanism to expropriate wealth from the people for the benefit of the State. The scheme was originally quite simple. Today’s valued dollars would be taken by the State so it could use them as it pleased and then returned at a future date after inflation had devalued those dollars significantly. But the scheme quickly became more complicated.

Since 1982 Social Security has been paying out more than it has been bringing in. This deficit, often referred to by cute names such as unfunded obligations or unfunded liabilities, is slated to ballon to $32.1 trillion by 2090. To put that in perspective, the current national debt is hovering near $20 trillion.

If Social Security (or the United States government for that matter) was a business it would be forced to file bankruptcy as there is no realistic way that it will ever be able to repay its debts.

Denial of Service Attacks are Cheap to Perform

How expensive is it to perform a denial of service attack in the real world? More often than not the cost is nearly free. The trick is to exploit the target’s own security concerns:

A flight in America was delayed and almost diverted on Tuesday after a passenger changed the name of their wi-fi device to ‘Samsung Galaxy Note 7’.

An entire flight was screwed up by simply changing the SSID of a device.

Why did this simply trick cause any trouble whatsoever? Because the flight crew was more concerned about enforcing the rules than actual security. There was no evidence of a Galaxy Note 7 being onboard. Since anybody can change their device’s SSID to anything they want the presence of the SSID “Samsung Galaxy Note 7” shouldn’t have been enough to cause any issues. But the flight crew allowed that, at best, flimsy evidence to spur them into a hunt for the device.

This is why performing denial of service attacks in the real world is often very cheap. Staffers, such as flight crew, seldom have any real security training so they tend to overreact. They’re trying to cover their asses (and I don’t mean that as an insult, if they don’t cover their asses they very well could lose their job), which means you have an easy exploit sitting there for you.

TSA Warning About Slave ID Deadline

Minnesota is one of the few remaining states that has told the federal government where to stick its REAL Slave ID requirements. If you do live in Minnesota and you really want an official Slave ID you can pay an extra $15 and go through the additional hassle necessary to convert your drivers license but it’s not required.

While it’s been known that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would begin requiring Slave IDs to board aircraft the exact deadline has remained unknown. Soon the TSA at the Minneapolis International Airport will post signs indicating that the deadline will be January 22, 2018:

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – Signs will soon be posted at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport with a warning that your current Minnesota driver’s license won’t be enough to pass through security in 2018.

Starting Jan. 22, 2018, you will need an alternate ID to fly if you have a standard driver’s license or ID card issued by any of the following states: Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina or Washington. Alternate forms of ID include a passport, military ID, or permanent resident card. You can find a full list of accepted ID at https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification

If you live in Minnesota and wish to travel on an airplane you should consider getting a passport. In fact, if you live in the United Police States of America you should consider getting a passport just so you have the option to leave this forsaken Orwellian nation.

I hope the Minnesota government continues to push against the Slave ID requirements but I fear that they’re going to kowtow to their federal masters before the deadline.

The Smell of Desperation

The defense attorney for Jeronimo Yanez, the officer that is being charged for the death of Philandro Castile’s death, has filed a motion for dismissal. What’s interesting is the justification used by the defense because it reeks of desperation:

Gray said that autopsy results indicated Castile has high levels of THC in his blood, the chemical responsible for marijuana’s psychological effects, and was “stoned” while driving that day. The memo said Reynolds confirmed that the two were “smokers,” had marijuana in the car and had smoked marijuana before the stop that day.

St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez is charged in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile.
“The status of being stoned (in an acute and chronic sense) explains why Mr. Castile, 1) did not follow the repeated directions of Officer Yanez; 2) stared straight ahead and avoided eye-contact; 3) never mentioned that he had a carry permit, but instead said he had a gun; and 4) did not show his hands,” the memo said.

Apparently using cannabis is grounds for summary execution according to Yanez’s lawyer. I say that because the motion doesn’t appear to claim that Castile posed a deadly threat to Yanez. It seems to only state that Castile was unresponsive to commands and chose poor wording for his attempt to inform Yanez about his firearm, not that Castile presented any kind of threat that one could reasonably construe as deadly. Furthermore, the lawyer tries to argue that Castile also violated the State’s bureaucracy:

Additionally, the memo said that Castile had falsely claimed on his application for a permit to carry a gun that he was not a user of an unlawful substance.

We know that Castile received his carry permit on June 4th, 2015. He was killed on July 6th, 2016. So he had his permit for over a year when he was shot. I bring this up because a lot can happen in a year. It’s quite possible that Castile wasn’t lying when he filled out his application but instead only started using cannabis after the fact. Either way, Yanez would have known none of this and even if he did lying on a form is not an execution worthy offense.

For you and me deadly force only becomes a legal option if there is a reasonable belief that great bodily harm or death could come to us. But as we know, the rules are different for those with badges. I only hope that this filing for dismissal is laughed out of the courtroom but it’s possible that the person in the magic muumuu will accept it.

The Doom and Gloom Predicted by Drug Prohibitionists Fails to Materialize

Every time it appears as though firearm restrictions may be loosened gun control advocates predict blood in the streets. Even though firearm restrictions have been loosened significantly in recent times the gun control advocates’ predictions have remained unrealized. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Violent crime has been going down.

A similar thing is happening with drug restrictions. Every time it appears as though drug restrictions may be loosened drug prohibitionists predict massive spikes in drug usage amongst teens. Drug restrictions have been loosening in recent years but drug usage amongst teens is going down:

Teen drug and alcohol use has fallen to levels not seen since the height of the drug war in the 1990s, according to new federal survey data.

The Monitoring the Future survey of about 50,000 high school students found that “considerably fewer teens reported using any illicit drug other than marijuana in the prior 12 months — 5 percent, 10 percent and 14 percent in grades 8, 10 and 12, respectively — than at any time since 1991.”

Teen alcohol and cigarette use are at historic lows, too. Among all students surveyed in 2016, just over 36 percent had drank alcohol in the previous year. That’s down by nearly half from the high in 1991, when 67 percent of high school students had consumed alcohol.

What’s the cause of this reduction? I could only offer guesses. But I can say for certain that drug prohibitions do not reduce drug usage amongst teens. If anything, the opposite may be true (or there may be no relation between drug usage amongst teens and the legal status of those drugs). Either way, we should stop taking the doom and gloom predictions by drug prohibitionists seriously.

Degrees of Anonymity

When a service describes itself as anonymous how anonymous is it? Users of Yik Yak may soon have a chance to find out:

Yik Yak has laid 70 percent of employees amid a downturn in the app’s growth prospects, The Verge has learned. The three-year-old anonymous social network has raised $73.5 million from top-tier investors on the promise that its young, college-age network of users could one day build a company to rival Facebook. But the challenge of growing its community while moving gradually away from anonymity has so far proven to be more than the company could muster.

[…]

But growth stalled almost immediately after Sequoia’s investment. As with Secret before it, the app’s anonymous nature created a series of increasingly difficult problems for the business. Almost from the start, Yik Yak users reported incidents of bullying and harassment. Multiple schools were placed on lockdown after the app was used to make threats. Some schools even banned it. Yik Yak put tools in place designed to reduce harassment, but growth began to slow soon afterward.

Yik Yak claimed it was an anonymous social network and on the front end the data did appear anonymous. However, the backend may be an entirely different matter. How much information did Yik Yak regularly keep about its users? Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, unique device identifiers, phone numbers, and much more can be easily collected and transmitted by an application running on your phone.

Bankruptcy is looking like a very real possibility for Yik Yak. If the company ends up filing then its assets will be liquidated. In this day and age user data is considered a valuable asset. Somebody will almost certainly end up buying Yik Yak’s user data and when they do they may discover that it wasn’t as anonymous as users may have thought.

Not all forms of anonymity are created equal. If you access a web service without using some kind of anonymity service, such as Tor or I2P, then the service has some identifiable information already such as your IP address and a browser fingerprint. If you’re access the service through a phone application then that application may have collected and transmitted your phone number, contacts list, and other identifiable information (assuming, of course, the application has permission to access all of that data, which it may not depending on your platform and privacy settings). While on the front end of the service you may appear to be anonymous the same may not hold true for the back end.

This issue becomes much larger when you consider that even if your data is currently being held by a benevolent company that does care about your privacy that may not always be the case. Your data is just a bankruptcy filing away from falling into the hands of somebody else.

So Much for Farook’s Phone

Shortly after the attack in San Bernardino the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) tried to exploit the tragedy in order to force Apple to assist it in unlocking Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. According to the FBI Farook’s phone likely contained information that would allow them to find his accomplices, motives, and basically solve the case. Apple refused to give the FBI the power to unlock any iPhone 5C willy nilly but the agency eventually found a third party that had an exploit that would allow the built-in security to be bypassed.

One year later the FBI hasn’t solved the case even with access to Farook’s iPhone:

They launched an unprecedented legal battle with Apple in an effort to unlock Farook’s iPhone and deployed divers to scour a nearby lake in search of electronic equipment the couple might have dumped there.

But despite piecing together a detailed picture of the couple’s actions up to and including the massacre, federal officials acknowledge they still don’t have answers to some of the critical questions posed in the days after the Dec. 2, 2015, attack at the Inland Regional Center.

Most important, the FBI said it is still trying to determine whether anyone was aware of the couple’s plot or helped them in any way. From the beginning, agents have tried to figure out whether others might have known something about Farook and Malik’s plans, since the couple spent months gathering an arsenal of weapons and building bombs in the garage of their Redlands home.

Officials said they don’t have enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime but stressed the investigation is still open.

This shouldn’t be surprising to anybody. Anybody who had the ability to plan out an attack like the one in San Bernardino without being discovered probably had enough operational security to not use an easily surveilled device such as a cellular phone for the planning. Too many people, including those who should know better, assume only technological wizards have the knowhow to plan things without using commonly surveilled communication methods. But that’s not the case. People who are committed to pulling off a planned attack that includes coordination with third parties are usually smart enough to do their research and utilize communication methods that are unlikely to be accessible to prying eyes. It’s not wizardry, it’s a trick as old as human conflict itself.

Humans are both unpredictable and adaptable, which is what makes mass surveillance useless. When an agency such as the National Security Agency (NSA) performs mass surveillance they get an exponentially greater amount of noise than signal. We’re not even talking about a 100:1 ratio. It would probably be closer to 1,000,000,000,000:1. Furthermore, people with enough intelligence to pull off coordinated attacks are usually paranoid enough to assume the most commonly available communication mechanisms are being surveilled so they adapt. Mass surveillance works well if you want a lot of grandmothers’ recipes, Internet memes, and insults about mothers made by teenagers. But mass surveillance is useless if you’re trying to identify individuals who are a significant threat. Sure, the NSA may get lucky once in a while and catch somebody but that’s by far the exception, not the rule. The rule, when it comes to identifying and thwarting significant threats, is that old fashioned investigative techniques must be employed.