Tag: 1984 was a Warning not a Blueprint

Arizona Moves to Make Police Less Accountable

How could the United Police States of America possibly make police less accountable? By keeping their names secret for 60 days after shooting somebody, which is what Arizona is moving to do:

Critics call Senate Bill 1445 an attack on government transparency at a time when American police departments are trying to earn the public’s trust after a series of controversial shootings.

The bill would prevent law enforcement agencies statewide from releasing the names of police officers “involved in a use of deadly physical force incident that results in death or serious physical injury” for 60 days.

Why 60 days? Because that’s more than enough time for the story to fall off of the media’s radar. In fact 60 days is overkill since the media forgets about stories about two weeks after they happen in most cases. Regardless this bill would ensure that when people learn the identify of the shooter it will have little in the way of consequence. At most it will get a mention on the back page of a newspaper section under a generic title such as “Identify of police officer released.”

It’s too Late to Change Anything After the Polling Place Opens

What’s the solution to all of this nation’s problem? More democracy! At least that’s what Obama seems to think:

President Obama on Wednesday suggested that if U.S. voters want to counter the outsized influence of money in politics, it might be a good idea to adopt mandatory voting.

“Other countries have mandatory voting,” Mr. Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cleveland, Ohio, citing places like Australia. “It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything.”

Mandatory voting might have a transformative effect if ballots had an option to disband offices. But that option is never available so mandatory voting laws would just coerce you into choosing a master. And since money in politics shapes the ballots it’s already too late to counteract it by the time the polls open (but Obama isn’t an idiot, he already knows that). By the time you’ve gone to the polls the big money players have helped appoint nominees for the two major parties and electoral regulations severely limit what third-party candidates, if any, appear on the ballot (and they don’t have the money for a major media campaign anyways nor are they usually allowed into debates).

It doesn’t matter how many people vote because voting is just confirming the choices already curated for you by your overlords. Another comment by Obama points out another transformative effect of mandatory voting laws:

The president continued, “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities… There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”

The keywords here are lower income. Expropriating wealth from people who have little is difficult for the state to justify without looking like a complete asshole. Income and sales taxes don’t raise much money from people with little income to tax or buy things with. Civil forfeiture laws are limited in scope so can’t be applied across the entire demographic. But Australia has shown other states the way by fining people who fail to show up at polling places. Suddenly the state can justify expropriating more wealth from lower income people. It also knows that lower income people have a harder time getting to polling places since they often lack transportation, can’t get time off of work, etc. so the probability of getting to fine them under mandatory voting laws is very high.

Mandatory voting laws are just another sham to make people believe they have a say in politics and a convenient trick to steal their money. As an added benefit, as can be noted by North Korea’s bragging about 100% voter turnout, mandatory voting laws also provide the state with propaganda it can use to justify its legitimacy. How could one, for example, argue that Kim Jong-un isn’t a legitimate ruler when 100% of the population voted for him?

Venezuela Going Full Dictatorship

It was bound to happen. As the failure of centrally planned economics wrecks the lives of Venezuelans and the United States places more sanctions on the country to make those miserable wretches even more miserable somebody was going to demand absolute power in the name of fixing everything. That demand was made by the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and was granted:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been granted the power to govern by decree until 31 December.

The measure was approved by the National Assembly, where Mr Maduro has a majority.

He requested the approval of the Enabling Law after the United States issued new sanctions against Venezuelan officials.

The opposition says he is using the incident to amass power and divert attention from the economic crisis.

Mr Maduro said he needed the special powers to deal with the threat posed by the United States, which he accuses of meddling in Venezuela’s affairs.

The opposition, that is to say the members of the National Assembly who aren’t completely ignorant of history, called it. Maduro is just exploiting a horrible situation to amass power. This is the exactly same playbook used by a million despots before him and will likely continue to be successful in the foreseeable future. What can Venezuela expect? It depends on how drunk with power Maduro gets. In the best case scenario little changes and his power to rule by decree goes away at the end of the year. But the worst case, which is also the more commonly case, involved his opponents all dying and his ability to rule by decree lasting indefinitely.

I really hate to see the lives of so many people become as miserable as the Venezuelans have. But our species seems entirely unwilling to learn from the mistakes of centrally planned failures. Even when we get reminders such as Venezuela the common reaction seems to be blaming the entire mess on not enough centralized power being wielded.

This is What Happens When Officers Can Turn Off Body Cameras

Advocates of police accountability have been arguing that police officers should be required to wear body cameras while on duty. Although there was some resistance to this idea from police apologists that has mostly faded. Many of them are now on board with the idea because they understand that body cameras can collect evidence to prosecute more people and that officers and disable the cameras when they’re about to beat somebody down. That second part is important because it will render any of the benefits of body cameras useless. What we can expect in the future is what Denver is experiencing now:

As the nation’s policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren’t captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology.

There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor’s report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video.

If officers can disable their body cameras without consequence then any benefits of mandating body cameras, at least as far as the people are concerned, go out the window. Unless officers are punished, and by that I mean charged with a crime, for disabling their body cameras while on duty the only purpose those fancy devices will serve is to collect evidence to prosecute people.

Body cameras along won’t hold officers accountable. There also needs to be policies that will result in officer being fired, fined, and opened up to lawsuits if they disabled their cameras. I believe arguments could even be made for jailing an officer who disables his body camera during a use of force incident (in which case I would argue that doing so would effectively be an admittance of guilt in a court hearing unless evidence of non-officer related failure could be shown).

Today’s Browser Vulnerability is Brought to You By the State and the Letters F, R, E, A, and K

People often mock libertarians by claiming they blame everything on the state. But the recently revealed Factoring Attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys (FREAK) that leaves Android and Apple users vulnerable was actually the fault of the state. How so? Because of its futile attempts in the 1990s to control the export of strong encryption technology:

The weak 512-bit keys are a vestige of the 1990s, when the Clinton administration required weak keys to be used in any software or hardware that was exported out of the US. To satisfy the requirement, many manufacturers designed products that offered commercial-grade keys when used in the US and export-grade keys when used elsewhere. Many engineers abandoned the regimen once the export restrictions were dropped, but somehow the ciphers have managed to live on a select but significant number of end-user devices and servers. A list of vulnerable websites is here. Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars the vulnerable devices included virtually all Android devices, as well as iPhones and Macs.

This is yet another example of how state regulations make us all vulnerable. In the state’s lust to control everything it often puts regulations in place that prevent its subject from utilizing the best available defensive technologies. From restrictions on encryption technology to body armor the state’s vested interest in spying on your and killing you far outweighs whatever concerns it may have about your safety.

We’re in the midst of a second crypto war but the state isn’t using its failed regulatory red tape this time. Instead it is trying to convince companies to implement back doors, actively exploiting encryption technology without disclosing the vulnerabilities to developers, and surveilling whatever data connections it can get its taps into. Even though the strategy has change the end goal remains the same; leave the people vulnerable to malicious actors so the state can ensure its capability to spy on us and kill us remain intact.

The United States is, Like, Totally Not a Police State

I’m constantly reminded by self-proclaimed patriots that the United States is the freest goddamn country on Earth. While they admit things have gone downhill since Ronald Reagan blessed this fine country with more freedom than 1776, they point out that we don’t have thuggish police killing people at random or secret facilities where citizens are held without charge or access to a lawyer. In other words they are totally divorced from reality (which should have been obvious when they started claiming Reagan was some kind of paragon of freedom). Police officers killing people at random is nothing new in this country but now we know that one department does run an actual black site:

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

This wonderful black site allows the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to keep detainees off of the books, beat detainees, and deny detainees their privilege to legal council. It also provides the CPD a place to cut off people from their friends and family members.

The article is lengthy and contains numerous accounts of abuse and even one death. But the more worrisome thing about this story is that if the CPD have one of these black sites you can be assured other domestic police departments are operating similar black sites.

Living in “a nation of law” is supposed to provide comfort to us. Unfortunately the laws on the books grant law enforcers a great deal of leeway in how they act and the system is designed to shield law enforcement officers form liability when they perform misdeeds. When the laws of a nation are stacked against the people the phrase “a nation of laws” is entirely meaningless. And since statism grants a monopoly on creating laws to a handful of individuals you can ensure that anywhere a state exists the legal system will be stacked against the people.

The Terrorist Canard

With encrypted communications threatening to reduce the state’s revenue stream by letting us little serfs conceal our black market business dealings the political body is getting worried. Whenever the political body gets worried it begins efforts to propagandize the general populace. The propaganda always exploits fear. At one time the fear being exploited was drug usage then it became street crime and now it’s terrorism. Hoping the hamper the development of strong cryptographic tools the political body has been looking at introducing laws that would require software and hardware developers to introduce backdoors for state usage. Because it’s the fear of the day they’re selling these laws under the guise of fighting terrorism:

President Barack Obama is making his position on encryption known: he is a supporter and “believer in strong encryption” but also “sympathetic” to law enforcement’s needs to prevent terror attacks.

“I think the only concern is… our law enforcement is expected to stop every plot. Every attack. Any bomb on a plane. The first time that attack takes place, where it turns out we had a lead and couldn’t follow up on it, the public’s going to demand answers. This is a public conversation that we should be having,” Obama said in a Friday interview with Re/Code. “I lean probably further in the direction of strong encryption than some do inside law enforcement. But I am sympathetic to law enforcement, because I know the kind of pressure they’re under to keep us safe. And it’s not as black and white as it’s sometimes portrayed. Now, in fairness, I think those in favor of air tight encryption also want to be protected from terrorists.”

Can we stop with the terrorist canard? Nobody expects law enforcement to stop every terrorist plot. In fact nobody, at least nobody sensible, expects law enforcement to stop any terrorist plot. What people expect of law enforcement is to clean up after a terrorist attack. If people actually expected law enforcement would stop terrorist attacks they wouldn’t be afraid of terrorist attacks.

Furthermore the state’s widespread surveillance efforts haven’t stopped a single terrorist plot. Every claim made to the contrary has been thoroughly debunked. This isn’t surprising. Widespread surveillance creates a sea of data from which no single piece of useful data can be extracted. What makes widespread surveillance even more worthless is that no single piece of data can reveal a terrorist plot so you need to find multiple pieces of connected data to being revealing a plot. If finding a single piece of useful data in a sea of noise is difficult try finding many pieces of connected data that aren’t obviously connected.

The only way law enforcement can stop terrorist plots is to utilize old fashion investigative techniques. But these techniques are expensive in both money and time and don’t lead to revenue for departments. Why would a law enforcement agency put resources into uncovering a terrorist plot when it can rely on anonymous tips to kick down the doors of drug deals and legally confiscate all of their property to auction of later? To add insult to injury solving a terrorist plot is actually detrimental to a law enforcement agency since they rely on successful terrorist attacks to justify buying surplus military equipment.

It’s time to put the terrorist canard to bed. Only the completely gullible are being fooled and they’re not the ones that need to be convinced. In order to put backdoors into software and devices the developers and manufacturers have to be convinced and they won’t be convinced because their users will stop buying their products if they implement said backdoors. Since many of their users are gullible idiots the state’s terrorist propaganda won’t accomplish its goal and thus the exercise is a waste of everybody’s time.

Court Rules State Secrets Trump Justice

I really do appreciate living in the United States. In what other country could you be subjected to constant surveillance by your own government and enjoy a court system that declares the practice legal? OK, that’s actually a lot of countries. But what makes the United States so special is its propaganda about being the land of the free. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been working on a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) for violating our supposed Constitutional rights against unlawful search and seizure. Today a district court in California ruled that the NSA’s was above the law because prosecuting it would require revealing state secrets:

A district court in California has issued a ruling in favor of the National Security Agency in a long-running case over the spy agency’s collection of Internet records.

The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.

That really shows how much protection the Constitution provides. The amendments in the Bill of Rights can be rendered null and void the second state secrets exist. If the Soviet Union were around today it would likely be envious of the American system.

Fellow Minnesotans, Please Take a Moment to Thank Your Representatives for Protecting Bad Officers from Accountability

I have some glorious news comrades! As you know there has been a conspiracy by the proles to hold bad police officers accountable for their actions. Part of this conspiracy involves making officers wear body cameras. They want to use evidence recorded by these cameras to review the actions of our brave enforcers. Thankfully our enforcers have loyal allies willing to stand up against the proles. Tony Cornish, Brian Johnson, and Dan Schoen presented a bill yesterday that would classify and quickly destroy all evidence collected by body cameras that isn’t being used to prosecute a prole in court:

A proposal by a trio of cops-turned-legislators would shield almost all footage shot by police body cameras from public eyes, in what they say is an effort to protect citizens’ privacy.

But advocates of open government say keeping the footage under lock and key undermines attempts to keep police accountable.

The measure filed Thursday is the first legislative effort to regulate the use of the video recording devices worn by police. Footage shot by body cameras would not be available to the public, although individuals captured in the videos would be allowed access. Agencies would be required to keep meticulous records and to destroy any video that is not part of an investigation.

As loyal citizens of this great state of Minnesota we should thanks these three brave representatives. As former police officers themselves Tony Cornish and Brian Johnson have demonstrated that they are still loyal to their fellow enforcers. Dan Schoen is showing he has the right stuff to continue his career in law enforcement. If you would like to read their wonderful work it can be found here.

We can only hope that this bill passes because these traitorous attempts by the proles to hold enforcers accountable cannot be allowed to stand. Our society would collapse overnight if enforcers were no longer allowed to steal, assault, murder, and rape proles without consequence. Tony Cornish, Brian Johnson, and Dan Schoen know this and we can only pray that they are able to convince their fellows of this truth before the proles have a chance to organize a counteroffensive.

Pravda Coming to Indiana

For those who either lived through or studied the Cold War the name Pravda is familiar. Pravda was the state sanctioned news source in the Soviet Union. When you needed to know what was now considered wrongthink you needed only to consult your latest edition of Pravda. For good reason people living outside of the Soviet Union made fun of the fact that the Soviet government had control over news. People living in side of the Soviet Union also made fun of Pravda because they knew anything it reported was almost certainly the opposite of the truth.

Now that the Cold War is over the United States seems hellbent on replicating many former Soviet programs. Indiana just announced that it will be creating its own state run news source:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) is starting a state-run news agency that will offer pre-written stories to news outlets in the state, according to The Indianapolis Star, which obtained documents about the news service.

The new news service, called “Just IN” will also sometimes offer stories about Pence’s administration. The site is set to launch in the later half of February. Stories will be written by state press secretaries and will be overseen by Bill McCleery, a former reporter for the Star.

In other words other news sources better write good things about the Party or face trouble in the form of not receiving exclusive access to politicians and potential lawsuits. Righthaven showed us the kind of legal damage one can wield with access to newspaper copyrights. While Righthaven ultimately feel when it was ruled they had no cases since they didn’t actually own any copyrights Indiana’s version of Pravda will, which could open the door for lawsuits against other news sources that reference it.

Obviously that last part is a worst case scenario but unlikely to hold up in court. But other news sources losing access to Indiana politicians is a very real threat if the state operates its own news source. After all, why would a politician risk talking to a news source that may badger them when they can talk to the news source they control?