1984 was a Warning not a Blueprint – Page 4

Meet California’s New Slave Tracker

License plate scanners have become all the rage in the slave tracking market. But what if you eliminated the need for scanners by making the license plates themselves broadcast their current location? That’s a feature now being rolled out in California:

California’s dramatic new license plate is hitting the streets — a digital display board that allows changeable messages controlled by the driver or remotely by fleet managers.

The new plates use the same computer technology as Kindle eBook readers, along with a wireless communication system.

[…]

If the car is stolen, the plate’s manufacturer says the plate can tell the owner and police exactly where the car is or at least where the license plate is if it has been detached.

Of course if the license plate can tell law enforcers where it is if the car to which it’s attached is reported stolen, it can tell law enforcers where it is when the car isn’t reported stolen as well. In addition to broadcasting their location, these license plates can likely provide other valuable information. For example, they can probably determine how fast you’re driving (a simple calculation if you have real time location information). If that information is tied with the location information, law enforcers can determine remotely whether or not you’re speeding and potentially issue you a ticket. Likewise, if you park somewhere, the license plate could provide law enforcers information about how long the vehicle has been stopped. If, for example, the vehicle is parked in a two hour spot, a parking ticket can be issued if the car has been stopped for two hours and one second.

Fortunately, this is currently a pilot program. During this pilot I doubt the license plates will be used for anything nefarious. But if this pilot program is successful, it will give the government of California an excuse to make these license plates mandatory. After that they will likely be used to expropriate additional wealth from drivers by being used as automated traffic and parking citation dispensers.

The TSA Is Making a List and Checking It Twice

When you travel on an airplane in the United States you must first subject yourself to the depravities of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Usually your options are to either walk through a slave scanner so a pervert can look at your naked body or submit yourself to sexual assault. It turns out that not everybody meekly rolls over when given these options. When air travelers decide to do anything other than shuffle through the security line with a submissive downcast gaze, their name goes on the TSA’s secret naughty list:

I thought of this exchange last week when the New York Times revealed that the Transportation Security Administration has created a secret watchlist for troublesome passengers. The TSA justified the list by saying that its screeners were assaulted 34 times last year, but did not release any details about the alleged assaults.

Naturally, the TSA’s official definition of troublemaking goes well beyond punching its officers. According to a confidential memo, any behavior that is “offensive and without legal justification” can land a traveler on the list, as can any “challenges to the safe and effective completion of screening.” Anyone who has ever “loitered” near a checkpoint could also make the list. So could any woman who pushes a screener’s hands away from her breasts.

The memo would be more accurate if it stated that anyone who fails to unquestioningly submit to all the TSA’s demands would be found guilty of insubordination. As an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, Hugh Handeyside, told the Washington Post, the policy gives the agency wide latitude to “blacklist people arbitrarily and essentially punish them for asserting their rights.”

According to the New York Times article mentioned in the above except, landing on the list doesn’t prohibit you from flying… yet. However, governments frequently use lists to punish people in the future. There may come a time when landing on this list will prohibit you from flying just as landing on several other secret government lists can currently prohibit you from flying. If that happens, you flying privileges will be in the hands of a flunkies who were probably bullied in high school and took a job with the TSA so they could live their revenge fantasies. But, hey, the United States is the freest country on Earth!

Land of the Free

My feelings for government agents are well known but even among such a rogues gallery Jeff Sessions stands out as particularly loathsome. I often compare him to a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He’s a two dimensional character who seem to be evil for the sole sake of being evil. In his latest disregard of common decency he has decided once again that the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four were the heroes and should be emulated:

Sessions, however, refuses to accept this reality. Instead, he has claimed that the agreement caused 236 murders. He points to a journal article written by Paul Cassell, a former federal judge, and Richard Fowles, that asserts the reductions in stop-and-frisk encounters from 40,000 a month to 10,000 a month caused the additional murders in 2016. While the report accurately states the reduced number of stop-and-frisk encounters and the spike in murders in 2016, it provides no causal link between the two events.

The authors essentially suggest that a huge number of random stops will reduce crime because no one will ever know when they might be stopped and, therefore, will not carry weapons. Apparently, they are fine with randomly stopping hundreds of thousands of people, a practice with a greater than 84 percent error rate.

Remember when films portrayed Nazis and Cold War Eastern European guards asking for papers as bad guys? Those were the days! Speaking of Nazi Germany and Cold War Eastern Europe, those governments taught us that even if you establish the most ruthless police state imaginable, crime will still be rampant. Random harassment teaches people to avoid law enforcers, nothing more. Needless to say, with such an education a policy of randomly stopping and frisking individuals can only manage to catch the dumbest criminals.

When the Government Is Big, Private Businesses Want to Do Business with the Government

I find that a lot of people don’t think their positions through very thoroughly. For example, I know a lot of people who advocate for a large, powerful government but then become upset when they read stories like this:

SEATTLE — In late 2016, Amazon introduced a new online service that could help identify faces and other objects in images, offering it to anyone at a low cost through its giant cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.

Not long after, it began pitching the technology to law enforcement agencies, saying the program could aid criminal investigations by recognizing suspects in photos and videos. It used a couple of early customers, like the Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, to encourage other officials to sign up.

See this capitalist shit? This is why we need socialism, comrades!

The supreme irony here is that most of the people I mentioned above fail to realize that the very thing they advocate for, a larger and powerful government, is what convinces businesses to pursue government contracts. It’s true that Amazon is operating on the capitalist principle of seeking profit. However, in a country where the government is large and powerful the most profitable contracts are often government contracts. If the governments in the United States were weak and poor, Amazon would have no interest in pursuing contracts with them. But they’re powerful and wealthy so Amazon, like everybody else, wants a piece of the pie.

Tracking Your Pieces of Flair

Some people mistakenly believe that if they don’t carry a cell phone, government agents can’t track them. While cell phones are convenient tracking devices, they aren’t the only tool in the State’s toolbox. Law enforcers have been using license plate scanners for years now. Such scanners can track the whereabouts of every vehicle in the department’s territory. And since license plate scanners are technological devices, they are improving in capabilities:

On Tuesday, one of the largest LPR manufacturers, ELSAG, announced a major upgrade to “allow investigators to search by color, seven body types, 34 makes, and nine visual descriptors in addition to the standard plate number, location, and time.”

Plus, the company says, the software is now able to visually identity things like a “roof rack, spare tire, bumper sticker, or a ride-sharing company decal.”

Even obscuring or changing your license plate won’t work if you have, like so many Americans, covered your car in unique pieces of flair.

I’m sure some people, thinking that they’re very clever, have already come up with the strategy of not driving their vehicle. After all, if you don’t have a cell phone or a personal vehicle, the government can’t track you, right? Wrong again.

Make the Slaves Carry Their Tracking Devices

Mobile phones are useful for both us and government. For us they provide almost instant communications with any of our contacts across the globe as well as access to the collective knowledge base of humanity. For government they provide real-team location information and a potential goldmine of evidence, which is why one British judge thinks that there are benefits to forcing individuals to carry their cell phones at all times:

A senior British judge has highlighted the benefits of legislation that obliges people to carry their mobile phone at all times.

Sir Geoffrey Vos QC, Chancellor of the High Court and former head of the Bar Council, raised the prospect of compulsory mobe-carrying in a speech to the Law Society (PDF).

His speech hypothesized a future where everybody is required to carry their cell phone and how that would lead to easier criminal prosecutions. It’s also not an implausible future, especially in Britain. The island is already a surveillance state. Legally requiring individuals to carry a tracking device at all times probably wouldn’t even be noticed in the pile of other tracking technologies already being employed by Big Brother. Moreover, once everybody is legally required to carry their cell phone, another law could easily be passed that mandates that all cell phones have a “law enforcement mode” that allows law enforcers to secretly active a phone’s microphone and camera to collect evidence. That would, after all, make life easier for law enforcers, which seems to be what this judge is interested in.

We live in an time where Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only technologically feasible but is easily implementable thanks to the fact that most people already voluntarily carry around a device that can collect evidence against them.

Eight Percent of the Time It Works Every Time

The Transportation Security Agency (TSA) is the embodiment of government incompetence. It has failed 95 percent of red team exercises, which doesn’t bode well for the agency’s general ability to detect weapons before air travelers are able to enter the “secure” area of an airport. However, the United States doesn’t have a monopoly on government incompetence. The United Kingdom (UK) also has its own program that has a failure rate of 90 percent:

A British police agency is defending (this link is inoperable for the moment) its use of facial recognition technology at the June 2017 Champions League soccer final in Cardiff, Wales—among several other instances—saying that despite the system having a 92-percent false positive rate, “no one” has ever been arrested due to such an error.

Of course nobody has been arrested due to a false positive. When a system has a false positive rate of 92 percent it’s quickly ignored by whomever is monitoring it.

False positives can be just as dangerous as misses. While misses allow a target to avoid a detection system, false positives breed complacency that quickly allows false positives to turn into misses. If a law enforcer is relying on a system to detect suspects and it constantly tells him that it found a suspect but hasn’t actually found a suspect, the law enforcer quickly ignores any report from the system. When the system does correctly identify the suspect, there’s a good chance that the law enforcer monitoring it won’t even bother to look at the report to verify it. Instead they’ll just assume it’s another false positive and continue sipping their tea or whatever it is that UK law enforcers do most of the time.

It’s Not Your Phone, Pleb

The Fourth Amendment is often cited whenever a legal issue involving privacy arises. While I recognize that the “rights” listed in the Bill of Rights are actually temporary privileges that are revoked the second they become inconvenient to the government, I think that it’s worth taking a look at the language:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What’s noteworthy in regards to this post is the fact that nowhere does the Fourth Amendment state that measures have to be taken to make information easily accessible to the government once a warrant is issued. This omission is noteworthy because a lot of the political debates revolving around computer security are argued as if the Fourth Amendment contains or implies such language:

Dubbed “Clear,” Ozzie’s idea was first detailed Wednesday in an article published in Wired and described in general terms last month.

[…]

Apple and other manufacturers would generate a cryptographic keypair and would install the public key on every device and keep the private key in the same type of ultra-secure storage vault it uses to safeguard code-signing keys.

The public key on the phone would be used to encrypt the PIN users set to unlock their devices. This encrypted PIN would then be stored on the device.

In cases where “exceptional access” is justified, law enforcement officials would first obtain a search warrant that would allow them to place a device they have physical access over into some sort of recovery mode. This mode would (a) display the encrypted PIN and (b) effectively brick the phone in a way that would permanently prevent it from being used further or from data on it being erased.

Law enforcement officials would send the encrypted PIN to the manufacturer. Once the manufacturer is certain the warrant is valid, it would use the private key stored in its secure vault to decrypt the PIN and provide it to the law enforcement officials.

This proposal, like all key escrow proposals, is based on the idea that law enforcers have some inherent right to easily access your data after a warrant is issued. This idea also implies that your phone is actually the property of the various bodies of government that exist in the United States and they are therefore able to dictate in what ways you may use it.

If we are to operate under the assumption that law enforcers have a right to easily access your data once a warrant is issued, we must necessarily admit that the “rights” outlines in the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist since the language offers no such right to law enforcers.

Overt Internet Censorship

The Internet, especially the free speech that it has enabled, was fun while it lasted but it has become obvious that the governments of the world will no longer tolerate such a free system. Of course few governments wants to admit to attacking free speech so they are using euphemisms. For example, the United States government isn’t censoring free speech, it’s fighting sex trafficking:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. law enforcement agencies have seized the sex marketplace website Backpage.com as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a posting on the Backpage website on Friday.

Groups and political leaders working to end forced prostitution and child exploitation celebrated the shutdown of Backpage, a massive ad marketplace that is primarily used to sell sex. But some internet and free speech advocates warned the action could lead to harsh federal limits on expression and the press.

Notice how they managed to throw the “for the children” get out of jail free card in there? Shutting down Backpage wasn’t about prostitution, it was about human trafficking, especially the trafficking of children. It’s just like how the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) is being sold as a law against sex trafficking but it’s really about opening the door to censoring any online material that offends the political class.

Fortunately, there are new frontiers. Tor Hidden Services and I2P offer a mechanism for server operators to keep their location concealed, which makes taking them down more difficult than taking down a standard Internet service. As the precedent being set by SESTA expands, more Internet service operators will find themselves having to utilize the “dark web” to avoid being censored.

He’s Making a List, He’s Checking It Twice

Few things are as frightening as government lists. No good ever comes from a government list and if you’re one of the individuals who is listed, your future is probably a bleak one, which is why journalists may be facing rather unhappy times in the near future:

In today’s installment of “I’m Not Terrified, You Are,” Bloomberg Government reports on a FedBizOpps.gov posting by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the relatively benign-sounding subject “Media Monitoring Services.”

The details of the attached Statement of Work, however, outline a plan to gather and monitor the public activities of media professionals and influencers and are enough to cause nightmares of constitutional proportions, particularly as the freedom of the press is under attack worldwide.

[…]

Meanwhile, the United States government, traditionally one of the bastions of press freedom, is about to compile a list of professional journalists and “top media influencers,” which would seem to include bloggers and podcasters, and monitor what they’re putting out to the public.

I can’t think of any reason why the Department of ~~Homeland~~ Fatherland Security (DHS) would want a list of all “media influencers” that aren’t horrible. Every regime in history who has created and maintained such a list has done so for the specific purpose of eliminating (either through intimidation, disappearing, or outright murder) media personnel who fail to push the approved agenda.

Since this is a DHS program, it’s being advertised as a method of tracking foreign media personnel. However, I think recent history with the National Security Agency has shown that government surveillance programs aimed at foreign entities tend to get aimed at domestic entities in short order. So while this database of media personnel may be advertised as being aimed at foreigners, if it isn’t already, it will shortly be aimed at domestic medial personnel as well.

On the one hand, this is rather unsettling. On the other hand, I do appreciate that the political class is finally being overt about its intentions.