Tag: 1984 was a Warning not a Blueprint

What Gun Registration Gets You

I’m not sure how many times I’ve been asked why I’m against gun registration. Usually people who ask me this aren’t aware of my complete disdain and absolute lack of trust in the state. Either way the question is often asked, I give my answer, and the person asking the question accuses me of being paranoid and killing puppies. The fact of the matter is trusting the government with the knowledge that you own firearms can only lead to one thing, confiscation. Miguel over at Gun Free Zone posted a story that demonstrates this very fact:

Raids yesterday morning by detectives working in Taskforce Acer 17 netted firearms police feared could be passed to criminals.

The weapons were held legally by registered gun owners, but police intelligence revealed 20 had “connections to family or associates who were persons of interest to the Acer Taskforce team”.

Officers simultaneously hit 21 properties at 8am to ensure the licence holders were complying with all conditions.

A total of 21 guns – including 15 shotguns and ammunition for an AK47 rife – were seized.

21 properties were hit simultaneously and every legally (according to the state) owned firearm was confiscated because the firearm owners had family ties to or associations with people who were being watched by the Acer Task Force. None of these people performed any criminal acts, they simply had some kind of tie to people being watch (not charged, so likely people who also did nothing illegal) by the state.

The government doesn’t want firearm registration to keep you safe, they want it to ensure they can steal your firearms whenever it damn well pleases. There is no legitimate reason to implement firearm registration and plenty of illegitimate ones. Anytime the state wants to expand their powers and knowledge you need to ask yourself why. Never trust the justification given by the state because that’s just a cheap method of getting you to go along with their plan to further expand their power. Ultimately there is always a nefarious purpose being any expansion of state power or knowledge, you just have to find it.

Next Up, Precrime

The law enforcement community seems to like their tools to be creepier and creepier. We have everything from checkpoints where innocent civilians are accused of various crimes without cause (usually they’re accused of driving under the influence) to closed circuit cameras lining street corners in major metropolitan areas. Now the police of Santa Cruz, California are testing software that predicts where crimes will occur:

The arrests were routine. Two women were taken into custody after they were discovered peering into cars in a downtown parking garage in Santa Cruz, Calif. One woman was found to have outstanding warrants; the other was carrying illegal drugs.

But the presence of the police officers in the garage that Friday afternoon in July was anything but ordinary: They were directed to the parking structure by a computer program that had predicted that car burglaries were especially likely there that day.

The program is part of an unusual experiment by the Santa Cruz Police Department in predictive policing — deploying officers in places where crimes are likely to occur in the future.

There are two things I’ll note about this. First, relying on a computer program to deploy police officers for the entirety of a day seems like a bad idea as a criminal who figures out the algorithm would know where the police weren’t likely to be. Second, how long will it take until the output of this software becomes admissible in court as evidence?

The story states that the police didn’t actually catch the two suspects breaking into a car, they caught them looking inside of cars. Granted nine times out of ten that usually means those people are planning to break into a vehicle but until they actually have performed the action no crime has been committed. Wouldn’t it have been better to wait for the two suspects to actually perform a crime before arresting them? I say this both as a libertarian who’s disgusted by the fact somebody can be arrested for not actually breaking the law and as an engineer who works to ensure his software is properly tested.

How can the police know if the software works if they didn’t wait for the suspects to actually break into a car? All they know now is that the program was able to predict people would arrive in the parking garage and look inside of vehicles. That right there is a poorly executed test case and if I were one of the developers I’d be rather pissed at the officers’ execution of the test.

The story does mention that one suspect had an outstanding warrant and the other was carrying drugs (which isn’t a crime in my book). That’s all fine and good but the fact of the matter is these two situations only came to light after the police arrested the women for not actually doing anything. Due to that simply fact I would say everything else the police learned is irrelevant.

Furthermore I’d also say the software isn’t so much intelligent as simply programmed with a great deal of common sense:

On the day the women were arrested, for example, the program identified the approximately one-square-block area where the parking garage is situated as one of the highest-risk locations for car burglaries.

Wait… a structure which houses, potentially, hundreds of cars that remain mostly unprotected throughout the day is a likely spot for car burglaries? Well Hell’s bells everybody this software can figure out what any person with common sense could have told you without needing thousands of man hours in development time. I’m sure if you park a few police officers in the parking structure unannounced every day of the week you’re going to encounter quite a few people planning on breaking into other peoples’ cars (until the criminals figure out that the police are hanging around there every day, then those thugs will find a difference parking garage).

The PATRIOT Act and Cloud Services

I’ve briefly described my attempt to get all of my “cloud” data moved to personal servers that I directly control. Part of my reasoning for doing this is the simple fact that I like having complete control over my property (and I consider my data personal property). The other reason is I don’t like the idea of federal agents being able to obtain my personal information without my knowledge. At the very least if the feds want to take my personal data now they will have to alert me when they come to take my server out of my dwelling (and since the data is all encrypted they’ll need my key to access anything… which will really frustrate them when I claim my fifth amendment right instead of giving over my encryption keys).

Some people have claimed another solution for this is to put your data in a foreign country. I never found that solution viable because the government of the country where your data is stored likely has access to it and will hand it over if the United States government puts in a request. Well Microsoft has confirmed that your data isn’t safe anywhere:

Organisations should be wary when entrusting their data to Cloud providers based in the U.S.

Microsoft, one of the first Cloud providers to come clean, have revealed that the U.S. authorities have the right to access any data stored by them, even if that data resides within the EU.

[…]

In addition, Gordon Frazer CEO of Microsoft admitted that customers would only be informed “whenever possible” with respect to authorities extracting data.

Such an example is where the FBI has the ability to issue a ‘National Security Letter’ demanding a company’s data. Frazer stated that in this case he wouldn’t even be able to admit he had received such an order.

Many people forget that those subject to “National Security Letters” are legally prohibited from even saying they received such a letter (note to the feds: if you hand me one of those letters I’m telling everybody, fuck you and your attempt to shit on the first amendment). This means if the feds to take your data you’ll never be notified because the company hosting said data will be legally muzzled.

I feel the best option in regards to your data is to maintain it all on systems that you have direct control over. Unless you have that direct control you can never be sure who is rummaging through your data (I’m not just talking about government agents at this point) or for what purposes. If you control the systems then you control who does and doesn’t have access to anything on that system.

Turning Your Keys Over to The Government

If you live in Cedar Falls, Iowa it’s officially time to perform an act of civil disobedience. Ordinance 2740, which requires every person with commercial property to surrender keys to said properties to the government under threat of force, was passed by a six to one vote against strong opposition from city residents:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFCLiij0CBA]

As the ordinance passed against the wishes of city denizens appealing to “representation” is a worthless endeavor here. When appealing to the “better nature” of government doesn’t work the next best thing is simply giving a big fuck you to those who think of you as a slave by ignoring their so-called laws. If you have commercial property in Cedar Falls either refuse to surrender keys to your property or give the city keys that don’t work. If the city tests the keys to ensure you gave them the right set give them a working key to test and change the locks as soon as the city’s thugs leave. The worst possible thing to do though is to surrender valid keys to your commercial properties because that will give those fuckers in the City Council exactly what they want and then they’ll decide they want more (probably keys to every home in the city).

It would be prudent to also call the members of the City Council (very late at night or early in the morning if you have their home phone numbers) an explain to them that they’re not going to have their cushy jobs next election cycle. This is the kind of abuse of authority that needs to be fought if we are to have any hope of regaining a free society.

People are Catching On

The one thing I hated about high school was the fact it didn’t feel like an educational facility but a prison. Once you were inside the prison walls you apparently forfeit any rights you had and were to submit to the demands of your overseers. You may be shocked to learn this but I didn’t do well in this environment as my problem with authority stemmed back from my days as a wee lad. Well it seems others are catching onto the fact that our education facilities are actually prisons and one site has posted 18 signs that public schools are prisons.

The Senate Votes to Renew PATRIOT Act Provision for Four More Years

Although I never doubted this would happen the Senate has officially voted to extend the expiring PATRIOT Act provisions for another four years:

The four-year extension was approved in the Senate just hours before the deadline at midnight (0400 GMT).

The bill was then sent to the House of Representatives, where it passed by a 250-153 vote.

That’s 250 “representatives” that are perfectly OK with shitting all over your rights.

A Secret PATRIOT Act

We all know and loathe the PATRIOT Act (unless you’re a statist in which case feel free to sodomize yourself with a retractable baton) but it seems things may be even worse than we realized. Senator Wyden or Oregon is claiming that a secret PATRIOT Act exists:

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

I think this news should put to bed any concept of the United States being a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It appears as though our “representatives” are just fine making up secret laws now.

Mixed Messages

I think part of the reason politicians anger me so greatly is the simple fact that they’re not consistent (well maybe one or two are consistent). Take for example Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Leahy has introduced, S. 1011, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2011 which in part would require the government to obtain a search warrant before going to online data service to acquire information on customers. Oh wait I understand why somebody who voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act renewal would introduce this bill, it also expands government power:

The bill isn’t absolutely free of problems: although it clearly would require a warrant for ongoing tracking of your cell phone, it would also and unfortunately preserve the current statutory rule allowing the government to get historical records of your location without probable cause. It also expands the government’s authority to use National Security Letters to obtain rich transactional data about who you communicate with online and when, without probable cause or court oversight. You can count on EFF to press for these problems to be fixed, and for all of the DDP principles to be addressed, as the bill proceeds through Congress.

I was wrong as there are no mixed messages only one consistent message about authoritarianism.

Senate Votes to Extend the PATRIOT Act

The Senate has voted, by a margin of 74 to eight, to shit all over our rights for four more years. This isn’t at all surprise at all. So who were the eight that actually give a shit about us? Well here is the vote breakdown:

Baucus (D-MT)
Begich (D-AK)
Heller (R-NV)
Merkley (D-OR)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)

These people are at least decent human beings. Fuck the rest of those yahoos.

My Government Curfew Rant

I mentioned that parts of Northern Minneapolis were under government enforced curfew but honestly I didn’t realize how pissed off the whole idea made me so here is my little rant on the subject. The United States was supposedly founded on the ideals of individual liberty. You were supposed to be free of government interference unless you were actively harming another individual or their property. There was supposed to be little government interference in your life. Well through the centuries our government, like all governments throughout history, has decided to give us all the middle finger.

Now there are few aspects of our lives where government interference can’t be found. Everything we do must be approved, stamped, and sealed. But the idea that a government goon can tell you when you must be in your home and when you can leave is disgusting. They have literally placed you into a prison during the hours of a curfew. The fact that our society has come to a point where it’s felt acceptable for the government to restrict your movements because they declared an emergency is sickening. As a free individuals nobody has the right to tell me when and where I can go unless my travels violate the property rights of another individual.

The only reason the police declare curfews is because they’re lazy and it makes their job easier. Instead of having to deal with those pesky problems like due process a state of emergency gives the police complete power to assume everybody that isn’t in a government approved uniform is doing something wrong. Evidence? Due process? Probable cause? Fuck all that noise, if you’re walking from your neighbor’s home back to your place after a specified hour you must be up to something wrong! After all anybody who disobeys the orders of our glorious leaders is probably a subversive person and should be dealt with anyways.

I haven’t granted the government any authority over my person, especially when it comes to my free movements. The people in Northern Minneapolis are being punished by the state because their homes happened to be conveniently located right in the path of Mother Nature’s range induced path of destruction. Those denizens are being imprisoned in their own homes by the government because of events nobody could control. I’m sure it goes without further saying but the entire concept of a government mandated curfew pisses me right the fuck off.