Tag: Shut Up Slave

Fahrenheit 451 without the Fire

The government of China, like most communist regimes, isn’t big on free expression. Expressing ideas that go against the state’s teachings can result in anything from spending some time in a reeducation camp to being outright executed. Although the Chinese government’s image has softened quite a bit since the days when Mao was killing millions, it still isn’t a teddy bear by any regard. For example, the regime is now cracking down on booksellers who traffic banned titles:

Lam Wing-kee knew he was in trouble. In his two decades as owner and manager of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books, Lam had honed a carefully nonchalant routine when caught smuggling books into mainland China: apologize, claim ignorance, offer a cigarette to the officers, crack a joke. For most of his career, the routine was foolproof.

[…]

On Oct. 24, 2015, his routine veered off script. He had just entered the customs inspection area between Hong Kong and the mainland when he was ushered into a corner of the border checkpoint. The gate in front of him opened, and a phalanx of 30 officers rushed in, surrounding him; they refused to answer his panicked questions. A van pulled up, and they pushed him inside. Lam soon found himself in a police station, staring at an officer. “Boss Lam,” the officer cooed with a grin. Lam asked what was happening. “Don’t worry,” Lam recalls the officer saying. “If the case were serious, we would’ve beaten you on the way here.”

[…]

Over the next eight months, Lam would find himself the unwitting central character in a saga that would hardly feel out of place in one of his thrillers. His ordeal marked the beginning of a Chinese effort to reach beyond the mainland to silence the country’s critics or their enablers no matter where they were or what form that criticism took. Following his arrest, China has seized a Hong Kong billionaire from the city’s Four Seasons Hotel, spiriting him away in a wheelchair with his head covered by a blanket; blocked a local democracy activist from entering Thailand for a conference; and repatriated and imprisoned Muslim Chinese students who had been in Egypt.

I have a lot of respect for individuals to trade in prohibited information. They’re the ones who ensure that any attempt at censorship fails in the long run. However, a lot of them often die before the information becomes so widely disseminated that censorship efforts are no longer feasible.

As China continues rising to dominance, it’ll be interesting to see how it attempts to expand its power outside of its borders. With how big of a market China is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it attempts to put pressure on international publishers in the future by refusing to allow them to sell any of their titles inside of the country if they publish a single undesirable title outside of the country (I also wouldn’t be surprised if this is already happening and I’m simply unaware).

Posse Comitatus Act

Trump announced that he intends to deploy the United States military along the Mexican border to guard it until his proposed wall is built:

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s calling on the military to guard the US-Mexico border until his long-promised border wall is complete.

“I told Mexico, and I respect what they did, I said, look, your laws are very powerful, your laws are very strong. We have very bad laws for our border and we are going to be doing some things, I spoke with (Defense Secretary James) Mattis, we’re going to do some things militarily. Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step,” he said during a luncheon with leaders of the Baltic states.

According to the Posse Comitatus Act, neither the Army nor the Air Force can be deployed to enforce laws within the United States without an act of Congress. The Department of the Navy has also created regulations that make the Navy and the Marines operate under the same rules.

However, does the Posse Comitatus Act matter this day and age? Congress has already granted the president the power to wage war without a congressional declaration of war, which is required under the United States Constitution. Since Congress has ceded that power, I see no reason to believe it won’t cede its powers granted by the Posse Comitatus Act. As an aside, if Trump does follow through with his plan, it may be the first time that the Third Amendment gets some love.

But all of this may be a moot point. There isn’t a strong correlation between what Trump says and what he does. He’ll say he’s going to do something one day then seemingly forget all about it the next day.

A Glimpse of America’s Future

Britain used to be the country towards which I looked when I wanted to see what creepy surveillance technology was soon coming to the United States. The British government has a long, proud history of surveilling everything its subjects do. But Britain is falling behind the surveillance game. There’s a new king in town and that king is China:

Chinese authorities claim they have banned more than 7 million people deemed “untrustworthy” from boarding flights, and nearly 3 million others from riding on high-speed trains, according to a report by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

The announcements offer a glimpse into Beijing’s ambitious attempt to create a Social Credit System (SCS) by 2020 — that is, a proposed national system designed to value and engineer better individual behaviour by establishing the scores of 1.4 billion citizens and “awarding the trustworthy” and “punishing the disobedient”.

China’s Social Credit System is the next step in surveillance. Britain and the United States have been doing something similar. For example, in the United States the information gathered about you by the government can land you on a no-fly list, which then prevents you from boarding aircraft. However, these efforts have been chump change compared to what China is doing. Unfortunately, what China is doing is technologically feasible by both Britain and the United States. All of the required surveillance technology is already in place. All that is needed is tying those surveillance devices into a domestic social credit system.

I won’t be surprised if the United States implements a similar system within a decade. The country has certainly been moving in that direction since at least the beginning of the Cold War and has pushed the pedal to the metal since 9/11.

We’re at the Mercy of Service Providers

Yesterday I mentioned the changes Microsoft made to its terms of service and touched on the one sided licensing agreements to which users must agree in order to use Microsoft’s services. Today I want to take the discussion one step further by explaining the dangers these one sided agreements have to users integrated into entire company ecosystems.

Imagine that you, like many people, are heavily tied to Microsoft’s ecosystem. You have an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One. You play games online with your Xbox Live Gold membership. Your home computers all run Windows 10. You use Outlook.com for e-mail. You’re a developer who relies on Visual Studio to do your job and utilize One Drive and Office for online collaboration with coworkers. When you’re traveling to customer sites, you rely on Skype to keep in touch with your family. Your Microsoft account pretty much touches every facet of your life.

Now let’s say you’re on a work trip. While talking to your wife on Skype you say and offensive word and somebody at Microsoft just happens to be monitoring the session. Perhaps this individual is a stickler for the rules, perhaps they’re just having a bad day. Either way they decide to exercise Microsoft’s right under the terms of service to which you agreed to terminate your Microsoft account right then and there. Your Skype session terminates immediately. You can no longer access your e-mail. Your entire trip to the customer site is wasted because you no longer have the tool you need, Visual Studio, to do your job.

The trip was a complete loss but the pain doesn’t stop there. When you get home and decide to blow off some steam by tearing apart people online, you find that your Xbox Live subscription has also been terminated. You aren’t even able to play offline games because you purchased them all via the Xbox One Store and the licenses for those purchases were tied to your user account, which was terminated. Much of your life has come to a grinding halt because one Microsoft employee monitoring your Skype session decided to terminate your account.

While one could accuse me of hyperbole for concocting this scenario, it is a very real possibility under the terms of service to which you agree when signing up for a Microsoft account. The terms of service give you no power and Microsoft absolute power. Microsoft can make whatever rules it wants whenever it wants and your only options are to submit or not use its services.

Microsoft isn’t even unique in this regard. The same one sided agreements are made when you create a account with Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or pretty much any other service provider. The sad truth is that most of us rely heavily on accounts that we have no real control over. Your Google account could be suspended tomorrow and with it would go your Gmail account, any apps you’ve purchased for Android via the Play Store, revenue derived from YouTube ads, etc.

The licensing model ensures that we don’t actually own many of the things that we rely on. The one sided agreements to which we agree in order to access services that we rely on ensure that we have no recourse if our accounts are suspended. We’re effectively peasants and our lords are our service providers. What makes this situation even worse is that it’s one we helped create. By submitting to one sided agreements early on, we told service providers that it’s acceptable to take all of the power for themselves. By being willing to license software instead of owning it, we told developers that it’s acceptable to let us borrow their software instead of purchase it. We put ourselves at the mercy of these service providers and now we’re finally faced with an absurdly high bill and having regrets.

Embracing the Darknet

Big changes came to the Internet shortly after Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). SESTA, like most legislation, has a name that sounds good on the surface but actually conceals some heinous provisions. One of those major provisions is holding website owners criminally liable for user generated content. This resulted in some drastic changes to sites like Reddit and Craiglist:

So far, four subreddits related to sex have banned: Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy. None were what could accurately be described as advertising forums, though (to varying degrees) they may have helped connect some people who wound up in “mutually beneficial relationships.” The escort forums were largely used by sex workers to communicate with one another, according to Partridge. Meanwhile, the “hooker” subreddit “was mostly men being disgusting,” according to Roux, “but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith.”

[…]

Reddit yesterday announced changes to its content policy, now forbidding “transactions for certain goods and services,” including “firearms, ammunition, or explosives” and “paid services involving physical sexual contact.” While some of the prohibited exchanges are illegal, many are not.

Yet they run close enough up against exchanges that could be illegal that it’s hard for a third-party like Reddit to differentiate. And the same goes for forums where sex workers post educational content, news, safety and legal advice. Without broad Section 230 protections, Reddit could be in serious financial and legal trouble if they make the wrong call.

The passage of SESTA set a precedence that will certainly expand. Today Section 230 protections can be revoked for user generated content about sex trafficking. Tomorrow it could be revoked for user generated content involving hate speech, explaining the chemistry and biology behind how prohibited drugs work, showing the mechanics of how a machine gun operates, and so on. User generated content is now a liability and will only become more of a liability as the precedence is expanded.

Will this rid the world of content about sex work, drugs, and guns? Of course not. It will merely push that content to anonymized servers, commonly referred to as the “darkweb.” As laws make hosting content on the non-anonymized Internet a legal hazard, Internet users will find that they need tools like I2P and the Tor Browser to access more and more of the content they desire. The upside to this is that it will lead to a tremendous increase in resources available to developers and operators of “darkweb” technologies. Eventually the laws passed to thwart unapproved behavior will again make restricting unapproved behavior all but impossible.

Microsoft Is Altering the Deal

Microsoft recently announced some changes to its terms of services:

5. In the Code of Conduct section, we’ve clarified that use of offensive language and fraudulent activity is prohibited. We’ve also clarified that violation of the Code of Conduct through Xbox Services may result in suspensions or bans from participation in Xbox Services, including forfeiture of content licenses, Xbox Gold Membership time, and Microsoft account balances associated with the account.

This is a great example of the pitfalls of the licensing model. When you purchase a game, movie, or other form of digital content from Microsoft, you’re merely acquiring a very one sided license. Effectively the license states that you can continue to use the content so long as Microsoft doesn’t decide to revoke your license. To make matters worse, the license gives Microsoft the option to alter the terms of the license whenever it wants and without even giving prior notice. In this case Microsoft changed the terms to state that your content licenses can be revoked if you use “offensive language” (a term so vague that it covers pretty much anything you say).

But the fun didn’t stop there. In order to enforce the new terms of service, Microsoft has also reserved the right to surveil you:

When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue.

And this is a great example of the pitfall of not having end-to-end encryption. Microsoft’s services generally lack an end-to-end encryption option, which means a man in the middle, like Microsoft or any entity it authorizes, can view whatever information is being transmitted using its services. Your Skype sessions aren’t as private as you might think.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. Any agreement that gives one party no power and the other party absolute power, like content licenses, is going to be abused by the party with absolute power. Fortunately, unlike with government, you have an option when Microsoft does something you don’t like; you can cease using its products and services.

Preparing Kids for Prison

Approximately 2.3 million Americans are currently sitting behind bars. Public schools are sold, in part, as facilities to prepare children for the real world. With so many individuals behind bars, it makes sense that schools should prepare children for a life in a cage, where everybody is watched by guards and zero privacy is allow:

MIAMI—The Florida high school where a gunman killed 17 people last month will require students to carry only clear backpacks, school administrators announced on Wednesday, after the shooting suspect’s brother was charged with trespassing on campus and two students were arrested on charges of carrying knives.

[…]

Robert Runcie, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, sent a letter to the families of Stoneman Douglas High students imposing the new backpack rule, reminiscent of security measures at airports and professional sports venues. He said any student without a clear backpack would be provided one at no cost after spring break, which takes place next week.

Students also will be issued identification badges, which they will be required to wear at all times while in school. Staff members have badges as well.

In addition, Runcie said the district was considering using metal-detecting wands at school entrances and installing permanent metal detectors — a safety measure Runcie recently criticized as ineffective. A person intent on committing an atrocity would find his or her way around them, he said in an interview last month.

I’m glad to finally see some real world applicable education taking place! I also appreciate that the school administrators have finally decided to punish all of the students in this school for the crime of attending the same school as a murderer. Hopefully these students will decide to be reincarnated in a school district without a murderous fellow student.

The real tragedy about this policy is that the students who did nothing wrong are the ones being punished, which is the norm in the United States. When somebody goes on a shooting spree, laws are proposed and passed to punish the gun owners he didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree, students are subjected to new levels of humiliation because of a shooting spree they didn’t perpetrate, and students who didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree are dragged through hell by school administrators who are more concerned about appearing tough than the student’s welfare.

Everybody involved in implementing this decision can fuck right off.

Members of Congress Will Continue to Use Your Money to Settle Their Sexual Harassment Cases

Sexual harassment has been a hot button issue since last year. Hollywood and Washington DC has been awash in accusations, apologies, and payoffs. However, when an actor in Hollywood decides to pay off their victims, they use their own money. When a politicians decides to pay off their victims, they use your money:

An overhaul of Capitol Hill’s workplace misconduct system is in jeopardy and likely won’t be attached to a government spending bill this week, diminishing the likelihood of reform before the midterm elections, according to Politico.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who introduced the bipartisan Congressional Harassment Reform Act last December, said on Monday that House and Senate leadership “stripped” provisions from the language from the spending bill at the eleventh hour.

[…]

Among its provisions, the act requires that members of Congress personally pay for sexual harassment settlements when they are found liable. Currently, lawmakers can tap taxpayer funds to settle with victims. Also, unless the victim opts for privacy, under the act, settlements would automatically be made public, thus lifting the veil of secrecy around the process.

Having access to tax dollars is yet another mechanism that politicians can use to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. If Congress was composed of angels, this wouldn’t be an issue because the members wouldn’t vote themselves the power to use tax dollars to pay off sexual harassment victims. But Congress isn’t composed of angels, it’s composed of crooked bastards who only care about power.

While many voters will likely claim that they’re outraged by this, members of Congress know that voters will toss aside all of their outrage come election day because most of them will continue to cast their vote for the “lesser evil” incumbent. Members of Congress won’t hold themselves accountable and neither will the voters.

If Violence Isn’t Solving Your Problem, You’re Not Using Enough of It

The United States government has been waging a war against drugs since 1914 when it passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. In 1970 it greatly stepped up its efforts after passing the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. For the entirety of its war against drugs, drugs have been winning by a landslide. I would think after unsuccessfully waging a war as rigorously as the United States has been waging its war against drugs since the 1970s, most sane people would realize the futility of the war and stop. But the United States prefers to live by the mantra of if violence isn’t solving your problem, you’re not using enough of it:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will unveil a plan on Monday to combat the opioid addiction crisis that includes seeking the death penalty for drug dealers and urging Congress to toughen sentencing laws for drug traffickers, White House officials said on Sunday.

The White House plan will also seek to cut opioid prescriptions by a third over the next three years by promoting practices that reduce overprescription of opioids in federal healthcare programs, officials told a news briefing.

As Anatoly Rybakov wrote, “Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.”

What will this likely accomplish? Nothing positive. People who suffer from chronic pain will have to resort to taking an aspirin and toughing it out, which will likely lead a few sufferers choose suicide over living a life of constant agony. But, hey, at least if they’re dead they won’t be addicted to opioids! Drug traffickers will continue to traffic drugs because they’re already subject to summary execution by law enforcers so the possibility of being sentenced to death is nothing new. I guess it will provide a little dog and pony show for the masses who want to see a drug trafficker executed after a trial instead of before.

Unfortunately, the war on drugs isn’t going anywhere. The profits of the government, especially its law enforcers, are too dependent on the wealth confiscated from drug manufacturers, sellers, and users.

We Must Listen to Children… If They Agree with Me

Children make the best political pawns. If you want to boost the chances of your political agenda succeeding, find a way to make it “for the children.” If you really want to boost the chances of your political agenda succeeding, find a way to put some children supporting your agenda in front of a television camera.

Gun control advocates opted for the latter and helped organize an official school walkout day to support gun control. As part of this plan, gun control advocates said that it was time for America to listen to its children. And this plan largely played out the same way that walking children in front of television cameras always does. Children were made to believe that adults actually care about their thoughts. Unfortunately, they will likely learn that their opinions only matter when they agree with what adults are pushing them to support:

The idea that children, in their innocence, have special moral insight goes back a long way in Western culture — perhaps to the biblical injunction that, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It has, of course, always warred with some variant of the belief that “children should be seen and not heard” — that children are not yet ready to hold up their end in adult conversations.

So when does the special moral insight of children manifest itself? When they are telling us that algebra is a stupid waste of time and the drinking age should be 14? No, funnily enough, children are only gifted with these special powers when they agree with the adults around them. Our long-standing cultural dichotomy lets adults use them strategically in political arguments, to push them forward as precious angels speaking words of prophecy to make a point, and then say, “hush, they’re just kids” when the children mar that point by acting like, well, children.

Do the opinions of children matter when they’re advocating for lowering the legal age to buy cigarettes? No. Do the opinions of children matter when they’re advocating for an end to homework? No. Do the opinions of children matter when they’re supporting gun rights? No. Their opinions only matter when they’re the correct opinions.

This is why I have an especially low opinion of individuals who use children to push their political agenda. I’m sure some adults do genuinely care about the opinions of children but they are certainly the minority. Most adults only want to march out the children to push their agenda then return them to their boxes so they cannot be heard until the next time they’re needed to push an agenda. This is the kind of nonsense that I have to believe teaches children that they’re nothing more than disposable tools.