Tag: Shut Up Slave

No Hero Goes Unpunished In The United States

The United States has a very proud history of punishing its heroes. William Binney had armed goons storms his home and kidnap him because he revealed rather concerning National Security Agency’s (NSA) programs. When Chelsey Manning revealed war crimes being committed by the United States military she ended up in a military prison. Edward Snowden is still in exile for revealing the NSA’s illegal surveillance operations. Now the United States government is going after the man who revealed the corruption in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court:

A former Justice Department lawyer is facing legal ethics charges for exposing the President George W. Bush-era surveillance tactics—a leak that earned The New York Times a Pulitzer and opened the debate about warrantless surveillance that continues today.

The lawyer, Thomas Tamm, now a Maryland state public defender, is accused of breaching Washington ethics rules for going to The New York Times instead of his superiors about his concerns about what was described as “the program.”

Tamm was a member of the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review and, among other things, was charged with requesting electronic surveillance warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility said Tamm became aware in 2004 that certain applications to the FISA Court for national security surveillance authority “were given special treatment.“

Isn’t it ironic how the State keeps urging whistleblowers to come forth if their information is related to a private organization but prosecute any whistleblower who comes forth with information about government corruption? If a whistleblower can lead the government to some wealth to steal it is grateful but when its dirty laundry is aired it becomes angry and violent.

Assumption Of Guilt

We truly live in wondrous times. At one time people held inconvenient beliefs about people being innocent until proven guilty by a jury of 12 impartial individuals. Today is a simpler time where most cases never go to trail. Instead the State merely coerces accused individuals into admitting guilt:

The presumption of innocence helps to combat prejudice and prejudging in the U.S. criminal justice system. But because plea bargains have supplanted trials in our criminal justice system, that presumption does not apply to most cases in the United States.

[…]

Unfortunately, the system that is described by our school teachers and that Americans see on television and in the movies is now defunct. Jury trials are now rare events in the United States. In fact, about 95 percent of the cases moving through the system will not go to trial. The overwhelming majority of cases will be resolved by plea bargains.

In a plea bargain, the prosecutor typically offers the defendant a reduced prison sentence if he agrees to waive his right to a jury trial and admit guilt in a brief hearing before a judge. Prosecutors use their power to pressure people who have been accused of a crime, and are presumed innocent, to waive their right to a trial and admit guilt.

We know this is true because prosecutors admit that this is what they are doing. The Supreme Court has approved these prosecutorial tactics in the landmark 1978 case, Bordenkircher v. Hayes. By a close 5-4 vote, the court said there was no constitutional problem with pressuring the accused to waive his trial and admit guilt. According to the court, there is no illegal coercion “so long as the accused is free to accept or reject the prosecution’s offer.”

The article touches on the folly of this system but I want to make another important point.

A person accused of a crime isn’t involved in a fair game. From the very beginning of a case, where the accused is arrested, the deck is stacked against them. Cops can lie to them but they can’t lie to the cops. So the accused is at an immediate information disadvantage because the cops and lie about evidence, witness testimony, and other things that can make a charge look hopeless to fight. Prosecutors have the right to threaten an accused with decades of prison time whereas the accused has no right to threaten the prosecutor with, say, a retaliatory lawsuit if it’s later found out that they’re innocent. In addition to that it’s also not uncommon for an accused party to front their legal defense fees even if they are found innocent.

The deal presented to the accused party isn’t fair by any sane definition. No matter what avenue they choose they’re at a major disadvantage. Admitting guilt and taking the lesser sentence seems like a good choice when the alternative is a longer sentence and tremendous legal defense fees. Especially when, as far as the accused knows, the evidence against them is thoroughly damning.

A legal system that favors one side over the other cannot be considered an engine for justice. It is merely a formality that allows the advantaged side to declare its actions just when it crushes the disadvantaged side.

The State, Like Any Other Thief, Is An Opportunist

The State is no different than any other thief. It’s an opportunist that preys on the most vulnerable. An incredible example of this is Denmark’s parliament:

The Danish parliament has backed a controversial proposal to confiscate asylum seekers’ valuables to pay for their upkeep.

[…]

Under the new law, refugees entering the country will only be allowed to keep possessions up to a value of about 10,000 kroner (1,340 euros; £1,000) – a figure raised from 3,000 kroner following objections.

Seldom is the State this brazen in its theft. Usually it wraps its actions in euphemisms such as taxes, citations, and civil forfeiture. The State also avoids openly targeting the vulnerable but in this case it is making an exception.

What makes this blatant theft worse is that many people seem to support it. Supporters of this crime claim that it’s a legitimate way for the refugees to offset their burden on society. This, like any other claim justified by nonsensical collectivism, is bullshit.

Let’s address the very premise that there is a burden on society. Why would people living in Denmark have to foot the bill for refugees entering the country? Because the State has a gun to their heads demanding they do so. Taxes aren’t increased because refugees are entering the country. Taxes are increased because the State has yet another means to justify increasing its rate of theft. The refugees aren’t the problem, they’re merely the excuse used by the problem.

Refugees are entirely without fault in this mess. They have every right to cross the imaginary line claimed by the biggest gang in Denmark as its territory. That gang has no legitimate claim to the land so nobody is in the wrong for crossing into it. None of the refugees are stealing wealth from the people already living in Denmark. All of the theft is being performed by the Danish government.

The Inevitable Outcome

Here we are in election season. As with the last election and the election before that one this election is most notable for having the worst candidates imaginable. Cock us, err, caucus season is upon us. Right now the headliners of this political mascaraed are a fascist and a socialist:

Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump have opened up solid leads in Iowa less than two weeks before the state’s caucuses kick off the 2016 presidential nominating contests, according to a poll released Thursday.

The survey from CNN/ORC shows Mr. Sanders, who was trailing Mrs. Clinton significantly in early December, erasing her lead and overtaking her. Likely Democratic caucusgoers now back the Vermont senator over Mrs. Clinton by eight percentage points, 51 percent to 43 percent. Last month she was ahead of him by 18 percentage points.

Because I know I have intelligent readers I’m sure many of you are wanting to point out that fascism is a form of socialism so the competition is really between two socialists and you would be right. And that brings us to the point of this post (yes, there is a point, I wasn’t going to waste your time with meaningless politicking): the United States has reached its inevitable outcome.

When the Revolutionary War was over and the colonists decided to replace one king with another they put the people of the United States on a collision course with collectivism. Statism in any form is collectivist in nature. It deemphasizes the individual in favor of an abstraction we often use for convenience: the people. The State, we’re told, reflects the will of the people. But the people don’t have a will, only individuals do, and each individual has a unique will. There is no way to reflect the will of the people by the simple fact that every individual living in a country doesn’t share a common will. To get around this inconvenience the very human desire to fit in is exploited by means of statistics.

Voting, like the people, is an abstraction. When you go to your polling place you’re not voicing your opinion, you’re participating in a statistical survey. One, I might add, that reinforces the State by providing you a curated list of candidates. In this statistical survey the decision is based on the majority. Whichever name on the curated list gets the most responses from the sample gets to be in office. Everybody who either wanted somebody else in the office, to abolish the office, or something else entirely different is ignored. Their wills are set aside.

The problem with collectivism is that it’s self-reinforcing. It tricks individuals into thinking about the good of the people (i.e. the State) through propaganda. We’re told to think of the greater good and that acting on our personal wants is selfish. Voting is used to reinforce the propaganda. The statistics show that the people wants X so anybody demanding Y is selfish. Since a great many humans desire to fit in they would rather be with the majority (a statistical majority in this case) than be selfish.

It’s no surprise that the greater good is whatever is best for the State. And nothing is better for the State than socialism. Under the ultimate ends of socialism everything is collectivized under the State. There is no need to steal through taxation, citations, civil forfeiture, etc. The State declares ownership over everything and doles out what rations is believes necessary to individuals.

So here we are. Through more than two centuries of collectivism reinforced by statistics individuals have played their part in their own executions. Individuals have been conned into considering the greater good, which is whatever is good for the State, over their own. In so doing they’ve handed the State increasingly more power. Now the United States is at a point where the State is so powerful the biggest election in the country is between two socialists. Even if one or both of the two candidates don’t receive their party’s nomination the other eligible nominees are all socialists as well. No matter who wins individualism loses and with it goes freedom.

Be Careful Posting About Bernie Sander’s Campaign

Although I suspect most of my readers aren’t feeling the Bern I could be wrong. Just in case some of you are Bernie supporters I’m going to do you a huge favor and warn you about posting material from his campaign online. It seems the campaign does not appreciate such things. Wikipedia received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice from the Bernie Sanders campaign because it displayed publicly available campaign material:

A lawyer representing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has demanded that several of the campaign’s logos be removed from Wikipedia, saying that reproducing the logos violate copyright law. The Wikimedia Foundation has complied with the DMCA takedown notice and removed the notices.

If you’ve been posting information from Sanders’ campaign you should consider removing it immediately less you receive your own DMCA takedown notices.

It is funny, from my vantage point of an anarchist, that a political campaign would decide to enforce its copyright like this. Most people are away that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. This is especially true for political campaigns. Even if people were using campaign material for mockery it will both amuse opponents and stir up supporters. There’s really no way a campaign can lose by letting people use its materials since such use is almost certainly not going to convince anybody to change their viewpoint.

Oh well, some people want a master. I guess it’s good for them to get a feel for the new yoke before they have to wear it.

News From The Crypto War Frontline In New York

I continue to be amused by politicians’ efforts to prohibit math. A bill has been introduce in New York that would require manufacturers to implement backdoors in their mobile devices or face… some kind of consequence, I guess:

A New York assemblyman has reintroduced a new bill that aims to essentially disable strong encryption on all smartphones sold in the Empire State.

Among other restrictions, the proposed law states that “any smartphone that is manufactured on or after January 1, 2016 and sold or least in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.”

If it passes both houses of the state legislature and is signed by the governor, the bill would likely be the first state law that would impose new restrictions on mobile-based cryptography. Undoubtedly, if it makes it that far, the law would likely face legal challenges from Apple and Google, among others.

One of the great things about democracy is if a vote doesn’t go the way you want you can reintroduce the vote and waste everybody’s time again.

One question you have to ask is how this bill could be enforced. As written, it would punish sellers who sold phones that couldn’t be decrypted by law enforcers. But New York isn’t that big of a landmass and Ars Technia points out the rather obvious flaw in Assemblyman Titone’s clever plan:

UPDATE 3:49pm ET: Also, it’s worth pointing out that even if this bill does pass, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for New Yorkers to cross a state line to buy a smartphone.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to see what would happen if this bill was signed into law. Sellers in New York may go under but sellers in neighboring states would see a jump in sales. In addition to sellers in neighboring states, the sales of online stores would likely increase as well since, you know, you can just order a cell phone online and have it delivered to your home.

Part of me is amused by the idea of strong cryptography being outlawed. Imagine millions of Android users flashing customer firmware just so they could remove government mandated backdoors. Such a prohibition would almost certainly create a sizable black market for flashing customer firmware.

The Never Ending Ended War

Remember the war in Iraq officially declared over? Remember how much he and his supporters bragged about him ending Bush’s war? Guess what? We’re sending more troops there yet again:

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. – An elite U.S. Special Operations targeting force has arrived in Iraq and will carry out operations against the Islamic State, part of a broader effort in 2016 to strike at the militants and that also includes U.S. Special Operations troops in Syria, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Wednesday.

The targeting force is now in place and is prepared to work with Iraqis to begin going after militant fighters and commanders, “killing or capturing them wherever we find them,” Carter said, speaking to about 200 soldiers at the home of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, which is expected to deploy about 500 soldiers next month to Iraq and Kuwait as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

If you’re psychopathic enough to want to build an empire there are two ways to go about it. You can do it the smart way, the way the Mongols did it, and leave a conquered area to run its own affairs as long as it pays your demanded tribute. Or you can do it the stupid way, the way the United States prefers, and try to micromanage a conquered area even if they do pay your demanded tribute.

The problem with the stupid way is that the people tend to resent you far more. Because of that they continue actively fighting you, which ensures you can never really lay longterm ownership over the region. Even though the war was declared over the United States will likely be fighting it until it finally decides to leave.

Intellectual Property Means Not Owning Your Stuff

Intellectual property laws are always justified as being necessary for human innovation. Setting aside the fact humans have been innovating for longer than intellectual property laws have existed, the belief many people hold is that nobody would invest the resources necessary to innovate if they weren’t promised a monopoly on manufacturing afterwards. More and more though we’re seeing what the real purpose behind intellectual property laws are. It’s not to encourage innovation, it’s to curtail ownership.

Copyright is the biggest offender. Due to software copyright laws it’s getting more and more difficult to say you own anything because manufacturers are claiming anything with a computer in it is licensed, not sold. What’s that mean? It means when your product breaks down you are legally prohibited from fixing it:

How many people does it take to fix a tractor? A year ago, I would have said it took just one person. One person with a broken tractor, a free afternoon, and a box of tools.

I would have been wrong.

When the repair involves a tractor’s computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. government agencies, an official hearing, hundreds of pages of legal briefs, and nearly a year of waiting. Waiting for the Copyright Office to make a decision about whether people like me can repair, modify, or hack their own stuff.

[…]

Thanks to the “smart” revolution, our appliances, watches, fridges, and televisions have gotten a computer-aided intelligence boost. But where there are computers, there is also copyrighted software, and where there is copyrighted software, there are often software locks. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, you can’t pick that lock without permission. Even if you have no intention of pirating the software. Even if you just want to modify the programming or repair something you own.

Enter the tractor. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a repairman by trade and a software engineer by education. I fix things—especially things with computers in them. And I run an online community of experts that teaches other people how to fix broken equipment. When a farmer friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way to tweak the copyrighted software of his broken tractor, I knew it was going to be rough. The only way to get around the DMCA’s restriction on software tinkering is to ask the Copyright Office for an exemption at the Section 1201 Rulemaking, an arduous proceeding that takes place just once every three years.

Ownership implies you have sole control over something. It can’t exist under intellectual property laws. So long as you stand the chance of being severely punished for repairing, modifying, or selling something you cannot claim to own it. Intellectual property claims are promises granted by the State that it will dish out those severe punishments.

This problem is also going to become exponentially worse as the number or products with embedded software increases exponentially. Soon we won’t be able to claim ownership over our refrigerators, coffee makers, or door bells. Everything in our homes will be rented property of the manufacturer. And if we violate the terms of the rental agreement the State will send its armed goons at oh dark thirty, kick down our doors announced, and shoot our pets.

What’s Your Score

Police, even more so than most people, tend to be lazy. And like other lazy people police are trying to replace everything with algorithms. But there is a difference between police relying on algorithms and private entities: algorithms in private hands seldom lead to people being killed. A higher death rate is the only outcome I can see coming from this:

FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

Algorithms that try to model human behavior are notoriously unreliable. Part of this is due to humanity’s lack of homogeneity and part of it is due to data limitations. An algorithm is only as good as the data it is fed. What data is fed into an algorithm is determined by the developers, which means the results often reflect their biases. In this case if the developers viewed gun owners as being prone to violence the algorithm would end up reflecting that.

Usually we don’t pay much attention when an algorithm screws up and recommends a product to us based on our previous purchasing history that we have no interest in. But an algorithm that tries to estimate a person’s threat level to police is going to carry much more dire consequences. There is already a chronic problem with police being too trigger happy. Imagine how much more trigger happy your average cop would be if they were told the suspect is rated high by the threat assessment algorithm. Chances are the officer will go for a shoot first and ask questions later approach.

Theoretically this type of algorithm wouldn’t have to result in such severe consequences but it is being utilized by individuals who are generally not held accountable for their actions. If an officer, for example, received notification that the suspect was rated is highly likely to be violent but knew gunning them down without cause would result in charges they would likely act more cautiously but still not resort to shooting without justification. But that’s not how things are this is will likely end badly for anybody facing off with an officer employed by a department that utilizes this system.

The Great American Outdoor Show Will Be Safer This Year

There has been some disagreement between the City of Harrisburg and the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA is hosting its Great American Outdoor Show in the city. In addition to brining a good deal of money to local businesses the NRA is also making a donation to the Civil War Museum. However, the mayor of Harrisburg wants to shutdown the museum so he’s a bit peeved that the cash is going there instead of his gang in blue. Now the mayor wants to exact revenge:

Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse says Harrisburg City Police will not staff the upcoming gun show, which is sponsored by the NRA.

In the past, the city staffed officers and the NRA made a donation to Harrisburg City Police in return. In 2015, that donation was $50,000.

This year, Papenfuse says the NRA is donating money and most of it is going to the Civil war Museum, which the mayor wants to close.

And in so doing he inadvertently made the event safer. Without the local gang in blue meddling with the event the attendees don’t have to worry about being extorted, assaulted, or kidnapped.

So the secret to hosting a safe event in Harrisburg is to make a donation to the local Civil War Museum instead of the gang in blue.