Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Property Cannot Exist Under Statism

Although there are a lot of disagreements between libertarian anarchists and libertarian statists one of the biggest is their views on property. Libertarian anarchists generally believe property rights are absolute whereas libertarian statists don’t believe in the concept of property rights. I imagine there are several libertarian statists screaming at their computer as though it was actually me. One of the things they’re probably screaming about is their belief that the state is necessary to protect property rights. But libertarian statists believe there should be a state and wherever a state exists property rights cannot.

This discussion isn’t necessarily restricted to libertarian property rights theory. Anywhere a state exists no form of property, other than the state having all rights over all property, can exist. Anarcho-communism’s concept of collectively owned means of production cannot exist. Mutualism’s concept of usage based rights cannot exist. And libertarian anarchism’s concept of absolute private property rights cannot exist.

A state is nothing more than an organized gang that claims a monopoly on the use of force within a geographic area. Different forms of states exist but all of them share a common trait: they declare a monopoly on making and enforcing the rules.

Consider the United States, a state that libertarian statists generally claim to be one of the most libertarian states in existence. Under the laws of the United States private property rights are the rule. There are no legal means by which a person can forcefully take the property of another. I’m just messing with you. In the United States nobody can be said to actually own anything. Everything is owned by the state and individuals are merely granted temporary usage and possession privileges.

If you don’t believe me try not paying your property taxes. You will soon find armed officers at your door threatening to either arrest or evict you. But large property like houses aren’t the only instance where your supposed property can be taken from you. If you fail to pay your income tax the state may put a lien against your property and seize it if you fail to pay off your “debt” within a specified period of time. Civil forfeiture laws allow the state to seize cash, automobiles, and any other property a police officers claims might be related to a drug crime. Your firearms can be seized if the state deems you a felon. There really are no limits on what the state can take.

These laws haven’t always been in existence, which is the biggest point of this post. Although the property rights granted under a particular government may be “libertarian” at one point that can change. Since a state has a monopoly on making and enforcing the rules it can change any rule at any time. Civil forfeiture laws are a prime example of the rules on property ownership changing. Before civil forfeiture laws were passed a random police officer couldn’t steal your car and all of your cash by simply claiming he believe it was somehow related to a drug crime. But the state changed the rules and now random police officers can take your stuff without so much as a court order. The income tax wasn’t always in existence but after it was brought into existence it gave the state an excuse to seize the property of anybody delinquent on their income taxes.

The reason property rights can’t exist under a state is because the state has the power to change the rules at any point. That power makes any property ownership nothing more than a temporary privilege that can be revoked at any time.

It Turns Out The Paris Attackers Didn’t Even Use Encryption

Immediately following the attacks in Paris politicians were demanding bans on effective cryptography. That would lead one to believe that the attackers used cryptography to conceal their communications. As it turns out the attackers coordinated their efforts over regular old unencrypted Short Message Service (SMS):

Yet news emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.

European media outlets are reporting that the location of a raid conducted on a suspected safe house Wednesday morning was extracted from a cellphone, apparently belonging to one of the attackers, found in the trash outside the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Le Monde reported that investigators were able to access the data on the phone, including a detailed map of the concert hall and an SMS messaging saying “we’re off; we’re starting.” Police were also able to trace the phone’s movements.

This is why jumping to conclusions is foolish. The politicians and other assorted government goons demanding effective cryptography be banned didn’t wait long enough to learn whether the attackers actually used encrypted communications. Now that evidence exists suggesting they didn’t the entire narrative being used to justify the proposed bans has fallen apart.

So how did the various governments’ intelligence services miss the attacks? Probably because the unencrypted messages were buried so deeply in random noise nobody noticed them.

Another possibility is complacency. When you’re looking for boogeymen everywhere you will find them everywhere. Western governments are always looking for terrorist attacks and see them everywhere from foreign nations to local airports. Their security briefings are overflowing with warnings against imminent terrorist attacks. But when you constantly hear about imminent terrorist attacks that never happen you became so numb to the warnings that when a credible threat does exist you dismiss it as yet another overreaction from an overly paranoid intelligence agent seeking a promotion.

Either way mass surveillance did nothing to thwart the attacks and most likely hindered efforts to do so.

Border Walls Are Good For Keeping People In

Even though more Mexican immigrants or leaving than coming into the country there are still a lot of people demanding a fortified wall be erected between the United States and Mexico. They believe such a wall will not only keep the Mexicans out but will also keep out the terrorists. But walls work both ways. And as the economic situation continues to degrade in the United States, and with it the amount of plunder available to the State, more barriers are going to be placed between Americans and freedom. One such proposal is to revoke the passport of people delinquent on their taxes:

If you owe the Internal Revenue Service more than $50,000 in taxes, you could soon have your U.S. passport taken away.

House and Senate negotiators are trying to hammer out a long-term highway bill that would fund road and mass-transit projects, and the passport-revocation provision is one revenue-raising measure that’s been approved by both chambers. Lawmakers are scheduled to hold a conference meeting Wednesday morning to begin ironing out a compromise bill.

We’re always told that taxes exist to fund major infrastructure projects. If that were the case you would think the United States government would want people who owe a lot to the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) to leave so they stop adding wear and tear to the roads.

While we’re constantly bombarded with the “dangers” of immigration the State doesn’t spend much time on emigration because that’s what it really fears. When people leave a country they take their wealth with them. Cash, assets, capital, and labor generally all leave with an emigrant. That’s why many countries implement an expatriation tax. They know it’s their last chance to steal from the person leaving. Sometimes an expatriation tax isn’t enough and countries erect physical barriers to prevent emigration, such as the Berlin Wall that East Germany built and the Korean Demilitarized Zone that prevents North Koreans from fleeing to South Korea.

Before you go demanding that wall just remember that as things continue to degrade here the politicians are going to become more desperate to prevent emigration. A fortified wall would serve as a great barrier.

Losing The Signal In The Noise

As I’ve mentioned before mass surveillance is not effective at discovering and thwarting terrorists attacks before they happen. When you collect everything the signals are lost in the noise. But government officials continue their demands for weakening encryption so their mass surveillance apparatuses can better spy on us. This in spite of the fact the National Security Agency (NSA) is already so overwhelmed with noise that finding signals has become an exercise in luck:

A TOP-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY DOCUMENT, dated 2011, describes how, by “sheer luck,” an analyst was able to access the communications of top officials of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.

Beyond the issue of spying on a business, the document highlights a significant flaw in mass surveillance programs: how indiscriminate collection can blind rather than illuminate. It also illustrates the technical and bureaucratic ease with which NSA analysts are able to access the digital communications of certain foreign targets.

The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is a March 23, 2011, article in the NSA’s internal newsletter, SIDtoday. It is written by a signals development analyst who recounts how, in addition to luck, he engaged in a “ton of hard work” to discover that the NSA had obtained access to vast amounts of Petróleos de Venezuela’s internal communications, apparently without anyone at the NSA having previously noticed this surveillance “goldmine.”

That the NSA, unbeknownst to itself, was collecting sensitive communications of top Venezuelan oil officials demonstrates one of the hazards of mass surveillance: The agency collects so much communications data from around the world that it often fails to realize what it has. That is why many surveillance experts contend that mass surveillance makes it harder to detect terrorist plots as compared to an approach of targeted surveillance: An agency that collects billions of communications events daily will fail to understand the significance of what it possesses.

Since the analyst made a note of finding the data on Petróleos de Venezuela it must be assumed it was on the agency’s list of desired signals. It was only after a lot of work and some dumb luck that the analyst found it buried in the sea of collected data.

If the NSA already has too much data how is adding more data going to improve matters? It’s not. In fact it will only make its ability to find valuable signals even more hopeless. That being the case, it makes you wonder what the real intentions of making mass surveillance easier are. It certainly isn’t to thwart terrorist attacks since doing that would require greatly trimming down the amount of data collected. On the other hand, if you just want the data at hand to prosecute a thorn in the side at a later date the mass surveillance system could prove to be somewhat useful.

Ministry Of Truth

Since shutting down the Internet isn’t a feasible option what can the righteous nations of Christendom do to combat the scourge of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)? According to to the governor of Ohio, John Kasich, a Ministry of Truth must be established:

During a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club, Ohio Governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich offered a litany of ideas meant to broaden the influence of the United States and combat the rise of the Islamic State. Among them was one that, on its face, seemed to contradict the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

“We must be more forceful in the battle of ideas,” Kasich said. “U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents’ propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association.” The areas he would target: the Middle East, China, Iran and Russia.

I do appreciate politicians like Kasich being honest about what they want. Too many politicians try to conceal their true intentions under layers of bullshit. Kasich is just straight up saying he wants the government to espouse particular religious beliefs. Maybe the United States can do what jolly old England did and declare its own church with the president as the pope!

Remember, this guy is one of your so-called leaders. Do you really want a guy who wishes to established a Ministry of Truth running your life?

The State Is A Specialist

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend about propaganda. Although we started off discussing corporate propaganda we quickly ended up talking about the State’s propaganda when I mentioned its program for paying football teams to be propagandists. This lead my friend to ponder whether the general libertarian claim that the State is incompetent was false.

This is actually something worth discussing. Is the State actually incompetent or very competent? I don’t see the State as either. Instead I see it as a specialist, which is to say it’s very competent within its speciality but varies in its competency in other areas. So what is the State’s specialty? Theft.

The State is just another name for the largest gang in an area that pilfers wealth from the people. This pilferage has many euphemisms including taxation, permits, fines, civil forfeiture, and prison work programs. But all of them result in wealth, both in the forms of assets and labor, being transferred from the citizenry to the rulers. Since this is the State’s speciality it’s no surprise that it’s very competent at it.

Propaganda is just one of many tools the State uses to commit theft. As I mentioned yesterday, the State needs to convince its victims that they’re not actually victims, otherwise they get uppity and may either overthrow the rulers themselves or assist a neighboring gang in “liberating” them. A good analogy is the Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes rely on an ever increasing number of victims. Getting more victims is made possible by the perpetrators of the schemes convincing the victims that they’re actually investors and will make money in the end. So long as this fiction can be maintained the victims aren’t likely to go to the authorities.

As with most perpetrators of Ponzi schemes, the State is very good at selling its criminal activity as an investment. It tells its victims that taxation is actually an investment that funds infrastructure, defense, and education facilities. Permits are sold as a necessity to fund oversight that ensures dastardly citizens won’t cause undue suffering to their fellows. We’re told fines and civil forfeiture are disincentives for actions that harm others. And prison labor is called a method to reform wrongdoers by giving them valuable skills to make a living with after they’ve paid their debt to society.

Unless the State at least provides the illusion of investment the citizenry is unlikely to believe it for long. So the State invests some of its plunder in building roads, militaries, and schools. Of course, of those things, only the military is any good and that’s because it furthers the State’s plundering. But there’s something there for the State to point to as proof that taxation is an investment. Maintaining the illusion of permits is easier because it only requires finding one or two wrongdoers to make a public example of. Fines and civil forfeiture are even easier sells. All the State must do is scare the citizenry into believing that without such punishments in place horrible things like drug dealers handing out heroine to children would become commonplace. Prison labor may be the easiest one to sell because everything takes place behind giant walls that separate the incarcerated from the citizenry.

Through all of this propaganda the victims can be made to believe they’re investors and maintaining that belief is necessary for the State to continue its specialty of theft unopposed.

So, I believe, the State’s varying levels of competency can be explained the same way as any specialist’s varying levels of competency: when you focus the majority of your efforts on a single skill you slowly become extremely competent at it. Propaganda is a tremendously useful skill to a thief, which is why the State excels at it. It’s the same reason a brilliant computer programmer may, for example, display no skill whatsoever in linguistics.

Congressman Wants To Shutdown Twitter, Facebook, and Every Other Social Media Site

You’re being ruled by idiots. They attempt to dictate policy on things they know nothing about. This is especially true when it comes to technology, which most of the rulers know next to nothing about. Ranking up there with Ted Stevens calling the Internet “a series of tubes,” we have a gem from Joe Barton:

Barton today asked Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler if the commission can shut down websites used by ISIS and other terrorist groups. Barton didn’t name any specific sites but said that “we need to do something” because of the terrorist attack in Paris.

“ISIS and the terrorist networks can’t beat us militarily, but they are really trying to use the Internet and all of the social media to try to intimidate and beat us psychologically,” Barton said. Addressing Wheeler during an FCC oversight hearing held by the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Barton continued:

Isn’t there something we can do under existing law to shut those Internet sites down, and I know they pop up like weeds, but once they do pop up, shut them down and then turn those Internet addresses over to the appropriate law enforcement agencies to try to track them down? I would think that even in an open society, when there is a clear threat, they’ve declared war against us, our way of life, they’ve threatened to attack this very city our capital is in, that we could do something about the Internet and social media side of the equation.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) isn’t creating a bunch of random self-hosted websites. It’s using popular social media sites such as Twitter. What Barton is asking for is the shutdown of major social media sites. And while sites like Twitter are trying to shutdown accounts used by ISIS it’s not easy because, at the article I just linked to points out, ISIS is gaming the system.

If you want to recruit new members you go to where the people are. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites are where the people are so it’s what ISIS uses. The only way you can shutdown its Internet presence is to shutdown the Internet itself, which isn’t something the United States government can do because the Internet is a collection of interconnected servers spread throughout the world.

Jumping To Conclusions

Before any facts about the perpetrators of the Paris attacks could be discovered many politicians here were already jumping to conclusions. The governors of 17 states jumped to the conclusion that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and used that to declare their states closed to any refugees from Syria. But an investigation into the attackers turned up evidence that they were European nationals:

“Let me underline, the profile of the terrorists so far identified tells us this is an internal threat,” Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, said after a meeting with EU foreign ministers. “It is all EU citizens so far. This can change with the hours, but so far it is quite clear it is an issue of internal domestic security.”

My point isn’t that the attackers were carried out by European nationals. The investigation has just begun so other evidence could indicate the attackers were indeed Syrian refugees or trained members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) who snuck into France or shapeshifting lizard people from another dimension.

My point is that jumping to conclusions before an investigation has come to a conclusion supported by solid evidence is foolish. Be smart. Wait for evidence to be discovered before telling everybody what you think happened.

Freedom Is Slavery

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. — George Orwell

Doublespeak, the political use of language to say one thing but mean another, was a subject George Orwell spent a great deal of time writing about. Although the term is generally associated with Nineteen Eighty-Four the excerpt above was taken from Politics and the English Language, a nonfiction work penned by Orwell on the use of language as it pertains to politics.

Although doublespeak is used by politicians at all times it is most heavily used during times of emergency. France is now under a state of emergency and its president is employing doublespeak to convince his subjects that what he’s doing is for their benefit:

“We will eradicate terrorism because we are committed to freedom and the influence of France throughout the world,” Mr. Hollande.

What does Mr. Hollande mean by freedom? Slavery:

The president said he wants parliament to update and potentially expand his powers under France’s state of emergency statute while extending the current state of emergency for three months.

Created during the Algerian war in 1955, the state of emergency gives authorities far-reaching powers including banning travel in certain areas, shutting shops and concert halls.

The interior minister can ban people from leaving their homes, and the state can take “all measures” to control the press and radio. Searches can be undertaken without sign-off from a judge, and those who refuse to comply can be fined and held in custody for up to two months.

To account for technological advances since the 1950s, Mr. Hollande asked lawmakers to update the state of emergency law on confining individuals to their homes and search seizure. Faced with a war on terror, constitutional laws relating to wars on foreign soil should be updated so the president can take exceptional measures without resorting to a state of emergency, he said.

Imprisoning people in their homes, censoring the press, and performing searches without so much as permission from a judge are powers people tend to associate with tyranny. But Mr. Hollande isn’t satisfied with just those measures, he wants even more power. It’s rather ironic that he, a self-declared socialist, is so open about wanting a return to overt serfdom.

What we’re seeing in France isn’t some kind of exception to the rule. States are nothing more than gangs of thieves and like all thieves they become greedier over time. The State might start small, asking only for a small percentage of the profits you make on your whisky, but it will exploit every “emergency” to increase its plunder. A war may justify a “temporary” taking of a percent of your profits on tobacco. Another war may justify a “temporary” taking of a percentage of your profits on everything you sell. Some minor scuffle with a foreign nation may lead to a “temporary” import fee on goods you buy in that nation. An economic failure may lead to a “temporary” taking of a percent of all of your income for “recovery” programs. Temporary is doublespeak for permanent and it’s always related to the transference of wealth from the people to the State.

Emergency powers are merely another tool in the State’s toolbox. It allows it to steal from anybody is can label a counter-revolutionary, enemy of the state, or terrorist. By simply declaring a state of emergency a government can justify searching houses for valuables, stealing any discovered valuables, and imprisoning the rightful owners all by applying a simple label to them.

This is why emergency powers always target citizens. War serves the purpose of stealing from foreign nations but doublespeak must be used to steal from the citizenry because if they become too unhappy a neighboring gang could decided to “liberate” them and enjoy popular support instead of resistance.

Better Check That Deoxyribonucleic Acid

Has anybody done a DNA test on John Brennan? With the way he’s swooping down on the corpses of those killed in Paris to argue for more surveillance I’m beginning to think he’s a vulture that developed language skills:

John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be speaking in part about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden in 2013. Those disclosures prompted sharp criticism and new restrictions on electronic spying both in the United States and in Europe.

Mr. Brennan also seemed to be pushing back against complaints from privacy advocates in light of a growing threat from the Islamic State against Western countries, exemplified by the gun and bomb assaults in Paris that killed 129 people on Friday night.

“In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that have been taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging,” Mr. Brennan said after a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization.

As I noted yesterday, not a single terrorist attack was thwarted by the United States’ surveillance apparatus before the Snowden leak. When you have over a decade to show results and don’t there is no reason for anybody to take your program seriously.

This is the exact same shit we’re told whenever there’s a mass shooting. People must be disarmed to protect the people! The only difference is the word “gun” is replaced with the word “encryption.” But disarming people creates soft targets. When you take their guns you put them at the mercy of armed assailants. When you take their encryption you put them at the mercy of both state and non-state malicious hackers.

The “unauthorized disclosures” Brennan mentioned lead to a major overall increase in computer security. Everybody who uses a computer benefited from those disclosures. Common cryptographic libraries were studied under a new level of scrutiny and the result was a lot of bad crypto, which put people at risk, was replaced by better crypto. Political dissidents who lived under repressive regimes that relied on tools that often relied on bad crypto to identify them became safer. Searching for potentially embarrassing medical information became more confidential. Transmitting your credit card number to online retailers became less risky. Thieves who stole mobile devices found it much harder to harvest personal information about the rightful owner from them. Defense as a whole improved.

Considering that tradeoff, zero change in an ineffective program versus improve security for everybody, it’s hard to take Brennan seriously.