Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

The Skies Have Eyes

We know that the government, primarily through its official surveillance department known as the National Security Agency (NSA), has been spying on Americans for years. When thinking about government surveillance I would bet things like wiretaps in data centers are the first things to come to mind. What about small aircraft? As it turns out the government has been using them to spy on you as well:

The US Department of Justice has been using airplanes to collect Americans’ cell phone data, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett.

The surveillance program, which is run by the US Marshals Service under the DOJ, has reportedly been in effect since 2007.

Officials have been using portable cell towers, known as “dirtboxes,” on small planes to collect identity and location information on cell phone users.

Those Cessna aircrafts fly from at least five airports near major cities, effectively allowing them to surveil most Americans.

Considering what we know thanks to Edward Snowden this isn’t surprising. Really this is just a Stringray with wings, which means it has a lot of range. What this story really shows is just how much time, effort, and money the state is dumping into its various programs to spy on each and every one of us.

Gun Owners in Washington Planning Act of Mass Civil Disobedience

During the election i594 passed in Washington, which requires all gun transfers to be performed through a federally licensed dealer. As you can guess gun owners are pissed. After all, what parent wants to pay a middle man just so they can give their child his or her inheritance to them? Who wants to pay a middle man just to get permission to sell a firearm to a friend? It’s a stupid law, it’s unenforceable, and it appears that Washington’s gun owners are planning to give their rulers a rightfully deserved gigantic middle finger:

Tens of thousands of Connecticut gun owners chose to become overnight felons rather than comply with that state’s new gun registration law. The defiance spurred the Hartford Courant editorial board to impotently sputter about rounding up the scofflaws.

New York’s similar registration law suffers such low compliance that state officials won’t even reveal how many people have abide by the measure—a desperate secrecy ploy that the New York State Committee on Open Government says thumbs its nose at the law itself.

Now Washington state residents pissed of about i594, a ballot measure inflicting background check requirements on even private transactions, plan an exercise in mass disobedience next month.

According to the event’s Facebook page they plan to gather en masse at the Washington State Capital and exchange firearms without involving any middle men. Since only federally licensed dealers can access the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to perform a background check these transfers will be in violation of the law.

I’m a big fan of civil disobedience because it shows how impotent the state is. Assuming half of the 6,100 people (as of this writing) marked as going show up it will be impossible for law enforcement agents to arrest them all. Even if they did manage to round them all up they probably wouldn’t have enough cages to keep them in. The state’s power is predatory in nature. It attempts to isolate individuals and attack them. But when it faces masses of people it must either back down or use violence on all of them, which quickly erases its legitimacy in the eyes of many.

This even will, in all probability, also cause many gun control loons to reveal their true faces. I’m sure social media outlets will be jam packed with comments by anti-gunners who claim to want peace demanding the police execute these unruly gun owners. Nothing brings out an anti-gunner’s violence nature like disobedient gun owners. I look forward to reading their rants for the LULZ.

First Parties are Spoiling Elections

Voting isn’t really my thing anymore since I’m not in the market for a master. But I have many friends that still play political games. Many of those friends aren’t entirely gullible and play political games for less evil political parties (often referred to as third parties). This means that they are subjected to constant accusations by people playing in the more evil political parties (the Democrat and Republican parties) of spoiling election. Republican will accuse people who vote Libertarian of letting the Democrats win (no, seriously, they actually claim that there’s a difference between the two parties) and Democrats will accuse people who vote Green of letting the Republican win (again, without any irony, claiming that there is a difference). But in reality it’s not people voting third party that spoils elections, it’s people voting for first parties:

The reason libertarians don’t vote for candidates from the two major parties is not because they suffer from a false consciousness that leads them to misapprehend their own political preferences. The reason they don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats is because—brace yourself now—they don’t want either Republicans or Democrats to win.

As far as libertarians are concerned, the 2 percent of Americans who vote libertarian don’t spoil an election. Rather, the 98 percent of Americans who don’t vote libertarian are the ones who spoil it for everyone else.

Republicans tend to blame Democrats for all of the country’s woes and Democrats tend to blame Republicans for the same. What we do know is that these two parties have been in power for a long time whereas third parties haven’t. Therefore it would seem that these two parties are responsible for the country’s woes. That being the case it would seem smart, if you’re going to play political games, to play political games for the parties that still don’t have a track record of fucking us all in the ass with a retractable baton.

Registration Leads to Harassment After Death

After the death of a loved one what’s the first thing you want to deal with? If you answer cops coming to your door in search of the deceased’s firearms I recommend moving to Buffalo, New York:

Buffalo, New York police are now visiting the homes of those recently departed in search of firearms as part of a new plan to help keep tabs on local guns.

The move, put into effect by Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda, is described as an effort to stop firearms, specifically handguns, from winding up back in circulation and off the books.

“We recently started a program where we’re cross referencing all the pistol permit holders with the death records, and we’re sending people out to collect the guns whenever possible so that they don’t end up in the wrong hands,” Derenda told WGRZ. “Because at times they lay out there and the family is not aware of them and they end up just out on the street.”

As they say, registration leads to confiscation. That confiscation may happen on a random day of the state’s choosing or it may happen after a loved one has died. But this story proves once again that registration is a stupid idea. Oh, and it also proves that the state’s goons are assholes.

Obama Urges FCC to Allow ISPs to Charge by the Byte

Net neutrality is back in the limelight again thanks to one idiotic senator and one idiotic president. First there is Ted Cruz, who seems entirely unaware of how the Internet currently works:

Cruz spokeswoman Amanda Carpenter echoed the senator in her own tweet, writing, “Net neutrality puts gov’t in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?”

The Internet in this country already moves at the speed of government thanks to the regulatory atmosphere that gives a handful of Internet Service Providers (ISP) a practical monopoly on providing Internet access. And Cruz’s spokeswoman isn’t much smarter since net neutrality doesn’t put the government in charge of pricing, terms of service, or what products can be offered. It’s just a fancy term for the status quo, which is all traffic being treated with equal priority. What would give the government control over such matters is if we went with what the government considers net neutrality, which is an even more heavily regulated market than the one that already exists.

But the Republicans weren’t the only ones to field an idiot to speak about the Internet this week. The Democrats fielded none other than Obama:

President Obama today urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reclassify broadband service as a utility and to impose rules that prevent Internet service providers from blocking and throttling traffic or prioritizing Web services in exchange for payment. Obama also said utility rules should apply both to home Internet service and mobile broadband.

Treat the Internet like a utility? That’s just urging ISPs to charge customers by the byte instead of charging by access speed. Furthermore it would give local governments more power to further monopolize Internet access. Many municipalities already grant one or two companies control over utilities such as water and electricity. Case in point, the government of Minneapolis has granted monopoly electricity contracts to Xcel Energy and monopoly natural gas contracts to Centerpoint Energy. Imagine if the Internet becomes a utility. Then municipal governments such as Minneapolis could grant monopoly contracts to the likes of Comcast. Not only would you potentially be paying by the byte but you probably wouldn’t even have the almost nonexistent choice between ISPs that you have today.

So long as rely on the state to solve this problem we’re going to get fucked hard. The only long-term solution is to decentralize Internet access provision. That’s why I’ve been working on mesh networking initiatives. Mesh networks provide a decentralized network that would be very difficult for the state to regulate if designed correctly. I’m sure other options exist for decoupling the Internet from the state and I would love to hear about them.

Be Careful When You Vote, You Never Know When the Rules Will Change

Voting can be a dangerous activity. Not only are the chances of dying on the way to the polling place greater than actually changing anything with your vote but the rules can chance at a moment’s notice. Take this woman for example, she was convicted of a nonviolent drug offense. She was told that her voting privileges would be restored after she served her probation. But then the rules changed in 2011 and she faced the possibility of more time in a cage:

Two months after I cast my ballot as a civics lesson for my daughter, the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation agents parked across the street from my house, questioned me, and eventually arrested me and charged me with voter fraud.

Let me explain: When I was convicted on a nonviolent drug charge in 2008, my defense attorney told me that once I served my probation, I would regain my right to vote automatically – correct information at the time. But Gov. Terry Branstad suddenly changed the rules in 2011, and now all citizens with a felony conviction lose their voting rights for life. Our Secretary of State Matt Schultz, in fact, has made this subversion of democracy a point of pride. He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hunting down and prosecuting people with past convictions who unknowingly registered or cast a vote.

Luckily for her the jury utilized its right of nullification and acquitted her. But they very well could have convicted her. So the moral of the story is that the rules of voting (and anything involved the state in general) are made up and what you’ve been told by a defense attorney doesn’t matter.

How to Write a Civil Forfeiture Christmas List

Christmas is right around the corner and many police departments are writing their wish list. But police departments don’t have to beg parents to buy them the things they want, they need only accuse people of possessing property suspected (by a random cop with no need to acquire a warrant or even have evidence of his accusation) of being related to a drug crime. This is the wonderful world of civil forfeiture and there are seminars that help police departments write their lists:

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.

In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.

“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”

This is why I’m glad I don’t drive anything flashy. I very much doubt the police are drooling over a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix or a 2005 Ford Ranger. People with nice things just make themselves targets for state sponsored theft. And the theft is so beloved by police departments that they give each other tips on maximizing profit.

Shut Up, Slaves

It looks like British rulers are tired of hearing criticisms and have thus begun working on crushing free speech, at least from a legal point of view:

Nearly 350 years after us Brits abolished the licensing of the press, whereby every publisher had to get the blessing of the government before he could press and promote his ideas, a new system of licensing is being proposed. And it’s one which, incredibly, is even more tyrannical than yesteryear’s press licensing since it would extend to individuals, too, potentially forbidding ordinary citizens from opening their gobs in public without officialdom’s say-so.

It’s the brainchild of Theresa May, the Home Secretary in David Cameron’s government. May wants to introduce “extremism disruption orders”, which, yes, are as terrifyingly authoritarian as they sound.

[…]

Once served with an EDO, you will be banned from publishing on the Internet, speaking in a public forum, or appearing on TV. To say something online, including just tweeting or posting on Facebook, you will need the permission of the police. There will be a “requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web, social media or print.” That is, you will effectively need a licence from the state to speak, to publish, even to tweet, just as writers and poets did in the 1600s before the licensing of the press was swept away and modern, enlightened Britain was born (or so we thought).

There’s a reason George Orwell’s 1984 takes place in Britain, it really is the prototype police state for western civilization. It’s interesting to see a British politician take such an overt stance on destroying free speech. Most British politicians that I’ve heard anything about, much like the politicians here in the United States, at least pay lip service to free speech.

What’s laughable about this idea is that censoring speech is impossible. Thanks to the Internet a person can post material anonymously. We know this because people in tightly control countries such as China and Thailand have continued to post criticisms of the regimes of those countries without getting crushed (in all fairness some of them do get crushed but that’s what happens when you fail to properly utilize the tools available to you).

People wanting to post “extremist” speech in Britain will continue to do so. The only difference is that a few people of lukewarm intelligence that post “extremist speech” will get arrested and made an example of (and being individuals of lukewarm intelligence they will probably be unable to actually go through with any “extremist” plans they post about).

Arnold Abbott Arrested Again for Feeding the Homeless

The government of Fort Lauderdale, Florida really hates homeless people. In fact it hates them so much that it recently passed a law aimed at preventing people from feeding the homeless. Arnold Abbott and a few of his friends decided to keep feeding them in spite of the law and were actually arrested by, what I imagine are, the biggest assholes to ever become police officers (seriously, if you’re a police officer and you’re arresting people for feeding the homeless then you are part of the problem). The city cited Mr. Abbott and he decided to give them a rightly deserved middle finger by continuing on his mission to make the lives of homeless individuals slightly better. Needless to say he was arrested again:

Arnold Abbott, the 90-year-old advocate for the homeless who was issued a citation earlier this week for feeding the homeless without adhering to new rules that would require him to obtain a permit and provide portable toilets, was cited again Wednesday night for the same reason.

This is an example of civil disobedience done right. An erroneous law was passed because a city government believes that the best way to deal with the homeless is to make their lives more miserable so they mosey on to the next city. To demonstrate how shitty the law is people have decided to publicly disobey it, which requires the police and city government to either demonstrates the fact that they’re raging asshole or back down.

The people of Fort Lauderdale would be right if they decided to arrest and detain both the members of the city government and the police for their attempts at restricting voluntary association.

If You’re Going to Run an Illegal Business Don’t Hire a Fed

The big news floating around the darknet community is that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) managed to shutdown Silk Road 2.0. When the news first broke there was a lot of speculation about how the FBI managed to do this. Many people theorized that the FBI has managed to break Tor’s hidden service functionality in such a way that it can identify the location of servers. As it turns out the FBI’s method was much more mundane:

The complaint describes how federal agents infiltrated Silk Road 2.0 from the very start, after an undercover agent working for Homeland Security investigators managed to infiltrate the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website.

“On or about October 7, 2013, the HSI-UC [the Homeland Security Investigations undercover agent] was invited to join a newly created discussion forum on the Tor network, concerning the potential creation of a replacement for the Silk Road 1.0 website,” the complaint recounts. “The next day, on or about October 8, 2013, the persons operating the forum gave the HSI‐UC moderator privileges, enabling the HSI‐UC to access areas of the forum available only to forum staff. The forum would later become the discussion forum associated with the Silk Road 2.0 website.”

The complaint also explains how the feds located and copied data from the Silk Road 2.0 servers. “In May 2014, the FBI identified a server located in a foreign country that was believed to be hosting the Silk Road 2.0 website at the time. On or about May 30, 2014, law enforcement personnel from that country imaged the Silk Road 2.0 Server and conducted a forensic analysis of it . Based on posts made to the SR2 Forum, complaining of service outages at the time the imaging was conducted, I know that once the Silk Road 2.0 server was taken offline for imaging, the Silk Road 2.0 website went offline as well, thus confirming that the server was used to host the Silk Road 2.0 website.”

The FBI didn’t utilize anything fancy, it relied on old fashioned investigative work. First it infiltrated an agent into the Silk Road 2.0 team and then it obtained the cooperation of foreign law enforcers to obtain an image of the server and looked to see if complaints of downtime corresponded to the server being taken down for imaging.

The takeaway from this is that keeping a hidden service truly hidden is difficult, especially when your adversary has the resources of government law enforcers on its side. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible but you have to know exactly what you’re doing.

As an agorist I’m a huge fan of “black” market businesses so long as they don’t involved initiating force against people. Silk Road was a great business that not only managed to siphon funds away from the state and render its drug prohibition irrelevant but it also made the drug trade safer by separating customers from sellers with a nice barrier of anonymity. While Silk Road 2.0 shutting down is rather sad it’s not the end of the world since another hidden service will rise to replace it. Hopefully the new online drug market will learn lessons from this case and make themselves even more difficult to shutdown.