Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

After Having Over a Year to Scrub Its Records the NSA Claims Snowden Never Raised Concerns

After Edward Snowden released his treasure trove of leaked data from the National Security Agency (NSA) many statists asked why he didn’t go through “proper” channels. Snowden said that he did raise concerns numerous times to no avail. It has been over a year since Snowden let us in on the NSA’s surveillance game and now the agency is claiming that Snowden never filed a complaint:

In response to claims by Edward Snowden that he raised concerns about NSA spying in emails sent to the spy agency’s legal office, the NSA released a statement and a copy of the only email it says it found from Snowden.

That email, the agency says, asked a question about legal authority and hierarchy but did not raise any concerns.

“NSA has now explained that they have found one e-mail inquiry by Edward Snowden to the Office of General Counsel asking for an explanation of some material that was in a training course he had just completed,” the NSA said in a statement. “The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed. There was not additional follow-up noted.

“There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations,” the statement continued. “We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

Let me get this straight. The NSA, one of the most unscrupulous agencies of the United States government (and that’s saying a lot, expects us it when it says Snowden never filed a complaint? I’m guessing that the NSA has been busy scrubbing all records of Snowden’s filed complaints just so it could claim that he never filed any.

But let’s assume he didn’t file any complaints, why does it matter? Anybody who has dealt with government bureaucracy knows that “proper channels” is synonymous with memory hole. It’s impossible to get anything done within a government agency by using the agency approved channels. The only way to get a government agency to change its ways is to create public outrage and even that isn’t a guarantee that anything will improve.

Net Neutrality for Libertarians

Net neutrality is a hot topic in libertarian circles. May libertarians mistakenly see net neutrality as another unwelcome intrusion of the state into the free market. It’s not that uncommon of a trap for libertarians to fall for. When they see a battle that appears to be private enterprise versus government they instinctively side with private enterprise. But net neutrality isn’t a debate between private enterprise and government regulations. It’s merely government regulations versus government regulations.

The mistake lies in seeing businesses like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as private enterprises. In reality they are where they are today thanks to special privileges granted to them by the state. AT&T and Verizon, for example, have government granted monopolies over a lot of wireless spectrum and Comcast enjoys near or outright monopolies in many areas thanks to government control over who can build networking infrastructure where. Many states even have restrictions against municipalities providing Internet service because of Internet service provider (ISP) lobbying efforts.

But that’s not all. At one time telephone companies were the primarily ISPs. But ISPs have become content providers and content providers have become ISPs. I believe this is what really sparked the net neutrality war. Companies with monopolies on a great deal of copyrighted material suddenly found a way to further exploit that monopoly by controlling what their ISP customers can access. Comcast can leverage its licensed monopolies on a lot of entertainment content by charging competitors such as Netflix an inflated rate that makes it untenable for Comcast customers to utilize Netflix. And if you just download the content from alternate sources (such as BitTorrent) you’re in violation of the law because you don’t have a license for that monopolized content.

What more libertarians should focus on is the fact that there is no free market in providing Internet access. Only those granted permission by the state can do so. And much of the content that makes the Internet valuable is controlled by a handful of ISPs that will happily withhold said content unless you’re getting Internet access through them.

In other words no matter who wins we lose. Losing net neutrality won’t be a win for the free market and keeping it will mean more government control over something that has had too much government control over it. What is truly needed is the destruction of the monopolies on content and infrastructure, which isn’t going to happen through the political process (since the content providers/ISPs have such effective lobbying efforts).

No Honor Amongst Thieves

With the number of laws on the books the state has to fast track as many cases as it can. Fast track, in this instance, refers to the practice of offering lesser sentences in exchanges for a guilty plea. This is commonly referred to as a plea bargain and is often chosen by those facing prosecution because the guarantee of 18 months in a cage beats the possibility of 50 years. But there’s no honor amongst thieves so even if you take the plea bargain you may not get the lesser sentence:

A 16-year-old Utah boy was sentenced earlier this month to up to 15 years in a maximum security prison after a judge changed the terms of a plea agreement.

Cooper Van Huizen pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree felony robbery for his role in a home invasion late last year.

The teen, who had no prior criminal history, and his parents believed the plea deal would result in 180 days in jail.

But District Judge Ernie Jones told Van Huizen at the May 7 sentencing hearing he believed the terms recommended by prosecutors and the probation board were “too soft” and instead sent the boy to Utah State Prison for one to 15 years.

Never make a deal with the devil state because it, like all disreputable individuals, cannot be trusted to honor its side of the bargain. The darker part of my kind of hopes that this type of behavior becomes more common amongst judges. I feel that the plea bargaining system has put a lot of innocent people in prison and enabled the state to prosecute more people than it could if it had to bring each suspect to trail. If more judges changed the terms of plea bargains it would encourage people to take their case to trail, which would increase the state’s costs for prosecuting. On the other hand I would like to see this judge be disbarred for failing to honor his team’s side of the bargain.

The Greenwald Orbital Ion Cannon

Depending on how comprehensive this list is this latest release by Gleen Greenwald could effectively be the orbital ion cannon strike in the war against the National Security Agency (NSA):

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.

“One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.

I’m imagining a list a million names long and am really hoping my name appears somewhere in it. But the list will likely be much shorter than that and may just contain the names of the “important” people the NSA is spying on. Either way it will be interesting to see who’s one it and, hopefully, determine some of the criteria the NSA uses to select targets for espionage.

Why Voting isn’t For Me

I’ve given up voting. The last presidential election, in which I wrote in Vermin Supreme, was the last election that I plan to vote in. When I say this I’m often met with criticisms from people who believe voting is the way to change things politically. That may be true if your idea of change is to replace a Democratic ruler with a Republican ruler of vice versa but that’s not the type of change I’m trying to accomplish. I came across an essay by one of my leftist anarchist brethren that does a good job of summarizing why I’m done with voting:

To vote is to give up your own power.

To elect a master or many, for a long or short time, is to resign one’s liberty.

Call it an absolute monarch, a constitutional king, or a simple M.P., the candidate that you raise to the throne, to the seat, or to the easy chair, he will always be your master. They are persons that you put “above” the law, since they have the power of making the laws, and because it is their mission to see that they are obeyed.

My goal, politically speaking, is to abolish masters. It’s not a matter of a neoliberal or a neoconservative ruling my life. I’m more than capable of ruling myself thank you very much. The only thing that I ask is that nobody initiate aggression against me and in return I won’t initiate aggression against anybody. We don’t need rulers to dictate this request, common sense and community outcry will do so. There doesn’t need to be men in marble buildings writing decrees against murder because targets of a murderer will defend themselves and members of the target’s family and community will rise to his defense. The same is true of theft, rape, and other acts that involve one individual aggressing against another. Rulers only need exist to write decrees prohibiting behavior that a community won’t itself enforce. In other words rulers only exist to write decrees that a community doesn’t actually want.

Truth be told I don’t care if you choose to vote. That’s your choice. But I’m not going to vote and I don’t give a damn if you think that makes me a bad person.

Why Legalizing Driverless Cars is Likely to Be an Uphill Battle

One of the political battles currently being waged in Minnesota is cannabis legalization. The reason the battle is so heated is because law enforcement agents are opposing legalization because they know it will hurt their funding from civil forfeiture laws. This will likely be the reason why law enforcement agents will also oppose legalizing driverless cars:

Google’s driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver’s seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.

Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimate $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year.

Driverless cars are less likely to violate traffic laws. As driverless cars become more prevalent this will cause the number of traffic citations issued by police to dwindle. Without the kickback from those citations departments will find that their funding will also dwindle. In other words this is why we can’t have nice things.

One of the major problems with modern policing is the fact that it incentivizes the creation of criminals. The more criminals that exist in society the more money law enforcement agencies can rake in. That creates a conflict of interest as law enforcement agencies are incentivized to support any measure that creates more criminals and oppose any measure that reduces the number of criminals. This conflict of interest becomes especially egregious when you consider that technology like driverless cars have the potential to save a lot of lives by reducing traffic accidents.

The Conspiracy Theory that Annoys Me the Most

Conspiracy theories are fun even when you don’t buy into them hook, line, and sinker. I enjoy reading about all of the wonky theories people have come up with, especially if that theory involves lizard people. But amongst the conspiracy theories out there the one that annoys me the most is that the government is all omnipotent. This theory is very prevalent in libertarian circles, which is ironic considering that most libertarians view the government has being entirely incompetent. Whenever I try to discuss tools to secure one’s self against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance apparatus there are usually a few people who start making up bullshit and claiming that using such tools with either make you a target, are backdoored by the NSA (even if the project is open source and the code has been thoroughly reviewed for such shenanigans), or that the NSA has magical super computers that can instantly break all encryption protocols.

Unlike most conspiracy theories, which usually contain some kernel of factual information that wild theories are based off of, the claim that the government NSA can render all computer security tools impotent is entirely baseless. As Bruce Schneier pointed out in a recent blog entry the NSA isn’t magic:

I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously privileged position on the backbone. The NSA breaks crypto not with super-secret cryptanalysis, but by using standard hacking tricks such as exploiting weak implementations and default keys. Its TAO implants are straightforward enhancements of attack tools developed by researchers, academics, and hackers; here’s a computer the size of a grain of rice, if you want to make your own such tools. The NSA’s collection and analysis tools are basically what you’d expect if you thought about it for a while.

The NSA is little more than the combination of well known hacking tools, massive funding, and privileged positions on the main infrastructure. Edward Snowden has said numerous times that encryption works. Anybody who claims that the NSA can render all known encryption protocols impotent is literally making shit up. It’s no different than the conspiracy theory that lizard people secretly control all of the governments of the world. Zero evidence exists supporting the claim.

My theory is that people who claim nobody should bother using encryption because it’s futile are simply too lazy to learn how to use the tools and don’t want to admit it. To make themselves feel better they justify their actions by claiming doing otherwise is pointless.

How the Abolition of Net Neutrality is Being Bought

The battle for net neutrality is a difficult one to sort out because it’s effective oligarchs arguing with other oligarchs. Oligarchs that hold actual monopoly in many areas to distribute Internet content want the ability to suck more money out of both customers and service providers. These oligarchs own much of the infrastructure and claim that they have a right to use it as they please since it is their property. What they don’t mention is that they have legal protections from other oligarchs that prevent any meaningful competition from arising in the Internet content distribution market.

The other set of oligarchs are the ones that compose the legislature and regulatory bodies. It’s an election year for many in the legislature so they want to convince the serfs that their rulers are very benevolent and should be vote in for another term. Since the serfs are quite fond of the current model used to distribute Internet content the oligarchs in the legislature are demanding the model stay in place. The regulatory body most involved in this fight, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is stuck between both sides. Its current chairman, Tom Wheeler, is a form lobbyist for the infrastructure oligarchs but he also wants to continue his position as chairman of the FCC, which means he must also make the oligarchs in the legislature happy.

Fortunately when competing sects of the oligarchy go to war they don’t use bombs. Instead they negotiate with one another to determine how much which sect will pay to get its way:

These lawmakers, including the top House leadership, warned the FCC that regulating broadband like a public utility “harms” providers, would be “fatal to the Internet,” and could “limit economic freedom.”​

According to research provided Friday by Maplight, the 28 House members received, on average, $26,832 from the “cable & satellite TV production & distribution” sector over a two-year period ending in December. According to the data, that’s 2.3 times more than the House average of $11,651.

What’s more, one of the lawmakers who told the FCC that he had “grave concern” (PDF) about the proposed regulation took more money from that sector than any other member of the House. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) was the top sector recipient, netting more than $109,000 over the two-year period, the Maplight data shows.

The infrastructure oligarchs obviously feel very strongly about being able to change their current distribution model because they are paying a good chunk of change to key oligarchs in the legislature. I predict an end to what we call net neutrality in the near future (probably not until the next election cycle or two have concluded though). It will be a slow death consisting of apparently minor changes over the coming years.

If we want to continue enjoying a distribution model that is neutral towards service providers then we will likely have to cut out the infrastructure oligarchs entirely. That will involve building our own infrastructure, which will almost certainly be declared an illegal act at some point. I’ve mentioned several times that I’m working with a handful of other people in the Twin Cities to develop a local mesh network with the hopes of expanding it over time. I think mesh networks, being decentralized (and therefore hard to stop through the judicial and law enforcement systems), are a promising strategy for bypassing the Internet service providers that are trying to double dip by charging both content consumers and content providers more money to access one another. The Chaos Computer Club’s idea to launch small satellites into orbit to bypass state censorship also appeals to me. Between all of us who dwell online would should be able to develop a practical solution to the oligarchy problem.

Judge Ensures Campaign Dollars Continue to Flow Unabated

In April the Supreme Court ruled that caps on campaign contributions were unconstitutional. This ruling was most conveniently timed as the political season is ramping up, which means both incumbents and would-be politicians can reap the maximum benefit from this unhindered cash flow. Here in Minnesota there was a separate law that determined how much politicians can accept and a federal judge just shot that down:

A federal court judge has ordered that a campaign finance law that limits how much money candidates can accept from wealthy donors be suspended.

The order marks the local legal impact of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that removed overall caps from how much money donors could give to federal candidates.

The Minnesota branch of the Institute for Justice and four plaintiffs, including two current and former Minnesota lawmakers, used the Supreme Court’s ruling in the McCutcheon case to argue that the state’s limits on ”special source” donations prevent free speech.

Here in Minnesota judges are elected. I wouldn’t go so far as to insinuate that this federal judge was looking out for his state level cohorts but, never mind, I am insinuating that.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if members of the Minnesota Congress and judiciary met and determined who would take the popular opinion hit to shoot down this restriction on campaign finances during this election cycle. Since the state Congress has take several major hits already it was probably determined that the judiciary should take one for the oligarchy this time around. Either way this ruling really changes very little. The wealthy have always been the ones to buy elections. Now they just have to pay more for them.

The USDA Has To Stop Those Raw Milk Criminals

At least that’s what I’m assuming the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is planning on using .40 caliber submachineguns for.

It amazes me how every government agency has a armed teams. Hell, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a webpage featuring their armed response team. At least NASA can claim to need such a team to fight aliens. I’m not sure what the USDA does with armed teams. Is the department now tasked with enforcing Monsanto’s patents? Do raw milk sellers really need to be raided by dudes in riot gear? Maybe farmer Smith is using fertilizer with too much potassium.