Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

I’ll Scratch Your Back If You Scratch Mine

Fascism is basically circlejerk economics. Government officials are jerking off corporate cronies while corporate cronies are jerking off government officials. This system works very well if you’re at the top but most of us aren’t at the top so we get to suffer protected monopolies, inferior products, and shitty service.

Another side effect of fascism is that government will always swoop in to protect its corporate cronies. Right now the White House is demanding that its corporate partners who hand over customer data to the National Security Agency (NSA) received legal immunity:

The White House has asked legislators crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency to provide legal immunity for telecommunications firms that provide the government with customer data, the Guardian has learned.

In a statement of principles privately delivered to lawmakers some weeks ago to guide surveillance reforms, the White House said it wanted legislation protecting “any person who complies in good faith with an order to produce records” from legal liability for complying with court orders for phone records to the government once the NSA no longer collects the data in bulk.

In other words the White House doesn’t want any actual reform. Unless entities handing over data to the NSA face consequences there’s no motivation for them to not do so even when they know a request is illegal. This is especially true when you consider how much money many companies make off of government data requests.

As an aside, it’s funny how the White House never demanded whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden received legal immunity for revealing government corruption. I guess our illegal secrets aren’t the same as the government’s illegal secrets.

Checks and Balances

Back in junior high school we spent a lot of time in civics class discussing the system of checks and balances that exists between the three branches of government. It was a wonderful fairytale about how no single branch of the government could ever attain absolute power because the other two branches would stomp it down. What wasn’t covered was the truth, which is that all three branches are playing on the same team. When the executive branch wants a law the legislative branch writes and passes it. When the legislative branch wants a law enforce the executive branch dutifully enforces it. When either branch want somebody to back their actions up they ask the judicial branch. It’s really just one big government circle jerk.

But the judicial branch has another option available to it. Instead of ruling in favor of the actions of the other two branches it can simple opt to not hear a case:

The Supreme Court declined Monday to resolve the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, leaving intact what a lower-court judge described as an “almost-Orwellian” surveillance effort in which the metadata from every phone call to and from the United States is catalogued by US spies.

Surveillance state got you down? Are the people unhappy about being spied on? Is the executive branch demanding you rule its actions constitutional? Do you want to avoid a public relations nightmare but are stuck between a rock and a hard place? No problem, simply refuse to hear the case!

With the simple act of refusing to hear the case the Supreme Court managed to make the issue of phone surveillance somebody else’s problem, which likely saved it from the wrath of both the executive branch and the people being spied on. It’s a wonderful way to avoid being a check against abuses of power and tipping the balance of public opinion against you. Good job guys!

War Criminal Claims American Gun Culture is Out of Balance

I’m still laughing about this:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday the nation’s gun culture has gotten “way out of balance” and the U.S. needs to rein in the notion that “anybody can have a gun, anywhere, anytime.”

This coming from a war criminal. Talk about hilarious!

But few people are discussing the irony of a war criminal lambasting gun owners. Instead they’re talking about supporting whatever candidate the Republican Party runs against Hillary (because Hillary is almost certainly going to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate). The fear machine is already ramping up as I’ve started seeing comments on several gun forums that claim Hillary will be even worse than Obama. Although this will fall mostly on deaf ears I might as well make an attempt to point out the game being played. I again return to Noam Chomsky’s great quote about political debate:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate

Here in the United States the oligarchs have successfully narrow the spectrum of acceptable opinions to the point where only one opinion is truly acceptable. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, if you play the Republican versus Democrat game you’re arguing in favor of the oligarchy. Within this narrow spectrum only a handful of issues are allowed to be debated. Gun rights, the legalities of abortion, how open the borders should be, whether we’ve always been at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and so on. The trick is that all of these issues are very emotional for those who are invested. And those issues are almost always argued in a manner that insinuates that our rulers have a right to make decisions about what we can and cannot do.

So long as we all continue to fall for their tricks and play their game we’re never going to be free. Unfortunately the oligarchy is good at playing the game and know exactly what buttons to push to get the results they desire. By simply referring to the gun culture as being out of balance an army of gun owners are whipped up into a Republican frenzy and not even thinking about the prospects of a society devoid of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

[Digital] Papers Please

As the popular phrase “On the Internet nobody know that you’re a dog.” tries to explain the Internet is a bastion of anonymity. You can be whoever you want to be when posting online and if you properly utilize effective anonymity tools there is no practical way for anybody to connect your online identity to your real identify. This shield of anonymity enables truly free speech, which means the government wants to stop it. Meet the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) initiative, an attempt by the executive branch to force people to obtain a license to use the Internet. This license isn’t merely are method for the state to identify you as being qualified to use the Internet, it’s an attempt to remove the shield of anonymity that protects free speech online:

The draft NSTIC says that, instead of a national ID card, it “seeks to establish an ecosystem of interoperable identity service providers and relying parties where individuals have the choice of different credentials or a single credential for different types of online transactions,” which can be obtained “from either public or private sector identity providers.” (p. 6) In other words, the governments want a lot of different companies or organizations to be able to do the task of confirming that a person on the Internet is who he or she claims to be.

Decentralized or federated ID management systems are possible, but like all ID systems, they definitely pose significant privacy issues. 1 There’s little discussion of these issues, and in particular, there’s no attention to how multiple ID’s might be linked together under a single umbrella credential. A National Academies study, Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy, warned that multiple, separate, unlinkable credentials are better for both security and privacy (pp. 125-132). Yet the draft NSTIC doesn’t discuss in any depth how to prevent or minimize linkage of our online IDs, which would seem much easier online than offline, and fails to discuss or refer to academic work on unlinkable credentials (such as that of Stefan Brands, or Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya).

Providing a uniform online ID system could pressure providers to require more ID than necessary. The video game company Blizzard, for example, recently indicated it would implement a verified ID requirement for its forums before walking back the proposal only after widespread, outspoken criticism from users.

Pervasive online ID could likewise encourage lawmakers to enact access restrictions for online services, from paying taxes to using libraries and beyond. Website operators have argued persuasively that they cannot be expected to tell exactly who is visiting their sites, but that could change with a new online ID mechanism. Massachusetts recently adopted an overly broad online obscenity law; it takes little imagination to believe states would require NSTIC implementation individuals to be able to access content somehow deemed to be “objectionable.”

I will go so far as to argue that truly free speech isn’t possible without the availability of anonymity. We see this whenever a company sues a customer who wrote a bad review, the state kidnaps a businessman, somebody is kidnapped for holding the wrong political belief. Imagine how much easier it would be for a business to sue anybody who left a negative review of their products if the NSTIC initiative was realized. Confirming the identify of the reviewer would be simple and that would put anybody leaving a negative review at risk of a lawsuit.

The only reason I can perceive for the executive branch’s push for its NSTIC initiative is for squashing political dissidence and suppressing critics of its corporate partners. Problems of authentication, authorization, and accounting have already been solved in numerous ways that allow an individual to keep their online identity separate from their real life identity. There are even methods that allow a user’s real life identify to be verified (which is what my certificate provider does). Nothing in the NSTIC initiative solves a problem that hasn’t been solved already. It merely introduces another way to solve these problems in a manner that centralized information for easy federal and corporate access.

The State is Hindering Smart Gun Availability, Not the NRA

Today’s theme, as you can probably guess from the previous post, is putting the blame where it should be. Far too often the media attempts to blame anybody but the actual culprit for perceived wrongdoings. For example, The Verge recently ran an article accusing the National Rifle Association (NRA) of taking peoples’ smart guns. At least that’s the accusation found in the title, the article itself points out that the NRA doesn’t actually oppose smart gun technology:

Opponents counter that the technology adds an unnecessary failure point — you don’t want to fumble with a fingerprint unlock if someone is breaking into your home. They also fear the spread of laws like New Jersey’s, since similar proposals have been introduced in other states and in Congress. “The NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms,” the group writes on its website. “We are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as grips that would read your fingerprints before the gun will fire.”

And the closing paragraph finally points to the real cause of opposition to smart guns:

Many gun owners don’t object to smart guns, as long as they’re still allowed to buy regular guns. “If someone wants to buy a smart gun, that is fine,” Raymond said in his Facebook address. “When the law legislates it, that is a sin.” After the apology, he and his shop were flooded with supportive emails, calls, and visits. Members of the Maryland Shooters forum even rallied for a barbecue at Engage Armament. “It is only a matter of time before such guns are available. Acting like babies about it doesn’t make things better,” one user wrote. “Assuming of course there is an actual market for such a bad idea.”

So we come again to the real culprit, the state. As the article points out New Jersey passed legislation that would mandate smart gun technology be integrated into all firearms sold in the state within three years of the technology becoming available to consumers. That being the case it’s pretty simple to figure out why so many people oppose this unproven technology.

Smart gun technology is another victim of the gun control advocates’ policy of making everything either mandatory of verboten. If a new technology can inhibit firearms they demand it become mandatory and if the technology can enhance firearms they demand it be prohibited. Access control policies (which is what gun control advocates really mean when they say smart guns) could inhibit the reliability of firearms as none of the proposed access control methods have been rigorously tested. I don’t want a gun that will sudden cease to function because some asshole decided to jam the radio frequency being used to authenticate with my firearm. And I certainly don’t want to cut up and deface my current firearms (some of which are very valuable to me) to jerry rig some half-assed access control system into them. But that’s what the politicians in New Jersey have demanded and, as a general rule, if the politicians in New Jersey concoct a gun policy then us gun owners know it’s not to be trusted (and in this case those politicians were kind enough to make it blatantly obvious why we shouldn’t trust them).

There’s almost certainly a market for firearms with reliable access control technology. But the state doesn’t want to allow that market and the market for guns sans access control technology to coexist. So the debate necessarily becomes one of “us” versus “them”. If the state wasn’t using its monopoly on force to favor one market over the others then we could have both and everybody could be happy (except the anti-gunners but they’re never happy so there’s no point in trying to please them).

Find My iPhone Vigilantism, a Demonstration of State Failure in Providing Security

The New York Times ran a story covering a recent phenomenon where victims of iPhone theft use the Find My iPhone feature to find the thief and reclaim their phone:

Using the Find My iPhone app on her computer, she found that someone had taken the phones to a home in this Los Angeles exurb, 30 miles east of her West Hollywood apartment.

So Ms. Maguire, a slight, 26-year-old yoga instructor, did what a growing number of phone theft victims have done: She went to confront the thieves — and, to her surprise, got the phones back.

Ah, the lovely Hollywood outcome where all is well at the end. But the news isn’t Hollywood so you know that a happy ending at the beginning of the story must be followed by a story of horror:

In San Diego, a construction worker who said his iPhone had been stolen at a reggae concert chased the pilferer and wound up in a fistfight on the beach that a police officer had to break up. A New Jersey man ended up in custody himself after he used GPS technology to track his lost iPhone and attacked the wrong man, mistaking him for the thief.

The rest of the article mostly consists of dire warning, primarily form police officers, against people seeking out thieves and attempting to recover their property. By the end of the story you’re supposed to see these so-called vigilantes as well-meaning albeit foolish people. What isn’t discussed are the motivations of these people willing to put themselves at risk to recover their stolen property.

I see this phenomenon (which likely consists of no more than ten or so people but the media needed a story so it inflated how common this practice is) as an example of the state’s failure to provide adequate security. As you likely know the state maintains a virtual monopoly on security services via its monopoly on law enforcement. While there are a few areas that the state allows private security providers to operate in (namely building security) the personal electronics recovery market isn’t one of them. If somebody steals your mobile phone you’re expected to rely on the police to recover it. This wouldn’t be an issue if the police would actually invest resources into recovering a stolen phone. But in most cases they will fill out a meaningless report and inform you that it’s almost impossible to recover a stolen personal electronic device. Even providing the police with access to your Find My iPhone service will seldom encourage them to get off of their asses and retrieve your phone. In fact you can get more done by contacting Apple and providing it with your stolen phone’s serial number. At least then the phone will be kept by Apple should it ever be brought in for repairs and the person who brought it in will be reported to the police. But that’s a pretty big if.

Since the solution provided by the state is unwilling to retrieve your phone and private solutions are verboten you’re left with only one option: if you want to retrieve your stolen phone you have to do it yourself. Don’t blame the vigilantes, blame the state that monopolized the security market and failed to provide an adequate service.

A Real Minimum Wage Proposal

My biggest criticism of minimum wage laws are the people who proposed them. You can tell that those people don’t actually believe the bullshit they spew out. If they did they would propose major hikes in minimum wage instead of the incremental steps they always throw out. Thankfully we have Barbara Lee, a senator from California who believes in minimum wage laws and isn’t a pussy about it:

California Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee expressed support for a $26 minimum wage in her state — a move Republican congressman Andy Harris encouraged, assuming jobs would rapidly flee California to his state of Maryland.

[…]

“Let me ask you this question, you’re a good advocate for this,” Gingrich asked Lee. “The mayor of Seattle is proposing that the minimum wage ought to go up to $15 an hour.”

“Good for him,” Lee responded. “In California — more than likely, from what I remembered — a living wage where people could live and take care of their families and move toward achieving the American dream was about $25, $26 an hour.”

“So would you support that as a minimum wage for California?” Gingrich asked.

“Absolutely I would support it for California. I think the regional factors –”

“And you don’t think that’d have an effect on unemployment?” Gingrich interrupted.

“No, Newt, trust me, believe you me,” Lee replied, “you’d have a more productive workforce, you’d have people who could afford to live in areas now where they cannot afford to live. You would increase diversity in certain communities where you don’t have diversity anymore. You would have economic parity and the income gap would begin to close.”

Finally! None of this $11 or $15 per hour nonsense. I think it’s time for everybody to finally put their money where their mouths are. If minimum wage laws are good for the economy, as many economically illiterate people claim it is, then they should demand a minimum wage that would put everybody into the middle class. That way poverty could be entirely eliminated.

Of course when economic reality hits everybody will be unemployed. Facing the decision between starvation or working in the “underground” economy most people choose the latter. Then we can finally see real markets in action instead of this coercive cronyism we suffer under now. So my desire to see an absurd minimum wage is not entirely without self-interest. As an agorist any restriction placed on the market by the state is a good thing because it pushes people into the “underground” economy, which deprives the state of authority and resources.

Shot Down in Flames

Rand Paul has obvious aspirations of the presidency (everybody has dreams, some dreams are just stupid). Anybody who has researched presidential politics knows that becoming president requires one to kneel down and perform fellatio on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). For those of you who don’t know the AIPAC labels itself as America’s biggest Jewish lobby. In reality the group is America’s biggest pro-zionist lobby and not all Jews are zionists. But the point is you must appease the AIPAC to stand a realistic chance of attaining the presidency.

So Rand Paul decided to demonstrate his loyalty to it by presenting the Stand With Israel Act of 2014:

Sen. Rand Paul today introduced the Stand with Israel Act of 2014. This legislation halts all U.S. aid to the Palestinian government until they agree to a ceasefire and recognize the right of Israel to exist. The bill, S. 2265, can be found HERE and below:

“Today, I introduced legislation to make all future aid to the Palestinian government conditional upon the new unity government putting itself on the record recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and agreeing to a lasting peace.”

Too bad for Rand but the AIPAC is having none of his shit:

While the legislation is expected to garner widespread backing in Congress, AIPAC is quietly expressing reservations about it, according to those familiar with the group’s position.

“We are not supporting the Paul bill,” said one AIPAC insider. “We believe the law currently on the books is strong and ensures that aid is contingent on key conditions that help maintain America’s influence, keep Israel secure, and advance the peace process.”

“I want to be very clear, AIPAC supports a cut off of aid to any Palestinian government that includes an unreformed Hamas, and this is what is provided for in current law,” the AIPAC insider said.

In other words it’s not fucking stupid. The United States already has a policy of not providing funding [PDF] to any organization in Palestine that could possibly be against Israel. You can’t buy off one of the most politically powerful lobbies in the United States by simply making something that is currently against policy more against policy.

I could point out how Rand Paul’s attempt at picking sides in a foreign conflict isn’t a libertarian thing to do. But commenters over at The Daily Paul reminded me Rand Paul’s “liberty” supporters will perform fantastic feats of mental gymnastics to explain away any of Rand’s anti-libertarian actions as part of his super secret plan to bring libertarianism to America. If that’s what Rand’s supporters want to believe so be it. But one thing is certain, if Rand doesn’t figure out how to play the game better he’s never even going to become president.

Don’t Worry Mr. President, The Senate Has Your Back

The best thing about having three branches of government is that you can get three separate affirmations for all government activities. I kind of feel bad for dictators, kings, and other monarchs. When they make a decision they don’t have anybody else to back them up. But here in American when the government does something it’s first written and voted on by Congress, signed by the President, and ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.

A few days ago President Obama was concerned that he might actually have to release details about the people who he ordered to be executed by drones. Fortunately the Senate reassured him that it had his back:

WASHINGTON — The Senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States uses lethal force.

The move highlights the continued resistance inside the government about making these operations, primarily carried out using armed drones, more accountable to public scrutiny. In a letter to the Senate earlier this month, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, expressed concern that a public report would undermine the effectiveness of the operations.

And with that simple removal the Senate affirmed that the President’s practice of withholding information about those executed by drones is totally cool. We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court’s affirmation of this behavior but that should be coming soon since the case is moving through the judicial system:

A federal appeals panel in Manhattan ordered the release on Monday of key portions of a classified Justice Department memorandum that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who intelligence officials contend had joined Al Qaeda and died in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

The unanimous three-judge panel, reversing a lower court decision, said the government had waived its right to keep the analysis secret in light of numerous public statements by administration officials and the Justice Department’s release of a “white paper” offering a detailed analysis of why targeted killings were legal.

I’m sure the Supreme Court will reverse this decision quick, fast, and in a hurry. We can’t have the government going around disagreeing with itself, it creates a bad image.

Police Officers Aren’t Lawyers

I must confess that I made a poor decision last night. Needless to say I’m not proud of myself. Although I would like to blame a shortage of newsworthy events to write about that is hardly an excuse. Last night I broke down and visited the Star Tribune’s opinion section, which is known to have some of the lowest hanging fruit in existence.

Not surprisingly I found something stupid. This stupidity comes in the form of mistaking police for lawyers. The author, after running down and tackling a woman who broke into his home, called the police. After they took the suspect into custody the author asked what they could do to prevent future burglaries:

In stunned amazement, we asked the police what we could do to prevent future burglaries. A friendly female cop replied: “You can either get a burglar alarm or a gun …. But if you get a gun, shoot to kill, because the wounded, breathing burglar will claim, ‘I was just looking for a warm place to sleep for the night.’ And you, sir, will be charged with attempted manslaughter.”

You know what that was? Really shitty advice, that’s what. If you’ve taken a Minnesota permit to carry class (which I’m betting most of my readers have) the legalities of self-defense were likely explained to you (and if they weren’t your instructor sucked). You don’t shoot to kill, you shoot to stop. It doesn’t matter if the aggressor is dead or just incapacitated. Once the threat of immediate death or great bodily harm is no longer present you stop using deadly force. Any lawyer versed in Minnesota’s self-defense laws will tell you this. And this is why you ask lawyers for legal advice not people who have a badge that allows them to break the law without consequence.

The author goes on to point out that Byron Smith followed the officer’s advice:

Byron Smith did what the cops recommended, except that he also produced evidence against himself with the tape recordings. Was this self-incrimination?

Byron Smith isn’t in prison because he produced evidence against himself. He’s in prison because he followed the officer’s advice. In other words, Smith’s case is proof that the officer’s advice was shitty. If the author asked a lawyer he would have been informed that shooting home invaders to the point of incapacitation, dragging their bodies to another part of the house, and finishing them off is not allowed under Minnesota’s self-defense laws (nor, in my opinion, is it allowed under common decency).

So we’ve learned to valuable lesson today: don’t go to the Star Tribune’s opinion section and don’t ask a police officer for legal advice.