Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Paranoia I Appreciate

My first Apple product was a PowerBook G4 that I purchased back in college. At the time I was looking for a laptop that could run a Unix operating system. Back then (as is still the case today albeit to a lesser extent) running Linux on a laptop meant you had to usually give up sleep mode, Wi-Fi, the additional function buttons most manufacturers added on their keyboards, and a slew of power management features that made the already pathetic battery life even worse. Since OS X was (and still is) Unix based and didn’t involved the headaches of trying to get Linux to run on a laptop the PowerBook fit my needs perfectly.

Fast forward to today. Between then and now I’ve lost confidence in a lot of companies whose products I used to love. Apple on the other hand has continued to impress me. In recent times my preference for Apple products has been influenced in part by the fact that it doesn’t rely on selling my personal information to make money and displays a healthy level of paranoia:

Apple has begun designing its own servers partly because of suspicions that hardware is being intercepted before it gets delivered to Apple, according to a report yesterday from The Information.

“Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the report said. “At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips.”

Anybody who has been paying attention the the leaks released by Edward Snowden knows that concerns about surveillance hardware being added to off-the-shelf products isn’t unfounded. In fact some companies such as Cisco have taken measure to mitigate such threats.

Apple has a lot of hardware manufacturing capacity and it appears that the company will be using it to further protect itself against surveillance by manufacturing its own servers.

This is a level of paranoia I can appreciate. Years ago I brought a lot of my infrastructure in house. My e-mail, calendar and contact syncing, and even this website are all being hosted on servers running in my dwelling. Although part of the reason I did this was for the experience another reason was to guard against certain forms of surveillance. National Security Letters (NSL), for example, require service providers to surrender customer information to the State and legally prohibit them from informing the targeted customer. Since my servers are sitting in my dwelling any NSL would necessarily require me to inform myself of receiving it.

How The State Makes Us Less Secure Part MLVI

Statists often claim that the State is necessary for the common defense. If this were the case I would expect it to do what it can to make everybody safer. Instead it does the opposite. In its pursuit of power the State continues to take actions that make everybody under its rule less safe.

The latest chapter in this ongoing saga revolves around the iPhone of Syed Farook. After trying to get a court to force Apple to write a custom firmware for Farook’s iPhone that would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to brute force the passcode, the agency postponed the hearing because it claimed to have found another method to get the data it wants. That method appears to be an exploit of some sort but the Justice Department has classified the matter so we may never know:

A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned.

The Justice Department made headlines on Monday when it postponed a federal court hearing in California. It had been due to confront Apple over an order that would have forced it to write software that would make it easier for investigators to guess the passcode for an iPhone used by San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook.

The government now says it may have figured out a way to get into the phone without Apple’s help. But it wants that discovery to remain secret, in an effort to prevent criminals, security researchers and even Apple itself from reengineering smartphones so that the tactic would no longer work.

By classifying this method the Justice Department is putting, at minimum, every iPhone 5C user running the same firmware as Farook’s phone at risk. But the exploit likely reaches further and may even put every user of every iOS device at risk.

Since Farook’s iPhone is in the State’s possession there is no risk of its firmware being upgraded. That being the case, there’s no reason for the Justice Department not to disclose the vulnerability its exploiting. Even if the exploit is disclosed the agency will still be able to use it to gain access to the data on Farook’s phone (assuming the exploit works as implied). But disclosing it would allow Apple to patch it so it couldn’t be used against the millions of innocent people using iOS devices.

There is a conflict of interest inherent in statism. The State is supposed to provide for the common defense of those within its territory. At the same time it’s charged with investigating crimes and dispensing justice. In order to fulfill the latter goal it must be able to gain access to whatever information it deems pertinent to an investigation. Ensuring that access is available conflicts with providing for a common defense since an effective defense against foreign aggressors, especially as it relates to protecting data, is also an effective defense against the State.

Let’s Talk About Privacy Rights

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The Republican lawmakers’ obsession with bathrooms has made its way to Minnesota. Senators Scott Newman, Dan Hall, Dave Thompson, Michelle Benson, and Paul Gazelka introduced a bill to mandate discrimination against transgender individuals:

Republicans in the Minnesota Senate introduced a bill on Friday that would block businesses and other employers from providing gender-neutral restrooms or from enacting policies that allow transgender employees to use appropriate restrooms. Senate File 3002 amends the 1993 Minnesota Human Rights Act — the nation’s first nondiscrimination law to include gender identity.

The bill starts with a specious definition of “sex.” It states, “A person’s sex is either male or female as biologically defined.” The bill does not mention people who fall outside the male-female binary such as those who are intersex, nor those whose sex designations have been legally changed under Minnesota law.

Why do these particular lawmakers feel qualified to define sex? Hell if I know. They probably believe democracy carries some kind of magical power that grants otherwise unremarkable individuals divine knowledge. Either way, their delusions of grandeur are only one absurdity amongst many in this case. Another absurdity is the justification given in the bill for its existence:

No claim of nontraditional identity or “sexual orientation” may override another person’s right of privacy based on biological sex in such facilities as restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and other similar places, which shall remain reserved for males or females as they are biologically defined.

Emphasis mine. Let’s discuss what a right to privacy is. A right, as it pertains to legal matters, is something that cannot be prohibited by the government. When somebody says you have a right to free speech they mean the government cannot prohibit you from saying something. When somebody says you have a right to a jury trail they mean the government cannot bar you from having a jury trail when it has accused you of a crime. When somebody says you have a right to privacy they mean the government cannot violate your privacy.

A right to privacy in a restroom, lock room, dressing room, or other similar facility means the government cannot surveil you in those facilities. That’s it. Since this bill has nothing to do with government surveillance in these facilities it also as no business arguing that its preserving a right to privacy.

In fact this bill would be a violation of privacy rights. How can a bill restricting what bathrooms transgender individuals can use be enforced? First, the enforcers have to identify transgender individuals. That would require looking through every individuals’ medical records. Second, the enforcers must surveil bathrooms so it can catch anybody violating the restriction. Since victimless violations of the law such at this one have no injured parties the only way to enforce them is through surveillance. That necessarily requires the government to violate everybody’s privacy.

Cruzing The Ghetto

The attack in Brussels is only happened a few days. That means there hasn’t been enough time for a serious investigation. But that isn’t stopping people from playing the blame game. Wild speculations are being thrown about everywhere but I think Ted Cruz managed to become king of the asshole mountain:

After repeating his standard campaign-trail assertion that Barack Obama has failed to confront – or even properly identify – “radical Islamic terrorists”, he called for the US to stop admitting refugees from areas with a so-called Islamic State or al-Qaeda presence.

He then turned his attention to the home front.

“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods before they become radicalised,” he said.

Cruz is always looking to make government smaller and more efficient. Whereas Franklin Roosevelt built expensive concentration camps to hold American citizens of Japanese decent, Cruz wants to use the cheaper option of simply turning Muslim neighborhoods into little Warsaw Ghettos.

Since Cruz stylizes himself as an individualist his proposal is ironic. Collective punishment, as the name denotes, is an entirely collectivist ideal. By saying Muslim neighborhoods must be patrolled Cruz is stating that he believes all Muslims shared responsibility for the action of the bombers in Brussels. That’s the exact opposite of individualism, which only holds the individuals directly responsible for crimes responsible (because they were the only ones responsible).

If turning Muslim neighborhoods into ghettos isn’t the proper response to these attacks, what is? As much as people hate to hear it the only proper response is to have patients. Nothing can be accomplished until a thorough investigation has been performed and the evidence has been analyzed. Until the investigation has concluded anything we hear will be speculative or preliminary in nature. Once the investigation has concluded we can consider methods of mitigating future attacks like this. Unfortunately it will be impossible to bring those responsible for these attacks to justice since they killed themselves. But we can use the information gathered by investigators to make future attacks like this harder to pull off (of course, since the government will claim a monopoly on implementing countermeasures, we’ll probably just get an expansion of the police state instead of effective methods of guarding against these kinds of attacks).

Property Taxes Encourage Gentrification

Property taxes are often used by municipal governments to raise funds for the services they’ve monopolized. These services include paychecks for municipal employees, which often includes the very people who voted to implement the current property tax rates.

Because property taxes are used to fund municipal services they’re also a popular topic for political do-gooders. Whenever a perceived blight on the city arises; whether it be homelessness, crime, or environmental issues; the do-gooders demand the property taxes be raised to fund programs to alleviate the blight. Oftentimes these do-gooders are also the same people who complain about gentrification. As politics tends to do, this creates a vicious cycle that leads people to be at odds with themselves.

The very property taxes that fund municipal services are also an incentive for municipal governments to gentrify entire neighborhoods. Gentrification, after all, leads to an increase in property taxes since older, lower-valued properties are replaced with newer, higher-valued properties. Together a few home built in the 1940s tend to have a much lower property value than a single high-density apartment complex. Since property taxes are almost always tied to the value of a property a municipal government can make more money off of the high-density apartment complex than the old homes.

As the number of municipal services increases the number of city employees also increases. That means a larger and larger block of municipal voters are dependent on the rate of property taxes. Furthermore, municipal employees, like every other kind of employee, want to see their pay increase over time. Since politicians tend to want to stay in office instead of finding meaningful employment they have a vested interest in pandering to the majority of voters. How can members of a city council promise municipal employees that their jobs won’t go away and that they’ll get their desired raises? By raising property taxes, of course. As an added benefit the increase in property taxes allows the members of the city council to increase their pay as well.

I’m sure you can see the vicious cycle that forms from this. Wanting to increase the amount of money brought in by property taxes, the municipal governments continue to implement programs that encourage lower-valued property be replaced by higher-valued properties. As these programs fulfill their intended goal the number of properties affordable by poorer individuals continues to decrease. In effect property taxes, instead of being a form of relief for the poor, create a cycle that incentivizes municipal governments to push the poor out of the city.

Giving Children A Taste Of The Police State While They’re Young

It’s true, the United States is a police state. But even Uncle Sam has nothing compared to his dear old mum. While the United States is still fighting terror by having the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) radicalize adults with lukewarm intelligence the United Kingdom (UK) has already moved on from such trivial matters and is now dealing with the threat of radicalized four year-olds:

Staff at a nursery school threatened to refer a four-year-old boy to a de-radicalisation programme after he drew pictures which they thought showed his father making a “cooker bomb”, according to the child’s mother.

The child’s drawing actually depicted his father cutting a cucumber with a knife, his mother says, but staff misheard his explanation and thought it referred to a type of improvised explosive device.

On Friday the boy’s mother showed the Guardian video footage of her son in which he is playing happily on the floor of his home, and is shown a cucumber and asked what it is. “A cuker-bum,” he says, before going back to his toys.

The footage was taken by the mother at the family home in Luton after the nursery discussed referring the child to a de-radicalisation programme out of concerns that pictures drawn by him referred to explosions and an improvised explosive device known as a “cooker bomb”.

How brainwashed by propaganda does a nursery school staff have to be to assume a four year-old is saying “cooker bomb” when they say “cuker-bum”? At that age children are still working out how to pronounce words. Hell, at that age I will still trying to figure out why “very” wasn’t pronounced “berry”. The fact that these mouth breathers are so fucking terrified that they immediately assume a child failing to pronounce a word correctly is related to a terror plot should disqualify them from working with children.

What was especially egregious was the nursery school staff’s statement to the mother:

In between the odd tear and laugh of disbelief, the mother spoke about the experience, which she said had left her shaken and upset, and involved her being told at one point: “Your children might not be taken off you … you can prove yourself innocent.”

Emphasis mine. Prove her innocence? That’s not how things are supposed to work. The fact that the nursery school staff believes a person must prove their innocence instead of the State proving guilt demonstrates just how fucked the UK is.

One of the biggest problems facing The United States and many European countries is the rampant number of quislings. You know the type. The jackass neighbor who calls the police because you have a fire pit going in your backyard and they know you didn’t get a permit. The car mechanic who calls the police because they found a dime bag of weed in your car while they were fixing it. The nosy neighborhood watcher who calls in your car because it was parked on the street for over 24 hours. Because of these worthless busybodies the State is well informed of its laws being broken and can enforce them. Without them the State would have a much harder time enforcing its laws because it wouldn’t know about the violations.

It Was Snowden All Along

In 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) demanded Ladar Levison hand over the TLS keys to his Lavabit service. He did comply, by providing the key printed out in small text, but also shutdown his service instead of letting the key be used to snoop on his customers. The FBI threw a hissy fit over this and even threatened to kidnap Levison for shutting down his business. But one question that always remained was who the FBI was after. Everybody knew it was Edward Snowden but there was no hard evidence… until now.

Court documents related to the Lavabit case have been released. The documents are naturally heavily redacted but the censors missed a page:

In court papers related to the Lavabit controversy, the target of the investigation was redacted, but it was widely assumed to be Edward Snowden. He was known to have used the service, and the charges against the target were espionage and theft of government property, the same charges Snowden faced.

Now, what was widely assumed has been confirmed. In documents posted to the federal PACER database this month, the government accidentally left his e-mail, “Ed_snowden@lavabit.com,” unredacted for all to see. The error was noted by the website Cryptome earlier this week, and Wired covered it yesterday.

This revelation didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before but it’s nice to have hard evidence in hand. Now we know with certainty that the FBI completely destroyed a business as retaliation for having Snowden as a customer. I say this was retaliatory because the court documents [PDF] clearly show that Levison was willing to cooperate with the FBI by surveilling the single target of the order. However, the FBI decided it would accept nothing less than the surrender of Lavabit’s TLS key.

Had the FBI been reasonable it would have had its tap. Instead its agents decided to be unreasonable fuckheads, which forced Levison to shutdown his business entirely instead of putting thousands of innocent users at risk. This case is also a lesson in never cooperating with terrorists. Levison offered to cooperate and still had his business destroyed. When the FBI comes to your door you should refuse to cooperate in any way. Cooperating will not save you. The only difference between cooperating and refusing to cooperate is that in the case of the latter your business will be shutdown before innocent users are put at risk.

Law Enforcers Caught Abusing A Databases Again

I have a natural aversion to government databases. This may seem ironic coming from a man whose name probably appears in dozens of them but that’s beside the point. Databases for sex offenders, felons, known gang members, and gun owners are always sold as being valuable tools for protecting the public. What is often ignored by proponents of such databases is how easily they can be abused by law enforcers. Denver law enforcers are the latest in a long line of law enforcers busted for abusing government databases for personal gain:

Denver Police officers caught using a confidential database for personal reasons should face stiffer penalties, the city’s independent monitor argued in a report released Tuesday.

The report, which reviewed both the Denver Police and the Denver Sheriff Department’s performance for 2015, found several instances of officers abusing both the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and it’s state counterpart, the Colorado Crime Information Center (CCIC). Independent Monitor Nicholas Mitchell said in the report that he believes the penalties for those caught aren’t stiff enough to deter further abuse.

[…]

One officer, for example, was found to have used the database to assist an acquaintance who was going through a divorce determine the identity of the man he believed his wife was having an affair with. Then it spiraled out of control, possibly enabling violence from the vengeful ex-husband:

Shortly thereafter, the ex-husband began driving by the man’s house and threatening him. The ex-husband also found and contacted the man’s wife to tell her that the man was having an affair. The ex-husband told the wife that he knew their home address, showed her a picture of the man’s car, and asked her questions about the man to find out what gym he worked out at, what shift he worked, and where he spent his leisure time.

[…]

In another instance, a Denver Police officer who was at a hospital investigating a reported sexual assault made “small talk” with a female employee at the hospital who wasn’t involved in the investigation. The report continues:

At the end of her shift, the female employee returned home and found a voicemail message from the officer on her personal phone. She had not given the officer her phone number, and was upset that he had obtained it (she assumed) by improperly using law enforcement computer systems.

Note the lack of punishments received by officers caught abusing these databases. The first mentioned infraction resulted in a written reprimand and the second resulted in a fine of two days pay in addition to a written reprimand.

There are two major problems here. First, the existence of these databases. Second, the almost complete absence of oversight. These databases hold a tremendous amount of personal information on individuals. That information isn’t anonymized in any way so any officer can bring up the home address, phone number, and other personal information of those entered into the database. No oversight is apparently needed as multiple officers have been able to access the database for unauthorized uses. And no apparent interest in establishing oversight seems to exist since those finally caught abusing the database received no real punishment.

Databases containing personal information are dangerous to begin with. But when you add a complete lack of accountability for those accessing the databases, especially when they’re almost entirely shielded from personal liability, you have a recipe for disaster. Never let yourself be lulled into believing establishing a government database is necessary or in any way a good thing.

No Matter Who You Are, No Matter Where You Are, The Black Market Has Your Back

What is the enemy of tyranny? Is it the ballot box? Is it the bullet box? No! It’s the black market:

North Korea’s isolation from most of the world is not just economic and diplomatic, but technological too. Only about 3 million of its people have access to its domestic telecommunications network, which does not permit access to outside countries. Its internet, meanwhile, is accessible only to the nation’s elites.

But some North Koreans have been able to circumvent these restrictions, thanks to the spread of illegal black market phones into the country. A new report from Amnesty International explains that these smuggled devices—referred to as “Chinese mobile phones,” even if they’re not actually from China—have become an important tool for North Koreans looking to connect with loved ones who have left the country and want to stay in touch.

If their relatives or friends at home don’t already have a “Chinese mobile phone,” the report explains, “often the person who has left will try to send them a phone, for example one bought in South Korea, Japan, or China.”

North Koreans who obtain one of these smartphones can connect with people outside the country by installing a Chinese SIM card in their device. They then must go to a part of the country close to the Chinese border, where they might pick up signal from a neighboring Chinese network.

No matter how repressive of a regime you suffer under the black market is there to provide you the goods you want. Are your overlords preventing you from communicating with the outside world? Never fear! The black market is here to provide you unrestricted telecommunications. Do your overlords prohibit you from owning the most effective means of self-defense? The black market is here to provide you with guns and ammo. Is there some government agency that artificially restricts your access to medication? The black market is here to provide you the medications you need.

The black market has been and continues to be the single greatest enemy to tyranny. By flagrantly providing illicit goods the black market shows that the emperor wears no clothes.

Threat Posed By Personally Owned Drones Overblown, Water Is Wet

Last year the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it would be requiring all drone owners to register so their personal information, including home address, could be published for all to see. This requirement was justified under the claim that personally owned drones posed a major threat to other forms of aviation traffic. A lot of people, including myself, called bullshit on that and now research exists backing up our accusation:

That research, shown in a study just published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, was based on damage to aircraft from another sort of small, uncrewed aircraft—flying birds.

Much of the fear around drones hitting aircraft has been driven by FAA reports from pilots who have claimed near-misses with small drones. But an investigation last year by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) found that of the 764 near-miss incidents with drones recorded by the FAA, only 27 of them—3.5 percent—actually were near misses. The rest were just sightings, and those were often sightings that took place when drone operators were following the rules. The FAA also overcounted, including reports where the pilot said explicitly that there was no near miss and some where the flying object wasn’t identified, leading the AMA to accuse the FAA of exaggerating the threat in order to get support for its anti-drone agenda.

So for starters all the “near misses” we’ve read about in the media weren’t near misses. A vast majority of them were mere sightings. But the FAA’s bullshit doesn’t stop there:

There hasn’t yet been an incident in which a drone has struck an aircraft. But bird strikes (and bat strikes) do happen, and there’s a rich data set to work from to understand how often they do. Researchers Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond reasoned that the chances of a bird strike remain much higher than that of an aircraft hitting a drone because “contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones but by fowl.”

The researchers studied 25 years of FAA “wildlife strike” data, reports voluntarily filed by pilots after colliding with birds. The data included over 160,000 reported incidents of collisions with birds, of which only 14,314 caused damage—and 80 percent of that number came from collisions with large or medium-sized birds such as geese and ducks.

Emphasis mine. No drones have struck a plane yet, which means the threat of drones to already existing aviation traffic is still entirely unrealized. Hell, this combined with the fact most reported near misses weren’t near misses, we should actually take a moment to recognize how much of a nonissue personally owned drones have been so far. Drone operators by and large have been very well behaved.

The data on wildlife strikes is also valuable since it indicates that when a drone finally does strike a plane there probably won’t be much damage to the plane. Most personally owned drones are more fragile than the large or medium sized birds that managed to cause damage when colliding with a plane.

What we have here is another example of a government money grab disguised as a crisis. With the FAA’s new rules in place the agency can extract $5 from every registered drone operator and up to $250,000 from operating a drone without being registered. Furthermore, the FAA can up the fees and fines as it sees fit.