Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Rule Are for Thee, Not for Me

Senator Ron Wyden has had enough of consumers’ privacy being violated and has decided to do something:

The Senator’s proposal would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claimed that self-regulation is all that’s necessary to protect consumer privacy.

Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

I read through his proposal [PDF]. Strangely enough the proposal doesn’t mention any punishments or penalties for politicians or other government agents who violate people’s privacy.

Rules are for thee, not for me, ya fuckin’ plebs.

When it comes to surveillance my primary concern is government surveillance. The main reason I’m concerned about private surveillance is because it can turn into government surveillance (either by payment or by a subpoena). If that weren’t the case, I’d be far less concerned because, unlike government surveillance, I can opt out of private surveillance. Moreover, if private surveillance couldn’t turn into government surveillance, a company seeing me do something it didn’t like wouldn’t result in men with guns busting down my door at oh dark thirty to either kidnap or murder me. So any legislation that doesn’t curtail government surveillance is, in my opinion, worthless.

Making Surveillance Easy

We’re only a few days away from yet another “most important election in our lifetime.” Since the Republicans are in power, the Democrats and their sympathizers are pissed and when they’re pissed it’s not uncommon for them to protest (Remember the last time they were out of power? They actually protested the wars that the party in power started! Those were the days!). Nobody likes it when people protest again them so the party in power wants to keep tabs on the people who might take action against them. Fortunately for them, most protesters make this easy:

The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don’t like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military’s role and influence on domestic intelligence.

The vast scale of this effort is reflected in a number of government social media surveillance patents granted this year, which relate to a spy program that the Trump administration outsourced to a private company last year. Experts interviewed by Motherboard say that the Pentagon’s new technology research may have played a role in amendments this April to the Joint Chiefs of Staff homeland defense doctrine, which widen the Pentagon’s role in providing intelligence for domestic “emergencies,” including an “insurrection.”

A couple of years ago a few friends and I had the opportunity to advise some protesters on avoiding government surveillance. They were using Facebook to organize and plan their protests. We had to explain to them that using Facebook for that purpose meant that every local law enforcement agency was likely receiving real-time updates on their plans. We made several recommendations, most of which involved moving planning from social media to more secure forms of communications (Signal, RetroShare, etc.). In the end they thanked us for our advice, decided that using anything but Facebook was too difficult (which made me suspect that there were undercover law enforcers amongst them), and kept handing law enforcement real-time information.

The moral of the story is that government agencies pour resources into social media surveillance because it works because most protesters are more concerned about convenience than operational security.

Drop the Word Internet

It turns out Internet freedom is declining:

Digital authoritarianism is on the rise, according to a new report from a group that monitors internet freedoms. Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said today that governments are seeking more control over users’ data while also using laws nominally intended to address “fake news” to suppress dissent. It marked the eighth consecutive year that Freedom House found a decline in online freedoms around the world.

“The clear emergent theme in this report is the growing recognition that the internet, once seen as a liberating technology, is increasingly being used to disrupt democracies as opposed to destabilizing dictatorships,” said Mike Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, in a call with reporters. “Propaganda and disinformation are increasingly poisoning the digital sphere, and authoritarians and populists are using the fight against fake news as a pretext to jail prominent journalists and social media critics, often through laws that criminalize the spread of false information.”

There’s a great deal of irony in a pro-democracy, i.e. a pro-mob rule, organization discussing a decline of freedom but I digress.

Internet freedom isn’t the only freedom that’s in decline. Pretty much every government that has the ability it tightening its grip on its slaves. That is the purpose of government after all.

The Most Sensible Proposal

Drug prices here in the United States are absurd, which shouldn’t surprise anybody since drug manufacturers hold government granted monopolies on their products. However, the plebeians are screeching and after a while that sound can get annoying to our overlords. In the hopes of reestablishing a serene environment, our overlords have been considering strategies to bring drug prices down. To accomplish this they could simply remove the monopolies they granted to the drug companies and let competition bring drug prices down or they could pay government employees to fly down to Mexico and buy the drugs for less. Guess which strategy is being fielded first:

Amid a flurry of national proposals to bring exorbitant U.S. drug prices in line with other countries’ charges, one Utah insurer has a different option for patients:

Pay them to go to Mexico.

PEHP, which covers 160,000 public employees and family members, is offering plane tickets to San Diego, transportation to Tijuana, and a $500 cash payout to patients who need certain expensive drugs for multiple sclerosis, cancer and autoimmune disorders.

It makes sense to try this strategy first. The pharmaceutical companies paid good money for their monopolies and revoking them would show bad faith on behalf of the government and that could dissuade other companies from paying to purchase monopolies.

The Arbitrary Decrees Called Law

The United States is often advertised as a land where “the law reigns supreme.” The upside about this is that if you don’t like what is currently reigning supreme, you just need to wait 15 minutes for it to change:

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, according to excerpts of an interview released Tuesday.

Arbitrary laws changing arbitrarily.

This executive order is more interesting than most because it is attempting to nullify the Fourteenth Amendment:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Fortunately for Trump, there is a great deal of precedence for politicians nullifying the clauses of the Constitution. Every single gun restriction law is a demonstration of the fact that the Constitution is toothless and therefore irrelevant. Perhaps some members of Congress or the judiciary will find their spine and declare Trump’s executive order irrelevant but I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, if Congress or the judiciary had a spine, executive orders wouldn’t be a thing.

Job Opportunities

A lot of people complain that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from hardworking Americans. I expect many of them will soon be heading down to Texas to claim the jobs recently freed up by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE):

ICE rounded up more than 150 employees — nearly a quarter of Hiebert’s workforce — loaded them into buses and booked them for working in the country unlawfully. A criminal investigation of the company continues.

OK, I don’t expect any of the people complaining about illegal immigrants taking jobs to head down to Texas to fill those jobs. Why? Because welding trailers all day is generally seen as shit work. The hours are long, the work is repetitive, and the environment isn’t as comfortable as most office jobs. In other words it’s work that most Americans have no interest in doing, which is why a lot of these industries are dependent on illegal immigrants. While a lot of these jobs qualify as shit work for the average American, they qualify as a huge step up from the opportunities otherwise available to many illegal immigrants.

ICE isn’t freeing up these jobs so hardworking Americans can claim them, they’re removing the only labor pool that these manufacturers realistically have available to them. If ICE keeps up its current efforts, it could put a lot of manufacturers out of business.

The Government Giveth, the Government Taketh Away

The problem with basing federal civil rights laws on government defined groups is that the government can at any time redefine or remove group definitions. One moment you might be a member of a protected group as defined by the federal government, the next moment you might not:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

[…]

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

Libertarianism, being an individualistic philosophy, argues that all should be equal under the law. This article demonstrates why. The principle that all are equal under the law is meant to take away the government’s ability to give and take protections willy nilly.

Of course it’s impossible for everybody to be equal under the law as soon as a government is established because members of a government by definition have privileges that people outside of the government lack (one of those privileges being the ability to define what protections exist). But I digress.

As soon as any individual is made unequal under the law the door is open for making other individuals unequal under the law. Title IX was meant to guard against gender-based discrimination in federally financed educational programs and activities. However, this law only came into existence because all were not already equal under the law. Instead of fixing the root of the problem, a group of politicians decided that two legally defined groups, men and women, should enjoy the same privileges from federally financed educational programs and activities. These protections were later expanded to transgender individuals by the previous administration. Now the current administration is proposing to redefine the applicable groups in such a way that transgender individuals lose Title IX protections.

Debates like this are inevitable when legal protections are granted collectively to legally defined groups instead of equally to every individual.

Obedience School

To open with one of St. George Carlin’s best monologues:

There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed.

[…]

They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

The public schooling system here in the United States has nothing to do with education. Whatever education a child may receive is merely accidental. What the public schooling system is meant to do is create obedient subjects:

Late Friday afternoon, I received a notice from the Plano Independent School District, which runs the middle school our youngest daughter attends in Dallas, describing a new policy authorizing “random, suspicion-less metal detector searches” of students in grades 6 through 12. The district plans to use “both walk-through and hand-held metal detectors” on “random groups of students,” who will be required to “remove all metallic items from their pockets and person.” In addition, “backpacks, bags and personal items capable of concealing a weapon will be opened and inspected for the presence of weapons.” Any student “who refuses to comply with the search process will be removed from campus and subject to disciplinary consequences.”

Most students are subjected to a civics class where the Bill of Rights is explained. One may worry that learning about something like the Fourth Amendment may convince a student that they have protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, which is why the students are also taught that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to them. When I was in school the line was that since we weren’t yet adults, the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to us. The school mentioned in the article has opted to go with a more demonstrative strategy by subjecting students to completely random searches.

The end goal is to create a population that believes it is free without actually being free. After these students graduate they will be used to rolling over for random searches so when law enforcers demand that they submit, the vast majority of them will without question.

NYPD Suspends Use of Body Cameras

What were sold as a tool for law enforcer accountability turned into a tool for evidence gathering. Body cameras have failed to reign in bad police behavior but they still provided us little people with some amusement as law enforcers tried to explain how really egregious looking footage was actually a misunderstanding. It appears as though the New York Police Department (NYPD) has tired of explaining the embarrassing footage because it has completely suspended their use:

The NYPD’s plan to outfit every officer with body cameras has run into trouble. The department has pulled about 2,990 Vievu LE-5 cameras across the city after one officer’s camera caught fire near a Staten Island precinct. There’s a “possible product defect” with the LE-5, the NYPD said in a statement, and it was removing existing models out of an “abundance of caution.” Most of the force’s 15,500 cameras (including LE-4 models) aren’t affected.

As one of my friends said, I wonder how long the officer had to hold a lighter to their body camera before it stayed lit.

Voter Fraud

There are certain rules in the universe. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and arguments about voter fraud become more frequent as election dates near. An election is drawing near here in the United States so politicos are arguing about voter fraud. As is tradition the Republicans are arguing that voter fraud is a major problem while the Democrats are arguing it isn’t.

What amuses me most about this argument is that everybody involved in it uses the term voter fraud as if voting itself wasn’t a form of fraud. According to Wikipedia, “fraud is deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.”

When people go to the voting booth, what are they trying to accomplish? They’re trying to get their preferred candidates into office. Why would they care about what candidates are in office? Because they hope that their preferred candidates will reciprocate by giving supporters special favors.

Mind you, no self-respecting voter will admit to this, which is where the deception comes in. If you ask 10 voters what they hope to accomplish by voting, you’ll probably hear 10 people tell you that they’re trying to make their nation, state, and/or local community better for everybody living in it. They don’t claim to being voting for themselves but for the greater good. Isn’t that so magnanimous?

If the claim to be voting for the benefit of everybody is a lie, what special favors might a voter hope to gain if their preferred candidates get into office? A business owner might hope that their preferred candidate will pass regulatory legislation that will hinder their competitors. An anti-gun activist might hope that their preferred candidate will pass legislation that prohibits nongovernmental entities from possessing firearms. A religious individual might hope that their preferred candidate will pass legislation that gives their religious beliefs force of law.

Voting is nothing more than a deception to realize unfair gain or deprive individuals of legal rights. When somebody commits what is commonly referred to as voter fraud, they’re simply cheating at cheating. That being the case, I believe that the term voter fraud is redundant and should instead simply be referred to as voting.