May 2012
11 posts
What Your Cell Phone Company Is Telling the... →
It’s time for cell phone companies to be up front with customers about how their personal information – including their location history and who they call and text with – is being collected, stored, and shared with the government. In an op-ed on CNN.com, ACLU attorney Catherine Crump argues that wireless carriers – “who we pay to provide a service, not to keep tabs on us for the government” –...
The Automation of Government Coercion
Mark: Switching gears just a bit... We've watched the SOPA/PIPA controversy, now its CISPA; the "Stellar Wind" project was featured in Wired last month, and recently an NSA whistleblower, former Director William Binney, came out and said flat out that the government is lying, they intercept and store everything we do, Constitution be damned. It seems the government won't stop until it completely controls the flow of information on the Internet and has the ability to monitor and record everything we say and do online. You're a counter-terrorism expert, how much of this is hype and how much of it is really necessary to safeguard national security, in your opinion. And what about our civil liberties and right to privacy?
John: It’s a mixed bag. There’s certainly lots of concern in regards to how the NSA gathers data on US citizens. Added to what the private sector is gathering, its safe to conclude that we don’t have any privacy.
For example, nearly every new phone sold today has a GPS chip in it. It’s constantly gathering data on where that phone is and sending it to the phone company. All of that phone company data, from all of the phone companies across the world, is aggregated and provided to select governments for use in counter-terrorism. In short, the three billion people that are using cell phones are being tracked in order to help find and kill a couple hundred terrorists (its contribution is probably limited to being the primary source for neutralizing a couple of terrorists a year).
What do they do with this data? All of the public and private data collected -- from credit card purchases to library records to Internet usage to GPS cell phone data to EZPass info to aerial photos -- is being constantly analyzed by computers for what is called a “terrorist profile.” This network analysis software is looking for patterns of activity that would indicate a specific person is a terrorist, or part of a terrorist cell. The problem with this analysis? It doesn’t work if you don’t have a starting point, a known terrorist, that you can work outwards from. If you don’t have a reference point, the analysis generates too many false positives to be of use.
This analysis gets really scary when you President can now designate any US citizen an enemy combatant without going through a judicial process. This Presidential list is the equivalent of hit list. What does it take to get put on this list? How big can this list get? Nobody knows. It's probably safe to assume that this list will become increasingly automated over time with nearly zero human oversight (just guidance).
On top of all of this, killing people designated as terrorists is getting much, much easier. When I was in counter-terrorism, getting to the bad guys and back safely was risky. Every operation put dozens of people at extreme risk. Now, all you need is an armed drone. Armed drones are killing hundreds of people a day now in Pakistan. Drones, instead of troops and airplanes, are increasingly becoming the way the US controls the world. From a political perspective, using drones is nearly costless. No shot down pilots on TV. No body bags. All it costs is money, and less and less money as drones get smaller, smarter, and more deadly.
So, if you combine the automation of terrorist identification with an administrative “hit” list with automated drones that execute the order, you have a global killing machine. A machine that requires very few people to run and can kill almost anyone that triggers in in a matter of minutes.
What will be done with it? If we end up in a disorderly economic depression, as it increasingly looks like we will, we’re going get a good demonstration of what life under automated authoritarianism.
Last word. There’s also a whole host of laws and regulations that are aimed at restricting our freedoms in favor of the Intellectual Property mafia. They want the ability to censor everything we see and shut down web sites if there is even a whiff of IP infringement. Massive, automated censorship is going on now. Google blocks 300,000 URLs a week from its search results due to corporate pressure. Are all of these requests to block infringing content reviewed? No. It’s automated. It’s non-judicial. It’s simply corporate censorship.
The Great Inequality →
It is appropriate at this point to ask why inequality matters. Schutz offers several compelling reasons. First, from the fact that the power that generates inequality is inherently undemocratic, it follows that societies that exhibit consistently high degrees of inequality, as is true of all capitalist societies, cannot be democratic. As inequality rises in the United States, even the formal...
Why is the FBI Manufacturing Reasons to Arrest... →
Michigan's tulips bloom early due to unusually... →
“Instead of taking the time to read deeply and widely about policy, we watch the...”
– How the Media Wastes Our Time During Political Campaigns (via azspot)
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Book of the Month, May 2012
The Origin of Species
On December 27, 1831, the young naturalist Charles Darwin left Plymouth Harbor aboard the HMS Beagle. For the next five years, he conducted research on plants and animals from around the globe, amassing a body of evidence that would culminate in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind—the theory of evolution.
Darwin presented his stunning insights in a...
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Charity of the Month, May 2012
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. Founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971, the SPLC is internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups. Our innovative Teaching Tolerance program produces and...
