The NSA is supposed to be America’s offshore spy agency, forbidden from spying on Americans. But as an important article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Nadia Kayyali points out,
the FBI, DEA and other US agencies have closely integrated the NSA into
their own efforts, using the NSA’s mass surveillance to gather
intelligence on Americans – as Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide discloses, the NSA isn’t a stand-alone agency, it is part of an overarching surveillance state.
And it’s not just the FBI that we should be concerned about. The
NSA’s role in ordinary investigations is not new information. But every
document that expands on the NSA’s involvement in anything domestic, and
not national security related, should ring alarm bells for everyone in
the United States. We know now that:
* The NSA data is fed to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “Special
Operations Division.” The DEA in turn uses this information in ordinary
investigations, while cloaking the source– even from judges and prosecutors.
* The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the NSA to share unminimized data
with the FBI, as well as the CIA, with the “Raw Take” order. Prior to
this “agencies [had] to ‘minimize’ private information about Americans —
deleting data that is irrelevant for intelligence purposes before
providing it to others.”
* Information sharing between the FBI, NSA, and CIA has been
routinized through “software which would automatically gather a list of
tasked PRISM selectors every two weeks to provide to the FBI and CIA.” (slide31.jpg).
Similarly, the NSA sends “operational PRISM news and guidance to the
FBI and CIA so that their analysts could task the PRISM system properly,
be aware of outages and changes, and optimize their use of PRISM.”
* And, most recently, we learned that the NSA partners with the DEA to record nearly all cell phone calls
in the Bahamas– but not for national security purposes. This
surveillance helps “to locate ‘international narcotics traffickers and
special-interest alien smugglers’—traditional law-enforcement concerns,
but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of
mass destruction.” In fact, a 2004 memo discusses the NSA’s integral goal in the war on drugs.
“A
medical group that has long opposed doctor-assisted death has reversed
course and dropped its opposition to the practice, saying the decision
should be up to the patient and physician.
The California Medical Association, which represents more than 40,000
physicians in the Golden State, removed language from its internal
policies referring to end-of-life options as “physician-assisted
suicide.” The group also walked back its opposition to a California bill
that would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication to
terminally ill patients after the bill’s sponsors added additional
protections for doctors and hospitals who do not wish to provide such
options.
“As physicians, we want to provide the best care possible for our
patients. However, despite the remarkable medical breakthroughs we’ve
made and the world-class hospice or palliative care we can provide, it
isn’t always enough,” CMA President Dr. Luther Cobb said in a Wednesday
statement. “The decision to participate in the End of Life Option Act is
a very personal one between a doctor and their patient, which is why
CMA has removed policy that outright objects to physicians aiding
terminally ill patients in end of life options.”
Cobb continued: “We believe it is up to the individual physician and
their patient to decide voluntarily whether the End of Life Option Act
is something in which they want to engage. Protecting that
physician-patient relationship is essential.”
When a giant hedge fund is bidding on all the foreclosed houses in a
poor neighborhood, living humans don’t stand a chance – but that’s OK,
because rapacious investors make great landlords.
Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 foreclosed houses in
the past two years, bundling together the rents they generate into
bonds that are just like subprime mortgage bonds, only without the
pretense that the poor people who generate their payments have a hope
of ever getting out from under their obligation to enrich the richest
people in the world.
Blackstone – owner of Seaworld, Hilton Hotels, and the Weather Channel
– is the biggest player here, and when they come into town to buy up
all the single-family properties, they price actual families out of the
market. Their securitized rent payment bonds are backed by some of the
biggest subprime criminals, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and
JPMorgan.
Hedge funds really epitomize compassionate landlording, too. When
Blackstone buys in, it jacks up tenants’ rents by as much as a third and
immediately begins eviction proceedings against renters who can’t pay.
If there are any troubles with your payments, they assess fines against
you and make you miss work to pay the rent and penalties in person.
From the government-controlled China Daily on the recent US charges of hacking by China:
“We should encourage organizations and individuals whose rights have
been infringed to stand up and sue Washington. Regarding the issue of
network security, the US is such a mincing rascal that we must stop
developing any illusions about it.”
The
government of China will forbid the use of Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS in
government computers, “to ensure computer security after the shutdown of
Windows XP.” All desktops, laptops and tablet PCs “purchased by central
state organs must be installed with OS other than Windows 8,” according
to an online statement by the Central Government Procurement Center
“The
hawkish argument that “the world is better off” because of the Iraq war
isn’t just obviously false, but it’s the sort of desperate
ends-justify-the means claim that only ideologues and propagandists find
compelling. If we take Iraq war dead-enders at their word that they
think the world is better off, this just confirms that they have no
understanding of the consequences of the war they supported. More than
decade of conflict in Iraq has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives,
injured countless more, displaced millions, driven millions more into
exile, and has brought about the complete ruination of an entire
country. The war empowered sectarians and jihadists, and exposed the
country’s religious minorities to an unending nightmare of persecution.
Only a fanatic could look at the devastation wrought by the Iraq war and
its aftermath and conclude that the world is better place because of
it.”
“‘President
Obama and Secretary Clinton hastily withdrew troops, threw away the
gains of the surge, and embarked on a broader policy of pivoting away
from the Middle East,’ Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ®, a likely 2016
candidate, wrote on his Facebook page last week.
That’s a very smooth translation to Republican-speak of ‘President
Obama and Secretary Clinton observed the George W. Bush-negotiated
withdrawal plan and the wishes of the Iraqi government.’
You know what I’m interested in? Copyright lawsuits.
And profanity.
Lucky for me, Google and Viacom have provided both today, in the form of
a series of emails released through the discovery process in Viacom’s
billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. In these emails, the two
companies take turns cussin’ and spittin’ and swearin’ about each other.
Hilarity ensues. Ars Technica rounds up some of the highlights.
# Viacom complains that YouTube employees “sneered at rights holders as ‘copyright bastards’ and ‘a-holes.’
# Google retorts that Viacom can’t complain about this language, and it
quotes numerous Viacom execs to make its point. Sample outbursts
include, “fuck you, you Google bastards,” “bastards at Google are
harassing me,” and the eloquent “fuck those mother fuckers.”
# A Viacom VP even complained about the “fucking assholes” at
YouTube–because the company “enforced its repeat-infringer policy
concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple
take-down notices from Viacom’s legal department.” The lulz, they are
here in spades.
# Viacom top brass wrote e-mails with more exclamation points than my
niece would even consider decent. They also had what Google calls an
“obsession” with buying YouTube.
# Case in point: “I WANT TO OWN YOUTUBE. I think it’s critical, and if
it goes to a competitor…..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That was from MTV Networks
head Judy McGrath.
# Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, “If we get UTube… I wanna run it.”
McGrath responded, “You’ll have to kill me to get to it first.”
“It
turns out that the Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the
total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal
minimum wage.
You read that right: Just the annual bonuses for just the sliver of
Americans who work just in finance just in New York City dwarfed the
combined year-round earnings of all Americans earning the federal
minimum wage.”
Pot and Spoon tells the tale of Madeline, a young woman who
brought her pot and spoon to the OWS protests and had them confiscated
by the Police. As Madeline tries to get them back we learn about flaws
in the system, unhelpful public employees and police over reach. Pot and
Spoon, locked up in an evidence holding warehouse, have a great
conversation about social structure and the types of change the Occupy
movement hopes to engender.
If you’re a hacker interested in obtaining a cybersecurity job at the
FBI, don’t “smoke weed on the way to the interview.” Director James Comey says he was only joking when he said he was cool with potsmoking techies just a few days ago. His comments suggested the FBI would loosen
hiring policies regarding marijuana users because so many marijuana
users also happen to be excellent security experts. Today, that tune
changed.
Congress has authorized the FBI to add 2,000
personnel to its rolls this year, and many of those new recruits will be
assigned to tackle cyber crimes, a growing priority for the agency. And
that’s a problem, Mr. Comey told the White Collar Crime Institute, an
annual conference held at the New York City Bar Association in
Manhattan. A lot of the nation’s top computer programmers and hacking
gurus are also fond of marijuana.
“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals
and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,”
Mr. Comey said.
Mr. Comey said that the agency was “grappling with the question right
now” of how to amend the agency’s marijuana policies, which excludes
from consideration anyone who has smoked marijuana in the previous three
years, according to the FBI’s Web site. One conference goer asked Mr.
Comey about a friend who had shied away from applying because of the
policy. “He should go ahead and apply,” despite the marijuana use, Mr.
Comey said.
“I am absolutely dead-set against using marijuana,” said
Mr. Comey in an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary
Committee. “I did not say that I am going to change that ban.”
Before Edward Snowden went on the run and effected the first-ever leak of documents from the NSA, he threw a cryptoparty in Hawai'i,
coordinating with Runa Sandvik from the Tor Project and Asher Wolf from
the Cryptoparty movement to plan an event where everyday people were
taught to use crypto. He gave a lecture for his neighbors on Truecrypt,
and told people that he ran at least two Tor exist nodes to help people
keep their anonymous traffic moving (Boing Boing also runs a Tor exit
node). Apparently, his girlfriend videoed the event – I’d love to see
it!
Snowden used the Cincinnatus name to organize the event, which he
announced on the Crypto Party wiki, and through the Hi Capacity hacker
collective, which hosted the gathering. Hi Capacity is a small hacker
club that holds workshops on everything from the basics of soldering to
using a 3D printer.
“I’ll start with a casual agenda, but slot in additional speakers as
desired,” write Cincinnatus in the announcement. “If you’ve got
something important to add to someone’s talk, please share it
(politely). When we’re out of speakers, we’ll do ad-hoc tutorials on
anything we can.”
When the day came, Sandvik found her own way to the venue: an art space
on Oahu in the back of a furniture store called Fishcake. It was filled
to its tiny capacity with a mostly male audience of about 20 attendees.
Snowden spotted her when she walked in and introduced himself and his
then-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who was filming the event. “He was just
very nice, and he came to the door and introduced himself and talked
about how the event was going to run,” Sandvik says.
They chatted for a bit. Sandvik asked Snowden where he worked, and after
hemming and hawing, he finally said he worked for Dell. He didn’t let
on that his work for Dell was under an NSA contract, but Sandvik could
tell he was hiding something. “I got the sense that he didn’t like me
prying too much, and he was happy to say Dell and move on,” she says.
Sandvik began by giving her usual Tor presentation, then Snowden stood
in front of the white board and gave a 30- to 40-minute introduction to
TrueCrypt, an open-source full disk encryption tool. He walked through
the steps to encrypt a hard drive or a USB stick. “Then we did an
impromptu joint presentation on how to set up and run a Tor relay,”
Sandvik says. “He was definitely a really, really smart guy. There was
nothing about Tor that he didn’t already know.”
Since its inception in 1908, the FBI has prohibited audio or visual
recordings of statements made by criminal suspects, unless agents obtain
special approval. “Now, after more than a century, the U.S. Department
of Justice has quietly reversed that directive by issuing orders May 12
that video recording is presumptively required for interrogations of
suspects in custody, with some exceptions.”
There was no news release or press conference to
announce the radical shift. But a DOJ memorandum —obtained by The
Arizona Republic — spells out the changes to begin July 11.
“This policy establishes a presumption that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the United
States Marshals Service (USMS) will electronically record statements
made by individuals in their custody,” says the memo to all federal
prosecutors and criminal chiefs from James M. Cole, deputy attorney
general.
“This policy also encourages agents and prosecutors to consider
electronic recording in investigative or other circumstances where the
presumption does not apply,” such as in the questioning of witnesses.
The US Transportation Department today proposed
air travelers be given detailed information on the fees they’re being
charged for each checked bag, advance seat assignments, and carry-on
luggage.
The rules would apply whether passengers bought tickets on
the phone, in person or online — and not just from airline websites.
Airlines that want their tickets to remain available through travel
agents and online ticketing services would have to provide them
information on fees for basic services, too, something most have been
reluctant to do.
The idea is to prevent consumers from being lured by low advertised
airfares, only to be surprised later by high fees for services once
considered part of the ticket price.
Airlines currently are required to disclose only bag fees, and even then
they don’t have to provide an exact price. Some provide a wide range of
possible fees in complex charts.
On Tor.com, author and reviewer Jo Walton has an insightful look at why
so many science fiction readers and writers are discussing David
Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a book that is already a darling of the Occupy movement:
One of the problems with writing science fiction and fantasy is creating
truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other
things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF,
where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh
at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But
it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in
genuinely different directions. As a British reader coming to SF there
were a lot of things I thought were people’s amazing imagination that
turned out to be normal American things and cultural defaults. And no
matter how much research you do, it’s always easier in the anglosphere
to find books and primary sources in English and about our own history
and the history of people who have interacted with us. And both history
and anthropology tend to be focused on one period, one place, so it’s
possible to research a specific society you know you want to know about,
but hard to find things that are about the range of options different
societies have chosen.
What Debt does is to focus on a question of morality, first by framing
the question, and then by examining how a really large number of human
societies over a huge geographical and historical range have dealt with
this issue, and how they have interacted with other people who have very
different ideas about it. It’s a huge issue of the kind that shapes
societies and cultures, so in reading it you encounter a whole lot of
contrasting cultures. Graeber has some very interesting ideas about it,
and lots of fascinating details, and lots of thought provoking
connections.
For a more academic discussion of Debt among political scientists and economists, see this Crooked Timber seminar on the book, and the author’s reply. I liked Debt,
but was also frustrated by the amount of circling back and meandering
the author engages in. That said, it was one of my more
thought-provoking reads of 2011.
Iran’s governing elite have been making noises for years now about the
construction of a “Halal Internet,” a kind of national intranet with its
own email service, microblogging, search tools, etc. Now a leaked
Persian-language “Request for Information” from the Research Institute
for ICT in Tehran, which consults on technology for Iran’s Ministry of
ICT suggests that the plan has evolved into a more ambitious version of
the existing national censorship regime. In Ars Technica, Cyrus Farivar
analyzes the proposal:
As the final volume of Brian Wood’s brilliant anti-war graphic novel DMZ
nears publication, Dominic Umile looks back on the series’ 72 issue run
of political allegory and all the ways that it used the device of
fiction to make trenchant comic on the real world. DMZ is a
story about the “State of Exception” that the American establishment
declared after 9/11, a period when human rights, civil liberty, economic
sanity, and the constitution all play second-fiddle to the
all-consuming war on terror. Like the best allegories, it works first
and best as a story in its own right, but it is also an important
comment on the world we live in.
In DMZ #8, Matty Roth reviews a series of New York Times newspapers to
reconstruct a timeline of the book’s war. Burchielli’s panels are nearly
blacked-out. It’s as if Roth is squatting on a darkened stage: Nothing
behind him is discernible outside of more yellowed newspapers, each
slugged with copy that’s painfully close to our own real-life headlines.
Brian Wood’s chief character is despondent and sounds like many of us
do today in the era of Occupy Wall Street, hostilities in Afghanistan,
the Obama administration’s drone campaign, and rampant corruption
plaguing state and federal government, all amid an ever-theatric run-up
to another presidential election.
Even as DMZ had another 64 issues and more than five years to go, Roth’s
thoughts are rendered with an undeniable degree of both prescience and
finality: “I never paid attention to politics. Never seemed to be a
point. Politics happened the way it happened regardless of what anyone
thought or did. So why bother?”
Forget what you’ve heard. We don’t know much about how Internet use affects the brain.
After years of being told that the Internet was rotting my brain,
I decided to assess the damage by gathering the scientific evidence. My review of the published scientific literature found no evidence that typical Internet use harms the adolescent brain.
I’m a neuroscience student researching human brain development, specifically during the teen years. Our brain undergoes a lot of changes
between childhood and adulthood, and the lab I work in is interested in
how these changes relate to our ability to navigate the social world.
It’s fun work, especially because many people seem to be as interested
in learning about the teen brain as I am.
Whenever I present my research to groups of parents or teachers,
I’m usually asked a version of the question: “How are digital
technologies affecting teenagers’ brains?” Until I conducted this
review, I would normally respond with a cautious, slightly dismissive,
and utterly unhelpful answer: “We don’t know.”
Ways of knowing
Teachers possess valuable knowledge about young people and
generational trends. Over 2,000 American middle and high school teachers
responded to a recent survey
by the Pew Research Center asking them how they felt the Internet (and
other digital technologies) were affecting their students. The majority
of teachers (87%) felt that Internet use was creating an “easily
distracted generation with short attention spans,” and 88% felt that
“today’s students have fundamentally different cognitive skills because
of the digital technologies they have grown up with.”
While surveys can tell us about how people perceive the world,
the scientific method allows us to test these observations for their
validity. As E. O. Wilson
said, “the heart of the scientific method is the reduction of perceived
phenomena to fundamental, testable principles.” With this in mind, I
set out to review the scientific evidence for the Internet’s impact on
the brain–specifically the teenage brain. However, to do so I had to
first figure out how to define Internet use.
Normally technology migrates from prisons to schools to airports –
think CCTVs and Pre-Check – but for the late and unlamented
radioactive pornoscanners that the TSA had to give up on, the technology path went the other way
– if you’re lucky enough to be incarcerated in the USA (which
incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth), you may be
treated to one or more TSA-surplus pornoscans.
Part
of feminism isn’t just proving that women are strong and capable it’s
also admitting that women can be awful and disgusting. It’s the flip
side of destroying the ‘women are delicate angels’ myth. Don’t pretend
women don’t beat, murder, and rape. They do. And stop glorifying women
who do god awful things just because they do it in heels and lipstick ok
that drug cartel woman is not someone you should be idolizing.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario