Yves here. This is a terrific piece on the thinking, such as it is, that has come to dominate the Beltway, and how these preoccupations keep the US lurching forward in a costly, destructive policy trajectory.
Read more...A new leak shows that the even-more-secret-than-the-TTP-and-TTIP Trade in Services Agreement is worse than you imagined.
Read more...Yves here. I left NYC the day that Ismaaiyl Brinsley killed two New York City policemen after shooting his former girlfriend in Baltimore. On the plane, three students (two in grad school, one in college) who didn’t previously know each other and were going home to Birmingham were discussing the event. All were concerned that this would put a chill on the protests against police brutality. And in case you wondered, yes, all were white.
The police are using this tragedy for selfish and anti-democratic ends. And what is troubling is that Mayor De Blasio hasn’t put them in their place. Corey Robin explains what that really signifies:
Read more...The sort of people you want around if there’s ever a legitimacy crisis.
Read more...A maniacally close reading of “Glossary of Open Politics,” beginning with the entry for “deep state.”
Read more...The “ground truth” of the protests, the forces arrayed against them, the grand jury, political economy in Ferguson, and Mike Brown’s father.
Read more...Bob sent me a post from Slashdot which should serve as a wake-up call as to how difficult it is to protect yourself on the Internet if you are a mere mortal. They quote an Electronic Frontier Foundation report on how encryption is being subverted:
Read more...Yves here. This interview with Laura Poitras is a reminder of how the world has, and more important, hasn’t changed since the explosive revelations made by Edward Snowden less than a year and a half ago. Even though his disclosures produced a great uproar, with demands in the US, UK, and Europe for explanations and […]
Read more...Yves here. This post presents some of the CIA’s less-than-proud moments, curiously omitted in a recently-published history of the CIA’s meddling in the Middle East, juxtaposed with some of its more recent miscues.
Read more...The American intelligence services, despite their lavish funding, are not as smart as they’d have you believe. In fact, by many standards, they are colossal failures. Why is that?
Read more...Your humble blogger is a beached whale as a result of the steady march of police state practices on the Internet. And to calibrate how heinous the underlying situation is, Lambert, who has 20 years of experience as a computer professional, calls my current mess the technology equivalent of being shoved into a minefield without any signs. And as you’ll see below, I’ve already stepped on one mine.
Read more...Does New Zealand’s Intelligence Service spy indiscriminately on New Zealanders? High-profile, high-stakes claims and counterclaims, just ahead of the NZ elections.
Read more...Yves here. Lambert, in his relentless Obamacare skullduggery, has unearthed yet another ugly feature of this Rube Goldberg contraption for enriching health insurers: unprecedented levels of required reporting to the Federal government. Your humble blogger had already flagged one, that Obamacare is designed with the bizarre assumption that everyone in America has a steady paycheck. You are supposed to be able to estimate your income. How can people who are part-time workers, with employers who ratchet up and down how much time they need, supposed to comply? Or even worse, how about self-employed people, who have variable and unpredictable income and expenses, as well as the occasional collection issue.
But Obamacare policyholders are ALSO required to report on a raft of “lifestyle changes” including when you become pregnant (which means you also need to report if you have a change in that “status” via miscarriage or abortion), or a change in “household size”. One assumes that means “household” from an IRS standpoint, but could it mean from a Census perspective? Do renters have to report if they take on a roommate?
And even better, as Lambert discusses in detail, HHS also makes it hard to prove that you’ve made the required updates. Charming.
Read more...Yves here. If we had a bona fide democracy left in America, as opposed to a simulacrum of one, the night-after-night spectacle of constabulary overkill in Ferguson would spark outrage and a concerted effort to restrict militarized policing, particularly against peaceful protestors. Officials knew precisely what was at stake when they kept journalists as far away as possible from the 17 city, coordinated paramilitary crackdown against Occupy Wall Street.
But now that many comparatively small cities have war toys like tanks in their possession, and are also hiring former soldiers, it appears that we’ve passed an event horizon. Unless some of these municipalities are prepared to get rid of this militarized policing gear (and not by giving it to another city, but by destroying it or letting it deteriorate into uselessness), it’s inconceivable that the police won’t continue to abuse their greatly expanded powers.
Read more...I first heard about what would later be called the Internet of Things in 1991 from Michael Hawley, who happened to be providing support for my NeXT computer. Hawley was then a graduate student at MIT and favorite of Nick Negroponte. (Hawley, who had also worked at NeXT, pointed out that having him do my tech support was tantamount to having Steve Jobs on deck). He later became a professor in the MIT Media Lab
In addition to showing me the coolness of networks (like accessing files on remote computers, which was bleeding edge back then), he was also keen about discussing digital libraries and how his belt buckle would be able to talk to his refrigerator and why that would be useful. I kept quiet about my reservations about my objects having private conversations about me.
The problem with the idea of having even more devices than your smartphone and tablet gathering information for your convenience, of course, is the many ways all that data can be used against you.
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