RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Jim Hightower Brings the Lowdown on 'Poopgate' and 'Tinkle-Down' Economics

Texas populist gadfly Jim Hightower at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Famed Texas populist commentator
and political gadfly, Jim Hightower

In 30 years, we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics. We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2013

Texas populist writer, commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 13, 2013.

Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer is a weekly syndicated radio program recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 13 interview with Jim Hightower here:


Texas progressive populist writer, public speaker, humorist, radio commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner and is a former editor of the Texas Observer.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books including Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow; Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There's Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried on more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, and on Radio for Peace International. He publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, which now has more than 135,000 subscribers, is the fastest growing political publication in America, and has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

'Tinkle-down' economics

Jim Hightower told the Rag Radio audience that “we have a greater share of our wealth going to the tiniest portion of our people than any time in the last century.”

“In 30 years,” he said, “we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics.” According to Jim, “We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.”

“This is a structural change,” he says. “this isn’t a recession, this isn’t a technical glitch in the system. Thie is deliberate. We’ve enthroned the corporate powers to rewrite the rules.”

And we have a Congress “that is so ideological that they don’t care. And so many of them really don’t know regular workaday people. They’re millionaires, most of them,” he said. “You’ve got both parties that are tied to the corporate money.”

Thanks to gerrymandering and the dominance of big money in electoral politics, the politicians “rig the system so that they keep getting elected.” The Republicans, who “have voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare," play to a “Republican tea party fringe that doesn’t represent 10 percent of the American people.”

They “ignore the real problems” like “joblessness and rampant underemployment,” and “play games with these phony political issues.”

Hightower faulted the corporate-run media. (“A reporter used to be a working stiff. They worked in rumpled clothes, went home to a working class neighborhood, drank at a bar named Joe.”)

We do have some strong progressive media, he said, citing the country’s numerous independent community radio stations, many of which air Hightower's commentary -- with special praise for Austin’s KOOP and Rag Radio -- and the Texas Observer. “And we’ve got voices like Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman,” he said.

Texas pols -- and 'Poopgate'

On the show, Jim talked about the recent “flapdoodle” in the Texas legislature over abortion and women’s health that drew thousands of activists to the Texas Capitol and was highlighted by State Sen. Wendy Davis’ remarkable filibuster.

“It’s about abortion,” Jim said, “but it really is about power. Mostly men, wanting to go back to ‘Father Knows Best’ years, the 1950s, before women got uppity...” In this case, the dramatic citizen activism “defeated the Republican leadership and embarrassed them. And, quite honestly, frightened them.”

“It was a hoot,” Jim says, “to hear Rick Perry say, ‘It was a mob. Mob rule! Mob rule!' And (Lt. Gov. David) Dewhurst saying, ‘Socialists, socialists!’ One representatives even said we had terrorists in the Capitol.”

Jim wrote about the events at the Capitol in the Hightower Lowdown: “If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of truly uproarious low comedy.”

And then there was ”Poopgate!”

According to Hightower, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst (“he’s such a prissy guy anyway, a multi-millionaire public servant who doesn’t like the public...) got spooked by all the women in the State Capitol building.

Dewhurst “had heard that they were going to bring tampons and other ‘feminine projectiles’ into the Senate chamber, to toss down on the floor,” Jim says. So he had the state troopers search ladies’ purses at the Capitol entrances and confiscate anything resembling a tampon.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, “Dewhurst claimed that they had also confiscated some 19 jars of feces and urine.” But, when pressed by the media, he couldn’t come up with any evidence. So the reporters asked the troopers at the Capitol gates, and they didn’t have a clue what Dewhurst was talking about. “They said, No, that they hadn’t seen any excrement -- except what was in the Lt. Governor’s memo!”

“It’s just astonishing,” Jim said. “The extremism that is loose. And they seem to think that this is leadership.” But, “not only the women who were there, but just people of good will recognize that and think, maybe we can do something. Because there was such a force there that can’t be denied.”

“Throughout our history, we’ve had to do a little screaming, and confrontation, and rebelling -- when the skids are greased and the system is rigged against people. Because that’s what happened that night.”

Whether or not Wendy Davis runs for governor, Hightower believes that real change is in the works for Texas politics. The long-dormant state Democratic Party is alive and kicking, he says, under the “vigorous and vibrant” leadership of new party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is committed to returning the party to grassroots organizing.

The Texas Democrats “got way too cozy with the lobbyists and with the money,” Jim says. “We had people sitting in the office down by the Capitol, just talking to each other.” Now the party has 20 organizers working in the field.

Concerning efforts at voter suppression, Hightower asked, “Why don’t Republicans want people to vote?” “We should make it an issue,” he said, “that these bozos are trying to keep people from voting in the United States of America!”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, populist commentator Jim Hightower, and Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz.

Corporate trade scams and NSA eavesdropping

One issue that raises Hightower’s hackles is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (a secretive and very controversial “nuclearized and supersized NAFTA” that would involve 11 nations, including China and Japan). “It’s not about free trade,” Jim Says. “It’s a corporate coup d’etat. Against us… It’s about enthroning corporate power.”

Jim says there’s strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being organized by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a "wonderful project that's been battling these issues for years." “We’ve defeated 10 of these kind of trade scams just in the last decade,” Jim says. “So people really will make a difference.”

“You know, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.' So, the more people know about this thing, the more that they’re smelling that manure.”

Jim is also enraged about the NSA’s massive eavesdropping program. “This is not just another entity that’s poking into our personal privacy and lives... this is a comprehensive violation of at least the first and fourth amendments, and possibly the fifth and sixth as well. And a violation of the privacy laws of the United States.”

“It’s one thing to use spooks to go chase down terrorists, which we certainly want them to do, but to then decide that the entire 330 million people of the United States of America are suspects, that’s another thing altogether.”

“There are 3 billion phone calls made in the United States every day. They get them all... These are not metadata, as they call them, these are profiles. They’re little pieces of us. And they draw a picture.”

They are “using these super-supercomputers, and using this fog of fear that was generated by the powers that be, using 9-ll, to take away our core rights.”

“Snowden, to me, has done a tremendous public service by revealing all this,” Jim said.

Also read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" on The Rag Blog from April 11, 2012, and listen to our earlier Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower here.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer; Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was an editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Steve Russell : Big Brother in the Data Mines

Cover of the first Signet Classics edition of George Orwell's 1984. Image from Vintage Paperback Archive.

We're talking yottabytes here:  
Big Brother in the data mines

We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

One of the television talking heads really hurt my feelings in a report the other night on Edward Snowden, the traitorous hero or heroic traitor who leaked the existence of PRISM, wholesale collection of data from the servers of various major players on the Internet. Not once but twice, he demanded to know how a 29-year-old high school dropout could become a computer jock for the National Security Agency with a top-secret clearance?

I was once an 18-year-old high school dropout who was a computer jock for the NSA (USAF branch) with a top-secret clearance. In the three years I worked up to my elbows in top secret intelligence, I can remember two items the leaking of which would have landed the news on the front pages along with the leaker in the pokey.

We were all told regularly and often what the consequences of revealing classified information would be. Would I have done that? I like to think I would if the public interest in the information clearly outweighed my own safety, but that circumstance never came up, so I can’t know. Before you spit your coffee on the keyboard, remember that the very oath every military person takes involves putting the interests of the country above your own.

Spying on the retail level has been part of war on this continent at least since the pueblos pulled off a sneak attack that sent the Spanish colonists all the way back to El Paso del Norte, licking their wounds.

Spying on the wholesale level awaited technology, not intent. Governments had always tried to gin up networks of informers, some of which became famous in history and did the job for a period of time. Scholars estimate that one in seven East Germans informed for the Stasi on some level. People, over time, seem to revert to their own values over those imposed by government, and so become less reliable as informers. People lack the discipline of computers.

During WWII, Bletchley Park began to move warfare into the digital age. Communication had for some time been by wire and by broadcast, and so intelligence became a contest between code makers and code breakers in, as the computer geeks say, real time.

One obvious method of code breaking is to archive and collate vast numbers of messages and look for patterns. This became possible by entrusting analysis to Alan Turing’s mathematics, which became the Allies’ ACE (“Automatic Computing Engine") in the hole.

Once the algorithms were written, the issue became how to capture and store mountains of communication data. We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By the time the calendar turned over the date that gives the title to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the technology was possible for Big Brother to be watching us. When the date whizzed by with no more notice than Y2K, some of us wondered whether the American people, like Winston Smith, had learned to love Big Brother?

Image from The Matrix.

Apparently, not all people share amorous attachment to the government, since the sales of Orwell’s novel have spiked with the revelations about PRISM.

Back to the Okie teenager who got his top-secret clearance in 1965. We learned our trade on computers that stored data in kilobytes. When we moved to intelligence, we were dealing with megabytes. There were rumors about gigabytes, like the computer in my home on which I compose this column. Today’s NSA is storing data in yottabytes. That is, a septillion bytes.

We are told PRISM collects “metadata,” not identifiable to individuals or even organizations. Numbers called to and from, length of call. Not content. Not even who made the call.

Excuse me, but how would it help catch terrorists if it could not be focused on individuals or organizations? Back when I did this, just about everything we had in the computer was from communications intercepts and aircraft sorties. Collating that told us all kinds of useful things about our adversaries.

The question how many data points it takes to focus on an individual is not one of opinion but one of mathematics, and the number of data points is directly related to the level of certainty we demand. In the case of cell phone metadata, there’s some evidence that a mere four hits on the same number can identify 95% of individuals.

Because published studies in scientific journals are limited, that could be wrong, but the fact remains that the question is not one of opinion, but of mathematics.

By cross-referencing telephone and Internet metadata with bank records, which are already in electronic form and do not require a search warrant to access, the NSA can discover things about you that your parents may not know.

We are told that the metadata can be accessed from the desktop computer of any analyst who has the proper clearance. You know, like the one I had at age 18? Let’s not give Big Brother too much credit for having his attention focused on us, but let’s not pretend that it’s impossible or that the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing when thousands of people have access to yottabytes of data.

Big Brother does not care about you, but he cared enough about Martin Luther King, Jr., to bug his motel room, a laughably primitive method. He cared enough about the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement to insert double agents, which is also kind of labor intensive and old fashioned.

If the United States is data mining on this level, what do you think China and Russia are doing? China in particular has pulled off some hacks into corporate databases that left me scratching my head.

This is not an argument to shut down PRISM, assuming that would be possible given the resources already invested in storage. Consider these words like a weather report, since, after all, the databases being mined were already in corporate hands before the government touched them. I’m unclear that maximizing shareholder value is a less dangerous imperative than maintaining a government in power.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : Government Lies and Secrecy Destroy Credibility

Whistleblower Edward Snowden. Image from MGN Online.

Government lies and
secrecy destroy credibility

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2013

When a high government official blatantly lies in testimony before Congress, it is rare that we learn of the lie as quickly as we did this past week. Sometimes, such misconduct takes decades to be revealed.

But thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, who once worked for the CIA and was, until recently, a civilian employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a National Security Agency (NSA) private contractor, we now know of the lie.

In March, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, boldly and knowingly lied in response to Sen. Ron Wyden’s question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied “No.”

When Snowden released proof of vast electronic spying on all Americans who use telephones and the internet, Clapper’s lie became obvious. However, President Obama has made no move to oust Clapper for his lie or take other corrective action.

Actually, Clapper’s demeanor during and immediately after the lie made me suspicious from the beginning -- his rapid eye-blinking and nervous extended spot-rubbing of a spot on his bald head are behaviors that have been identified by some psychological research as indications of lying.

But I did not know until the Guardian published Glenn Greenwald’s essay on his interview with Snowden that my suspicions were confirmed. Even more remarkable to me is that Clapper knew he would be asked Wyden’s question the day before he testified, and still he lied.

Now, Greenwald and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who has been briefed in a classified meeting about the extent of the National Security Agency’s electronic spying on Americans, have both confirmed that what has been revealed so far by Snowden is just the “tip of the iceberg” regarding NSA’s domestic electronic spying.

The Washington Post has now reported that actual phone conversations have been listened to, and emails have been read, all without specific judicial approval. Sen. John Tester, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, has said that he was not aware of the electronic spying that Snowden revealed.

Ever since this story broke, we have been bombarded by columns and essays from various pundits and arguments by electronic spying supporters that the real problem is the character, personality, and motivation of Edward Snowden. Thanks to political columnist Juan Cole, we have a list of ways Snowden will be smeared in order to discredit him with the public.

Snowden will be labeled a traitor and a defector (for going to Hong Kong); his mental health will be questioned; it will be claimed that he didn’t understand the spying program he revealed; his accusations will be called untrue; charges Snowden did not make will be labeled incorrect (attack by misdirection or a “red herring”); claims will be made that the spying is legal (which can’t be confirmed because the courts will not allow anyone standing to sue); minor parts of the allegations may be acknowledged to divert attention from the major intrusion on Americans’ lives; it will be claimed that Snowden has given aid and comfort to terrorists; and since this is a democracy we can always have a debate about the spying (although meaningful debate is impossible with regard to a secret program).

Already, every one of Cole’s points have been used by some writer or politician to attack Snowden.

Similar propaganda was directed at Bradley Manning, Julian Assange (a conduit of whistleblowing information through Wikileaks), and most other whistleblowers and reporters who have revealed unsavory, if not illegal, secret government actions.

Perhaps the most thorough personal attack on Snowden, bearing out Cole’s prognostications, was by New York Times columnist and PBS NewsHour commentator David Brooks. What seems to bother Brooks more than the real or imagined events of Snowden’s life, is that Snowden has no respect for authority or loyalty to authority.

Brooks seems to believe that such respect and loyalty are bestowed on government like a divine right of kings, mainly because respect and loyalty are essential for a democratic society to function properly. Brooks doesn’t believe that respect and loyalty must be earned by the government, just as it must be by individuals.

When members of Congress don’t know the extent of our government’s activities, especially those activities that appear to violate our constitutional rights, the system of checks and balances has failed, and trust in our government is nearly impossible for many Americans. But when the source of our distrust comes by way of whistleblowers, the American public seems confused. Even so, a Reuter’s poll shows that more Americans approve of Snowden’s actions than disapprove.

From my limited personal experience with whistleblowing, I have concluded that the institutional culture of large organizations in both the private and public spheres is not to make waves and to protect colleagues, as well as higher-ups. This trait is so ingrained that there is often little chance that anything will be done about wrong-doing that is reported within an organization. Worse, the wrong-doing will not become known by the public.

Bradley Manning seemed to know what I have figured out from my limited experience with corrupt authority -- the only way to get the information about U.S. atrocities to the people of the U.S. is to bypass the military and the politicians entirely.

Without Manning’s actions, we would not know how eager those with their fingers on the triggers were to kill innocent Iraqi civilians and members of the news media. We would not know how we were conducting the Middle East wars. We would not know our government’s policies and practices nearly as well as we know them now.

Manning has admitted to what he did, but the government wants to convict him of aiding the enemy -- treason. The charge would be true if the American public were the enemy. Article Three, Section Three, of the U.S. Constitution, appears to require collaboration with an actual wartime enemy of the United States (though the Supreme Court has yet to clarify this matter).

Manning released his information to the media, and it was published by such notable news purveyors as The New York Times and The Washington Post. In truth, the government was embarrassed by Manning’s disclosures and had to explain itself, which it has not been able to do successfully.

Manning’s disclosures could be termed "treason-by-embarrassment." No enemy received a tactical or strategic advantage by seeing video of the intentional murder of innocents by Americans. If al-Qaeda got some propaganda value from the release, it is of little more value than the entire immoral Afghanistan-Iraq-Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia debacle we call our War on Terror.

During Clapper’s hearing, Sen. Diane Feinstein sat silent as Clapper lied, and she has defended him since by attacking Snowden, as have many other members of Congress and the administration. Even serial liar Dick Cheney has weighed in on the electronic spying. Cheney’s position is that if elected officials in Congress and the administration approved the actions, we should trust that they are appropriate and legal. No surprise there.

But Clapper’s perjury, the propaganda attack on Snowden and the other whistleblowers, and the continuing cover-up by the administration and the Congress make it difficult to trust the government. It has little credibility, which is unfortunately true of most governments that prefer keeping the people in the dark about what the government is really doing.

Congress has oversight responsibilities, but its members would rather look into made-up scandals to hurt political opponents than keep tabs on policies that can harm the country and its people, and violate the Constitution. Most Americans have good reason to believe that the Fourth Amendment protects us from governments that engage in secret, unaccountable searches and seizures:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And the American people assume that they are protected further by the Fifth Amendment, which provides in pertinent part: “No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

When the government engages in massive electronic spying on its citizens on a scale that rivals or exceeds the abandoned Total Information Awareness program adopted after 9/11, the liberty we have accepted as our birthright has been taken from us without due process. All three branches of government -- legislative, administrative, and judicial -- have worked together to keep us from finding out how much our rights have been abused by keeping the information secret.

As Glenn Greenwald has written,

...the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing. If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?

One of the most troubling aspects of what has happened to us over the last nearly twelve years, is that we have acquiesced to this violation of basic rights, largely out of fear of another terrorist attack under the mistaken belief that only by diminishing our rights can we be safe.

Benjamin Franklin’s statement made in the Revolutionary period seems apt for this situation: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

But when none of the three branches of our government will allow us even to seek a remedy for apparent rights violations, perhaps it is unfair to use Franklin’s words to suggest that “we the people” have acquiesced to our loss of liberty.

Once again, the ACLU is attempting to obtain a court ruling on the constitutionality of NSA’s electronic spying. Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU deputy legal director, had this to say about the lawsuit the ACLU filed last week:

This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens. It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation. The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy.

Along with many Americans, I am worried about another terrorist attack in the U.S. But unlike New York Times columnists Tom Friedman and Bill Keller, I don’t find the NSA’s activities “well-regulated” when data mining has allowed the government to access anyone’s phone conversations or email communication without obtaining a warrant from an appropriate court -- even the almost-always-obliging FISA court.

And I suggest that the government’s electronic spying is different from commercial data-gathering: there is a difference between having a corporation’s computer, using an algorithm, determine our buying interests and showing us an advertisement for a product we may be interested in buying, and allowing the NSA to read our emails and listen to our phone conversations based on its access to data it acquires directly from the servers of Yahoo, Google, and other internet sources without participation by those companies.

This activity is an unprecedented breach of our constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of speech.

It is time we elected people to office who will put a stop to such activity, or our government will never again be trusted, or be worthy of our trust. A government that fights accountability at every turn cannot be trusted.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Peter Finn : Drone Used in Austin Raises Privacy Issues

Wasp III drone -- the kind used by Texas DPS in 2009 Austin police operation. Grab from KVUE.com / Austin.
Drones over Austin:
Law enforcement use of aerial drones
raises issues of privacy, civil liberties

By Peter Finn / CommonDreams / January 24, 2011

AUSTIN -- The suspect's house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles.

As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department's aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.

So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect.

"The nice thing is it's covert," said Bill C. Nabors, Jr., chief pilot with the Texas DPS, who in a recent interview described the 2009 operation for the first time publicly. "You don't hear it, and unless you know what you're looking for, you can't see it."

The drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is entering the national airspace: Unmanned aircraft are patrolling the border with Mexico, searching for missing persons over difficult terrain, flying into hurricanes to collect weather data, photographing traffic accident scenes, and tracking the spread of forest fires.

But the operation outside Austin presaged what could prove to be one of the most far-reaching and potentially controversial uses of drones: as a new and relatively cheap surveillance tool in domestic law enforcement.

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration -- which controls the national airspace -- requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground -- high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

Such technology could allow police to record the activities of the public below with high-resolution, infrared and thermal-imaging cameras.

One manufacturer already advertises one of its small systems as ideal for "urban monitoring." The military, often a first user of technologies that migrate to civilian life, is about to deploy a system in Afghanistan that will be able to scan an area the size of a small town. And the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence to seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity.

But when drones come to perch in numbers over American communities, they will drive fresh debates about the boundaries of privacy. The sheer power of some of the cameras that can be mounted on them is likely to bring fresh search-and-seizure cases before the courts, and concern about the technology's potential misuse could unsettle the public.

"Drones raise the prospect of much more pervasive surveillance," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "We are not against them, absolutely. They can be a valuable tool in certain kinds of operations. But what we don't want to see is their pervasive use to watch over the American people."

The police are likely to use drones in tactical operations and to view clearly public spaces. Legal experts say they will have to obtain a warrant to spy on private homes.


Surveillance slingshot: A Wasp drone, used by the U.S. Marine Corps, shown being launched. Image from Defense Update.
FAA authorization

As of December 1, according to the FAA, there were more than 270 active authorizations for the use of dozens of kinds of drones. Approximately 35 percent of these permissions are held by the Defense Department, 11 percent by NASA and 5 percent by the Department of Homeland Security, including permission to fly Predators on the northern and southern borders.

Other users are law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, as well as manufacturers and academic institutions.

For now, only a handful of police departments and sheriff's offices in the United States -- including in Queen Anne's County, Md., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and Mesa County, Colo.-- fly drones. They so do as part of pilot programs that mostly limit the use of the drones to training exercises over unpopulated areas.

Among state and local agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety has been the most active user of drones for high-risk operations. Since the search outside Austin, Nabors said, the agency has run six operations with drones, all near the southern border, where officers conducted surveillance of drug and human traffickers.

Some police officials, as well as the manufacturers of unmanned aerial systems, have been clamoring for the FAA to allow their rapid deployment by law enforcement. They tout the technology as a tactical game-changer in scenarios such as hostage situations and high-speed chases.

Overseas, the drones have drawn interest as well. A consortium of police departments in Britain is developing plans to use them to monitor the roads, watch public events such as protests, and conduct covert urban surveillance, according to the Guardian newspaper. Senior British police officials would like the machines to be in the air in time for the 2012 Olympics in London.

"Not since the Taser has a technology promised so much for law enforcement," said Ben Miller of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, which has used its drone, called a Draganflyer, to search for missing persons after receiving emergency authorization from the FAA.

Cost has become a big selling point. A drone system, which includes a ground operating computer, can cost less than $50,000. A new police helicopter can cost up to $1 million. As a consequence, fewer than 300 of the approximately 19,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States have an aviation capability.

"The cost issue is significant," said Martin Jackson, president of the Airborne Law Enforcement Association. "Once they open the airspace up [to drones], I think there will be quite a bit of demand."

The FAA is reluctant to simply open up airspace, even to small drones. The agency said it is addressing two critical questions: How will unmanned aircraft "handle communication, command and control"? And how will they "sense and avoid" other aircraft, a basic safety element in manned aviation?

Military studies suggest that drones have a much higher accident rate than manned aircraft. That is, in part, because the military is using drones in a battlefield environment. But even outside war zones, drones have slipped out of their handlers' control.

In the summer, a Navy drone, experiencing what the military called a software problem, wandered into restricted Washington airspace. Last month, a small Mexican army drone crashed into a residential yard in El Paso.

There are also regulatory issues with civilian agencies using military frequencies to operate drones, a problem that surfaced in recent months and has grounded the Texas DPS drones, which have not been flown since August.

"What level of trust do we give this technology? We just don't yet have the data," said John Allen, director of Flight Standards Service in the FAA's Office of Aviation Safety. "We are moving cautiously to keep the National Airspace System safe for all civil operations. It's the FAA's responsibility to make sure no one is harmed by [an unmanned aircraft system] in the air or on the ground."

Officials in Texas said they supported the FAA's concern about safety.

"We have 23 aircraft and 50 pilots, so I'm of the opinion that FAA should proceed cautiously," Nabors said.


Legal touchstones

Much of the legal framework to fly drones has been established by cases that have examined the use of manned aircraft and various technologies to conduct surveillance of both public spaces and private homes.

In a 1986 Supreme Court case, justices were asked whether a police department violated constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure after it flew a small plane above the back yard of a man suspected of growing marijuana. The court ruled that "the Fourth Amendment simply does not require the police traveling in the public airways at this altitude to obtain a warrant in order to observe what is visible to the naked eye."

In a 2001 case, however, also involving a search for marijuana, the court was more skeptical of police tactics. It ruled that an Oregon police department conducted an illegal search when it used a thermal imaging device to detect heat coming from the home of an man suspected of growing marijuana indoors.

"The question we confront today is what limits there are upon this power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 2001 case.

Still, Joseph J. Vacek, a professor in the Aviation Department at the University of North Dakota who has studied the potential use of drones in law enforcement, said the main objections to the use of domestic drones will probably have little to do with the Constitution.

"Where I see the challenge is the social norm," Vacek said. "Most people are not okay with constant watching. That hover-and-stare capability used to its maximum potential will probably ruffle a lot of civic feathers."

At least one community has already balked at the prospect of unmanned aircraft.

The Houston Police Department considered participating in a pilot program to study the use of drones, including for evacuations, search and rescue, and tactical operations. In the end, it withdrew.

A spokesman for Houston police said the department would not comment on why the program, to have been run in cooperation with the FAA, was aborted in 2007, but traffic tickets might have had something to do with it.

When KPRC-TV in Houston, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., discovered a secret drone air show for dozens of officers at a remote location 70 miles from Houston, police officials were forced to call a hasty news conference to explain their interest in the technology.

A senior officer in Houston then mentioned to reporters that drones might ultimately be used for recording traffic violations.

Federal officials said support for the program crashed.

[This article was originally published by The Washington Post and was distributed by CommonDreams. Washington Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. © 2011 The Washington Post.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jonah Raskin : Google Is Not God

Illustration © 2007 by Stuart Brown / Modern Life.
Google is not God:
Whatever happened to privacy in America?

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 3, 2010

Google often seems to be all-powerful, and as omniscient as God himself -- or the Goddess herself, as the case may be. But recently a court in Italy sentenced three Google executives to six months in prison for a video on Google that depicted students taunting and harassing an autistic kid. The Italian Judge, Oscar Magi, ruled that the video was an invasion of the privacy of the kid who did not want his image transmitted around the globe.

Google officials have been irate -- even though the sentences were suspended; not surprisingly they see the ruling as a threat to Google’s aim to operate freely, globally, without adhering to particular customs, cultures, and laws. In short, like the British Empire of old, Google doesn’t want the sun ever to set on its dominions, or for colonial territories to rebel against its world-wide hegemony. Not surprisingly, Google lawyers, and some American law professors in the United States, have viewed the decision by the Italian court as a victory of European ideas of privacy against American ideas of privacy and freedom of speech.

But wait a minute! What American ideas about privacy? And what about the actual respect for the right of privacy in the USA and not simply the ideals? Yes, two Harvard Law Professors wrote in 1890 a famous article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in which they complained that photographers were taking pictures of rich and famous people, and that the servants of the ruling classes were going to the media with tales of their debauched bosses. They demanded the “right to privacy” -- and incidentally it was the privacy of prosperous Bostonians they had in mind, not the poor Irish immigrants arriving in the harbor.

Now, 110 years later, there’s probably less actual privacy in the United States than when Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy.” There is also probably less privacy now in the United States than in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was written, and, while the word privacy is not in the Bill of Rights, it is inherent in the First, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments.

Freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of expression are connected inherently to the right to privacy -- to have and to enjoy one’s own free thoughts. During the investigations into communism and communists in the 1950s, subpoenaed witnesses often invoked the First Amendment when they declined to answer questions about their political beliefs and affiliations.Tthe First Amendment and the Right to Privacy might be thought of as two sides of the same coin -- both aimed at protecting the citizens against arbitrary power whatever its source.

So, one might ask, why is there less privacy today than in 1890 or 1790. First, because of expanded government power, recently augmented in the Patriot Act that gives the government the right to monitor phone calls, and emails, and maintain surveillance of citizens –- all in the name of the war on terrorists and terrorism. There are more “unreasonable searches and seizures” today than there were in 1890. Police power to search and seize is almost though not entirely unlimited.

Second, there is less privacy now because of the power of corporations –- linked to computers and the Internet –- that monitor what consumers buy and sell, where they shop, and how much they spend –- with the aim of branding them and persuading them to spend more money. Marketplace privacy is largely a thing of the past.

Third, there is less privacy today than 100 or so years ago, because Americans are tattling on their friends, their neighbors, their lovers, and their spouses. They’re tattling on Facebook and they’re twittering, too, and for the moment there does not seem any way to curtain those invasions of privacy. As a culture we are outing ourselves. We are outing our own brothers, as in the case of Mark McGuire’s brother who recently wrote a book about steroid use by the home run king.

Even in what might be called the heyday of privacy in the 1960s and 1970s, when citizens and consumers rose up to protest and to protect themselves against big government and big corporations, privacy was rarely if ever absolute. In court, when a newspaper could persuade a judge that the information it published was “newsworthy,” the newspaper was almost always ruled not guilty of invasion of privacy.

Judges – especially male judges –- had an odd way of thinking about and defining privacy. So, naked women’s bodies made their way into newspapers and magazines –- as “newsworthy” -- even when women cried “invasion of privacy.” Some mothers, like Brooke Shields’s mother, sold nude photos of their own daughters when the price was right.

The right to privacy has been superseded by the power of the mass media, including Google, to spotlight and publicize the fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary as well as extraordinary citizens –- the poorest of the poor, as well as the richest of the rich. There is, of course, also a long history of this kind of journalism in the United States. The penny press of the mid 19th-century –- so-called because the newspapers sold for one cent –- capitalized on the tragedies of the urban poor: poverty, suicide, domestic violence, and alcoholism.

It was all entertainment –- all part of the spectacle of American culture. Reporters and photographers zoomed into private spaces, caught people in marital affairs, or stuffing their faces with food, and snorting cocaine.

We no longer have the “stocks” in which colonial Americans were locked down in public and for the purpose of humiliation. But we have the mass media to ridicule citizens, mock them, and dehumanize them. The judgments made by the mass media can be as harsh as the rulings of judges, or the acts of executioners. Invasions of privacy are sometimes as effective in enforcing conformity as hell-and-brimstone sermons from the pulpit, or arrests for indecency and profanity.

Google, it seems to me, has no right to invade the privacy of citizens anywhere in the world. Google has an obligation to be responsible. As a giant corporation, it is not the little man or the little woman battling against tyrannical power. It has all the potential to be tyrannical itself, and it is refreshing to know that a judge in Italy kept an eye on Google and stood up to Google’s imperial power and its imperious executives.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism and Field Days. He teaches media law at Sonoma State University.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Deep Packet Inspection : Global Censorship Technology Used in Iran -- AND in U.S.

Deep Packet Inspection:
Free Press warns of global censorship technology deployed in U.S.

DPI technology is America's sleeping giant. It has been widely deployed by Internet service providers across the country, and could be secretly put to use without our knowledge or consent.

By Jen Howard / June 22, 2009

WASHINGTON -- According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran and China are likely using Deep Packet Inspection technology to monitor and control the Internet.

This spring, a Free Press report, Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It?, argued that DPI technology poses a major threat to the open Internet, giving network providers unprecedented power over Internet users. The use of DPI by U.S. companies like Comcast and Cox has already sparked widespread concern about abuses of Net Neutrality and online privacy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Iranian government appears to be using this same technology "to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes." The Chinese government is believed to be using DPI to implement its "Great Firewall," "widely considered the most advanced and extensive censoring in the world" -- an "arrangement that depends on the cooperation of all the service providers."

In a May speech, President Barack Obama said, "Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not -- I repeat, will not include -- monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to Net Neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be -- open and free."

Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, issued the following statement:

"DPI technology is America's sleeping giant. It has been widely deployed by Internet service providers across the country, and could be secretly put to use without our knowledge or consent.

"The American Internet experience is not the same as that of Iran or China. But we see how dangerous this technology can be when it falls into the wrong hands, or is used for the wrong purposes. Whether DPI is wielded by a government or a big corporation, the power to pursue political or economic discrimination is disturbing.

"President Obama clearly understands the critical importance of preserving our online civil liberties. The United States should set a shining example by safeguarding the free and open Internet against power grabs by governments or ISPs.

"We urge our lawmakers to heed the cautionary tale of Iran and China. We should not blindly permit concentrated control over the Internet. Before this technology is widely activated, we encourage Congress to open a broad inquiry to determine what is in the best interest of the American people."

[Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications. Learn more at www.freepress.net.]

Source / Free Press

Also read:

• Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology by Christopher Rhoads and Loretta Chao / Wall Street Journal / June 23, 2009
• US computer group disturbed by tech supplied to Iran / AFP / Google News / June 22, 2009
• Read Deep Packet Inspection: The End of the Internet as We Know It? / by M. Chris Riley and Ben Scott / Free Press / March, 2009
• Fed contractor, cell phone maker sold spy system to Iran / by Eli Lake / Washington Times / April 13, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

FCC Warrantless Searches : Coming to a Home Near You?

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts

'Anything using RF energy -- we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,' says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

By Ryan Singel / May 21, 2009

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device.

“Anything using RF energy -- we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

The FCC claims it derives its warrantless search power from the Communications Act of 1934, though the constitutionality of the claim has gone untested in the courts. That’s largely because the FCC had little to do with average citizens for most of the last 75 years, when home transmitters were largely reserved to ham-radio operators and CB-radio aficionados. But in 2009, nearly every household in the United States has multiple devices that use radio waves and fall under the FCC’s purview, making the commission’s claimed authority ripe for a court challenge.

“It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. “When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna — the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre.”

George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, a constitutional law expert, also questions the legalilty of the policy.

“The Supreme Court has said that the government can’t make warrantless entries into homes for administrative inspections,” Kerr said via e-mail, refering to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that housing inspectors needed warrants to force their way into private residences. The FCC’s online FAQ doesn’t explain how the agency gets around that ruling, Kerr adds.


The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a
2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. “Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection,” the statement says.

The notice spooked those running "Boulder Free Radio,” who thought it was just tough talk intended to scare them into shutting down, according to one of the station’s leaders, who spoke to Wired.com on condition of anonymity. “This is an intimidation thing,” he said. “Most people aren’t that dedicated to the cause. I’m not going to let them into my house.”

But refusing the FCC admittance can carry a harsh financial penalty. In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC’s direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

Administrative search powers are not rare, at least as directed against businesses -- fire-safety, food and workplace-safety regulators generally don’t need warrants to enter a business. And despite the broad power, the FCC agents aren’t cops, says Fiske. “The only right they have is to inspect the equipment,” Fiske says. “If they want to seize, they have to work with the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

But if inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior — say, a marijuana plant or stolen property -- a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger’s automobile junkyard. When he couldn’t produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

In the meantime, pirate radio stations are adapting to the FCC’s warrantless search power by dividing up a station’s operations. For instance, Boulder Free Radio consists of an online radio station operated by DJs from a remote studio. Miles away, a small computer streams the online station and feeds it to the transmitter. Once the FCC comes and leaves a notice on the door, the transmitter is moved to another location before the agent returns.

[This post was updated Thursday morning to include comment from Professor Kerr, and to remove an inaccurate example of unrelated criminal behavior.]

Source / Wired

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on The Peep Diaries

To Peep or Not to Peep? That is the Question

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2009

[The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, by Hal Niedzviecki, City Lights.]

In 1953, the British historian, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox” that made him famous the world over. Berlin argued that there were two fundamentally different kinds of thinkers. There were the hedgehogs of the world, and there were the foxes. The hedgehogs had, he explained, one dominant idea that informed everything they wrote about. The foxes knew a great many things, and were not satisfied to be identified with a single all-embracing idea.

Berlin didn’t originate the hedgehog and the fox concept. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus did thousands of years ago, but Berlin gave it currency in the 20th-century, and it caught on. So, Dante and Hegel are often grouped with the hedgehogs; Shakespeare and James Joyce with the foxes. If nothing else the hedgehog and the fox categories provide fodder for cocktail parties. An entrepreneurial fellow might create a Hedgehog and Fox Blog; everyone with email could join one group or another, or put their friends in a category.

Hal Niedzviecki would probably be found among the hedgehogs. In true hedgehog fashion, he finds a single idea and holds on to it tenaciously. He sees everything and everyone through the lens of that one idea. In his new book, The Peep Diaries the hedgehog idea is right there in the subtitle: “How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors.” Niedzviecki hammers away at his idea for more than two hundred pages, and if somehow you’ve missed it in the subtitle he repeats it in the book itself. “We’re all learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors,” he says in chapter one.

Much of what Niedzviecki says is obvious. Everyone reading this online, as you’re doing now, already knows most if not all of what he has to say. “More than ever we’re putting everything on line,” Niedzviecki writes. Gee! He adds, “it’s getting harder and harder to keep a secret.” Wow! A bit further on he writes, “In the age of Peep, everyone wants to know everything (and everyone wants everyone else to know everything) about who they are, why they are, and how they are.” What will he think of next? Still further on he observes, “Peep culture is our (admittedly twisted) answer to the problem of the dehumanizing of humanity.”

Aha! “The dehumanizing of humanity.” Now, there’s a big theme that nearly every college sophomore has written about in a term paper for the last 50 years. I know I did, and so did many of my classmates. Sophomores are still writing essays on that subject. Much of what Niedzviecki says is trite, clichéd, and dare I say it, muddleheaded.

Perhaps the main problem I have is with the word “Love” in the subtitle – as in “how we’re learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors.” Now, I know that advertising and public relations persuade masses of people to love things – like Wendy’s hamburgers – and people – like Brad Pitt – so that we consume them in one way or another. But as a teacher at a public university in California I also know that my students do not love the loss of their privacy. Yes, they email and Blog and take photos of themselves and their friends and post them. That is true. But they also dislike invasions of their privacy, and indeed feel that they have a right to it. They don’t want anyone to follow them in the bathroom and watch them poop or pee.

Some of them are willing to fight to preserve their privacy. I know. I teach a class that focuses on privacy issues. In a recent moot court we held in class the students were all on the side of the citizens whose privacy was violated, and against the media that invaded it. When I told them that our college president had surgery to shrink the size of his stomach, and that he had lost 100 pounds they insisted that wasn’t news, and that they’d never print it in the campus newspaper.

I disagreed. If Derek Jeter’s hands and Alex Rodriguez’s knees are news, the college president’s stomach is news, too. He’s getting paid $150,000 a year, and I want to know if he’s healthy or not and able to do his job.

I have always liked gossip, and I like to gossip. I have gossiped about Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Jessica Mitford, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the son and daughter of my friends, Naomi and Stephen Gyllenhaal, who produced Homegrown, the marijuana movie I wrote, and who made everyone who worked on the movie sign a contract saying that they would not do drugs during production. Sometimes there is more news in so-called gossip then in hard news stories. Whenever I hear juicy gossip I email friends. I tell the world. I have largely lived a transparent life ever since I wrote my autobiography Out of the Whale in 1974. I recommend transparency – though Niedzviecki mostly doesn’t. Come out and play, I say.

Privacy is also a very strange thing. In many ways it’s hard to lose it, no matter how hard you try because the context is all-important. When I tell students in a crowded lecture hall that I dropped acid and rioted in the streets in the 1970s it doesn’t mean much if anything to them, and I don’t feel that I have lost my privacy, whatever that is. The students weren’t there, then. They don’t know that historical moment and what it meant. They don’t get it. So, I’m as private as I ever was.

Near the end of The Peep Diaries, Niedzviecki writes that when he began his book he wasn’t sure if he’d end it on a note of “pro or anti-Peep.” When he did reach the end, he says, he was “as undecided as ever” and that he still didn’t know where he stands. “Do I install every possible privacy protection on my computer? Do I track my friends and let them track me?” He does say that he has come to one strong, definite conclusion: he won’t put a picture of his daughter on his blog. And he won’t mention her name online, either.

“That’s about the only thing I’m absolutely sure about when it comes to Peep,” he writes. On his website he writes, “Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a 37 year-old writer/thinker. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and two-and-a-half year-old.” In a way he has already exposed his daughter. We know she exists; we know her age, we know who her father is. Writing about oneself, one automatically and inevitably writes about others. It is impossible, or nearly so, not to out friends and family if we are writers. It comes with the territory.

Niedzviecki’s book begins to become interesting at the very end when he gets beyond glib phrases like the “dehumanizing of humanity,” and writes about himself, his wife and his daughter. This book could use more candor and more disclosure; make it more like a diary, Hal, and less like a dissertation. The book could also benefit from an insightful comment made by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald had a better idea, I think, than Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs and foxes. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Perhaps if Niedzviecki had started The Peep Diaries by disclosing his duality about “the culture of peep” it would have made for more compelling reading. It would certainly have made the book far more of a human document. After all, the essential humanity of the author is what matters most of all.

[Find Hal Niedzviecki's The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors at City Lights.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Worse Than Thought : Maryland Spied on EVERYBODY

Maryland State Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan announced in October that the department was sending letters to activists, inviting them to review their files. Photo by Sarah L. Voisin / The Washington Post.

'The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.'

By Steve Benen / January 4, 2009

SURVEILLANCE STATE RUN AMOK....

In July, the Washington Post reported on undercover Maryland State Police officers conducting surveillance on war protesters and death penalty opponents. Today, we learn that the monitoring was worse, and more pervasive, than first believed.

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights."

And people wonder why "civil-liberties types" worry about government abuse when it comes to surveillance of Americans.

Under the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), Maryland law enforcement infiltrated law-abiding protest groups and labeled 53 Americans, who had done nothing wrong, as "terrorists" in a state database shared with federal authorities. (It turns out, their law enforcement database didn't have categories for anti-war activists.

Police created "terrorism" categories to make filing easier. How reassuring.)

How many Maryland State Police officials have been punished as a result of this project? To date, none. An undercover trooper who infiltrated peace groups has instead been promoted twice.

The Maryland State Police is "preparing to purge files and say they are expecting lawsuits." It seems like a safe bet.

Source / Political Animal / Washington Monthly

See More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying by Lisa Rein and Josh White / Washington Post / January 4, 2008

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Obama's 'Black Widow' : The Super Spy Computer

'The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.'

By Nat Hentoff

Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood: "The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages."

In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans' telephone and Internet communications.

The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: "The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing."

This gives the word "dragnet" an especially chilling new meaning.

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, director of its National Security Project, adds that the new statute, warming the cold hearts of the NSA, "implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind."

Why did Obama vote for this eye-that-never-blinks? He's a bright, informed guy, but he wasn't yet the President-Elect. The cool pragmatist wanted to indicate he wasn't radically unmindful of national security—and that his previous vow to filibuster such a bill may have been a lapse in judgment. It was.

What particularly outraged civil libertarians across the political divide was that the FISA Amendments Act gave immunity to the telecommunications corporations—which, for seven years, have been a vital part of the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program—thereby dismissing the many court cases brought by citizens suing those companies for violating their individual constitutional liberties. This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.

That's OK with the Obama administration? Please tell us, Mr. President.

Some of us began to see how deeply and intricately the telecoms were involved in the NSA's spying when—as part of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit—it was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant's fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio on November 7, 2007, he disclosed: "It's not just AT&T's traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T's network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest [the one firm that refused to play ball with the government], Global Crossing, UUNet, etc."

What you should know is that these fruitful cables go through "a splitter" that, as Klein describes, "just copies the entire data without any selection going on. So it's a complete copy of the data stream."

Under the new FISA Amendments Act, there are no limits on where this stream of data can be disseminated. As in the past, but now with "legal" protection under the 2008 statute, your suspicious "patterns" can go to the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, and state and local police that are also involved in "fusion centers" with the FBI.

Consider the enormous and bottomless databases that the government—and its NSA—can have a ball with. In James Bamford's The Shadow Factory (Doubleday)—a new book that leads you as far as anyone has gone into the bowels of the NSA—he notes: "For decades, AT&T and much of the rest of the telecommunications industry have had a very secret, very cozy relationship with the NSA." In AT&T's case, he points out, "its international voice service carried more than 18 billion minutes per year, reaching 240 countries, linking 400 carriers, and offering remote access via 19,500 points of presence in 149 countries around the globe."

Voilá! Also, he notes: "Much of those communications passed through that secret AT&T room that Klein found on Folsom Street in downtown San Francisco."

There's a lot more to come that we don't know about. Yet. In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford quotes Bush's Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as saying that this wiretapping program was and is "only one program of many highly secret programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11" (emphasis added). McConnell also said of the NSA's nonstop wiretapping: "This is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has officially been acknowledged."

Come on, Mike. Bush acknowledged the NSA's flagrant contempt of the First and Fourth amendments only after The New York Times broke the story in December 2005. When the Times executive editor, Bill Keller, first decided to hold the explosive story for a year, General Michael Hayden—the former head of the NSA who is currently running the CIA—was relieved because he didn't want the news to get out that "most international communications pass through [these telecommunications] 'switching,' " Bamford reports. It would blow the cover off those corporate communicators. Now, AT&T, Verizon, et al., don't have to worry, thanks to the new law.

There are increasing calls, inside and outside of Congress, for President Obama to urge investigations by an independently bipartisan commission—akin to the 9/11 Commission—to get deeply into the many American and international laws so regally broken by Bush and his strutting team.

But there is so much still to find out about the NSA's "many highly secret programs" that a separate commission is sorely needed to probe exclusively into the past and ongoing actions of the Black Widow and other NSA lawless intrusions into our privacy and ideas.

President Obama could atone for his vote that supported the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 by appointing such a bipartisan commission composed of technology experts who are also familiar with the Constitution.

Bamford says that the insatiable NSA is "developing an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking." Here come the thought police!

Source / The Village Voice / Posted Dec. 23, 2009

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Invasive Procedures : Privacy, and Online Behaviorial Targeting

Privacy advocates meet with Obama's people concerning online advertising and the use of behavioral research.
by Wendy Davis / December 17, 2008

Privacy advocates met Tuesday with members of President-elect Barack Obama's Federal Trade Commission transition team to urge that the government more aggressively regulate the online advertising industry.

"The overall message was that the Bush FTC gets an 'F' on privacy," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "We're expecting the Obama team to take a better approach."

Chester, who two years ago filed a complaint with the FTC about online behavioral targeting, is pressing for new laws that would require marketers to seek Web users' permission before tracking them for ad purposes.

Other groups at the one-hour meeting Tuesday with FTC transition team heads Susan Ness and Phil Weiser included the ACLU, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and World Privacy Forum.

Online ad executives and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have argued that the FTC should not restrict behavioral targeting because the practice does not harm consumers. Ad companies also say that behavioral targeting is often anonymous because they don't collect names, addresses or other so-called personally identifiable information. Instead, companies track users anonymously via cookies as they go from site to site, compile profiles, and then serve ads to users based on their presumed interests.

But privacy advocates have questioned just how anonymous this type of targeting really is. They say that in some circumstances, it might be possible to identify specific individuals from detailed profile information.

In addition, some consumer advocates say behavioral targeting is inherently problematic.

"Behavioral tracking and targeting is actually deceptive on its face because consumers' information is being collected by entities with whom they have no relationship, to whom they didn't give their information, and for purposes of which they're unaware," said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America.

Grant added that her organization was concerned that some consumers could face tangible consequences due to behavioral targeting. For instance, she said, companies could potentially use information gleaned from tracking people online to make different offers to different people.

Some of the advocates also criticized the Network Advertising Initiative's new privacy guidelines to the transition team. Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said those standards don't adequately protect the privacy of people's medical information.

"To say they're non-starters is an understatement," Dixon said.

The new NAI guidelines call for ad companies to refrain from collecting data about sensitive medical information or serving ads related to such information, unless consumers expressly consent. The prior guidelines said marketers should never collect such data if it was personally identifiable, but allowed them to do so if the information was anonymous and people could opt out.

Source / MediaPost

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...