Homeland Security Given Permission to Monitor (a.k.a. spy on) American Journalists

Freedom of the Press?  And how do you define "the Press"?  Are bloggers and social media mavens part of the Press?  And what if the government starts collecting information on those it deems are "the Press"?

Freedom of the Press is a nice principle that isn't really encoded in any laws.  It's not like Freedom of Speech that's so important it was the first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Freedom of the Press should mean that those of us who self-identify as Press can go about our business without government interference.  There are plenty of examples from around the world, both modern and in the past, of governments afraid of the stories reported by journalists, and they used all sorts of legal leverage against journalists, and in some cases unfairly imprisoning for supposed anti-government sentiments or whatnot, not to mention all the journalists killed under mysterious circumstances.  Freedom of the press is meant to counter that tendency of governments and other powerful people to try to stop certain stories from being published.

RT News is somewhat disingenuously reporting on an effort by the U.S. Homeland Security Department to gather publicly visible information about 'news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”'

This is a really broad definition of people because those who keep an audience "situationally aware and informed" includes anybody who routinely posts links to articles on social media networks.  Posting links to those networks is a highly common activity and is undertaken by anybody seriously interested in building an audience.

The project scours the social networks for information, but the DHS claims it is not collecting "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII) .. "While this Initiative is not designed to actively collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII), OPS is conducting this update to the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) because this initiative may now collect and disseminate PII for certain narrowly tailored categories."  While they aren't collecting PII they can collect it if necessary such as:  "For example, in the event of an in extremis situation involving potential life and death, OPS will share certain PII with the responding authority in order for them to take the necessary actions to save a life, such as name and location of a person calling for help buried under rubble, or hiding in a hotel room when the hotel is under attack by terrorists."

The authority cited is Section 515 of the Homeland Security Act (6 U.S.C. § 321d(b)(1)

Where the RT News report becomes disingenuous is when they say this:-  "The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses."

In other words, RT News is demonstrating a belief that this is somehow new behavior on the part of the U.S. Government.  In truth the Government has been working on what they call "open source intelligence" for years.  Namely, collecting publicly available information for intelligence gathering purposes.  The social media networks make this easy because many of us actively want to be found on those networks which is great if we want to build an audience, but that audience may include Big Brother government agents snooping on our every tweet.

I've written about this plenty of times before:- 

• Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic 
• Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information
• Massive privacy violation by U.S. government
• Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
• Federal Reserve looking to launch "sentiment analysis and social media monitoring" program

The thing about publicly available information is that it's publicly available.  Complaining about it being collected is a bit silly, really.

However it is troublesome.  For a reason why ponder a factoid about the Jewish Holocaust.  The Nazi government contracted with the IBM subsidiary in Germany to develop machines to assist with gathering and tracking information about the ethnicity of the population.  This was the 1930's and the technology were simple punch cards and automated machines for processing the punch cards, but there's no way in heck you could call these machines "Computers" because those didn't start to come into existence until the 1950's.  In any case no matter how rudimentary the machines IBM could supply at that time, it did enable the German government to efficiently find Jewish people to send to the Concentration camps.

Fast forward to the marvelous computers we have today ..




Some supporting documents:-

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/supporting-documentation-for-homeland.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/april-2010-bp-oil-spill-response-social.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/2010-winter-olympics-social-media-event.html

http://politics.7gen.com/2012/01/haiti-social-media-disaster-monitoring.html

Pondering the Dangers of eBooks warning from Richard Stallman

I'm planning to get into writing books using e-Book Publishing as the means to get published. Modern technology and the Internet have given us a very interesting opportunity for authors to have more freedom and ownership over their work in a way that hasn't been possible ever in the history of book publishing. At the same time these modern gizmos (Kindle's, Nooks, iPad's, etc) contain buried within them an implementation which endangers the freedom of information and the accepted norms we have as book consumers. Richard Stallman recently released a one page PDF outlining the freedom concerns related to electronic books as currently implemented, and calling for a different implementation that preserves the existing freedom model around printed books. I've embedded the document below and have a long list of thoughts about this.

I think the first topic to cover is the question: Why should we pay attention to this guy? Who is he? To me Richard Stallman is something of a hero who inspired legions of software engineers with software freedom ideology. He might cringe at the phrase but Open Source Software owes a lot to the thinking he did around the ideology of Free Software. Lest you wonder what Open Source Software is about, most of the websites you visit (like this one) are built using open source (or free) software, and so are most of the web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and to an extent Safari) as are the Linux or FreeBSD or Mac OS X operating systems built either entirely or in-part with open source (free) software.

He makes a distinction about Free Software as being different from Open Source, where Free Software is distributed under terms with baked-in guarantee of preserved freedom. Free Software isn't about the cost but about the Freedom.

While his career has been about applying this ideology of freedom to software, the same ideology can be applied in other areas, and the document he posted attempts to apply it to books.

The context is - as he puts it - business dominates government and writes the laws, so it shouldn't be surprising that the result is a weak government whose laws benefit businesses over the needs of we the people. In that context technology is being developed as businesses develop new products to dazzle us with, and time and again the products are being developed to chain us in bonds of enslavement rather than granting us freedom.

It may be difficult to look at an iPad or Kindle and see it as chains of enslavement, but the chains are there nonetheless.

He first describes the current book publishing and distributing system as having a lot of freedom. I've uploaded the document to scribd.com to enable embedding it and hopefully it's visible below, or you can download the PDF directly from his website (linked below). I find myself almost entirely agreeing with his claims:

buy anonymously with cash: Go to any bookstore where they sell printed books and quaint as it may seem today they do take cash. Buying with cash means your transaction is completely anonymous. This freedom is especially important in a time when the police state is for example routinely demanding to see records of book borrowing from libraries, or book purchases.

you own it: Here is one claim where Stallman is off base. I know he understands the word Copyright and would have to agree that when you buy a printed book you're not ending up with ownership of the words on the paper to do with as you wish. You've bought a pile of paper with ink printed on it, and because of Copyright the real owner of the book is the publishing house that printed the ink on the paper. I'm in the middle of writing a book myself and the contract I signed with the publisher includes turning over copyright over the material I'm writing.

not required to sign a license to use the book: Again, there is a Copyright on the book and while you don't sign a license agreement there is an implied pseudo click-through license.

known format, nothing proprietary to read it: Well this is true unless the book is written in a language you do not understand.

freedom to scan and copy the book: Here he's showing some disingenuousity regarding copyright. Copyright law generally prohibits wholesale scanning or copying of books.

Nobody has the power to destroy your book: Maybe he's forgotten about book burnings? While book burning is in the past, I think the religious right when/if they establish the Theocracy they want for America plan to hold massive book burnings of anything that doesn't agree with their brand of Christian Ideology.

The existing printed book system isn't quite as open and free as he puts it. Yes there's a lot of actual freedom such as the whole industry of used bookstores and the ability to trade books with your friends etc. But the main problem with printed book system is the control over who is allowed to be a book author. Publishers are in charge and act strongly to prohibit who can or cannot become published by dint of owning the printing press.

Electronic books offer authors quite a lot of newfound freedom. It's now possible for an author to just put together a document with their word processor, and go to any of several service bureaus to get books into the electronic book marketplaces. It's opened up opportunity galore for authors to become published.

At the same time, as he says, the existing electronic book system does erase the freedoms book consumers have enjoyed over the years. It's impossible to share an electronic book after you "buy" it, impossible to sell it on the used book market, impossible to return it to the store for a refund, etc. Further some electronic book market owners have used back door access to electronic book readers to change or delete books after they were purchased.

He's quite right in raising an alarm about the freedom our society has to access to information as it currently exists. I'm quite concerned by the situation of electronic books. At the same time I'm relishing the thought of much easier access to the marketplace as an author. It's a mixed set of freedoms and constraints.

The Danger of eBooks - Richard Stallman

Links: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57314192/The-Danger-of-eBooks-Richard-Stallman

Links: 

http://stallman.org/articles/ebooks.pdf

Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic

Today NPR ran a piece on University of Buffalo Computer scientist Rohini Srihari who is developing automated translation software which can be aimed at social networks allowing english speaking folk to read non-english tweets. Maybe this sounds benign, after all Google Chrome has some of this ability built in. In another tab as I write I have a french web-page open which Chrome translated for me into semi-readable text. It's really useful having automated language translation because it can help us connect more readily with each other over the Internet. So why did I put an alarmist title on this post? It's because of the Dept of Defense Total Information Awareness system, and that Dr. Srihari's research is funded by the U.S. Military.

In case you've forgotten what TIA is, this occurred several dozen alarming revelations ago in the months after GW Bush was elected and remained public until some time in 2002. The TIA project was headed by (ret) Admiral Poindexter (the guy convicted of lying to congress during the Iran-Contra period) to apply modern datamining technology to national security intelligence activities. The intent is to create an all-encompassing system of tracking a huge amount of information (total information awareness), look for "patterns" indicating nefarious activities, and nip them in the bud early.

This was one of the first articles I posted way back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate ... The Defense Department pages referenced are no longer public, but I did a comprehensive summary of the program.

Dr. Rohini's project doesn't fit neatly into the projects cited under the TIA umbrella back in 2002, however many of the projects were associated with language translation. This way the US Intelligence Community could hire anybody, rather than rely on language/social experts, for intelligence analysts.

As the NPR piece said: "One way to follow what's going on in the Middle East and South Asia right now is through social media — Facebook, Twitter and blog posts." This is called "open source intelligence" or intelligence gathering from sources out in the open.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are awesome but one side effect is they force global social conversations to be conducted in the open where "anybody" can listen in. While that's kinda cool in the light of creating more connection between everyone on a global scale, it does mean that spies can snoop on everything.

What if, for example, the spies are looking for signs of an impending uprising against a brutal dictator who happens to be friendly to the United States, and receives lots of United States funding and equipment and training which increases the effectiveness of that dictators military forces? The U.S. routinely does this, support government leaders who are brutal to their people. Mubarak, the recently deposed leader of Egypt, was one of those brutal dictators.

What will the U.S. spies do if they notice the impending uprising? Stand back and applaud the revolution? Or do something that will help the brutal dictator stay in power? If the U.S. has invested so much money in maintaining a particular government structure (no matter how brutal) wouldn't they act to protect their investment?

As Dr. Rohini said: "What I want is to determine who are the people, places and things being talked about," she says. "Is there an opinion being expressed? Is it a positive or negative opinion being expressed?" And... "And when you are able to figure out what the topic of the conversation is," she says, "what kind of sentiment is being expressed around that, that's the goal of what we are trying to do." And... "So in Twitter posts and tweets and so on, if there's specific factual information that's being mentioned — they want that extracted," Srihari says. "There's also definitely an interest in sentiment and opinion mining."

Who's to say that foreigners speaking their local languages aren't the only group being targeted by the total information vacuuming project? Perhaps they're also vacuuming up social network conversations by Americans? Don't believe me? See: Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information

Other related articles:

Total Information Awareness lives on...

Another brick to building the Total Information Awareness system

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Links: 

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135049784/computer-translator-reads-between-the-tw...

Ed Markey, chairman, House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming - - POLITICO.com

“It is vitally important that we show we are no longer turning a blind eye to the problem of climate change,” Markey told POLITICO. “The Obama administration will be able to say to the world, ‘We are no longer going to preach temperance from a bar stool; we are now ready to begin to make a commitment.’” Still it is possible Markey and dozens of other House members would be no-shows, if their presence was needed on Capitol Hill to vote on the health care bill. But if he makes it to Copenhagen with his colleagues, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Markey said, “our message will be that the Congress is committed to partnering with the Obama administration toward the goal of passing historic energy and climate legislation.”

Article Reference: 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30066.html

Internet means Freedom? Or more Tyranny?

For a long time many have claimed that the growth of the Internet will mean that the proletariat can shake off the chains of tyranny and gain freedom. But is that true? Clearly there are examples where the Internet and the Web have played a significant part in the people circumventing official media dominance to learn things tyrannical governments would rather not be known. Clearly that can lead to more freedom and perhaps the ability of the proletariat to actually revolt against their tyrannical governments. But is this always the case?

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships goes into this.. so ...

He's got some good points.. that it's up to the people using the Internet to use it in a given way. Just because the creator of a thing wants it used one way doesn't mean the users will do so, they may have some other use for the thing than the intended purpose. Also the powers that be have an ability to be inventive about ways of using the Internet to gather open source intelligence, or to engage with their critics in a way that defuses the criticisms.

I think at the basic fundamental level for a society to successfully revolt against a tyrannical government, the society has to take the step of kicking the bums out. That means an actual revolution, fighting in the street, etc. It won't happen automatically once we all have a blog and can post our thoughts for everybody else to read.

An example is -- if Television is the Opiate of the Masses -- World of Warcraft and other addictive Internet experiences are doubly so. In China for example World of Warcraft and other online games are so widespread that they've identified "Internet Addiction" as a disease and have treatment centers for it.

Someone on the Internet playing games is not a threat to the tyranny of the regime, just as television addicts are also not a threat to the tyranny.

Free Green home plans, and open source green technology

The Free Green project is pretty interesting. I'm completely in agreement with their mission: "At FreeGreen we hope to encourage progressive building practices by making green home designs free for everyone." What they're doing is providing free house plans which are 'green' -- meaning energy efficient, healthy materials, etc.

You can download the plans for free and take them directly to a builder to arrange construction. They also sell green building products, offer design services, etc.

Despite the zero cost do not confuse this operation with open source. The license these plans are published under do not fit the real open source model. However this is still a very cool service.

UPDATE: I downloaded one of their plans to check out the service.. it's pretty impressive though I have no way to know if these plans are enough to go to a house builder. One thing to be aware of is to download plans you have to register, giving your email address and a couple other bits of identification.

To download plans you're asked to make some selections in a form that describes the sort of house you're looking for. It seems they mean to allow you to search through hundreds of house plans to select the one most fitting your needs. Today there are only two plans available, one for a typical 3-5 person family with a two-car garage, the other a "suburban loft" style home.

The plans download includes three PDF fils: a 'Welcome' package, an energy analysis, and the actual construction plans.

The welcome package is very extensive and gives great information about building a 'green' home and some items to think about. For example there's a really interesting point to ponder about green home financing. It's often thought the price for a green building is higher than a nongreen home, but they suggest a way to reframe this question. The real issue, they suggest, is the cash flow. The vast majority of home purchases are on a mortgage so while your monthly mortgage payment would likely be higher due to the higher purchase price, your other payments (utilities etc) would be lower plus you might easily qualify for a government tax break. The trick is to make the utility cost savings offset the increased mortgage payment.

The welcome package also contains a LEED Certification checklist that's already filled in with the LEED points. LEED? They also include a few pages describing the LEED certification process and how to interpret the checklist.

The energy analysis demonstrates one of the values in potential energy savings. In the plan I downloaded the baseline energy use of a typical house of that size was said to cost over $2,700 per year, however they describe two scenarios of lower energy use with a final cost of either $1,700 per year or $1,000 per year. The latter involves building a photovoltaic system into the house.

The plans document is a detailed walk-through of construction techniques, requirements, LEED certification details etc. There are many pages of engineering drawings showing construction details at all levels from overall floor plan to the inner construction of the walls and more. However since I've never read a set of house construction plans I have no idea whether these are sufficient for a builder to construct a house.

The welcome package suggests the plans are sufficient and that it will help to look for a builder possessing one of these certifications: LEED for Homes, NAHB Green Building Program, or EnergyStar

Links: 

http://www.freegreen.com/

Links: 

http://www.freegreen.com/Terms-Conditions.aspx

External Media

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

"It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps." The article details 10 steps to turn a free society into a dictatorship. These steps have been taken over and over in countries around the world and have been demonstrated to work. Most recently they were taken following the Coup in Thailand that overthrew the Democracy there.

Article Reference: 

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

e-FOIA reviewed by the National Security Archive

"The Freedom of Information Act enables the public to obtain information from the federal government to ascertain... "what the government is up to."...a government shrouded in secrecy is not a government by the people and for the people."

It is far less burdensome and costly for federal agencies to post basic and most frequently requested information online than to respond separately to many individual requests for the same information when that information cannot be accessed on agency Web sites.

While the National Security Archive audit highlights some chief offenders of E-FOIA, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (a Department of Homeland Security component) and the Air Force, the audit also compliments certain federal branches, such as NASA for proactively posting records of great interest to the public (like the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster) and the Department of Education for providing guidance and tools like online forms for FOIA requesters.

Article Reference: 

Freedom of information? Uncle Sam, get it right!

"We have written a blank check on drawn our liberties"

This is Olbermann commenting on the recent law, the Military Commissions Act, which suspended Habeas Corpus. George W Bush and others lied to us a string of claims, lies, that led to the recent signing of this law which suspends Habeas Corpus and other guarantees. It was sold to us as a way to protect freedoms, but are we free if the government can just lock us up with no just cause, not required to show proof of our existence, etc? This has happened in the past, in the United States, when Habeas Corpus was suspended. At times Newspaper journalists and editors have been imprisoned, by the government, for the things they wrote in their newspapers. And more famously during World War II the Japanese descendants living in the U.S. were imprisoned, not because of anything they did, but because they were Japanese. We have entered a new era where the government is now free to do this again.

Here's another video talking about what Habeas Corpus is. It's pointed out the U.S. says, about Habeas Corpus, that it cannot be suspended unless the country finds itself in grave danger such as invasion or rebellion. Now, is the U.S. in actual danger of any invasion?

An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.

With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Their work is described this way:

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

...

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

In other words their job is similar to the Google Earth service. But it's likely that, because they're the military, the resolution on their images is much better.

The images available through commercial services are, by law, limited to a resolution of 1 meter. Meaning the smallest object that can be identified is 1 meter in size. So we wonder what their resolution is. For example if you have a habit of having sex in the back yard, the commercial images won't recognize what you're doing, but what about theirs?

The article raises a big question. Just what are they doing spending most of their effort looking inside the U.S. territory? What are they looking for? An obvious use leaps to mind, that this service could help locate marijuana fields and the like. It might also help locate illicit airfields, such as used by drug smugglers.

I expect one strategic service they provide is finding new construction. This would require some fancy image analysis, but with a whole world full of images detecting new construction would be very labor intensive. However a computer, with fancy image analysis, might be able to identify changes between pictures taken at different times. The tricky part of course is the pictures will never be at the same angle or lighting conditions, hence the required fancy image analysis.

My thought is that if "change" is detected in a series of pictures, then a flag could be raised to send those pictures to an analyst for further study. It may be benign, but it may be an illicit nuclear weapons construction facility.

In any case the current hubbub is over domestic spying. Earlier in this I suggested this is probably legal. My reasoning is pictures taken of the outdoors are, by definition, public spaces. A warrant is not required for anybody to take a picture of the outside of a building, nor is one required to take a picture from above. That's all they're doing.

Where it becomes a little tricky is they have made arrangements with building owners to incorporate video from surveillance cameras. Where are those surveillance cameras pointing? Inside or outside buildings? Are they pointing into private spaces or only public ones?

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006

Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says, DefenseTech.org May 12, 2006

"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database DefenseTech.org, May 12, 2006

NSA's data mining explained, CNET News, May 12, 2006

The system in the latest revelation relies on cooperation from the telephone carriers. The telephone carriers worked with the NSA to install equipment in their switching systems, and the equipment extracted certain information from the telephone switching systems, and transmitted that information back to NSA headquarters.

The claim is the data is simply the telephone numbers involved with every phone call. This is known as "envelope" information, as it is akin to the addressing on the outside of an envelope sent through postal mail.

The way I understand this, each individual telephone call doesn't give much information. But by collecting a huge number of phone calls one can build a map of associations between telephone numbers. That is, if person A at phone number N regularly calls person B at phone number Z, that's an association.

Each call sets up a relation between the phone numbers involved in the call.

If, by other means, the spooks have determined that phone number T is used by nefarious individuals, then any phone call to/from that phone number should be of interest to the spooks. Calls to/from that phone number associates the other phone number with those nefarious activities done by the owner of phone number T.

Since the system only records the envelope (supposedly) all phone calls have equal significance. Suppose the nefarious people at phone number T decide to make an innocent phone call? For example someone might come to their door saying "my car broke down, can I call my brother". Now the brother of this innocent bystander has now become associated with the nefarious people. Who knows what method the spooks have for detecting innocent bystanders and weeding them out.

This system is obviously a followon to the Total Information Awareness system. I recorded the status of the TIA back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's important to point out that the discovery by the public of the TIA caused a privacy hubbub, which then caused the Congress people to make enough hubbub that the Department of Defense "cancel" the program. What they actually did was cancel a couple of the programs, and then migrate the rest of the programs to other directors.

Among the TIA projects existant in 2002, there are two which are obviously related to this.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) involved detection of interesting correlations and connections between specific elements in large sets of data. The discussion I wrote above about the relations between telephone numbers by tracking the calls between phone numbers would fit very well with EELD.

Genisys describes a data collection and storage system that would be very useful to EELD.

I think it's very important to interpret this relevation within the larger context. It's clear that the U.S. Government wants a very intrusive system that watches everything that we do. The revelations last year of wiretapping, and the current revelations of collecting the phone numbers of every phone call, these are not isolated incidents.

The prior existence of the Total Information Awareness system tells us what they are interested in. They will not have lost interest in their goal, instead they will have moved the projects around putting them behind cloaks of secrecy and more.

Again I find myself thinking -- is this the world we want to create? Does this match the core values of America? Or is this representing a government that has diverged itself from American values?

I think this is divergent from American values. If this is true, then why are we, Americans, sitting on our hands and not doing anything about this?

UPDATE: William Arkin with the Washington Post just posted Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg which gives more details of the existing programs being developed by the government. Included in this posting is a list of 500 software tools that have been developed by government agencies for intelligence data gathering and mining.

Of course it makes sense for the government to be employing advanced software tools. As technology advances, shouldn't the government make use of it?

Well, okay. But, the issue is how often are they going to make mistakes, and whether the systems are intrusive or not.

The President ignoring the law?

In his Huffington Post blog, Cenk Uygur writes about The Shadow Government ... that is, he's claiming that President Bush has declared his administration will ignore over 750 of the laws that have been passed during his tenure in office. And further that we know his administration is ignoring FISA, a law passed long before his tenure in office, which raises the question of how many other laws the administration is ignoring.

Because the administration is engaging in wholesale ignoring of the laws of this country, he says the government we think we have governing us doesn't exist. In it's place is a shadow of the government we think we have.

So, what's he talking about? As always it helps to understand the facts behind the story that's being presented. Fortunately in this case we can get to them.

He's pointing to this Boston Globe article: Bush challenges hundreds of laws President cites powers of his office

That article discusses the practice known as "Signing Statement". I don't know how common signing statements were before G.W. Bush, but under Bush they are very common. The signing statement is published at the same time as when a new law is signed by the President. The law that's being signed comes from Congress, as always, but the signing statement comes from the Administration. The signing statements I've seen detail how the Administration will interpret the law the President is signing.

Unlike Cenk Uygur's hype about this, the signing statement does not commit the administration to ignoring the entirity of the law. Instead the signing statements I've seen discuss certain provisions in the law, and detail how that provision will be interpreted.

This might sound like a benign practice. After all, most laws are full of strange legalese and could stand for some interpretation help. But in actuality these signing statements are, in effect, rewriting the intent of the law in drastic ways.

This is one of the examples cited by the Boston Globe article:

March 9: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Bush's signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

The actual signing statement is on the whitehouse.gov site and is itself full of legalese. Including that troublematic "unitary executive" phrase.

In any case it's alarming that on the one hand Congress is requiring the Administration to hand over certain information, and the Administration is saying they'll decide what information they'll hand over. This is an administration which has repeatedly picked out select portions of intelligence reports, for example to "justify" the invasion of Iraq when the actual evidence to justify that invasion was nonexistant. Under their signing statement they'll be able to continue cherry-picking the data they send to Congress, to continue puffing out smoke to obscure what they're really doing.

As Cenk Uygur says: Wrong information equals wrong decisions. People can't be blamed if they don't know. It is the job of the press to let them know. The 2006 elections are the last chance to check this imperial presidency. If the press fails our democracy at this critical juncture and the electorate doesn't know what we know by the time they step into that voting booth, we will have done great damage to our country and its principles.

So, if the Administration is free to send select information to Congress, then how is Congress to have a clear picture of what's actually happening in the world? But, there's nothing new here. Wars have been launched before based on falsified evidence, the most infamous being the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the Vietnam War.

As I've kept coming to in my blog entries ... is this the country we want? Is this the country we thought we had? If not, then what are we going to do about this?

If we let these events continue without challenging them, then our country of freedom will become another dictatorship.

Bush Administration proposes labeling for web sites with sexually explicit content

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

See Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law and U.S. attorney general calls for 'reasonable' data retention

This kind of discussion is not new, and the articles above give a history of the previous efforts along these lines. The big bugaboo that has people scared, of course, is will their children accidentally stumble across these sites. I've looked at some of those sites, and the raunch people engage in and look at it simply astonishing. Some of that stuff is clearly not for children, and it's quite possible to stumble across it.

e.g. "A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs."

One issue mentioned in the article is concerns by search engines. For example the government might decide to make a law requiring that search engines correctly index sexually explicit sites, and then correctly return results based on the sexually explicitness of the query. But, as the search engines pointed out, it's rather difficult to determine whether something is sexually explicit or not. And, in some cases, the raunchy crowd will reuse innocent words to have raunchy meanings.

The whole issue raises a whole range of freedom of speech considerations.

The people who publish and read/view the raunchy material certainly have a right to do so. That's called freedom of speech, but there's a principle I heard a few years ago that's very apropos. Your freedom to swing your fists stops at my nose.

Should their freedom to publish raunch stop somewhere before it reaches childrens eyes?

But, wait, there's more ..

For example, how can this preserve the right of medical researchers to discuss Breast Cancer?

For example, the Dirty Old Mens Association Intermational (DOMAI) exists to publish photographs of naked women. You might think, oh, they'll fall directly into this sexually explicit category. But, I challenge you to look through their site and find sexual explicitness. The purpose for that site is the celebration of beauty, specifically the beauty of the feminine form. They don't publish sexual pictures, but instead the pictures are of naked women in their beauty. Often the sexually explicit pictures are, to my eye, very degrading as it presents a naked woman purely as a sexual object. On the DOMAI site their pictures are very affirming of beauty and femininity.

I will say the proposed law is interesting by explicitly naming the kind of content which must be labeled.

In the past there was always a question over whether something is, or is not, pornographic. Like I said about the DOMAI site, there's a long tradition of non-pornographic artwork depicting naked women as beauty.

They are borrowing definitions from existing federal law: sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person. Clearly those categories are easy to verify and enforce, unlike prior standards which.

The second article linked above is a little more chilling. It concerns requirements proposed to be placed on "internet service providers" requiring that "data" be retained for 90 days. They are claiming that the "failure" of ISP's to retain data is hampering investigations into criminal activity, including "gruesome sex crimes".

This may be very innocent and above board, but it also may be coming from the existing government plans to create a ubiquitous spying apparatus akin to Big Brother.

Again, there is a privacy consideration. In this case the "data" is our activities on various web sites, email we send and receive, even chatroom transcripts. The requirement is for that "data" to be retained, so that it can be handed over to government investigators.

Hurm...

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens

Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.

What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.

My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.

So, yeah, there's some clear air safety considerations. The AOPA is doing their job in raising those concerns.

But, that's as far as they're going. I get the impression that if the FAA enforces some set of rules against UAV's the AOPA will be happy. But what about the rest of us, the ones who are going to be spied upon?

On the one hand the government and industry representatives are portraying this as being used for border security. Again, the danger of terrorists lurking in every corner ready to kill us if we don't deploy eternal vigilance. But on the other hand these were used to monitor a biker rally. It was used to watch for "unruly behavior". Yeah, you can expect "unruly" behavior at a biker rally alright, but does that warrant spying on the people?

It seems that yet again I'm coming up with the same question that's turned up before.

Technology is giving us more and more capabilities. But is the world that's being created around us the one we want to live in?

Is the technology getting away from us and creating a monster that will be difficult to reign in?

Resources and articles

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies discusses regulatory concerns about the depoloyment of UAV's in the U.S. for border surveillance, detection of marijuana crops, and buzzing biker rallies.

AOPA acts to keep unregulated UAV operation out of navigable airspace and AOPA questions FAA's 'stealthy' UAV TFR on Mexican border discussing actions by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to cause the FAA to review UAV usage for safety considerations.

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours and High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us and Aerovironment tests a hydrogen powered airplane -- my previous UAV coverage.

Not Optional - a nice rant about the oil situation

Not Optional by Jim Kunstler with Clusterfuck Nation is right on the money, so far as I can see. Enjoy -- warning, it gets a little ranty.

The topic he's writing on is collective blindness on several angles. For example, how can the people really believe we can just pull out of this misbegotten war in Iraq. Regardless of how illegal that war is, we started a total mess there and pulling out now would only make matters worse.

The other blindness is about oil. The war is for oil, despite the protestations of the Administration. The Bush Administration has taken lying to the public to a fine art, and for that I must applaud them.

It's about oil because Iraq has a huge chunk of it, and the U.S. has very little. In order to keep our standard of living, which is one of the meme's the Bush Administration keeps mouthing, we must grab the oil wherever it is.

The problem is this is a fools quest. There's not that much oil left in the world anyway, and there are plenty of alternatives. The better route is to invest in alternative energy research in a big way. Not these piddly little bits here and there the Administration has been throwing out to keep the environmentalists happy. There's a real problem here, and with the direction the Bush Administration is leading the country the only result is a kind of world described in the Mad Max movies.

Archbishop of Canturbury backs evolution over creationism

Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution ... Apparently the Intelligent Design quandry has been raised in England as well as here in the U.S. I shouldn't be surprised since it's clear the political strategists behind this are international in scope. In any case it's interesting how Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury, have all announced that it's a mistake to teach creationism in schools, and how we should accept evolution into religious peoples view of the world.

The Intelligent Design crowd are fundamentalists who seem to be at odds with leading religious figures. Hmmmm.... Interesting.

Here's the Guardian article: Archbishop: stop teaching creationism ...or...

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.
The debate over creationism or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot, so-called "intelligent design" (ID) which argues that creation is so complex that an intelligent - religious - force must have directed it, has provoked divisions in Britain but nothing like the vehemence or politicisation of the debate in the US. There, under pressure from the religious right, some states are considering giving ID equal prominence to Darwinism, the generally scientifically accepted account of the evolution of species. Most scientists believe that ID is little more than an attempt to smuggle fundamentalist Christianity into science teaching.

It's clear these religious leaders aren't saying to ignore the Creation story and only look at Science and Evolution. The Archbishop's words seem to center on guarding the specialness of the Biblical Creation story.

In my eye the story isn't as simple as Evolution is superior over Intelligent Design. And, for that matter, its disturbing that the Archbishop seems to be saying we shouldn't be questioning or debating the validity of the Creation story.

First, consider this: Establishing control over a society ... the gist is that religion is easily be used to control the beliefs of society. The Intelligent Design debate is precisely an example of religious claims being pushed by political operatives to establish some control over society. And, further, it's an example of the people in society being expected to suspend their power of critical thought just because their church tells them to do so.

Why shouldn't the claims of religion be tested? We have the power of critical thought. We have the power of independant reasoning. Why not examine spiritual practices, experiences and beliefs?
Okay, one problem with that leaps immediately to mind. Scientists have regularly tried to test religion and ended up bashing religion, largely because they're testing it in the wrong way. Religious folk are expected to lean on "faith" and to not ask questions, leading to a dependency on something other than rational critical thought for making decisions. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to trust only logic and equations and critical thinking, and to distrust subjective experience.

The problem is the nature of the religious claims. God is said to be something which created the universe and everything within it. God is said to be everywhere. How can a scientist hope to measure such a claim? The proof of God comes from subjective experience, the thing scientists are taught to distrust.

For example, when you pray what happens? Do you feel good when you pray? Most do. Is that a subconscious thing firing off some brain chemicals, and that because you believe God is helping you feel nice when you pray, therefore the chemicals your subconscious fires off will help you feel good? Or is there a divine presence that reaches inside you?

What about miraculous healing? What about prayer for someone who's sick? It's been shown in several studies (double-blind etc) that intercessionary prayer helps the ones who are prayed for.
It seems to me the critical mind, the dependence on logic, can easily go too far. And that the dependence on logic interferes with subjective experience. That the way to experiment with the divine is to operate with both subjective experience, and the critical mind. Subjective experience is not to be pushed away but to be embraced. Just as we are wired for the critical mind so are we wired for subjective experience.

Hmmm... I seem to have strayed from Intelligent Design versus Evolution. Sorry....

Establishing control over a society

I want to share a realization that recently came to me. It is a way of establishing control over a society, allowing you to bend them to your will. However in practice this will take generations to really lodge into society, so you probably won't have direct benefit but your heirs will.

Step 1: Beg, borrow, steal or forge a set of spiritual writings

Step 2: Present those writings as the Word of God

Step 3: Present the writings as being the infallible source of truth

Step 4: Appoint a group of people as the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words as written in those writings

It helps to have an authentic spiritual guru deliver the writings you are going to start with. That's not an absolute requirement. The other steps serve to separate the individuals in the society from their own authentic ability to determine the truth.

The other steps make it so Truth is determined only from the spiritual writings, and that Truth is so difficult to understand that only the select anointed ones can tell what's right or wrong. Hence when someone has a question, they won't be able to answer it for themselves but instead have to turn to the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words to tell them the truth.

Once the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words are established with credibility, then can claim literally any idea as being Gods Infallible Truth. Of course this assumes the official interpreters become corrupt, and no longer be serious students of spiritual truth.

In the ideal the priesthood's role is to explore the divine and to have the freedom to devote their lives to authentic spiritual practice. But we can think of dozens of religions throughout history where it began as an authentic spiritual practice, then devolved into corruption and power mongering.

I believe we all have access to divine truth. There are many spiritual teachings which say so, and which say we can look within for the divine truth. They tend to encourage us to explore and experiment for ourselves divine truth. In my experience the confidence this gives is stronger than "faith".

Be in command of your life

A SPAM email I just received had the title "Be in command of your life, process judgements...". Hmmm... I thought, their appeal is for independence. But what kind of independence are they offering? Just another job, "processing judgments".

I didn't read the SPAM but there's a million offers like that. Some kind of "earn megabucks working from home" which often turns out to be a job stuffing envelopes, or door-door sales, or maintaining marketing materials in stores, etc. A lot of us want more money and it's that desire these offers are exploiting.

But ... stop and think about this. Is it money that's desired or freedom?

Speaking for myself, the dream I hold is being able to travel regularly, to see the world, greater ease, etc.

Do these get-rich schemes offer a way to be in command of ones life? I don't think so. The offer tends to make one just as beholden to some activity that earns money. What would change is the activity to which one is beholden.

Typically people hold a job and that job provides the money with which they live, and if they want to continue living they must continue holding that job. Hence, the typical person is beholden to their job and they could not live without that job. Is that typical person in command of their life? Nope, because to a large extent their life is dictated by the job.

Here's a great question to ponder ... What would it be to be in command of ones own life?

I think that to be in command of my life, I would be choosing for myself my daily activities. Rather than having to go to the office every day, I could choose from a whole pallette of possibilities.

There's a couple ways of approaching this ...

For example if one were to be independantly wealthy then one wouldn't have any required activities. The independantly wealthy don't have to work, and hence aren't beholden to a job to provide their living. They have more freedom than the typical person to choose their life.

It's possible for the "typical person" to develop independance. I wrote up a personal finance plan which nearly anybody could use to build up financial stability and freedom. The key to the plan is for your spending to be less than your income, and to salt away that difference into investments. It's called "living beneath your means" and it's the opposite of the Keeping Up With The Joneses which ties most of us into the rat race.

I think there's another way of being in command of your life. Question: What is it you most wish to do in your life? What would you do with your life if you had the freedom?

In other words, why do you need to stay in the job you are in? You could be in a job you would enjoy, one where you believe fully in the results of what your job has you do, etc.

In such a scenario you would still be working to earn the money you live on. The difference is your work would be more in alignment with your values and desires.

Employee free speech, and a VA nurse being investigated for Sedition

In September 2005 a pair of hurricanes hit New Orleans and the surrounding land. As a result much of New Orleans has effectively been destroyed. The government response to help the people of New Orleans and the surrounding land has been egregiously bad.

Shortly after the hurricane, a VA nurse in Albuquerque wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining of the bad government response to the hurricane. Immediately afterward she was referred to the FBI and since then has come under investigation by the FBI for "sedition". Sedition being the legal word for advocating the forceful, violent overthrow of the government.

The story is here: V.A. Nurse Accused of Sedition After Publishing Letter Critical of Bush on Katrina, Iraq (as presented on Democracy Now)

The story is astonishing and alarming. The nurse, Laura Berg, acted under belief she was protected by the First Ammendment gaurantee of freedom of speech. In the interview she reiterates her claim of first ammendment gaurantees of freedom of speech.

The government is threatening her with years of jail time, the sentence for "Sedition". But how could her letter to the editor be taken as advocating violent overthrow of the government? This is the U.S. and we have a long history of the right of citizens to criticize their government.

As she says:

LAURA BERG: Amy, I did not sign away my First Amendment rights as a citizen, you know, by choosing to serve in the federal government and choosing to serve veterans and care for people that have been wounded like this, you know. And this letter sounds like something from a totalitarian regime, you know, that we are supposedly going in and share our democracy. This is way out of line. This was way out line. I have a right to speak my opinion. I have a right to say I'm a V.A. nurse. I do not speak for the V.A. I speak as a public citizen....

In my mind the case is open and shut, but for one thing.

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

Should your company have a corporate blogging policy?

FOX Sics its Dogs on "Un-American" Professors

The general principle in the articles I've linked is -- employers have the right and ability to restrict the speech of their employees.

How so? For example, what is proprietary information? It's information a corporation wants to keep secret, that gives the corporation competitive advantage, and if an employee is caught revealing proprietary information the employee can very likely be fired for having done so.

That's just one example of many sorts of ways an employer can limit what an employee says.

There have been instances of people being fired for blogging about aspects of their job, even when doing that blogging from home on their own computer onto their own blogging account. For example a teacher with DeVry was fired over comments she blogged about her students. Someone else, who worked in a customer support job, was fired for derogatory comments she wrote on a blog talking about the people who came to her for support were dweebs etc.

The issue with Laura Berg is that her employer is the U.S. government. Specifically, the Veterans Administration. The U.S. government has more options at its disposal for threatening its employees. e.g. trumping up charges of Sedition.

With the tradition of employers being able to control the speech of their employees, what happens when that employer is the U.S. government?

And, I think the bigger question is, why is there such a blanket acceptance of employers controlling the speech of employees? Clearly it represents a huge blanket of suppressed rights to free speech.