Radio Shack shows no company values privacy

By Frank Moraes

Have you read the privacy policy at my blog Frankly Curious? I’m assuming not, because there isn’t one. But if there were one, I can promise you this: I would have really meant it when I wrote it. I’m like Google: I do my best not to be evil — as long as it doesn’t inconvenience me much. But if I had a bunch of your private information, and I could sell it and retire in Paris (or even Canada), I would have a policy change. You would probably think that I was a jerk, but I would be justified in thinking that you were an idiot for believing me. For one thing: you didn’t even know that I didn’t have a privacy policy! If I did, I would doubtless have put something in it to allow me to weasel out of it.

Okay, maybe not. I pride myself on standing for something. Just the same, I have my price. I wouldn’t murder someone just to spend my evenings in cafes drinking Burgundy, but giving your contact information so that some company could sell you things is not the same. If someone offered me a more reasonable (but still unrealistically large) amount of money, like $1,000, I wouldn’t do it. I already have a hard enough time living with myself; I don’t need that on my conscience. So you are safe. More or less.

But given that privacy policies are apparently not legally binding, one might wonder why companies have them. The reason, I think, is because they are evil. They don’t know what they are going to do with all the personal information they have, but they know that it might be helpful to have it. At some point, it might be worth a lot of money. And then it is Burgundy Time, my friends! (How ever they may define that.) And then they just change that policy and sell out. Go team!

The reason I bring this up is because Radio Shack just announced that because of its bankruptcy, it is selling all of our personal information for $26 million. If you are as old as I am, you may remember that you simply could not go into a Radio Shack and purchase a half foot of wire without providing them with your full name and address. Really, the next time an employer wants to know where I’ve lived the last ten years (and increasingly, they all do), I should just refer them to Radio Shack. Or rather, Standard General, the company that is buying Radio Shack’s rotten corpse.

As Michael Hiltzik noted, Radio Shack made a very big deal out of their commitment to the personal data that the company collected on upwards of 120 million of us:

“We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any time,” the chain stated on its website. At the checkout registers in its stores, a placard read: “At RadioShack, we respect your privacy… We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list.”

They did pride themselves on that! And now that they did exist, they don’t need no stinking pride. They need money to pay their creditors. And these creditors aren’t little people like are in their data files; they are rich people; you know, people who matter. Hiltzik joked that Radio Shack is like Captain Corcoran inHMS Pinafore, for whom “never” means “hardly ever.” But I’m afraid that is too generous a description of the company. Radio Shack valued customer privacy exactly up to the point where it didn’t.

The government doesn’t care. “Privacy Ombudsman” Elise Frejka decided that it was okay for Radio Shack to sell the data because it “is not of a sensitive nature.” One has to wonder, however, if that’s the case, why did Radio Shack make such a big deal out of collecting it? Also, it seems to me that it provides enormous amounts of personal data about shopping patterns. Regardless, if it is such banal data, why is it worth $26 million?

My only advice is to not trust anyone. And that is impossible in this modern world. We are supposed to have a government to protect us from such things. But in America, the government just facilitates whatever the rich want. The only solution if for us to take control of the government. I’m not hopeful about that.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

What is and what can never be

By Carl

So, Edward Snowden has apparently decided to have a freak-out over losing Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Let’s review, shall we?

First, the preening, gloating, self-important popinjay had this to say:

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said his "mission's already accomplished" and spoke of having “personal satisfaction” at the revelations about U.S. surveillance policies in an interview published Tuesday.

The former intelligence contractor, who exposed extensive details of global electronic surveillance by the U.S. spy agency, said he was not being disloyal to the U.S. or to his former employer.

"I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA," he told The Washington Post. "I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it."

OK, fair enough. He realizes that he exposed an already public program, and that what happens next is up to the people reading his revelations. Altho that last bit, about working as some sort of dubble-sekrit sooperspi is a bit…disturbing. But I digress…

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NSA smacked down over massive data collection of Americans' phone records

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What Orwell feared.

The fight for Americans' privacy rights and civil liberties against an increasingly totalitarian surveillance state just got a major boost:

A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans' phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as "almost Orwellian" and suggesting that James Madison would be "aghast" to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way. 

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction "in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues," allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. "Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment," which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. 

Let's keep this in perspective. This is just one judge. The government will appeal. It is likely that an appeal will be successful, more or less, and that the NSA will be authorized to continue doing most, if not all, of what it is doing now. And, regardless, given the available technology, the surveillance state is here to stay. (The question is just how vast and unregulated that surveillance state will be, and in the end whether Americans' retain anything of their essential American-ness.)

But this is nonetheless a victory -- hopefully not just a temporary one -- for the forces of liberty and privacy, and it's pretty much entirely thanks to Edward Snowden and those, like Glenn Greenwald, who have worked so hard, against the shrieking cries of the establishment and its supporters across the spectrum, to reveal the truth, as Charles Pierce explains (via Libby):

Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn't let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don't know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian. This entire country was founded after a revolution that was touched off to a great extent by the concept of individual privacy.

Personally, I think very highly of what they did. And for this fight to have any chance at all, we need much more of it.

Denying reality: Surveillance state apologists and the obsequious submission to authority

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Ever since the Edward Snowden saga started, I've been writing "surveillance state apologists of the left" tweets, directed mainly at Obama-can-do-no-wrong types who seem to think there's nothing wrong with what the NSA is doing, with what's been authorized under the Patriot Act, and with what the country is doing generally in its effort to go after terrorists. In some cases, these surveillance state apologists are also drone war apologists. Generally, they're a-okay with the national security state, not least because it's one of their own running the show right now, and so they viciously attack Snowden, and Greenwald, and make fun of "emoprogs," and avoid actually having to address the nuts and bolts of what the government is doing in their name, and to them, and what that means for life, liberty, and privacy.

Great to see the surveillance state apologists of the left turn their head-up-the-ass venom on #Snowden and @ggreenwald again.
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 1, 2013

At The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, whom I admire greatly for his uncompromising views on drones, domestic surveillance, and other aspects of the national security apparatus, wrote about the "privacy moderates" in similar terms -- that is, about those who think that "the national-security state ought to be subject to more oversight, debate, scrutiny, and restrictions" but who also "contrive frames that enable them to criticize both the surveillance state and its antagonists, as if the excesses of both sides are commensurately important and worrisome," and who sometimes "even attack critics of the NSA more energetically than the surveillance state itself." He writes:

I am mystified by the "privacy moderate" who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

Indeed. I would just add that there are many not just in the "middle" but also on the left who aren't yearning for any such thing, so enamored are they of Obama, so much have they been taken in by the fearmongering propaganda that is the democracy-crushing currency of the national security state, the state of fear that it feeds to justify its acquisition of ever more power, justifying ever more intrusions into life, liberty, and privacy.

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Never mind

By Mustang Bobby

Over the weekend the story went out on CNET that Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said that the N.S.A. can listen in on any phone call it wants to without a warrant.

Except he didn’t say that.

Update at 2:50 p.m. ET on June 16: We’re pulling the plug on this story, following Rep. Nadler’s comments that debunk CNET’s story. In a statement to our sister site, Nadler said: “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.” We’ve left the amended article (post the previous update, below) in tact for transparency, but corrected the headline.

Glad we cleared that up.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Dianne Feinstein is a traitor

By Frank Moraes

It's hard to know what to think about Edward Snowden, the young man who leaked NSA information to the Guardian and the Washington Post. On the surface, it is all good and he looks like a hero. But I will admit that the story seems a little weird and so I will wait for more information. What can't be questioned is that the documents leaked should have been leaked. The American public have a right to know about this stuff.

We've come a long way from where we started in this matter. It used to be that the government didn't want newspapers to print troop movements. Now, the government doesn't want newspapers to print that there is even a war. The dust up over Snowden's revelations makes no sense. On the one hand we hear that he is a traitor who put American lives in danger. And on the other hand we hear that we already knew this was going on. This, of course, is what we heard about Bradley Manning, "This doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know—and it's dangerous!"

Last night, The Hill reported that my very own United States Senator Dianne Feinstein thinks that Snowden is a traitor. On the most basic level, this is absurd. Just as I won't say that he is a hero, she can't know he is a traitor. But in her tiny mind he's a traitor because he broke the law. She said, "He violated the oath, he violated the law. It's treason." Let's just step back and think about it for a moment. Ever since the Nuremberg Trials, we have supposedly know that there are some orders—some laws—that should not be followed. My question for Ms. Feinstein is, "If the law said you should kill 6 million Jews, would you?"

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is typical of our elected officials. I think of this as the 5-year-old approach to justice: it is always wrong to lie; it is alwayswrong to fight; it is always wrong to break the law. Of course, Feinstein is all for complexity when it comes to defending her authoritarian approach to the surveillance state. Why do we need it? She'll tell you it is because it saves lives. But she can't show you the lives that it saved. Because that might cost lives. I'm serious! She says that she'd be all for accountability, "Here's the rub: the instances where this has produced good—has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is all classified, that's what's so hard about this."

Actually, it isn't hard at all. As Scalia said, "I'll bet you, if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you'd get more convictions too." The question is not whether having a member of the NSA follow each of us everywhere we go wouldn't make us safer in the sense of fewer terrorist attacks. The question is whether the trade off is worth it. Clearly, Feinstein thinks the current actions of the NSA are worth it. I think they aren't. I think it is worth talking about. Without Snowden we couldn't even do that. Even with him it looks like we can't.

Treason is a funny thing. When Feinstein was elected to Congress, she took an oath to uphold the Constitution. As the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, she has not only allowed the government to infringe on my constitutional rights, she has cheered it on. Who's the real traitor?

Update (11 June 2013 10:03 am)

I just wrote to Feinstein:

I'm displeased you are calling Edward Snowden a traitor. Breaking the law or an oath does not necessarily make one a traitor. All your public comments are doing is poisoning the water so that we can't have a reasonable discussion of this. The truth is that at this point we can't say if Snowden is a hero or a traitor. And you more than anyone ought to understand that. We didn't send you to Washington so you could be a firewall against democracy and open government. Please at least moderate your rhetoric.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.) 

Maybe a Democratic surveillance state?

By Frank Moreas

I think of Mike Konczal as an economics writer, but he is usually just as illuminating when writing about other things. Yesterday at Wonk Blog, he wrote, Is a Democratic Surveillance State Possible? In it, he described work by Yale law professor Jack Balkin where he argues that there are two kinds of surveillance states: authoritarian and democratic. Of course, in the United States, we have the authoritarian kind. And that is perhaps understandable. It matches our pretend democracy.

Authoritarian surveillance states act as gluttons and misers of information. They are gluttons in the sense that they collect all the information they can without regard to content or source. As Konczal puts it, "More is always better, indiscriminate access is better than targeted responses, and there's a general presumption that they'll have access to whatever they want, at any time." But they are misers in that they want as little information as possible to get out about who they are and what they do. In other words, authoritarian surveillance wants ultimate power and no accountability or transparency.

Democratic surveillance states, on the other hand, are, "information gourmets and information philanthropists." They are highly selective about the information they collect and generous about what they are doing and for what purpose. Konczal points out that a big part of this would be information destruction. That's one thing you can count on: the government might, for example, take your finger prints to identify you. But they will use those fingerprints even after you die to accuse you of crime. The information just goes on and on. In the case of fingerprints, it probably makes sense. But does it make sense for the NSA to maintain all of my phone records until the end of time? I assure you that they think so.

Read more »

Private parts

By Mustang Bobby

The ever-insightful digby leads us to an article by Daniel J. Solove in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2011 wherein the discussion about privacy and why it matters is discussed. In short, it calls into question the trope that we hear whenever something like news of the N.S.A. looking into the data of every phone call ever made hits the headlines: “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

To describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data, many commentators use a metaphor based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.Orwell depicted a harrowing totalitarian society ruled by a government called Big Brother that watches its citizens obsessively and demands strict discipline. The Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control), might be apt to describe government monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status, isn’t particularly sensitive. Many people don’t care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own, or the kind of beverages they drink. Frequently, though not always, people wouldn’t be inhibited or embarrassed if others knew this information.

Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what’s in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he’s unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

The question is not whether or not I or anyone else has something or nothing to hide. We all do, whether it’s our credit card statement or or web-browser history, and no matter what it is, the idea behind a country founded on a Bill of Rights that includes the statement “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” should be taken as least as seriously as the one about the well-regulated militia.

Simply put, the only person who can decide for me what’s private and what’s not is me. I can go on Facebook and tell the world — or at least those who know me — what I had for dinner last night, what movie I saw last week, and so forth. I can even tell you if I’m in a relationship or not or where I work and who I work with. Those are my choices, though, and I made them freely. But the idea of things that I choose to keep private being subject to scrutiny by other people and without my knowledge or consent is offensive not because they might find some deep dark secret but because I’m the one who is supposed to be the one who decides that, not someone else.

I may indeed have nothing to hide. But that’s for me to decide.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Outlook ad for Thunderbird

By Frank Moraes

My friend Will and I discuss computers a lot. This is mostly because Will is only really interested in computers (and for the last couple of months beer brewing). And one thing we discuss a lot is privacy and the fact that after the lives that we have led, we don't worry about it all. We worry about it for our clients, of course. Some of their lives might be private. And that is why I really liked this new commercial from Microsoft:

My first wife[1] was a privacy freak. And as with most people who are really hung up on privacy, she had very little of interest to hide. Compare this to me—I have a public enough background that I can't get a regular job. Oh well. You either embrace it or embrace it. I choose to embrace it.

Anyway, I think this ad works because it is true. Google does do that. In fact, they are constantly offering me opportunities to get my MBA—probably because I write a lot about economics. And the truth is, I used to be bothered by it. And I think more people probably should be bothered by it. Of course, there a much better (And free!) alternatives to Microsoft.

Think different. Not Apple, silly! Non-corporate!

________________

[1] This is from The Girl's On Fire:

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Police use Predator drones for surveillance in North Dakota

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So you really don't think the U.S. is becoming more and more of a police state?

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

No big deal, you say? Police should use whatever means necessary to apprehend criminals? Please. Are you not paying attention as your privacy -- and indeed your freedom -- is being taken away from you without you even knowing it?

As John Cole writes: "[T]o those of you poo-pooing this and saying "how is this any different than a helicopter," in five to ten years when unmanned drones are flying all over your neighborhood surveilling and storing info at random, you can think back to mocking us privacy hysterics. I'm sure very similar arguments were made in years past about police needing armored vehicles and .50 cals and every locale needing a SWAT team armed to the teeth."

It's one thing, and then another thing, and then another thing, and each time you say, "oh, so what?" Well, it all adds up to something, doesn't it? It's bad enough that your phone is allowing you to be tracked, that you can't make any sort of transaction without being identified on the grid. Do you really want to live with drones flying overhead?

As Libby Spencer writes: "A police state doesn't happen overnight. Big changes happen in just such tiny incremental infringements. If we wait to express our concern until, like the Geneva Conventions, Posse Comitatus is rendered quaint, it will be too late."

Actually, it's probably too late already. And not just in North Dakota.

(photo)

Tea Partier’s nude photo drama fuels TSA paranoia

By Nicholas Wilbur

Baseless Paranoia isn't a Christian folk band, but if it were Michele Bachmann would be the lead singer.

The Tea Party representative from Minnesota recently added herself to the ever-growing list of Republicans who abhor the space-bubble etiquette violators known as TSA scanners. The reason was not constitutional in nature, surprisingly. It did include a riff about airport security privatization, not surprisingly. But mainly it was personal: Bachmann will avoid TSA scanners because she fears naked pictures of her will turn up on the Internet.

We have always known that there is a vein the size of a fire hose that pumps paranoia into the organs of the Tea Party. What we didn't know, until now, is that the 54-year-old founder of the Tea Party caucus in Congress is a World Wide Web virgin who so trembles at the unknown ether world that she has proposed handing over our national security to the unregulated whims of profit-based corporations in order to thwart potential voyeurs.

It will probably not calm this Heartland harpy to know that beyond the websites and blogs that spew left-wing propaganda, advocate atheism, denounce farm subsidies, demand logic-based political discourse, and lament the intellectual decline of the conservative demographic, there is also a cache of risqué photos of Bachmann already circulating the Internet.

And yes, some of them show the milk maid farm girl of the Breadbasket in the nude. Others show her drinking cocktails with suggestive expressions on her face. Another shows her in the seductive pose of pin-up model. A few show her as the subject of the Spanish Inquisition-era painting, The Naked Maja. And at least one shows her in the least flattering light of all – as a 54-year-old woman (wrinkles, stretch marks, sagging baby feeders, and all.) For all ye who hath grappled with the curse of curiosity, rest assured that none of the photos are worth viewing.

Nor would I recommend sharing the photos with Bachmann. That would be like giving The Origin of Species as a Kwanzaa gift to your creationist Catholic mother-in-law. It would be like showing a copy of the president's birth certificate to your Fox News-addicted grandfather. It would be like returning from a hunting trip and dropping an elk fetus on the dining room table for your six-year-old daughter to dissect as practice for achieving her dream of one day becoming a veterinarian.

Such brisk exposure to the World Wide Web might cast Bachmann into the solitary confinement of a priest's confession chamber for the rest of her life.

Then again, it would be irresponsible to become an enabler of such hyper-paranoia. The truth, as they say, will set you free. So perhaps we should free Bachmann of her ignorance and open her eyes to how ridiculous it is to criticize airport security on the hypothetical basis of leaked nude photos.

The fact is, TSA scanners make us cringe not because they are an infringement on our freedoms, but because we can't accept the fact that we are imperfect beings. We are a nation of fat people living in a hypersensitive society where a blemish is akin to sin, and we will stop at nothing and invest in anything to hide this reality from ourselves.

The makeup, the girdles, the loose-fitting clothing, the attempts by "big-boned" women to draw attention to their oversized breasts – via low-cut blouses and push-up bras – in hopes of drawing attention away from their oversized arses, thighs, and midriffs – these are all zealous yet failed attempts at over-emphasized vanity.

And if you're a man with a complex about having TSA workers mock your less than Herculean genitalia, do what others in your position have done: overcompensate with intelligence. With a million bucks in your pocket, you can hire your own airport security. With a trophy wife on your arm, self-esteem won't matter.

If you fear a grainy x-ray image of your figure being leaked to the web, stop eating at McDonald's, begin an exercise program more vigorous than lifting your fat ass out of the sofa for a second serving of Häagen-Dazs every night, and, most importantly, stop worrying about what you aren't.

As for Bachmann, she's a 54-year-old woman who has brought five beautiful children into the world. A lifetime supply of Victoria's Secret lingerie, Cover Girl, and Mary Kay will not turn you into a pencil-thin supermodel. So get over it. Web surfing voyeurs jacking off to ultrasound images of your pixilated silhouette should not be a source of paranoia.

Especially not when there are Kenyan colonialists turning this country into a socialist state populated by pot-smoking liberals bent on upending the Constitution and stomping on the graves of our Founding Fathers. Get your fucking priorities straight.

There's no need to start calling for Israeli interrogation-style airport security just because our body parts don't point in the same direction they did as vestal maidens and strapping young lads.

I can promise that a TSA image of Michele Bachmann wouldn't go viral. Most of us already know what a middle-aged woman looks like nude (we can all thank Kathy Bates for the hot tub scene in About Schmidt for that revelation).

We expect more from our elected representatives in the United States Congress than this.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

Things that ring in the night

By Capt. Fogg

If there is any part of "our freedoms" that must be defended more than the right to risk irreparable disaster for profit, the right to sell fraudulent securities, bogus debt reduction plans and to buy election results, it's the right to harass people at all hours of the day and night in their homes, in their cars and at work in the process of fleecing them.

Yes, there are laws regulating telemarketing: no call lists, restrictions on times called, restrictions on robocalls that tie up the line until they're through telling you how evil Nancy Pelosi is or how they can get you out of debt by lending you more money at 400% interest. These laws are scrupulously ignored and lawbreakers are carefully protected by the phone companies who in turn are allowed to buy the privilege of ignoring not only the law, but common decency. Virtually all these calls, including the call that woke me at 3:33 this morning are untraceable. "Hell-O - are you late in your mortgage payments???" I was ready to kill someone, but thanks to an FCC that is owned by the telecommunications industry, I'm not allowed to do what I would be allowed to do if someone in a black ski mask showed up in my bedroom at the same hour. That I don't have a mortgage and am not in debt adds a certain edge to the anger. That I only got 4 hours of sleep hasn't allowed it to dissipate.

I may have to give up my land line. Even in a non-election year, I average about 8 telemarketing calls every day, usually most frequent at 8 O'clock AM, again around dinner time with a late peak at 9 to 10 PM. It rings when I'm in the shower, in the pool, up on a ladder trimming trees or under my car changing the oil. Of course it's nearly twice as bad this year.

My number is registered on that most pathetic of places, the Federal no-call list. I wonder why I bothered to register it. So is my cell phone and yet every loan shark and financial con man sends me text messages and calls me at the most inopportune times, so I have to remain unreachable, which largely defeats the purpose of owning one. Yes, this continues when one is overseas and for some reason, candidates all over the country continue to call me even when I demand to be removed.

Of course, I'm just a crank with no knowledge of how evil Liberals are and no proof that the ever further to the right corporate shills still calling themselves Republicans aren't the cause of our woes. After all, it's just freedom I'm objecting to and the will of the proletariat is that the will of the corporations be the law -- and isn't it typical of loser liberals like me to promote such Communo/Fascist ideas like a right to be left alone by scam hawkers and sleazemongers and political flim flam artists who have a far greater right to use a service I pay for than I do.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

The trouble with Facebook

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Whoops:

The wife of the new head of MI6 has caused a major security breach and left his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying operations abroad.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site’s 200m users around the world who choose to be in the open-access London social network on Facebook.

Wait. The trouble with Facebook? No, not so much. Rather, it's the trouble with Facebook users, some of whom, apparently, have not a clue. (Though perhaps Facebook should have strict privacy as the default setting. If I'm not mistaken, that is not presently the case.)

You'd think Sir John would have had a chat with his wife about security, no? Did he never question her about her Facebook account? Did it never come up?

The humanity and hypocrisy of Mark Sanford

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he's obviously lost." So writes Slate's John Dickerson to open an article on the Mark Sanford saga that, in light of what we learned yesterday, adds some much-needed humanity, largely out of respect to Sanford's own humanity, to what has been, in some circles, a case of gleeful Schadenfreude.

It's an article that really got me thinking last night. Hopefully this makes sense.

I and many other bloggers and political commentators were making a big deal out of the Sanford saga. At first, though, it was rather easy to. The man upped and disappeared, ditching his security detail and not even telling his family where he was going over Father's Day weekend. Plus, it seemed like his office was lying, or that he'd been lying to his staff. (His wife said he was off writing. His staff said he was hiking. Surely there was inconsistency there.) And then there was the not-so-small matter of a sitting governor just leaving. It all seemed rather weird, and I think it was only proper to ask questions.

Which is the point that many observers were making, myself included: There were more questions than answers. What was needed was answers.

Well, the answers came yesterday, in an awkward and uncomfortable press conference, a confession in front of the press, and, yes, Sanford revealed himself to be... a human being -- deeply flawed, perhaps, or perhaps even broken, but much like the rest of us all-too-human human beings.

And, yes, I do feel sorry for him. (He and his wife, Jenny, have separated. Read her statement here. I have been through too many personal difficulties of my own over the years not to be sympathetic. I do not envy them.)

Here at The Reaction, there was a difference of opinion with respect to whether even to cover the saga in the first place (with me writing extensively on it, prior to Sanford's return, and Carl arguing yesterday that Sanford's philandering is simply not "within bounds").

The saga remains a huge story, though, and so we continue to cover it, but, now that we know what happened, more or less, we can acknowledge that it's really none of our business. Sanford's personal troubles, I mean. He will have to live with what he has done, and his family will have to try to recover. It doesn't seem quite as funny, though it remains rather disturbing, that he took off for Argentina while his staff, clueless or covering up, put him somewhere on the Appalachian Trail.

Where there is an issue, though, is with the hypocrisy of conservative Republicans who talk family values but don't live up to the talk. It's an old story, yes, and there are many of them: Vitter, Foley, Ensign, Gingrich, etc.

To me, that is the story, or a big part of it, and it is what separates liberals from conservatives. Liberals and Democrats have, to be sure, found themselves at the center of media storms over their philandering: Clinton, Edwards, etc. But neither Clinton nor Edwards was a moralist or a theocrat. They revealed themselves to be flawed human beings, but they didn't promote conservative "family values." There was no hypocrisy.

"The State has no place in the bedroom of the nation," said Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada's greatest prime ministers, and, to me, that applies to all of us. The nation -- the people -- has no place in anyone's bedroom, unless there is harm being done, unless there is just cause to intervene.

In this case, we have no place in Sanford's bedroom, or in the middle of his family. What he did in private, in Argentina or elsewhere, is his business -- and his family's. But what he did in public -- the executive of a state using state property, and temporarily leaving the state on personal business without, it would seem, informing all those who needed to know, as well as what he has said and the policies he has supported as an elected official, namely, the moralism of the right -- well, that's the people's business, too, especially so in a democracy.

Liberals, in particular, should respect the public/private divide and give Sanford space. It makes no sense, and it is just plain ugly, to gloat over the very human failings of another human being. But I think we are right to point to the hypocrisy, and to marvel at the arrogance of one who forces his morality on everyone but himself.

Bigger, more intrusive government

By Capt. Fogg

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men — the right to be let alone."

- Justice Louis Brandeis -

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well, of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and, of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Opt out privacy

By Carl

There's an interesting decision in the case of a couple suing Google for invasion of privacy:

A ruling issued Wednesday by Judge Amy Reynolds Hay in a Pennsylvania district court states that Google's Street View mapping service is not an invasion of privacy. Judge Reynolds has dismissed a lawsuit against the search giant and has denied a request for injunctive relief that sought to block Google from publishing Street View imagery.

The lawsuit was filed last year by Aaron and Christine Boring, who contend that Google violated their privacy when a Street View camera car drove past a "private road" sign in their driveway in order to take pictures of their house.

Google countered that there was already a public record photo of the house, filed by the county tax assessor's office, and said this proved that "complete privacy does not exist." Perhaps that's a point, although I would argue strongly that being forced to file with the county is not the same thing as having a private enterprise drive up your road. This would be much like claiming that, because you get US mail, you should be forced to accept each and every stinking flyer that a car wash decides to litter your property with.

Here's where the argument gets interesting: Google claims (and it's probably right) that it protects privacy on an "opt out" basis, that, if you ask it, it will eliminate your house from Street View.

Um, what?

It strikes me that privacy is a little like virginity: Once you've lost it, you can't exactly ask for it back. If anything, then, privacy shouldn't be an opt-in right, but an opt-out right.

In other words, Google, no matter how benevolent or benign your purpose may be, it seems to me that the polite thing to do, particularly when it comes to driving onto someone's property, is to ask permission.

The judge's rationale for this boorish invasion by Google? In two words, utterly ridiculous:

Judge Reynolds sided with Google and concluded that the Street View service doesn't meet the criteria for an unlawful intrusion. Case law precedents define an actionable intrusion as one that causes "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation to a person of ordinary sensibilities." Reynolds doesn't believe that sufficient evidence was provided to demonstrate that Street View can cause such damage.

"While it is easy to imagine that many whose property appears on Google's virtual maps resent the privacy implications, it is hard to believe that any -- other than the most exquisitely sensitive -- would suffer shame or humiliation. The Plaintiffs have not alleged facts to convince the Court otherwise," the Judge wrote in the decision.

The Judge also pointed out that the Borings have not taken steps to have the images removed from Street View through Google's opt-out process and have, in fact, decreased their own privacy by drawing attention to themselves with the lawsuit. They did not file the suit under seal, which would have minimized exposure.

Judge Reynolds, now arguably the stupidest jurist in the States (privacy suddenly looks pretty good, Judge, don't it?), has clearly made a brutish and Neaderthalic interpretation of the law, very much akin to the rape victim being told, "Well, hell, don't dress like that, beeyatch!"

Amy Reynolds has compounded the heartache that the Borings (intriguing name, by the way) now feel by basically telling them, "No, no, you didn't read my mind and you got the wrong answer."

"Minimized exposure"? By filing a lawsuit, the Constitutional method of handling these things (unless you want us to fly to Google headquarters and picket, or worse), the Borings availed themselves of the legal recourse open to them, but that recourse has been held against them because it wasn't perfect enough.

As for the whole case law precedent that "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation" must accompany an invasion of privacy, isn't the simple act of exposure a mental suffering? We're talking about a violation, severe enough that the Borings took it upon themselves to fight back. That act alone ought to qualify as evidence of a mental suffering, unless you are going to claim that somehow this couple is masochistic enough to take on one of the biggest frikkin' corporations in the world and is enjoying their moment in the spotlight.

Judge Reynolds, maybe you need to be back in traffic court!

(Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)

Facebook: Big Brother?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, maybe not, yet, but there is cause for concern, now that it will keep your content even after you close your account.

As always, be careful -- be very careful -- what you share online.

Google: Big Brother

By Carl

There's a fine line between informative and intrusive. Ask any celebrity. But now, it seems, we are all celebrities:

This image was published on Google Earth (original image). It depicts Australia's Bondi Beach. If you look closely enough, as PC World points out, you can practically read the labels on the bikinis.

Worse than this, of course, is this new Google product:

The tracking feature, called Latitude, will appear on compatible mobile devices in a new version of Google Maps, version 3.0.0. It can also be added as a gadget on iGoogle, the company's personalizable home page service.

Google reassures us that this feature is opt-in only, but here's the kicker:

To begin sharing your location, you must either sign up for the Latitude service or accept an invitation to view the location of someone already using it.

Latitude's help pages describe the fine-grained control the service allows over who sees what, and when. For each friend with whom you choose to share information, you can give your precise location, the name of the city only, or no information at all.

Key phrases here: "accept an invitation" and "For each friend with whom you choose to share information."

In other words, if you're drunk one night and some intriguing contact decides to share their location with you... you know, to facilitate chat or some such... you are automatically enrolled in Latitude. Worse, everyone you know who is enrolled in Latitude will now, by default, have access to your precise location unless on a case-by-case basis, you choose to limit their access. You can't block general location services completely unless you opt out of the service or manually fix your location on a Google map.

Say you have G-chat, Google's chat feature. Your contacts on there will be able to precisely locate the exact address where you are, whether you are using your mobile device or your home PC. Or as Techtree puts it, you can "stalk your friends." Doesn't matter if you're home, at your girlfriend's house, at HER girlfriend's house (*wink-wink*), a bar, work, playing hooky, whatever. People will know precisely where you are at all times.

Well, now that sucks! What's the point in that?

Here's the kicker: Latitude is bundled with the latest downloadable version of Google Maps for Mobile software, which means if you want the latest mapping, you have to install Latitude, too.

Couple that with what appears to be the ultimate iteration of Google Earth, a live or at least near-live feed of the Earth, and your friends will get to see this.

Ew!

(Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)

It appears that women may actually have a right to bodily privacy in NY

By LindaBeth

According to Thursday’s New York Times, a woman who was upskirt-photographed in a NY subway station (and was able to capture her assailant’s identity on her camera!) has successfully filed criminal charges against him:

Mr. Olivieri was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday on misdemeanor charges of unlawful surveillance, attempted sexual abuse and harassment, a criminal complaint said.

That he was arraigned is surely excellent news, since in many other jurisdictions, women bodies are public property, with no expectation of personal privacy in public. Even more, it was the taking of photos that brought the criminal charges, not their distributing. In some conversations on my main blog around this pet peeve issue of mine, some have suggested that posting the images should be wrong, but that the taking of them in public is and ought to be completely legal.

This NY case indicates that the “wrong” done is in the violation of the photographing; “unauthorized surveillance” seems to indicate that a woman’s body, regardless of its location, is always a zone of privacy. And to that I say an emphatic “yes”!

More past posts on bodily privacy

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

Women’s bodies are not public domain: part 2 of 2

By LindaBeth

Read part 1 here

After posting that first post, I checked back on the Hoyden thread’s discussion, and sure enough a douchebag had entered the discussion, reeking with male privilege. I really couldn’t let his fallacious comments go unaddressed, so I commented on the thread, and wanted to post what I wrote here as well, since this is a topic I am very passionate about and I write about often.

So again, from Hoyden About Town (and I encourage you to check out the thread and the blog, it’s good reading):

Anders Feder

Jul 17th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

Pete:
Apart from the lameness, there is absolutely nothing wrong in posting a picture of an unidentifiable person’s legs.

Suggesting that I am a ‘fellow sociopath-wannabe’ for standing up for reasonable freedoms of expression, on the other hand, is highly questionable.

Oh, and by the way: I demand that you all ask for my permission before responding to this post directly or indirectly. Anything else will offend me.

My response:

lindabeth

Jul 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am

I really have to respond to what Anders said:

Apart from the lameness, there is absolutely nothing wrong in posting a picture of an unidentifiable person’s legs.

The unidentifiability is not the issue here. It’s the lack of consent to be photographed and the lack of consent to have the photograph distributed online.

Suggesting that I am a ‘fellow sociopath-wannabe’ for standing up for reasonable freedoms of expression, on the other hand, is highly questionable.

This is my main beef with what you say. “Freedom of expression” NEVER becomes an issue here, because freedom of expression implies some sort of ownership involved: your art, your words, your text. Photographing a woman, attempting to photograph up her shirt, no less, without her consent, and publishing it online, also without her consent, does not give any legitimate ownership of her body’s representation to this guy.

This is an issue of (the woman’s) privacy, and to be honest, her goddamm right to exist as a human being in public without being unknowingly immortalized online as a sexual thing (right? “just a pair of legs”) and NOT at all an issue of expression. It would be an issue of expression if he asked the woman to photograph her and asked her if she minded him posting it on his blog and she agreed, and if the same reaction ensued. But our reaction is not over the image’s content per se–expression–but rather over the “who do you think you are?” that he felt the right to a) take the pic in the 1st place, b) publish it online, and c) place it in an even further sexualized context through his commentary.

You, however, exhibit in gobs male privilege and an arrogant sense of entitlement over women’s bodies if you think that by a woman daring to be in public “like that” her body is up for grabs to be “owned” (by being photographed), sexualized (despite her desire to simply exist in the world as a female human being), and then displayed online for all to see and continue to sexualize her body, fetishizing her humanity’s absence (her face).

Her legs are her legs, her body is her body, and she decides what will be done with it, not you or anyone else. They are part of her, as a human being, and are not not not public domain. I don’t know why this is so hard for men especially to understand!

Your idea that the photo’s “anonymity” makes it alright, shows how much women have been dehumanized in western culture to the point that our only humanity is in our faces. Everything else, according to you, is just an think to sexualize, and is up for public ownership, so long as we women “dare” to be in public at all.

Your victim-blaming aside (she;s acking to be sexualized, because clearly in your male privilege-laced fantasy world all women dress solely for men’s visual benefit and according to the degree they want to be sexualized, c’mon… think about the “possible views” when a woman is sitting down on a bus with even a professional, just-above-the-knee skirt and her legs crossed. A professionally dressed woman would likely appear like this, so how dare you suggest that the very act of her taking the bus in any clothing that might show some leg means she’s up for grabs. bullshit.)

Oh, and by the way: I demand that you all ask for my permission before responding to this post directly or indirectly. Anything else will offend me.

Actually–wrong. By commenting on this blog you are consenting to discussion. That’s part of the rules of engagement in the blogging medium. She walked outside of her house. Into her community. And traveled by public transportation as a human being and community member. That is not consent to anything. You have consented to this activity; she did not consent to his activity. That is the crucial difference.

I know I rail on this issue a lot, and it might seem a small thing on The List of important issues. But I think this is very important: it says an awful lot about what women’s “place” is, who has rights to women’s bodies, and to what degree to women own their own person; in other words, to what extent are women really Lockean liberal subjects, who own property in their own person?? To me, this is an important question that has implications for all sort of women’s issues–issues legal equality (”rights”) and issues of social equality.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know what to do about it, practically speaking. For one, how could you stop people from doing thing things you aren’t aware of! And second, the internet is so expansive that making a law that make this kind of crap illegal would do little to stop it–because it could only be stopped if the person photographed, or someone they knew, actually saw it.

It’s more reasonable to attack the root cause of this: that in our society, women** do not own the right to their bodies in public, and increasingly in private. This is what needs to change. As I said above too, why can’t people leave other people alone? That’s still true, but this isn’t just an individual issue; it’s a cultural one, exacerbated by recent technology that makes this nearly impossible to solve through law. There has to be a paradigm change in the discourse on women’s bodies. And is this not part of the unfinished sexual revolution? I think so.

**And I know this kind of thing affects men too, mostly in the celebrity world, but the entitlement attitude repeatedly comes from men about women, and I think it’s more a gender issue than, say the celebrity/paparazzi issue is. Although that, too, is about public “ownership,” and while it affects male celebs too, again, it affects women disproportionately more.

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)