Category Archives: Internet

Surveillance Societies Condition Helplessness, Anxiety and Compliance.

Constitution, Individual Rights, Internet, Justice, Law, Liberty, Regulation, Technology, Terrorism, The State

“It’s slow and subtle,” writes Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, “but surveillance societies inexorably train us for helplessness, anxiety and compliance. Maybe they’ll never look at your call logs, read your emails or listen in on your intimate conversations. You’ll just live with the knowledge that they always could — and if you ever had anything worth hiding, there would be nowhere left to hide it.”

An superb piece by Sanchez, which I’ve followed, below, with a Sanchez segment on Stossel:

Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyeror an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of?

Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.

It’s precisely this kind of analysis the NSA is likely interested in doing to help “fingerprint” either specific suspects or the general profile of a terror suspect. Link that information to other data sets being collected, like credit card bills, and you can even deduce when a woman is pregnant before her own family knows. Think of big data analysis as a statistical Sherlock Holmes, capable of making surprising inferences from seemingly insignificant details and patterns.

But fine, so what if a bunch of strangers in a room in Fort Meade could, in principle, discover these things about you? There’s no reason to think they’re digging for that kind of stuff, and even if they did, it’d be like learning there are naked photos of you circulating in a Mongolian village: A little creepy, maybe, but unlikely to have a concrete effect on your life.

Assuming you don’t match a profile that gets you flagged for more intensive surveillance, that’s probably right — as long as they’re only using that vast, rich database to look for specific terror or espionage suspects. If they change their minds about the rules governing access to the database or how it’s put to use, of course, we’re unlikely to ever know; we didn’t know what the rules were before the leak either.

That’s one problem with bulk collection of data. The information often sticks around indefinitely, while the rules only stick around until someone decides to change them. The IRS is all fired up to use big data to hunt for tax cheats, and in principle, the NSA can disseminate evidence of some crime. Sooner or later, other agencies may start to wonder why such a juicy data set is going to waste.

But the average person is unlikely to pique the NSA’s interest, even when those sweeping surveillance powers are abused for purposes ranging beyond terrorism. It probably won’t affect you personally or directly.

However, that seems like an awfully narrow way to think about the importance of privacy. Folks don’t usually say (aloud, anyway), “I’m white, why should I care about racism?” or, “My political and religious views are too mainstream to ever be restricted, so why should I care about the First Amendment?”

READ ON.

And watch (no transcripts, of course) Stossel, as Sanchez explains that “most cellphone carriers have the capability to install remote spyware on your cell phone,” in addition to the dozens of [other] ways we can [and are being] tracked.

UPDATED: ILANA MERCER Twitter Identity Hijacked & Is Google Now A Proxy For The NSA? (DuckDuckGo.com’s NSA-Proof)

Fascism, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Media, Propaganda, Technology, The State

The ILANA MERCER handle on Twitter—name and identity—has been hijacked by at least one rogue actor on Twitter, acting maliciously to impersonate me.

The holder of this fraudulent account has, naturally, altered his account’s URL, but is otherwise masquerading as me, down to my description on the original Ilana Mercer Twitter account. This shameless fraud calls his account “Live It Up.”

Another likely bad actor using my name (ILANA MERCER) on Twitter calls herself “Ilana Mercer (Viola_ti_do).” She has not appropriated the identity/description associated with my Twitter account.

What’s really suspicious is the results of the latest Google Search for “ILANA MERCER Twitter.” On a search for “ILANA MERCER TWITTER,” Google has suddenly (literally starting today) begun to throw up first these imposter handles and their puerile postings.

Understand: The impersonators’ posts are not current. Mine are. Yet a Google sweep has placed them first up on a search for “ilana mercer twitter,” and has made it well-nigh impossible to trace the authentic “ilana mercer twitter” account on its Search.

Questioning Google operations is far from unreasonable in light of the revelation that “the National Security Agency has ‘direct access to the systems of Google.” This writer, like many other libertarians, has moreover, written of Google’s collusion with the administration in “‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden,'” the widely read WND, EPJ and American Daily Herald column.

Well before the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal broke, when the teletwits—legal experts included—were deferring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) respectfully as a protector of rights—this column had warned against the filthy FISA Court. In “From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA,” I cautioned, in particular, that “Companies that give up … information to the government have ‘immunity,’ which has been ‘built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.’

Name and shame impersonators and mischief-makers on social media.

Question the search engine whose search algorithms appear to favor the “Statist Quo,” as opposed to reality.

Share, Re-tweet, and Like this post on social media.

And remember, this could happen to YOU!

UPDATED: The NSA-Proof DuckDuckGo.com search engine gets it right. We are blessed with pockets of free-market innovators. One of them is an NSA-proof new search engine, DuckDuckGo.com. Guess what? Plugged into this NSA-proof search engine, the search “ilana mercer twitter” yields the authentic account, rather than the imposter accounts.

This is interesting.

Will freedom-lovers ditch Google for DuckDuckGo.com?

UPDATE II: Publishing Books In The Age Of The Internet, Pathological PC and Unprecedented laziness (Hire Your Own PR)

Education, English, General, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Journalism, Literature, Political Economy

The welcome news comes that Karen De Coster is publishing a book.

A mutual friend, author Rob Stove, has offered Karen some advice and posted it on her heavily trafficked Facebook Wall.

I counseled differently:

“As someone who has done every bit of heavy lifting for my last book—quite successfully, I might add—I have to disagree somewhat with Rob (who advises writing for prestigious publications on the topic, first).

The traditional, stuffy, staid publishing world is dying (yippee). I read the once-brave TLS. All new writers have to be (it would appear) people of color and/or those with no Y chromosome. The only writing worth reading vis-a-vis these new writers is the superb writing by the TLS’s increasingly PC reviewers (who try to be kind to the pig-ignorant, boring, PC writers they have to review).

In any case, you sell books from a platform. Mine was developed over almost 15 years as a weekly columnist.

Karen De Coster writes for a very large site, LRC, with a dedicated, niche readership. She manages social media with skill and has thousands of FB friends (whom she will have to instruct to “Like” her book and display it on their FB pages, if they want to keep her FB company. Here is my Facebook Friendship Policy).

That’s the future of publishing. Who cares if some pompous scribe in a dying publication (check its Alexa rank for stage of rigor) gives one a good review? Rob Stove—he edited The Cannibal; hire a good editor. We all need one—was mentioned by the New Yorker, and other prestigious publications. To this not all of us can aspire. However, were Rob to write a book about politics or culture, he would have to forget about future mention.

Back to my point: Karen can sell lots of books if she publishes the book herself (How much would you rather earn? 17%-50% royalties or 100%, all the more so when you, the writer, do all the work). She can go the CreateSpace route or with her own label. She then uses her platform on LRC to sell to an already interested audience. She also promotes her book on Facebook, via ads and by requiring all friends to “Like” and display book on their Fav. page. Even big names are publishing their own books (see David Frum’s new book. I followed it from CNN).

A small publisher does nothing for a writer except deplete him/her. There are a handful of large publishers worth considering for the TV PR they can generate. This writer (me) manages every aspect of the project—social media, fan page and website designs (I pay the attendant bills too, so…), Amazon page management, all writing, limited PR, etc. That’s the route to getting books read by the public in the age of the Internet (without which the true rebels would be destined for obscurity). Books published by smaller, if respectable, publishers are like the proverbial tree felled in a faraway wood. Almost no one reads them. (Check their profile on Amazon. You’ll see.)

For example, “The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism” is written by a man with the “right” kind of name (non-English/non-Western): Hamid Dabashi. It was published on June 5, 2012 by Zed Books, a print that met the Times Literary Review’s standards.

It’s Amazon rank: #1,614,336 in Books. If you are new to book marketing, that’s abysmal.

(Btw, if you don’t market on Amazon, you’re retarded.)

On the bright side, by the number of reviews “The Arab Spring” got, we can tell that at least one person has read what Dabashi has to say. Conversely, and pessimistically, “0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.” In other words, so far, nobody gives a tinker’s toss what Dabashi’s single reviewer had to say about Dabashi’s latest work.

UPDATE I (10/30): Here’s another TLS “winner,” published (November 1, 2011) by Encounter (who refused the well-motivated proposal that became The Cannibal).

In Money In A Free Society, Tom Congdon touts every form of macroeconomic statism. His approving TLS reviewer mentions the “Austerians” (very bad) but says nothing about the Austrians.

Amazon ranks Money In A Free Society at #560,109 in Books. Zero reviews. Who pays these people?

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): HIRE YOUR OWN PR.

Unless you can get a book deal with one of the major big publishers (try), publish yourself. You’ll be smacking yourself if you don’t. To repeat: 15% royalties (standard industry fare) vs. 100%? Case closed. All the more so since small publishers do nothing for you. Unless your publisher is prepared to invest a few thousand for a few weeks of TV and media blitz. However, you could buy such PR yourself privately. Why hand over your money to a 2nd party to hire a 3rd? If you control the purse strings (as disposable income dictates), hire PR directly, to get on the main shows.

Want to have a frothy a day? Go with a small publisher. They suck. These are dominated by errant youth (or hippie elders who defer to such youth), who don’t have a work ethic or a brain cell to rub between them. No one has taught America’s young how to work professionally; how to conduct themselves with respect to author and contract and execute duties properly: If you want them done to standards, you’ll be inputting info and updating your Amazon page and other Internet displays of your product.

Individuals such as Karen are coming from an accounting career. They work alongside people who have serious degrees. The writing profession, on the other hand, is dominated by individuals who are repositories for postmodern education and values (even when they are libertarian). Don’t go there, unless it’s with a powerful, large publisher.

Your Republican Reptile In Action

Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Internet, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Fredrick Ray Hartman, a DC-based statist Republican, in the employ of the government, had petitioned me for Facebook Friendship (not the other way around).

On getting notice of my Facebook Policy, he writes furiously:

“don’t send people [note the royal plural] a copy of facebook policies again…you are being deleted…..i was your friend ditto… removing you from my friends list…..i tried to friend you from another wall and you had the gull [sic] to respond with a facebook policy note….you don’t know your friends i guess…..good luck”

Your Republican politician (or aspiring overlord) in action.

And OMG! What will I do without these Republican faithful “pals” of mine, of whom I have none, as they deserted me on September 19, 2002, when I wrote this op-ed for the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers.

Let me remind Hartman and his ilk (statist, power-hungry Republicans, whom we libertarians disavow) that he was the one to petition me for Facebook Friendship, not the other way around. This statist and I (a long-time paleolibertarian) have nothing in common.

This conduct is a taste of what you should expect from your reptilian Republican in office, should you demand that he comply with YOUR rules, enacted on your turf, or property.

This is the chance of all like-minded Republicans on this Wall to join Fredrick Ray Hartman; Unfriend me please.

Ron Paul for president.