Category Archives: Liberty

Long Live Big Brother

Government, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Internet, Law, Liberty, Media, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism

Long live Big Brother
By Myron Pauli

In 1788, Jefferson observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground”. Now, apparently, our National Security Agency might be compiling a Yottabyte of data – a trillion trillion bytes which is over 3000 trillion bytes per American. Consider that to store a 9 digit zipcode on you every minute for 100 years is only 1 billion bytes (without data compression), that is a lot of information – “We want information”.

Banks, FBI, IRS, and “Fair-Tax advocates” want to eliminate cash – thus, everything you spend can be monitored. Devices in your car, phone, person, and probably soon clothing can track you 24/7. Like Santa Claus, the government knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake – and stores that knowledge indefinitely.

Search engines can find out who you call, where you go, what you read and write, your friends, your relatives, your medical records, your purchases – all accessible. Is Joe Biden a stingy tipper or did Rand Paul ever set foot in a strip club – ask Uncle Sam? Blackmail-R-Us.

And who has access – potentially millions of people – J Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Bradley Manning, IRS, Barack Obama, Verizon, Vladimir Putin, FBI, CIA, BATF, Alabama State Police, Citigroup, who knows… – and anyone that one of these people gives information to! Search for “libertarian Jews” or “anorexic Ukrainian lesbians” or imagine a Chinese agent in Utah searching for “Chinese grad students in America who read Ayn Rand” – all inside that Yottabyte – soon to be expanded to kilo-Yottabytes.

With new laws and “administrative regulations” passed each year, more and more Americans are probably in some degree of non-compliance. In the past, of course, surveillance was confined to hard core terrorists such as Wendell Willkie, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Robert Bork, and Martha Stewart.

Now it is YOU!

Just contemplate all the info in the hands of prosecutors such as Michael Nifong, Angela Corey, Torquemada, and John Yoo – exercising their prosecutorial discretion. America already holds 25% of jail inmates worldwide and the Yottabyte archive can assure our global leadership in this category for years to come.

The mainstream media, however, seems to care little. From FOX through MSNBC, the focus is not on the 4th Amendment (what’s that??) but just how “Snowden is evil” (24-1 in Washington Post op-eds). Harassing the lover of reporter Glenn Greenwald (is David Miranda a terrorist?) only receives minor attention.

When the media focuses on human rights, it concentrates on the specks and logs in overseas eyeballs and not in our own. We are told how things are bad for blacks in Libya or Christians in Egypt (sometimes as a result of our own meddling!). That is the “safe” human rights advocacy – it not only does not challenge the American power structure but actually supports the Department of Defense.

“Fight mistreatment of gays in Russia with the Lockheed F-35 fighter” or “Build the Zumwalt destroyer to liberate women in Afghanistan.” Where popular opinion could make a difference – that is, our own country. – we can just be told “Shut up – it is always worse in North Korea”.

Then we can add in “Stop-and-frisk.” Rightists love anything that involves police and military. Leftists only care if it is “fair” – frisking black “youths” at midnight is OK if you frisk oriental grandmothers at noon. Harassing Farouk from Yemen, when boarding an airplane is fine as long as 5-year-old Suzi from Ashtabula also gets the rubber hose. An Equal-Opportunity-Gestapo – hallelujah!

There are some signs that some Americans are changing their minds on the limitless Yottabyte Archive State. Unfortunately, there will always be “threats” – some wacko will shoot up a school periodically or a Boston Marathon bomber or DC Sniper will strut his stuff. In between the low-level carnage, the FBI can always find (typically) ex-con addicted minority dimwits and convince them to try to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with wire cutters or drive a bus into the Sears Tower. The trillions of $$ spent on defense can never be enough and the Yottabyte Archive needs more info on all of us. As they might say in Casablanca, “Round up the usual 313,900,000 subjects”.

Long live Big Brother!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

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: Will Mark Levin Ever Diss Militarism and Majoritarianism (As Facets of Statism)?

Constitution, Democracy, Federalism, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Liberty, Military, Neoconservatism, States' Rights

Mark Levin is right about the need to repeal the 17th Amendment. Libertarians have long since argued in favor of senators once again being elected by the respective state legislatures, as was the original intent of the Framers.

However, about eight minutes into Mr. Levin’s segment with Sean Hannity, I heard the radio host emphasize only the idea of term limits vis-a-vis the Senate, when he should have also been dissing the idea of democracy. Were not America’s constitution makers trying to put in place a scheme that would forestall unfettered democracy?

Was this not the purpose of an upper House elected by state legislatures, and not by the people at large as the 17th Amendment decreed?

I imagine there is no place for curbing militarism in the grand scheme of Mr. Levin’s new book.

Neoconservatives do not consider the military-industrial-complex a branch of Leviathan. However, militarism and majoritarianism are facets of statism.

UPDATE: From “Independence And The Declaration of Secession”:

“While Mark Levin, the radio man lauded by his Republican adherents as “The Great One,” has denounced the secessionists among us (check), McClellan (a real scholar) seconded the Declaration’s secessionist impetus. …”

IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity

Constitution, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Liberty, Morality, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity” is the current column, now on WND:

“House Republicans are waging a symbolic and futile battle to slash the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $3 billion. Republicans, according to reports, want the tax-collectors to pay for ‘unfairly scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.’

As usual, the GOP finesses the matter, as does the press.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson understated the IRS’s abuse of ‘police power’ as a mere ‘intrusion’; an ideological targeting by federal investigation of a political movement. To its credit, the Post’s Editorial Board stepped it up, conceding, at the time of the scandal that, “Any unequal application of the law based on ideological viewpoint is unpardonable—toxic to the legitimacy of the government’s vast law-enforcement authority.”

More to the point—and likely with White-House imprimatur—the IRS persecuted American patriots for promoting the constitutional principles upon which America was founded, but which are no longer a lodestar for the country’s government. These groups were hounded for their principles—and for asking to keep more of what is rightfully theirs in the service of these values.

How perverse is that?

And how perverse is the sight of the same IRS bureaucrats getting their freak-on (as in groove-on) at your expense?

Watch this YouTube clip of a representative cross-section, no doubt, of the IRS workforce at a “training conference.” Look at these off-putting officials having a jolly good time on your dime. Chins and butts wiggling obscenely all over the show; these people belong in a Federico Fellini film.

You could not fan away the smell in that hall if you tried. …

… These repulsive IRS agents, stomping about with abandon in carnival-like conferences and getaways: Do they represent you? Do they reflect your habits, manners, demeanor, priorities or worldview?

…We are trapped in the deforming, deadly clutches of institutionalized freaks, the remedy to which is…”

The complete column is “IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity.” Read it on WND.

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