Never have I been so grateful to have been so wrong.
... and ...
We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy.
From an op-ed of considered hope, by one of my heroes, Edward J. Snowden.
Seen on Ars:
Engineers from Stanford and Berkeley Universities have figured out how to make radios the size of an ant, which have been created specifically to serve as controllers and sensors in the Internet of Things.
The radios are fitted onto tiny silicon chips, and cost only pennies to make thanks to their diminutive size. They are designed to compute, execute, and relay demands, and they are very energy efficient to the point of being self-sufficient. This is due to the fact that they can harvest power from the incoming electromagnetic signal so they do not require batteries, meaning there is no particular lifetime associated with the devices.
Emphasis mine.
[Added] Related.
Hello, my fellow Americans!
On the left, your National Reconnaissance Office's new logo for their latest spy satellite. Don't you feel safer already?
On the right, something intended to make you fearful.
From a different time. And a different country.
(Image credit: PsionEdge, on Ars. From that source, you can also get to a long Ryan Lizza piece, subtitled "Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?", if you like. I haven't yet found it within me to get to page 2.)
Who knew the Communist Party was worried about this?
Besides everybody on the planet, I mean.
Story link? Really? You want one? OK.
Did you see this, in the NYT?
... some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.
William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.
But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”
Really.
He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”
Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge an assistant professor at Hebrew University.
Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.
A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.
The Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.
Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found.
Do tell.
The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.
As you can tell from the spelling of "centres," this is furrin reporting. Another win for our homeland media! USA! USA! USA!
Oh, and ...
The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.
Read it and weep.
(h/t: Gary Legum | pic. source | pic credit: "Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au")
In case you haven't heard about the goings-on in Utah, "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say):"
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
One such insider was willing to go on the record for the article, William Binney. He is "a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network," who "left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program."
... they're also dumber than a sack of hammers.
Latest bit of evidence? It seems that a couple from that noted terrorist haven of Ireland were detained by your Department of Homeland™ Security® and after hours of interrogation, denied entry into the erstwhile land of the free and home of the brave. For? A "terrorist tweet." Their words. I am not making this up.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the only way the real terrorists win is if we let them.
(h/t: JC, who got me Googling after sending a different link. Not that I don't trust you, JC, but, you know. The Sun. Always worth double-checking whatever they say, even if they got this one right.)
99% of the police make the rest of them look bad.
-- Jacob Applebaum
That line was delivered at 55:47* of his joint talk with Roger Dingledine, "How governments have tried to block Tor."
P.S. If you're wondering, "Should I watch this whole talk?", a hint may be gleaned by jumping to the 1:18:05** mark.
__________
* The link should bring you to that point, but for some reason, it's not getting there exactly. Sorry.
** (Same link problem, sorry.)
When police tell people to turn off their video cameras, that’s exactly when they need to turn their video cameras on.
-- Amy Goodman, as quoted by Erich Vieth
(h/t: Several tweeps, on this list somewhere down a few screens)
Pic via Ken Layne, who also has video posted. Along with some righteous words.
[Added] A partial screengrab from James Fallows's post, which is also well worth reading in its entirety:
More from Fallows:
This Occupy moment is not going to end any time soon. That is not just because of the underlying 99%-1% tensions but also because of police response of this sort -- and because there have been so many similar videos coming from cities across the country.
As a wise friend of mine predicted about a week ago.
The above is not a one-off. See, for example, Joshua Holland's report, "Caught on Camera: 10 Shockingly Violent Police Assaults on Occupy Protesters."
[Added2] In summary.
Even if they won't say so out loud.
David Simon: Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. Since we basically have become a market-based culture, that’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad dénouement. I think we’re going to follow market-based logic right to the bitter end.
Bill Moyers: Which says?
David Simon: If you don’t need ’em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you’re doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There’s no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.
"Read the whole thing, you will not regret it," says Anne Laurie.
It's tough -- I've had to take two breaks already -- but I encourage you to try.
He takes respect my authoritah to a whole new low.
He began by filing a $1.2-million lawsuit against YouTube, apparently finding the only lawyer on the planet who could say with a straight face, "This level of ridicule goes beyond what is reasonable." He demanded that YouTube take the cartoons down. He demanded YouTube reveal the identity of the person who posted them. Oh, and it doesn't end there. He also demanded to know the real names of twenty-four commenters, so he can sue them, too.
His initial abuse of his police powers is bad enough, but you really have to wonder how anyone living in the Western world in the year 2010 does not get how everything he has done since then is even stupider. Both of the newspaper articles cited above report that the cartoons have been taken down by YouTube. That may have even been true for five or six minutes, but of course it is not any longer. And of course, there is now a "Fire Officer Bubbles" Facebook group. (Now with new and improved name!)
I don't know whether this clown is looking to cash in on his infamy by scoring his own reality teevee show, or if he is just bucking for a job with Joe Miller's securitah forces, but in any case, let's all teach Officer Bubbles the real meaning of the words Streisand Effect.
(h/t: Substance McGravitas || pic. sources: assassin | WMD)
Notes on the Politics of Fear and Loathing
I observed elsewhere a couple of days ago that Bryan Fischer of The American Family Association had posted a screed on the AFA site, bellowing, "No more mosques, period." As in, anywhere in the US. He also insists that "Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment." I came across this via Lauri Apple, who noted some other examples of similar such bed-wetting, too.
Now, here's another, more detailed and comprehensive look from Stephan Salisbury, which begins as follows.
The Far-Right's Anti-Mosque Mania Spreads from Ground Zero to Across the U.S., Pointing to Dark Politics Ahead
The phony 'debate' over the construction of an Islamic cultural center near the former World Trade Center portends darker things to come.
August 11, 2010 | There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan. The angry “debate” over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen.
It’s not just that opposition to the building has coalesced around a phony “Mosque at Ground Zero” shorthand (with its echoes of dust, death, and evildoers). Many have pointed out -- futilely -- that the complex will be more than two blocks from the former World Trade Center, around a corner on Park Place, and will feature an auditorium, spa, basketball court, swimming pool, classrooms, exhibition space, community meeting space, 9/11 memorial, and, yes, a prayer space for Muslims. The shorthand still sticks.
Nor is it just that this is only the most visible of a growing number of nasty controversies over proposed mosques in Tennessee, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Illinois as well as Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and Midland Beach, Staten Island, in New York City. Such protests are emerging with alarming frequency. Nor is it simply that political leaders -- from Republican presidential wannabes to New York gubernatorial hopefuls -- have sought to exploit the Lower Manhattan controversy. (Sarah Palin demanded that “peaceful Muslims” step up and “refudiate” the plan; Newt Gingrich denounced the building of such a “mosque” as long as Saudi Arabia bars construction of churches and synagogues; Rick Lazio, a Republican campaigning for the governorship of New York state, asserted that the plan somehow subverted the right of New Yorkers “to feel safe and be safe.”)
No, it’s the déjà -vu-ness of the controversy that kindles special unease, the sense that we’ve been here before as a country, and the realization that, for a decade, a significant number of our nation’s political leaders have been honing an anti-Muslim narrative which fertilizes anti-Muslim sentiment to the point where it is now spreading like a toxic plume, uncapped and uncontrollable.
The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it’s about the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and fear that now dominate the nation’s psyche. The mere presence of Muslims at prayer is now enough to trigger angry protests, as Bridgeport, Connecticut, police discovered last week. Those opposing the construction of the center in New York City are drawing on what amounts to a decade of government-stoked xenophobia about Muslims, now gathering strength and visibility in a nation full of deep economic anxieties and increasingly aggressive far-right grassroots groups. Lower Manhattan and Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Temecula, California, are all in this together. And it is not going to go away simply because the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission gave its unanimous blessing to the Islamic center plan. Since that is the case, it’s worth pausing to consider what has happened here over the past 10 years.
(h/t: @ronaldjackson)
Following up from the previous post, here's a related note.
Wikileaks posts an Insurance policy
Wikileaks Afghanistan War Diary
It seems that Wikileaks has posted a massive (1.4 GB, 10x larger than all the other files on the page combined) heavily encrypted file on it's dedicated "Afghan War Diary" page labeled simply "Insurance". (See link above)
Possibly in response to the harsh rhetoric issuing from the US DoD regarding Wikileak's founder, Julian Assange (including the rumored price on his head), sometime last Sunday afternoon the new file was quietly uploaded with no explanation.
The Daily Beast is reporting the Pentagon has a manhunt currently underway for Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange.
The rest, from Antemedius.
My impression, based on occasional impressions formed over the past couple of years, is that Julian Assange is a bit of a drama queen. However, if the part about the "Pentagon manhunt" is true, that all by itself is enough to legitimately alarmed, I'd say.
(h/t: @BrianDegenhart | x-posted)
A volunteer for Wikileaks was detained by officials Thursday while entering the country at Newark International Airport.
Jacob Appelbaum, noted for his work with the Tor online security project, was searched and "interrogated" for three hours before being released, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous.
Wikileaks, a clearing house for information submitted by whistleblowers, released a trove of "War Logs" last Sunday relating to the conflict in Afghanistan. Appelbaum delivered a keynote speech at the recent HOPE conference in Wikileaks chief Julian Assange's place, and gave an interview to Boing Boing about the content of the logs.
According to the source, Appelbaum was stopped by customs officials and spoken to for at least three hours by a team that included a U.S. Army investigator. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning was named last week as a possible Wikileaks source in relation to the classified logs.
Appelbaum's interviewers demanded that he decrypt his laptop and other computer equipment, the source said. After his refusal to do so, they confiscated it, including three cellphones. The laptop was returned, apparently because it contained no storage drive that investigators could examine. He was also asked about his role in Wikileaks and informed that he was under surveillance.
The FBI also asked to speak to Appelbaum earlier today in Las Vegas after his talk at the annual DEFCON hacker conference. Mr. Appelbaum, the source said, had an attorney present who declined the request on his behalf.
Appelbaum, reached Saturday afternoon, said he was unable to comment.
Update: CNET has more details of the detainment.
From the CNET article, this just killed me:
Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, …
The interview, conducted the day after the Wikileaks/Afghanistan story broke, is worth a look. I liked this line:
Boing Boing: The Department of Defense has called Wikileaks a "national security threat."
Jacob Appelbaum: Wikileaks is not a national security threat; we are an international security promise.
(h/t: siouxeeq via RT | x-posted | see also)
[Added] Follow-up.
Sorry, Jim Newell. Your post must be stolen in its entirety.
No, Illegal Immigrants Do Not Kidnap and Behead Everyone in Arizona
If you have heard John McCain and Jan Brewer making hyperbolic claims of illegal immigrants kidnapping, murdering, raping, and beheading everyone and their brother in Arizona these days — their justification for the immigration law — then consider ignoring them?
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who usually spreads this unchecked conventional wisdom on a weekly basis, has written an excellent column debunking the myths of exponentially surging illegal immigrant violence along the border that right-wing Arizona politicians are shouting about all day, in order to justify that harsh, racial-profiling immigration law.
For example: Jan Brewer, the flustered Arizona governor, claimed last week on television, "Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded." But when this was fact-checked, "medical examiners in Arizona's border counties and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading."
Two months ago, the Arizona Republic published an exhaustive report that found that, according to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been "essentially flat for the past decade." For example, "In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes." The Pima County sheriff reported that "the border has never been more secure."
FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago — yet Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reports that the violence is "the worst I have ever seen." President Obama justifiably asserted last week that "the southern border is more secure today than any time in the past 20 years," yet Rush Limbaugh judged the president to be "fit for the psycho ward" on the basis of that remark.
So poor Jan Brewer was not forced to sign this immigration bill into law because the hordes of beheading, kidnapping Mexican death monsters were surrounding her office and law enforcement needed emergency powers to shoo 'em out. And the more Brewer and McCain play up this threat of constant violence, the worse it is for Arizona's economy. And Arizona's economy is really really bad! Have you been there? Empty houses and whatnot, everywhere.
(Above: Jan Brewer gets a Wet Willie, and someone
who has NeverConsidered™ himself a Maverick™)
(pic. sources: Janny, Johnny | x-posted)
__________
[Added] I really cannot second Jim's recommendation strongly enough: read Milbank's column.
Sheesh. Forget about secession of these dumb hick states. How about we expel them?
Not content with passing a law that empowers the police to harass anyone whose skin is deemed insufficiently white, Arizona Republicans have now doubled trebled down on the stupid, looking to pass a law that would ban ethnic studies in any school that receives state funding and another that would ban teachers with "accents" from teaching kids for whom English isn't a first language. (Would this include Sarah Palin, one wonders?)
(h/t: Ken Layne)
__________
This thinly-veiled racism has me too discouraged to say much at this point, so I'll steer you to Timothy Egan's latest -- "Desert Derangement Syndrome" -- which is righteous.
Following up on the earlier post related to airport "security" …
I passed along the delightful "Take Off Your Shoes, and Is the Parrot Loaded?" article to my Bh.tv forum friend and African Grey owner Wonderment, teasingly asking if he had a gig at the NYT. His reply is too good not to repost (you should read the article first):
Ha! That article gives a whole new meaning to "Spread 'em."
But no, I'm not Joe Sharkey. My baby is a DNA-tested male, doesn't know the "eagle" trick (or any other trick), and would likely have bit the inspector's fingers off or delayed the flight for 48 hours while basking in police-state attention and gazing nevermore-esquely at his fellow flyers.
I do think Joe should teach Rosie to scream "Allah hu akhbar" at airports in order to prove to one and all that Islam is a religion of peace.
This story about a private company that calls itself American Police Force, which has taken over (leased) a jail in a small town in Montana to build a multimillion-dollar "training facility," is all kinds of conspiracy-freak bait. (Oh, yeah, Alex Jones is all over this one.) However, this is the part that troubled me the most (emph. added):
And where is American Police Force getting the money for this venture? Company spokeswoman Becky Shay -- until about a week ago the Billings Gazette reporter covering APF -- says they are no plans to answer that question.
I'm well aware that this is far from the first reporter to trade her soul for the easy money of a flack job, but still. Ugh.
(h/t: Jim Newell)
