Former Florida governor, brother of former President George W Bush, son of former President George H W Bush, and Republican frontrunner for the 2016 US presidential election, Jeb Bush … has strongly defended the NSA’s mass surveillance of innocent people.
Speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as part of his run for the White House, Bush made it clear that if he did become president he would retain the programs introduced under his brother’s administration.
While covering broad foreign policy topics, Bush appeared to go off script when he said that in order to effectively tackle Islamic terrorism, it was necessary to have “responsible intelligence gathering and analysis – including the NSA metadata program, which contributes to awareness of potential terror cells and interdiction efforts on a global scale.”
He continued: “For the life of me, I don’t understand.. the debate has gotten off track, where we’re not understanding or protecting.. we do protect our civil liberties.. but this is a hugely important program to use these technologies to keep us safe.”
Fast forward to the 28-minute mark for the fun to begin in this vid, streamed live on Wednesday, of his talk
Category: Human stupidity
FCC’s Ajit Pai: By Making Sure The Internet Is Open And Free… It Will Inspire North Korea And Cuba To Censor
I should note, upfront, that I’ve had the chance to meet FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai a couple of times, and always found him to be interesting and knowledgeable, as well as engaged on important issues. Yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to net neutrality issues, the former Verizon lawyer (clue number 1) seems to have gone off the deep end, tossed all logic and intellectual honesty out the window, in an effort to just lash out angrily with whatever he’s got. We’ve talked about his incoherent attack on Netflix and his sudden and newfound love of transparency (never noted before…).
But his latest move just strips whatever credibility he may have had on the subject completely away. He’s insisting that the FCC’s new net neutrality rules (which he opposes) will inspire North Korea and Iran to further control and censor the internet (which they already control and heavily censor). And he’s not arguing this in a “they hate us for our freedom” way, but he’s actively lying and claiming that this move — a move to guarantee openness and not censorship online — will give the North Korean and Iranian governments the political cover to censor the internet. Let’s be frank, Pai’s statements are complete nonsense.
“If in the United States we adopt regulations that assert more government control over how the Internet operates … it becomes a lot more difficult for us to go on the international stage and tell governments: ‘Look, we want you to keep your hands off the internet,’” he said.
“Even if the ideas aren’t completely identical, you can appreciate the optical difficult in trying to make that case,” he added.
More Power For Bad Cops: NYPD Head Supports Raising ‘Resisting Arrest’ To A Felony
Asked whether the penalty for resisting arrest should be increased from a misdemeanor to a felony, [NYPD Commissioner Bill] Bratton said he supported the idea.
“We need to get around this idea that you can resist arrest,” Bratton reiterated to reporters after the hearing. “One of the ways to do that is to give penalties for that.”
The most half-baked “weapon” in any policeman’s arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. “Resisting arrest” is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you’ll see plenty of “resisting arrest” charges.When a San Francisco public defender tried to head off a detective who wanted to question and photograph her client without her permission, she was arrested for “resisting arrest.”
Waterboarding Whistleblower Released From Prison, Two Months After Torture Report’s Release Vindicated His Actions
Guess who went to jail because of the CIA’s long-running, illegal torture programs.
It wasn’t former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn’t any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn’t the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of “national security.”
The single person to be put behind bars thanks to the CIA’s torture programs was the man who blew the whistle on the agency’s waterboarding: John Kiriakou. Now, he’s finally free again (mostly), two months after the Torture Report that corroborates his allegations was released.
Kiriakou is serving out the remainder of his sentence for “revealing an undercover operative’s identity” under house arrest. While still imprisoned, Kiriakou wondered aloud (in the Los Angeles Times) why Panetta wasn’t facing similar charges, considering the former CIA head had disclosed far more sensitive information, including the names of SEAL operatives to a civilian — the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty.
Texas School Overreaction
Seems that a Texas school has suspended a 9-year-old for threatening another student with a replica One Ring. (Yes, that One Ring.)
55th Largest Private Company In America Sent Millions To China Because An Email Told Them To
You’ve all heard of this kind of scam before. Some nefarious person or group gets a hold of someone’s email or computer screen, pretends to be someone in some official capacity, and demands a whatever sum of money they can get away with. Some of the time these scammers pretend to be the IRS, or a utility company, or even law enforcement. What these scams tend to mostly have in common is that they go after private citizens en masse, in the hope to entice whatever percentage of the more gullible amongst us to pay up. What you don’t expect to hear about is one of the largest corporations in the United States essentially falling for the same thing.
Australian Prime Minister: Social Media Is Like Electronic Graffiti
I’ll leave social media to its own devices. Social media is kind of like electronic graffiti and I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media,” Mr Abbott said on Australia Day. “You wouldn’t report what’s sprayed up on the walls of buildings.
– Tony Abbott, Prime minister of Australia
Unpacking France’s Chilling Proposal to Hold Companies Accountable for Speech
France’s misguided efforts to grapple with hate speech—which is already prohibited by French law—have been making headlines for years. In 2012, after an horrific attack on a Jewish school, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed criminal penalties for anyone visiting websites that contain hate speech. An anti-terror law passed in December imposes greater penalties on those that “glorify terrorism” online (as opposed to offline), and allows websites engaging in the promotion of terrorism to be blocked with little oversight. And following the attack on Charlie Hebdo last month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated that “it will be necessary to take further measures” to address the threat of terrorism.
Despite such a history, the latest proposal to emerge from the country is shocking. At the World Economic Forum last week, President Francois Hollande called on corporations to “fight terror,” stating:
The big operators, and we know who they are, can no longer close their eyes if they are considered accomplices of what they host. We must act at the European and international level to define a legal framework so that Internet platforms which manage social media be considered responsible, and that sanctions can be taken.
In effect, Hollande’s proposal seeks to hold social media companies accountable for the speech that they host. This is antithetical to US law, where online service providers are explicitly exempted from being treated as publishers, with few exceptions, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
‘Privacy is DAMAGING to PROGRESS’ says Irish big data whitepaper
More than 350 Irish boffins have signed a white paper calling for nothing less than a “Magna Carta for Data”.
The Insight Centre for Data Analytics says it wants to “put Europe on the road to fair and relevant legislation”, but most of the language sounds like what it really wants is to water down privacy rights in favour of Big Data businesses.
“We have progressed so rapidly that the term ownership is obsolete. Does a person own all of the data they generate, for example? Or just the identifying parts of it?” the group innocently asks.
Dara Murphy, Ireland’s Data Protection Minister, spoke at the presentation of the paper in Brussels on Wednesday, saying: “In seeking to harness the power of Big Data, we must place the protection of individual privacy at the heart of everything we do.”
With thousands of jobs in Ireland dependant on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other data slurpers, however, he is unlikely to let the flow of data to big business dry up.
Although it makes some conciliatory noises about “trust”, according to the paper “the almost exclusive focus on the privacy of the individual, while politically popular, is potentially damaging to progress.” It further dismisses public fears that “data owners may evolve into monopolies” and “lock in” or “control” citizens, saying this would undermine the benefits of data analytics.
The paper further suggests that self-censoring behaviour “by those who think they are being monitored” is a problem in the face of potentially unrealistic fears. But it does concede: “Direct harm to autonomy might occur when an autocratic (or democratic) government uses Big Data technologies to effectively root out any resistance.”
The paper asks eight questions about data ethics but is short on answers. The usual defences of health diagnoses and smart cities are trotted out alongside a surprisingly long treatise on the benefits of Monsanto’s prescriptive farming programme in California. The paper then glibly adds that “companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are [also] collecting consumer data.”
Well, that’s OK then.
Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension
New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States’ already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the “Mickey Mouse Act” as it was called due to Disney’s heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. Nations including Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Canada would all be required to extend their terms and grant Big Content companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason. This means that all of the TPP’s extreme enforcement provisions would apply to creative works for upwards of 100 years.
Negotiators have been made well aware that there is no economic rationale that can justify this extension. The fact that they have chosen to ignore what is a clear consensus among economists points to the fact that this agreement has not been driven by reason, but by the utter corruption of the process by lobbyists for multinational entertainment conglomerates, who have twisted what is notionally a trade negotiation into a special interest money-grab. After all of the trouble that public interest advocates have gone to educate negotiators about the folly of term extension, the fact that they have gone ahead anyway is the last straw for us. We’ll now be pulling out all the stops to kill this agreement dead.