After the recent revelations about DEA snooping, I guessed the NSA would have to be involved. Hm. Not necessarily. Not when you have AT&T at your right hand. (Via Sipsey Street.) And how strange have things gotten — how very, very strange? — when you try to reach the Secretary of State and after gradually climbing the bureaucratic ladder, you end up getting a callback from Eric Schmidt’s girlfriend instead? Happened to Julian Assange. And does not appear to have been “an isolated incident.” How much longer can this corrupt, rotten, secrecy-obsessed corporate-state UberGovernment center hold?
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
We were all probably hoping and thinking that Glenn Greenwald and his partner David Miranda weren’t behaving stupidly while sending/transporting Snowden documents over international borders. Alas, perhaps they were. Even if you’re in major anti-news mode, you’ve probably heard about or seen Miley Cyrus’ grotesque “twerking” performance a few days back. The ‘Net has been full of tsking about the way “Hannah Montana” turned on her little-girl fans with her crude display of sexuality. But everybody’s missing the point, you see. It’s not that Cyrus’ performance was over-sexualized. It’s that it was racist! Yes. Seriously. Racist. I think this sets…
This came from C^2 with the title “A Cartoonist’s Advice.” It’s that (words by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, art by cartoonist Gavin Aung Than). It’s one heck of a lot more. A deep-breath-taking reminder that no matter what anybody else wants, demands, or expects of us, our life is ours to make. —– Raining this morning. The first really good fall-like rain. Though temps are still summer-mild and there’s not even a breeze to rattle the wind chimes hanging outside the window, it’s another reminder. It reminds me of this. And to live while life lasts (a…
I’ve been saving some of these for a week or more. So if you’ve seen a few before bear with me. Chaos is gradually receding. But gradually … NYPD refuses to answer questions about how they (and Bloomberg) pointed firearms at an innocent audience. “At war with the concept of secrecy itself.” ‘Nother good one from Tom Knapp. The Free State Wyoming project has a brand new forum hosted by my old friends at the Mental Militia. (UPDATE: Please see Mama Liberty’s correction in comments. The new Wyoming Mavericks forum has no official connection with the FSW.) “23 signs you’re…
Since the Snowden revelations, there’s been a lot of this sort of talk on the Tubz. Summary: You can’t fight the NSA’s surveillance because you can’t even understand the NSA’s capabilities and methods. Some truth in that, of course. Not only can we not know just what the NSA’s doing and how. But for all we know there could be 15 other secret spy agencies using yet other technologies and methods to poke and prod into our lives. All with the happy cooperation of tech companies like Google, Facebook, Verizon, et al. We are the first in all of human…
When I was 10 or 11, the 16-year-old boy next door would sit pressed up against the fence between our properties, listening to my friends and me talk. During backyard campouts our conversations often turned to sex, as we shared misinformation and bad jokes in hopes of understanding that mysterious adult something we were beginning to feel in our bodies. Though we whispered, evidently we didn’t whisper quietly enough because Roger would sit there on the other side of the fence for hours, doing we did not know what, though it involved occasional grunts and groans. Even when we were…
Last week was busy. But productive. This week has been busy — but almost entirely occupied by suckage. Coping with sh … stuff. Don’t worry. This is not the sort of stuff that matters in the vast scheme of things (though one of the individual stuffs has the potential to be painful in the near term). It’s mostly just the mundane irritations that make you want to tear your hair out, wish you’d never gotten out of bed, and ask yourself how much pain you’re willing to bear tomorrow for drowning your sorrows in not one but two bloody Marys…
… doubt no more. The government — and now the UberGovernment — is filled with idiots. Here’s an email (with names redacted) sent by a friend about one of their more less amusing stupidities: Dear Claire, We thought we were under scrutiny because of the words we use, but it turns out the FBI also don’t like the word “Subversion”. My firm (and probably 100,000 other small and large businesses) use the open-source software package Subversion to provide version control of documents and code. The idea of version control is alien to the uber-government, but ignorance has never deterred thugs.…
Carl-Bear (who occasionally traffics in science fiction) makes his best guess about what Elon Musk’s mysterious new “hyperloop” transportation system will be. And finds it familiar. One more (rather weird) way that the rich are different than the poor. Different toxins in their bodies. Government forces one privacy option out of business (in the creepiest way). A new privacy option is born. Not in the U.S. of course. Nobody in their right mind would base a privacy service in the U.S. from here on out. Small business? The IRS wants to know what you’re doing with your cash — and…
The last few days I’ve been doing physical labor, spending time in the sunshine, painting rooms — and thinking about America’s UberGovernment. It’s dawning on a lot more people that a government run by secret spymasters is illigitmate even by the most conventional, mainstream standards. Among freedomistas, even those like the folks at DownsizeDC — who are usually pretty polite, mainstream, and hopeful of working within the system — are talking last straws. Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA were a shock, though not a surprise. Now this week they’re followed by news of DEA operations that are top secret…