Posts

Friday: Sinnerman

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In this roundup: A look outside the U.S.’ borders — TTIP’s end, Turkey at risk, Chile and women’s reproductive rights, more.

Featured jazz artist today is Eunice Waymon, known best by her stage name Nina Simone. Recognized for her powerful political work, Mississippi Goddamn, Simone was an incredibly gifted pianist trained at Juilliard with a predilection for the works and method of Johann Sebastian Bach. She became a singer only after nightclubs for which she performed insisted she must sing and play piano together.

Two of my favorites apart from Sinnerman shared here are Feeling Good and I Put a Spell on You. I’ll always have a warm, fuzzy place for Ain’t Got No/I Got Life medley, a variation of the song from the 1960s Broadway musical Hair. I can remember singing along to this recording during long road trips.

Why Nina Simone today? Because of Sinnerman, which seems particularly appropriate during this election season.

Looking away from our nation’s navel

  • Op-ed: Is Turkey nearing civil war? (Süddeutsche Zeitung) — Guest contributor Yavuz Baydar reviews developments in Turkey after the so-called coup attempt, including calls to arm citizens, reestablish an Ottoman caliphate, and create militarized youth groups attached to mosques. Turkish media, operating with the blessing of President Tayyip Erdoğan, has shown maps featuring Mosul and parts of northern Greece as part of a Turkish empire.
  • TTIP may be in death throes, but resuscitation attempted (euronews) — This article quotes a Spanish automotive partmaker who complains the need to inspect parts both on export and import is expensive, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement would eliminate the costly redundancy. Except the existing duplicative inspections didn’t prevent Volkswagen Group and its vendor Bosch from shipping fraudulent vehicles and parts, did it? Yeah. Not so much…in spite of TTIP’s near-death, the US and EU met earlier this month to regroup and try to force TTIP through before the end of President Obama’s term.
  • Chile’s president aims to change restrictive anti-abortion laws (NPR) — Chile is among the five most restrictive countries in the world, outlawing abortion even to save the life of the mother. President Michelle Bachelet made it her goal to change the laws; the country’s lower house has already approved legislation to allow abortion in case of rape, to save the mother, or in case of mortal fetal defect. Chile’s senate must yet vote to approve this legislation before it becomes law. In the mean time, women must travel abroad to obtain abortions or risk jail if they attempt it in Chile on their own.
  • Radical Ukrainian nationalists rising (euronews) — Members of far-right groups Azo regiment and the Right Sector recently marched through Kyiv to celebrate Ukrainian patriotism while protesting pro-Russian separatists.

Tech Debris
Here’s a collection of odd technology bits I’ve run across recently worth a read:

  • Dutch researchers working on anti-hacking technology (euronews) — They’re working on unique identifiers for devices attached to the internet, like the myriad Internet of Things (webcams, baby monitors, so on). This seems like a waste of time given every device should already have an ID assigned by a network. Keep an eye on this; it’d certainly make surveillance easier. Ahem.
  • Troubling case of Facebook v. Vachani (NPR) — Fluffy overview of the suit filed against Steven Vachani whose portal site product pissed off Facebook greatly. But you should read the op-ed from July by Orin Kerr about this case — brace yourself for your freak out.
  • From the archives: Interview with John Arquilla on cyberwarfare (FRONTLINE) — Perspective on the origins of current cyberwarfare policies arising from Bush administration post-9/11. As you read this, keep in mind Arquilla is a proponent of preemptive warfare and the use of cyberwarfare against terrorism.
  • Twitter as a government tool against the people (Bloomberg) — We take for granted we can type anything we want in social media. Not so in much of the rest of the world, and Twitter is an example of social media with both great potential to inform while putting users at risk where speech is not free. Although after the recent revelations Twitter sold data to a U.S. intelligence front, speech isn’t exactly free on Twitter for U.S. citizens, either.

Longread: Did newspapers screw up?
We’ve watched the decline of newspapers for over a decade as its analog business model met the reality of a digital age. Jack Shafer wrote about the possibility newspapers may have made a critical error during the generational shift to online media — perhaps the seasoned existing outlets should have remained firmly committed to print. Two key problems with this analysis: 1) printing and distribution remains as expensive as all other factors in producing a newspaper, and 2) the population consuming newspaper content is changing, from a print-only to digital-only audience. This must be acknowledged or newspapers will continue to struggle, and large papers will continue to pursue consolidation in order to reduce costs to operate.

With that in mind, I still don’t understand why The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, hasn’t opted to offer a Kindle to subscribers willing to pay for a full print subscription a year in advance. A low-level Kindle is cheaper than the cost to print. Ditto to The New York Times; why hasn’t it considered a tie up with Kobo or another e-reader manufacturer?

That’s it for this week; have a good weekend!

Thursday: Another Grungey Anniversary Observed

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In this roundup: Recalling 25 years of Nirvana’s Nevermind, petro-pipeline-economic challenges, lead poisoning, anthrax, and cops gone wild. Read more →

Monday: Gotta’ Catch ‘Em All

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[NB: Embedded video contains adult language NSFW]

I had a very disturbing conversation with some 18-to-20-somethings this weekend about privacy and networked communications. I can’t decide if I’m pissed off or terrified that these particular youngsters believed:

  • Most young people their age don’t care if their privacy has been compromised;
  • If they care at all, they believe it’s not a big deal, there’s little danger because they can just shut off the GPS/location and voice features on their phones;
  • This is the way it is with technology and there’s no way to change the status quo.

I know for certain not all youngsters in this age group feel this way, but what set this particular group apart is their privilege. They are going to school in business and education at some of the best schools in the country. Their educations are paid for in full and they know they have jobs waiting for them. Their political heritage is conservative — anti-tax, pro-business, with a Christian fundamentalist spin. They are the next generation of elected officials because they can afford to run for office.

They are what a well-to-do public school district created, and what will come out of a top ten business school: people who don’t give a shit about anybody else’s needs for privacy, because they simply don’t see any risks to their way of life.

The entire conversation began because they were questioning my opsec habit of covering my cellphone camera lenses. When I pushed back about their habit of waving their phones around without any respect for others’ privacy, the topic rapidly went south. It didn’t matter, nobody was following them, they didn’t need to worry; whoever wanted to track them already had all their information anyhow. And still not a lick of concern about anybody else’s privacy, safety and security, free speech, freedom from unwarranted seizure…

And now comes Pokémon Go, the augmented reality mobile device game which this particular cohort had yet to play with on their cellphones. I’m sure they’ve since loaded on their phones without a second thought about the gross failure of Pokémon Go’s privacy policy let alone its ridiculously broad request for device permissions.

Stay away from me, kids. Far, far away. Go ahead and give me a hard time again about protecting privacy rights. Treat me like an old lady yelling at you to stay off my lawn, and I’ll find somebody to tell your super-conservative mother what kind of porn you’ve surfed while you claim you’re at the library studying on her dime. I’m sure I can get somebody to do it for the price of a Pokéstop lure and a Clefairy water Pokémon.

Meanwhile, protesters documenting civil rights abuses by hyper-militarized police have risked their freedom and lives doing so. Like the protesters and reporters seen in the short video taken of Baton Rouge Police arresting protesters gathered peacefully on private property yesterday, forcing their way into a private home and pushing around its residents. Or Ramsey Orta, who videoed the chokehold death of Eric Garner, harassed repeatedly by NYPD since then and jailed, or Chris LeDay’s suspicious arrest after he posted video of Alton Sterling’s murder by Baton Rouge police. These citizens and the journalists who covered them are surely concerned about their privacy and the chilling effect on their free speech a lack of privacy protections will cause for them as individuals and as activist groups and news outlets.

And it’s these people those privileged 18-to-20-somethings I spoke with will never consider as they navigate their way through the rest of college and into the business world. It’s no wonder they believe there’s no way to change the status quo; they aren’t taught to think outside the tight confines of their safe little world nor do they face any threats inside their narrow groove.

I grieve for the future.

FIVE DAYS
That’s all that’s left for in-session days on the U.S. House calendar for July. I see nothing in the remaining schedule directly related to the Flint Water Crisis. Only California’s ongoing water shortage will have a hearing. While the House fiddles, Flint area nonprofits continue to raise money to buy bottled water for city residents. The city water system is allegedly safe, but we all know the entire city is riddled with damaged pipe causing one Boil Water Notice so far this summer. Lead pipes continue to service homes. The roughly 8000 children poisoned so far don’t need even a smidgen more lead from those water lines. But All Lives Matter, right?

I hope every journalist covering an incumbent’s House or Senate campaign will ask what the candidate has done while in office to address both Flint’s GOP-inflicted man-made catastrophe and future crises of a similar nature given underfunded EPA mandates for clean drinking water and equally underfunded infrastructure replacement.

Don’t even get me started on Congress’ weak gestures on Zika, especially after the first Zika-related death in the U.S. this past week and ~1133 patients who’ve tested positive for Zika, including ~320 pregnant women. Zero effort to encourage birth control among at-risk population, let alone adequate warning to the public that unprotected sex as well as mosquitoes spread the disease.

Po po no no

  • Suspect fires on Houston police during 7-hour showdown; SWAT team subdues him using gas (KTRK) — Look, ma, no deadly force! Gee, I wonder what the suspect’s race/ethnicity is?
  • Tiny study without peer review based on unreliable data claims whites shot as often as blacks by police (NYT) — Harvard researcher looked at 1,332 shootings by 10 police departments in Florida, Texas, and California across fifteen years to come up with this swagged conclusion. There was so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Even the lead researcher’s personal experience suggests there’s a problem with the data. The New York Times simply regurgitates this without any push back. After all the video evidence we’ve seen since Ferguson, should we really believe police-supplied data from such a small sample of nearly 18,000 police departments? We really need a mandatory collection of data from all police departments based on standardized methods combined with an audit. There’s more accountability in banking than there is in police use of force — and we all know how that turned out after 2008’s crash.
  • Dallas shooter was ‘changed’ by military service (The Blaze) — Once interested in becoming a police officer, formerly happy extrovert Micah Johnson became withdrawn, disappointed during his military service. Wonder if he suffered from untreated PTSD and depression after leaving the military? Wonder how many law enforcement officers likewise were former military who sublimated their post-service frustrations? Are we doing enough to help former service persons ease back into civilian life?

Enough. I’m already wishing for Tuesday.

Friday: How It Begins

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I was half way through a post yesterday when a friend in the UK told me a member of Parliament had been killed by a fascist.

An assassination, I thought at that moment, unable to write another word for my post. How many times has an assassination kicked off a horrible chain of events?

I hoped and prayed as best a lapsed Catholic can that the murder of MP Jo Cox by a man shouting, “Britain First!” was not the beginning of something dreadful. Research says it’s less likely than if an autocratic figure had been killed, but who can really say with certainty?

We won’t know for some time if this was a trigger event for something else, though it did set off a cascade of stomach-turning crap. So many media outlets referred to politician Cox’s death by a political fanatic as something other than an assassination. Really? Would Cox have been targeted had she not been a pro-EU unity supporter? Would the assassin — characterized by so many euphemisms as mentally ill — have killed her had he not been rabidly anti-EU and racist, impelled by ramped-up anti-EU rhetoric in advance of the EU-Brexit referendum?

And the disparity in coverage between [lone white gunman suspected of mental illness] and [armed terrorist—labeled so because they’re not white]? Beyond disgusting. The racism is all the more obvious. The public is conditioned by media’s implicit bias to expect and accept the lone white gunman, but never the dark-skinned person bearing a weapon. The accused must have sympathized with white nationalism, irrespective of country, having bought his firearm components from U.S. neo-Nazis more than a decade ago. The description of his attack on Cox is chilling — it was a cold political execution, not just some wildly insane flailing without care for the outcome.

The world lost someone very special when Jo Cox died yesterday. Someone who lived progressive values out in the open, modeling a better way for us. Don’t kid yourself this was just a crazed man acting alone when white nationalist politicians like Nigel Farage believe “violence is the next step” if angry constituents feel they’ve lost control.

And don’t fool yourself into believing this was an isolated event occurring in a vacuum.

Today’s Friday jazz is a performance of She’s Crying for Me by the Yorkshire Jazz Band, in honor of Jo Cox’s home county.

A note on hacking stories
The breach of the DNC’s computers is one of a number of stories over the last several years following a pattern: the breach is attributed to one entity and then yet another entity, while the story itself has a rather interesting point of origin. Initial reports may say the hackers were affiliated with [nation/state X] and later reports attribute the hacking to [unaligned third party Y] — or a variation on this order — a key characteristic is the story’s immaculate birth.

Try looking for yourself for the earliest story reporting the hacking of the DNC. Who reported it and when? Who were the original sources? Did the story arise from a call to law enforcement or a police report, and a local beat reporter who gathered named eyewitnesses for quotes? Or did the story just pop out of thin air, perhaps simultaneously across multiple outlets all regurgitating the same thing at the same time?

My point: Be more skeptical. There’s an adage in reporting, drummed into journalism students’ heads: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Three examples of manipulated opinion
Speaking of being more skeptical, bias manifests itself in all manner of ways and can be easily used for good or ill.

  • U.S. government and military orgs tricked into running ‘imposter code’ (Ars Technica) — Suckers didn’t perform due diligence on packages of code hosted at developer communities before running them. Gee, I wonder if any political parties’ personnel might have done the same thing…
  • GOP-led House waffles on HR 5293 surveillance bill because Orlando (HuffPo) — Ugh. Would this vote have been different this time if a lone crazed white gunman had shot up a bar? Sadly, we can’t tell based on the bill’s approval last year because the vote took place one day before Dylan Roof’s mass shooting in a Charleston church. Nor can we tell from the bill’s 2014 approval by the House because the mass shootings the week of the vote were just plain old run-of-the-mill apolitical/non-racist with too few fatalities.
  • Send manuscripts out under a man’s name = agents and publishers notice (Jezebel) — If you’re a woman you can be a great writer and you won’t get any nibbles on your manuscript — unless you submit it under a male name. Hello, implicit bias, much? This isn’t the only example, either.

Worthwhile long read
This commentary at Tor.com looks at the movie V for Vendetta, saying it’s “more important than ever,” in spite of the adaptation’s rejection by Alan Moore, author of the graphic novel on which this film was based. The essay was published this past Tuesday; read it now in light of Jo Cox’s assassination Thursday. A single event can change perception. This line alone now means something very different to me:

It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place. But for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.

If time permits, I may slap up a post this weekend to make up for yesterday’s writer’s block. Otherwise I’ll catch you on Monday.

Thursday Morning: Eye in the Sky

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I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind

— excerpt, Eye in the Sky by Alan Parsons Project

It’s not like I wanted to haul out all my high school and college music, but they sure seem to work well this week.

Speaking of the eye in the sky…

FBI and DHS circle overhead a LOT
Buzzfeed published its findings after looking into FBI and DHS surveillance flight records, finding a lot of planes circling over mosques. The results also looked at flights immediately after the San Bernardino shooting. You know what would be interesting? Comparing that information against the handling timeline for the Apple iPhone issued to Syed Farouk by his employer.

U.S. dealerships sue Volkswagen – but expand on Dieselgate
Not only are three family-owned dealerships suing VW for its fraudulent use of an emissions control defeat system in their diesel passenger vehicles — they are suing because of VW’s financing practices, which steered money away from dealership’s preferred financing while leaving the dealerships stuck with rapidly depreciated business value. The potential losses to VW just swelled by another magnitude.

Iceland’s new PM expects elections this fall
Rather than dissolving the government, the former Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson’s coalition partners negotiated the appointment of Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson as his replacement after Gunnlaugsson’s Panama Papers-driven resignation. Johannsson said the coalition expects elections this autumn while continuing to focus on working on stability. That’s a nice way of saying the Progressive Party and the Independence Party are stalling for time to avoid a likely rout if elections were held today. Polling indicates the Pirate Party would stomp the other three major parties if a vote was held now.

MP and Official spokesperson of the Pirate Party Birgitta Jónsdóttir was interviewed by Democracy Now! about Iceland’s current political climate. Jonsdottir, a possible contender for PM, explained her country’s reaction to the Panama Papers’ revelations:

…What is in particular disturbing about the prime minister’s conduct in this matter is that the day before new laws took effect in Iceland about how you declare and how tax havens are dealt with, because Iceland is a part of a sort of a campaign, international campaign, to stop tax havens being a part of a solution on how to get away from participating in paying tax in your own country. He signed—his sold his wife his share for one dollar the day before the laws took effect. And that, in itself, seems highly dubious. And then, he has actually been using his wife as a shield and saying that people that are criticizing him are attacking his wife. I actually think that this guy is in some sort of meltdown, because his behavior in the last few days has been so outrageous that it seems like we are stuck in a satire by Dario Fo, you know, in a complete theater of the absurd. And I’m just so deeply humiliated on behalf of my nation that this is what the outside world is looking at. …

The feeling of betrayal is palpable. It’s a good read, do check it out in its entirety.

Odd lots

  • Massive breach exposes 55 million Philippine voters’ identities (The Register) — That’s Philippines’ Commission on Elections (COMELEC) *entire* database, which COMELEC claims doesn’t contain anything sensitive. Except for stuff like fingerprints and passport numbers. Oh, and all the information for half the entire country’s population.
  • China’s ‘Great Firewall’ architect reduced to using VPN during a speech (Shanghaist) — Oops.
  • Adobe patching a Flash zero-day (Naked Security) — Again. I know, I know, when will Flash die?
  • Climate change could lengthen Europe’s dengue fever season (Science Daily) — Longer, warmer summers will extend the season for Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito populations, the disease’s key infection vectors. Hey, you know what else might show up for longer periods of time, too? Zika, since it’s carried by Aedes aegypti.

Wow. It’s coffee break time already? Have at it. Catch you tomorrow morning!

Superb Owl: Keeping Eye on Fans and More?

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If humans could see the full spectrum of radiation, the San Francisco Bay Area shines bright like the sun this evening — not from lighting, but from communications. The Super Bowl concentrates more than 100,000 people, most of whom will have a wireless communications device on their person — cellphone, phablet, or tablet. There are numerous networks conveying information both on the field, the stands and to the fans watching globally on television and the internet.

And all of the communications generates massive amounts of data surely monitored in some way, no matter what our glorious government may tell us to the contrary. The Super Bowl is a National Special Security Event (NSSE), rated with a Special Event Assignment Rating (SEAR) level 1. The designation ensures the advance planning and involvement of all the three-letter federal agencies responsible for intelligence and counterterrorism you can think of, as well as their state and local counterparts. They will be watching physical and electronic behavior closely.

Part of the advance preparation includes establishing a large no-fly zone around the Bay Area. Non-government drones will also be prohibited in this airspace.

What’s not clear to the public: what measures have been taken to assure communications continuity in the same region? Yeah, yeah — we all know they’ll be watching, but how many of the more than one million visitors to the Bay Area for the Super Bowl are aware of the unsolved 15 or 16 telecom cable cuts that happened over the last couple of years? What percentage of local residents have paid or are paying any attention at all to telecommunications infrastructure, or whether crews “working” on infrastructure are legitimate or not?

Planning for a SEAR 1 event begins almost as soon as the venue is announced — perhaps even earlier. In the case of Super Bowl 50, planning began at least as early as the date the game was announced nearly 34 months ago on March 28th, 2014. The Levi’s stadium was still under construction as late as August that same year.

And the first cable cut event happened nearly a year earlier, on April 16, 2013 — six months after Levi’s Stadium was declared one of two finalists to host the 50th Super Bowl, and one month before Levi’s was awarded the slot by NFL owners.

News about a series of 11 cable cuts drew national attention last summer when the FBI asked for the public’s assistance.  These events happened to the east of San Francisco Bay though some of them are surely inside the 32-mile radius no-fly zone observed this evening.

But what about the other cuts which took place after April 2013, and after the last of 11 cuts in June 2015? News reports vary but refer to a total of 15 or 16 cuts about which law enforcement has insufficient information to charge anyone with vandalism or worse. A report last month quotes an FBI spokesperson saying there were 15 attacks against fiber optic cable since 2014. Based on the date, the number of cuts excludes the first event from April 2013, suggesting an additional four cuts have occurred since June 2015.

Where did these cuts occur? Were they located inside tonight’s no-fly zone? Will any disruption to communications services be noticed this evening, when so many users are flooding telecommunications infrastructure? Will residents and visitors alike even notice any unusual technicians at work if there is any disruption?

Keep your eyes peeled, football fans.