Filed under: BoingBoing, DARPA, Government, Humor, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, YouTube
Ah, looking around, seeing the different components of the rise of the machines. Here’s a nice bit from BoingBoing:
And then this news item: Police Drone Crashes into Police
Make that “tired and embarrassed.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Guns, Privacy, Terrorism, Travel
…who finds the absurdity of the TSA to be grating, but every once in a while I come across something that very nicely summarizes the pointlessness and waste of the organization. A friend sent me one such item a little while ago, and I want to share it: TSA: Fail. Go read the whole thing – it’s by someone with 25 years FBI experience, who can safely be described as an expert on both terrorism and security, and who sees the utter uselessness of the security theater currently in place. Here’s one good passage:
Frankly, the professional experience I have had with TSA has frightened me. Once, when approaching screening for a flight on official FBI business, I showed my badge as I had done for decades in order to bypass screening. (You can be envious, but remember, I was one less person in line.) I was asked for my form which showed that I was armed. I was unarmed on this flight because my ultimate destination was a foreign country. I was told, “Then you have to be screened.” This logic startled me, so I asked, “If I tell you I have a high-powered weapon, you will let me bypass screening, but if I tell you I’m unarmed, then I have to be screened?” The answer? “Yes. Exactly.” Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. “You can’t bring a knife on board,” he said. I looked at him incredulously and asked, “The semi-automatic pistol is okay, but you don’t trust me with a knife?” His response was equal parts predictable and frightening, “But knives are not allowed on the planes.”
Yeah, like I said, go read the whole thing. And try not to sob at the ridiculousness of this infringement of our privacy and civil liberties.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Privacy, tech, Wall Street Journal
From the Wall Street Journal:
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.
Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.
Good lord. 3,000.
And that’s how many they were *admitting* to. Do you honestly believe that was all of them? Or that there were 3,000 instances where such routine infringement of the rights of Americans was warranted (well, so to speak)?
And, of course, this is just one small aspect of our increasing surveillance society.
Good lord.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Emergency, Flu, Government, Pandemic, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, tech, Violence, Writing stuff
As we’re closing in on having Communion of Dreams ready to go out in both digital and print form, I’ve been thinking about changes in story-telling formats. And I’ve just seen an exceptional example of just that, even though I’ve never been fond of horror movies/books, and the zombie genre in particular. It’s brilliant, though some of the images are disturbing.
Be sure to start down at “Day 1”. http://www.reddit.com/user/Vidzilla/submitted/
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Consider first Basham:
Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Then Smith:
All corporations are run like this [as dictatorships]. The bonuses are handed out to the people who determine the fate of the CEO. It’s a tiny number of people—ten to 20. There are very few shareholder revolts that work. Most leaders are deposed internally. This is why corporations pay huge bonuses.
And finally Madison:
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Then draw your own conclusions.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Failure, Government, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Steampunk, Terrorism, Travel, Wired
Via BB, an item in Wired from an insider telling all of us what we already know: that Airport Security is nothing but an expensive farce, based on bad science:
TSA is trying to get away from its stigma of being the guys who grope and photograph you. It’s taking the porno out of the scanners by getting rid of the “nude” imaging displays. Its director, John Pistole, talks about becoming an “intelligence driven” agency that compiles behavioral profiles of potential terrorists and — someday — targeting its toughest screening on only those who fit the profile. Kids no longer have to take their shoes off before boarding a plane.
Just one problem, according to Brandt: The behavioral science is no panacea. “The scientific community is divided as to whether behavioral detection of terrorists is viable,” he writes. According to the Government Accountability Office, TSA put together a behavioral profiling program “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment.” Even if the science was sound, the office found last year, TSA officers “lack a mechanism to input data on suspicious passengers into a database used by TSA analysts and also lack a means to obtain information from the Transportation System Operations Center on a timely basis.”
It’s like the government awarded military contracts during the Civil War for the development of æther craft in order to defeat the South – makes for a good story, perhaps, but has little or nothing to do with reality.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, George Orwell, Government, movies, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, The Prisoner
I’m beginning to think that Orwell was an optimist:
Oxford taxi conversations to be recorded, council rules
By April 2015 it will be mandatory for all of the city’s 600 plus cabs to have cameras fitted to record passengers.
The council said the cameras would run continuously, but only view footage relating to police matters would be reviewed.
Big Brother Watch said it was “a total disregard for civil liberties”.
When I first saw this on BoingBoing, I thought “oh, another DailyMail exaggeration piece, blowing something relatively innocuous all out of proportion.” Then I saw it was from the BBC. Reading the full article makes it quite clear that this is not exaggerated in the slightest.
>sigh<
How long before you think someplace in the US follows suit? I give it five years.
Jim Downey
First they came for the air travelers,
and I didn’t speak out because I almost never fly*.
Then they came for the train riders,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t ride the train.
Then they came for the Greyhound riders,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t ride the bus.
Then the came for the truck drivers,
and I didn’t speak out because I don’t drive a truck.
Then they came for me
and by then no one cared about liberty.
Jim Downey
*of course, tomorrow I am, and then again on Tuesday. So I’ll probably regret this. Which says a lot, right there.
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Society, Star Wars
Via BB, an interesting news item:
Couple in shock after drug raid
ROSWELL, N.M. (KRQE) – A massive drug raid in Roswell last week targeted dozens of people at homes across the city.
But one of those homes didn’t have what police were looking for, and their unexpected visit left the people inside shaken and upset.
* * *
She said her husband opened the door to multiple officers in raid gear with guns drawn.
“We were completely shocked, upset,” she continued. “I was panicked because I’ve never had anything like this happen to us before, never.”
She said the officers demanded to come inside her home.
“And my husband asked, ‘Do you have a warrant? Who are you looking for?’ and they said, ‘Gerald Sentell,'” Parker said. “We don’t even know this person.”
OK, at this point, what usually happens in these situations is the DEA or other law enforcement agency comes in, ‘secures’ the house (including putting occupants on the ground, perhaps with handcuffs or suchlike, and if there are any dogs…), does their search and any apologies or reparations for damage to the house comes later after a big public outcry.
What happened this time?
Parker said she and her husband were wary of cooperating because they weren’t sure what was going on.
When asked if she thought the officers could have been imposters, Parker replied, “Yes. That’s very much what we thought, and that’s why my husband said no, you’re not coming in this house without a warrant.”
The DEA spokesperson said the agents left when they were denied entry by the couple.
* * *
The DEA said all of the officers involved in the raid were following procedure and did nothing wrong.
Huh.
This both delights me, and outrages/frightens me.
I mean, I’m glad that Mr. Parker seems to have Jedi mind-control powers (not to mention the presence of mind to ask for a warrant under these circumstances) and so avoided going through the additional trauma usually inflicted on citizens in this situation. Seriously – that’s great. His door is still on the hinges, no shots were fired, the DEA actually respected his constitutional rights. Wonderful!
But the “following procedure” statement outrages me. So the DEA procedure is to conduct these raids without a warrant?
Really?
Think about that.
Then think about the fact that this probably comes as a surprise. I know it did to me. No, not that the DEA raid was conducted without a warrant (I call that stupid, but not terribly surprising). What’s surprising is that they didn’t just go ahead and conduct the raid, anyway, once they were there, under the pretense that one of the agents “smelled something” or “thought he saw drug paraphernalia” or some other excuse. Because that’s the usual script in these cases.
Yeah, it’s surprising that the DEA actually respected the 4th Amendment.
That should scare the hell out of you.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 