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The average person is a statist, whether he realizes it or not. It is important that liberty activists recognize and accept this fact because the truth of our limitations as a movement determines the kinds of solutions into which we should ultimately put our time and energy. The fantasy of a final grand march of an awake and aware majority on the doorsteps of power is just that: a fantasy. Some people might argue that given more time, such an event could be organized or could happen spontaneously. But these people seem to forget that the immediacy of any crisis inspires awareness and cuts the bindings of complacency for only a certain percentage of any given population. With “more time” often comes more complacency, not less.

So, history becomes a kind of balancing act, with crisis generating the necessity of intelligent and moral action in some people but rarely, if ever, in most people (even during the American Revolution, in which patriots represented a stark minority). The reason that the culture of freedom consistently plateaus and remains stuck at underdog status is because human beings are, first, often acclimated to the idea that crises are things that only happen to other people, and, second, they are obsessed with the idea that governments should retain prohibitory and administrative power over the public as a means to “prevent” crisis from occurring (the sheepdog and sheep mentality).

Not all people necessarily “love” their current government, but many citizens tend to see the idea of government as an inevitability of a stable society. They assume pre-eminence of the state because they have never known anything else.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Would Somebody Please Bring Freedom & Democracy To America

July 29, 2015

Would Somebody Please Bring Freedom & Democracy To America

Clearly, the language of freedom is no longer the common tongue spoken by the citizenry and their government. With the government having shifted into a language of force, “we the people” have been reduced to suspects in a surveillance state, criminals in a police state, and enemy combatants in a military empire. — John W. Whitehead

Drivers, Beware: The Costly, Deadly Dangers of Traffic Stops in the American Police State

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

The odds weren’t in Walter L. Scott’s favor. Reportedly pulled over for a broken taillight, Scott—unarmed—ran away from the police officer, who pursued and shot him from behind, first with a Taser, then with a gun. Scott was struck five times, “three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart.”

Samuel Dubose, also unarmed, was pulled over for a missing front license plate. He was reportedly shot in the head after a brief struggle in which his car began rolling forward.

Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his car to enter a convenience store. Directed to show his license, Jones leaned into his car to get his wallet, only to be shot four times by the “fearful” officer. Jones was also unarmed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Are Free, Like It Or Not

June 24, 2015

You Are Free, Like It Or Not

One evening I went with my family to a Thai restaurant for dinner. They seated us near the back, not far from the kitchen doors.

A very bubbly waitress brought us our menus, filled our waters and told us to let her know if we needed anything, or had any questions about anything at all.

When she came back, we ordered. “Perfect!” she said with a huge smile, taking our menus. She went off to the kitchen. As soon as she was through the doors, her voice changed. She was chatting with the staff and we could hear every word.

“Oh my God, I was so sick this morning! I couldn’t stop puking. My boyfriend had to hold my hair back for me.” She went on about the trip to bar, the shooters, the cab ride, the stupid friends who didn’t show up. Lots of details and swear words.

Then she came through the doors again, her waitress face back on, and took orders from a few more tables. She went back into the kitchen again. More profane banter. When she brought out our food, she had a wide, wholesome smile, and it was really hard not to laugh.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Jean-Paul Sartre had written about a similar scenario to illustrate a human tendency he calledbad faith. His waiter at a cafe seemed to be completely under the spell of his role as a server. He moved too quickly, too snappily. He spoke about the daily specials with an enthusiasm that no food could warrant in real life. His gestures were so ridiculously waiterly that he seemed to have lost track of the fact that he was a free-choosing person, as if there was nothing to him besides his current role.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Property Rights, Inequality and Commons

June 20, 2015

Property Rights, Inequality and Commons

I recently spoke at a conference, “Property and Inequality in the 21st Century,” hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe. They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality. Below are my remarks, “The Commons as a Tool for Sharing the Wealth.” The conference was held at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, on June 12-13, 2015.

Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the relationship between property law and inequality – a topic that receives far too little attention. This should not be surprising. Now that free-market ideology has become the default worldview and political consensus around the world, private property is seen as synonymous with freedom, economic growth and human progress.

Oh yes, there is this nasty side issue known as inequality. Malcontents like the Occupy movement and renegade economists like Thomas Pikketty have brought this problem to the fore after years of neglect. Their success has been quite an achievement because for years the very existence of inequality has been portrayed as an accident, an aberration, a mysterious and shadowy guest at the grand banquet of human progress.

I wish to argue that hunger, poverty, inadequate education and medical care, and assaults on human dignity and human rights, are not bugs in the system. They arefeatures. Indeed, market ideologues often argue that such deprivations are a necessary incentive to human enterprise and economic growth; poverty is supposedly needed to spur people to escape through the work ethic and entrepreneurialism.

Property rights lie at the heart of this dynamic because they are a vital tool for defining and patrolling the boundaries of private wealth, and for justifying the inevitably unequal outcomes. So it’s important that we focus on the role of property rights in producing social inequality – without ignoring the many other forces, including social practice, culture and politics, that also play important roles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Prisons Without Walls: We’re All Inmates in the American Police State

June 17, 2015

Prisons Without Walls: We’re All Inmates in the American Police State

“It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation wants him to think, feel and act. . . . To him the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.”—Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World Revisited

“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving.

“As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” writes former prison employee Marlon Brock, “it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system were being implemented outside those walls.” In fact, if Brock is right, then we “free worlders” do live in a prison—albeit, one without visible walls.

In federal prisons, cameras are everywhere in order to maintain “security” and keep track of the prisoners. Likewise, the “free world” is populated with video surveillance and tracking devices. From surveillance cameras in stores and street corners to license plate readers (with the ability to log some 1,800 license plates per hour) on police cars, our movements are being tracked virtually everywhere. With this increasing use of iris scanners and facial recognition software—which drones are equipped with—there would seem to be nowhere to hide.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Computers Are Listening: NSA Won’t Say if it Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

June 9, 2015

The Computers Are Listening: NSA Won’t Say if it Automatically Transcribes American Phone Calls in Bulk

Third in a series. Part 1 here; Part 2 here.

When it comes to the National Security Agency’s recently disclosed use of automated speech recognition technology to search, index and transcribe voice communications, people in the United States may well be asking: But are they transcribing my phone calls?

The answer is maybe.

A clear-cut answer is elusive because documents in the Snowden archive describe the capability to turn speech into text, but not the extent of its use — and the U.S. intelligence community refuses to answer even the most basic questions on the topic.

Asked about the application of speech-to-text to conversations including Americans, Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said at a Capitol Hill event in May that the NSA has “all sorts of technical capabilities” and that they are all used in a lawful manner.

“I’m not specifically acknowledging or denying the existence of any particular capability,” he said. “I’m only saying that the focus needs to be on what are the authorities the NSA is using, and what are the protections around the execution of those authorities?”

So what are those authorities? And what are the protections around their execution?

Litt wouldn’t say. But thanks to previous explorations of the Snowden archive and some documents released by the Obama administration, we know there are four major methods the NSA uses to get access to phone calls involving Americans — and only one of them technically precludes the use of speech recognition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crisis and the Politics of Possibility

June 6, 2015

Crisis and the Politics of Possibility

The Marketplace Belongs Only to Those Who Can Pay For It

Following in the tradition of his father and Bill Clinton before him, in 2003 George W. Bush launched a ‘liberal’ war to, in the words of the agreed upon rationales; protect the ‘homeland’ from attack and remove a dangerous tyrant from office. Enlisted in selling the ‘war of liberation’ were liberal hawks who apparently believed, against considerable history, that the American military is a force of liberation and trusting feminists who believed, against considerable history, that exporting Western liberalism at the point of a gun would free women from religious patriarchy to realize themselves. Reliably, the result was grim destruction beyond the imagination of most mere mortals— the only liberation that took place was of one million Iraqis from their mortal coils.

The point isn’t retrospective finger pointing, but rather to pin down where liberal goals departed from the social mechanisms that were believed to support them? Part of the calamity generation resulted from people— American liberals, who were free to have opinions without bearing their consequences. The sympathetic frame put forward was of ‘speaking for the voiceless,’ many of whom apparently believed the American liberation myth themselves. But the more serious shortcoming was in not understanding the motivations of the political leadership, the nature of the corporations and other economic interests seeking to benefit from war and the complexity of the social relations that were destroyed. Put differently, the conception of ‘freedom’ at work left unconsidered the divergent interests; military contractors, infrastructure rebuilders and multinational oil companies, whose life-blood is economic plunder.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tyranny: It Pisses Me Off

June 3, 2015

Tyranny: It Pisses Me Off

Tyranny is not a wholly definable condition. There are many forms of tyranny and many levels of control that exist in any one society at any given time. In fact, the most despicable forms of tyranny are often the most subtle; the kinds of tyranny in which the oppressed are deluded into thinking that because they have “choices”, that necessarily makes them “free”. Tyranny at it’s very core is not always the removal of choice, but the filtering of choice – the erasure of options leaving only choices most beneficial to the system and its controllers.

The choice may be between freedom and security, individual opinion and societal coherency, personal principle or collective indulgeance, catastrophic war or disaster multiplied by complacency, terrorism or surveillance, economic manipulation or financial Armageddon. We are presented with these so called choices everyday and they are about to become even more of a bane in our regular lives. But these are often engineered options that do not represent reality. We are led to believe that only one path or the other can be taken; that there is no honorable way, only the lesser of two evils. I am done with false choices and the lesser of two evils. I prefer to create my own options.

Beyond method lies motivation; and tyranny begins where the best of intentions end. Every despotic action by government and collectivists today, from the NDAA, to the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, to mass electronic surveillance, to drones in our skies, to political correctness and social justice warrior tirades; all are given rationalization through “noble intentions”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability

June 1, 2015

Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability

Yet while surveillance budgets balloon, watchdogs starve. Last in a series.

For anyone involved in the privacy debate, it’s been a busy couple of years. Barely a week goes by without new revelations about the activities of the Canadian spy agency known as Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and its Five Eyes partners in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

In just the past few weeks, for example, we learned that the CSE actively exploited security holes in a popular mobile web browser. We also learned that the U.K. government passedquiet legislation granting Government Communications Headquarters (Britain’s version of CSE) immunity for hacking into our computers and mobile phones. And we’ve seen the U.S. National Security Agency implicated in extensive spying on European citizens and private companies, in ways that go far beyond national security.

As leading privacy expert professor Michael Geist wrote last week, “nothing surprises anymore” when it comes to surveillance.

What these reports reveal about our spy agencies’ activities are indeed disturbing. But the seemingly unending stream of revelations also point to a larger problem — the striking lack of accountability, transparency and oversight that people have over what are, at the end of the day, government agencies operating with taxpayer dollars.

Canadians are clearly unhappy with this state of affairs. Concerns about lack of accountability were expressed again and again by those who took part in our crowdsourcing work for Canada’s Privacy Plan, the pro-privacy action plan launched recently by OpenMedia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Time is Different

May 28, 2015

This Time is Different

For years, I have warned that we will face our worst nightmare – the collapse of socialism. In the death throes of this abomination that even the Ten Commandments listed as a serious sin, equal to “thou shalt not kill”, government will become the ugly beast that will devour society to retain power. Of course, they will never see themselves that way, but they will justify in their minds that stripping us of our freedom, rights, privileges, and immunities, is necessary to maintain socialism for the good of the people.

We are running out of other peoples’ money, as Margaret Thatcher warned. Karl Marx, who sought to change society by sheer force, set all this in motion. What has taken place is really scary, for indeed they have altered society far more than anyone dares to ponder.

Why is this Sovereign Debt Crisis collapse different from 1931? When the governments of the world defaulted on their debts in 1931, there were no pension funds. Government has exempted itself from all prudent reason for you take the state operated pension funds, like Social Security in the USA, where 100% of the money is in government bonds. They may have no intention of defaulting, but very few government have ever paid off their debts in the end.

Then there are states who regulate pension funds requiring more than 80% to be in government bonds. A Sovereign Debt Default this time around will wipe out socialism, yet the bulk of the people are clueless not merely about the risk, but the ramifications. Younger generations do not save to support their parents for that was government’s job post-Great Depression. Socialism has altered thousands of years of family structure following the ranting of Karl Marx. This has been one giant lab experiment that ended badly in China and Russia and is coming to a local government near you.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

10 Pictures That Show How America Is Becoming A Lot Like Nazi Germany

May 23, 2015

10 Pictures That Show How America Is Becoming A Lot Like Nazi Germany

The history books tell us about how evil and wicked the Nazis were, so why aren’t we more alarmed that the United States is becoming more like Nazi Germany with each passing day? More than three years ago, I wrote an article entitled “25 Signs That America Is Rapidly Becoming More Like Nazi Germany” which got a ton of attention. Unfortunately, nothing has gotten better since I first published that piece. Government control freaks are still watching us, tracking us,recording our phone calls and monitoring our emails. TSA thugs at our airports are still fondling the private parts of our women and children and laughing while they do it. Our police and our military are still training for civil unrest and martial law in America. And even though our politicians are socializing our economy and destroying our constitutional freedoms, the American people keep sending most of them back to Washington time after time. It is an incredibly sad thing to watch the country that you love slowly die right in front of your eyes.

At the heart of Nazism was a desire to control everyone and everything, and that is exactly what we are seeing in America today. Most of our “leaders” are psychotic control freaks that want to micromanage every aspect of our lives. For example, a bill that was just introduced in Congress would force all children in public schools nationwide to be vaccinated with no exceptions whatsoever. Other new legislation that was just introduced would ban all sales of ammunition over the Internet and require ammo dealers to report all bulk sales to individuals to the government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadians to Spy Agencies: Get a Warrant!

May 22, 2015

Canadians to Spy Agencies: Get a Warrant!

Ranked first among privacy priorities, the people of Canada have spoken. Second in a series.

Do our digital homes deserve the same right to privacy as our brick-and-mortar homes?

This is one of the questions Canadians are asking after CBC News revealed that a government spy agency — the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) — targeted popular mobile browsers and apps, leaving millions at risk of having their private data hacked.

This is the latest in a long series of revelations about how the government has been spying on our private online activities on a massive scale — without ever going to a judge to ask for a warrant.

Earlier this week, we launched a crowdsourced pro-privacy action plan, to tackle these and other concerns. The early reception has been positive, with the federal privacy commissioner stating that he “shared many of the views expressed by participants in this project.”

As part of our crowdsourcing process, we presented participants with a range of privacy priorities, which we asked them to rank in order of preference. Top of Canadians’ list was “require a warrant for government to spy on personal information,” which barely edged out “end blanket surveillance” for the number one spot.

Tackling Canada’s privacy deficit starts with getting a warrant, finds new OpenMedia report.

We drilled down further by asking in what circumstances should the government be allowed to access Canadians’ personal information. Again we presented a range of options, and this time the result was overwhelming:

Over 93 per cent of participants said a warrant granted by a judge is a must when it comes to accessing your personal information. Independent studies, such as this one by the privacy commissioner and this one by Forum Research, reinforce these findings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Free Trade is Plutocratic Propaganda

May 10, 2015

Free Trade is Plutocratic Propaganda

With the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership dominating the headlines, now is a good time to revisit an old scam called “free trade.”

In 2003, Kevin Flanagan was an information technology employee at Bank of America. They told him he was being replaced with foreign labor, and he was ordered to train his replacement. After he completed his assignment, he was laid off. Then he went to the parking lot and shot himself.

That’s “free trade.”

Like The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, sometimes, the most effective way to lie is to use the most innocent words. No word is more susceptible to propaganda-leveraging than “freedom.” Attach that word to any concept, and all of a sudden, it’s unassailable. That’s exactly what happened with “free trade.”

Proponents of free trade will often use the simplest analogies to convey their point, as if you were retarded. The reason they have to resort to such caveman illustrations is because free trade does not exist in the real world. There is no such thing as equality of bargaining power. If someone has ten million dollars and you have zero dollars, anything above zero is an “improvement” in your situation. The free trade economists will say this person with zero dollars is “free” to work for $1 per hour, and they will do so because it improves their situation. This is what “freedom” means to free trade economists.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How a Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center in Texas Targeted Animal Rights Activists

May 9, 2015

How a Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center in Texas Targeted Animal Rights Activists

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Last September, a Facebook event caught the eye of a counterrorism specialist within the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The email was among those released by the Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC) last month. This same release revealed that ARIC took stock of potential anti-circus demonstrators in 2012.

Given the overall tame tenor, it’s unclear how such a post came across a counterterrorism specialist’s desk, or why it merited sharing.

The privacy policy for ARIC similarly limits collection of information on individuals and organizations. Collected information must relate to terrorism, criminal activism or a threat to public safety.

– Fromt the Muckrock article: Vegan Potlucks, Anime Screenings on the Counterterrorism Unit’s Calendar

In the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, the American public morphed into a collective of spineless jellyfish and basically let Congress and the intelligence agencies to do whatever they wanted in order to “protect them.” Never mind that convincing a naive and fearful populace to hand over authoritarian powers to the government has been the playbook of tyrants for millennia, it still worked brilliantly on the dumbed down American public.

One of the most hideous creations to emerge from the post 9/11 societal lapse in sanity was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As far as I can tell, this organization has done nothing but harass and threaten ordinary Americans for completely normal activities. Let’s revisit a few examples from the DHS highlight reel:

The “War on Terror” Turns Inward – DHS Report Warns of Right Wing Terror Threat

Navy Veteran is Fired from Hotel Job and Called a “Terrorist” for Posting Pictures of DHS Vehicles on Facebook

“War on Terror” Targets Underwear – Department of Homeland Security Raids Maker of Unlicensed World Series Panties

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Computers Are Listening: How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

May 6, 2015

THE COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING: HOW THE NSA CONVERTS SPOKEN WORDS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documentsdescribe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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