A portion of Back To The Future II where Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly invades the far-flung future of 2015. Among flying cars, self-drying clothes, and hover boards a few of the citizens where these weird glasses that they use to watch TV and do other activities. The people wearing these devices look weird and are committing a horrendous fashion faux pas. This is how many people view Google Glass, but fashion statement aside they also don’t trust the digital accessory because of privacy concerns. TechEye.net explains in “Americans Distrust Google Glass” that a recent market survey from Toluna explained that more than 72 percent of Americans do not want to spend the money on the device, because they’re worried their private data could become public and being recorded without consent.
The ongoing disinformation campaign financed by carbon interests such as the Koch brothers, combined with the corruption of every branch of our government, has left us in this condition.
In the age of the Iraq war and Obamacare, the government is hardly a trustworthy body.
The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government this week has been described as ‘sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered. The report goes into astonishing detail about what severe climate change would mean – and what it means already to specific villages, mountains and beaches.
The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become
John Naughton
The Observer, 10 May 2014
When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.
But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What's Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”
A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.
Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.
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In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.
The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.
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Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.
But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.
Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading. Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”
It’s a new world for the 17 agencies within the intelligence community. Their budgets are shrinking in the face of an undiminished threat landscape and a growing list of cyber-adversaries.
The IC can do a lot of things, but it can’t make money grow on trees. It faces a grand workforce challenge: Smaller budgets. Reduced hiring. Increased uncertainty. The problems are magnified significantly during national security events that require a surge of talent.
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With all that in mind, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance developed a task force of former senior intelligence officials and stakeholders from industry and academia to explore potential solutions. The resulting white paper released May 7, titled “Smart Change II: Preparing the Intelligence Community Workforce for an Evolving Threat and Fiscal Environment,” is a sequel to an initial INSA-led effort in 2011.
The white paper outlines several ways the IC could ensure a continuous assessment of strategic risk related to workforce reductions and proposes an overarching framework for civilian, military and contractor components of the IC that would guide strategic planning and management decisions.
“Budget constraints are the reality now,” said Deborah Kircher, Chief Human Capital Officer for the Office of the National Director of Intelligence, speaking at a Strategic Manpower Planning event hosted by Nextgov.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com. More articles by Dr. Barrett
Here is a very good assessment discussing what I think is wrong with American foreign policy first under Bush and, now, under Obama. In my view Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are mass murderers no less than John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and ought to be in prison. It is it any wonder we are hated around the world?
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup, the 2011 ‘regime change” in Libya and drone wars waged in several countries by President Barack Obama.
