Stuff

Latest NSA revelations

Today's Times article, published despite NSA objections, confirms many more of our "paranoia is heightened awareness" suspicions.  I think it was especially interesting that Our Government coerced some companies into installing backdoors in their privacy software.  I'm pretty sure that GnuPG encryption still is safe, though, and it's not as hard to use as some would have you believe.  Anyway, if you want to discuss your secret terrorist plans without NSA interference, try it — but remember to do your composition and encryption offline, and to securely delete your original before you go back online.  Your hardware might be hacked.

Obama and Syria

It seems Our President did not have much success lining up support for his proposed attack on Syria at the G-20, and he's having even less success at home.  Americans, you see, are just not into it, and the ones against it for reasons more substantial than just hating Obama have some questions to ask, like, what if you bomb them now and they do it again later?  What if you make it easier for Al Nusra to come out on top?  What makes you think that sending missiles against Syria will have any impact at all on Iran, except to make nuclear negotiations more difficult for Hassan Rowhani?  Let's hope Congress, for whatever stupid reasons, says no.

Jobs

The unemployment rate is down to 7.3%, almost entirely because the labor-force participation rate is so low.  The new jobs being "created" by the "job creators" are nearly all "McJobs," and median family income remains roughly $4000 less than it was in 2008.  Sadly, the government we have is not going to do anything about it.  Some people just have too much goddamned money, and much too much of it goes to 501(c)(4)s, and from there to our "representatives" in Congress.

Surveillance State

If the FISA court approved a warrant for the FBI and NSA to obtain all of Verizon's "metadata," I think it's safe to assume it approved warrants for all the other major carriers as well.  I am certain that neither my friend Prudi not my friend Judy are terrorists — they just don't have the skills, much less the motivation — and they're my primary telephone correspondents.  Yes, my kids call every week or two, and they're not terrorists either, so I guess I won't be scooped up in some anti-terror dragnet.

On the other hand, I do get fairly frequent calls from other parties who must also be calling terrorists.  You probably get the robo-call that begins, "This is an important message about your current credit card account..."  I'm betting that the real terrorists get more calls from that outfit than from any of their terrorist buddies, and I'm calling on the FBI to shut them down.  They might even be calling from outside the USA — who knows?  Maybe they are terrorists, trying to drive us so crazy we go out and start killing each other.

Seriously, though, Barack Obama and his administration have been a total disappointment with regard to Fourth Amendment rights and with regard to transparency.  "Oh," exclaim the administration hacks, "but the things we do are for the sake of national security — to protect your safety.  And if it weren't for those horrible leakers letting you know they're happening, they wouldn't bother you at all!"

Once again, it's time to quote Jefferson:  "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Why only the SECOND amendment?

Second Amendment absolutists are out in force these days, insisting that the Constitution gives citizens the right to unrestricted ownership of any goddamned gun that makes the most money for the gun industry.  What the hell.  As I've noted before, I don't think any private citizen has to have a hand gun, and if all the super-popular Glocks disappeared tomorrow, it would be a great day for the USofA.

What I'm wondering about today, though, is why only the second amendment gets such special treatment.  Why not the first, or the fourth, or the sixth, or the eighth?  (Probably, you don have a clue what the sixth or the eighth  are about.  We former social studies teachers probably were less effective than we might have liked.)

In case you have forgotten what the fourth was about, it's the one on search and seizure — that is, the right to privacy.  Our President, in case you had not noticed, not only has supported the infringements on our rights in the Patriot Act, but expanded them.  If you really want online anonymity, for example, your best bet now is the Tor Project.  Is the whole thing run by the CIA or the FBI?  I don't think so, but who the hell knows?

The sixth amendment is trial by jury — speedy and public.  Ask the leftover Yemenis at Guantanamo how that right is holding up for them.  Ask the American citizens executed by drone strikes overseas.  The eighth amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, figures in here too.  Obama says torture is a thing of the past, but he won't prosecute any former torturers because it's all top secret, so who knows?

Oh, and by the way, FREE BRADLEY MANNING!