Cobb

Restrepo

Restrepo is the name of a film, an outpost, a soldier. It is the legacy of at least a couple of dead men. It is an intimate documentary of the soldiers involved in a campaign in the Korenagal Valley, a remote location somewhere in the depths of Afghanistan. It's about broken promises.

Not many people stateside are aware of our goals in Afghanistan. I am certainly not informed by public discussion on the matter. But as I watched the film it was clear that we are holding to the new form of ideological warfare, where we are not interested in holding property, but slewing the the population and eliminating those enemies bold enough to call themselves enemies. It is a rather stupid form of war when you think about it, but it's about all we can manage these days in our half-hearted foreign policy. 

The kind of war that makes more sense that we do not pursue is the kind that demands peace. Instead we pursue the kind that sorta argues for peace and kind of asks for peace. The difference is found in the attitude towards the enemy combattant. IE the definition of the enemy. You see we do not make war on a place so much as we do on an idea that's somewhat in place in a place. In the good old days, every male who could pick up a rifle and shoot was considered a potential soldier and thus subject to being killed or captured. These days we find an interpreter and have him fill out a questionaire. Are you a bad guy? Well we saw you hanging out with bad guys, what do you think of that? It's a job our soldiers aren't very good at, young as they are. Nor should soldiers be good at police work. But that's how they get their purple hearts these days in Afghanistan. 

In the course of human events there are things worth warring over, but it's not clear we have such purpose these days. It's something we once had, but not so many hearts bleed over what passes for injustice in Afghanistan. War is the most expensive sort of justice, even when it's done right. But there's no peace worth demanding these days - just a lot of people who may or may not deserve to die for no particularly good reason. We've signed on to that, and as a nation bound by our global obligations we are marching to the 4/4 timing we established. 

Our Obligations To Street People

You know the old saying about giving a man a fish. When I look back at my debts of gratitude towards the Leftists that made my welfare their business, I try to distinguish that which was useful and inspirational from that which was by turns condescending, phlegmatic and authoritarian. The Left gave me a fish and told they could teach me how to fish, but that I'd never compete with the rich white fishermen in Beverly Hills. I went next door to Beverly Hills and figured it out myself. Now I build some of the best fishing line in the world. 

As I have arrived at a fairly useful and comfortable place, mostly by my own doing and the vagueries of chance, it's easy for me to dismiss the Left. But I have been seriously considering exactly what the proper appeals are for Socialist Project upon humanity despite its obvious need for altruism.  

To that end, I have put some George Orwell and Franz Kafka on my future menu, but these and other ingredients are on a slow burning back burner. Here's today's piece.

I am intrigued by something I received, unbidden, from the 78th Assembly seat holder about her efforts to cede some acreage onto public land which includes the remains of some 1400 year old aboriginal settlement. And I find it ironic that this government entity would find it useful to include this with pride. Of course one understands the bourgeios sentiment associated with giving propers to pre-European cultures here on the North American continent, but exactly how this translates into *empowerment* of Hispanics and Latinos is literally vague. Although how it will rhetorically be used by La Raza is as plain as day, depending upon the corporate face of contestants for the land within the aegis of the 78th. To wit, Walmart bad, cultural center good.

Included in my thoughts about this are some stunning revalations about the unread sections of the new Immigration Bill, somewhere within the machinations of our Congress. According to this legislative analyst with her partisan fealties the greatest deception of the Bill is that it transfers billions of dollars out of the funding of government bureacracies into a new estate of community organizations. Let's allow that to percolate a moment. The new Immigration Bill funds billions of dollars of community organizations, as opposed to government bureacracies.

Now unless one is so naive as to think that all community organizations are created equal, I'd like you to take a guess as to which community leaders are likely to be funded. Without failing to note the unusual scrutiny placed by the IRS on Tea Parties of late, I would summarize my opposition to this heinous idea in two parts. 1). The Civil Service is non-partisan and subject to strict regulations. Community organizations are not. 2). This is transparently an attempt to get the Federal Government into the business of the heretofore private business of astroturfing.

I should also mention in passing that I am not surprised, now having watched 'The Andromeda Strain' for the first time, that under the Obama Administration we find more coming under the purveiw of the Centers for Disease Control. I believe that Obama's scientism finds its practical way to power by defining more American liberties as threats to health. The properly funded CDC study will show how the number of bullets in Texas correlate scientifically with x morbidity, and thus the goverment, in the interests of health, uses incontravertible medical evidence to execute gun control. 

If we owe people fresh to the Post-War American standard of living something through the arms of altruist government largesse, isn't it a high paying job? What I learned in economics was that America has a minimum wage so that jobs are harder to come by, but also more permanent. That if we dropped the minimum wage, more people would have more part-time work with lower benefits. What is the precarious balance? Well as the post-war prosperity has found no new industries with low-hanging economic fruit we've seen both, a rising minimum wage, rising unemployment and rising fractions of part-time low benefit jobs. Nobody wants to take a whack at redefining Exempt from Non-Exempt do they? I didn't think so. So the job situation is what it is, structurally speaking. 

But what if you're a community organizer, or an activist volunteer? Has anyone ever heard of what level of civil service exam you have to pass.. oh wait. There's nothing like that. You just need too much time on your hands and no real job. Show up and they put you to work, with no pay. Until the Immigration Bill passes. Or maybe there's another law in the future that puts billions of federal dollars into the hands of useful community organizers or the proper sort. It does solve a lot of problems doesn't it?

I suspect that this sort of make-work will function at the level of say Congressional appropriations. It's another kind of Affirmative Action, which is to say it fulfills our obligations to people on the outside by getting them on the inside. That is, until somebody not beholden to that system gets into office and decides that taxpayer money should go somewhere else. The institutionalization of community organizations funded through partisan legislation is a brilliant maneuver for everyone except the class of flunkies it pays the minimum wage. But if your view of society is that we need community organizations driven by political expedience and not businesses driven by markets, then your vote matters as much as my dollar. For now.

Still Trying To Vote Your Way To Freedom?

In the news is that several states will have the same rules applied to them when it comes to changing voting laws as the rest of the country. Those states, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia have essentially been on probation for fifty years. Now they can change their laws without special oversight from the Federal Government. 

It probably comes as no surprise that these are all 'red' states that voted for Romney in 2012. Well, Virginia was a 'blue' state. And similarly comes as no surprise that these are all slave states. No, wait, Alaska wasn't a slave state, neither was Arizona. In fact, no black man was ever even lynched in Arizona. Hmm. Well let's not get too specific in categorizing them - they were all highlighted as the most racist states hostile to blacks. But Arkansas and Massachussetts were not included. And wasn't it Florida that was doing the voter disenfranchisement?

If you see the inconsistency here, then you should understand the simple reason I don't find a particularly foul odor eminating from the Supreme Court while plenty of folks I see are turning up their noses today. 

There are three ways I see this as a simpleton priority. 

1. It engages race for race's sake and asserts that racial identity is the substance of and the basis for voter disenfranchisement. Zero sum. This logic always comes down to counting noses by race and always depends on subjective criteria of 'sufficient'. This is what I call the six pounds of racism problem.

2. (Which may be obviated by proof, but unlikely none not considered by the SC). There is no evidence that Texas 2013 is Texas 1964 when it comes to voter suppression by race, nor for the others. Conversely there is no evidence that any other state has emerged to require such special scrutiny.

3. (Most importantly) It ignores economic reality, which is substantially the point of the intent in the first place. 

African Americans didn't initiate the Civil Rights Movement because they like pushing buttons in voting booths. They didn't march in the streets for the great privilege of filling out voter registration cards. They did so, with great justification and widespread support, for the economic uplift that access to public accomodations brings for those excluded from them on the lowest rungs of society. At the time, that's where most African Americans were.

Today most African Americans are middle class. That dream is reality. It's a reality in Georgia and its a reality South Carolina. 

Furthermore, there is no vote for black power. There is no vote for black freedom. There is no vote for racist discrimination. There is no vote for racist suppression. There is no legislation that treats African Americans any differently than anyone else. All that is part of the law of non-discrimination that nobody questions, but not a whole lot of people actually need. What African Americans need that is denied them by racists for racist reasons cannot be purchased through voting. If that were the case, then the election of Barack Obama would have made that difference. Twice.

Once upon a time, voting was what was needed, and America generated heroes. Their triumphs had almost a fairy tale kind of justice. The scariest part of the story is that 'Happily ever after' is not guaranteed. Sure, Jack slayed the Giant. David killed Goliath. But that's just one battle, and it cannot be fought over and over, on the same terms. 

You cannot vote your way to economic prosperity. You cannot vote your way into good health. You cannot vote your way into moral righteousness. The ballot box in America does not have that power. Power moves through very different channels these days. Fortunately we are a nation of liberty and people choose their own paths to success. It defies the American spirit to suggest it would be delivered to you with the stroke of a pen. That's not how we work. That's not how we pray. That's not how we learn. That's not how we raise and keep our families. American life and success comes from blood, sweat and tears. But then you know that.

I just thought I'd remind you in case you thought you smelled something. 

Sean Hannity?

I watch exactly no television news, and I really haven't since the early 90s when I pretty much dropped everything except for Charlie Rose. And I basically watched Charlie Rose because many of his guests wrote books, and so I read the books. I have been out of the mainstream media for two decades. 

That said, when I moved from NY to ATL, it took some time understanding redneck radio and distinguishing that from Right radio. In those days Hannity was a rank amateur and picked all kinds of stupid examples for everything - but I understood finally where all of Right radio was coming from. 

The last time I listened to Right radio on the regular (meaning once or twice per week) was about six years ago with Hugh Hewitt, although I did listen to Dennis Miller for a while too, now that I think of it. But on the whole I don't miss it.

The reason is this. Radio has the opportunity to bring focused attention to deep issues. In order to handle the deep issues properly, you *must* have a companion website that is well edited and has transcripts of every broadcast. I think there are only a few radio personalities who are deep precision shooters, most shoot from the hip and just go overboard on thin talking points. So they would sound stupid in print, where real analysis could take place. But that's the nature of radio and they don't want to change. 

Now once upon a time, Bill Bennett had a radio show. There's no way I would give my limited media time to Sean Hannity if Bennett were still on the air. But you see the problem. Bennett got lynched over a soundbite, and that's how radio has been dumbed down to the level of Sean Hannity who sucks by comparison even to that other dude the Left hates. Not Limbaugh but.. the guy on CNN. Anyway. Oh yeah Glenn Beck. 

Here's the bottom line. All of broadcast media, all radio and TV pundits are are purveyors of CONVENTIONAL WISDOM. They neither have the will nor the capacity to *teach* and basically what they are expert at is bringing what you already know into punchy dramatic relief. Two maybe three stories a week. Week after week after week.

You will never get them to deal with any politics at the level of law. So everything they do can only be measured by popular polling, not legal or policy ramifications. So it is impossible for them to inform the public at a substantial level - instead they make popular polling seem more important than it is - thereby inflating the significance of their influence. 

Here's the other thing. When you're on radio and you come back to a story you did one way (NPR does this all the time) which was wrong. You come back and mention it as if it was only a small part of your interest. I don't know what the logical fallacy of that is, but it's basically like saying - Some people think Joe Biden is not an intelligent Vice President. They thought Dick Cheney was intelligent until he shot that guy in the face. Radio personalities always put disproportionate emphasis in their editorializing. It's horrible journalism and I wish all the Baby Boomers would just die. 

Brian Lamb is the last honest, intelligent journalist in America. And if I really cared about politics, I would only watch him and read books he recommends.

The Absurdity of Snowden's Challenge

I have read Edward Snowden's recent interview in the Guardian and recognize the depth of his heroism. I think he is challenging all of us on several levels. If it is possible for a double-agent to be respectable, then he has just about all I can give. That's because I beleive he is smart, conscientious and that he has the goods on the NSA. So much so that lots of people are scared to death to present them. 

...remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

At the core of Snowden's challenge is to consider the value of suspicionless surveillance from a cost benefit analysis to American citizenship. Most publications have picked up on that 'consent of the governed' piece. But then he throws us a deeper, moral consideration. If the NSA gives us civil libertarians pause, it is because its awesome apparatus is aimed at American citizens. Snowden challenges us further by implication - if we don't like our privacy violated because we have not given informed consent by our government, then what hope does any non-US citizen have? In this regard, Snowden is not merely asking a civil rights question, but a human rights question.

Except that he can't because there is no such thing.

Yes, I'm repeating that old line of paleo-conservatives that there is no such thing as human rights. Unless and until the actual New World Order comes into being, we are citizens of nations, and as such there are only those civil rights we are guaranteed by our constitutions, within the ambit of our nation's ability and willingness to defend them. Everything else is wishful thinking. Especially when it comes to SIGINT. It is thus absurd for anyone, especially an American vetted into the highest echelons of the American Military-Security Complex (aka Echelon) to expect some higher authority than the self-interest of American citizens to reign in that which was built for our benefit. 

It comes down to the simple question of whether or not we believe that the average American will be persecuted. And that eventually comes down to whether or not we actually trust our government in this matter, and I firmly believe that will come down to cases. 

My personal opinion is that I find it difficult to believe that the NSA is out of control. So long as there are appropriate controls and oversight, I think Americans' well-justified fears of abuse of NSA powers can and will prevail. I think that American military leadership will not be hushed. I also believe that the CIA and the NSA and all of the new intelligence organizations are more incompetent than evil. I have advocated for a separate MI5 domestic surveillance agency and for a separate counter-terrorism court a la Posner. Yes of course the possibility for abuse is there, but is this an area that we would rather not police? That's a tough question, and although I fall on the libertarian side of that equation, I do not believe that the system has been abused enough to justify its dismantling. This is a specie of a Cold War question of unilateral disarmament. We survived Cold War nukes. We can survive NSA snoops. But can we survive Islamist nukes without NSA snoops?

So the only real pressing question is whether or not we trust the FISA court. If we do not, and we believe that the NSA tail is wagging the FISA dog, then our problem is not at all with PRISM. Rather this is a specie of Iraq War torture. In short, either the Administration knows exactly what the NSA is doing or they don't. If they don't, then the answer lies in the direction of Snowden's admonishment - but only to the extent that we the people are willing to eyeball our consent with discipline. Of course we in the alarmed public will inevitably punt that duty to the attorney class. The law *is* transparent, isn't it? If we do know what the NSA is doing (wrong) then what is it?  So. Who has disappeared? Where are all the victims of this snooping and what pain has been visted upon them by our watchdogs? Are we, in this era of Benghazi incapable of sniffing out what goes horribly wrong? 

See the other side of the story here is that there probably, and I would say 95% probably, isn't very much that goes on in SIGINT that your ace hacker at DefCon or SchmooCon et al hasn't already figured out. And we also have a critical mass of people who understand very well what can and what cannot be done with data mining and all that other stuff. And to counter the paranoia, you really have to deal with more paranoia - which is to say, the people who know best what can be done hack and snoop wise, know it because they've done it themselves. And it just so happens that those people are not committing mass suicide. That's the thing about science. It works the same everywhere. 

Brewster Kalhe, who first started archiving the whole of the Internet a decade ago has done the math. It would cost less than $30 million per year to build, staff and maintain the facility to capture all the phone traffic in America. NSA has got way way more than that. They can do all the video on the planet, plus satellite streams and military telemetry that most people don't even know exists. How much do you want to bet that the American intelligence establishment never wants to make a mistake about stockpiles of chemical weapons again? How much do you want to bet that they knew what was going on at Benghazi?

Which interestingly brings us back to the matter of policy and judgment. The American public can and will be deceived, and they can and will be duped by politicians who will claim to have superior moral judgment. Everybody wants only their hands on the ring of power. But who is going to decide that? Americans. 

From the same pool of people who created the beast will be those who decide how long its leash shall be. Not the Chinese. Not the Koreans. Not the British or the French or the Canadians or anybody else we have decided to share the spoils of digital war. It is now and forever shall be Us vs Them. We can only hope for a better Us. 

Snowden's simple challenge requires only a change of complexion, a change of policy, a new CC on the email distibution list of NSA power. But it will not destroy the beast. It's still our beast. Snowden's deeper challenge requires that the US not be the power that decides US power, and for that he's a bit late. The Cold War is over. 

Unless he thinks he knows something about China that Washington doesn't already know.

Peacetime Sucks

War is Hell. Hell is well understood. Peacetime sucks. 

For the same reason that the noose focuses the mind, liberty allows for discovery of novelty in every sphere. I am reflecting for a moment on my discovery several years ago of the benefit of war. To reiterarte, the great value of war is that it becomes the excuse for everything, and it simplifies and accentuates the meaning of life. War is in every sense, reductive. 

Peacetime sucks because in peacetime, flirtations with the truth are sufficient. Nobody quite cares if you miscalculate because in general, nobody is going to lose an arm or a leg about it. Consequently, every mistruth becomes pretty much equal to every other mistruth, and the slippery slope ends up going down certainly. But not down to Hell. Because we are at peace with ourselves, our misdeeds, our mistruths and well isn't there delightful discovery in all that novelty? Yes there is. Peacetime breeds the corruptions of injustice, especially a peacetime with no death penalty.

Make no mistake. Peace is always preferable to war. Only during peacetime, with its attendent modes of discovery can we find value in the myriad permutations of human character and endeavor. Nobody loves humanity and all the diversions of society so much as during peacetime. In war, all we want is for war to end, by any means necessary - which generally means more war. In wartime, anything and everything goes to win, and blood debts give rise to greater commitments until the very end of human ability is tried. It exhausts the very soul. War makes zombies of humans, we become single-minded rabbits, astounding in our abject terror. Every face of every child reminds us that we are not our true selves in war, that we are reduced to following the orders of survival. And so we crave peace.

Peace is where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman, and a man can be a woman and so on. War does not allow us that luxury. So it is amusing as we contemplate our peacetime selves that women are wanting to be men and vice versa. The corruption is so vexing that it makes me entertain the clarity of Hell and the reduction of desire to survival. 

In between these extremes is Justice. I am sufficiently certain of this and don't feel compelled to backup this idea with my previous levels of investigation. I won't be looking up Adam Smith's version to compare it to somebody else's. I will simply rest on that certainty. More on Justice later.

Suspicionless Surveillance

Suspicionless surveillance is the term used by Edward Snowden to describe the ambit of the US government's ongoing SIGINT. It is, as I understand it today, a total capability which is limited only by policy. Being a database architect myself, the extent of this capability comes as no surprise. I guess I just finally heard what I needed to hear from Snowden's recent Guardian interview which I will publish here in its entirety...

We interrupt this post to entertain a paranoid fantasy.

As I am writing this, I am having trouble logging into Evernote and also in sending an email confirmation for something else entirely unrelated. And I am considering a phrase called 'direct access' and the likelihood that Cutlass and I here can be on a list which is a million lines long of 'owned computers'. With the presumption that NSA can bruteforce TrueCrypt, and/or are keylogging my machine, there is no doubt that somebody is watching me.

But what if that person watching me were sympathetic to my ethical discipline? What if they were a dude like Spy (of my existential partners Cobb readers may recall) that really is a genuine big brother - somebody who doesn't want to see me get in trouble? Somebody who says, look once you go play in this arena, you're going to lose all your legal support. Somebody on the inside who, for all they can see, is convinced that liberty as we once knew it, is gone and only the fantasy of it remains, but that the only real liberty left is a particular subset, a subset whose definitions are clear within the realm of the watchers, but not so clear in the civilian population. 

Well, then we are already dead. Let's have a bourbon. Let bourbon be in America, what vodka is in Russia and let us all sing together as we drown.

Da hoo doray!

That said, I will continue with what I was saying (and search around for my Gadsden flag). But first, a small video. 

Snowden & Obligatory Seriousness

Some young dude named Snowden with a clear and present risk to his own freedom has divulged something that may or may not be relevant to Americans' privacy and freedom. He is ratting out the existence of a tool used by the NSA which goes under the name of PRISM. As far as anybody can tell, and there are probably only a few who actually could, this PRISM tool is used on ordinary Americans without their knowledge to collect and/or organized data for the purposes of the American Intelligence establishment.

Now several months ago, I came to understand that the authorization of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act (how Orwellian is that?) would create secret laws authorizing secret laws. At the time there were several folks who ought to know, who vehemently protested these provisions. Knowing in my heart that President Obama has all the integrity of a Maitre D', I figured that Americans would get the responsible service in this regard that they paid for, which for most of us is a contemptible near-zero amount. In checking my archives on Security and Paranoia I can't find everything that I want, but thankfully there are enough bloggers out there with some history that hasn't been erased.

My gut is telling me that Snowden is about as reliable a source as can be had - which is to say very bloody unlikely to be left standing credibly at the end of the day. Whatever grains of truth he is able to reveal should be sufficient for society's wheels to start churning up the checks and balances we can rely upon to find out. Snowden is the pebble at the center of what should become a snowball rolling down the mountainside. The fate of the pebble is not the issue, but how big the waves are that ripple in a properly democratic pond. Snowden will sink and can only rise if we are not drowned or mired and actually drain the swamp. But of course there will be an ocean of resistance. 

On the one hand, Snowden either had to apprehend somebody abusing the system or find it easy enough to abuse the system himself to call its controls into question. Either one of those actions in a relatively closed organization can result in 'career limiting moves'. There is no way easy to leak what one knows as a professional - our shorthands and our Dilbertisms limit us. We all know what goes wrong and what can be improved - and in some way we are all in the same boat. There is no inconsequential way for him to leak if we are a serious society of law. The significance of all this must be hyped to a certain level - meaning those of us who care about the core issue of civil liberty must keep on the backs of the experts we will need to get to the bottom of this problem. I say this because I expect the Administration to cover its tracks. 

It seems we cannot keep up with the number of scandals coming out of Washington. But I will try to keep up with this one. As an IT professional, the ability for any to trust in what I aim to do is at risk. In the meantime, I'll be checking on Schneier, Spook86, Volokh and Fernandez in order to keep up. 

I like Snowden today better than I ever will sympathize with Julian Assange or with Bradley Manning, his agent. I believe that Snowden was simply astonished at what he found, and that the other two were angry men with knives just looking for someone to stab. 

Son of Carnivore

I believe that there is a switch that law enforcement has. I have no idea when it is right or proper to flip that switch. I have no idea how many times it has been abused. But I do have an idea what is behind that switch. As the Vietnamese hooker said "Any thing you want".

I'm talking about the hackers that hack the hackers. I'm talking about the NSA.

Here's what I believe about how 'anything' comes from a limited set of somewhat anonymous things. First of all, what I don't doubt is the skills of investigators who are in the business of CT. What I suspect is that they have gained legitimate access to non-anonymous stuff that can be named in a warrant, but that they also have shady access to anonymous stuff that is collected on the sly. In otherwords, like every other police force, they have admissible evidence and non-admissible evidence. The difference between the two can always be attributed to 'a hunch'. If you bust a jaywalker and destroy his lunch plans, you can find out who's sitting in the restaurant you know he was going to and casually observe who is checking their watch. 

What I am not likely to find out is the exact record layout of the sort that Verizon is giving up to the Feds. But somebody knows. If I had a peak at those, I could tell you what kind of information is inferrable. What I believe happens is that network analysis is done to identify the suspect's contacts and then observations are made based on suspicions of who those individuals are. In other words, it's up to the investigating agency to de-anonymize those anonymous, non-content records since they will have some key even if the lookup to that key is not made available.

Take a cell phone call. What can I know? I can take Tsarnaev's cell phone and determine its identification. Then, knowing where T has been on the day of his crime, I can isolate all cell traffic within X radius of the cell phone towers. Know that basically all towers carry all traffic. Either you're CDMA or GSM, Verizon and AT&T have a trading backchannel clearinghouse where they exchange information about 'cross' traffic. So even if I'm looking at AT&T's tower, I could still have (what I remember to be) about 40% of other carrier's traffic. 

So I figure out what I know to be true, and exclude what I know to be false. I can deduce a great deal. For example. Who has called Russia in the past 12 months? Believe me, that cuts down a whole lot of traffic. Who called Russia in the past 12 months that was in Boston in May? This kind of programming is very simple. The question is merely whether it comes from admissible sources and whether or not those who have secret inadmissible sources are clueing in investigators as to what they may have proven to be impossible. IE, a senior guy saying "I have a very strong hunch that it's not Suspect 22". Or "Have you considered the possibility that Suspect 22 might have been using the public phones over at Harvard Square?"

The more data sources, the more triangulation. For example. It doesn't take much to figure out that the likelihood of a person writing a post this long onto Facebook wasn't composed on a mobile device. So it would be easy to find confirmation or denial of a person being at home vs not at home. After all, if Facebook is passing weblogs with a GUID, it would be very burdensome for them to scrub out the IP addresses of the web clients. In fact, my nickel says weblogs are probably open season because it costs so much to process them that website owners would only pass them in a pure unadulterated form.

Let us not forget that hackers hack. An NSA without a botnet is unthinkable. An FBI without a favor from the NSA is also inconceivable, as is an Eric Holder who doesn't play fast and loose with domestic firewalls. Our Congress refused to sunset the Patriot Act. So there are many things government agencies can know and do know. And the cost to know gets lower every month. 

So I'm just talking around what I believe - which is that the best way to avoid getting busted by the cops is to be a cop. The next best thing is to know what cops know, and try not to be surprised. When it comes to domestic surveillance, nothing surprises me. Nothing at all.

 

Related articles

Here's how the NSA analyzes all that call data

Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers

Verizon Customer? NSA Was Secretly Recording Your Phone Calls

The Guardian's Bombshell Revelation About NSA Domestic Spying Is Only The Tip Of The Iceberg

52

52

On this the day of 52
All graying are the skies
Just westward lies the ocean blue
And to the East the City lies
I stand between the two

My City friends all send the greeting
Cheer upon my date of birth
And finding joy in every reading
I overestimate my worth
For joy in life is fleeting

And so I seek the western shore
And tarry in the mists a while
The breakers crash the seabirds soar
My place my planet every mile
God's handiwork I might explore

The gifts of God and Man are few
Or so it seems in thankless haze
And working days in which we stew
Now. I give thanks in all my ways
On this the day of 52