Two good short stories about privacy & the corporate nanny state

Two short stories that bring together the pitfalls of big data and the internet of things.

  • One Star, about what to do when your self-driving taxi decides to drive you to the police because you fit a profile instead of your destination;
  • Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things, takes the fact that Target knows when you are pregnant and runs with it in a most paternalistic conclusion.

Another Global War on Terror Toxic Legacy

Our disposable society example #807.

It looks like the US’ major military involvements seem to poison US soldiers and the civilians of the countries we fight.  Agent Orange in Vietnam.  Gulf War syndrome in that war. Now the US government has covered up the burning of toxic waste in open pits at US miltary bases by private contractor Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of Halliburton.

Since the illness’ effects are delayed, respiratory issues or cancers, the VA won’t cover it. Iraqi and Afghan civilians, like the Vietnamese, are just left to suffer.

Of course, outsourcing the burn pits to private contractors allowed them to cut costs by cutting corners:

Did the military’s use of private contractors like KBR in some ways help to facilitate this crisis?

KBR operated many of the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some regulations for contractors, but they’re not nearly as stringent, and the penalties are not nearly as harsh for contractors as they are for soldiers. So these contractors were super-careless with these burn pits. There were burning anything and everything in them, and they didn’t care and they didn’t think they could be held accountable.

They’ve grown to the point where they feel that the government can’t operate without them. These companies have that arrogance. Contractors that were operating the burn pits in Iraq were actually told by their headquarters, “If they’re going to investigate us over these burn pits, don’t worry about it. If we pull out, they can’t run this base.”

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration hasn’t been helpful to whistle-blowers on this issue. Thankfully, in the documents that Chelsea Manning leaked is information about how the US military was aware of the burn pit health hazards.

The GWoT just keeps giving.

First they came for an iPhone 5c

Posting here and at masspirates.org.

The FBI got a judge to order Apple to create a custom iOS version so they can decrypt the work iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. They want Apple to push out a custom version that will disable the delays between wrong pin entries and the ten wrong pin tries and the phone gets wiped security feature. Apple is fighting it.

This Tuesday the Pirate Party is joining with Fight for the Future to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. Join us and stand up for your privacy and right to keep your data encrypted and secure.

Considering that ISIS didn’t know about the attack, it is doubtful there is much on the phone that will help them get other leads. The FBI can already request the metadata (who was called, when, how long, from where) for Farook’s communications using the phone or any other service the shooters used. The mobile phone providers are always willing to provide that information, often for a fee. Whatever other info they need, the NSA has likely gathered it with their mass surveillance program. FBI could use the NSA’s data to identify what other information they need and then get a subpoena to get the data legally, though unconstitutionally.

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It isn’t as if the Federal government hasn’t used parallel construction in the past.

The phone was owned by Farook’s employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, and someone there reset the phone in an attempt to gain access. Had they not, the FBI could have backed up the data to Apple’s iCloud service and gained access to it. It isn’t clear who made the decision to reset the password.

Which is all good for the FBI, because it gives them the excuse they need to force Apple to modify iOS to make it easier to break into, and set a precedent for getting a backdoor in any phone, even newer ones. Once those backdoors are there, anyone can take advantage of them whether the security services of other countries, criminals or abusive ex-boyfriends. That process may already have begun with China.

So please come out this Tuesday and join the Pirate Party, Fight for the Future and others to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. The more people who stand up for privacy and encryption, the stronger is our message.

More articles to read on this subject:

Disposable military dogs

Our disposable society example #806.

Looks like the military’s practice of discarding soldiers applies to bomb-sniffing dogs used in Iraq and Afghanistan according to an NYPost investigation. Robby’s Law allows military dog handlers to adopt the dogs they worked with, but “hundreds of handlers [are] still searching for their dogs — and the Army, the Pentagon and K2 Solutions [are] covering up what happened, and what may still be happening.” Of course the military mercenary private contractor is blaming the military since the dogs are owned by the military, but it isn’t clear who really owns the dogs.

Soldiers suffer:

“I guess I had PTSD before, but I never really noticed till I gave Fistik up,” Kornse says. “I started having nightmares. I never experienced that before. She made ­everything better for me — that’s the best way I can describe it.”

And the dogs suffer:

“All of these dogs have PTSD,” Scarborough says. “Squires said that to me.”

“Half of the dogs were on human Prozac and Xanax,” kennel master Greg Meredith tells The Post.

And so may the public:

None of the people who sought to adopt was vetted. None was asked what they planned to do with the dogs, or if they were capable of dealing with a dog with war wounds. None was asked whether they had small children.

Someone made money off of these dogs and the dogs sacrificed for our expeditionary wars. Apparently it is too much to ask that they find people who need them and can take care of them.

Financial Crisis: Keep an Eye on Europe (Again)

Yves Smith has a useful overview of the pitfalls facing the European banking system and as a result Europe generally: Eurobanks: The Probable Point of Failure as Systemic Stress Rises. It is worth your time, but I’ll summarize the key points.

As Yves’ points out 1/4 of the advanced economies are now in negative interest rate territory. With negative interest rates you are paying to loan someone your money with the result that your capital declines in both relative and absolute terms. This creates an incentive to park your money in cash, which at least won’t decline in absolute terms, though it will decline in relative terms due to inflation (currently a paltry 0.4% in Europe). She points out:

But its utterly stunning to see this move not only being treated as a sound policy option, but actually being implemented. Deflation is the worst possible place to be in an economy with heavy debt levels. Economists have managed to forget the most basic lesson of the Great Depression, and tell themselves the bizarre story that putting money even more on sale will lead people to borrow and spend. Earth to central bankers: they won’t if they are worried about their future. What is needed is more demand, which means more fiscal spending and better incomes for workers, which means more labor bargaining power. Yet orthodox policymakers are deeply allergic to both ideas.

Or as they say in monetary theory, you cannot push on a string. The central bank policy of the US, Europe, Japan and China was and is to make sure money is plentiful for the financial sector in the hope that that it will be lent out and used to increase demand. But US and European bank balance sheets are still full of bad loans and giving them cheap money papers over the problem, but doesn’t solve it. With demand low, US & European banks have little reason to risk loaning money to the private sector, but are better off buying government bonds and using the interest rate differential to shore up their (still) poor balance sheets.  Japan had its lost twenty years. The US and especially Europe are making good progress in catching up with Japan.

In China, the excess money went to increasing production, which since demand isn’t rising fast enough, meant too much supply for the demand and thus product deflation. Charming. The solution of course is increasing demand, but Europe and the US leaders are more interested in keeping wages down, profits up and the rich richer.

The European Central Bank (ECB), like the US Federal Reserve of the late 20s and early 30s, is ill equipped to deal with the situation. Prior to the 2007 financial crisis the European Central Bank was a “currency union with a think tank” (don’t remember who first said that, but it is accurate). There is no European-wide banking insurance system ala the US FDIC, rather each state has to deal with its own failing banks. Ireland’s government debt went from 20% of GDP to 123% of GDP in 2013 due, in part, to socializing the bad bank debts. It was even forced into it by the ECB.

The ECB’s current solution to any bank failures is to convert depositor’s money into stock in the company which was tried in Spain and the 2012-13 Cyprus financial crisis. Using bail-ins to resolve insolvent banks makes the banking system less, not more stable:

The bail-in provision, which is now in place all across the Eurozone as part of the new EU banking rules that became effective January 1, is supposed to occur only when national deposit guarantee funds fail, and those are supposed to cover deposits of up to €100,000. There is a EU-wide second layer of insurance that is being implemented in phases, but it is more fig leaf than real. We’ve mentioned that there is a slow motion bank run underway in Italy, reflecting the fact that alert large depositors (and perhaps even smaller ones) recognize that they are at risk. Anyone with an operating brain cell will move their money out in part or in whole if they think their bank is at risk. Thus bail-ins increase the odds of bank runs, the last thing a regulator wants to have happen.

As do contingent convertible bonds, called cocos:

All cocos, however, take losses contingent on one or more trigger events: for example, the issuing bank falling below a preset capital threshold, or a decision by regulators. The triggers can push some cocos to convert into shares, while others instead write down to zero.

There is a second catch: risk. In good times, cocos behave like a normal high-yield bond, but in falling markets they expose investors to equity-like losses and volatility. In financial jargon this is called negative convexity, or “death spiral” risk: losses accelerate as things get worse.

With China seeing money leaving at a fast pace, how long it can keep from devaluing is an open question. If it does, the deflation problem will only get worse, putting further pressure on everyone’s banking system, especially Europe’s. France, the Netherlands and the UK banking sector assets are over 350% of GDP with Germany, Spain and Portugal not far behind. These have only grown since the start of the financial crisis. If enough French or German banks go belly up, the ECB has put in place rules that will only make the resulting financial and economic crisis much, much worse. Our elites always seem to learn the wrong lessons from history.

The fraud of voter id laws

John Oliver has a supremely funny take down of voter id laws as a solution to a problem that does not exist. In one study there were 31 incidents out of over one billion votes cast.

Voter id laws are a Republican tool to limit the number of votes by people of color, the poor and the young. It is gerrymandering the electorate on a wide scale and will lead to disenfranchising millions of voters. Or as Brecht said:

Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?