The right is crowing about this...

Lilia Luciano, a Miami-based NBC News correspondent, is no longer working for the network, TVNewser has learned.

Luciano last reported for NBC News March 31. Until that point, she had been reporting mainly on the Trayvon Martin story. Sources tell TVNewser Luciano’s dismissal came after an investigation which also led to the firing of a seasoned NBC News producer over a similar, misleading edit.

In rightwingerland, these two firings mean that NBC can't be trusted. To the contrary: Letting go of these reporters (over what I consider to be small-ish infractions) demonstrates that NBC can be trusted.

Compare NBC's attitude to the one displayed by Fox News. You may have seen this screen grab in an earlier post:


This "story" was generated in 2008 after Castro wrote an editorial that insulted both Obama and Clinton. Did anyone at Fox get fired for false reporting? No.

As you know, Fox pulls this kind of crap every hour of every day, and nobody gets the sack. How many times has Fox tried to convince the public that Obama is a Muslim?


Whenever a Republican gets bad press, Fox "accidentally" labels the miscreant a Democrat.








And then there's the strangest example of all...


I could upload these screencaps all day, of course. But I'm under deadline, and the point is made. Roger Ailes never fires anyone for the outrageous misreporting on Fox. Permalink

CNN wonders why Occupy May Day fizzled. I'm amazed that it did as well as it did, given the sheer inanity displayed by the brain-damaged fetuses placed in charge of publicizing the event. I don't know what the ad campaigns were like in other cities, but here in Balmer, the agit-prop achieved a level of surrealistic stupidity matched only by David Lynch's "Dumbland" cartoons.

During a visit to Dundalk, we took photos of the Occupy May Day posters affixed to various walls and telephone poles around town. Dundalk is a working class suburb of Baltimore -- and by "working class," I mean very working class. When I lived in southern California, everyone made fun of the proles living in Sylmar -- but Dundalkians make Sylmarians seem like Yale graduates.

Many dockworkers live in Dundalk, and a surprising number of them sound like Popeye. I'm not kidding: Popeye. If you think that voice was invented for the cartoons, think again. Some Dundalkians even kind of look like Popeye, except not as thin.

There hasn't been a bookstore in this burg in decades. Them newfangled computer thingies are objects of wonder and awe.

Everyone smokes -- all the time. In the morning, you can see all the cute little boys and girls walking to Dundalk Elementary, and they're all holding cigs between their stubby little fingers. Squirrels and puppies and cats all smoke. Birds swoop down from the trees to steal cigs from the squirrels.

In Dundalk, young women never talk about their husbands or their boyfriends: They talk about "My baby's daddy." As in: "Me and my baby's daddy went to the movie show last weekend."

The last time anyone in Dundalk made a clever remark was 1965. The last time any Dundalkian comprehended a clever remark was 1983. A monument in Freedom Park commemorates the occasion.

You occasionally see Dundalkians rolling around the pavement because they've forgotten the technique of upright walking. You occasionally see Dundalkians choking to death because they've forgotten how to breathe. If the Hulk lived here, he'd be the superintendent of schools.

Get the picture? This is the audience that the Occupy forces hoped to reach when they placed posters throughout Dundalk.

I will now present to you the words and images that the Occupy organizers thought would go over huge with the chainsmoking, Popeye-voiced dockworkers:


Ah yes. Minimalist surrealism. Bewildering non-sequiturs. If that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Dundalk.


This is good. Everyone knows that Dundalkians are big Erich Fromm fans. And it's not as though you need to give anyone a reason to get up off that couch.


Absolutely nobody reading these words felt any compulsion to strike. Nothing in these posters offered any reason for doing so. There was no appeal to the hopes, dreams or fears of the target audience.

Not pictured here: The poster that featured nothing but that fucking Guy Fawkes mask -- as if we haven't had enough of that.

I can just picture the arrogant pseudo-Marxist college kids who dreamed up these images. They probably dress in black and eat vegan meals and hang out at Red Emma's bookshop, if that place is still open. They would, no doubt, offer endless justifications for their inane and otiose approach to the ancient art of the propaganda poster. The smirky young fucktards who like imagery of this sort are usually too damn smug ever to admit making a miscalculation.

Get a clue, fetuses: You have to know your audience. You have understand what motivates people. You have to speak to their concerns, in a striking and memorable and inviting fashion. If you're talking to dockworkers, speak their language.

The Dada imagery that appeals to your two or three closest college buddies may not appeal to people who work in crummy jobs.

Yeah, this post opens me up to charges of snobbishness. Yeah, I've had some fun at the expense of the hard-working people who call Dundalk home. To be fair, Dundalkians have a good-natured tendency to kid themselves, and they often call their home town "Dumb-dalk." (If you wanna hear vicious, ask 'em about Essex.)

That said, I gotta tell ya: The proles who work in Dundalk -- and Essex, and Sylmar, and any other Proleburg you can name -- are freakin' geniuses compared to the idiotic kids who cobbled together Occupy May Day. Permalink

Aw, shit. This is bad. Very bad. We all know full well what the Fox News crew will do with this little gift. We also know how the pro-CISPA forces will react.

The propaganda has already started.

How fitting, the first non-Islamist terror plot in a long time and it involves leftists.

In the first place: These kids did not call themselves leftists. They considered themselves anarchists, which means that they have drunk deep from the Ron Paul wells.

No, I'm not saying that they are actual Paul sectarians; any such affiliation remains to be determined. I speak in more generalized terms. By definition, anarchists adhere to an anti-government philosophy. You pretty much have to be anti-government if you wish to enter the business of blowing up publicly-funded structures.

(Update: You'll want to read what Emptywheel has to say about the actual bridge these clowns allegedly targeted. Also see this humorous page on the close relationship between anarchism and libertarianism. Wikipedia classifies its "Anarchism" entry as "Part of a series on Libertarianism." Perhaps we may fairly call these kids libertarian terrorists.)

Anarchism is the opposite of the New Deal ideal of democratically regulated capitalism. We who revere the FDR legacy do not want right-wing propagandists conflating our stance with a philosophy that has nothing to do with us. FDR fans want to build bridges, not blow them up.

Allow me to make the next point in the boldest possible fashion, because I want the message to be very clear:

I am sick of seeing that fucking Guy Fawkes mask, which so many would-be anarchists (like those five ninnies in Ohio) have stupidly embraced. Get rid of that symbol. It's old. It's uncool. It was no damned good in the first place.

Look here, you young dummies: Alan Moore -- the guy who wrote V For Vendetta and the man who foisted Fawkesian imagery on the larger world -- did not intend his masked protagonist to be a hero in the conventional sense. In his original story (which differs from the popular film), he placed the extremes of anarchism and fascism in opposition to each other. He meant to demonstrate that both of those isms have the capacity to create monsters.

Moore could never have written that comic book if he did not live in a very non-anarchist country with a government-funded social safety net. That net allowed him to embark on a very iffy new career without putting his young family at risk of starvation. Moore has made that very point in numerous interviews.

Speaking as a liberal, I've never felt that anarchism was the answer. Wall Street went to hell in 2008 precisely because anarchy reigned in the financial sector. Using anarchist ideology to fight the "one percent" is like trying to lose weight by going on an ice cream diet. A tendency toward anarchist stupidity is one reason why the Occupy movement has always frightened and frustrated me as much as it has intrigued and enthralled me.

The idiocy of these five ambulatory fetuses in Ohio proves that young people should not be allowed to do -- well, anything.

In the comments, on a regular basis, I spar with smirky kids -- particularly on the topics of 9/11, Ron Paul, the historicity of Jesus, and conspiracy theory in general. Mes enfants, you must understand something: We, your elders, have failed you. I admit it. It's all our fault. We did not provide you with the educations you need in order to function in this world. Blame us. We, the over-50s, deserve any spit you might care to expectorate in the general direction of our faces.

But no matter how much moisture you hurl, you can't change one fact: If you are under 40, you are an idiot. Simple as that. You do not know how to think. You may think you can think, but you can't.

As a result of your (perhaps permanent) state of brain damage, the best thing you can do for your country is...nothing.

Do not attempt to do anything, ever. Not on your own.

If you must act, act under the direction of someone old enough to recall those golden decades of New Deal normality (FDR to Carter). Otherwise, you are doomed.

If you try to act independently, if you fool yourself into thinking that you know what's actually going on in this world, you'll simply end up used and entrapped, just like those five dolts in Ohio. Do you really want to be tossed in the clink and forced to bend over for Larry the Lifer? That's what will happen to you.

The only way to avoid that fate is to follow the directives of your infinitely more intelligent elders. Permalink

New evidence? Nina Rhodes-Hughes (sometimes known as Nina Rhodes) was a television actress in the 1960s who was a witness to the RFK assassination, standing just a few feet away from the senator. The official FBI report says that she heard only 8 shots. But she claims that the report is wrong...

"What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right," Rhodes-Hughes said in an exclusive interview with CNN. "The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups."

In a response also filed in federal court in Los Angeles, the defense team led by New York attorney William Pepper contends that the FBI misrepresented Rhodes-Hughes' eyewitness account and that she actually had heard a total of 12 to 14 shots fired.

"She identified fifteen errors including the FBI alteration which quoted her as hearing only eight shots, which she explicitly denied was what she had told them," Sirhan's lawyers argued in February, citing a previously published statement from Rhodes-Hughes.

Rhodes-Hughes tells CNN the FBI's eight-shot claim is "completely false." She says the bureau "twisted" things she told two FBI agents when they interviewed her as an assassination witness in 1968, and she says Harris and her prosecutors are simply "parroting" the bureau's report.

"I never said eight shots. I never, never said it," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "But if the attorney general is saying it then she's going according to what the FBI chose to put into their report."

"There were more than eight shots," Rhodes-Hughes said by phone. She says that during the FBI interview in her Los Angeles home, one month after the assassination, she told the agents that she'd heard 12 to 14 shots. "There were at least 12, maybe 14. And I know there were because I heard the rhythm in my head," Rhodes-Hughes said. She says she believes senior FBI officials altered statements she made to the agents to "conform with what they wanted the public to believe, period."

"When they say only eight shots, the anger within me is so great that I practically -- I get very emotional because it is so untrue. It is so untrue," she said.

An analysis of a recently uncovered tape recording of the shooting detected at least 13 shot sounds erupting over a period of less than six seconds. The audiotape was recorded at the Ambassador Hotel by free-lance newspaper reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski and is the only known soundtrack of the assassination.

Audio expert Philip Van Praag told CNN that his analysis establishes the Pruszynski recording as authentic and the 13 sounds electronically detected on the recording as gunshots.

"The gunshots are established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns, which clearly distinguishes gunshots from other phenomena," he said in an e-mail. "This would include phenomena that to human hearing are often perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or bursting balloons."

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I used to know Ira Goldtein, one of the five non-fatally wounded victims shot that night. Although he was only a teen at the time, he was recording "actualities" (to use the then-current term of art) for a local news radio station. He had left his tape recorder behind when he followed RFK and his entourage through the kitchen. After the shooting, Ira went to retrieve his equipment; it was missing.

He always presumed that a dishonest individual simply helped himself to a free tape recorder, although it is difficult to believe that someone had petty theft on his mind on that occasion. I asked if the recorder was close enough to the shooting site to pick up the sounds of the gunshots. He said it was possible.

Back to CNN's story on Rhodes-Hughes:

Rhodes-Hughes says that after she entered the kitchen pantry's west entrance, she could see Kennedy in left profile, "greeting" well-wishers a few feet ahead of her. She says a moment later she was looking at the back of the senator's head, as he continued onward, when suddenly the first two or three shots were fired.

"I saw his left profile. And then, very, very quickly, he was through greeting, and he turned and went into the original direction that he was being ushered to," Rhodes-Hughes told CNN. "At that point, I saw the back of his head and part of his shoulders and back."

"My eyes were totally on him, and all of a sudden I started hearing popping sounds, which I thought at first were flashbulbs from a camera," she said. It was Rhodes-Hughes' account of Kennedy's movements in the pantry that Sirhan's lawyer Pepper focused on in particular when CNN asked him to comment on Rhodes-Hughes' account of the shooting.

"This observation is vital," said Pepper. "Her clear recollection of being some short distance behind the Senator and seeing his left profile and then seeing him quickly turning so that the back of his head was in her sight at the time the shooting began -- this reveals that the Senator was almost directly facing Sirhan just before he took three shots, from behind, in his back, and behind his right ear at powder burn range, making it impossible for Sirhan to have been Robert Kennedy's shooter," the defense attorney said in an e-mail to CNN. "It clearly evidences the existence of a second gunman who fired from below and upward at the Senator."

Rhodes-Hughes says that while she was behind Senator Kennedy, looking at the back of his head and hearing the first two or three gunshots, Kennedy did not appear to be struck by bullets at that point.

Still believing the first shots were merely flashbulbs, she says she then took her eyes off the senator, while turning leftward, and caught her first glimpse of Sirhan standing in front of Kennedy and to the candidate's left.

She told CNN that the 5-foot-5-inch tall Sirhan was propped up on a steam table, several feet ahead of her and slightly to her own left. Rhodes-Hughes says part of her view of Sirhan was obstructed and she could not see the gun in his hand but she says that, as soon as she caught sight of Sirhan, she then heard more shots coming from somewhere past her right side and near Kennedy. She told CNN that at that point she was hearing "much more rapid fire" than she initially had heard.

Rhodes-Hughes told CNN she heard gunshots coming from some place not far from her right side even while Sirhan was being subdued several feet in front of her. "During all of that time, there are shots coming to my right," she said. "People are falling around me. I see a man sliding down a wall. Then I see Senator Kennedy lying on the floor on his back, bleeding. And I remember screaming, 'Oh no! Oh, my God, no!' And the next thing I know, I'm ducking but also in complete shock as to what's going on.

"And then I passed out," she said.

Debunkers, of course, will argue that an earlier statement is preferable to later ones. The upholders of the official view always make a big stink about the "earlier is better" principle -- except, of course, when a latter-day statement proves convenient to their viewpoint. There is no reason why thinking people of the 21st century should have unshakable confidence in the honesty of Hoover's FBI in 1968 -- certainly not in a case involving the Kennedy family.

Rhodes-Hughes is not telling this story for the first time, although this may be the fullest published account of her experiences. Her recollection of 12 or more shots appears in Philip Melanson's 1997 book Shadow Play and in Shane O'Sullivan's Who Killed Bobby? It has been said that, back in 1968, she told a radio or television interviewer that she heard 12 shots; if so, I do not know the exact details. Perhaps a reader can provide them...?

The O'Sullivan volume is reviewed here -- and the review provides an excellent intro to the case as a whole.

One last thing: If any of you kids consider this post an occasion to spew conspiratorial nonsense about 9/11, don't expect your inanity to appear here. The RFK case is something real. I'm continually infuriated by attempts to discredit genuine research into the assassinations of the 1960s by flavoring it with Bizarro-world bullshit. When adults are talking, children should be neither seen nor heard. Permalink

In a Salon interview, Michael Lind -- author of Land of Promise, an economic history of the United States -- offers an analysis worth quoting. I give you the question and the answer:

You’ve touched on an issue that I was going to ask you about – the extent to which history offers a route out of the current economic malaise. You talk about reforms, but where are the reforms going to come from today? Three years into the Obama presidency, not much has changed.

I think you have to get the timing right. The Civil War started in 1860-61, and the period of reform came to a conclusion in 1877 with the end of Reconstruction, so it came about over a 15-year period. It’s the same with the New Deal. Most of the New Deal reforms came in the late 1930s, and in some ways the Great Society reforms of the 1960s were simply the finishing touches to the New Deal, so there you had a 15- to 30-year reform period. A lot of people thought that when Barack Obama assumed the presidency he would be in the position of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. But, arguably, he was more like [President Herbert] Hoover. In other words, the real wave of reform will come after him. I may be mistaken about this, but I think that no matter who wins the next election – even if the Republicans recapture the White House and control both houses of Congress – their stated program simply will fail. Even an all-Republican government will have no alternative than to undertake some alternatives to this program of tax cuts for everybody. It helps them when they’re out of power, but once they’re in power it is not a governing program.

One of the arguments of my book is that during these periods of reform, the reform tends to be bipartisan. So, for example, if you look after the Civil War when the Democrats captured both the White House and Congress at the time of President Cleveland, they did not reverse all the reforms of the Civil War; they ratified them. The same is true with the New Deal. Under Eisenhower and Nixon, who were the Republicans in the 40-year New Deal era, they did not attempt to overturn the New Deal. So it’s not a matter of left or right particularly, but of political paradigms which become dominant in a particular era. I may be mistaken, but I think that we are toward the end of this period of neo-liberalism, which began arguably with Jimmy Carter rather than Ronald Reagan, and has included Democrats like Bill Clinton and Obama in his first term as well as Republicans.

This is spot on. Krugman has said much the same about that 40 year period.

However, I'm in a cynical mood today, and I suspect that Lind has fallen into an error that many historians make: He thinks in terms of cycles, and he does not consider the possibility that modern technology may be used to impede the wheel's ability to revolve. I'm referring to the technology of propaganda, which has demonstrated such an astounding ability to compel men and women to act against their best interests. History cannot be recaptured if it is rewritten, and the revisionists have succeeded in convincing many young people that those 40 marvelous years were hell on Earth.

Moreover, at no other point in our past -- not even during the Civil War -- were so many powerful people intent on ending the American experiment. Even Jefferson Davis wanted to maintain the U.S. as a trading partner. Although he favored southern agrarianism, he did not want the north's manufacturing prowess to decline. I think both Davis and Lincoln would have agreed that our current course -- outsourcing, de-industrialization, destruction of our infrastructure -- is a form of self-destructive insanity.

We are now in the grip of a libertarian ideology which defines democracy as socialism. The ideologists ultimately intend to do away with democracy altogether, and to see this country carved up into constituent entities whose assets can be sold at rock-bottom prices to a handful of oligarchs.

Perhaps we should think in terms of cycles, but larger ones. Large enough to encompass the rise and fall and civilizations. Permalink

Windows 8 may indeed be a disaster, but so what? There's always W7. More importantly, Microsoft has decided to back away from supporting CISPA.

In response to queries from CNET, Microsoft, which has long been viewed as a supporter of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, said this evening that any law must allow "us to honor the privacy and security promises we make to our customers."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been active in an anti-CISPA coalition, welcomed Microsoft's new statement.

"We're excited to hear that Microsoft has acknowledged the serious privacy faults in CISPA," said Dan Auerbach, EFF staff technologist. "We hope that other companies will realize this is bad for users and also bad for companies who may be coerced into sharing information with the government."

This is undeniably good news. If privacy becomes hip, corporate America will have to fall in line.

Nobody really knows Apple's view on CISPA. Personally, I do not trust Apple. It's not a privacy-friendly company. The iPhone tracks you wherever you go, and you can't even take out the battery. The iPad (I've been granted the opportunity to play with one lately) is a great toy but not a computer to use if you're working on sensitive documents, since you can't plug a USB device into the damned thing. Sure, you can email the data to yourself; that's one way to get it onto your iPad. But doing so places the data on another server -- which mean that the NSA will scoop it right up.

If CISPA passes.

But (congressfolk and the NSA tell us) we have to do pass that legislation. We have to pass CISPA to...uh...uh...to protect the children.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The children. Why doesn't someone think of the children?

Also, terrorists. Something something terrorism yada yada Al Qaeda yada yada. And China. Something something China spying on all of our precious secrets must stop China yada yada.

So in conclusion, we really have no choice: CISPA! Permalink

These images have been around for a while, but for some reason, they are weighing on my thoughts today. Are they for real? Or should I say: Our they for real?

Has anyone done any research into the possibility that these signs are clever hoaxes perpetrated by liberals?

Now that would be a droll stunt. Normally, I do not favor deception operations (except on the first day of April). But if the results are really funny...



Regarding the yellow sign: What's with the hyphen connecting ARE and COUNTRY?

I have to give the sign-makers credit. They did not put needless quotation marks around any words. Alas, the cropping of the lower photo does not allow us to determine if AMERICANS is spelled AMERICAN'S.

The bagger message can be summed up in a sentence: "God" bles's are-country!

Permalink

It's a Facebook thing, so I learned about it at second hand. But apparently, there is a movement to have Jon Stewart moderate one of the presidential debates.

A somewhat cool idea. You know what would be a totally cool idea?

Having Jon Stewart ask all the questions. Permalink

The GOP has a great idea. They want to chop food stamps to preserve military spending.

We have to abandon the "both parties are the same" narrative. Yes, the Dems have drifted from their principles -- but only to the degree that the entire country has drifted from sanity.

Ronald Reagan couldn't get the GOP nomination today: Too much of a lefty. Richard Nixon couldn't get the Democratic nomination today: Too much of a lefty.

In a zeitgeist like ours, of course you are going to get a lot of Dems who don't act like Dems. You can't blame a person for veering right if he's trapped on a boat going starboard; the best he can do is stay on the port side of the ship.

Under these circumstances, I'm surprised at the number of Dems who continue to stand by principle. Take CISPA for example: Yes, it was co-sponsored by a Democrat -- by a guy who is, literally, the NSA's congressman. (Also my congressman. But the boys and girls at Fort Meade have his attention in a way I never will.) It is also true that a couple of dozen House Democrats voted for this terrible assault on the Fourth Amendment.

But...

Fact 1: The vast majority of House Dems voted against CISPA.

Fact 2: The vast majority of Republicans voted in favor.

Fact 1 and fact 2 tell us that the two parties are still very different animals. Anyone who says otherwise is either a blinkered ideologue or a Rovian ratfucker.

Fact 2 also tells us that when teabagger Republicans talk the libertarian talk, they care about just one aspect of the ideology: The part where Wall Street gets to control everything. Baggers don't give a damn about anything else -- privacy, anti-imperialism, separation of church and state -- that traditional libertarians claim to favor.

If you scan the comments on right-wing blogs, you'll probably encounter quite a few Republicans disavowing Dubya and his stupid wars. Those disavowals come from the perspective of libertarian isolationism -- an honorable stance, if held sincerely. But it's all a pose. It's phony. Everyone knows that if Romney gets into power, he'll seek any excuse to launch an attack on Iran. When he does, those very same Republican rank-and-filers will retreat to their 2003 position: They will wave the flag and they'll accuse anti-war liberals of not supporting our troops.

If you haven't read it yet, run your eyes across this important piece by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. A lot of people are talking about it.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.

I would like to argue in favor of the spirit of compromise, but that time is past. The Republicans never compromise on anything; they simply demand compromise of others. And even when that compromise occurs, GOP propagandists will continue to pretend that liberals are extremists. They will continue to say that all moderates are really liberals, and all liberals are really socialists, and all socialists are really commies.

The either/or, off/on, "shirts versus skins" mentality is hard-wired into their skulls. Perhaps into all of our skulls, by this point.

The Republicans insist on war. There is nothing for it but to engage them on that level.

I just wish we had a Democratic warrior as president. Permalink

Here's where you should go.

And here. 

Contact your senators now. And then send a message to Obama.

Not too long ago, everyone agreed that the laws which limit the government's ability to eavesdrop on your cyber-communications should be more or less than same as the old laws about wiretapping landline telephones. The cops can't wiretap unless they first get a warrant.

Most people seem to have forgotten all about the need to get a warrant. I haven't.

CIPSA allows the government to scoop up your private communications. No warrant needed. All that is necessary is for some anonymous person, somewhere in the bowels of the intel community, to decide on his own that your words concern cybersecurity (which can mean anything -- even watching a DRM-protected movie clip on YouTube), "national security" (which can also mean anything), pedophilia ("Think of the children! Why doesn't someone think of the children!"), and "threats of bodily harm."

This decision to spy on you need not be explained to a court. You will never know who made that decision, or why. The people spying on you will remain nameless, faceless and unaccountable.

Look, I don't care if someone out there is discussing a plot to kill me. The government has no right to eavesdrop on that conversation unless there's a warrant involved.

CISPA comes down to this: Uncle no longer wants to have to get a warrant. Uncle wants you to give up your right to demand a warrant.

It's not as though warrants are hard for cops and the FBI to get. They are handed out routinely. They can even be sought after the fact.

But the "get a warrant" process does insure that, at some point, the eavesdropper is going to have to tell a court why there was good reason to spy on you. Someone has to come forward and say: "I am accountable."

The government no longer wants to be accountable.

If you stand for that crap, you're a sheep.

By the way: Here's Techdirt's response to those who say that the amendments actually made CISPA "all better":

Basically, the amendment closes a loophole but opens a door. It takes away some of the language that allows overreach of the bill, but then explicitly endorses the exact things people were worried the government would do with that language—as in, start using the data to investigate and build cases against American citizens without regard for the laws that would normally protect their privacy.

Let me break it down for you further. Previously, the supporters of this bill claimed that it was simply a measure to plug a few holes in the security of our cyber-networks. Opponents countered that this is actually a bill allowing spies to eavesdrop on your words to build a criminal case against you -- just in case you should say something that pisses off Big Brother. The CIPSA amendments constitute an admission: Yeah, this is about building criminal cases.

Of course, it's not as though everyone trusted what supporters were saying about the bill's purpose before. We all knew it would be used for these other things. But simply getting them to admit that is not really progress.

Permalink

A day ahead of schedule, the House approved CISPA.

The vote was 248 to 168, as 42 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in backing the bill. The “no” votes were cast by 140 Democrats and 28 Republicans

Despite these numbers, my readers will no doubt insist on trying to convince me that both parties are equally culpable. Take that bullshit to some other blog.

Some observers argue that the amended version is, as this author puts it, only "slightly less creepy." In fact, the rewritten bill is much worse than before.

Previously, CISPA allowed the government to use information for "cybersecurity" or "national security" purposes. Those purposes have not been limited or removed. Instead, three more valid uses have been added: investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crime, protection of individuals, and protection of children. Cybersecurity crime is defined as any crime involving network disruption or hacking, plus any violation of the CFAA.

Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cybersecurity bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a "cybersecurity crime". Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all. Moreover, the government could do whatever it wants with the data as long as it can claim that someone was in danger of bodily harm, or that children were somehow threatened—again, notwithstanding absolutely any other law that would normally limit the government's power.

"Protection of individuals"? That wording is far too broad. BDSM fantasists can be targeted under CISPA. We're in Minority Report territory here -- prosecuting people for crimes that have not been committed yet.

We are best protected by a justice system that respects our privacy. We don't want our every online communication scrutinized by unseen spies. We want a system that disallows searches by anyone other than a cop armed with a warrant. As Orson Welles once wrote: Police work is easy only in a police state.

Here's the EFF's take:

Minimization Retention and Notification Amendment This amendment has a somewhat misleading title because it does little to actually “minimize” the retention of sensitive user data. In short, the amendment states that if a department or agency receives information that actually isn’t related to cyber security threats, they shall “notify” the entity that gave them the information. This amendment also says that data won’t be kept for purposes other than what has been outlined in the bill—but doesn’t actually narrow the expansive reasons that data can be kept.

The bill also states that the government “may” choose to “undertake reasonable efforts to limit the impact on privacy and civil liberties.” There’s no mandate to do so and no explanation of what constitutes “reasonable efforts.”

Definitions Amendment—We’ve been highly critical of the overbroad ways in which “cyber security” is defined in the bill. We’re concerned that typical privacy-protective measures like using Tor or pseudonyms might be deemed “cyber threat information” under the vague definitions of CISPA. The good news is that this amendment excludes intelligence pertaining to efforts to gain unauthorized access that “solely involve violations of consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements and do not otherwise constitute unauthorized access.” This is a step in the right direction because at least signing up for Facebook with a pseudonym is unlikely to get you reported to the FBI for attempting to gain “unauthorized access.”

Unfortunately, this amendment doesn’t address the serious problems with the vague definitions. Even after amendments, “Cybersecurity system" defines the system that “cybersecurity providers” or self-protected entities use to monitor and defend against cyber threats. This is a “system” intended to safeguard “a system or network.” The definition could mean anything—a Local Area Network, a Wide Area Network, a microchip, a website, online service, or a DVD. It might easily be stretched to be a catch-all term with no meaning. For example, it is unclear whether DRM on a DVD constitutes a “cybersecurity system.” And such a “cybersecurity system” is defined to protect a system or network from “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy”—language that is similarly too broad. Degrading a network could be construed to mean using a privacy-enhancing technology like Tor, or a p2p protocol, or simply downloading too many files.

If I understand the EFF correctly, making use of a Virtual Private Network could be considered an assault on a cybersecurity system. VPNs are much like Tor or a proxy server -- they allow you to route all your traffic through an unrelated server. A lot of people use VPNs to watch the BBC outside of the U.K., or to watch Hulu outside of the United States.  The new law is so broad that you may be consider a "cybersecurity threat" if you simply try to hide your identity.

Under this law, the military will have the power to collect all sorts of data on innocent Americans. If you still don't understand the scope of the danger, let me turn on all the lights for you: Although the CIA is prohibited by statute from operating domestically, that statute does not cover the Defense Department's new DCS. I can't think of any other reason why the DCS was brought into existence without any notable public debate.

We didn't need yet another intelligence service in order to fight terrorists. The new spooks will be spooking you. And CISPA gives the intelligence community all the tools necessary to track your every movement. your every association -- your every thought.

What made CISPA so controversial is a section saying that, “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” companies may share information with Homeland Security, the IRS, the NSA, or other agencies. By including the word “notwithstanding,” CISPA’s drafters intended to make their legislation trump all existing federal and state laws, including ones dealing with wiretaps, educational records, medical privacy, and more.

Now the battle for privacy goes to the Senate. Here's how to petition your senators.

We must also put pressure on the White House. And I'm talking about an unprecedented amount of pressure.

I don't want to hear any defeatist caterwauling. True, I'm a cynic by nature, and nobody ever called me an Obama fan. But the fact remains -- he may soon be the only protection we have against the passage of this bill.

At this writing, the White House threat to veto CISPA remains operational. So...there's that. We have to make sure that Obama understands that if he fucks us this time, Dems will finally rebel.

This is it. We must draw a line, and we must inform the President in no uncertain terms that he dare not cross it. Tell Obama: If you don't veto, we don't vote. Permalink

Paul Ryan, author of the Republican budget and frequent promoter of Atlas Shrugged, now says he disavows Ayn Rand. Don't get your hopes up: What he means is that he disavows Rand's atheism. I'm sure he'll also disavow her anti-imperialism if the GOP pushes him in that direction.

The important point about libertarianism is that it's all about giving absolute power to the finance capitalists. Anyone who talks about the other stuff -- "Smoke dope legally, dude!" -- is simply trying to seduce you into supporting Total Wall Street Control.

Ayn's atheism has a certain appeal to smirky young religion burn-outs -- twenty-something pseudointellectuals who are damned certain that Jesus never existed even though they've never read any scholarly works on the subject. But most libertarians will downplay (or, in Ryan's case, disavow) the godless part of the Randroid philosophy in order to appeal to this country's many fundamentalists.

I wonder what Ayn would have said if she knew that Republicans would one day force her into a shotgun wedding with Jesus? Permalink

Will Obama cave -- again? Less than a day after Obama issued an official veto threat on CISPA, there are ominous signs of deal-making. This bill is a shit popsickle, and it won't be any more palatable if it has 20% less shit in it, or if the shit receives a Dove bar coating.

Near as I can tell, the proposed amendments don't address the serious problems posed by this legislation. Go here and here if you want to know why CISPA is, and always will be, unacceptable.

(Just to complicate matters, there are two other cyber-bills in the offing. One is sponsored by John McCain and the other by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. We'll have to talk about those bills later.)

Meanwhile, Republicans are defending CISPA on the absurd grounds that it is needed to combat -- get this! -- intellectual theft and counterfeiting from China.

No, really. These clowns want you to believe that that's the reason why we need to pass a law which would make Google and Facebook partners with the NSA.

Google knows everything about you -- and soon they'll be giving that data to the NSA routinely, without a warrant. CISPA means goodbye to warrants. Goodbye to privacy.

What's up, CDT? The Center for Democracy and Technology was a key part of the anti-CISPA effort. Suddenly, just as the anti-CISPA online drive had gathered roughly three-quarters of a million signatures, the CDT changed its tune.

CDT appears to have inked a deal with the House Intelligence committee not to criticize CISPA -- in exchange for a commitment from Rogers to offer amendments that, while improving the bill, would not go nearly as far as the ACLU and other coalition members wanted.

Hours later, the CDT did yet another about-face. Now they oppose CISPA again.

This episode will likely solidify CDT's reputation in Washington as an unusual breed of advocacy group: one that is viewed as a civil liberties organization, even though nearly half of its revenue...comes from companies in the technology, telecommunications, and data broker industries.

CDT frequently adopts positions that tend to benefit its funders.

As we shall see, this law is all about money. Datamining is the new gold rush.

Meet Dutch. The Bill's co-sponsor is House intel chair Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat who represents Baltimore County. He is -- egads! -- my congressman.

Allow me to digress.

The intelligence community usually never lets anyone head the oversight committee unless....hm. How did LBJ so quaintly put it? "Ah don't trust a man unless ah got his pecker in my pocket." Yes. I think it was something like that.

I don't know whose pocket contains Representative Ruppersberger's pecker, but I do know that good old Dutch was one of the few guys allowed to see the photos of Bin Laden's dead body. That photo was snapped just before the military dumped said body in the ocean, in accordance with the Conspiracy Theorist Full Employment Act of 2004.

Allow me to digress a bit more. I promise to bring this back to CISPA.

As you know if you read this blog (though you may not know these things if you get your news from the teevee), the Defense Department recently created its own version of the CIA operations division, called the DCS -- Department of Clandestine Services. Nobody has seen fit to explain to the American people why yet another American spook shop is needed. The Powers That Be simply declared: "IT SHALL COME TO PASS AND THOU SHALT PAY FOR IT."

Here's what good old Dutch had to say about DCS...

"It's not as involved with what we do at Fort Meade," said Ruppersberger, who has been briefed on the service.

"We"? Oui.

When Dutch says "Fort Meade," he refers, by metonymy, to the NSA, which is in his district. So when Dutch speaks of the NSA's activities as "what we do" instead of "what they do," he may be acknowledging a fact of geography. Or perhaps -- just perhaps -- he considers the NSA to be his true employer.

In other words, Fort Meade is the place providing the pocket in which the pecker is put, as LBJ (in an alliterative mood) might have put it.

Yes, I know. That's a terribly paranoid thing to say. But these are paranoid times. And CISPA is a paranoia-inducing bill.

It is very telling that the NSA's congressman is the guy who is trying to force CISPA upon us. We should, however, be quick to note that most of the support for this bill is coming from Republicans and most of the opponents are Democrats -- so please spare me the Standard Issue "Both Parties Are The Same" speech.

Let us also quickly note that Ron Paul is a strong opponent of CISPA. I can't stand Paul, but on this issue, he fights alongside the angels.

The role of money. As noted earlier, there's big money behind the effort to foist CISPA upon us. Aside from Facebook (duh), the two biggest companies behind CISPA are both NSA contractors: Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC.

Other current NSA data-mining contractors are lobbying to pass CISPA. Northrop Grumman has at least 10 registered lobbyists promoting the bill. Lockheed Martin has a comparable number of lobbyists doing the same.

Bottom line. Here's what the ACLU has to say about CISPA:

In the name of cybersecurity, the legislation threatens to blow a hole through every privacy law on the books and allow companies to share customers' private information with the US military. It's not pretty.

Think for a minute about all the things in your life that are kept on computers, but you would like to keep private. How about your medical records? Your banking and financial records? What about your education or library records? How about the things you bought on Amazon last year? Or those love letters you emailed? Or the political opinions you share with close friends? Do you think the bureaucrats and spies at the National Security Agency have any right to gather that information on you, when you've done absolutely nothing wrong? What if we tell you that once the NSA has the information, it can keep it forever, share it with whomever it deems necessary, and that no court will be able to look over the NSA's shoulder and keep it in check?

Here's how CISPA's scheme might work: imagine you are emailing your doctor from your Gmail account about a medical condition. Your doctor pulls up your medical records from his cloud storage server and sends them your way. Somewhere in that communication, a virus crops up. Under CISPA, Google could send your emails, including the electronic copy of your medical records, to the NSA, so they can gather information on the virus. But, Google would be under no obligation whatsoever to scrub out your private details — which have nothing to do with the virus. And now your medical records are in government hands indefinitely — and the government can use them for all sorts of unrelated purposes like the undefined "national security."

Here is Tim Berners-Lee, who helped to create the internet as we know it, on the efforts of governments to control the internet:

Berners-Lee said: "The idea that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused."

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken defender of the "open internet", warning in 2010 that web freedom was under threat from the rise of social network "silos" such as Facebook, "closed world" apps such as those released by Apple, and governments' attempts to monitor people's online behaviour.

Fortunately, there is a growing movement to stop Facebook (which backs CISPA) from becoming the de facto "new internet." Umenow is a new social networking platform that respects privacy.

It's run by a woman named  Evelyn Castillo-Bach, known to many as Privacy Mom -- and she has made a strong statement against CISPA:

"It's important for leaders and experts in technology and communication to stand up and be counted in recognizing that CISPA represents a false solution to a real problem. We should be highly concerned by reports that some companies are meeting behind closed doors with politicians to hammer through some version of CISPA and other laws like it that circumvent our privacy rights as Americans," stated Evelyn Castillo-Bach, CEO and founder of UmeNow, the super-private network that has banned all tracking, including tagging and face recognition technology -- and has also banned all third party apps and games because they are often used to extract private information without consent.

And here's what she says on the Umenow site: 

If this bill passes, our lives as we know it will change irrevocably. We will enter a new era: The 'cyber police state' will be led by giant tech and communication companies, legalized or deputized to conduct surveillance and interception of our communication, reporting back to the government. We won't have the right to be notified, or the right to sue if wrongfully targeted.

CISPA legalizes a cyber coup against Americans and our constitution. CISPA empowers companies to do what government cannot -- kill the 4th Amendment.

The 4th Amendment, from which most of our privacy rights are derived, does not apply to companies, only to state and federal government. In CISPA, government lawyers who crafted the bill lure companies into becoming spies and cyber informants by promising to shield them from legal liability and law suits -- while simultaneously telling the public that the law is needed to protect the general population and tech companies from cyber attacks launched by global bad actors.

Listen to your Privacy Mom, boys and girls! Permalink

I cannot believe this. Obama has actually given us a reason to vote for him (and not just vote against Romney).

This is HUGE: President Obama just threatened to veto CISPA if it makes its way through Congress.

The White House says that any cybersecurity legislation must preserve "Americans' privacy, data confidentiality, and civil liberties and [recognize] the civilian nature of cyberspace." It says that, "The bill also lacks sufficient limitations on the sharing of personally identifiable information between private entities and does not contain adequate oversight or accountability measures necessary to ensure that the data is used only for appropriate purposes."

Is this a cold political calculation on Obama's part? Maybe, but I don't care. His veto threat is admirable, and we should applaud. Of course, Obama has done more caving than Tom Sawyer and Floyd Collins put together. That's why I would admonish you to send a message to the President telling him not to back down.

And please don't misunderstand: I'm not forgetting about any of this. Permalink

The Obama forces did a lot of blog trolling in the 2008 elections. They will no doubt continue the practice in 2012, although you won't see their handiwork unless your blog-reading habits skew right. Romney divides conservatives (Freepers hate him), so the O Team would be well-advised to concentrate on deepening those divisions. The pro-Obama forces probably won't spend much time and money manipulating Blogistan Left during this election cycle. Why should they?

We also know that Republican trolls will be out in force heavily this season, romping through prog-land. This remarkable Skydancing post outlines the evidence. The ad discussed here by Bob Cesca clinches the case. I've seen similar ads on freelancer sites.

What intrigues me are two specific documents that have been floating around since last August. Both documents are attributed to Karl Rove. Both outline plans for blog trolling.

The first document is called "Tactics for Effective Conservative Blogging." You can find it here and here and here. Here's a sample:

Engage. Demand an elaborate, time-consuming comparison / analysis between your position and theirs.

Entangle. Insist that the Liberal put their posts in their own words. That will consume the most time and effort for the Liberal poster

They will be unable to spread numerous points on numerous blogs if you have them occupied. Allowing a Liberal to post a web link is too quick and efficient for them. Tie them up. We are going for delay of game here.

Demoralize. Dismiss their narrative as rubbish immediately.

Do not even read it. Once the Liberal goes through the trouble to research, gather, collate, compose and write their narrative your job is to discredit it. Make it obvious you tossed their labor-intensive narrative aside like garbage. This will have the effect of demoralizing the Liberal poster.

It will make them unwilling to expend the effort again, and for us, that is a net win

And so on. This text certainly does a good job of describing right-wing tactics. Nevertheless, I'm not persuaded that Karl Rove is the real author. The wording is too obvious, too on-the-nose, and the villainy is too self-aware. Forgers tend to forget that, in real life, the people they consider the Bad Guys think of themselves as the Good Guys. Political opponents don't twirl their mustaches while cackling at their own evilness.

Does anyone have a provenance for the text called "Tactics for Effective Conservative Blogging"? Is there any evidence of Karl Rove's authorship?

This document reminds me of certain infamous fakelore texts which have received widespread distribution within the conspiracy buff subculture. I refer, of course, to such notorious works as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, "Silent Weapons," or L. Ron Hubbard's Brain-Washing hoax.

I have a longstanding interest in these forgeries. They always take the form of "liberated" documents written by a perceived Bad Guy (or a Bad Guy Group) scheming against fair play, decency, and all that is holy.

Political fakelore is, for the most part, a right-wing phenomenon. Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery details the 19th century history of this disreputable literary genre. (Sorry to keep mentioning that book, but it really is quite good.)

The best-known left-wing example of fakelore is The Report From Iron Mountain. The Report is an oddity, in that it began as a liberal prank and found a new home among the paranoid rightists. Some on the right still consider it real.

Arguably, the "King Alfred Plan," which outlines an alleged government plot to murder American blacks, is another piece of left-wing fakelore. This pseudo-document first appeared in a novel called The Man Who Cried I Am, written in the 1960s by John Williams. The book is clearly labeled fiction. The Plan is the book's maguffin -- in other words, "King Alfred" is the Horrible Secret that the protagonist hopes to expose and the bad guys want to cover up. The novel, although quite good, had largely faded from memory by the early 1970s, when an unknown party retyped the Plan to look (sort of) like an actual CIA document. In that form, the Plan was distributed throughout the black community, and many people accepted it as real. There is good reason to believe that a member of the John Birch Society engineered this deception.

I can't think of many other well-known examples of incendiary political fakelore by left-wingers. (If you scour the JFK assassination literature, you'll find a few clumsy contributions to the genre, but these texts are familiar only to specialists.) Since far-rightists disseminated both Iron Mountain and "King Alfred," one cannot fairly call them left-wing forgeries, even though liberals wrote both works.

Our second putative Rove text is a memo titled "Internet Operations --  For Immediate and Aggressive Implementation." It can be found here and here. This one  is even less convincing.

Here's a sample:

1. Main mission:  Infiltrate all liberal web sites, posing as disaffected liberals with liberal-sounding user names, icons and signatures.  (Reference Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, FDR, Smedley Butler, Bill Clinton, etc.)

2. Express.  Disappointment.  With.  Obama.  (Whining pays double!)  (jk!)

3. Push primary challenge.  Push third party.  Push Green.  Push Socialist.  Push write-in voting.  Push non-voting to "send a message."

"Internet Operations" was allegedly made public by the hacker collective known as Anonymous. I've seen no independent evidence that anyone linked to Anonymous ever had anything to do with disgorging these words. If hackers had gained access to Rove's emails, we would have seen an entire Rove trove -- including correspondence with people unfamiliar to the general public. Much of the material would be puzzling and obscure to outsiders.

I feel reasonably certain that Rove did not write this text. "Internet Operations" is, in all likelihood, a concoction designed to discredit any progressive who expresses public disappointment in Barack Obama.

Did this forgery originate in Axelrod's shop? Possible, but I doubt it.

Both documents -- "Tactics" and "Internet Operations" -- made their first appearances in August of 2011. Both were the initial postings of unknown newcomers to venerable progressive communities -- The Young Turks and Daily Kos. Although both texts are attributed to Karl Rove, the writing styles differ -- from each other, and from published Rove writings.

"Internet Operations" is written in a style we may call "internet-ese." Take a second look at this bit:

Express.  Disappointment.  With.  Obama.  (Whining pays double!)  (jk!)

Most people of Rove's generation don't write that way. You would expect to see that kind of puerility from a Twilight aficionado discussing the latest fanfic.

The only progressive known to me who enjoys playing these sorts of games is Neal Rauhauser, who also goes by the names John Dean and SluggoJohn. He's a well-known (if not always well-liked) net presence whom I described in an earlier post. However, I see no evidence connecting him to these two documents. Permalink