Constantly being on edge or "high alert" causes several psychological problems. We're moving into an age that could end the concept of privacy, entirely. Can we adapt? Do we want to?
Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice →
This has become common over the past several years, since it hasn't been challenged. Basically, it gives up our rights to sue companies in any meaningful way. They get to decide what's "fair" when they mess up.
On Page 5 of a credit card contract used by American Express, beneath an explainer on interest rates and late fees, past the details about annual membership, is a clause that most customers probably miss. If cardholders have a problem with their account, American Express explains, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.”
Those nine words are at the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.
Transparency in the Intelligence Community →
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Clapper announced a plan to implement a new set of transparency principles for the Intelligence Community. This is the latest in a series of Intelligence Community initiatives to disclose more information about how the agencies do business.
While the release of this “implementation plan” may seem at first blush to be a minor bureaucratic event, it is a welcome development for several reasons. It shows that the agencies are beginning to break a habit of reflexive secrecy. The difficulty of shedding institutional habits developed over the course of decades—if not centuries—should not be underestimated, and the plan released on Tuesday shows that the government is serious about taking on this challenge.
But what about more detailed rules and procedures? When do they reveal sources and methods? How much can the government tell the American public (and therefore everyone else in the world) about what type of information our agencies can and cannot collect and the sources from which they can and cannot collect it before legitimate targets can use that information to avoid surveillance altogether? These are not easy questions. The Intelligence Community undoubtedly hopes that its new transparency principles and implementation plan will help it strike the right balance.
There's a lot of work to do (and especially in a future where privacy is less possible)
The Rise of Political Doxing →
Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what's become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.
It's called doxing -- sometimes doxxing -- from the word "documents." It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people, primarily women, on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying "I know a lot about you -- like where you live and work." Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It's very effective, by which I mean that it's horrible.
Brennan's doxing was slightly different. Here, the attacker had a more political motive. He wasn't out to intimidate Brennan; he simply wanted to embarrass him. His personal papers were dumped indiscriminately, fodder for an eager press. This doxing was a political act, and we're seeing this kind of thing more and more.
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Of course they won't all be doxed, but some of them will. Some of them will be doxed directly, like Brennan. Some of them will be inadvertent victims of a doxing attack aimed at a company where their information is stored, like those celebrities with iPhone accounts and every customer of Ashley Madison. Regardless of the method, lots of people will have to face the publication of personal correspondence, documents, and information they would rather be private.
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There's no good solution for this right now. We all have the right to privacy, and we should be free from doxing...
Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct →
In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.
The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records.
"It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country," said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them."
Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.
In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.
The officers involved in such wrongdoing represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands whose jobs are to serve and protect. But their actions have an outsized impact — miring departments in litigation that leads to costly settlements, crippling relationships with an already wary public and scarring victims with a special brand of fear.
Texas Orders Health Clinics to Turn Over Patient Data →
Highly invasive. Seems like an illegal "fishing expedition."
Three days after Gov. Greg Abbott announced his decision to end Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, state health department investigators showed up on Thursday at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Brownsville with orders to turn over thousands of pages of documents, including patients’ records and employees’ home addresses and telephone numbers.
Some, but not all, of the extensive records sought by the state related specifically toabortion.
The Doxing Trend →
If the director of the CIA can't keep his e-mail secure, what hope do the rest of us have -- for our e-mail or any of our digital information?
None, and that's why the companies that we entrust with our digital lives need to be required to secure it for us, and held accountable when they fail. It's not just a personal or business issue; it's a matter of public safety.
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Brennan was lucky. He didn't have anything classified on his AOL account. There were no personal scandals exposed in his email. Yes, his 47-page top-secret clearance form was sensitive, but not embarrassing. Honan was less lucky, and lost irreplaceable photographs of his daughter.
Neither of them should have been put through this. None of us should have to worry about this.
The problem is a system that makes this possible, and companies that don't care because they don't suffer the losses. It's a classic market failure, and government intervention is how we have to fix the problem.
It's only when the costs of insecurity exceed the costs of doing it right that companies will invest properly in our security. Companies need to be responsible for the personal information they store about us. They need to secure it better, and they need to suffer penalties if they improperly release it. This means regulatory security standards.
The government should not mandate how a company secures our data; that will move the responsibility to the government and stifle innovation. Instead, government should establish minimum standards for results, and let the market figure out how to do it most effectively. It should allow individuals whose information has been exposed sue for damages. This is a model that has worked in all other aspects of public safety, and it needs to be applied here as well.
We have a role to play in this, too. One of the reasons security measures are so easy to bypass is that we as consumers demand they be easy to use, and easy for us to bypass if we lose or forget our passwords. We need to recognize that good security will be less convenient. Again, regulations mandating this will make it more common, and eventually more acceptable.
Weather on Demand: Making It Rain Is Now a Global Business →
Cloud seeding has been controversial since it was invented by Vincent Schaefer in 1946. A chemist for General Electric, Schaefer made the first snowstorm in a laboratory freezer. The media predicted that cloud seeding could perform miracles, from dousing forest fires to ensuring white Christmases. But doubts quickly arose about the impact of meddling with nature. Concerns that cloud seeding might “steal” water from an area a cloud is traveling toward—robbing Peter to water Paul, as it were—have been dispelled. Storm clouds continually regenerate and release only a portion of their moisture when they rain, which means you can’t “wring out” all the moisture from one cloud. “If anything, the area downwind would get more precipitation from cloud seeding, not less,” says Dave Reynolds, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“There’s little dispute that if you can actually get the seeding material inside the clouds, it will enhance precipitation,” says Dan Breed, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “The question is, by how much?” Just as it’s hard to predict the weather, it’s hard to really know if you’ve made it rain or not. Breed’s own research—a nine-year, $14 million government-funded study he completed last year in collaboration with WMI and the University of Wyoming—found that seeding increased snowfall 5 percent to 15 percent from clouds in two Wyoming mountain ranges.