It’s Getting Better All The Time →

We'll never stop complaining (nor should we). Because we're not perfect, there's always more to work on. But it's important to recognize that we've improved.

Because of these two trends — richer information about abuses and changing standards for what constitutes an abuse — human rights reports released today may sound as dire as those from earlier decades, even in cases where the underlying practices have actually improved. So, when scholars convert those reports into numeric scales, countries that have made significant gains may appear to have stalled or even regressed.
...According to Fariss’s best estimates, once we account for these underlying changes in the information available and standards applied, we see that practices on many of the human rights tracked by existing data sets have improved significantly since the early 1980s. On some issues, such as political imprisonment, Fariss finds that there hasn’t been much change. On other core concerns, however, including torture and political killing, the adjusted data show substantial gains over the past 30 years. So, the trajectory varies across issues and countries, but in most cases the arc has continued to bend toward a better world.

Policy Repercussions of the Paris Terrorist Attacks →

The politics of surveillance are the politics of fear. As long as the people are afraid of terrorism -- regardless of how realistic their fears are -- they will demand that the government keep them safe. And if the government can convince them that it needs this or that power in order to keep the people safe, the people will willingly grant them those powers. That's Goldsmith's first point.
Today, in the wake of the horrific and devastating Paris terror attacks, we're at a pivotal moment. People are scared, and already Western governments are lining up to authorize more invasive surveillance powers. The US want to back-door encryption products in some vain hope that the bad guys are 1) naive enough to use those products for their own communications instead of more secure ones, and 2) too stupid to use the back doors against the rest of us. The UK is trying to rush the passage oflegislation that legalizes a whole bunch of surveillance activities that GCHQ has already been doing to its own citizens. France just gave its police a bunch of new powers. It doesn't matter that mass surveillance isn't an effective anti-terrorist tool: a scared populace wants to be reassured.
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Terrorism is singularly designed to push our fear buttons in ways completely out of proportion to the actual threat. And as long as people are scared of terrorism, they'll give their governments all sorts of new powers of surveillance, arrest, detention, and so on, regardless of whether those powers actual combat the actual threat. This means that those who want those powers need a steady stream of terrorist attacks to enact their agenda. It's not that these people are actively rooting for the terrorists, but they know a good opportunity when they see it.

We know that the PATRIOT Act was largely written before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that the political climate was right for its introduction and passage...

When People Flee to America’s Shores: We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. Yet we always fear who is coming next. →

...When 52 percent of Americans believe Syrian refugees will make the country less safe, it’s easy to demagogue against their entry. But this is self-deception, albeit a well-meaning one. If our history shows anything, it’s this: The United States is a nation that fears immigrants and refugees as much as it’s a nation of immigrants and refugees.

Bouie chronicles the numerous times that waves of immigrants seeking refuge from disease and war tried entering America, and were feared and threatened. Yet, they integrated. The U.S. looked different, but we eventually forgot we were ever worried.

The broad point—the reason to focus on the these patterns of hostility—is to emphasize the extent to which they are part of the American tradition. In calling for acceptance of Syrian refugees, President Obama, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and others are voicing one set of American values—the ones we want to hold ourselves to. But the same goes for Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Greg Abbott, and the other Republican governors and presidential candidates who want to reject them—those too are American values.
The question of the refugees isn’t if we’ll honor our values; it’s which ones we’ll choose. Will we embrace our heritage of inclusion or reject it for nativism? Will we be a country of actual open arms or one where our rhetoric is in recurring contrast to our actions?

The US and China now have a 'space hotline' to avoid satellite warfare →

Washington and Beijing are making efforts to avoid a crisis in space before it happens. The US and China have set up a direct link — or "hotline" — allowing both nations to easily share information about activities in space. Specifically, the so-called space hotline is designed to help the space and military agencies of both countries to discuss "potential collisions, approaches, or tests," according to the Financial Times.
Like the well-known "red telephone," set up between Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the idea is to keep a misunderstanding or other miscommunication from escalating to a dangerous situation in space and here on Earth.

Bernie Sanders's New Deal Socialism →

Great piece. Interesting history of the use and meaning of the term "socialism" here in the U.S. Shows how much things change over time.

Mill was hardly alone in expecting capitalism to work out its kinks. Eisenhower’s world lacked a name for its settlement between government and markets partly because that settlement was the new normal, and the normal doesn’t need a name. Mature capitalism was supposed to produce only a moderate level of inequality. A strong government, staffed by public-minded experts, would iron out economic wrinkles. The remaining problems for reformers were remedial: bringing in previously excluded populations, especially African-Americans and isolated Appalachians. For those already on the inside, the challenges were those of what the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “the affluent society”: how to want less, enjoy life more, and help build a post-materialist paradise of humanism. It is no coincidence that L.B.J., who supported the civil-rights movement and launched the War on Poverty, also promoted the National Endowment for the Humanities to enrich the lives of those whose historical labors were over. He described his Great Society program as seeking an economy that satisfied “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” where “the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”
That is the lost world to which Sanders’s “socialism” points back. The return of the label, though, doesn’t mean that anyone knows how to get more radical than tacking toward Scandinavian social democracy, with its socialized health care and higher education and generous family leave. Sanders isn’t much of a socialist compared to F.D.R., either. At the heart of Roosevelt’s program was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which greatly strengthened the hand of unions, essential parts of every welfare-capitalist order in the twentieth century, from Scandinavia to Canada. Sanders, astonishingly, didn’t once mention unions in his Georgetown speech. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of twenty-five thousand dollars (the equivalent of about four hundred thousand dollars today), which we won’t be hearing from Sanders. Sanders’s socialism is a national living wage, free higher education, increased taxes on the wealthy, campaign-finance reform, and strong environmental and racial-justice policies.
This is not a program for a different kind of economy, based on coöperation and deepened democracy— what socialism used to stand for, which powered it as both a threat and a hope. The heart of Sanders’s program, like F.D.R.’s, is economic security: like F.D.R., he argues that “true freedom does not occur” without it. In the same way, he sees a strong government as protecting individualism from an economy that bats people around like the gods in Greek dramas. Calling this once mainstream idea socialism is a way of saying how far it feels from where we find ourselves now, how radical a step it would be to get back to it.

Illinois court sets new rules for cops using Stingrays →

A recent court ruling just made it harder for police to track down your cell phone. An Illinois district court judge issued new requirements earlier this month to better protect innocent bystanders from Stingray devices deployed in their vicinity. The cell-site simulators, whose constitutionality remains murky, are used to gather suspected criminals' cell phone information and location, but often pick up innocent people’s data in the process.

Walmart’s Use of Sci-fi Tech To Spot Shoplifters Raises Privacy Questions →

But earlier this year, Walmart showed how times have changed. It tested a system that scanned the face of everyone entering several of its stores, identified suspected shoplifters, and instantly alerted store security on their mobile devices.
The potential of such facial recognition technology has been discussed for years. But now some stores are actually using it.
Walmart’s experiment, which it ended after several months, highlights the powerful high-tech tools available to retailers to reduce theft. However, it also raises questions about whether stores should have to follow rules when using the technology to protect shoppers’ privacy.

On CISA →

I have avoided writing about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), largely because the details kept changing...
...the bill encourages companies to share personal information with the government, allows them to take some offensive measures against attackers (or innocents, if they get it wrong), waives privacy protections, and gives companies immunity from prosecution.
Information sharing is essential to good cybersecurity, and we need more of it. But CISA is a really a bad law.