Month: August 2013

Pressure Cookers and XKeyscore

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XKeyscore map

Yesterday we had a semi-false alarm from a woman that merely Googling “pressure cooker” could get you a visit from jackbooted thugs. I say “semi-false” because the tip-off didn’t from from the NSA searching through the Google search records of private Americans. It came because Michele Catalano’s husband or son (unclear which) was using a work computer to Google “pressure cooker bomb” and this was discovered by the employer and they sent a tip to the police. So, having the cops show up because of an Internet search is slightly Orwellian, but the fact that it was just the company monitoring their own hardware is a lot different than some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet.

Only, at more or less the same time, we had the Guardian publish more docs (originally from Snowden) documenting how there is, in fact, some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet. It’s called XKeyscore.

The devil is always in the details with these things, but there are some alarming details. First, no court order is required for a search. Second, the database that is searched is near real-time.

As a general rule, I think that you basically have to choose one of two mindsets about these things:

  1. It’s not a problem until someone actual abuses the system.
  2. It’s a problem as long as someone could abuse the system.

I tend to fall into the second camp, and so these revelations are disconcerting (to put it mildly). I think that, in principle, the idea of keeping huge amounts of data on American citizens (or non-citizens) could be defended if there were some really, really robust transparency measures and checks and balances. But the really big problem is that these are all secrete programs we weren’t supposed to know about. And if we can’t know about them, then I have a hard time trusting that they won’t inevitably be abused.

What Are “Obamaphones”?

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2013-08-02 Obamaphone

I’ve heard lots about so-called “Obamaphones”, but this is the first article that really explained what’s going on.

The Federal Communications Commission oversees the so-called Lifeline program, created in 1984 to make sure impoverished Americans had telephone service available to call their moms, bosses, and 911. In 2008, the FCC expanded the program to offer subsidized cell-phone service…

The rest of the article is really easy to predict once you know just one simple fact: the companies are paid by the government for every cell phone plan they create. If you’ve got a company that’s supposed to only hand out one free cell phone per household, but they’re getting paid by the cell phone, what do you think will happen? Jillian Kay Melchoir (who wrote this piece) decided to find out. Although she doesn’t qualify for any phones and although she never lied on any of the applications, she ended up with a handful of free phones anyway. She got progressively sillier in her attempts to get new phones, culminating in a scene like this one: 

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Reza Aslan and Fox News: It’s Never That Simple

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2013-07-31 Aslan

I love watching partisan news stories play out. It’s fascinating to see the way everyone weaves as fast as they can so that each new fact can be nestled snugly into a pre-existing worldview before the next one. That’s one of the changes of the Internet-based news era, I guess. We all make our own spin now.

I’ll be honest, though, when the painful-to-watch Fox News interview of Reza Aslan hit my social networking feed, I thought this was a pretty cut-and-dry case of total cluelessness on Fox’s behalf. Here, you can spin up the video while you read the rest of the post if you like.

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