There are already lots of news articles about this story, but why not go to the source? This is Lavabit’s homepage with their entire statement:
Politics
Inequality that Matters
Megan McArdle has a piece for Bloomberg that really resonates with me. She starts out with something that I’ve always felt as well:
I care a lot about the absolute condition of the poor…but I don’t care whether Bill Gates is living in a house that cost 19 squintillion dollars. I care whether everyone else in the country has a warm, dry abode with indoor plumbing and all the other mod cons.
But she then goes on to talk about a kind of inequality that really does matter: marriage inequality. Not the kind that’s abut sexuality, but rather the kind that’s about class.
Does Japan Have an Aircraft Carrier Now?
Japan just launched a warship, the Izumo, that looks an awful lot like an aircraft carrier. But is it?
Planned Parenthood, Fraud, and Media Bias
Media bias is one of those tired old claims that those on the American left get tired of hearing. Frankly: I get tired of hearing about it, too.
Regrettably, however, we’ve got another egregious example.
Wannabe RoboCops Kill Bambi
The Wall Street Journal ran an article called The Rise of the Warrior Cop on July 22 about the militarization of ordinary police forces. The problem–and it is a problem–has to do with the proliferation of SWAT-style police units:
The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%. The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.
If you want an idea of how absurd this is consider that the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and the Department of the Interior each have their own SWAT-style unit. Why does NASA need a military-grade police unit?
Pressure Cookers and XKeyscore
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:
- It’s not a problem until someone actual abuses the system.
- 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”?
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:
Reza Aslan and Fox News: It’s Never That Simple
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.
The Psychology of Anthony Weiner’s Photo Problems
With an odd blend of poignancy and frankness, Katy Waldman explains at Slate just how mistaken Weiner is if he thinks his, *ahem*, “self-portraits” are having their intended effect:
Is there anything more depressing than the crotch shot? Any other form of so-called erotic communication that telegraphs the same mix of loneliness and tawdriness? Amanda Hess finds Anthony Weiner’s newly-unearthed sexts boring. To me, they are more like the photos of oil-soaked birds that surface after a petroleum spill: greasy, helpless, and broadcasting a frantic need.
The rest continues in this vein and I think it’s worth the read precisely because it’s not trying to be funny. It’s a serious consideration of Weiner’s issues and, along the way, of what men so often get wrong about what women
(I’m sure there’s all kind of ridiculous fun I could have had with this headline, but I think I’ll just leave that to Matt Drudge. The self-portrait line is as far as I’m going to go.)
NYT Remembers How to Say “No”
After growing increasingly frustrated with Mark Sanford’s successful return to politics, I was grimly resigned to watching Anthony Weiner set a new low for what we’ll tolerate from our politicians. It seemed more and more like what is often taken as a willingness of American citizens to forgive wayward politicians was morphing into limitless permissiveness. Imagine my surprise, then, when the New York Times, finally told a politician “no”:
At some point, the full story of Anthony Weiner and his sexual relationships and texting habits will finally be told. In the meantime, the serially evasive Mr. Weiner should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City. [emphasis added]
Now, I would have preferred this to have come before Weiner had to hold another press conference and apologize again for even more sexual impropriety, this time from months after he resigned from office for the last (publicly known) round of sexting, but it’s comforting to know that there’s still some limit to what the NYT Editorial Board will tolerate from our elected representatives. On the other hand, this might no really be so much as a stand against immorality as a stand against sheer idiocy. A man with this little self-control and common sense shouldn’t be trusted with neighborhood dog-catcher, let alone mayor of New York City. Then again, the NYT does specifically call out his “arrogance” and question his integrity, so I’m going to remain optimistic call this one a win.
I want to emphasize that I really don’t have anything against Weiner. I believe in forgiveness. But it’s a joke to apply that to cases like these. I wasn’t personally wronged or hurt in any way by his absurd actions, and so it’s not a question of forgiveness, but of a willingness to hold our elected representatives to a minimal standard of decent human behavior. To me it actually doesn’t matter if Weiner has learned his lesson or not (which is where I disagree with the NYT). It’s not a question of justice so much as a question of properly aligned incentives. When we allow politicians to lie, cheat, and abuse their offices and then take them back we’re creating an environment where those who lie, cheat, and abuse their office are going to flourish. It’s not about punishing the wrongdoer so much as it’s about discouraging future wrong-doing.
Eliot Spitzer is probably enjoying this, but I have a hard time begrudging him that. At least he had the sense to start his political comeback running for comptroller instead of mayor.
And, on a final note, can we maybe have Cubicle Guy take over the Weiner campaign?
