I donât want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I donât want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.
Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.
Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader recordsâwhoâs read whatâand this has led to people being rounded up and killed. As a librarian, you take this very, very seriously. So, when you get demands for information about a patronâs activities, there are things that sort of flash before your mind. Where am I? What century is this? What country am I in?
Chicha made with saliva remains an important part of the diet of many South American tribes, and a woman’s ability to make it is important for her husband’s social status. It is rude to refuse it, as this account written up in Salon describes. Given the amount of calories and nutrients such beverages can provide, it amazes me that many ethnographical and anthropological surveys seem to ignore or downplay their presence, as if they were just mere recreation.
To me, each song on âExile in Guyvilleâ reverberates powerfully, making it patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made.
Few fully understand that the tension between young black men and the police (and by extension, security guards, traffic cops and just about any sort of watchman) is the main thing keeping America from getting past race. If ten years went by without a story like the Martin case weâd be in a very different country.
One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Lukeâs room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: âYou know, Iâve seen the real thing. So Iâm not really interested. Iâm sorry.â
Donât forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestorâs Georgia plantation.
Imagen If I Did ‘Molly’ and then Imagened an Epsode of Seinfeld Where They Do ‘Molly’
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If Saturn were as close to Earth as the moon.
As the world eagerly watches Snowden’s movements today, the public should put aside the mainstream media frenzy buzzing around Snowden’s personal life, and ask the more important question: in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, why does a whistleblower have to seek political asylum elsewhere after exposing government wrongdoing?
My wife Ana Hurtado and I have been eating a paleodiet (by accident because of fieldwork) for more than 30 years, because we grew accustomed to that diet (long before the fad). Meats, and unprocessed plant foods are a simple generalized ancestral diet and appear to produce better health than the current standard modern diet. As anyone who knows us can affirm, Hurtado and I are a lot leaner and fitter than most Americans in our age cohort (near 60). Why?
I believe a world in which everything is recorded and persists forever carries the seeds of something monstrous. It is in the nature of computer systems to remember things indefinitely, but there’s nothing difficult about programming machines to forget. It just requires laws to do it. We can’t treat it as a technical problem. And to get the laws passed, we need to politicize the issue.
Maciej CegĹowski : Persuading David Simon
I’m glad David Simon has caught so many people’s attention with his myopic apologism, because it has led to such fantastic articulation of the dystopia we’re prototyping.
Cost to Store All US Phonecalls Made in a Year so it Could be Datamined
Estimate by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who knows something about data storage. If you donât want to click, itâs about one twenty-five thousandth of the defense budget.
You have to assume everything is being collected.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure
No less true for being nine days old, folks.
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âOver the course of a year, I researched and created ZXX, a disruptive typeface which takes its name from the Library of Congressâ listing of three-letter codes denoting which language a book is written in. Code âZXXâ is used when there is: âNo linguistic content; Not applicable.â The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them? I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) â misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence. I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.â
Making Democracy Legible: A Defiant Typeface â The Gradient â Walker Art Center
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92y:
You heard her, sloppy joints. Of course.
Watch the excerpt of Martha telling this story to Bravoâs Andy Cohen, plus who she would âshag marry killâ and - sincerity face - her thoughts on elder care from her new book, Living the Good Long Life: A Practical Guide to Caring for Yourself and Others.
The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elfâbi-racial, like me. Iâm putting this out there because itâs hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the âby any means necessaryâ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellonâit was one of those D&D gamesâand at the final moment of the first âseasonâ of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient âevilâ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks.
We are not just ourselves anymore. Each one of us has a new, statistical self living in databases around the world. Itâs those selves, uniquely identified bundles of behavior, that marketers target and companies try to reach. These are remarkable, distributed portraits of what we read, what we eat, and where we sleep. When it comes to our statistical selves, the difference between the NSA and private companies such as Facebook or Google or Amazon.com lies in what the government can do with the data it collects. Itâs building that giant index so that, if it needs to, it can actively cross the line between your statistical self and your real, physical self. Itâs the difference between âwould you like to receive local coupons for businesses you love?â and âwhy is there a van in front of our house?â
I began to wonder if abstaining from animal products actually contributed to improvements in animal welfare or just gave me a false sense of moral purity while flesh from abused animals that could otherwise have been eaten just wound up rotting in the trash. I decided I could do more to improve animal welfare by supporting farmers who do treat animals well than by keeping my money from “farmers” that would be better termed “meat production engineers.”
When my wife and I were first dating, weâd talk on the phone constantly, the way that new lovers often do. She lived on the south side of Chicago and I was up on the north side and I kept crazy hours at work, and so weâd connect by phone when we couldnât connect in person. And those conversations would range the way those conversations always do: hopes, dreams, work, laundry.
I was working one of those ridiculous long nights we often had during production of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran back then, and I was idly chatting with my girlfriend on the phone about a story we were working on about Iraq. This was back probably in 1999, when the crippling sanctions on Iraq since the first Iraq war had mostly been forgotten and we were one of the few news organizations (if you could even call us that) still trying to keep that story alive. This was thanks mainly to the work of a single guy, Jeff Guntzel, who would send us dispatches from the country when heâd travel there with the activist group he was a part of. Heâd also occasionally call us from a business center in Baghdadâhis voice a raspy whisper through the amount of static and noise on the line.
I was working on the layouts for one of Jeffâs stories and was excited to tell this girl I was trying to impress more about it. But, as those young love conversations do, we moved off-topic pretty quickly, jumping from one topic to the next. I donât remember much about those conversations now, but I still remember the distinct click the phone made when we switched from talking about the Iraq story to discussing her misadventures at the local laundromat earlier that evening.
That click became a regular occurrence on our office lineâpopping up as youâd move towards or away from more politically charged topicsâand was followed not long after by intractable problems with our office phone line. Occasionally youâd pick up the phone and, instead of a dial tone, youâd get the digital static of a modem; other times youâd pick up and thereâd be a few moments of silence followed by a click and a dial tone. Mid-conversation youâd sometimes find your voice beginning to echo, then snap back into normality. And of course, sometimes the phone would stop working entirely, and a bewildered customer service representative would mutter words about things being âflaggedâ before putting me on hold. The line would usually start working quickly after those service calls.
Finally, after an extended period of bad dial-tones and calls getting cut off, the line just entirely went dead. A particularly dogged technician came to the office. He spent time in our space, time in his truck, time up on a pole. If I remember right, he even drove to one of the main switches near us. Finally he came back, looking completely bewildered and said, âI really donât know what to tell you. Itâs almost as if your line goes somewhere else before it comes to us.â
This was before September 11. This was before the PATRIOT Act. This was before Bush was elected and Obama after him. This was, obviously, almost a decade and a half before this weekâs revelations of governmental phone metadata collection and the NSAâs PRISM project. We were a tiny magazineâat the time, our readership probably hovered somewhere around 10,000. And yet there was this technician telling me what Iâd already deeply suspected: Our line was going somewhere else.
I wish I could say I was outraged by the NSA PRISM project, by the collection of cellphone metadata, by any of it. I am disturbed by all of it, disappointed for sure, but outrage would imply that my worldview was shattered. But the world Iâve lived in for a long time is the world weâve all been plunged into with the revelations this week. My worldview that things might be different than they are went away a long time ago, broken by the clicks that came up through the line as two young lovers shared their secrets over the phone.
Whatâs at stake has to do with how power is employed, by whom, and in what circumstances. Itâs about questioning whether or not we still believe in checks and balances to power. And itâs about questioning whether or not weâre OK with continue to move towards a system that presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect. Regardless of whether or not youâre in one of those classes or networks, are you OK with that being standard fare? Because what is implied in that question is a much uglier one: Is your perception of your safety worth the marginalization of other people who donât have your privilege?
Somewhere around its final passage, which begins when a slacker picks up the Pixelvision camera through which we ourselves see the next few minutes, you realize youâve been watching something on a higher plane.
Daniel Ellsberg: Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America:
In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:
"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America’s intelligence gathering capability â which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era â “at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left.”
That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi â the secret police in the former “democratic republic” of East Germany â could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.
So we have fallen into Senator Church’s abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible.
Ed Snowden is a hero because he realized that our very humanity was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe. Unlike those around him, who were too absorbed in their task to reflect on their actions and pause in their pursuit of digital omniscience, Snowden allowed himself to be âdisturbedâ by what he was doing. More in the midst of technology than most of us will ever be, Snowden disengaged for long enough to be human, and to consider the impact of what he was helping to build. He pressed pause.