Tag: surveillance

Categories
Accountability privacy tax policy

Stay On Call 

facial recognition, taxes, privacy, freedom

Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.

We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.

Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.

It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)

The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.

But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.

Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-​than-​trustworthy IRS. A third-​party vendor would have been involved.

So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-​term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?

Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability government transparency insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Major Media’s Major Corruption

MSM, mainstream media, CIA, Surveillance, propaganda, PSYOP

The revolving door between regulated big business and regulatory agencies is a known problem. “Regulatory capture” is one of the concepts economists have used to explain it.

We got used to this sort of corruption in finance: under the Bush and Obama administrations, with Goldman Sachs serving as the Executive Branch’s talent pool. The Pentagon and its major contractors have long had a cushy, cross-​pollinating relationship. And we are just beginning to learn about Fauci’s close ties to Big Pharma.

But the most dangerous employment overlap? Between the Deep State and major media news services.

Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack column on Sunday, calls our attention to an MSNBC opinion article titled “Julian Assange extradition could mean even more legal trouble for Donald Trump.” It was written, explains Greenwald, “by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this.”

We in America tend to think of the news media’s role as that of a watchdog — against government corruption. Instead, we see, that this direct seeding of media roles with Deep State agents “is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.”

In the Sixties, there was a program called Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA used a variety of techniques to control the media. Now “the CIA is the media.”

This is not a “free press.” It is a controlled press, with the mechanisms of the control right out in the open — simply look at the “journalists’” resumes.

Is this big business capturing regulators, or regulators capturing business?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights privacy tax policy too much government

A Closer IRS

IRS, privacy, banking, audit

Congressman Jared Golden, a Democrat in a Trump district, may be feeling heat.

“First, Nancy Pelosi said she’d raise taxes. Now, she’s coming for what’s left,” warns an American Action Network television advertisement airing in Golden’s Maine district. 

“To help pay for trillions in new spending, Pelosi wants the government to spy on nearly every American bank account, looking for new money to spend,” the spot continues. “Your deposits, payments, bank balance … under Pelosi’s plan, the government monitors them. 

“Call Jared Golden and tell him to … keep the government out of your bank account.”

Fact-​checking the spot, News Center Maine determined that, “yes, as part of that plan, banks would be required to give two additional pieces of information to the IRS: how much money went into certain bank accounts over the course of the year and how much came out.”

Those “certain” accounts started out being those with $600 going in or out. After the public uproar, the plan hiked the amount to $10,000. 

Same principle, though.

“The only way to ensure that upper-​income taxpayers pay what they owe,” explained a U.S. Treasury press release, “is by giving the IRS the resources and information required to close the tax gap.”

But does our system work that way? Not according to the Fourth Amendment.

We do not keep “a closer eye” on people making a certain amount; it is un-​American to require all such “suspects” be put through the wringer the better to find a few guilty of something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling

School Boards Withdraw

Merrick Garland, School Board, censorship

Several state school board associations are withdrawing from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). And doing so pointedly. 

Why? 

Because of the NSBA’s September letter to President Biden characterizing the many protests by upset parents across the country as “domestic terrorism.”

Those protests are ample evidence of the growing discontent with the injection of racist “critical race theory” (CRT) into K‑12 classes. In addition to calling the avalanche of complaints a form of “domestic terrorism,” the NSBA claimed that the CRT agenda “is not taught in public schools.” 

This was met with widespread (and justified) incredulity. The NSBA claimed that CRT was not being taught because college-​level texts purveying CRT aren’t used in K‑12 classes. Nevertheless, teachers had been instructed, workshops had been conducted, and students had been lectured and censured — all in CRT lore and dogma.

The NSBA later unpersuasively apologized for “some of the language” of their previous letter without repudiating its main contentions or the CRT indoctrination.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued no apology for using the original NSBA letter to rationalize establishing a task force to investigate parents.

The statement of the Ohio School Boards Association public sums up the sentiments of the state organizations leaving the NSBA: “OSBA believes strongly in the value of parental and community discussion at school board meetings and we reject the labeling of parents as domestic terrorists.”

Parents Defending Education reports that as of mid-​November, some 26 state school board associations have “distanced themselves” from the letter. Fifteen have formally withdrawn their memberships.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Something to Hate

hate speech, free speech, surveillance, freedom

Headline: “Hate talk in homes ‘must be prosecuted.’”

“Must”?

The proposed legislation targets speech alleged to promote prejudice. It is backed by Scotland’s secretary for justice, Humza Yousaf.

Might the law be deployed to squelch debate regarding, say, radical Islam?

“Are we comfortable giving a defence to somebody whose behaviour is threatening or abusive, which is intentionally stirring up hatred against, for example, Muslims?” Yousaf asks. “Are we saying that that is justified because that is in the home?”

I suspect that here we have someone who has never attended a sizable family gathering. Many attendees might report “hate talk” but oppose fining or imprisoning the so-​called hate-talkers.

Could the law be directed against journalists and others who publicly express loves and hatreds?

“We wouldn’t want to give the likes of Tommy Robinson a defence by saying that he’s ‘a blogger who writes for The Patriot Times,’” says Yousaf.

“Stirring up hatred” is, of course, not identical to threatening or instigating violence. Presumably it is already illegal in Scotland to plan murder and mayhem over the dinner table.

There’s an awful lot of speech out there with which we might vehemently disagree. Plenty of dumb, hateful, prejudice-​laden speech that violates the rights of no one does get uttered in homes and Internets. We must preserve the distinction between “things that are wrong to say or do” and “actions that should be illegal.”

Scots should resist these hateful assaults on their right to speak freely.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs media and media people

Defying China … for Now

China, Hong Kong, Big Tech, censorship, surveillance,

According to a New York Times report, “American Internet giants are struggling to respond” to China’s recent crackdown on Hong Kong.

For now, the outcome of the struggle is that Facebook, Twitter, and Google have stopped sharing data with Hong Kong officials. Doing so has become tantamount to sharing data with the Chinese government.

If this wasn’t clear before China’s repressive new “national security” laws in Hong Kong, it’s clear now. The Chinese government is systematically working to muzzle and punish anyone who threatens “national security” by openly criticizing the Chinese government.

Yahoo has changed its policies as well, so that users are now governed in their dealings with Yahoo by American law, not local Hong Kong law (rapidly becoming synonymous with the mainland’s edicts).

So far, so good. 

Worrying, though, is how inconsistent the tech giants have been. Yahoo once helped the Chinese government to identify and imprison two dissidents, claiming it had “no choice” but to turn over the info. Google and others have worked with China to censor information that the Chinese government doesn’t want its citizens to see.

These companies should never — in no way, shape, or form — help China go after dissidents. 

They should never cooperate, rationalize, compromise. 

It would be better to pack up their services and leave Hong Kong altogether than to “struggle” to find a middle way that “sort of” cooperates with China’s repression — and “sort of” leaves Hong Kongers in the lurch.

To bolster these companies’ new backbones, we had best leverage our power as customers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts