Tag: surveillance

Discreditable Credit

China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense

Capitalism can be rigged a hundred different ways, apparently. China’s is run by its Communist Party, and even current innovations bear the stamp of the Party.

Take “social credit.”

Not the quaint decentralist economic reform movement that was a minor deal in politics on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada 60 or more years ago.

What I’m referring to is the innovative credit scoring system devised by a gaming company in cooperation with China’s commie-run government.

But it’s not quite like the credit scoring systems set up by competing companies in the U.S., which cook up “credit scores” based on going into debt and paying off debt. If you pay your bills, you get a higher score. If you don’t, it plummets.

The new “Sesame” credit scoring system is less interested in the debts you pay off and more in what you buy and what you put up on social media. The company has concocted a secret algorithm, and gives higher scores to good citizens — obedient people — and lower scores to lazy people (inferred from, say, if you play a lot of video games) or to folks who are rebellious free thinkers (posting pictures of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, for example).

That is what it seems like, so far.

It rewards those Chinese who are industrious (yay?) and who kowtow to Communist Party expectations (yikes!) — and makes me extra glad I live in the U.S., where government is too chaotic and stupid to cook up anything quite this insidious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags big government, China, Communism, Credit Rating, government, surveillance, surveillance state

crime and punishment privacy too much government

Are They Reading This?

Stingray, surveillance, privacy, invasion, collage, photomontage, illustration, editorial, listening, spying

You’re a nice person, Gentle Reader; I’m glad to communicate with you in a public forum and listen to your responses.

But we both expect limits to this mutual access. If we’re not legitimately suspected of being criminals, we expect to go about our business without strangers intruding upon us at will. We have a right to boundaries.

More and more, though, the borders of the privacy we rely upon are routinely violated by government employees who trawl our lives at random. We often have no idea of the existence or extent of the intrusions until long after the fact.

The latest disturbing practice we’re getting a smidgen of info about is the secretive use by police agencies of so-called “sting ray” devices, which simulate cell towers to track cell phone data and location.

For years, obeying FBI demands for secrecy, prosecutors have been dropping cases rather than report how the devices are deployed. In a Baltimore murder trial, though, Detective Michael Dresser testified that his department has used the device 4,300 times. He assures us that officers await judicial permission … unless the circumstances are too urgent.

That’s nice. But without a lot more transparency about how and when the sting ray is deployed, I don’t have much confidence that such scrupulousness is par even in Baltimore, let alone all other locales. It’s hard to give government agencies the benefit of the doubt when the track record is so lousy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags privacy, surveillance, surveillance state

crime and punishment general freedom

Big Brother Rides Along

Hertz has begun installing cameras in their rental cars as part of a system called NeverLost. But don’t worry, they’ve got no plans (they say) to use them (yet).

“The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so,” Hertz spokesman Evelin Imperatrice assures us. I guess Hertz is with St. Augustine about how all that exists time-wise is a vanishingly small present moment, inasmuch as the past is already gone, the future not yet here. Ergo, nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless, customers are worried.

“I even felt weird about singing in the car by myself,” says one.

“The system can’t be turned off from what I could tell,” reports another. “[And] the camera can see the entire inside of the car. I know rental car companies have been tracking the speed and movements of their vehicles for years but putting a camera inside the cabin of the vehicle is taking their need for information a little too far.”

I’m all in favor of extensive monitoring of police and others with government-conferred power over us, in a position to easily abuse that power. I’m not in favor of indiscriminate spying by everybody on everybody. Or of any gearing up to do that.

What to do? A little bit of tape over the lens, that’s one option. Another: boycott Hertz until they rip the cameras out. Or at least make them easy to turn off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags privacy, surveillance

too much government

Diverse Drivers’ Data

The idea of a “Surveillance State,” where government watches and records our every move, is usually billed to us as a matter of protection.

That’s sure a good way to sell us tyranny.

True, we do sometimes receive protection from governments that keep tabs on us about what we do, where we go, who we see. But if this sort of thing doesn’t also give you the creeps, I am at a loss.

I hear from friends in the Libertarian Party of Virginia, where I live, that bills pending in the State House and Senate would limit the length of time state and local governments may keep data on citizens’ driving habits.

Right now, governments collect a lot of information via license-plate reading cameras, and there are no legal limits on how long the information can be kept; some jurisdictions do keep data indefinitely. AAA Mid-Atlantic, an automobile service organization, is backing the legislation, pushing for a legal limit. “AAA believes that the retention period should be limited to the time necessary to compare it with local and national crime data banks,” a press release states, adding that the limit should reflect the rather short amount of time required, which is “a matter of hours or days, not months or years.”

We don’t advocate limits on this kind of data to protect criminals, but to reduce temptation to those folks in government who might abuse their positions for personal gain or bureaucratic mission creep.

Governments tracking and recording our every move just isn’t safe — even if our safety is the professed goal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags data mining, surveillance, Virginia

too much government

Yes, You Are a Suspect

Sometimes the Internet makes a mistake.

The other day, one of my favorite websites embedded a Fox News video about NSA spying. Fox News entitles their video “Citizens Treated As Suspects.” At the site showcasing Fox’s story, though, the headline reads: “The NSA Grabs Information from Non-Suspects; Ninety percent of those spied upon are under no suspicion.”

Can this be right? When you’re treated as a suspect, you are a suspect, aren’t you? You’re being suspected of something. At least of being somebody who might be up to something worth snagging in an all-embracing fishing expedition. If you’re not guilty, somebody else leaving comparable data traces is, surely.

On the other hand, no matter how innocent you feel, you gotta be guilty of something for which the government could come after you, right?

I do not say you have done something actually wrong. Only something some policeman or bureaucrat could hassle you for. We live in an era when parents get arrested for letting their kids play in the park

Fox News reporter Shephard Smith says that most Americans caught up in the particular NSA surveillance net discussed in his story are just ordinary, everyday blokes — not reasonably suspected of anything NSA-spy-worthy. This is unsurprising given all we’ve been learning from the NSA documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden (see ProPublica’s revelation-chart).

These days, in the eyes of our government we are all suspects. Continuously.

And there’s something very suspicious about that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags NSA, Shephard Smith, surveillance

national politics & policies too much government

Something to Protect

Blasé about sweeping government surveillance? Think you have “nothing to hide”?

I bet you do.

Ever draw curtains? You have “something to hide.” If you balk when a con man says, “I need your birthday and Social Security Number,” you have “something to hide.” When you feel comfortable giving certain information about yourself to some persons but not others, you demonstrate your preference to hide some things from some people.

That’s not nothing.

Philosopher Harry Binswanger, however, says he is not worried. “I have no secrets. Those who raise the specter of Big Brother are not on a wrong basic premise, but they are being unrealistic: when and if we fall into the grip of totalitarianism, there will be nothing to stop the dictatorship from spying on us by any means it wishes. Such a regime does not require that the tools have been set up in advance.” Some reining in may be appropriate, but “alarmism” is unwarranted.

It’s warranted.

Totalitarianism doesn’t happen with a flip of the switch. Tyranny works from precedents. Daily encroachments help establish it.

And our government violates our rights in the here and now, in days prior to any fully Orwellian dystopia. The tools usable tomorrow by an American-style GPU or Gestapo to violate our rights can be thus used today by an IRS or NSA.

Our governments snoop on us unwarrantedly today. They hide the extent of their spying on innocent people, today. They have motives to use what they get by their spying — today.

It should stop.

Today.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.