Monday, March 21, 2011

In-District Meetings: Defend Your Rights

Action speak louder than tweets.

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

Senators and Representatives don't spend all their time in Washington; they also head home to visit with their families and constituents. This happens frequently -- in fact, Congress is only in D.C. about 137 days per year.  When they aren't in D.C., they're at home - and you can go visit them! You can either schedule a meeting with your elected leaders in person or engage them in a public event, like a town hall meeting or fundraising event.

Congressional representatives care about what their constituents have to say; after all, constituents are their bosses! And in-district meetings are particularly important.  Every in-person meeting has an exponentially bigger impact than a letter or email. It engages them in a way no other form of communication can.

Read more at www.eff.org
 

Lawsuit Challenges NSA Surveillance

Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Challenging NSA Surveillance of Americans

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

It’s easy to forget these days, but former President George W. Bush’s illegal warrantless surveillance program was never halted by Congress, nor by the Obama administration. It was merely legalized in a 2008 law called the FISA Amendments Act. That means the surveillance of Americans’ international phone calls and internet use — complete with secret rooms in AT&T data centers around the country — is likely still ongoing.

Read more at www.wired.com
 

Friday, March 18, 2011

In the Shadow of Sunshine Week

Only the guilty need fear Sunshine Week.

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

As Sunshine Week sets, it’s a good time to take a quick inventory of the federal government’s ongoing failures of transparency.

MapLight.org, which tracks the influence of money in politics, ran down the opacity the public confronts at every level of government — from antiquated campaign-finance reporting requirements to Freedom of Information Act shortfalls.

Read more at www.wired.com
 

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Rushing to Regulate the Internet

Where's the fire? What is the Commerce Dept. trying to hide?

Amplify’d from techliberation.com

The Commerce Department gave the many, many interested parties the worst four weeks of the year—including  Christmas, New Year’s and Martin Luther King Day—to digest and comment on an 88 page, ~31,000 tome of a report on proposed regulation of how information flows in our… well, information economy. Oh, and did I mention that those same parties had already been given a deadline of January 31, 2011 to comment on the FTC’s 122 page, ~34,000 word privacy report back on December 1 (too bad for those celebrating Hanukkah)? In fairness, the FTC did, on January 21, extend its deadline to February 18—but that hardly excuses the Commerce Department’s rush to judgment.

Read more at techliberation.com
 

Monday, March 07, 2011

Subversion, sedition and sabotage

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Yes, Virginia, there are differences between the official “left” and “right”.  But those differences are “split” in such a way that one segment of the ruling class benefits no matter who you support.  I tend to prefer indirect economic tyranny to direct pseudo-religious pleasure-control tyranny myself, and I suspect most of you would as well, being the shiftless deviants I know and love.  It’s still not something to cheer about.  The other advantage to our would-be masters of creating two inconsistent, self-contradictory “wings” is that in a democracy they will tend to take turns running things, so each faction of the ruling class gets their chance to be more favored.  There’s a war in the heavens, but you’re not invited to the victory dinner.  You might even *be* the victory dinner, one way or the other.

You can’t just up and change the system. But what you can do is subvert it. If enough people subvert things long enough, the system changes de facto. In order to do this, you have to stop buying into the idea that the system as such is legitimate, that it has a claim on your behavior. Subversion, sedition and sabotage.  Direct action in pursuit of your goals.  Not only does it get results, but it allows you to live like a human being again.  You will be, if not entirely free, liberated from the wasteful trap of throwing your life away trying to convince the ruling class to go against their own interests.

Read more at c4ss.org
 

Friday, March 04, 2011

The Free Market’s Regulatory Model

We've all seen how Big Government "regulates" its Big friends in Big Business. Corporate cartels that are "too big to fail" get Big money to paper over the Big mistakes. Who pays? We do.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Big Business, we are frequently advised, is the enemy of our natural biosphere, forever seeking new ways to sidestep its responsibilities to the environment and to dirty it at will. This assumption is, in the main, difficult to contest, its evidentiary support inescapably confronting anyone paying even the least attention. This popularly-understood fact, however, is attended by another assumption regarding the relationship between power and the natural world, that the state is the great taming influence on the evil corporation.

As historian Gabriel Kolko demonstrated in his groundbreaking account of the Progressive Era, absolutely nothing in political life could be further from the truth. “[T]he federal government,” reveals Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, “rather than being a source of negative opposition, always represented a source of economic gain” for Big Business. The state, in conflict with the widely-accepted story we get from “respected” outlets, allowed corporate powerhouses to “solve their economic problems by centralization.”

Read more at c4ss.org
 

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Digital Jasmine: Flirting with Revolution

A real-world example of covert communications. Using available tools in unexpected ways to get the word out. May your day be filled with jasmine.

As uprisings spread across northern Africa this month, protesters lit up social networking sites with updates—even Egypt’s attempt to shut off the Internet couldn’t stop them completely. But in Libya, where the fight is getting hotter and hotter, few people use sites like Facebook or Twitter, and many would be afraid to write there openly. So protest leader Omar Shibliy Mahmoudi found a place where they could speak in code: dating sites.

Read more at blogs.discovermagazine.com