Lawmakers and Legal Experts Call For Restraint in Wikileaks Hearing

EFF wrap-up of the House Judiciary Committee Wikileaks' hearing.

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

The House Judiciary Committee held a surprisingly subdued hearing this morning on the legal and constitutional issues surrounding Wikileaks' publication activities. Committee members repeatedly emphasized the importance of protecting First Amendment rights and cautioned against overreaction to Wikileaks. The seven legal experts called to testify agreed, almost all of them noting that:

Excessive government secrecy is a serious problem that needs to be fixed,

It's critically important to protect freedom of expression and the press, and

The government should be extremely cautious about pursuing any prosecutions under the Espionage Act or any legislation that would expand that law, which is already poorly written and could easily be applied in ways that would be unconstitutional. Read more at www.eff.org

 

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Human Rights Organizations Worldwide Decry Attacks on Freedom of Expression

EFF provides highlights from the position statements of human rights organizations.

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

It has been almost two weeks since cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website hosting leaked US diplomatic cables, was taken down, and the right of Wikileaks to publish truthful information was immediately besieged. Since then, human rights organizations around the world have condemned the attacks on WikiLeaks and have raised their voices to protect freedom of expression online.

To help illustrate what human rights and other organizations are saying internationally, we have highlighted some excerpts from their own institutional statements over this David-Goliath style battle. Read more at www.eff.org

 

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WikiLeaks Contender ‘Promising’, Analysts Say

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

A new transparency site being launched by WikiLeaks defectors is a promising alternative, according to media and government transparency analysts, but its true value will depend on whether it can garner the trust and interest of sources with valuable documents to leak.

The new site, OpenLeaks.org, is set to launch this week and promises an equally secure and anonymous channel for leaking important documents to journalists and other recipients. However, it also aims to avoid the “cult of personality” that has arisen around WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the various controversies and legal pressures that his leadership has attracted, by placing editorial control of leaks in the hands of established journalists, rather than acting as a publisher itself. Read more at www.wired.com

 

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Court Rebuffs White House on Warrantless Cell-Site Tracking

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

The decision (.pdf) by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is one in a string of court decisions boosting Americans’ privacy in the digital age — rulings the government fought against. The most significant and recent decision came Tuesday, when a different federal appeals court said for the first time the government must obtain a court warrant for an internet service provider to grant the authorities access to a suspect’s e-mail. Read more at www.wired.com

 

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Decentralizing Twitter – And the Rest of the Web, Too

Interesting interview from Technoccult

Amplify’d from technoccult.net

I just interviewed J Chris Anderson, the CFO of CouchOne, for ReadWriteWeb. CouchOne is the corporate sponsor of an open source database and programming language called CouchDB. Anderson recently started hosting a demo/proof of concept app called Twebz – a decentralized Twitter Client – built with CouchDB and node.js. Anderson explains how CouchDB could be used to decentralize not only Twitter, but most other web applications as well. It’s pretty geeky but could have big ramifications: This tech could help build a more resilient Internet in the face of disasters, cyberwarfare and censorship. Read more at technoccult.net

 

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Constructive Direct Action Against Censorship

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

The past few weeks have highlighted the vulnerability of centralized information systems to censorship: online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Sites hosting legitimate speech were caught up in an anti-counterfeiting raid by the Department of Homeland Security, EveryDNS stopped hosting WikiLeaks.org’s DNS, Amazon refused hosting service to WikiLeaks, and independent protesters conducted denial-of-service attacks on businesses refusing service to WikiLeaks. If the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA; the internet censorship bill introduced in the US Senate) or something like it passes, the threat centralization poses to First Amendment-protected speech may be unavoidable. Corrective action — designing, implementing, and deploying robust, fault-tolerant architectures — will improve the security and availability of the internet infrastructure generally, to the benefit of all.

What, then, can digital activists do to protect speech on the internet? Fortunately, there are a bunch of technical projects dedicated to reducing centralization in the internet infrastructure. Some are in the idea stage, some are up and running, and some are in-between. All of them could use help: development, documentation, security review, server infrastructure, testing, and evangelizing. EFF urges technologists of all stripes and skill levels to work on potential solutions to the centralization problem. Read more at www.eff.org

 

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Law Profs: We Need FDA-Style Approval for Laws - Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

http://athousandnations.com/2010/12/13/law-profs-we-need-fda-s...

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Change technology, change incentives: Napster-Kazaa / WikiLeaks-OpenLeaks

Amplify’d from athousandnations.com

After Napster was shut down as a company & a service, Kazaa was quickly written to address the central point of failure weakness.  With a pure P2P system, there is no concentration of liability – the liability of any one peer is vastly less than a company and removing them doesn’t stop the system, so the benefits are far less.  On the cost side, while the cost to sue one peer is less than suing a company,  the cost to sue every peer is vastly higher than the cost to sue one central company.

While WikiLeaks may have benefited from having a known leader who could fundraise and recruit, we can now see the weakness of that system.  When the US got angry enough, Julian Assange was the obvious target.  But you can’t take vengeance without teaching a lesson, and the movement to free information for public benefit can now simply reconstitute around a model robust to the “find a guy and throw him in jail” attack.  Already, next-generation solutions are in the works: Read more at athousandnations.com

 

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OBAMACARE Individual Mandate Struck Down, What Now?

URL:  http://c4ss.org/content/5382

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AnonOps Communications: New Strategy

URL:  http://anonops.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-strategy.html

Anonymous announces new strategy in support of Wikileaks.

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Secure Persons and Privacy

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Like anybody else, I want to be as safe as I can reasonably expect. I certainly don’t want my loved ones to suffer a terrorist attack. But I don’t believe that sacrificing liberty is going to make anyone safer. Compare the TSA-style measures’ effectiveness in thwarting terrorist plots to the effectiveness of good intelligence, thorough investigation, and the initiative of intended victims.

Government priorities mean that security checkpoints are not mainly looking out for bombs or terrorists. Checkpoint personnel are looking for people with immigration violations, drugs the government does not approve of, weapons carried without government approval, and whatever else will boost arrest stats and criminal justice revenue. The traveler will be confronted by militarized authoritarians who aren’t totally focused on passenger safety.

It should be clear that the loss of freedom doesn’t really make us safer. But we pay for the security state in other ways too. People are made late, travel time is increased and inconvenience leads to marginally less travel. As a result the economy becomes less dynamic. If people avoid public transportation there will be more highway traffic and more car accidents. Increased spending on fuel consumption and road repair is made at the expense of things people would otherwise desire more. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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2010: E-Book Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy

URL:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/2010-e-book-buyers...

Thinking about e-books for Christmas? Think about privacy-

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Join EFF in Standing up Against Internet Censorship

URL:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/join-eff-in-standi...

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Amuse Your Way Through Life's Problems

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.

“It’s imagination, it’s inference, it’s guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously,” said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.”

“It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos,” Dr. Danesi said. “And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ” Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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California's Pension Crisis Needs Serious Reform

Adam Summers addresses California's pension crisis.

Amplify’d from www.ocregister.com

California needs to switch to a defined-contribution system for all new employees, as the private sector has been doing for decades. This would work just like 401(k) retirement plans do for so many nongovernment workers. The state would contribute a certain percentage of the employee's pay, and possibly match up to an additional portion, to that employee's individual retirement account.

Since contributions are essentially a fixed percentage of payroll, they do not vary widely from year to year based on pension fund performance. Contributions must be paid in full every year so there is no such thing as an unfunded pension liability in a defined-contribution plan.

Politicians can't continue to merely nibble around the edges of the state's pension crisis. It's time to admit that the 401(k)-style retirement plans that are good enough for nearly every private sector worker are going to have to be good enough for state workers, too. Read more at www.ocregister.com

 

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The State’s Corporate Wasteland

David D'Amato continues to expose the State-Corporate con game.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

The perceived inefficiency of government is often measured against the wholly unsubstantiated myth of the well-oiled corporate machine. The state’s many modules, thought of as shiftlessly unconcerned with the bottom line, are implored by the standard conservative philippic to be “run like a business,” as if real-world businesses are models of sleek efficiency.

The binary framework of American political folklore sees business interests as hermetically sealed from state interests, with the cold orderliness of “professionalism” defining our image of the corporate world. The state, by comparison, is thought to be the sanctum of all the good-hearted, underpaid crusaders for social justice, imprudent with the dollar but well-meaning. Just a passing glance at the actual corporation (as opposed to its idealized image), however, begs for a thorough reconsideration of the prevailing narrative.

And as vast, hierarchical institutions defined by a numbness to technological and social chance, corporations seem an especially appropriate analogy to the bureaucratic mammoths of state socialism. The largest and most powerful of them, rather than being the most avant-garde or the most reactive to the wants of the humble consumer, are the most inept and incapable of competing in the tempestuous world of untrammeled exchange. In his exhaustive treatise of economics Human Action, Ludwig von Mises counseled that a “successful corporation is ultimately never controlled by hired managers,” and in a free market that may be true.

In the state-corporate society, though, where status lives in job titles and climbing the corporate ladder, managerial elites enjoy a tight grip on the power; it is no coincidence that they run their companies in much the same way that the state functions, through gradations of authority and arbitrary administrative processes. It isn’t even as though there’s a societal balance between state and corporate interests, implying some polarity between the two; they are very simply elements of the same arrangement, whereby laws like the Williams Act — a securities rule that purports to protect shareholders — regulate away challenges to indolent suits in corner offices. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Culture and certification - crossing the threshold of the Invisible College

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2789

Excellent take on the sociological phenomena of the "Invisible College"

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Buzz Out Loud’s Epic Misunderstanding of Peering

URL:  http://techliberation.com/2010/12/02/buzz-out-louds-epi...

Comcast is not blocking NetFlix.

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The Unintended Humor in Wikileaks Criticism

URL:  http://c4ss.org/content/5157

The humor is dark, but it's there. I'm reminded of Mel Brooks' definitions of comedy and tragedy: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."

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U.S. Government Seizes 82 Websites: A Glimpse at the Draconian Future of Copyright Enforcement?

URL:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seiz...

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The LA Times vs. American Travelers

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

The important thing to remember is that the weak point in American air travel safety is government.

In the long term, it’s the state that makes us targets for terrorists in the first place.

Al Qaeda didn’t hijack those planes because Osama bin Laden got an undercooked hamburger at a fast food joint, or because some big box chain store sold him a defective lawn chair.

They hijacked those planes by way of attempting to blackmail powerful politicians into doing things they don’t want to do by scaring their constituents into demanding it. Take the power away from the politicians and the tactic goes away with it. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Atlas Shrugged Video Contest

http://atlasshrugged.com/contest/

Last call for video entries!

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WillUsingThePrefixCyberMakeMeLookLikeAnIdiot.com

http://willusingtheprefixcybermakemelooklikeanidiot.com/

The few seconds it takes to answer some simple questions can save you a lot of embarrassment.

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Captive Audience

URL:  http://blogs.oreilly.com/wateringhole/2010/11/the-water...

An excellent example of why projects go astray.

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Super-slim NANDrive SSD with SATA interface

URL:  http://www.gizmag.com/greenliant-nandrive-sata-storage-...

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Real-life gadgets for real-life superheroes

URL:  http://www.gizmag.com/real-life-superhero-gadgets/16862/

I've aged out of the Hero game, but ten, fifteen years ago... if I had the will this would be the way.

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Public Choice Ignorance Everywhere (via Let A Thousand Nations Bloom)

http://drewt333.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/public-choice-ignoran...

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Posterous Does What Others Can't

Posterous can post to Delicious and Live Journal, Amplify and Ping.fm can't. I suppose Amplify doesn't need to, auto-posting to Posterous gets the job done but Ping.fm used to. The rang of services Ping.fm can post to seems to be shrinking.



What's the big secret, Posterous?

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/endz

The Fed’s Latest Scam

David D'Amato of C4SS brings us play-by-play on the latest Federal Reserve shell game.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

In a press release yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced plans to undertake quantitative easing measures, “purchas[ing] … $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month.” Quantitative easing is the sly euphemism used to describe a policy whereby, instead of attempting to pass another highly visible stimulus package through Congress, the central bank purchases the federal government’s debt obligations.

If we didn’t know better, we might speculate that, considering its profligate spending, the Fed has a cache of wealth in a secret vault somewhere, some tangible value to back up its decision. Careful to characterize its latest move as a legitimate treatment for an ailing economy, the many voices of the Fed have stressed that the maneuver is a value-for-value exchange as opposed to a gratuitous handout to the banking/creditor class. While the Fed is paying for something — government Treasury bonds — it is acquiring that something at a price that no one in a market completely free from coercion would ever ante up for such rotten debt.

By diluting the money in our wallets, essentially dividing our dollars into parts and pretending those parts are worth as much as the original bills, the new round of quantitative easing is a veiled tax. Quantitative easing therefore operates to drain the real wealth out of productive society for sake of the banking elite, relieving their books of the debt that only an institution financed by brazen theft would buy; this is the perverse spectacle of the state-created and -backed central bank buying the state’s securities with the state’s fiat currency.

A system that allowed free market banks or credit unions to circulate their own currencies would reestablish the link between money and the things or services it is exchanged for; ratios between competing currencies would, in turn, provide the kind of price information that the state’s coercive system is so perilously lacking.

The Fed is showing the world what anarchists have always understood, that more regulation and state involvement in the marketplace and in banking are jeopardizing rather than protecting the average consumer. The free market, emancipating the working class and shattering privilege, is the lone answer to the corporate morass we’re stuck in today. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Obamacare Feeds Insurance Oligarchs

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Today, a Wall Street Journal opinion column titled Big Business, Big Medicine reports the “turn toward consolidation among insurance companies,” a “dynamic [that] is leading to much larger hospital systems and physician groups, and fewer insurers dominated by a handful of national conglomerates.” If this seems an anomalous result from an administration thought to represent a departure from the corporate cronyism of its predecessor, then the blatant and contrary writing on the wall was apparently ignored.

Like all regulations declaredly subduing Big Business predominance over consumer’s lives, the new laws synthesize “public” and “private” — both of which are ultimately meaningless is our system — boosting an already corporatist economy for health services. As we might have foreseen, the politicians’ solution nurtures a condition whereby smaller “carriers will collapse under the new mandates and higher overhead.” So in the face of everything the President said about “not accept[ing] the status quo as a solution” in health care, “Obamacare” delivered for Big Insurance, a cartel that loathes competition and welcomes impenetrable regulation. Both the state and Big Business — adversaries only in the popular imagination — are triumphant, the coordination of the two saddling us with another shakedown scheme.

The United States’ health care system, a teetering house of cards that will ultimately implode, exists through economic fallacy. Even so, by the time the elites’ scheme withers, they will have already thieved more than enough from the productive class; they will, as always, leave insolvency and beggary behind, but they’ll benefit from the presumption that their hearts were in the right place in trying to give health care to everyone. The insurance lobby is getting what it paid for with these policies and this President. We can inaccurately call this process of fraud and favoritism a free market, or we accept that such are the contours of American Capitalism and subscribe to free markets as a means of disbanding these price-fixing protection rackets. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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The Robin Hood Tax is but a Bandaid on the Corporatist Economy

URL:  http://c4ss.org/content/4465

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5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.

URL:  http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-w...

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Michael Moore Almost Gets It Right

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Michael Moore, writing at Alternet (“Why Republicans Are Always Worried About Their Pet Corporations Facing Any Real Free Market Competition,” Oct. 21),  makes a very acute observation:  “whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support ‘free markets’ and ‘competition,’ check to see if you still have your wallet.”  The reason is that “nobody” — not even Marxists — “hates competition more than corporations.”

Moore was so close — but he just missed it.  Moore frames the issue as one of big corporations trying to suppress competition by weakening the antitrust laws.  “When corporate executives start pushing for ‘free market policies,’ what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.”

If he’d said they want “a government that HELPS them become a monopoly,” he’d have had it just right.  The main factor behind monopoly isn’t whether government lets it exist by failing to enforce antitrust laws.  It’s whether government enables it by erecting entry barriers, suppressing competition with cartelizing regulations, and enforcing legal monopolies like “intellectual property.”  Government doesn’t “allow” monopoly.  It props it up. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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How Public Employee Unions Can Halt the Pension Crisis

Brad Spangler at C4SS addresses the coming collapse of state-funded pensions.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

If public employee unions genuinely want to represent the interests of their members, they ought to be sounding the alarm to man the lifeboats and prepare to abandon the ship of state.

Government, at all levels, is bankrupting itself and taking the rest of the country (nay, world) with it. An equity for debt swap is relatively common in bankruptcy cases. In this case, unions can serve as advocates and midwives for a new model of worker-owned privatization that gives rank and file public employees shares of common stock in formerly public enterprises as compensation for the default on pensions that’s inevitably coming, whether they want it to or not. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Sharp In Klein

http://athousandnations.com/2010/10/06/sharp-in-klein/

Mike Gibson at "Let A Thousand Nations Bloom" follows through on Ezra Klein's "What if the government were run more like a business?" thought experiment.

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Growing too many vegetables is illegal

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/weir...

The war on food continues.

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An Immoral System Can Only Be Sustained By Immorality

(C4SS) Kevin Carson's comments on World War II and the Great Depression.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

I believe that Horwitz, in countering Krugman’s argument with a description of how economic growth would be achieved in a free market, ignores the point that the industrial system we’ve had over the past 150 years hasn’t even remotely resembled a free market. It has been a corporatist system built from the ground up through overwhelming state intervention and massive collusion between big business and big government.

The state has promoted the overaccumulation of capital in mass-production facilities that are only profitable when they can amortize the cost of their expensive specialized machinery by running at full capacity without regard to preexisting demand, and then find some way to dispose of the product. And the only way to dispose of that full product has been through state-aided planned obsolescence, state-aided expansion in to foreign markets, direct state purchases of surplus output and surplus capital, and–as a last resort–massive state destruction of output and capital in war. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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One Human’s Taxation is a Tragedy; Three Hundred Million is a Statistic

Check out Third Way's publications here: http://bit.ly/acsApG

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

An itemized receipt for taxes? How lovely and desirable!

A think tank entitled Third Way just issued a paper wherein they analzed what the $5400 in federal taxes the median taxpayer of 2009 (who earned $34,140) actually purchased. Among the reactions in the blogosphere, one recurring comment strikingly resounded.

Writers noted that everywhere else an exchange of goods occurs, a bill of transfer or receipt is produced. Why is one not given to taxpayers in the same manner? An honest and baffling question for American citizens to ponder, with a lousy answer. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Victory: Internet Censorship Bill is Delayed, For Now

URL:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/victory-internet-c...

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The Market, Not Government, Is The Worker’s Friend

In the Center for a Stateless Society’s latest study, “Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model,” C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson examines the role of state labor regulation in halting the progress of unionism and explores the gains made for labor by direct action and worker solidarity in the face of combined state and corporate power.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

“The predominance of the conventional strike as we know it, as the primary weapon of labor struggle,” writes Carson, “is in fact a byproduct of the labor relations regime created under the Wagner Act. … In the system of labor relations extant before Wagner, strikes were only one part of the total range of available tactics. Unionism, and the methods it normally employed, was less about strikes or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power against the boss.” Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Fight the Copyright Trolls

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

EFF is trying to help by assisting people in finding lower cost or pro bono counsel, allowing people to fight back without the costs of defense bankrupting them. But in the meantime, these lawsuits are causing tremendous collateral damage — to the individuals targeted, to due process, and to the legal profession (which doesn’t need another example of unscrupulous lawyering). To be clear, no one is arguing that copyright owners don’t have a legal right to protect their works. But it’s quite another thing to game the legal system — and waste judicial resources, i.e., your tax dollars — to make a profit. Read more at www.eff.org

 

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Banned Books Week: it's back

URL:  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/09/bann...

The L.A. Times looks at the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom top 10 most-challenged books of 2009

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/cxwlht

Public vs. Private Charity

Bonnie Kristian addresses a classic false premise.

Amplify’d from bonniekristian.com

Q. Sometimes, when I have conversations with socialists (we call them “New Democrats” in Canada), I have no idea how to counter arguments like: But what do we do about the poor and marginalized? Cutting government spending only ensures that the poor and marginalized in society become more poor and marginalized. Then the elites can grab power and exploit the poor and marginalized. We need a balance, we need more government programs.

A. The “we must save the poor and marginalized one” is certainly a sympathetic one, I must admit.  However, it’s also based on a completely false premise:  that government helps the poor and marginalized.

In fact, I completed my honors thesis on this very subject of public vs. private charity, and I can tell you that the academic literature on the subject of private charity and comparable public programs is generally in agreement:  Private organizations are more efficient and/or effective in their work. Read more at bonniekristian.com

 

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Artificial Crisis of Contention

David D'Amato points out the dangers of collusion while the MSM moans about "gridlock" and "partisan politics."

"Next time you hear a talking head lament the unwillingness of radicals to 'play ball,' consider what cooperation between agents of subjugation and theft really means."

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

The truth, that Republicans and Democrats represent the same statist orthodoxy, is decidedly more mundane and doesn’t lend itself very readily to the kinds of linguistic overkill used by the mainstream news to present the nonissues of electoral politics. Rather than the hostility-mired war zone lambasted by authoritarians rhapsodizing over the virtues of political compromise, this country’s political process is a paragon of back room collusion, of the connivance between power elites.

And, for some reason, we’re meant to prefer this to the genuine, unaffected, ideological confrontation dreamt up by the mainstream, as if the established “debate” would suffer any idea that actually was fresh or in any way subversive. In the same way that America’s civic lore spuriously pits Big Business against Big Government where the two are actually quite friendly, there is systematic denial in this country about the basic nature of the two-party system. This clueless belief in meaningful inter-party antagonism occasions another, related error, that if opposing politicians could put aside their perceived bickering their collective sage wisdom would overbear any problem society might face, the state of course possessing the magic bullets that no nonviolent institution could. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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T-Mobile Claims Right to Censor Text Messages

URL:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/text-message-c...

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One Law for the Lion, One Law for the Lamb

URL:  http://c4ss.org/content/4057

Kevin Carson lays down the law.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/d4uxan

More Jobs for Kids

Minimum wage laws are a subtle form of discrimination against youth and other disenfranchised workers.

Amplify’d from reason.org

If lawmakers want to help kids find jobs, they would have more luck fixing the flaws in their current policies, not introducing new ones. The big culprit here: the minimum wage. Minimum wage laws kill jobs by making employing workers more expensive. Youth are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon because they, of all segments of the population, are most likely to work minimum wage jobs: the economics literature is quite clear on this point. Remove the minimum wage and you remove a substantial disincentive to hire young workers. New government interventions, like a make-work program for kids, would only be the latest in a long series of misguided, if well-intentioned, plans to help struggling workers. Read more at reason.org

 

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How to Record the Cops

Radley Balko at reason.com provides the Hows and Whys plus the Dos and Do Nots of keeping cops honest.

Amplify’d from reason.com

A guide to the technology for keeping government accountable

This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.

So far Massachusetts is the only state to explicitly uphold a conviction for recording on-duty cops, and Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is clearly illegal. The Illinois law has yet to be considered by the state's Supreme Court, while the Massachusetts law has yet to be upheld by a federal appeals court. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently issued an opinion concluding that arrests for recording cops are based on a misreading of the state's wiretapping statute, but that opinion isn't binding on local prosecutors.

In the remaining 47 states, the law is clearer: It is generally legal to record the police, as long as you don't physically interfere with them. You may be unfairly harassed, questioned, or even arrested, but it's unlikely you will be charged, much less convicted. (These are general observations and should not be treated as legal advice.)

One reason this issue has heated up recently is that the democratization of technology has made it easier than ever for just about anyone to pull out a camera and quickly document an encounter with police. So what's the best way to record cops? Here is a quick rundown of the technology that's out there. Read more at reason.com

 

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Developing Sofware for Activists

Entrepreneurs take note, it's a growth industry.

Amplify’d from www.eff.org

Writing software to protect political activists against censorship and surveillance is a tricky business. If those activists are living under the kind of authoritarian regimes where a loss of privacy may lead to the loss of life or liberty, we need to tread especially cautiously.

This post isn't going to get into the debate about the social processes that gave Haystack the kind of attention and deployment that it received, before it had been properly reviewed and tested. Instead, we want to emphasize something else: it remains possible to write software that makes activists living under authoritarian regimes safer. But the developers, funders, and distributors of that software need to remember that it isn't easy, and need to go about it the right way. Read more at www.eff.org

 

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The Servile Mind and the Spirt of Modern Democracy « Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

http://athousandnations.com/2010/09/16/the-servile-mind-and-th...

Mike Gibson of “let a Thousand Nations Bloom” comments on Kenneth Minogue’s excerpt from his book “The Servile Mind”

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Disapora social network source code released

URL:  http://www.gizmag.com/diaspora-source-code-released/16384/

Not precisely "anti-Facebook" just pro-security.

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Coming Soon: The War on Tacos

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2010/09/14/coming-soon-the-war...

California elitists pursue their agenda of politically correct racism by claiming health issues.

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No Place for Entrepreneurs in todays Economy

Amplify’d from www.nationalreview.com

Indeed, Obama believes fundamentally that the middle class owes its existence to the government, not to wealth-creating entrepreneurs or businesses. Without skipping a beat, the president fails to recognize (let alone acknowledge) the difference between a truly free market, where individuals decide how to invest their resources, and a government-directed one that sets collective priorities which require individuals to tow the line for specific policy objectives implicitly defined by the political class:    Read more at www.nationalreview.com

 

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Survey Shows Voters Are Fed Up with Excessive Federal Pay

http://reason.org/blog/show/voters-fed-up-with-federal-pay

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Cisco@25, Cisco In 25 Video Contest

URL:  http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/ts_090110.html

I'm betting on the "fire-hardened spear" to make a big comeback as the world degenerates into squabbling factions of religious zealots.

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Remember Constitution Day Sept. 17th

Amplify’d from thefire.org

Over the past few years, college students have embraced Constitution Day as an opportunity to remind fellow students about their rights on campus. Liberty-minded student groups host creative and attention-grabbing Constitution Day events to kick off the new school year. You can catch 2010 FIRE intern Nico Perrino with his group's "guerrilla gorilla" here, or read about Florida Atlantic University's "food for freedom" exchange here.Read more at thefire.org

 

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Watching the Wheels Go Round and Round

Classically Liberal on the shift of power and the growing horde of "libertarians by default."

Amplify’d from freestudents.blogspot.com

The two extremes in modern politics are busy-body Democrats and busy-body Republicans. The Democrats are dominated by the Nanny Statists and the Republicans dominated by nasty Theocrats. Given those choices I too would like the Democrats more. The Democrats think I'm stupid and need them to care for me. That is pretty disgusting. But what really scares me is that Republicans think I'm sinful and need to be punished. While trying to stamp out stupidity is, well, stupid, trying to force people to be virtuous is downright dangerous.Read more at freestudents.blogspot.com

 

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Business Start-Ups Creating Jobs

http://reason.org/blog/show/start-ups-creating-jobs

Anthony Randazzo brings us the numbers on new business and job creation at the Reason Foundation "Out of Control Policy Blog."

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Kicking the Backside of the State with an Invisible Foot

http://athousandnations.com/2010/08/31/kicking-the-backside-of...

Mike Gibson at "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" reintroduces the concept of "The Invisible Foot" and its application to government services.

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Let’s Open a Wireless Window to Cuba

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/lets-open-a-wireless-window-to-...

Lifting the embargo one text at a time.

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Two Schools of Internet Pessimism

Adam Thierer at The Technology Liberation Front posits two schools of doomsaying regarding Internet policy:

1. Net Skeptics, Pessimistic about the Internet Improving the Lot of Mankind

and

2. Net Lovers, Pessimistic about the Future of Openness



He discusses their elitism, their desire for intervention and counters them with evolution. Please read:

Amplify’d from techliberation.com

Despite their different concerns, two things unite these two schools of techno-pessimism.  First, there is an elitist air to their pronouncements; a veritable “the-rest-of-you-just-don’t-get-it” attitude pervades their work.  In the case of the Net Skeptics, it’s the supposed decline of culture, tradition, and economy that the rest of us are supposedly blind to, but which they see perfectly—and know how to rectify.  For the Net Loving Pessimists, by contrast, we see this attitude on display when they imply that a Digital Dark Age of Closed Systems is unfolding since nefarious schemers in high-tech corporate America are out to suffocate Internet innovation and digital freedom more generally.  The Net Loving Pessimists apparently see this plot unfolding, but paint the rest of us out to be robotic sheep being led to the cyber-slaughter since we are unwittingly using services (AOL in the old days; Facebook today) or devices (the iPhone and iPad) that play right into the hands of those corporate schemers who are out to erect high and tight walled gardens all around us.

Unsurprisingly, this elitist attitude leads to the second thing uniting these two variants of Net pessimism: An underlying belief that someone or something—most often, the State—must intervene to set us on a better course or protect those things that they regard as sacred.  They either fancy themselves as the philosopher kings who can set things back on a better course, or they imagine that such creatures exist in government today and can be tapped to save us from our impending digital doom—whatever it may be. Read more at techliberation.com

 

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Second Newspaper Chain Joins Copyright Trolling Operation

URL:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/copyright-trol...

The copyright troll story continues.

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The Friends of the “Free Market” Are Its Worst Enemies

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

The people who talk most about “free enterprise” and “free markets” in American political discourse, far from actually favoring those things, have appropriated the label “free enterprise” for their system of corporate welfare, corporate protectionism, and crony capitalism.

Quite frankly, I’m thoroughly sick of seeing right-wing Republicans referred to as “free market fundamentalists” by people like Thomas Frank. I’m sick of seeing “free market” treated, on the Left, as synonymous with a modernized version of Robber Baron capitalism. But it’s hard to blame them for this, considering that about the only people you see praising “the free market” in the mainstream media are, well, Robber Barons.

The private sentiments of the so-called friends of “free enterprise” — people like Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, and Dick Armey — are probably more honestly represented by former Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas: “The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.” “The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.”

Tom Friedman, the foremost defender of corporate globalization, knows exactly what the system really requires:

“For globalism to work, American can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.  The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

But then, I like the cheerfully sociopathic Blago unknowingly recorded on the phone (“effing golden”) a lot better than the guy on the talking head shows who lifts his eyes heavenward and compares himself to Gandhi and Mother Theresa. At least with people like Andreas and Friedman, you know what you’re dealing with. No hokum about “free enterprise.” Just flaming death from the skies for anybody who fails to ratify the Uruguay Round TRIPS accord or stops using the dollar as a reserve currency. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Time To Divorce Marriage and Government

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Marriage licenses are a fairly new invention, created in the mid-nineteenth century as a tool the state could use to enforce social proscriptions on interracial marriages.  By the early twentieth century they were nearly universally required as enforcement tools for the state’s increasing regulation of inheritance, parental authority, taxes and other matters.  Churches were subsumed into the new regulatory scheme — required to themselves obtain licenses both as establishments and for their officiants, in order to perform wedding ceremonies and act as agents of the state in enforcing those licenses.

A license is defined as “the permission by competent authority to do an act which without such permission, would be illegal.”  By obtaining a marriage license, a couple is begging for permission of the state to marry, which places both love and the church under the authority of government.  While the state often condemns polygamists, it  requires couples to marry a de facto third spouse — the government itself. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Musopen Wants to Give Classical Music to the Public Domain

URL:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/musopen-wants-give...

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Breaking the Information Monopoly

This is the kind of article that gladdens my heart. No blamethrowing, no psychorants made up of buzzwords and soundbites. An honest assessment of what's happening and what can be done.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

What the current information landscape represents is an inkling of a free society in practice. Cheap startup costs and the distribution of knowledge foster nearly unlimited competition. Trust can be verified by sourcing (which makes news research more participatory), by recommendation from trusted services (which is based on individual choice and reputation, not on legislative mandates), and by peer recommendation. This is good news for those of us who don’t trust the authorities to put our interests ahead of the interests of those who make a living by advising them. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Do We Really Need WikiLeaks?

Nick Ford at C4SS asks the musical question "Do We Really Need WikiLeaks?" Well, yes, we do. But more in the sense of leading by example than irreplaceability.

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

What would happen without Assange and WikiLeaks? In little to no time they’d be most likely be replaced. The social networking revolution against top-down hierarchies like the state would continue with or without them. It is a given that there is no reason to rely on WikiLeaks or one organization to carry on the work of delegitimizing the state in the public mind. Rather, this can be continued through networking on an anonymous, decentralized, and horizontal manner. There is no need for any central organization such as Wikileaks in the first place; the individuals that take the action and have the drive to go against the state are the true heroes. Read more at c4ss.org

 

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Organic guilt - Armed and Dangerous

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2473

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