You are not in a police state

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Of course not! This is just…. caution.

I was talking to a high-end geek friend some months ago after the Snowden stories came out, and he told me bluntly: “If you use Tor or anything like that, you will bring yourself to the NSA’s attention.” And of course, he was right!

The NSA marks and considers potential “extremists” all users of the internet anonymizer service Tor, German media reports. Among those are hundreds of thousands of privacy concerned people like journalists, lawyers and rights activists.

Searching for encryption software like the Linux-based operating system Tails also places you on the NSA grid, says a report by German broadcasters NDR and WDR. The report is based on analysis of the source code of the software used by NSA’s electronic surveillance program XKeyscore.

Tor is a system of servers, which routes user requests through a layer of secured connections to make it impossible to identify a user’s IP from the addresses of the websites he/she visits. The network of some 5,000 is operated by enthusiasts and used by hundreds of thousands of privacy-concerned people worldwide. Some of them live in countries with oppressive regimes, which punish citizens for visiting websites they deem inappropriate.

But merely visiting Tor project’s website puts you on the NSA’s red list, the report says. But more importantly it monitors connections to so-called Directory Authorities, the eight servers, which act as gateways for the entire system.

Obama has lunch with economists

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Vidéo : L'hommage d'Obama aux joueurs des USA

Must. Hit. Head. On. Desk.

I’m sure you’ve read that the rate of U.S. growth has slowed to a crawl. President Obama must be concerned — he and Joe Biden met with a group of economists yesterday for lunch. Look at the guest list.

I’m hearing so many people rage about Theoretical President Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street ties, but pay attention: this is the president we have right now.

See any real progressive economists on there? Maybe two.

See any neoliberal, Wall Street-loving economists on there — you know, the kind of people whose stupid advice dug us deeper and deeper into the austerity hole? Uh huh.

  • Luigi Zingalies, an economist and professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago School of Business. There’s some things to like (he speaks strongly against crony capitalism and regulatory capture, but he also supported eliminating all American income, corporate, and payroll taxes and replacing the system with a broad consumption tax. It’s the kind of thing that could work with the right progressive adjustments, but anything that makes it fairer is unlikely to be supported by Republicans.) Not necessarily a liberal, but not one of the wingnuts, either.
  • Kevin Hassett, conservative economist with the American Enterprise Institute and AEI’s director of economic policy studies. . (He was the chief economic advisor to both John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and says income inequality is just not a big deal.) He’s also a columnist for the National Review. (He was last seen making shit up about French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book.) Salon has called him “Romney’s dumbest economist.”
  • Robert Hall, Professor of Economics at Stanford University’s right-wing think tank, the Hoover Institution. Another big supporter of the flat tax that’s so beloved of wealthy conservatives!
  • Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, another wingnut think tank that specializes in urban economic research that blames individuals, rather than systemic problems. Yay!
  • Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard. Chief economic advisor to Ronald Reagan and a full-blown deficit hawk. (Can you say “Social Security cuts”? I knew you could!) He was a board member for AIG Financial Products, supposedly exercising oversight of the division of the international insurer that contributed to the company’s 2008 crisis. (Remember how they rated the toxic mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps that led to the crash?) For you conspiracy buffs out there, in addition to being one of Obama’s economic advisors, he’s also on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and he’s usually invited to Bilderberg.
  • Ben Bernanke, Distinguished Fellow in Residence, Brookings Institution. What can we say about Helicopter Ben? Some progressive economists hoped he’d extend the same economic stimulus to the suffering public that he did to AIG and the banks, but it was not to be. He was accused of some funny business re: Bank of America, but of course nothing came of it. More importantly, remember that as a member of the Fed board, he didn’t see the crisis coming, and we still don’t know the real numbers about how much he pumped into Wall Street.

And finally, the one honest-to-God liberal of the bunch:

  • Melissa Kearney, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, on leave this year as a non-resident fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. She specializes in inequality and a full range of anti-poverty issues. (We like her because she pushed for extended unemployment benefits.)

    • And of course, she was the lone female. I don’t like the odds that her voice was heard. Let’s hope so.

‘That right wing asshole’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito li

That’s what Sam Alito’s boss used to call him. And he was right!

In mid-November of 2012, hundreds of tuxedo-clad Republican lawyers gathered at a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC. They were a mix of heads hung in dejection and chests puffed out in compensatory bluster. Less than two weeks earlier, they’d seen President Obama vanquish his opponent at the polls. Their last chance to knock a hated president out of office — and their last real chance to halt that’s president’s even more hated health reforms — ended in failure. They and their allies had made their best case that liberalism was a path to economic ruin, and the American people had lined up at their polling places to pull the lever for liberalism.

And yet, at this annual gathering of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, arguably the most powerful legal organization in the country, Justice Samuel Alito was defiant. Not long after rising to give his keynote address to the room full of conservative senators, judges, and attorneys gathered before him, Alito launched into a story of a particularly uninspiring law professor whose course he took in law school. The professor, Alito recalled, authored a book in 1970 warning of a decaying society trapped in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.”

At this point in his speech, Alito paused, and looked over the roomful of lawyers still licking their wounds from Mitt Romney’s very recent defeat. “Our current situation,” he told them, “is nothing new.”

Justice Alito’s speech came during a brief moment of respite between two great constitutional battles. Just a few months earlier, the Court had rejected a request that it repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, based on a tenuous reading of the Tenth Amendment that one prominent conservative judge dismissed as having no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Justice Alito dissented in the Court’s health care decision. He wanted Obamacare gone.

Almost exactly one month after his speech, a gunman named Adam Lanza walked into an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and murdered 26 people, 20 of whom were children. What followed was a nationwide debate over the proper way to solve gun violence and over the scope and the wisdom of the Second Amendment. Many of the lawyers and lawmakers who attended Justice Alito’s speech would fight hard — and, ultimately, successfully — to defeat President Obama’s proposals to prevent future Sandy Hooks.