Terror Alerts

Data point: the federal government has released a global terrorism alert and shutdown embassies across the Middle East claiming they have highly credible evidence that al-Qaida (namely al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula) is planning an attack to coincide with the end of Ramadan.

Data point: Sunday saw continuing protests across the country against the NSA’s bulk data collection programs.

A cynical person will look at these data points and say the terrorism alert is possibly a politicized entity in order to strengthen arguments for the NSA programs. Let’s assume the government is telling the truth (I know, but bear with me) and they have credible intelligence that an attack is in the works.

First, if al-Qaida is that dumb to let word of an attack sneak out, how concerned should we be about their abilities to actually carry out something? Guess all that talk about Snowden’s leaks helping al-Qaida by informing them that we spy on them (like they didn’t know that–bin Laden didn’t after Internet access after all) never reached them.

Nevertheless let’s carry it a step further and say the government has intelligence indicating an attack and al-Qaida is actually planning to do something (instead of laughing as we run around screaming) and then nothing happens. How long before some statist congressman wanders out and says the NSA programs worked? I don’t bother watching cable news programs but I’m assuming people are already doing this.

Let me just say it’s crap. Americans are rightfully upset about the bulk collection of metadata and Internet information from American citizens in violation of the fourth amendment. Others outside the US are rightfully concerned about the agency’s collection of their data, but I want to focus on the American aspects given the recent failure of Representative Amash’s bill to defund parts of the NSA, namely the collection of phone metadata. That amendment was directly tailored to focus on the 215 business records abuses and focused on American citizens. It didn’t defund all of the NSA, nor would it have impacted the agency from collecting intelligence relating to the ongoing terror alert. If anything deducing the noise the NSA collects would help it improve detecting signals and help it remember the fourth amendment exists.

So if a congressman or woman wanders onto your television screen talking about how we stopped a terror attack and we need the NSA, kindly remind them they’re statist stooges.

Send the DOJ a Complaint

Via Legal Insurrection comes word that the Department of Justice has begun a campaign soliciting tips from the general public in an attempt to build a case for civil rights violations against George Zimmerman.

It pains me to have to do something to help Neighborhood Rambo, but what’s even more ridiculous than some of the reactions to the acquittal on Saturday is the DOJ’s attempt to carry out a political campaign against a single citizen who’s been acquitted. With the publicity Zimmerman has received over the last year it’s hard to believe the DOJ has a reasonable case against him if they’re reduced to opening a public email account and asking people to send them tips. This isn’t about George Zimmerman or approving of what he did (again, I don’t), instead it’s about voicing opposition to an administration that has increasingly embraced the seedy undersides of Chicago-style politics.

So, kindly take a minute or so to send an email to Sanford.florida@usdoj.gov. Be short and sweet, more than likely whomever reads it won’t read more than a sentence or two before deleting it when they realize it’s not a tip. Additionally, be nice, don’t say anything stupid, you don’t want a SWAT team banging down your door at 3AM.

Fuck it, Let’s Talk About Zimmerman Kids

Here’s a scenario: A man shots and kills another man in a neighborhood and claims self-defense. The man is arrested, tried and convicted for murder even though evidence at the trial failed to conclusively prove he killed the man for a reason other than self-defense. After being convicted the man, with the help of various non-profit criminal justice organizations mounts decades of appeals and gains supporters who argue the jury was racist to convict the man because he was black and the guy he shot was white.

That scenario is just the opposite of what happened with George Zimmerman, but don’t leave it to me to tell you there are thousands of people in jails across America for crimes they didn’t commit. Part of the reason these people are in jail is because juries ignored their duty to convict only when they believe beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant committed the crime. Does that mean some murderers get away with murder? Probably, but if the system works a lot more innocent people return to their families.

George Zimmerman was arrested, tried, and found not guilty by a jury of his peers. A LOT of people do not like that decision. After all, some random Rambo on his way to Target killed a teenager walking home with some Skittles and iced tea. It’s a terrible event for everyone involved, but it would’ve been worse if George Zimmerman had been found guilty murder, because that would’ve meant a jury ignored their requirement to be impartial and decided a verdict on emotions and what one group of people think “justice” should be.

I don’t care for George Zimmerman and personally his story doesn’t seem wholly truthful to me. Yet, if you watched the two weeks of the trial it’s hard to say the verdict the jury reached tonight is anything but the right one. The prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman committed second degree murder. One could make a case for manslaughter, but it’s still a difficult case (it’s the one the prosecution should have made if they weren’t prodded to pursue the murder charge by the court of public opinion.)

There’s a thousand things wrong with our justice system, but George Zimmerman walking out of the courthouse tonight a free man isn’t one of those things. We have thousands of men and women locked up in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. We have thousands of people locked up for committing “crimes” like smoking pot, who spend years in jail for something that hurt no one but the family they can no longer see. We have thousands of people locked up in solitary confinement for years on end. Prisons (public and private) across this country are overcrowded (mostly with aforementioned pot smokers). There’s mandatory minimums in this country that ruin lives for something like a high school senior having sex with his freshman girlfriend. We have an administrative branch that’s currently cracking down on anyone who wishes to oppose dragnet surveillance programs. There’s a court that holds secret meetings and issues secret rulings that affect everyone in this country and the world after only hearing the government’s side of the story. These are real issues.

George Zimmerman may have had malicious intent when he got of his car and followed Martin, but the not guilty verdict tonight means only one thing (like it or not): the system worked.

Boston

A few thoughts about the whole Suspend the Constitution Day in Boston/Watertown:

1. The whole lockdown in Boston was classified as a “request” by Deval Patrick. It was clearly more than a “request,” but the legality of the whole affair is probably dubious at best. I’d be curious to see if there’s any arrests or forceful demands from police if anyone came outside in Boston.

2. It’d also be curious to know what would’ve happened if anyone in the Watertown search area refused SWAT teams access to their house without a search warrant.

3. Lindsey Graham is an idiot. However, the Obama administration has expressed the same views.

4. The use of SWAT teams was appropriate today, but the number of armored vehicles and assault rifles by police demands should dispel ideas that police are outgunned in this country.

5. I sure hope the camoflauged SWAT teams running around today were National Guard members, but they probably weren’t. Police aren’t soldiers, regardless of the situation.

No Christopher Dickey, Civil Liberties Are More Than an Inconvenience

Contrary to whatever my post on the Christopher Dorner affair conveyed, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think JFK was killed in some CIA plot involving Bush Sr. dressed up like a homeless guy. I don’t think Marilyn was whacked for knowing too much or having an affair with Jack. I certainly don’t think the only accomplishment of W’s presidency was his ability to coordinate and carry out 9/11 and then keep it a secret. The events in Boston yesterday were not a false flag incident. They were simply vicious attacks by an asshole or assholes. Foreign or domestic, left-wing or right-wing, it was terrorism and that doesn’t have categories.

That being said Christopher Dickey’s article on the Daily Beast highlights an unfortunate fact that will arise out of the bombings—increased demand for surveillance and more “see something, say something” campaigns. To quote Dickey:

The best and most important defense is detailed, real-time intelligence about the fanatics and lunatics who may intend to carry out such attacks, and the means that they may use to slaughter innocents. Thus, the critical failure to protect the crowd at the marathon was summed up by Boston Police Commissioner Edward P. Davis in a single phrase: “There was no specific intelligence,” he said, that would suggest such an attack was imminent.

No. The simple fact, no matter how uncomforting, is that you can’t prevent anything unless you surrender all freedoms. It doesn’t take a genius to construct an IED, anyone with access to the Internet or a public library can figure out the basic parameters for building one with little effort. They can also ensure that bomb does increased damage with a simple trip to the hardware store or Walmart. The NSA sucks in an astronomical amount of information (probably even this post if I include the correct keywords) and that’s unsettling enough, but as Boston shows, terabytes of data a day can’t protect you from everything. Not only is the amount of information too large to effectively process and analyze, but until we start monitoring every transaction, library record, and keystroke inputted online we won’t stop every single threat. Boston is a tragedy, one I wish no one had to live through and one I hope I never experience, but I’m far more comfortable living in a world like yesterday’s than I am in Dickey’s surveillance state.

Of course, it’s easy for Dickey to talk about increasing surveillance. It’s one thing to be white and live in a world where terrorism has become synonmous with scary dark-skinned folks. Dickey doesn’t have to walk through airports and be subjected to increased security, he doesn’t have to worry about having a plane he’s on turned around because he’s speaking a different language, or any other issue Muslim-Americans are subjected to on a daily basis. Indeed it’s only when people begin protesting for civil liberties that it becomes an issue for Dickey:

Complacency about the terrorist threat has been a growing problem for counter-terror operations, not least because the public has begun to see as encroachments on its liberties measures that it deemed perfectly acceptable in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize a year ago for its exposé of NYPD surveillance activities among Muslims in New York City and elsewhere. Such criticism has led, inevitably, to more caution and ass-covering in Washington.

Traditionally we’d call constitutional restraint something better than “ass-covering” but not in the world we live in. According to Dickey those fine folks in Washington can keep you safe, if only you’d learn what’s good for you and stop demanding they follow that pesky Bill of Rights. If you thought that all of this so far has been repugnant, here’s how Dickey concludes his piece:

A truly terrifying thought: Did the Feds see something and not say something?

Until that question is answered, none of us will be safe.

No. Those of us who defend our civil liberties and expect the government to respect them are not at fault for Boston. A lunatic, an asshole, a terrorist, or a group of any of the aforementioned are responsible for the events yesterday. Dickey’s article is nothing more than the national security equivalent of blaming a rape victim for the attacker’s crime. Those who engage in slut shaming are rightfully derided, Christopher Dickey’s attempts to do the same with civil liberties should be roundly criticized as well.

Journalism, Paranoia, and Blurry Lines

So someone passed along this article about the person behind the AnonyOps twitter account and his alleged self-imposed exile from the United States. It’s a fascinating read that highlights the blurring of realistic fear of government actions and paranoia. I don’t have any reason to doubt his claims of exile, but at the same time he could be living in Los Angeles. What’s also interesting is the discussion was posted on Asher Wolf’s website, a Twitter user who has regularly blurred lines, this time between journalism and tweeting.

I’ve only been on Twitter for a short period of time, but I have a decidedly mixed opinion of Ms. Wolf. She seems nice enough, but too often I feel she overstates her journalism. Retweeting and collecting stuff from Twitter isn’t exactly journalism. A facet maybe, but journalism is also a lot more. More importantly, Twitter “journalists” have shown a tendency to be flat out wrong. Take for instance this retweet of hers from about an hour before I wrote this:

As you can see the tweet is from a year and a half ago and comes from a UK news anchor. The tweet links to this Snopes.com article that includes an infamous picture of Connecticut state representatives playing solitaire during a budget debate. So she’s retweeted a year and a half old tweet about a three and a half year old photograph. Amazingly, even though the Snopes article clearly indicates this was during a debate in the Connecticut State House, the original retweet says it shows “Congressman” during “the key debate to save the US debt crisis,” which is completely false. Connecticut had budget issues like the rest of the United States during the recession, but retweeting something of this nature during the sequestration era is clearly aligning an old state issue with a national issue with which it had no relationship. People have pointed this out to Wolf (and very belatedly Mr. Snow) but if she’s a journalist shouldn’t she have read at least read the full article and realized what the photograph shows? Probably.

I don’t really know where I planned to go with this whole thing, other than to say the one thing Twitter truly has done is blur lots of lines. Some of them are good, traditional media (read: newspapers, television news, etc.) could use improvement from some citizen journalists. At the same time it’s not a universally good thing. Too often we’re willing to blur retweeting anything, regardless of validity, as a form of journalism.

Random Saturday Obscenity Post

Frontline, PBS’s investigative journalism program, has a tendency to tweet out a link to their ten year old program “American Porn” on a fairly regular basis, probably because it’s still popular with anti-porn advocates. Here’s
a link they threw up on February, 24 that attracted eleven retweets and twelve favorites.

The story truly is an interesting time capsule of how the Internet and the pornography business have grown. I’m really not concerned with the industry or its growth, but what’s striking is the so-called “Cambria List” created by a longtime industry lawyer in an attempt to avoid obscenity trials. Anyone who cares to can find most of the taboo subjects on the list on any number of porn sites today and may of the big companies regularly produce videos with the formerly self-censored scenes. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at the world and porn (hint I’m in the former camp).

What I would comment on (a decade later mind you) is the last of the banned themes on the list: interracial sex. Cambria says in the Frontline video the list was created to ban anything middle-America soccer moms would look at and call obscene (and thus illegal). It’s amazing to think as late as 2001, we labeled simple interracial sex as obscene. That’s nearly forty-four years after the Supreme Court ruled banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional.

Just a random thing to think about.

Comedy Website Writes Bad Joke

Good morning after the Oscars everyone. Hopefully you didn’t manage to hang out with Kristen Stewart or lose everything in your Oscar pool. Anyway, let’s talk about the Internet rage of the night: Seth MacFarlane’s jokes and a satirical tweet from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.

First, MacFarlane. Anyone who expected anything other than what they got last night has never watched an episode of Family Guy. If you’re in that category allow me to fill you in with one fact: MacFarlane had two shows banned from the air, one for potentially being anti-Semitic and one that dealt with abortions. So MacFarlane likes to piss people off, and he likes to do it with crash, mostly politically incorrect humor. Most of the jokes are fine. Offensive? Out of context yes, but most of the time the jokes build to a conclusion in contrast to the joke (same can be said for South Park). Yet MacFarlane had some bad jokes last night. I don’t mean unfunny, I mean legitimately bad. Take the “prepared by getting the flu,” which trivializes blulimia as just another part of women looking good. That was bad. Or when he said Penelope Cruz, Selma Hayek, and Javier Bardem are allowed to hang around because they look good when no one can understand them. Bad. Boobs song? Really bad. Here’s some more for the offended.

Yet his biggest controversy came when he said nine year old Quvenzhané Wallis would be dating material for George Clooney in a few years. Get it? Clooney likes younger women. Creepy, offensive, and a sad attempt at humor. The Onion likewise got in trouble when they tweeted, “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?” The publication subsequently deleted the tweet after a wave of criticism and threats by an army of offended users to report them for violating Twitter’s rules. While I’m sure there’s a rule in the TOS somewhere about abusing the spam reporting system, I’ll just cut to the point and say I had no issue with the tweet. If it came from someone else sure, but if you’ve followed The Onion long enough you know their brand of irreverent satire.

Does satire has a line that can’t be crossed? Maybe, but satire also cuts pretty deep. I found the tweet a great take on the petty nature of award shows and Hollywood. Is it wrong to call a nine year old a cunt? Yes, but it’s not like The Onion was actually calling her a cunt, unlike the thousands who took to Twitter to voice an opinion about Adele’s body and meant it. Satire can be pretty offensive (Jonathan Swift wrote about eating babies being the classic example) but should we be calling a nine year old a cunt especially in a world that over sexualizes women all the time?

That’s the crux of the issue, and while some disagree, I personally feel nothing should be off limits from comedy and satire as long as it has a larger purpose. MacFarlane’s bulimia joke was tasteless and offensive as it contributed little and continued to preperate stereotypes. The Onion’s tweet was tasteless, yes, but it’s also not nearly as bad as some would care to make it out to be. Feel free to be offended by it, feel free to be offended by any joke, just don’t work to suppress it. Dialogue, or Holmes’s market of ideas, is always a better answer.

Popova Scrubs Claims From Her Site

If you recall, Maria Popova, proprietor of Brain Pickings and avid anti-ad crusader, was called out for running affiliate Amazon ads on her site. When called out it refused to acknowledge them as ads and then silently added in some text mentioning them on the support page.

Seems Popova has done some more scrubbing as of late. I happened to click on a link that unbeknownst to me was a link to her site and before closing the window I decided to check to see if she did any more editing of her donation pitch. Surprisingly she not only has, but she’s entirely removed the donation pitch that use to appear at the bottom of every post. Additionally she’s edited her support page to remove the claim it takes 450 hours a month to run the site. In it’s place is a simple claim that it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a month:

According to various cache services, the donation pitch has been removed within the last few days. Archive.org’s Wayback Machine shows it as active as late as Monday when the service last took a snapshot of the site. Google Cache doesn’t list it as active during it’s last cache earlier today, but the pitch does show up in the text-only version of the website.

When questioned about the various spam marketing websites she ran and during this latest controversy, Popova has deflected criticism by mostly ignoring the central issue at hand, yet it seems she’s willing to acknowledge her claims and pitch were not wholly accurate.

Updatey Stuff

If I was a journalist and not a blogger (contrary to the stereotype I am neither in a basement, my parent’s house, or my pajamas) I would’ve found this and this. So it wasn’t exactly silent, so I’ve removed that language from the post. It also explains why she removed the donation pitch, hard to pitch an ad-free website when the footer explicitly mentions being in an advertising. She does, however, have the language in the sidebar pitch and the support page. Both of which are still disingenuous but not as in your face as the previous pitch.

The one thing I’d add is her claim that she doesn’t review books is also slightly disingenuous. If you write “best of lists” that’s a form of reviewing the work as in labeling it a best book you’re giving an endorsement of the work.

In relation to her speech a few things. One, she never actually discusses how her opposition to ad-supported media doesn’t conflict with her opposition to ad-supported media, instead she spends twenty minutes discussing everyone else but herself. For instance the EB White quote about the sponsored Esquire model applies to her 100% of the time (she also gets review copies, another marketing relationship she never discloses).

Also her comparisons to the likes of Andrew Sullivan and other user-supported sites are (like everything else) disingenuous. Each of those websites is and was upfront about how they make money. Sullivan has explicitly rejecting advertising, instead asking people to support the website through subscriptions. Popova on the other hand never disclosed her relationship with Amazon until she was publicly called on it.

All things considered, should this affect how people view the site? Not necessarily, and in the long run it won’t. Like Felix Salmon I think it’s great she’s making a shitload of money on the site, however it comes about, but at the same time she takes a very preachy tone and as her talk demonstrates, she’s less than willing to see how her use of advertising conflicts with her stated opposition and use of quotes like EB White’s.

Also nice of her to dress up as her Twitter avatar. Marketing!

Anti-Ad Crusader Maria Popova Runs Affiliate Ads

Maybe you’ve heard of Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings website as it gets something like half a million views a month. The site mostly focuses on design, history, and literature (notably Susan Sontag as Popova falls over herself to discuss her) and has a pretty devoted following willing to donate to Popova on a regular basis. If you’ve only read one post on the site you’ll have noticed the large banner at the bottom of every post that reads “Donating = Loving…Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.”* Or maybe you noticed the sidebar which includes a similar appeal. Or maybe you clicked the about or support pages, both of which also tout Popova’s willingness to provide a website free of advertisements.

Unfortunately for Popova an anonymous Tumblr has highlighted the fact that Popova places Amazon affiliate marketing links in all of her posts. Should anyone purchase the product indicated (or any other one) through the link Popova gets a cut of the sale. While affiliate marketing can be a effective way for a website to remain ad free in the traditional sense (e.g. no banners or text ads), by using affiliate links Popova doesn’t fully disclose her relationship anywhere on her site with Amazon and the potential  motives behind the links. She also doesn’t disclose she has access to data on what people who use the links purchase.

While I’m usually no fan of the federal government, the Federal Trade Commission has so-called “truth in advertising” rules which have three basic principles:

Endorsements must be truthful and not misleading;
If the advertiser doesn’t have proof that the endorser’s experience represents what consumers will achieve by using the product, the ad must clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected results in the depicted circumstances; and

If there’s a connection between the endorser and the marketer of the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed.

When these “revised” rules were released in 2009 they received pushback for essentially being “unworkable” and “government gone wild,” which are both true. Yet bloggers have traditionally made it clear when they use affiliate links and have been known to criticize those who don’t. So Popova deserves criticism for her unwillingness to see anything wrong with the affiliate links and her holier than thou attitude.

So while Popova may wish to claim it’s “the exact opposite of an advertising relationship” and has no influence on what she posts on the site (which is believable—at least in part—given that thousands of less preachy bloggers use the links in a reasonable manner) she has a responsibility to her readers to be forthright and honest about the relationships she has with Amazon.

*Side Note: She claims it takes a sum total of 450 hours a month to run Brain Pickings (200 for the site, 200 for the Twitter feed, 50 for the newsletter). That seems like an obscenely ridiculous number given an average 30 day month has 720 hours, which means if you combine her claim with an average of 8 hours a sleep a night she’d be spending over 14 hours a day on the site, or all but 1 and a 1/3 hours she’s awake. (29 nights x 8 = 232. 232+450 = 682. 720 – 682 = 38/30 = 1.26 repeating.) Popova has also said in the past that the Twitter feed is mostly pre-scheduled.

More

Felix Salmon at Reuters has an excellent post on this whole affair. Like Salmon I don’t begrudge Popova for running affiliate ads, but rather for being opaque about her revenue streams versus her very public opposition to ads.

Two things of note from the story. This blog post highlights that Popova has been behind sleazy affiliate ad sites in the past, which are clearly advertisements and stand in stark contrast to her public stances on Brain Pickings. Additionally I missed the fact in her Twitter bio that she runs a second blog (along with her articles that appear on other sites) so her claims about how many hours spent on the site are clearly exaggerated. If Brain Pickings is her life (which it undoubtedly seems to be) she should be content to use that statement rather what are pretty clearly false numbers in soliciting donations.

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As some people have pointed out Popova’s claims about how much it costs to run the site are incredibly high for what she cites. To quote the Reuters post:

For example, I don’t tell people how much it costs to actually run the site – which, when you add up web hosting, email newsletter delivery, the money I spend on books, TypeKit, VaultPress, proofreader, developer, designer, and various data plans, adds up to about $3,600 a month. That doesn’t include my hours which, if paid at minimum working wage – so if I were cleaning toilets instead of, say, poring through Edison’s diaries – would bring the total up to about $7,000 a month.

You can get top tier webhosting for less than $100 dollars a month. Typekit adds maybe $100 a month. I doubt she’s enterprise level VaultPress so another $40 a month. That’s only $280 dollars on stuff that’s easily guessable. Let’s say she pays her proofreader $15 dollars an hour/20 hours a week. $1480 dollars. I’ll stop now.

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Here’s an interview from November in which she states she works for Lore, the company that publishes the other blog she edits. Given she states they’re her “employeer” I assume she gets paid by them, which seems to further destroy the 450 quote.

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Dick Wisdom with an excellent old post on how Popova’s “curator’s code” was just a pretty much just a hand-wringing exercise to get more views to her site that she barely followed.

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Notice a difference? Much nicer before when it all came from the users.

Before:

After: