“Data Is Digital Gold”: Beyond The NSA, What About Big Data Abuse By Corporations, Politicians?
Taking steps to end, or at the very least to constrain, the federal government’s practice of storing information on the personal communications of Americans is a good thing. There is every reason to respect initiatives that seek to prevent the National Security Agency’s metadata programs from making a mockery of the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
But the moves that President Obama announced Friday to impose more judicial oversight on federal authorities who might “listen to your private phone calls, or read your emails” and the steps that may be taken by Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to check and balance the NSA following the submission of proposals on March 28 ought not be seen mistaken for a restoration of privacy rights in America.
What the president and his aides are talking about—in response to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, congressional objections and public protests – are plans to place some controls on the NSA and perhaps to keep most data in “private hands.”
But what controls will there be on those private hands?
As long as we’re opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider the fact that it’s not just the government that’s paying attention to our communications—and to what they can reveal about our personalities, lifestyles, values, spending habits and political choices.
There’s a reason the NSA has been interested in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you’re mining, you go where the precious resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.
Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They’re big into data mining.
This data mining, and the commercial and political applications that extend from it, gets far less attention than the machinations of the NSA or other governmental intelligence agencies. Tech publications and savvy writers such as Jaron Lanier recognize these concerns. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Senate Commerce Committee have taken some tentative steps to address a few of the worst abuses. But that’s not enough, especially when, as Fordham University’s Alice E. Marwick noted in a smart recent piece for The New York Review of Books,
there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known. Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy. Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals. The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of the activities of data-mining and digital marketing firms are not publicly known at all.
Significantly, it is not just financial profit that data can yield.
As Robert W. McChesney and I note in Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), data is also mined by those who seek power.
Political candidates, political parties, Super PACs and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around. They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time.
Both parties do it. All major candidates do it. Obama did it better than Romney in 2012, and that played a critical role in providing the president with the resources and the strategies that allowed him to easily defeat a well-funded and aggressive challenger. The Grand Old Party’s response was to begin hiring the best and the brightest technical talent. A recent headline announced: “Republican National Committee to Build Platform to Share Voter Data.” Another reported: “RNC Pledges $20 Million to Build Data-Sharing Operation.”
So campaigns are going to do more mining. And so are the billionaires who fund so-called “independent” political operations. Last spring, Politico announced: “Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Lead Charge to Control Republican Data.”
Data already drives the money-and-media election complex that is rapidly remaking American democracy into an American dollarocracy, where election campaigns are long on technical savvy but short, very short, on vision.
So, give the president credit for wading into the debate about how the government uses and abuses phone data. Give key members of Congress, like Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, credit for pointing out that what the president has proposed is “not enough” to “safeguard against indiscriminate, bulk surveillance of everyday Americans.”
But then go the next step. Recognize that addressing governmental actions and abuses does not begin to restore privacy rights. For that to happen, there must be recognition that Marwick is right to argue: “While closer scrutiny of the NSA is necessary and needed, we must apply equal pressure to private corporations to ensure that seemingly harmless targeted mail campaigns and advertisements do not give way to insidious and dangerous violations of personal privacy.”
And that recognition must extend beyond concern regarding abusive commercial applications to include an examination of and responses to new approaches to fund-raising and campaigning that have the potential to warp our politics—and democracy itself.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 17, 2014
“An ‘Impermissible Attempt’ To Coerce Women”: Federal Court Permanently Blocks North Carolina’s Narrated Ultrasound Law
A federal court on Friday permanently blocked a North Carolina law requiring women to undergo coercive counseling and a narrated ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion. The judge permanently enjoined the unconstitutional law, ruling that “the Act requires providers to deliver the state’s message to women who take steps not to hear it and to women who will be harmed by receiving it with no legitimate purpose.”
United States District Court Judge Catherine Eagles called the law “an impermissible attempt to compel these providers to deliver the state’s message in favor of childbirth and against abortion.”
The decision is a clear victory for doctors and women in the state, and a strong indictment of similar laws intended to pressure or shame women out of accessing basic medical care.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, celebrated the ruling in a statement. “Today’s ruling marks a major victory for North Carolina women and sends a message to lawmakers across the country: it is unconstitutional for politicians to interfere in a woman’s personal medical decisions,” she said. “This dangerous law would have required abortion providers to perform an ultrasound and place the image in the woman’s line of sight — even if she asks not to view it. The provider would then be required to describe the image in detail — even over the woman’s objection. It made no exceptions for women under any circumstances, including cases of rape, incest, or those who receive a tragic diagnosis during pregnancy.”
The North Carolina law was a clear overstep, but as Salon has previously noted, forced ultrasound laws do virtually nothing to influence women’s choices, making them little more than intentionally punitive policies intended to shame women for making sound medical choices.
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, January 17, 2014
“Lives In The Balance”: Smoking Guns, The Deafening Silence Of The Assault Weapons Makers
When I hear about another military-style assault-weapon tragedy, I can’t help thinking about cigarettes.
It’s faded a bit into history now, but it was roughly 20 years ago that the heads of seven major tobacco companies were called before Congress to testify in hearings about regulating their products.
History was made when, one by one, they testified under oath that they, personally, did not believe nicotine is addictive – even though their scientists had generated box cars of data showing that creating addiction was precisely the point. One by one, the CEOs willfully deceived Congress in a roll call of commercial infamy: Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, U.S. Tobacco, Lorillard, Liggett, Brown and Williamson, American Tobacco.
By the time the hearings were over, the CEOs were being called “The Seven Dwarfs.”
So, from cigarettes to guns: Where is that public debate with the makers of hollow point bullets, high capacity magazines, and weapons designed to harm and kill human beings as quickly as possible?
(By the way, if you want to wade into these waters, keep your facts straight. A fully automatic weapon fires bullets as long as you hold down the trigger. They’re not illegal, but they are highly regulated. A semiautomatic weapon fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can get one at Walmart. There is no technical definition of assault weapon, but it generally refers to both automatic and semiautomatic rifles. In fact, the very complexity of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban riddled it with so many exceptions that it proved largely ineffective.)
I’ve posed that question of the cigarette maker-gun maker connection in various forums, and I get some interesting, angry, and often logic- twisting responses.
Among my favorites:
– You can’t compare cigarettes and assault weapons. Cigarettes harm and kill a lot more people. Accountability for these two product-related deaths tolls, then, is a matter of degree.
– Why not regulate blunt instruments? More people are killed by hammers each year than by guns – including assault weapons. The fact is: if you torture the data long enough you can make it confess to anything. And there is no doubt that there is a cottage industry on both sides in making statistics fit arguments.
But missing in those arguments: of all the implements used to kill people — knives, fists or a handy vase – only guns are created to do exactly that, and only assault weapons are manufactured expressly to do that as quickly as possible. Seriously – could Adam Lanza have dispatched 26 innocent souls in Newtown in five minutes with anything but an assault weapon?
And of course, there is the second amendment. I won’t try to imagine what was in the minds of the Founding Fathers. But I’m going to guess their thinking did not include high-capacity magazines (the ones Lanza carried held 30 bullets each) that serve up a new bullet as soon as the previous one is fired, and bullets designed to explode inside your body.
Still, as we debate statistics and parse definitions, the public is largely unaware of the companies that are making the weapons that are the subject of the debate. And that is exactly as intended.
Who can come up with the names of the top makers of semi-automatic weapons: like Bushmaster, Sig Sauer, Colt, Smith & Wesson, ArmaLite, DPMS and others?
The reason most people can’t name these companies is because of a very slick sleight of hand – executed flawlessly by NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, the gleefully belligerent face of the NRA who expertly draws attention away from the industry he represents.
LaPierre is very good at a job he is paid a lot of money to do. As long as we’re talking about his outrageous bluster, we’re not talking about the people who make a lot of money from the products he wants to keep on shelves of the local sporting goods store and laid out at gun shows.
His ability to do that is increasingly important to the industry. As hunting declines, so do rifle sales – even with periodic spikes driven by fears of gun restrictions. Long term, how do you replace that? A report from the Violence Policy Center argues that selling military-style assault rifles – re-branded as “modern sporting rifles” – to civilians has been a key part of the industry’s marketing strategy since the 1980s. Women, say gun control advocates and the industry alike, are a high marketing priority. The gun makers insist it’s for their protection. The lethal AR-15 (used in both the Aurora and Newtown killings) comes in pink. (Available now at Gun Goddess.com)
As the debate over assault weapons rages on, the deafening silence of the gun makers reminds me of a lyric in the Jackson Brown song – “Lives in the Balance.” “I want to know who the men in the shadows are. I want to hear somebody asking them why.”
Those who have been killed and injured by weapons made expressly for that purpose deserve no less.
By: Peggy Drexler, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University; Time Magazine, January 17, 2014
“Something Very Twisted Instead”: Straightforward? Not The Best Description Of Chris Christie, Or His Pal Karl Rove
When Karl Rove praises a politician’s “straightforward” approach to an erupting scandal, it seems wise to expect that something very twisted will instead emerge in due course – and to consider his real objectives.
In this instance, the former Bush White House political boss – and current Republican SuperPAC godfather – was discussing Chris Christie’s response to “Bridgegate,” as the events surrounding the vengeful closure of part of the George Washington Bridge by the New Jersey governor’s aides is now known.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Rove said that Christie “did himself a lot of good” during the famous two-hour press conference on the scandal, when he sorrowfully announced the firing of a deputy chief of staff and a top state party official, for “lying” to him about the bridge affair.
“I think his handling of this, being straightforward, taking action — saying, ‘I’m responsible’ — firing the people probably gives him some street cred with some Tea Party Republicans, who say that’s what we want in a leader, somebody who steps up and takes responsibility,” said Rove. Pandering to the Fox audience, he went on to contrast the righteous Christie with Bill and Hillary Clinton as well as Barack Obama, and to note that the IRS and Benghazi “scandals” hadn’t gotten nearly enough attention compared with Bridgegate.
While Rove sticks a halo on the man his old boss Dubya used to call “Big Boy,” everyone else might want to wait for the documents and testimony forthcoming from investigations at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge, in both houses of the New Jersey legislature, in the Department of Justice and in the United States Senate.
Observers dazzled by Christie’s press conference performance should perhaps ask themselves how his top aides managed to pursue this scheme – evidently in revenge against the mayor of Fort Lee, the New Jersey commuter town so badly damaged by the closing of traffic lanes – under his nose.
They might ask why the governor continued to believe, as he says he did, that the controversial action resulted from a “traffic safety study” for almost a month after the Port Authority’s top executive and two other PA officials testified last December 9 that no such study ever existed.
They might further ask about the curious photograph published by the Wall Street Journal on January 14, showing Christie yukking it up in public with David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who ordered the lane closures at the behest of Bridget Anne Kelly, last September 11 — three days into the traffic crisis in Fort Lee.
And they might then ask why Christie insisted — at the endless press conference where his candor so impressed Rove — that he has had “no contact with David Wildstein in a long time, a long time, well before the election.”
Christie’s description of his supposedly distant relationship with Wildstein is only one among many of his claims of innocence that contradict either the public record or common sense — or both. While awaiting additional information from Wildstein and other potentially immunized defendants, however, it may be worth considering the history that links Christie to Rove – and why the Republican strategist is so enamored of the New Jersey governor.
Their relationship was first exposed during the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal, when investigations of the gross political abuse of the Justice Department by the Bush White House clearly implicated Rove. Among the U.S. Attorneys cited as dubious political appointees was Christie, whose law partner, a top Bush fundraiser and Republican operative, had forwarded his résumé to Rove. Later, while still in the U.S. Attorney’s office – where he stage-managed a blatantly political election-year probe of Democratic senator Robert Menendez – Christie consulted with Rove about running for governor.
Christie is exactly the sort of presidential hopeful that a notorious bully like Rove prefers: a blustering loudmouth with a common touch; an experienced fundraiser who knows how to find the money; a Wall Street conservative capable of stirring up the base without scaring the independents. Without Christie as the GOP’s 2016 frontrunner, Rove has no plausible alternative to Tea Party hopefuls Rand Paul and Ted Cruz – and may see his own power, already waning, finally eclipsed.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 16, 2014
“It’s Not Time To Move On”: When John Boehner Tells Darrell Issa, “It’s Time To Move On”, It Will Be A Great Day Indeed
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) bridge scandal grows more interesting every day, as new evidence emerges, new questions arise, and new developments unfold. We don’t yet know why the Christie administration engaged in this corruption, who else was involved, who might yet turn on whom, and when the next shoe might drop.
And with all this intrigue surrounding one of the GOP’s highest-profile figures, the nation’s highest-ranking Republican official made the funniest comment of his professional career.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Thursday said that lawmakers and the media should move past the controversy surrounding New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge last year, noting that the governor has “held people accountable.”
“It’s time to move on,” he said during a Thursday press conference. “I think the governor made clear that mistakes were made.”
Um, no. Actually, it’s not time to move on. Ordinarily, it’s time to move on when all of the relevant questions have been answered, not when all of the relevant questions remain unanswered.
(House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa recently vowed to spend 2014 working on the IRS “scandal,” Benghazi, and “Fast and Furious.” When Boehner tells Issa, “It’s time to move on,” it will be a great day, indeed.)
As for developments in the Garden State today, quite a bit has happened over the last few hours:
* 20 new subpoenas are going out.
* The Senate Transportation Committee received information from the Port Authority, and found “no evidence” to support the “traffic study” excuse still being touted by Christie last week.
* The state Assembly has begun its new legislative session by creating a special investigatory committee to oversee the probe into the scandal. As Rachel noted on the show last night, it will led in part by former federal prosecutor Reid Schar, who helped convict former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D).
* The state Senate is also moving forward with its own investigation.
* The Christie administration has lawyered up.
* Bridget Kelly has lawyered up.
I’m at a bit of a loss as to how any fair-minded person could look at these developments, realize there are so many unresolved elements of this scandal, and conclude, “It’s time to move on.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 16, 2014
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