[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Privacy: Remember way back -- one week ago?

One week ago I wrote:
> Sometimes firms release what they call "anonymized" information -- info
> where they believe they've removed all of the uniquely identifying
> parts. But we know that doesn't work. See the famous database where
> reporters were able to turn a set of search engine queries into a
> specific woman looking up medical problems for her friends 
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak).

This week Lyft, a transportation firm akin to Uber which uses some 
autonomous vehicles, said it was

> excited to announce that Lyft is releasing a subset of our autonomous
> driving data, the Level 5 Dataset, and we will be sponsoring a research
> competition.

https://medium.com/lyftlevel5/unlocking-access-to-self-driving-research-the-lyft-level-5-dataset-and-competition-d487c27b1b6c

The data is available at https://level5.lyft.com/dataset/ and the prizes in 
their competition are worth about $25,000 (a paltry sum considering the 
businesses behind these vehicles are worth billions of dollars).

It'll be more interesting to see what information people can reverse 
engineer from the data and what those inferences mean to people. Perhaps 
we'll find some interesting correlations to things we know go on at certain 
locations (in flagrante delicto).

Related:
https://cpg.doc.ic.ac.uk/individual-risk/ -- estimate the odds you'll be 
identified despite anonymization by answering a few questions many people 
can answer about you (age, sex, zipcode).




Privacy: More surveillance from further away via better lenses.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/7/24/20708236/fujifilm-sx800-security-camera-long-range-1000mm-focal-length-image-stabilization-heat-haze-fog 
-- Fujifilm's SX800 surveillance camera has a 40X zoom which they say "is 
enough to focus on a car’s license plate from 1km or roughly 0.6 miles away".

 From the article (which is basically an ad posing as an article):
> From a cost perspective, this makes total sense for the facilities
> themselves since they’ll be able to cover a larger area with a smaller
> number of cameras. But for everyone else it’s a good reminder that just
> because you can’t see a security camera, that doesn’t mean one can’t see
> you, even if it’s multiple kilometers away.

This would seem to apply if one wanted to zoom into someone else's house 
windows as well -- high zoom capabilities allow one to more effectively spy 
on one's neighbors. Perhaps they're doing something you'll want to report 
to someone else? The article, typical of the corporate media that makes up 
most of the tech press, fails to bring up anything that would raise privacy 
concerns. The only coverage allowed in such so-called "articles" are items 
that ostensibly make the vendor look good.

The article has pointers to advertisements illustrating this capability.





Economy: Forgive them their debts? Or charge 'em forever?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-cant-handle-a-400-unexpected-expense.html 
-- Even corporate media can't avoid reporting on why the economy looks so 
bad for so many Americans: debt.

> Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay
> for an unexpected bill.
> 
> If — or, more likely, when — they're confronted with such an expense,
> they'd probably have to sell something or go into debt. The now
> oft-cited figure comes from the Federal Reserve's 2018 Survey of
> Household Economics and Decision Making, in which some 12,000 households
> were asked about their financial well-being.

[...]

> The Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making asks people how
> they would pay for an unforeseen $400 expense. If a respondent said they
> simply wouldn't be able to or would have to borrow money, sell something
> or neglect other bills to do so, they were included in the share of
> people for whom coming up with the money would be a challenge, which
> added up to that alarming 40%. Yet the Survey of Consumer Finances,
> which asks respondents for their bank account balance, found the share
> of households who have less than $400 in their checking or savings
> accounts was closer to 20%.
> 
> For some reason, many people who had $400 on hand still said they'd
> struggle to come up with the money. "We were scratching our heads," Chen
> said.
> 
> Ultimately, the researchers landed on a plausible explanation for both
> the discrepancy and why so many Americans are living paycheck to
> paycheck — debt. Many of the people who have $400 or more available to
> them likely have already earmarked that money for another obligation
> (and so, in other words, the cash isn't really available to them).
> 
> Frequently, Chen said, it's an upcoming credit card bill tying up the
> money. Indeed, after the researchers at Boston College subtracted
> people's outstanding credit card debt from their account balances, the
> disparity between the two surveys all but closed.
> 
> "Unpaid credit card balances are high-interest loans," Chen said. "I'm
> not surprised that households want to pay that off as quickly as they
> can." (The average interest rate today is almost 18%, compared with 12%
> a decade ago, according to Creditcards.com.)

Related: "...and forgive them their debts" by Michael Hudson
ISBN-10: 3981826027
ISBN-13: 978-3981826029
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html -- John Siman's review 
on Yves Smith's "Naked Capitalism" blog. The book gets a glowing review 
except for perhaps being too:
> densely written that it is profoundly difficult to read. I took six
> days, which included six or so hours of delightful and enlightening
> conversation with the author himself, to get through it. I often availed
> myself of David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years when I
> struggled to follow some of Hudson’s arguments.

On "moral hazards" consider the following:

> When I sent a draft of my review to a friend last night, he emailed me
> back with this question:
> 
> — Wouldn’t debt cancellations just take away any incentive for people to
> pay back loans and, thus, take away the incentive to give loans? People
> who haven’t heard the argument before and then read your review will
> probably be skeptical at first.
> 
> Here is Michael Hudson’s response:
> 
> — Creditors argue that if you forgive debts for a class of debtors –
> say, student loans – that there will be some “free riders,” and that
> people will expect to have bad loans written off. This is called a
> “moral hazard,” as if debt writedowns are a hazard to the economy, and
> hence, immoral.
> 
> This is a typical example of Orwellian doublespeak engineered by public
> relations factotums for bondholders and banks. The real hazard to every
> economy is the tendency for debts to grow beyond the ability of debtors
> to pay. The first defaulters are victims of junk mortgages and student
> debtors, but by far the largest victims are countries borrowing from the
> IMF in currency “stabilization” (that is economic destabilization)
> programs.
> 
> It is moral for creditors to have to bear the risk (“hazard”) of making
> bad loans, defined as those that the debtor cannot pay without losing
> property, status or becoming insolvent. A bad international loan to a
> government is one that the government cannot pay except by imposing
> austerity on the economy to a degree that output falls, labor is obliged
> to emigrate to find employment, capital investment declines, and
> governments are forced to pay creditors by privatizing and selling off
> the public domain to monopolists.
> 
> The analogy in Bronze Age Babylonia was a flight of debtors from the
> land. Today from Greece to Ukraine, it is a flight of skilled labor and
> young labor to find work abroad.
> 
> No debtor – whether a class of debtors such as students or victims of
> predatory junk mortgages, or an entire government and national economy –
> should be obliged to go on the road to and economic suicide and
> self-destruction in order to pay creditors. The definition of statehood
> – and hence, international law – should be to put one’s national
> solvency and self-determination above foreign financial attacks. Ceding
> financial control should be viewed as a form of warfare, which countries
> have a legal right to resist as “odious debt” under moral international
> law.
> 
> The basic moral financial principal should be that creditors should bear
> the hazard for making bad loans that the debtor couldn’t pay — like the
> IMF loans to Argentina and Greece. The moral hazard is their putting
> creditor demands over the economy’s survival.





Russiagate: Seth Rich's murder is going to get some coverage (if only in 
alternative news that doesn't let the corporate narrative dictate what is 
considered news).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGac4K4KuPo -- RT's report.
http://lawflog.com/?p=2210 -- an article by Ty Clevenger, Ed Butowsky's 
lawyer in the lawsuit that brings Seth Rich back in the news. This is also 
the source of RT's report.

Ty Clevenger writes:
> Former Fox News news analyst Ellen Ratner relayed information from
> Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Texas businessman Ed Butowsky
> regarding Seth Rich’s role in transferring emails to Wikileaks,
> according to an amended lawsuit that I filed this morning on behalf of
> Mr. Butowsky.

Ellen Ratner is also the former sister of Julian's deceased former attorney 
Michael Ratner. Butowsky says he met with Ellen Ratner and she told him 
Seth Rich was the source of the DNC email leaks.

The amended lawsuit filing 
(http://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019.07.15-Amended-complaint-stamped.pdf) 
includes:

> The DNC employee responsible for the leaks was Seth Rich, and he was 
> assisted by his brother Aaron. Mr. Butowsky does not know exactly when 
> the DNC figured out that Mr. Rich was the source of the leak. On July 
> 10, 2016, however, Mr. Rich was fatally shot while walking home in 
> Washington, D.C., and the murder has not been solved. Mr. Butowsky does 
> not know whether the murder is related to Mr. Rich's role in leaking
> DNC emails.
Butowsky claims that the negative press about Seth Rich's involvement (al 
'Seth Rich is not involved, Russia did it!') hurt Butowsky's business. 
Available evidence to date shows the DNC emails were leaked from within, 
not "hacked" (or obtained illicitly) from outside via the Internet.

Butowsky also claims that the Rich family also knew their murdered son Seth 
was a source of the DNC email leaks with Seth's brother:

> Butowsky: What I told him [Joel Rich, Seth Rich's father] was that I
> was told that your sons [brothers Seth Rich & Aaron Rich] downloaded the
> emails from the DNC server and sold them to WikiLeaks. And Mr. Rich
> said, and I didn't see him this was over the phone, like "Ed, we already
> know that. That's not new information to us.".

The Mueller Report says:

> Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016.
> In June, the Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team
> publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer
> network.

The Mueller Report offers no evidence to back up this claim.

Julian Assange has been consistent in never lying about what WikiLeaks 
publishes (WikiLeaks documents are what WikiLeaks claims them to be), 
identifying the source of the DNC emails as not a government, and that the 
DNC email data was leaked. The FBI did not interview him about this 
information, not even as part of the Mueller probe.




Healthcare/Identity politics: Seema Verma, Administrator for the Centers 
for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doesn't like public option or Medicare 
for All calling both "equally dangerous".

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/22/trumps-medicare-chief-i-view-public-option-and-medicare-all-equally-dangerous 
--

> Verma's remarks calling for an expansion of the current for-profit
> healthcare system came during a keynote speech at the Medicare Advantage
> Summit in Washington, D.C.
> 
> They are unsurprising, given her record of seeking to strip away
> healthcare "protections and provisions for vulnerable people," and, more
> recently, calling a single-payer plan like Medicare for All "bad" and
> "scary."
> 
> Deploying a standard GOP talking point, Verma said Monday, "we need
> government to be more hands-off."
> 
> She expressed concern over "the proposals we have seen to upend
> healthcare in America, particularly Medicare for All and the public
> option." Picking up on an accusation she's levied before, Verma said,
> "These proposals are the largest threats to the American healthcare
> system."
> 
> A Medicare for All system, she falsely asserted, would boot every
> American "into a system where Congress and bureaucrats make decisions
> about their care." Repeating the administration's narrative, Verma said
> Medicare for All would "harm seniors' access to care."
> 
> "I view a public option and Medicare for All as equally dangerous," she
> said.

If we're to take identity politics seriously we have to ask how this could 
possibly be? Verma is a woman, and we've been told that women are needed in 
positions of power because they're women. We're told to accept a woman's 
candidacy without regard to her politics (much as we were supposed to have 
supported Hillary Clinton for US president in 2016, or take advice from 
fellow war criminal Madeleine Albright who, in 1996, famously backed 
killing 500,000 Iraqi children via Iraq sanctions when she told '60 
Minutes' that "We think the price is worth it").

It seems like Verma is speaking on this to lay the groundwork for seeing 
Biden as a progressive:

> Verma framed potential passage of a public option, a plan put forth by
> Biden, as tantamount to passing a single-payer system:
> 
> "Access will be compromised for patients, and reimbursement cuts in the
> public plan will shift more pressure to employer-sponsored plans to make
> up the difference, driving up costs for 180 million Americans with
> private insurance. Make no mistake—the public option is a Trojan horse
> with a single payer hiding inside. It would use the force of government
> price setting to crowd private insurers out of the marketplace
> altogether, and achieve the true policy goal of a government-run single
> payer healthcare system."
> 
> Those comments echo industry talk points like the ones put out by the
> Partnership for America's Health Care Future.





Russiagate: Aaron Maté speaking on Muller hearing is very much worth 
watching particularly for anyone who hasn't paid attention to this up to 
now. Maté is one of relatively few commentators who gets to the facts: no 
conspiracy shown, no indictments made from Muller's report, the evidence 
for this hoax falls apart on analysis, and all of the time and money spent 
on it means resources not spent giving the American public what it needs (a 
national jobs program, potable water pipes, Medicare for All, pulling the 
US out of its many wars, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQXOV0PHL4 -- with Jimmy Dore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckAcHlkHDXk -- speaking on RT.




War: The US will continue to enable Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, continue 
to be the main reason the Yemeni are in the biggest humanitarian disaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QeHE-riiA4 -- Trump vetoes a bill to block 
selling US weapons to SA and UAE.



Publishing: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) sues Google for allegedly infringing 
her free speech by suspending her campaign ads after the first Democratic 
Party debate.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/07/25/tulsi-gabbard-democrat-candidate-sues-google/1828271001/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-sues-google.html

> Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the long-shot presidential candidate from
> Hawaii, said in a federal lawsuit that Google infringed on her free
> speech when it briefly suspended her campaign’s advertising account
> after the first Democratic debate in June.
> 
> The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in a federal court in Los Angeles, is
> believed to be the first time a presidential candidate has sued a major
> technology firm.

[...]

> Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google
> suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27
> and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her
> message to potential voters.
> 
> After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most
> searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on
> the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its
> website at the top of search results for her name.
> 
> The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were
> being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high
> rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

[...]

> No other campaigns have publicly claimed that Google has suspended their
> advertising accounts.
> 
> Interest in Ms. Gabbard, who has served four terms in the House and is
> an Army National Guard veteran, spiked after the debate. She entered the
> presidential race as a relative unknown and is still polling at less
> than 1 percent, according to New York Times polling averages.
> 
> But her appeal has crossed traditional party lines. She has drawn
> support from both the right and the left because of a staunch antiwar
> message. She has also received favorable coverage from influential
> conservative news media like Drudge Report, Fox News and Breitbart.

It should be interesting to see what comes from discovery in this case and 
to read the terms of the contract between Tulsi Now (Gabbard's campaign 
committee) and Google.

-J