What a disgusting and embarrassing state of affairs our democracy has become.
We are heading quickly into third world territory.
Thank you SCOTUS, thank you 1% ers, thank you GOP.… Read the rest
When author Julia Angwin has to post a photo of herself online, she now prefers to use a stencil image of her face in order to avoid detection by facial recognition software.
Welcome to her paranoid world of trying to frustrate increasingly sophisticated snoops.
http://www.amazon.com/Dragnet-Nation-Security-Relentless-Surveillance/dp/0805098070
Reflecting on her experiment, Angwin writes, “I wasn’t happy with the toll that my countersurveillance techniques had taken on my psyche.” She continues, “The more I learned about who was watching me, the more paranoid I became. By the end… I was refusing to have digital conversations with my close friends without encryption. I began using my fake name for increasingly trivial transactions.”
Links:
Reset The Net ~ “Don’t ask for your privacy. Take it back. Today we #ResetTheNet to stop mass spying.… Read the rest
“There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That’s the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond.” Lawrence Lessig
Lessig’s talk is snappy, hard-hitting, and make a compelling case that no matter what you think the most important issue is, you’re just not going to get it until this problem is addressed. Like many pundits, Lessig feels a need to decorate his speech with a bit of “both sides do it” (in this case, saying that real small government Republicans are also losers because the system provides little incentive for politicians to let go of the levers that give them some power over the money men) without owning up to the fact that the left (otherwise known as the positions, economic well-being, and security of a large majority of Americans) takes the brunt of the damage in this rich get richer system.… Read the rest