Should We Make Everyone's Tax Returns Public???

How much money do you make? How many tax loopholes do you use? Do you have a bunch of medical deductions?  Are you or your dependents suffering from some expensive and possibly embarrassing medical condition that you would rather not discuss with most people? Did you properly report all of your income, investment income and capital gains for the past year? 

What has been your rate of income growth over your lifetime? Are you well paid at your job?  Are you a lagging performer? Are you only hanging on to your job because your bosses don't think you're worth the trouble to fire because you earn so little? Do you have a job or do you instead survive on some combination of disability, savings, capital gains, and family or spousal support?  Did you retire early thanks to wise investments, business ownership and inheritances? Well if you're like most Americans I know you probably think that information and data like it is strictly between you, the IRS and any really close friends, family or intimates that you decide have a pressing need to know that information. It's not for public consumption. It's private.

Well at least one person on the NYT editorial board thinks that information should all be public for everyone.

In October 1924, the federal government threw open for public inspection the files that recorded the incomes of American taxpayers, and the amounts they had paid in taxes. Almost a century later, it’s time to revisit the merits of universal public disclosure. Democrats in Congress are fighting to obtain President Trump’s tax returns under a separate 1924 law, written in response to related concerns about public corruption. That issue could be resolved, at least in part, if Congress embraced the broader case for publishing everyone’s tax bill.

Upskirts, The Lincoln Memorial and Privacy

I believe in privacy. I also believe in free speech and free expression. Sometimes those values conflict. I have always believed that if an attractive lady has taken the trouble to put something on public display it would be rude not to look. And gentlemen should always strive to avoid being rude. The probability of me telling a non-related woman or a woman who I do not know from Eve that she is showing too much and should cover up is probably zero. I may have been tragically warped for life by watching too many Benny Hill skits at an impressionable age. That's my brother's hypothesis anyway. I don't say no to that. Nonetheless, if I did accidentally see something interesting, I definitely wouldn't grab a camera and start taking pictures. THAT seems a little bit, well creepy might be too strong of a word, but over the top would certainly fit. A gentleman doesn't do that. You take a quick glance, maybe offer a smile and keep moving. Discretion is important. You don't stand there drooling and staring like a fat man at a $2 all you can eat buffet. But everyone has different styles. When faced with publicly visible evidence of attractive femininity while visiting the Lincoln Monument, one Mr. Christopher Cleveland did more than take a brief look. He also chose not to approach the women to inform them in a non-threatening big brotherly manner that they might be revealing more than they intended. No. Mr. Cleveland decided that the right move was to whip it out (his camera that is) and start taking photographs. The local police noticed him. They forced him to stop taking pictures. They made him come away with them. Mr. Cleveland was charged with voyeurism. His camera's memory card had scores of revealing images of women in public places. And that's when things got interesting.

Apparently the crime of voyeurism requires that someone be trying to violate or actually violating your privacy. And when you are in public you have less of (none?) an expectation of privacy. In this particular case the judge, D.C. Superior Court Judge Juliet McKenna, found that Mr. Cleveland did not look at anything that wasn't on public display already. She even disputed the prosecutor's characterization of Mr. Cleveland's actions as "upskirting". She tossed the case against Mr. Cleveland. The judge wrote that:

'This Court finds that no individual clothed and positioned in such a manner in a public area in broad daylight in the presence of countless other individuals could have a reasonable expectation of privacy.' 'The images captured were not 'incidental glimpses' and in fact were images that were exposed to the public without requiring any extraordinary lengths whatsoever, to view. 'The photographs recovered from Mr Cleveland's camera memory card depict a variety of images ranging from long shots of the Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool and groups of people sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to close up photos of individual women seated or standing in the area.

'As Defendant's Response acknowledges some of these women are seated in such a way that their private areas, including the upper inches of their buttocks, are clearly visible.' However, all of these images were similarly available to other passersby in the area.'  The court documents added that there was no evidence Mr. Cleveland positioned his camera in any way or employed any photographic techniques , so as to capture images that were not already on public display.

So basically the judge ruled that if you are revealing something in public you can't charge people with a crime for looking at it or taking pics. If you are curious you can read the judge's decision here. When a similar case occurred in Massachusetts, legislators changed the law. In the Massachusetts case because the offender was taking steps to obtain photos that weren't readily visible to anyone I think there was a bit more expectation of privacy. I'm not certain that's the case here. There are occasions in life when we experience behavior that might be rude, tasteless or even reprehensible but isn't criminal. This might be one of those times. NYC hosts Puerto Rican Day, St. Patrick's Day and West Indian Day parades among others. Men from the entire eastern seaboard turn out in droves to watch, photograph and record women. Are those men all criminals? Some might say so but I wouldn't. Heterosexual men like looking at women. It's the nature of the beast. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is never ever ever going to change. If we make it a crime to photograph a woman would it also be a crime to look at a woman? If a man runs across a woman in revealing clothing should he be forced to avert his eyes on pain of prosecution? We don't have enough jails for that. If Cleveland had merely been looking instead of taking pictures would that have been okay?  I think I would feel differently if, instead of just taking pictures from afar, Cleveland had rigged cameras attached to his shoes, was dropping items in front of women, was putting cameras under skirts, or was otherwise going out of his way to violate decorum. That's criminal. Cleveland didn't do that. As the judge said, nothing he did was covert or surreptitious.

I think that you should expect privacy in your home, in your letters, when you're making whoopie, when you're in the bathroom, etc. But when you're in public, privacy isn't really a reasonable expectation. If in public, I notice a woman with a really short skirt or low cut/tight top, that's not being a voyeur. That's being human. If someone is taking pictures at a public memorial I don't want the police to be able to arrest the man, rifle through his photos until they find a woman's image and then charge the man with a sex crime. Increasingly governments and corporations are using surveillance of public streets and private areas both to maximize profit and prevent or solve crime. I find that a little creepier than an individual man looking at a woman but it could just be that I'm not a woman. I might have a different perspective if I were. But then again I might not. The judge was a woman and ruled as she did. The law must be above and beyond our personal biases.

What are your thoughts?

Pay your auto loan or don't drive!!!

I generally think that if you take out a loan you should adhere to the legally enforceable terms of the contact. So if you agree to pay X dollars back per month then you really should pay X dollars back per month. It irritates me when people borrow money from me and find all sorts of creative reasons why they should not pay it back. I think this is true regardless of financial status. Pay what you owe. A deal is a deal. That said, depending on what the loan or service was, the creditor can encounter difficulty getting repayment. The Federal government and to a lesser extent state governments have fewer problems getting money owed from you as they have the power to just TAKE money from your account, seize your assets, tell your employer or bank to stop giving you money and put you in prison. That will get your attention. Utility providers can shutoff service for non payment. Customers notice that. Loan officers operating outside the law can send unpleasant people to your home or workplace to threaten physical harm if they don't immediately receive payment. Getting your shins cracked with a baseball bat or having your hands broken can provide financial clarity. Some other creditors, say lenders on auto loans, don't have the ability to immediately and seamlessly compel payment. They loaned money on a quickly depreciating asset. Many people don't give car loans priority over housing or food costs. The debtor can easily move his car to another state. To repossess the asset, depending on state law, the creditor usually has to go to court to obtain a judgment before hiring some semi-reputable people to retrieve the vehicle. This could all be messy and costly. In some zip codes if someone hears or sees someone breaking into their car, they will shoot first and ask questions later. So what's a creditor to do?

Well imagine if instead of having to go through the hassle of sending out multiple dunning letters, taking people to court and spending money on repo men, a creditor could ensure that the debtor was interested in, even eager to pay the creditor on time and in full each and every month for the life of the loan? How would someone do that you ask? Well the creditor would just install a handy dandy gadget which prevents the auto from running if the creditor has not been paid.  

The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender. Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March. 

“I felt absolutely helpless,” said Ms. Bolender, a single mother who stopped working to care for her daughter. It was not the only time this happened: Her car was shut down that March, once in April and again in June. This new technology is bringing auto loans — and Wall Street’s version of Big Brother — into the lives of people with credit scores battered by the financial downturn. Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year. 

Last year, Nevada’s Legislature heard testimony from T. Candice Smith, 31, who said she thought she was going to die when her car suddenly shut down, sending her careening across a three-lane Las Vegas highway. “It was horrifying,” she recalled.
Ms. Smith said that her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance, had remotely activated her ignition interruption device.
“It’s a safety hazard for the driver and for all others on the road,” said her lawyer, Sophia A. Medina, with the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.

LINK

This is a good example of how poverty is quite profitable for certain segments of our population. Although these devices are currently only being used on those customers unfortunate enough to be entangled in sketchy subprime loans I would predict it's only a matter of time before usage is expanded to the entire consumer auto loan market. In short you might have a 800 FICO score and be willing to put down 80% of the car's value as a down payment. But a bank might still decide that it can reduce risk by insisting that all of its loans must include shutoff devices. I wouldn't like that. But it's not just enlightened self-interest that would make me oppose these devices. It might be funny from afar if, as described in the article, Joe Sixpack is embarrassed as a deadbeat in front of his lady. It's not so funny when a car shuts off while it's being driven. It's not funny when a car won't start when a police or fire vehicle needs to get in front of it. There's no humor in a a non-working car when someone needs to get to the hospital or there is some other emergency. When I am on the road I try to be as vigilant as possible to protect myself and the lives of others. Part of that protection is a societal interest in ensuring that other drivers are licensed and that their cars work. I don't want to be on the road with other cars that could suddenly shut off. That's an unnecessary risk for us all. The lenders are making unnecessary and dangerous intrusions into our privacy and our safety. I understand their interest in receiving timely payments. But there are other concerns against which those must be balanced. Electronic shutoff devices are a bad idea.

Should electronic shutoff devices be outlawed?

Would you buy a car if your loan included this device as a requirement?

Are these people just examples of poor financial acumen?

Should the Federal government get involved in regulating these devices?

Snowden Reveals NSA Spying On Americans

In the movie Baby Boy the self-described OG named Melvin played by Ving Rhames sneers at his possible future stepson. Melvin says that everything that the younger man is currently experiencing on the streets, the older man has already seen. To him, he boasts, it's just a rerun. 
I thought of that scene when I read the latest news that contrary to what its apologists have been saying about the NSA and the associated security structure, the NSA and FBI actually are spying on American citizens with political views and/or ethnicity that are out of the ordinary. This is something that Americans have seen before with surveillance (legal and extra legal) on civil rights and anti-war or left-wing activists from the 50s through the 80s. Rinse and repeat. Additionally the NSA is NOT just collecting metadata but actual data that lays bare the lives of millions of Americans who are neither suspected of or charged with criminal activity. So when the NSA spokesmen say they don't collect the actual contents of Americans' communications they are lying. These lies were obvious. Of course if anyone ever bothers to ask the President about this I am sure he will say that he knew nothing about it and is outraged. He will launch a commission to get to the bottom of it. Maybe. Someday. He will want to be perfectly clear that no one is more outraged than him. Yada, yada, yada. Rinse and repeat. Look over here there's news about Kim Kardashian! Look over there there's news about that celebrity's love life! Buy this pill it will make you a sexual dynamo! Start this secret Hollywood diet to lose weight to fit into this dress! These are the things that most Americans care about much more than the NSA activities, unfortunately.

I'd like to share Glenn Greenwald's challenge to people who serenely state they have nothing to hide from the government. If you have nothing to hide and just can't understand why other people don't want the government snooping around their personal effects I think you're lying to yourself. Self-deception is not the worst thing. We all do it sometimes. But on the off chance that you're not lying to yourself, please drop me an email with all of your financial, employer, personal email and social media passwords, intimate communications between you and the provider(s) of your nookie (pictures are preferred), medical records, discussions with close family members, your resume, academic transcripts, job performance reviews and of course a picture of you bending over and coughing twice. We just can't be too sure these days. Don't want to do that? Think it's a little odd that someone wants that info? Don't trust me? But you must trust the NSA because they are getting all of that exact information. Without a warrant. Without your consent. Just like Snowden said they were. Who's the liar now? Hmmm. Similarly, while the NSA is casting a wide net to vacuum up sexy pictures that women sent their boyfriends or husbands, it and the FBI are specifically targeting prominent Muslim Americans. These people have not been charged with a crime.  Five of the Americans monitored were willing to step forward.

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;
• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;
• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;
• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;
• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

“I just don’t know why,” says Gill, whose AOL and Yahoo! email accounts were monitored while he was a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “I’ve done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my community—I’ve done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do.”

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”

LINK

There have been people who have questioned the validity of Snowden's claims or whether or not he is a whistleblower. Some of those people are quite expert in law, commerce, government or military. I respect their concerns. Truly I do. But I think that these latest revelations should end that discussion. The government is lying to its citizens. The NSA and FBI are out of control. The NSA can't be trusted with the information it has. No government could. Snowden revealed and has proved that your government was and is lying to you. He's a whistleblower in my book. The entire alphabet soup framework of security apparatuses and government agencies needs to be dismantled and brought back under strict constitutional control. I do not view this as a partisan issue. There are Republicans who are outraged by these reveals and Democrats who couldn't care less. And vice versa. A lot of Republicans like invasive overreaching busybody government as long as it's not trying to provide birth control. Although I rag on President Obama in truth this issue is something that didn't start with him and won't end with him. It's a problem that has gotten worse with each President in the 20th century but took off after WW2 and the creation of the national security state. This security state may indeed see itself as independent of whoever is in the White House. Presidents change but security interests and institutional interests, as defined by spies and law enforcement, do not. 

The bottom line is that in a free country we can't allow the government to spy on its people in this manner. Citizens who are afraid to express themselves politically, who censor private communications for fear of government surveillance, who consider other citizens unworthy of robust constitutional protections, are citizens who may have forgotten what it means to be American.

What do YOU think about these latest revelations?

Obama Administration: DHS Proposal for National License Plate Tracking

If you're like millions of other people, you probably woke up this morning, had breakfast, and performed the usual toiletries that clean, psychologically normal and healthy people perform. You then bustled yourself off to yet another exciting day of work, school, raising your children, enjoying your retirement or any other number of productive or leisurely activities. One thing you probably didn't do is stop by your local police station or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office and provide those kind men and women a detailed, hour by hour itinerary of your plans for the day, how long you thought these things would take, who you'd be seeing and where you'd be for most of the day. I know that you're probably pretty busy. Perhaps the critical importance of letting the government and its running dog corporate lackeys know where you were slipped your mind. Never fear. DHS has got you covered.

In a sad reminder of just how far government has sunken and how contemptuous many governmental bureaucratic or law-enforcement types are of a citizen's right to privacy and to be left alone, the DHS confirmed that it is seeking a private agency to assist it in building a database of every US license plate and its real time location.

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

The agency said the length of time the data is retained would be up to the winning vendor. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, one of the leading providers of tag-reader data, keeps its records indefinitely. Nationwide, local police as well as commercial companies are gathering license-plate data using various means. One common method involves drivers for repossession companies methodically driving up and down streets with cameras mounted on their cars snapping photos of vehicles. Some police forces have cameras mounted on patrol cars. Other images may be retrieved from border crossings, interstate highway on-ramps and toll plazas.

Customs and Border Protection, another DHS agency, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the Justice Department, also have deployed cameras along the country’s borders. But DHS’s effort appears to be the first time a federal law enforcement agency is seeking such extensive access to a broad repository of data capturing the movements and images of American motorists from metropolitan ­areas...

Read the full article here. It's even worse than it sounds. 

DHS Solicitation of bids

If you've read this blog for more than a month or so you know where I stand on civil liberties and privacy. So you can probably guess what I think of this idea. Very simply this is bovine excrement. Wet stinky greasy foul bovine excrement. This is precisely the sort of thing that we read about states like Communist China or the former East Germany doing. A government that tries to know what its citizens are reading, with whom the citizens are communicating via phone, email, letter, and where the citizens are traveling and why is not a government that I have any respect for. It's a government that needs a radical haircut in its powers and so-called authority. If someone from the government wants to know what I did today they could ask me. And I could tell them to go  attempt airborne copulation with a rapidly revolving pastry. Unless I am under formal government control via imprisonment, parole or probation, who I talk to, why I talk to them, who I sleep with, where and why I travel, who my friends are and so forth and so on are none of the government's business. If the government REALLY needs to know, get a warrant. This is most definitely not a partisan issue. The great problem as I see it is that these increasing attacks on civil liberties and stepped up surveillance of citizen movements are sort of a Nixon to China moment. It took a right wing politician to attempt to woo China into the capitalist marketplace and make diplomatic concessions to the Chinese. This neutralized and isolated the rabid right-wing base that would have otherwise fiercely opposed such an action by a centrist or left leaning politician. Similarly if it had been widely reported under a Republican Administration that the FBI/DHS etc were seeking to maintain records of individual travel by all Americans, I suspect that many more left leaning activist groups and politicians might have slightly more than a few mild concerns to express. But because Obama is behind it you won't hear more than a few mumbles from most progressive people. This is wrong. Everyone should oppose these steps.

There are some fair minded people of goodwill who nevertheless still wonder why civil libertarians were so angered by warrantless wiretapping, metadata gathering, email and social network monitoring. They claim that as long as the government keeps us safe what's the big deal. To those people I would say that the big deal is exactly that giving the government a pass on the above activities, as we have largely done, just emboldens the government to take other bites out of our freedom. This really is a slippery slope.  People who come up with these sorts of ideas never ever have enough information. There's always someone out there who may have some fig leaf of privacy left. That bothers control freaks. There are many people who were alleged to have said this but it really is true that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  If you're still not convinced that this expansion is problematic I'm not sure what to say to you. The opportunities for abuse are endless in such a system. We know that the government already targets people with political views that it doesn't like. Is it such a leap to believe that armed with a real time database of people's travels that further abuses would proliferate?  Let's imagine for a moment that there is that is a pugnaciously righteous attorney general or governor of a large east coast state. This man has numerous bitter rivals and enemies among the political and financial establishment. So his detractors monitor his movements until they realize this pompous populist gadfly is spending quality time at a brothel or house of a woman not his wife. So the politician's rivals then try to blackmail this man into softening his stances or failing that charge him with a crime thus destroying his ability to seek higher office or threaten established financial power. Of course nothing like that would ever happen would it? I'm just being paranoid...

The Federal Government wants your passwords

Allegedly the U.S. Government is obtaining or trying to obtain your various internet passwords.
I can't say that I am surprised by this allegation. The horrible thing about the post 9-11 world to which Americans have eagerly submitted is that it gave permission to the most power-hungry authoritarian impulses on the both the left and the right to run amok. We have ceded so many rights and privileges of citizenship in order to be safe that I do not doubt that a future Administration will wish to put video cameras and screens in each American's home just to keep an eye on what everyone is doing. If we have to submit to a virtual strip search in order to fly, are subject to random stop-and-frisk walking the streets, have the Post Office scanning every piece of mail that has been sent and sharing that with intelligence or law enforcement agencies without a judge's approval, and have the NSA monitoring phone records and likely phone conversations and real time web conversations, why wouldn't the government just want to make things easy for itself by just getting user passwords? No muss no fuss. They can just sign on as you and read through your email or blog posts or facebook messages without any issues. What's the big deal right? If you have nothing to hide why wouldn't you want the government to have your passwords? What are you? An Al-Qaeda supporter? A fascist? A socialist? A Green Party voter?
LINK

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused."I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt utility.

The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment, which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to refuse the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could bring a criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives."In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled under the All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba Satellite laptop.

Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the password holder is the target of an investigation -- and don't address when a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an innocent third party.

In a display of breathtaking spinelessness the House of Representatives recently refused to pass the Amash Libert-e Act. This bill would have stopped the NSA activities concerning phone records and made it EXPLICITLY clear that what the NSA has been doing is not legal. It's important to notice that most Democrats voted for this bill, while most Republicans were opposed. While it's certain that some of those Democratic aye votes were only allowed by House Minority Leader Pelosi because she knew she already had the votes to defeat it, the fact remains that on this issue at least the Democratic and Republican Leadership as well as the White House were all united in defending the right of the NSA to gather any records on anyone at anytime. Such bipartisanship. It sort of gives the lie to the idea that the House Republicans won't unite with the President on anything. Without Republican assistance this bill would have passed the House. The President and the House Republicans are both in agreement that you don't have any rights the NSA needs to be concerned with. It's also important to point out that the Michigan Republican who introduced this measure, Justin Amash, is a libertarian. I have my issues with libertarians but when it comes to civil liberties at least, many libertarians and liberals are reading from the same choir book. And their interpretation of constitutional scripture doesn't change depending on who's sitting in the pulpit.

It ought to go without saying but I'll say it anyway. Yes it is a dangerous world out there and people in the various law enforcement and intelligence agencies must make decisions I wouldn't want to make. They know things I'll never know. And I want everyone to be and stay safe. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But I still say that unless you have a reason specific to me there is no reason for a government agency to have my password. And thanks to that little thing called the Fifth Amendment I think if you ask me for my password I'm going to tell you to commit an anatomically impossible act.

I think the time has come for us to have a constitutional convention. I'm no attorney and certainly no conservative but it looks to me as if the practices of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are stretching the limits of what our laws were meant to prevent. The new allegations of password requests are just the latest evidence of the old truism that if you give people an inch they'll take a mile. Or put another way,

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations"-James Madison

US Government Seizing Verizon Phone Records????

I don't have very much to add about the below story. It grows out of the Patriot Act, which was initially passed under President Bush and extended/expanded under President Obama. All I can say is IF this is true then it once again proves my point that when you give government expanded power to investigate you, violate your privacy and keep a watch over what you're doing, government will use it. This is not just about President Obama and/or his advisers and appointees having a disregard for privacy or limited actions to discover leaks or criminal wrong doing. Although in my opinion they certainly do have that disregard. No the problem here is that under the Patriot Act and associated legislation this is probably all completely legal. The only limitation to executive branch snooping is not the law or divided government but the caprices or morality of various people in the executive branch. This is not how our society is supposed to work but you know what I'm starting not to care any more. The Patriot Act was passed and passed again. People just don't care about civil liberties.

IF this report is true and that's a big IF it would just be another nail in the coffin of limited government and privacy. Again, this isn't just about "bad people". If I had powers to do things like this I couldn't be trusted either. No one could which is why historically the power of the state to invade your privacy had to be done under warrant, had to be specific to an action that you allegedly took and had to have some sort of probable cause.  I honestly think that eventually we ought to just get rid of the Bill of Rights, or at least the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Because IF this story is true, it's not as if anyone in power cares much about them...with the exception of whoever leaked this story.

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. 

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. 

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Welcome to surveillance society. But don't worry. I'm sure the Republicans would have been worse on this issue. Or something like that. Big government is your friend. And we know that the Administration will get to the bottom of this. No expense will be spared...to find out who told the Guardian and Glenn Greenwald about all of this...IF it's true. I keep saying IF it's true because after all we know the government would NEVER grab up millions of phone records just because it could...right? Can you hear me now??

Thoughts?

Hot for Teacher-Adult Actress Teacher Stacie Halas Fired

I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I'm hot for teacher
Hot For Teacher-Van Halen

It's been a minute since I was in grade/middle school. I don't remember having crushes on any of the women teachers there. I knew virtually nothing about their personal life and wasn't that interested. It was big news when occasionally their boyfriend or husband would pick them up from or drop them off at school. I mean who knew that Miss or Mrs. so-n-so actually had a life outside of the classroom? Of course I was a bit of a solipsistic young lad and the times were more conservative so it wasn't surprising that I didn't know anything about a teacher's extra curricular life or her activities and lifestyle before she became my teacher. Of course, as the Stacie Halas story shows us, maybe it's a good thing that I didn't know anything about my teachers' lives prior to them becoming an educator.

32 year old Stacie Halas was a California middle school teacher who was recently fired from her job. She lost her appeal of that firing as well. Why was she axed? Well she was terminated from her position because she was, prior to working as a teacher in her current school, but perhaps not other schools, an adult film actress. Evidently some other teachers and/or students recognized Halas' .... (ahem)... face and did some quick research to make sure. Once this information became public, Halas was let go. People found interviews in her movies in which she talked about being a teacher and hoped her other job choices would not be discovered. I wonder who got the job of downloading and reviewing those movies, purely for research purposes of course.

Her lawyer, Richard Schwab, said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry."Miss Halas is more than just an individual fighting for her job as a teacher," he said Tuesday. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

Halas has been on administrative leave since the video surfaced in March. Teachers then showed administrators downloads of Halas' sex videos from their smartphones. 

In hearings, former assistant principal Wayne Saddler testified that, at the start of a sex video, Halas talked about being a teacher, and he felt her effectiveness in the classroom had been compromised.

In October, Oxnard Unified School District spokesman Thomas DeLapp told CBS Los Angeles that once students were able to find the videos of Halas on the Internet, they made it difficult for her to be an effective teacher."We even had kids who were referring to her by her stage name in class, from catcalls in the back," DeLapp said.

LINK

Of course there are other jokes I could make about this but right now I don't have any more*. When I first heard about this I was somewhat opposed to the school board's action because people can and do change. Do we want to put a scarlet letter on someone for the rest of their life for a bad, but legal choice they once made?  Halas' time as "Tiffany Sixx" appears to be in the past. It's not as if she were arriving directly from the studio sets to teach impressionable young teens/pre-teens and/or tell them all about her deeds. At least, that doesn't appear to have been the case. But thinking more about this teachers are indeed supposed to maintain a good moral example for the children they instruct. Performing circus sexual acts on film for money with men and other women is usually not considered to be setting a proper moral example. I used to be a 12 yr old boy. I can definitely say that Halas' effectiveness as a teacher would be near zero if she was teaching boys of that age. So for that alone, even if I don't care about her previous career, she'd probably have to find a different job.  

And while the sordid details of her paid interactions with men or women may have been outre, the fact is that virtually every teacher, heck almost every human being has had sex or will have sex at some point in their life. There's just a record of some of her activities.  If she had announced she was gay, should/could she have been fired for that? That is still considered deviant in some circles and to be setting a bad influence. But working essentially as a prostitute is, unlike gayness, something that still unites many on the feminist left and on the traditionalist right in disgust. So maybe it's not as cut and dry as people might think.

And let's be honest, it's not just about the children. That's something of a cop-out. I do not think that in the average corporate workplace, were it discovered that the budget analyst in general ledger was or had been an adult actress, that she would be able to keep her job, or at least keep her job with the same level of respect and productivity that she had had prior to that information becoming public. Is that fair? Probably not. People should be judged on what they do at work, not on what they've done in their private lives. But that's idealistic. The reality is that often you sell not only your on the job skills to your employer, but also the implied or actual promise that you won't embarrass your employer or bring undue complications to your job. If, for example, a man who was an actuary, supply chain mgr or officer for a Fortune 500 Company decided to supplement his salary by investing in perfectly legal strip clubs or lingerie football leagues, chances are good that his company might bid him adieu. That's just how it goes.

So what do you think?

Was the school district within its rights to terminate Halas?

Was it the right thing to do?

Would you be concerned if Halas were teaching your children?

If you were a male student in her class would you ask her for extra "homework" or some one-on-one tutoring? (*Ok, just one joke)

Companies Demand Facebook Passwords!



"We're watching you"

One of the nice things about being a blogger or frequent blog commenter is that you get the opportunity to build an online persona and interact with people literally all over the world. This online persona may be close to your "real life" personality or it may be 180 degrees apart. You may decide to be totally and completely transparent with readers and co-bloggers or you may hold on fiercely to your "secret" or "online identity" and associated privacy.

Now imagine if a would be employer did an online search for you and found your Facebook page. They looked at the public views and didn't find anything objectionable: no racist jokes and calls for bloody revolution, no fond memories (and pictures) of Copenhagen orgies, no five star reviews of Tijuana brothels. You're good to go right? Not so fast. Let's say that the would be employer is not convinced that you're not hiding something. After all EVERYONE is hiding something. And this employer is a watchful, distrustful sort.

So the interviewer politely asks you for your various and sundry passwords from your Facebook/disqus/yahoo/gmail/hushmail/google/linkedin/amazon/etc accounts so that they can log on as you and review all of your private pages, emails, instant messages, associates, and what you've been viewing, reading or watching in your personal time.  

• After all, you might be a terrorist or worse, an ACLU member. 
• You might have friends of friends who said something negative about the company two years ago. 
• You might belong to "problematic" political or cultural groups.
• Maybe you've sent naughty instant messages to your spouse, significant other or friend with benefits. 
• You may have neglected to mention certain medical conditions you have.
• Maybe you got a thang going on with Mrs. Jones.

Like I said, EVERYONE is hiding something. But if you're NOT hiding anything then of course you won't mind the company looking, right? RIGHT????

SEATTLE (AP) — When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password. Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information..

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no...

Back in 2010, Robert Collins was returning to his job as a security guard at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services after taking a leave following his mother's death. During a reinstatement interview, he was asked for his login and password, purportedly so the agency could check for any gang affiliations. He was stunned by the request but complied.
"I needed my job to feed my family. I had to," he recalled,
After the ACLU complained about the practice, the agency amended its policy, asking instead for job applicants to log in during interviews.

Link 

Robert Collins

I think this is just a sad state of affairs. As so many people have been apathetic or quiet about the government invading their privacy without cause whether it be NYPD/FBI spying, FISA or Patriot Act or TSA searches, it only makes sense that companies would want to get in on the act.
I can't imagine working for a company that would even have the nerve to ask me something like this. The answer would be no. I would end the interview.  Of course I'm not currently desperate for a job and I matured before online personas had become so ubiquitous. What would I do were I younger or if I needed to get some money pretty doggone quickly to avoid eviction or repossession? I would still stand on principle and tell them to attempt airborne copulation with a revolving pastry. I've got to be free. But that's just me. How about you? You may need to think about this.

And the sign said "Long-haired freaky people need not apply 

So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why  

He said "You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you'll do"  

So I took off my hat, I said "Imagine that. Huh! Me workin' for you!"   

Questions

1) Would you agree to give a company passwords to your Facebook, emails, blogs, etc?

2) Should this be illegal?

3) Do you think a company would ever have any valid reason to ask for this information?