Socrates's Strangeness

The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. […]

The extant sources agree that Socrates was profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man—and resembling not at all the statues that turned up later in ancient times and now grace Internet sites and the covers of books. He had wide-set, bulging eyes that darted sideways and enabled him, like a crab, to see not only what was straight ahead, but what was beside him as well; a flat, upturned nose with flaring nostrils; and large fleshy lips like an ass. Socrates let his hair grow long, Spartan-style (even while Athens and Sparta were at war), and went about barefoot and unwashed, carrying a stick and looking arrogant. […] Something was peculiar about his gait as well, sometimes described as a swagger so intimidating that enemy soldiers kept their distance. He was impervious to the effects of alcohol and cold, but this made him an object of suspicion to his fellow soldiers on campaign. […]

What seemed strange about Socrates is that he neither labored to earn a living, nor participated voluntarily in affairs of state. Rather, he embraced poverty and, although youths of the city kept company with him and imitated him, Socrates adamantly insisted he was not a teacher and refused all his life to take money for what he did. […] Because Socrates was no transmitter of information that others were passively to receive, he resists the comparison to teachers. Rather, he helped others recognize on their own what is real, true, and good—a new, and thus suspect, approach to education. He was known for confusing, stinging and stunning his conversation partners into the unpleasant experience of realizing their own ignorance, a state sometimes superseded by genuine intellectual curiosity. […] Socrates was usually to be found in the marketplace and other public areas, conversing with a variety of different people—young and old, male and female, slave and free, rich and poor—that is, with virtually anyone he could persuade to join with him in his question-and-answer mode of probing serious matters. […]

It did not help matters that Socrates seemed to have a higher opinion of women than most of his companions had, speaking of “men and women,” “priests and priestesses,” and naming foreign women as his teachers: Socrates claimed to have learned rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, the lover of Pericles; and to have learned erotics from the priestess Diotima of Mantinea. […]

Athenian citizen males of the upper social classes did not marry until they were at least thirty, and Athenian females were poorly educated and kept sequestered until puberty, when they were given in marriage by their fathers. Thus the socialization and education of males often involved a relationship for which the English word ‘pederasty’ (though often used) is misleading, in which a youth approaching manhood, fifteen to seventeen, became the beloved of a male lover a few years older, under whose tutelage and through whose influence and gifts, the younger man would be guided and improved. It was assumed among Athenians that mature men would find youths sexually attractive, and such relationships were conventionally viewed as beneficial to both parties by family and friends alike. A degree of hypocrisy (or denial), however, was implied by the arrangement: “officially” it did not involve sexual relations between the lovers and, if it did, then the beloved was not supposed to derive pleasure from the act—but ancient evidence (comedies, vase paintings, et al.) shows that both restrictions were often violated. What was odd about Socrates is that, although he was no exception to the rule of finding youths attractive, he refused the physical advances of even his favorite.

via: New Shelton wet/dry |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Molly Markow "Untitled"
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Into the Cave

When Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was published in 1959, the second wave of feminism was wind blowing across the water of American life—an energy that was gathering and palpable, if largely invisible. In the decades that followed, however, Arendt was largely indifferent to the politics of gender and sex. She refused outright to define her intellectual project in terms of her gender, and certain arguments, even her general view of social and political life, have been criticized as antithetical to feminist concerns.

In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that some activities are fit to appear to other people, and others not; some belong in public and others in private. The public is, or ought to be, the bright realm of free speech and action, the place of politics proper. Being seen, people and actions are properly open to judgment by others, so as to allow us to decide issues pertinent to our life in common. By contrast, the private is the shadow realm of necessity, where we labor to maintain our bodies and the life of our species. While human actions constitute history in linear time, our unending labor for biological maintenance swings in a circle, a ceaseless cycle. (...)

Arendt calls the private realm “the realm of necessity.” The language is hers, but it’s a variation on an old binary theme, the song of necessity and freedom. Figured variously as chaos, the animal, the feminine and the shadow realm, human necessity is the umbrella term for those aspects of life not subject to the rational will. In Arendt’s understanding, it especially signifies the immediate reality of embodied life, the thick stuff of it, the part that’s been squicking out Western squares from Plato to the present. To the chagrin of the Platonist, it is an irreducible aspect of our living being.

In its most mundane iterations, necessity is a driving and an equalizing force that compels everyone. We all eat and drink, we shit, we sleep and probably try to get off—you, yes you. With luck, the resources for doing so are reasonably secure and we can meet these demands with dignity, securely and without fear of opprobrium at the salience of our appetites and drives. Fussing over particulars aside, there is not a lot of room for reason-giving or reason-having in this realm of experience. Bodies drive us in some things. We do them because we are essentially beholden—we have to. And, having to do them, we prefer to do them in private.

Pain is the most intense manifestation of this phenomenon. As Elaine Scarry puts it in The Body in Pain (1985), pain brings about “a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Scarry links pain’s destruction of language to the fact that, unlike most states of consciousness, it has no reference point—in pain, the whole of the matter is bounded in the body of who feels it. Pain is not an experience that can be shared in such a way that its full force will be adequately communicated to another. It is in this sense a private phenomenon. No accident that, absent some cause that would render it meaningful, one prefers to suffer pain out of public view. (...)

The most beautiful account of childbirth I’ve encountered in prose is the closing scene of Meridel Le Sueur’s underground feminist classic The Girl. Written at the tail end of the Depression but not published until 1978, the novel is a fictionalized account of events drawn from the lives of the women in Le Sueur’s writing group. It combines a potboiler plot with radical political commentary and bleeding-edge representations of how it feels to be alive, all in a colloquial vernacular that occasionally rises to the level of poetry. In the closing scene, the nameless title character enters the final throes of labor in a makeshift tenement where a public demonstration is also being organized. The women, says the girl, “made a little cave in the corner.” Then, as she begins to push, “It’s the realest dream.”

Through most of my own long labor I made a show of autonomy. I joked with my mother and husband, negotiated the terms of medical intervention with hospital staff, and balanced my body over the rolling waves of pain—between “How could it be worse?” and “Is that all there is?”

As the moment drew near, though, this performance of control diminished to a vanishing point. I requested a Coca-Cola. My rational will drew itself up and moved aside as I felt the force of life itself flow down and through my body, like water falling from a great height. They made a kind of cave around me. I screamed and was gently admonished to move the sound lower down in my body. I bellowed then, and the cry was deep and huge, evidence of a power that seemed alien but must have come from me, a power I could channel but not command.

As my body opened, the pain was ecstatic—ek-static, in the sense of the Greek roots of the word—that is, I stood outside myself. My field of vision was shortened to arm’s length and then dissolved. Borderless, I craved touch, needed skin on my skin and the pressure of hands and elbows to open me up and hold me together. There was a fissure, and for some time I occupied a liminal space between self and world. Hearing voices that exhorted it to bear, my body bore down. Cloudbreak, and return, and then a baby on my breast, looking up into my face. (...)

“They made a little cave in the corner.” This sense of enclosure, of invulnerability through the presence of intimates, goes a long way toward allowing life to come through over the objections of the self-conscious mind. Privacy is not essentially a question of the presence or absence of other people, as all of us who have been “in private” with others surely know. Rather, it is a feeling of being sheltered, of safety in vulnerability and permission to let go.

by Dawn Herrera-Helphand, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Greavette

Li Xiao Xing in Rodeo F/W 2013 by Johan Sandberg
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The street art of JR, Brazil’s favela graffiti.
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Bitcoin and the Digital-Currency Revolution

About a half-billion dollars worth of it vanished from an online exchange in Tokyo. A prosecutor in Manhattan arrested the 24-year-old vice chairman of its most prominent trading body on drug-related charges of money laundering. Its founder’s identity remains a mystery, and last year, it shed two-thirds of its value, losing an additional 44% in just the first two weeks of January. In his year-end letter to investors, Warren Buffett’s advice about it was emphatic: “Stay away.”

The digital currency known as bitcoin is only six years old, and many of its critics are already declaring it dead. But such dire predictions miss a far more important point: Whether bitcoin survives or not, the technology underlying it is here to stay. In fact, that technology will become ever more influential as developers create newer, better versions and clones.

No digital currency will soon dislodge the dollar, but bitcoin is much more than a currency. It is a radically new, decentralized system for managing the way societies exchange value. It is, quite simply, one of the most powerful innovations in finance in 500 years.

If applied widely to the inner workings of our global economy, this model could slash trillions in financial fees; computerize much of the work done by payment processors, government property-title offices, lawyers and accountants; and create opportunities for billions of people who don't currently have bank accounts. Great value will be created, but many jobs also will be rendered obsolete.

Bitcoin has some indisputable flaws, at least in its current iteration. Its price fluctuates too wildly. (Who wants the cost of their groceries to vary by 10% from week to week?) Its anonymity has made it a haven for drug dealers. “Wallets” (as the individual software applications that manage bitcoin holdings are known) have proven vulnerable to cyberattack and pillaging, including the wallets of big exchanges such as Tokyo’s Mt. Gox and Slovenia’s Bitstamp.

Even though the core program that runs bitcoin has resisted six years of hacking attempts, the successful attacks on associated businesses have created the impression that bitcoin isn’t a safe way to store money. Until these perceptions are overcome or bitcoin is replaced by a superior digital currency, the public will remain suspicious of the concept, and regulators will be tempted to quash it.

Like any young technology, bitcoin is a work in progress, but its groundbreaking core software program is constantly being improved. It is open-source and copyright-free, and thus accessible to anyone who wants to peer inside it, copy it, suggest improvements or create applications for it.

Inspired by this potential, “probably 10,000 of the best developers in the world are working on bitcoin,” estimates Chris Dixon, a partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This volunteer army has developed military-grade encryption to make bitcoin wallets more secure and insurable and also new trading tools to help stabilize the price. The faults of digital currency are being resolved.

by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg

A Modern Clinical Trial

It was my ritual for seven years.

Every day, take two sets of pills—one labeled, the other a mystery. Every three months, take three sets of blood-pressure readings, twice a day for a week. Once a year, collect urine for 24 straight hours, lug it everywhere in an ice pack, then get it through airport security for a flight from Washington to Boston.

For me and about 1,000 other participants in our medical trial, the payoff for such tedious detail came back last month: The combination of the two common types of blood-pressure drugs being tested didn’t make any significant difference in the progression of our inherited kidney disease.

That was disappointing. But it didn’t necessarily mean that the trial was a failure, a waste of the time I spent on it, or a poor use of the $40-million in taxes that paid for it. The trial’s participants got top-notch medical attention for our polycystic kidney disease, and our records will almost certainly help others with PKD, now and in the future. (...)

Randomized clinical trials are widely recognized as the gold standard for proving whether a treatment or practice really works. In our trial, everyone took two sets of daily pills. For half of the participants, the second pill was just an inert placebo. Neither the patients nor the trial doctors knew who was really getting both medications, allowing for a rigorous test of the two-drug combination.

All of that logistical structure can mean a huge financial cost. Randomized trials now account for about 20 percent of the $30-billion annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. Private drug companies spend more than $30-billion on them.

Yet drug trials fail at a rate of about 90 percent. That level of failure has attracted serious attention now that U.S. medical research has entered a period of tighter budgets, accelerating technological advances, and extensive procedural reassessments. In that light, much about our trial’s design and execution illustrates a system of human experimentation that’s ripe for overhaul. (...)

One of the most important questions in any trial, of course, is what medical intervention to test.

My trial, like many, was heavily shaped by testing on animals. Jared J. Grantham, an emeritus professor of nephrology and hypertension at the University of Kansas who led the creation of the PKD Foundation 30 years ago, said there were many studies prior to the trial—typically involving mice—that gave scientists hope that PKD might be slowed by the combination of two drugs. Those drugs, Lisinopril and Telmisartan, use different chemical mechanisms to block angiotensin, a hormone that raises blood pressure by constricting blood vessels.

But for many diseases, mice and other animal models are proving notoriously unreliable in predicting drugs’ effect on human beings. "From the point of view of PKD specifically, we have a number of hypotheses that have come out of the basic-science laboratories, and to a large extent the animal models often don’t exactly mimic what’s going on in people," said Joseph V. Bonventre, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and chief of the renal unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

More generally, many observers suspect researchers of becoming too enamored of their animal models.

"We’re extracting some cartoon version of the disease, and then treating it, so that the animal model becomes the focus of our research, not that actual human disease," said Susan M. Fitzpatrick, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation and an adjunct associate professor of neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis. "And we learn more and more about the model, but not the disease."

by Paul Baskin, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Image: Julia Schmalz

The Cobweb

Can the Internet be archived?

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane’s last radio contact was at 1:20 P.M. G.M.T. At 2:50P.M. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: “We just downed a plane, an AN-26.” (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777.

Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive’s Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov’s VKontakte page was on Shmelev’s list. “Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,” Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page “deserves to be recorded twice a day.”

On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov’s VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message “Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov’s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.” By then, Strelkov’s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine.

The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. Strelkov’s “We just downed a plane” post lasted barely two hours. It might seem, and it often feels, as though stuff on the Web lasts forever, for better and frequently for worse: the embarrassing photograph, the regretted blog (more usually regrettable not in the way the slaughter of civilians is regrettable but in the way that bad hair is regrettable). No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t. In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because “making more information available to more people” was providing “the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.” Seven years later, Britain’s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten years’ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writers’ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes.

Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. (Some of those companies may have notified users, but Jason Scott, who started an outfit called Archive Team—its motto is “We are going to rescue your shit”—says that such notification is usually purely notional: “They were sending e-mail to dead e-mail addresses, saying, ‘Hello, Arthur Dent, your house is going to be crushed.’ ”) Facebook has been around for only a decade; it won’t be around forever. Twitter is a rare case: it has arranged to archive all of its tweets at the Library of Congress. In 2010, after the announcement, Andy Borowitz tweeted, “Library of Congress to acquire entire Twitter archive—will rename itself Museum of Crap.” Not long after that, Borowitz abandoned that Twitter account. You might, one day, be able to find his old tweets at the Library of Congress, but not anytime soon: the Twitter Archive is not yet open for research. Meanwhile, on the Web, if you click on a link to Borowitz’s tweet about the Museum of Crap, you get this message: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.

The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?

by Jill Lepore, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Harry Campbell

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Sleater-Kinney

The Stranger: We Need Them More Than They Need Us

If a Car Is Going to Self-Drive, It Might as Well Self-Park, Too

Technology may soon render another skill superfluous: parking a car.

Sensors and software promise to free owners from parking angst, turning vehicles into robotic chauffeurs, dropping off drivers and then parking themselves, no human intervention required.

BMW demonstrated such technical prowess this month with a specially equipped BMW i3 at the International CES event. At a multilevel garage of the SLS Las Vegas hotel, a BMW engineer spoke into a Samsung Gear S smartwatch.

“BMW, go park yourself,” and off the electric vehicle scurried to an empty parking spot, turning and backing itself perfectly into the open space. To retrieve the car, a tap on the watch and another command, “BMW, pick me up,” returned the car to the engineer.

The i3 was equipped with laser scanners, including two mounted in the front right and left quarter panels. No G.P.S. was used. Instead, the car relied on a map of the parking garage and an onboard cellular data connection. No smartphone was needed. The Samsung watch includes its own cellular connection, so commands are sent to a BMW server, which then relays the instructions to the car, said Yves Pilat, one of BMW’s engineers developing the feature. BMW calls it fully automated remote valet parking.

Several other companies have demonstrated similar self-parking cars, including Toyota, Valeo and Volkswagen. In many ways, the development is an extension of existing parallel parking assist technologies. In such systems, the driver remains behind the wheel, but with a push of a button, the vehicle measures the parking space and then swings backs into it without any input from the human operator.

“Now, the concept is you can do any kind of parking spot,” Mr. Pilat said, and without a driver.

Aside from preventing Ferris Bueller-like joy rides by garage attendants, the advantage of introducing autonomous car features to handle parking has several benefits, foremost being to win over skeptical consumers.

Parallel parking was “the first step in getting drivers to understand that there are some tasks the car might be able to do better than you,” said John Hanson, Toyota Motor Sales USA’s national manager for advanced technology and business communication.

by John R. Quain, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: BMW AG

Franz Kline
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Street art, Paris
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Melih Dönmezer
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4 Ways Copyright Law Actually Controls Your Whole Digital Life

We all know that copyright law means you shouldn’t download copies of movies from shady torrent sites, and that you should pay for the music you listen to. We know it means people and companies have rights to stuff they make, like photos and music and books, and that there are legal and illegal ways of sharing those things.

But what most of us don’t really think about is how broad the net of copyright law really is.

Nominally, copyright protects content creators. If you write a book, or sing a song, or take a photograph, you have the right to control distribution of — to make money from — your original work. And, for a period of time, you are the only one with that right. If you take a picture, I can’t then print a copy and sell it for money without your explicit permission, because you have the right to the income from your own hard work. That much makes sense: legally and ethically, it’s yours.

That’s how it works in theory, anyway. Realistically, here in 2015, copyright law is a far cry from the original question of who has the right to copy a work. Now, copyright law is so much bigger.

The tendrils of copyright law reach worldwide into almost everything we consume, do, and are in the digital era. The rules and regulations about how the internet works, what privacy rights you have, and how the entire digital economy functions all spring from copyright. It’s everything from why a bar can’t buy a really big-screen TV to why you don’t actually own any of the media you pay for.

If you ever use a computer, or read, watch, look at, use, or listen to any piece of media or software created since printing or recording were invented, copyright law affects you.

Writer Cory Doctorow, probably best known for his work with tech and culture site Boing Boing, is a copyright expert. He’s joined a special project with the EFFto advocate for easing the burdens of DRM on consumers and content creators. And late last year he published a book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, explaining the impact of copyright law on pretty much everyone in clear, plain English.

Doctorow’s book is a readable, concise look at the breadth and scope of copyright law in the modern age. Here are four key takeaways we should all keep in mind.

1. Copyright is all about locks.

At this point, DRM and software go hand in hand. Everything comes with some kind of anti-sharing, anti-piracy, anti-copying, anti-any-unauthorized-use key built in.

The first digital battleground was music. After the Napster era dawned and crashed at the turn of the century, Apple’s iTunes and iPod launched an era of device-locked music. Now, the music industry has largely backed away from DRM (both iTunes and Amazon sell DRM-free tracks and albums), in favor of streaming services — but everything else is locked by platform.

But, Doctorow points out: all digital locks break. Every one can be broken, and is, usually quickly. From DRM on Kindle books to tech that supposedly locks down features on a blu-ray disc — any piece of code ends up with a cracked version all over the internet within, usually, minutes.

And that leads to…

by Kate Cox, Consumerist |  Read more:

Image: Consumerist

DSCF0928r by Leviacarmina on Flickr.
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What You Can Learn from Oakland's Raw ALPR Data

Police cars mounted with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) wind their way through the streets of Oakland like a “Snake” game on an old cell phone. Instead of eating up pixels of food, these cameras gobble down thousands of license plates each day. And instead of growing a longer tail, ALPRs feed into a giant database of locational data as they conduct surveillance on every driver within the city limits, and sometimes beyond.

This is the portrait that emerged when EFF analyzed eight days of ALPR data provided by the City of Oakland in response to a request under the California Public Records Act.

As cities and counties across the country pursue new law enforcement technologies, EFF is on a mission to use transparency as a counterbalance to mass surveillance. Since May 2013, EFF and the ACLU of Southern California have been engaged in a legal battle with two Los Angeles law enforcement agencies who are refusing to hand over a week’s worth of ALPR data. San Diego County, another jurisdiction, has similarly fought efforts by citizens to obtain access to data that law enforcement has collected on them using ALPRs. Both claim that the records are exempted under the California Public Records Act because they are records of law enforcement investigations. The agencies also argue the public interest in maintaining secrecy in ALPR data outweighs the public interest in learning how and where ALPR systems are being used.

The rub here is that law enforcement agencies like those in LA, San Diego, and Oakland aren’t using ALPR for targeted investigations, but rather running a dragnet on all drivers in their jurisdictions. As states across the country become more and more concerned about ALPRs andtake steps to limit their use, we believe the disclosure of a limited amount of license plate records will help to inform public debate on this mass surveillance tool.

Events in other jurisdictions support our position. After Muckrock and the Boston Globe obtained Boston Police ALPR data, the city suspended the program in the wake of the privacy concerns raised by the data. When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obtained ALPR data that it used to track the whereabouts of the mayor, it kicked off debate in the legislature about how to balance the privacy of innocent drivers against the ability of police to fight crime. As a Minneapolis city official noted at a public hearing on ALPRs after the data release, “now that we see someone’s patterns in a graphic on a map in a newspaper, you realize that person really does have a right to be secure from people who might be trying to stalk them or follow them or interfere with them.” A state legislator and former police chief noted at that same hearing, “even though technology is great and it helps catch the bad guys, I don’t want the good guys being kept in a database.”

by Jeremy Cillula and Dave Maass, EFF |  Read more:

Image: EFF

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'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize

[ed. See also: In the Crosshairs]

I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.

It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to beabout anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).

This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.

Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?

Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.

The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.

No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.

But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.

Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Warner Brothers

“No challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change, 2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does — 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it."

President Barack Obama, State of the Union, 2015
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