Category Archives: Privacy

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.

The Left

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…doesn’t like us very much.  And, by “us” I don’t mean Conservatives, I mean the United States in particular and Western Civilization in general.

Here are a couple of examples.  Recall President Donald Trump’s speech in Poland last week wherein he touted the successes of Western Civilization and the United States’ role in that and further said that we would never give in to the forces arrayed against us.

Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

And

[W]e value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.  That is who we are.  Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

And

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together, only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values.  We did not and we will not.  We will never back down.

But these are bigoted remarks, the Left says.

According to Salon, these are “white nationalist” remarks, and

Trump was fairly begging to be labeled a fascist with his speech painting the purity of white civilization as under threat from racialized foreigners….

Here’s Brad Woodhouse, former Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee:

Western civilization and Christian Values are dog whistles to white nationalists[.]

Malcolm Nance, author and commentator from the Left on terrorism [starts around 5:05]:

That speech was the ultimate fulfillment of Usama bin Laden’s ideology of the belief that there would be a clash of civilizations between what he views as his crazy version of Islam and the West.

Never mind that that clash, that war for our survival, has been inflicted on us for years.

And from the tabloid New York Times:

In Warsaw, Mr Trump boldly stated, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” In saying that, he demonstrated his administration’s born-again commitment to preserve America’s post-Cold War Western alliances, though at the price of redefining the very meaning of “the West.”

In the heady days of the Cold War, “the West” referred to the so-called free world—a liberal democratic order. Today it has been replaced by a cultural, rather than political, notion. But unlike in the 19th century, when a “white man’s burden” took pride of place, today what dominates are the “white man’s fears.”

Sure.  Because an American President who happens to be a white US citizen said these things and is following an American President who happened to be a black US citizen and who retreated the US from the world, taking to global extent his own view that “there comes a time when you’ve made enough.”

In a side note, the NYT in particular, also chose to “misunderstand” along a different dimension, too:

What stands out most in Mr Trump’s speech is not its oft-quoted illiberalism but its stark pessimism about the future of the West.  …he appears preoccupied by the fear of defeat. What he promised his listeners was not the West’s “victory” but that the West shall never be broken.

Because “we will never surrender” was Churchill’s pessimistic fear of defeat and not his optimism of ultimate victory, so it is with “never be broken.”  Apparently these guys skipped over an earlier part of Trump’s speech (they didn’t bother to listen to it live):

…we know that these forces [adversaries and enemies], too, are doomed to fail if we want them to fail.  And we do, indeed, want them to fail.  They are doomed not only because our alliance is strong, our countries are resilient, and our power is unmatched.  Through all of that, you have to say everything is true.  Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are.  And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten.  Americans will never forget.  The nations of Europe will never forget.  We are the fastest and the greatest community.  There is nothing like our community of nations.  The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

Yeah, that’s pessimism, all right.  [/aside]

It’s racist bigotry to manufacture a racism beef where there is none present, and it’s a particularly dishonest bigotry (redundancy deliberate) to manufacture a bigotry beef purely for personal attention.

It’s almost like they hate themselves so much they have to relieve the pressure by projecting.

“Pre-Crime”

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Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.

Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.

Jenkins saw this favorably as the basis of a “pre-crime” era of law enforcement, however pessimistically he also saw it as coming to pass anytime soon.  I see that unlikelihood less sanguinely, but to the extent it’s slow to come or doesn’t come at all, that’s a good thing.

Then Jenkins closed his piece with this:

The more the average citizen can understand and recognize the pattern, the more such incidents likely will be avoided without us even knowing it.

Indeed, and yet Jenkins completely ignored the implication of this. We don’t need Big Brother looking over our shoulder everywhere we are, in the real world or the virtual world of social interactions, nor do we need a Hoover-esque FBI peering in through our windows, real or virtual, nor can we support any other excuse for Government extend its regulation of our lives through this new version of prior restraint.

What we need is a return to a sense of community, where private citizens look out for each other at the local level. Local problems dealt with locally are much less likely to become national problems. And even those don’t require the assault on liberty that is prior restraint, which can only be done from politicians’ definitions of alleged need for the prior.

Obstructionism

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…for the sake of obstructionism.  And now the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate are getting blatant about it.  They don’t want to help reform the health care coverage disaster of the last eight years, so to block Republican and Conservative efforts at reform, these Progressive-Democrats have decided to block everything in the Senate.  Here’s Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) o the overall attitude:

What more could we do—hold Republican Senators by the arms to stop them from getting to the chamber?  I think we’ll use every tool at our disposal.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) even arranged to force cancelation of all committee meetings last Monday, regardless of the subject or purpose of those meetings.  No business was allowed to be conducted—all to block health care coverage reform.

Meanwhile, these Progressive-Democrats are ignoring the millions of Americans who are about to lose all coverage as coverage provider after coverage provider leave the Obamacare markets and withdraw from the ObamaMarts in the States.  Iowa, for instance, is about to lose all providers of individual plans—every single one of them—and no Iowa citizen will have access to market coverage.

This blanket obstructionism while the health coverage industry burns stinks, it’s damaging to Americans who need or want health care insurance, and it’s destructive of our democracy.

Incidental Unmasking

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Now we know that then-National Security Advisor to then-President Barack Obama (D) Susan Rice asked several times for American names to be unmasked that had been masked since their presence in communications of foreign nationals that were being legitimately monitored was entirely incidental to the communications and the reasons for which those communications were being monitored.

Rice’s requests were strictly legal; the NSA incumbent is one of the Executive Branch officials with the legal authority to ask for, and to receive, the names to be unmasked without having first to go through a court, even the secretive Star Chamber FISA court.

There are a couple of questions, though, that aren’t being answered.  One is why she asked for these unmaskings.  NSA could have entirely legitimate reasons for that, but the names for which she asked seem centered on then-President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and transition team members.

The other question concerns how long such unmasking, whether by Rice or by others of Obama’s administration, had been going on.