Tag Archives: ethics

The Wall Street Journal’s Embarrassing…Naiveté

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In a Friday op-ed, the editors of the WSJ had this to say, among other things, about the government’s invasion of American privacy in the name of “security.”

The effectiveness of data-mining is proportional to the size of the sample, so the NSA must sweep broadly to learn what is normal and refine the deviations.  A nongovernment analogue might be the credit card flags that freeze payment when, say, a New Yorker goes on a shopping spree in Phoenix.

This is beyond naïve, it’s disingenuous.  The “analogue” has nothing to do with what the government is doing.  The credit card company that does such flagging—data mining—is a private enterprise away from which any and all customers easily can walk should they disagree with the data mining.  Americans can’t walk away from our government without emigrating.  And waiting for the next election lets the government’s damaging invasion continue apace in the interim.

Moreover, that credit card company is data mining a single customer, albeit it’s likely doing this for each of its customers.  It’s not routinely aggregating, by…credit card number…those data with every other customer’s data.  But wait—the government, in its Verizon data mining isn’t collecting personally identifiable data—only phone numbers called and called from.  Please.  The point of the government’s data mining is to find out who and to whom—phone numbers aren’t the terrorists.  It’s breathtakingly easy to attach a name to a phone number.

Then they write this:

The Washington Post also revealed Thursday that NSA has a parallel metadata program for Internet address packets called Blarney.

If the NSA’s version of a computer science department operates like the rest of FISA, the government is cautious to ensure that its searches are narrowly tailored and specific protocols are reviewed by FISA judges.

On what basis does the WSJ make their assumption of that monumental “if?”  Do they really think a government (not just Obama’s administration) that has the present IRS, the present DoJ, the present HHS, the present EPA, etc can be trusted to honor secret limits?

Further, the Washington Post led their article with this:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs….

That’s content, not just address packets (the Internet’s analogue to phone numbers).

Given all of this, and the associated secrecy, I have to wonder who else is being investigated.  Conservative Americans, perhaps?  Americans who disagree with this government’s policies?

Finally, and this can’t be emphasized enough: we have no security without our individual liberties.  Ben Franklin understood this; it’s unfortunate that this conservative newspaper has made this mistake.

Government’s Commerce Power Grab

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The Federal government wants to nationalize another American private industry, this one nascent rather than burgeoning.  The State Department wants to classify privately owned and operated manned space vehicles as weapons and then to control these as such.

In a proposed Amendment to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (recall that Secretary of State John Kerry says in all seriousness that the US will sign the just concluded international arms control “treaty”), State insists pretty much that anything that flies into space must be a weapon, and so cannot be allowed to leave the United States government’s control.  The immediate effect will be to hinder, if not destroy, a budding space tourism industry, an industry that has such serious enterprises as Virgin Space, Xcor, and SpaceX, as major players.

Here’s the money part of the proposed amendment:

§ 121.1 General. The United States Munitions List.
* * * * *
Category XV—Spacecraft Systems and Related Articles
(a) Spacecraft, including satellites, manned or unmanned space vehicles, whether designated developmental, experimental, research or scientific, or having a commercial, civil, or military end-use, that

…
(4) Provide space-based logistics, assembly or servicing of any spacecraft (e.g., refueling);
…
*(7) Have any of the following electrooptical remote sensing capabilities or characteristics:
(i) Electro-optical visible and near infrared (VNIR) (i.e., 400nm to 1,000nm) or infrared (i.e., greater than 1,000nm to 30,000nm) with less than 40 spectral bands having an aperture greater than 0.35 meters;
(ii) Electro-optical hyperspectral with 40 spectral bands or more in the VNIR, short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) (i.e., greater than 1,000nm to 2,500nm) or any combination of the aforementioned and having a Ground Sample Distance (GSD) less than 30 meters;
(iii) Electro-optical hyperspectral with 40 spectral bands or more in the midwavelength infrared (MWIR) (i.e., greater than 2,500nm to 5,500nm) having a narrow spectral bandwidth of Dl less than or equal to 20nm full width at half maximum (FWHM) or having a wide spectral bandwidth with Dl greater than 20nm FWHM and a GSD less than 200 meters; or
(iv) Electro-optical hyperspectral with 40 spectral bands or more in the longwavelength infrared (LWIR) (i.e., greater than 5,500nm to 30,000nm) having a narrow spectral bandwidth of Dl less than or equal to 50nm FWHM or having a wide spectral bandwidth with Dl greater than 50nm FWHM and a GSD less than 500 meters;
*(8) Have radar remote sensing capabilities or characteristics (e.g., active electronically scanned array (AESA), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), ultra-wideband SAR) except those having a center frequency equal to or greater than 1 GHz but less than or equal to 10 GHz AND having a bandwidth less than 300 MHz;
(9) Provide Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT);
…
(7) Non-communications space qualified directed energy (e.g., lasers or RF) systems
…
(9)  “Space-qualified’” cesium, rubidium, hydrogen maser, or quantum
(e.g., based upon Al, Hg, Yb, Sr, Be Ions) atomic clocks, and specially designed parts and components therefor….

Notice that: any commercial enterprise that looks to maintain its commercial systems in space (e.g., repair or refuel a satellite, an orbiting space station, or later a mining station) can’t do so—the maintenance support vehicles would be weapons.

Any commercial enterprise that wants to equip its space vehicles, satellites, orbiting space station(s), or those future mining station(s) with sensing equipment so as to have advanced warning of approaching debris can’t have those sensors—they’re weapons.

Any commercial enterprise that wants to equip its space vehicles, satellites, orbiting space station(s), or those future mining station(s) with navigation equipment or clocks so those systems can know where they are and where they are going can’t have those nav systems—they’re weapons.

Any commercial enterprise that wants to mine the solar system (asteroids, comets, planetary moons, what-have-you) or destroy any approaching debris before collision can’t have the lasers with which to do so—mining and colliding debris destruction are weapons-centered efforts.

This overreach by this administration has to be stopped.  The power grab, even in the age of nationalized health industry and government diktats for the financial industry, is atrocious.

The proposed amendment can be read here and here.

 

h/t Spirit of Enterprise

Holder’s Defense

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On 15 May, Attorney General Eric Holder testified under oath before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that

With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.

Yet he had already been consulted concerning, and subsequently approved, a search warrant application to search the personal emails of an individual reporter (James Rosen of Fox News), a warrant that said in part

Because of the Reporter’s [Rosen’s] own potential criminal liability in this matter….

A three-page Department of Justice letter to the Chairmen of the House Judiciary Committee and that committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations is cynically unresponsive (quite aside from the fact that while the chairmen had addressed their concern on the “disconnect” to Holder, the latter didn’t deign respond, instead having an underling do so).

The letter devoted two and a half pages first to piously proclaiming Holder’s reverence for the role of a free press in American society and then to outlining the way getting warrants to search members of the press is supposed to work.  The underling then proclaimed that there was and is no disconnect between the facts of Holder’s testimony and the fact of the warrant’s accusation.  That’s it—just a bald, unsubstantiated pronouncement.  The underling offered not the least shred of evidence to support that claim.  The underling did, though, include this shocker in his penultimate paragraph:

At no time during the pendency of this matter—before or after seeking the search warrant—have prosecutors sought approval to bring criminal charges against the reporter.

DoJ and writers of the Left have made much of that word “potential,” saying that there was no prosecution after the fact, as though this non sequitur eliminates any potential.

Yet Holder did not testify “with regard to prosecution;” he testified explicitly to its potential.  And the warrant he’d already approved at the time of his testimony spoke explicitly about that potential.

It’s clear that Holder still has some tap dancingexplaining to do in order to reconcile his sworn testimony with the content of the search warrant he’d approved prior to his sworn testimony.

But there’re an additional couple of questions in my mind that goes to Holder’s fitness as the US’ chief prosecutor.  What kind of prosecutor accuses a man of criminal activity—that warrant—in order to obtain a search warrant while, at the time of the accusation, having no intent of prosecuting that man should the warrant produce the relevant evidence?

Did Holder lie to the judge in his warrant—he didn’t consider the reporter to be “potentially” criminally liable at the time?  Related to that, is it normal DoJ practice to deliberately mislead a judge with such ruses in order to get a warrant to conduct a search?  And: if the warrant is unobtainable without such shenanigans, how legitimate can the warrant be?

The DoJ letter can be read here.  The Rosen search warrant can be read here.

IRS Targeting

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The IRS’ targeting of groups and individuals who disagree with government increased sharply with President Barack Obama’s accession to office.  Reminds me of how he won his first election in Illinois.

As a community organizer, [Obama] had helped register thousands of voters.  But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot.  It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist.  “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right?  It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today.  He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters.  But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”

What he did then was hardball politics, might even have been dirty politics, but at least it was, strictly speaking, legal.  His actions today through the IRS—which not only targeted conservative political groups, it targeted groups and individual Americans opposed to abortion and those openly supportive of Israel—took his “destroy your enemy” mindset to a new level, a criminal one.

And now it’s coming out, from some of those “rogue agents” in Cincinnati whom he tossed under the bus, that the orders to do so came from…higher up.

Interviews with a regional IRS agent involved in the agency targeting Tea Party groups for additional vetting appear to contradict the White House assertion that rogue agents, not the administration, were behind the effort, according to partial transcripts released Sunday by the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

The agent in the Cincinnati office…told congressional investigators that he or she was told in March 2010 by a supervisor to search for Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status and that “Washington, DC, wanted some cases.

When asked by congressional investigators about allegations and press reports about two agents in Cincinnati essentially being responsible for the targeting, the agent responded: “It’s impossible.  As an agent we are controlled by many, many people.  We have to submit many, many reports.  So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen.

Hmm….