Washington Post: Convicted of a marijuana crime in California? It might go away, thanks to legal pot.  Ed: I always assumed this would be an automatic order of business once a state legalized pot, basically expunging the criminal record of every single victim of pot prohibition and giving them their lives back.

Bitcoinist: EU’s Bitcoin database could make privacy a thing of the past

Financial Times: German cartel office warns Facebook over personal data collection

Related from WaPo: Facebook wants your face data–in the name of privacy, it says

The Moscow Times: Russia to grant police access to bank customers’ biometric data

Planet Biometrics: Germany mulls facial recognition at all train stations

TechRepublic: MIT’s automated machine learning works 100x faster than human data scientists

Wired UK: Curbing your data addiction will help you make better decisions

Quartz: This year the world woke up to the society-shifting power of artificial intelligence

AP: Killings of women soared in the last decade amid Mexico’s Drug War

Fortune: Facebook accused of privacy violations in France

National Law Review: Wave of Illinois biometric privacy lawsuits continues unabated

CNET: Law enforcement requests for Facebook user data up 21 percent

Nasdaq: How the EU’s new privacy law will impact Big Tech in 2018

Ars Technica: Hackers take control of security firm’s domain, steal secret data

Techdirt: Another court says compelled password production doesn’t violate the Fifth Amendment

Government Technology: Public opinion often sets privacy standards for smart city tech

Washington Post: Former navy pilot describes encounter with UFO studied by secretive Pentagon program

High Times: Study shows that people prefer legal weed over alcohol

Mother Nature Network: 7 mind-bending facts about magic mushrooms

First, I’d like to welcome all the new readers.  I appreciate the perusal and page views, as the daily volume has reached a level that is forcing me to reconsider how much time I spend writing here.  Which means I will do more.  And I will add comments once I’ve figured out how. I’ve written for other outlets, but I would like this space to become the primary home to my writing, as the original purpose for my writing at all was one thing only: to advance liberty.  The threats to a free society are myriad: the galloping advance of a sophisticated, networked system of total biometric surveillance, a technological Panopticon that would make Jeremy Bentham blush.  The National Security State, born out of the post-9/11 wave of hysteria, has become a gargantuan bureaucracy, but the hysteria no longer exists.  Yet endless war persists, and the bureaucracy needs continual exterior threats to justify its existence.  And while the drug war winds down, millions languish in US prisons, the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, US police gun down over 1,000 citizens each year, and our government profiles and targets activist groups who attempt to effect change.  Every seemingly disparate and unconnected threat to liberty stems from the same web that reaches into every aspect of our lives.  Local police departments receive surveillance drones and bodycams, soon to be equipped with facial recognition technology that will feed into a national biometric database filled with detailed information of every citizen.  Military intervention abroad generates threats at home that provide a convenient excuse for the total surveillance bureaucracy that is consuming billions of dollars while stripping us of any semblance of privacy.

Yet there is hope.  There are stubborn pockets of resistance in the form of writers, bloggers, activists, and concerned citizens who would prefer a future not riddled with CCTV facial recognition cameras as they’re tracked like cattle everywhere they go.

Think about the dichotomy of surveillance and privacy.  Surveillance is what we conduct on things we wish to control, whether it’s plants, animals, or other possessions.  To conduct surveillance on another individual is to presume a level of ownership or control over that person.  When a government does it to its citizens, what is the implied relationship?  Who owns whom, who controls whom?

Which brings me to the title of post, “strange things happen at the one-two point”, an ancient proverb referring to Go, a deceptively simple board game developed in China several millennia ago, which means “the rules do not apply”.  I mention this quote for several reasons.  Two weeks ago, Google’s DeepMind AI mastered chess in four hours, and the news was trumpeted to the heavens.  But something far more significant occurred a few months earlier when another Google AI mastered Go by playing the game over and over for a span of 40 days.  What’s significant is the vast difference in complexity between chess and Go.  The number of potential chess games is what is referred to as the Shannon number, or 10^140, which is actually very large, but small enough for an AI to brute force learn every single outcome.  Go, on the other hand, has an outcome complexity of 10^(10^48), a number too large to learn the game by sheer brute force, which means the AI had to become creative, or, more human.  After 40 days it devised plays previously unknown to Go masters.  The underreported news story of the Go-playing AI eerily brings to mind John Connor’s words from the first Terminator: “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence.”

Strange things happen at the one-two point.  The rules do not apply.  Technology, governments, and their citizens are reaching a point of convergence, and anything is possible

USA Today: Surveillance cams, face scans help China make thousands vanish .Ed: this is the ultimate function of total surveillance, not as a crime-fighting tool but as one of population control.

NBC News: A teen sexting case revealed how judges let police invade children’s privacy

Brinkwire: Want to live in a futuristic smart city today? Take a cruise.

ABC News: Once-secret, now-closed $22 million UFO program confirmed by Pentagon

Daily Mail: Bitcoin mining is causing electricity blackouts

National Review: The lost art of privacy

Forbes: California’s $15 minimum wage will cost the state 400,000 jobs Ed: Why does anyone still support the idea of a minimum wage in the face of the evidence?

Techdirt: Cop shuts off dashcam during drug dog sniff.  Appeals Court: This is fine.

The Guardian: Wikileaks recognized as a “media organization” by UK tribunal

Activist Post: OKC musician arrested, strip-searched, and thrown in jail for singing without a license

Townhall: Freak-out, death threats, and…neutrality?

The Federalist: No, lifting ‘Net Neutrality’ doesn’t hurt gay people. “It is unnerving to realize that the leaders of the LGBT movement seem to believe average gay people are utterly dependent on them for seemingly everything.”

ArsTechnica: More haunting declassified scans of nuclear weapons test videos released

The Intercept: J20 defendants await verdict in first test of government attempt to criminalize protest group as a whole

High Times: Is this finally the big moment for hemp?

Reason: The FBI is not your friend

Nautilus: Why your brain hates other people

TelegraphUK: Data is the new oil, but how do you invest in it?

The Hill: FBI’s claim on surveillance abuse doesn’t fit the evidence

WSWS: Amazon conducts total surveillance of workers at German plant

Law360: DOJ attorney says surveillance program vital for US security

EFF: Senator calls on courts to increase transparency of surveillance orders

Toronto Star: How artificial intelligence will be used for social control

DW: Facial recognition surveillance test extended at Berlin train station

Alternet: Police shoot a lot more people than previously known

The Hill: Lawmakers look to punt controversial surveillance law debate to 2018

Business Insider: German court rules against foreign intelligence mass communication surveillance

iDropNews: Why Apple’s stance on differential privacy is so important

Media Post: Is email tracking the next big privacy concern?

War on the Rocks: The next military-industrial complex

Motherboard: This software developer is making a surveillance-free cell phone network

EFF: Don’t reauthorize NSA spy in a must-pass funding bill

Aviation Week: Big Data’s tyranny in aerospace

Fortune: NASA used Google’s AI to discover two new planets

High Times: Man settles in lawsuit against cops who forced him to eat weed

Reason: Scared cops are scary

Truthout: The US military is the biggest ‘Big Government’ entitlement program on the planet

FEE: The State is trying to replace your mother

Aeon: Plants have cognitive capacities, too

National Review: Google, Facebook, Amazon: Our Digital Overlords

The Wrap: Apple invests $390 million in facial recognition tech

Open Democracy: Digital giants are trading away our right to privacy

Futurism: Welcome to the future, a place where everyone knows your genetic code

Government News: Australia to trial world’s first city surveillance system

Rare: Rep. Rand Paul and Dem. Ron Wyden take on warrantless Surveillance State

EFF: FISC assurances on spying leave too many questions unanswered

LA Times: U.S. government’s embattled email surveillance program proves resilient

WGNO: ACLU of Louisiana slams New Orleans City Council’s ‘government surveillance on steroids’ proposal

Lexology: The Guardian: surveillance firms spied on campaign groups for big companies

Fox News: China’s DNA database in Xinjiang is in ‘gross violation of global norms’, says rights group

The Drum: Adtech firms collecting ‘vast amounts’ of data on kids despite online regulations

Marines.mil: Marine corps fields ‘game-changer’ biometric data collection system

BloombergQuint: World’s biggest biometric database grows in India despite doubts

ZDNet: NEC Australia to offer real-time video facial recognition

MediaPostCommunications: Facebook urges judge to toss ‘Faceprint’ suit

Dronelife: Drones among devices to be integrated with new surveillance technology

New York Times: The Pentagon Is Not a Sacred Cow

In related defense news from Newsweek: Why won’t the Pentagon tell us where our troops are fighting?

SFgate: “Verax”: dark picture of mass surveillance, whistle-blowers, drones, and war

ABC7news: San Mateo County ponders ban on killer robots

WhaTech: Facial recognition market worth $7.7 billion by 2022

The Inquisitr: Dragonfly Eye: AI machine can identify 2 billion people in seconds

findBIOMETRICS: NEC trains deep learning AI to focus

sUAS News: Facial recognition software for drones released by Face-Six

HuffPo: Welcome to the Surveillance State: China’s AI cameras see all

Bloomberg: Pentagon’s cloud transition under hush order from weapons buyer

Related from The Nation: The Pentagon doesn’t need more money

Mondaq: Two data breach bills introduced in US Senate

ACLU: NYC takes on algorithmic discrimination

The Business Journals: Biometric tracking brings security opportunities, privacy concerns

The American Conservative: Big Brother comes to the bathroom

The Wrap: Netflix says it’s really not creeping on you after it trolled users’ viewing habits on Twitter

Life Hacker: How to reclaim your digital privacy from online tracking

Newsmax: America no safer under mass surveillance

Forbes: Apple’s embarrassing attempt to rewrite iPhone X’s history

Counterpunch: History’s deadliest bombing campaign (the US bombing of North Korea between 1950 and 1953, which killed 2 million)

Fox News: Rep. King seeks more surveillance after Port Authority bombing

Techdirt: Court hold NYPD in contempt for refusing to hand over documents related to Black Lives Matter surveillance

Also from Techdirt: FBI director complains about encryption, offers to sacrifice public safety in the interest of public safety

HuffPoUK: Surveillance Cities

WIRED: How email open tracking quietly took over the web

The News Lens: Reporters Without Borders condemns Western tech execs for China endorsement

Phys.org: Secret surveillance methods in the Digital Age–how to ensure human rights protection

Climate Home: ‘Tsunami of data’ could consume a fifth of global electricity by 2025

Tech Wire Asia: Digital privacy: Phantom.me helps users become invisible online

The Hill: Yes, the FBI is America’s Secret Police

24/7WallSt: Global spending on data security to top $96 billion in 2018

Military.com: Fort Bragg leaders respond to sexual assault data.  This data.

International Business Times: Why Bitcoin’s strength is also its biggest weakness

Gizmodo: How to keep your home wifi safe from hackers

MinuteHack: How to stop hackers from stealing your data

FEE: AIs won’t command us to obey.  They will seduce us.

The Conversation: Will artificial intelligence become conscious?

PLOSblog: Top 5 human evolution discoveries of 2017

Business Insider: The ‘digital privacy case of the century’ is now in court

WIRED: Physical measures to amp up your digital security

Also from WIRED: How to encrypt all the things

And more: The Grand Tor: How to go anonymous online

American Thinker: Fake news on steroids–CNN forced to correct its latest big anti-Trump story

Reason: Court to cops: forcing a teenager to masturbate in front of you is not reasonable. (as in, the police coerced a teen to commit the act in front of them)

Daily Mail: Cop found not guilty of murdering unarmed, sobbing father of two.  (There is video evidence which clearly depicts murder by a power-tripping badged thug)

FEE: The myth of “unaffordable” health insurance just won’t die