Reason: Police body cameras may get facial recognition. Ed: A measure fought for by transparency advocates as a way to increase police accountability will now transform cops into walking avatars of the surveillance state.

Gizmodo: Companies in China are using brain sensors to monitor employees’ emotions

New York Times: Creepy or not? Your privacy concerns likely reflect your politics

USA Today: The walls have eyes for potential home buyers

Asia Times: Australia eyes wider spying on its citizens

Motherboard: Pimps are preying on sex workers pushed off web because of FOSTA/SESTA Ed: The solution to the human trafficking problem is the complete and utter legalization of prostitution. Violence and victimization are inherent to an illegal transaction, because neither party has recourse to courts of law.

Defense News: US makes it cheaper for foreign nations to buy American weapons

Mises Institute: Baby Alfie, the latest victim of omnipotent government

The American Conservative: Britain’s nervous breakdown

Boston Globe: Hoisting the false flag

FEE: How foreign competition strengthens domestic firms

The Intercept: Why do so many denounce authoritarianism from Trump and Putin, but not from Israel’s Netanyahu?

ACLU: The CIA gives a highly sanitized view of Gina Haspel while keeping her torture record secret

Rutherford Institute: While America feuds, the Police State shifts into high gear

Reason: Republicans love federal snooping: “Although Trump and Republican allies like Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, say the FBI broke the rules to engage in surveillance against members of Trump’s campaign, they resisted the chance to fix the underlying problem. In January, Nunes and 177 other GOP legislators voted against the bill to restrict domestic snooping, then advanced and passed a different bill to renew Section 702. Rather than scaling back domestic surveillance powers, the legislation expanded them, explicitly permitting the FBI to use foreign surveillance rules to fight domestic crimes.”

Activist Post: Military-Industrial complex stocks sent crashing as North and South Korea achieve peace

FEE: Billions have suffered ‘The Handmaid’s Tale” in reverse thanks to overpopulation myths Ed: Out of every delusional mass hysteria that totalitarianism and mass death could be built upon, the overpopulation fear stands out as by far the worst, because it seems the most reasonable, and most “reasonable” people appear to hold a view that there might be “too many people” already alive on this planet already.  Hideously benign books, like the popular Ishmael have propagated the superstition that we could be reaching a scenario where “too many people” exist on Earth, that is constitutes a crisis which can only be solved by government.  Guess what type of government is more than willing to “solve” just this type of “crisis”.  Sterilization, the forced abortion of those seen as inferior, the resurgence of eugenic thinking similar to what has appeared recently in Iceland in regards to the abortion rate for babies with Down Syndrome. The population of the world doubled, from 3.5 to 7 billion, during the past 50 years. Yet during the past 50 years, poverty and hunger have plummeted across the globe.  Living standards are constantly rising, in large part due to the unsung miracle that is comparative advantage, which basically states that everyone, no matter how “unskilled” has a place within a market economy to improve not only their own lives, but by doing so also improves the lives of everyone around them.  The overpopulation myth is a vehicle for demonizing other races, nationalities, those of lower IQ or with other “defects”, and it’s terrifying to imagine to how great effect a skillful politician could use such a will o’ the wisp.  We have nothing to fear as long as we preserve liberty.

The Intercept: It’s impossible to prove your laptop hasn’t been hacked. I spent two years finding out.

National Review: Don’t be mad at Wolf’s Sanders jokes if you’ve never been mad at Trump

The Nation: Sci-fi visions become reality in China’s AI use

From my well-worn copy of his The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 6:

“A society in which the position of the individuals was made to correspond to human ideas of moral merit would therefore be the exact opposite of a free society. It would be a society in which people were rewarded for duty performed instead of for success, in which every move of every individual was guided by what other people thought he ought to do, and in which the individual was thus relieved of the responsibility and the risk of decision. But if nobody’s knowledge is sufficient to guide all human action, there is also no human being who is competent to reward all efforts according to merit.

In our individual conduct we generally act on the assumption that it is the value of a person’s performance and not his merit that determines our obligation to him. Whatever may be true in more intimate relations, in the ordinary business of life we do not feel that, because a man has rendered us a service at a great sacrifice, our debt to him is determined by this, so long as we could have had the same service provided with ease by somebody else. In our dealings with other men we feel that we are doing justice if we recompense value rendered with equal value, without inquiring what it might have cost the particular individual to supply us with these services. What determines our responsibility is the advantage we derive from what others offer us, not their merit in providing it. We also expect in our dealings with others to be remunerated not according to our subjective merit but according to what our services are worth to them. Indeed, so long as we think in terms of our relations to particular people, we are generally quite aware that the mark of the free man is to be dependent for his livelihood not on other people’s views of his merit but solely on what he has to offer them. It is only when we think of our position or our income as determined by “society” as a whole that we demand reward according to merit.”

WhoWhatWhy: Spy University: How intelligence agencies recruit their next generation on U.S. campuses

The Intercept: The botched Cliven Bundy case was just the latest example of prosecutorial misconduct in Las Vegas

Techdirt: Appeals court: Driving attentively while black isn’t probable cause for traffic stop

Motherboard: The price of filming police violence

Zero Hedge: Amazon admits hackers could turn Echo speakers into listening devices

The Federalist: Why single-payer healthcare denies care to children like Alfie Evans

Reason: To save lives, make naloxone an over-the-counter drug

Reason: New York politicians want to suppress free assembly rights for gun rights supporters

Consortium News: Weapons inspector refutes US Syria chemical weapons claims

Mises: The war on cash is even worse than it seems

FEE: Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand how jobs are created

Time: A DNA site helped authorities crack the Golden State killer case. Here’s what you should know about your genetic privacy.

Electronic Intifada: Israeli snipers targeting journalists in Gaza

Truthdig: Department of Offense

High Times: YouTube remains silent as weed pages are purged

The Intercept: Facebook is demanding personal information from political advertisers, raising privacy concerns

The Verge: A pioneer in predictive policing is starting a troubling new project

The Week: The next frontier in criminal justice reform. One of my favorite writers, Bonnie Kristian, discusses the almost never-mentioned problem of America’s out-of-control district attorneys:

“Prosecutors in America, most commonly called district attorneys, have enormous and often unaccountable discretion. “They can choose how harshly to go after someone, how lenient to go after someone,” explainsJohn Pfaff, a Fordham University professor of criminal law. “They have tremendous power in that respect.”

City Lab: America’s justice system has the wrong goals

The Guardian: The ‘deep state’ is real. But are its leaks against Trump justified? Ed: I attempt to post every article discussing our permanent, unelected, real government.

New York Times: Do Americans know they’re handing out billions to corporations?

OC Register: US-backed Saudi coalition just killed dozens of civilians in Yemen

JFKfacts: CIA is still protecting spy who shadowed MLK Jr.

Bloomberg: Google aims at privacy law after Facebook lobbying failed

The Federalist: Here’s how Facebook decides what you can and can’t post

Common Dreams: A company announces its intent to create the world’s newest privacy nightmare

Wall Street Journal: Brain-computer interfaces: ‘The last frontier of human privacy”

Activist Post: “Smart City” projects are really police cam-share programs in disguise

The Hill: Congress is walking the online privacy tightrope with oversight

Fast Company: China’s terrifying “social credit” surveillance system is expanding

ZDnet: Dawn of the smart surveillance cameras

The Intercept: Comey says FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. was “shameful”, but Comey’s FBI also surveilled black activists

USA Today: Trump executive order fails to boost flow of military to police departments.  Thank god

The American Conservative: The pretty little lies behind America’s endless wars

Reason: Net neutrality is officially dead. That’s a victory for free speech.

Truthdig: Why the DNC is fighting Wikileaks and not Wall Street

Salon: Are psychedelics the answer to addiction and depression?

Bloomberg: Palantir knows everything about you

Techdirt: Lawmakers ask FBI why it isn’t getting busy cracking its stockpile of seized smartphones

Reason: Public transit becomes another tool for total government surveillance

National Interest: Here are all the reasons striking Syria was a bad idea

Zero Hedge: Army building “self-aware” squid-like robot that can be 3D-printed during combat

AEI: On Earth Day, let’s appreciate fossil fuels

Mises: Fear global warming? Markets offer our best chance for survival

FEE: 18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the first Earth Day in 1970

American Conservative: State Department report whitewashes Saudi war crimes in Yemen

Antiwar.com: There was nothing humanitarian about our strikes in Syria

Consortium News: Beware of white helmets bearing news

Independent Institute: Think twice about bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs

City Lab: Getting high is a civil right

The Federalist: Chuck Schumer explains why federalism is right for pot, wrong for everything else.

Reason: In defense of cash

Scientific American: Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

LADbible: People take LSD and then try to assemble Ikea furniture

Here’s an 80-something Hayek discussing the central problem of social theory for modern, complex societies, or what he refers somewhat lightly to as “the knowledge problem”, in the sense that no central authority could possibly acquire and use the virtually endless knowledge produced by all social actors in order to form a plan that wouldn’t end in mass starvation.  And, as forgotten theorist of uncertainty George Shackle noted, we are all planning for an unknowable future, all the time.  So in a sense, multiple futures already exist in our consciousness, and we act in pursuit of those futures based on the actions of everyone else in society, actions which are also the product of minds that are searching in the dark to gain a foothold on one possible future.  Strange, once you think about it.  The next thought inevitably, then, is, “how does society function at all, with so much uncertainty about the future?” Therein lies the central problem that thinkers such as Hayek, Shackle, Keynes, and the modern-day writer Nassim Taleb, in his Incerto trilogy, sought to solve.  With Taleb being a more ostentatious, yet derivative, version of much of Hayek’s later work.  Many creations of culture, products of human action yet not of human design, can be interpreted as a means of alleviating such radical uncertainty. Money, language, interest rates, prices all are part of the invisible web that make social order possible.  I’m going to go ahead and insert an extended quote from Hayek’s famous essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society‘, to further drive home his point about the significance of prices:

“We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

Of course, these adjustments are probably never “perfect” in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e.,they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.”

As an aside, there is something about Hayek’s voice, slight though it is, that seems to wake the dead, or least slumbering child and dog.  I can play Star Trek reruns in the background all night and nothing stirs, but the moment Hayek’s thick Austrian accent begins quietly playing, doggo perks up like her castle is under seige.

From The Road to Serfdom:

“The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialists
 disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their
democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.”

The best way to view the power you wish to grant to government is to imagine that power being wielded by someone who’s political viewpoints you despise.