The Economist: Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?

Reason: Supreme Court rules 8-1 against warrantless police search in important Fourth Amendment case

CNBC: How a Pentagon contract became an identity crisis for Google

BoingBoing: Leaked memos reveal the deep divisions within Google over Pentagon contract

Engadget: Google search showed ‘Nazism’ as California Republican Party ideology

Motherboard: ‘Techsploitation’ demonstrators blocked Google and Apple buses with scooters

Forbes: AI researchers create privacy filter for your online photos that disrupts facial recognition technology

National Review: The carnivores of civil liberties: “Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic party, the investigative media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama administration.”

National Review: Yes, the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign when it spied

Yeah right: The Verge: Google promises ethical principles to guide development of military AI

The Intercept: Face recognition is now being used in schools, but it won’t stop mass shootings

New York Post: Facebook slammed for ‘cheap trick’ to get people to accept privacy policy

ABC: Google’s plan for data-driven ‘smart city’ sparks privacy, democracy concerns

LA Times: Crackdown on immigrants takes toll on federal judge: “I have presided over a process that has destroyed families”

Common Dreams: 40+ rights groups demand Homeland Security release unredacted ‘race paper’ used to justify spying on activists

Boing Boing: The TSA has a secret enemies list of people who’ve complained about screeners

Engadget: Google Assistant is taught to fire a gun

The Federalist: The plug must be pulled on Google’s plan for thought control

Techdirt: Court has no problem with multiple invasive probings in search of drugs that didn’t exist

Gizmodo: Most federal agencies are ‘at risk’ or worse following damning cybersecurity report

Reason: Kim Kardashian is currently the nation’s greatest hope for prison reform

CATO: Nobody wins a trade war

The American Conservative: Police officers don’t need hate crime protections

Antiwar.com: The brilliance of Randolph Bourne

From Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, where he frames the problem that fueled the work he produced during the second half of his academic career:

“The discussion of the problems with which we are concerned was long hampered by the universal acceptance of a misleading distinction which was introduced by the ancient Greeks and from whose confusing effect we have not yet wholly freed ourselves. This is the division of phenomena between those which in modern terms are ‘natural’ and those which are ‘artificial’. The original Greek terms, which seem to have been introduced by the Sophists of the fifth century B.C., were physei, which means ‘by nature’ and, in contrast to it, either nom? , best rendered as ‘by convention’, or thesei, which means roughly ‘by deliberate decision’.18 The use of two terms with somewhat different meanings to express the second part of the division indicates the confusion which has beset the discussion ever since. The distinction intended may be either between objects which existed independently and objects which were the results of human action, or between objects which arose independently of, and objects which arose as the result of, human design. The failure to distinguish between these two meanings led to the situation where one author could argue with regard to a given phenomenon that it was artificial because it was the result of human action, while another might describe the same phenomenon as natural because it was evidently not the result of human design. Not until the eighteenth century did thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and David Hume make it clear that there existed a category of phenomena which, depending on which of the two definitions one adhered to, would fall into either the one or the other of the two categories and therefore ought to be assigned to a distinct third class of phenomena, later described by Adam Ferguson as ‘the result of human action but not of human design’. These were the phenomena which required for their explanation a distinct body of theory and which came to provide the object of the theoretical social sciences.”

From Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

“Economics has long stressed the ‘division of labour’ which such a situation involves. But it has laid much less stress on the fragmentation of knowledge, on the fact that each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and that each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests. Yet it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess, and therefore the fact that each moves within a coherent structure most of whose determinants are unknown to him, that constitutes the distinctive feature of all advanced civilizations.

In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs.  Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.”

Somewhere in Constitution of Liberty, Hayek apocryphally quotes an anthropologist that it would be more accurate to say that we are a product of culture than the other way around.  It’s strange to think about how many decisions we make throughout the day make use of knowledge and experience of someone other than our own, or the knowledge and experience of generations of unknown people who have, by pursuing their own ends, paved the way for our use of their accumulated knowledge.  In turn, our daily actions, plans, expectations, are building and transforming knowledge and culture that some future unknown individual will make use of.  The future is not merely unknown, but unknowable.

LA Times: Supreme Court extends privacy protection to cars in a driveway

Reason: Is the FBI trying to bolster its war on cryptography?

HPPR: Texas DPS has spent millions on high-altitude surveillance planes

EFF: Amazon, stop powering government surveillance

The Intercept: Hidden horrors of “zero tolerance”–Mass trials and children taken from their parents

World Socialist Website: Leading Democratic activists accidentally share photos of immigrants detained under Obama admin.

GEORGE WILL: Trump’s trade wars would avenge only mythical job casualties

FEE: How jailing drug users increases opioid overdoses

Antiwar.com: Questioning war is a civic duty. Why do so few do it?

Gizmodo: Police are more likely to arrest you at a protest where people actually give a crap, study finds

The Conversation: We’re not prepared for the coming genetic revolution

Truthdig: How the Pentagon paid for NFL displays of patriotism

New York Times: Can 30,000 cameras solve Chicago’s crime problem?

The American Spectator: The London-to-Langley spy ring

Muckrock: In the 50’s, CIA decried Soviet torture tactics that would later be used at Gitmo and other Agency black sites

The American Conservative: UN: Another 10 million Yemenis at risk of starvation by year’s end

NextGov: This start-up’s racial-profiling algorithm shows AI can be dangerous way before any robot apocalypse

Buzzfeed: Disturbing video shows cop punching 20-year old woman in the head at a New Jersey beach

Reason: Government has ‘lost’ 1,475 unaccompanied minors it apprehended at the U.S. border

The Verge: Some candidates are blocked from buying ads on Facebook while waiting on authorization codes

Techdirt: Amazon Alexa instantaneously justifies years of surveillance paranoia

Activist Post: Families of MK Ultra victims file lawsuit over government mind control experiments

Cato: TSA still awful after 17 years

Truthdig: The ‘butterfly effect’ of nuclear war

JIM BOVARD: Your tax dollars bankroll Afghan child-molesters

Scientific American: What are the limits of manipulating nature?

From Last Words:

“ONE of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. Democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done—which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”

I’m all for bringing back monarchy, where at least then the State didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was.  Democracy rests on the painfully obvious falsity that “we are the government”. Monarchies clearly know what they are and what they represent.  Their lack of pretension gives monarchies an elegance and beauty that democracies lack.  And, as history has shown, those States that have cloaked themselves in the propaganda that they were really “the people” are those that have slaughtered more of their own people than any other.  Think Russia, China, Cuba, etc.  Governments most given over to the “the people are the government” fiction are without fail always the most totalitarian.  Hans Hermanne-Hoppe’s Democracy, the God That Failed, a book that deserves to be quoted here occasionally, taught us that only during the age of “democracy” and the elimination of monarchy did the age of total war begin.  We are not the government. We are not our jailers, we are not the monopoly on the use of violence.  We are citizens separate from the State, and that understanding is indispensable to our control over the State.

The Verge: Orlando police scramble to defend Amazon facial recognition pilot

Human Rights Watch: Are US police disclosing use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology?

The Week: Beware the new military-technology complex

The Federalist: The FBI used its secret spy program to protect killers, jail innocents, and screw victims

Antiwar.com: House passes $717 billion military spending bill

Reason: NFL’s national anthem policy exposes free speech hypocrisy of Right, Left, and Trump Ed: Mandatory displays of respect for the symbols of the State is a symptom of fascism.

ACLU: We’re demanding the government come clean on surveillance of social media

Libertarian Institute: Cop siccs K9 on driver who politely refuses to answer questions Ed: There is video, and it is as ugly and insane as you’d imagine.

The Nation: America’s “War on Terror” has cost taxpayers $5.6 trillion

GARETH PORTER: How corporate media are undermining a US-North Korea nuclear weapons deal

FEE: U.S. schools don’t measure up, and polling shows Republicans and Democrats know it

World Socialist Website: US primaries: Military-intelligence candidates win four Democratic congressional nominations

Boing Boing: Alexa listened to a couple’s conversation and sent it to the husband’s employer without permission

Engadget: Google will always do evil

High Times: Arizona Supreme Court rules medical marijuana legal on college campuses

Truthdig: Security troops at US nuclear missile base took LSD, records show

Motherboard: The Pentagon releases new documents about the ‘tic-tac’ UFO

The Telegraph: Amazon defends marketing facial recognition tool to police amid privacy concerns

Ars Technica: Police use of Amazon’s face-recognition service draws privacy warnings: “Cloud-based service can index millions of faces and recognize 100 people in an image.”

Wired: Few rules govern police use of facial-recognition technology

NBC: Your DNA is the next big privacy battleground

National Review: Report: FBI greatly overestimated threat posed by encrypted cell phones

Techdirt: The attorney general thinks police having to follow the Constitution leads to violent crime increases

The Atlantic: The undemocratic spread of Big Brother: “Year by year, for the foreseeable future, surveillance hardware and software will keep improving, extracting ever more information. Threats to privacy will proliferate. Communities will theoretically be able to choose whether or not their police officers make use of a given piece of new technology. But in practice, if the status quo persists, even the most intrusive innovations that portend the most radical changes in society will be quietly adopted without public notice or debate or votes that force elected officials to be accountable. The cops will just press ahead without asking permission.”

The Intercept: With Medal of Honor, Seal Team 6 rewards a culture of war crimes

The American Conservative: The Saudi lobby’s scheme to destroy the Iran deal

Also The Intercept: One teen and three FBI operatives: Was the government behind a 17-year old’s terror plot in Texas?

FEE: How media outlets misinform the public about teacher pay

Reason: Firefighter earned $300,000 in overtime by working more hours than actually exist

Ars Technica: NASA’s EM Drive fails actual testing

LiveScience: Archaeologists find shipwreck with stash worth up to $17 billion

BoingBoing: Depression: the psychedelic cure