REPUBLIC REBORN

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” –From On Politics

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I can’t really believe that most people take democracy as a concept completely seriously. How far should the majority be allowed to go? Is anything off limits? If not, 51% of the people could do whatever they wanted. They could vote for slavery. But certain things are off limits, and most people would agree to that. But to say that is to be against pure democracy. So, to reverse the question, how much should be off limits from the desires of the majority? I’ll leave it at that, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. And one way to keep our sanctimoniousness in check.

01/09/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 8, 2018January 8, 2018 by S. Smith

The Verge: Electronic toymaker VTech settles for $650,000 with FTC over children’s privacy suit

ZDNet: Amazon turns over record amount of customer data to US law enforcement

ACLU: Proposal to expand mandatory DNA collection in Virginia raises serious privacy and due process concerns

The Telegraph: NHS hacker who stopped WannaCry virus ‘was coerced into confessing’ in US

EFF: Groups line up for meaningful NSA surveillance reform

Observer: GOP watchdog group ready to brawl over House surveillance bill

also EFF: Supreme Court won’t hear key surveillance case

Scope Weekly: As privacy and cybersecurity worsen, tech offers innovative solutions

Economic Times: Smart vision: This startup AI-powers CCTV cameras to understand what it sees

Deseret News: Orrin Hatch’s privacy bill would be a fitting legacy

USA Today: Sessions’ marijuana decision shows we learned nothing from Prohibition

The Federalist: The Feds botched the Bundy prosecution. Will this saga continue in court?

Hot Air: China bets on facial recognition in big drive for total surveillance

The Hill: Democrats should take the initiative in ending warrantless surveillance

Coinsquare: How ‘privacy coins’ could take over the world of digital currency

Washington Monthly: How to fix Facebook…before it fixes us

Techdirt: It took only three days for Germany’s new hate speech law to cause collateral damage

FEE: Hayek on the socialist roots of Naziism

NPR: When will we get more ‘Treknology’?

01/08/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 7, 2018 by S. Smith

Breitbart: CIA Director: “There is no ‘Deep State’ at the CIA”. How. Stupid. Do they think we are.

And The Hill: Pompeo rejects notion of ‘Deep State’ at the CIA

Jeff Tucker on who the ‘Deep State’ is from FEE: What About the Unelected?

PJmedia: Another ‘oops’ from the intelligence community

Salon: U.S. police killed 1,129 people in 2017, but that’s not the full body count

Activist Post: New Hampshire law bans warrantless Stingray spying

National Review: The FBI’s dubious probe of Hillary’s emails. “The FBI did everything but drive Hillary’s getaway car”

Washington Times: Trump must cut intelligence spending, which topped $73 billion in 2017

New York Times: Jeff Sessions’ endless war on marijuana

Antiwar.com: A Trump judicial nominee wrote one of the infamous Bush-era ‘torture memos’

Washington Examiner: Can the Pentagon actually figure out how it spends its money?

Laredo Morning Times: In China, facial recognition is sharp end of a drive for total surveillance

ZDnet: Privacy Foundation: Trusting government with open data ‘a recipe for pain’

Wired: Facebook bug could let advertisers get your phone number

01/08/18 Overnight reading assignment

Posted on January 7, 2018 by S. Smith

Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False‘

Snippets:

“What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.[6] If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior.[7] This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them. The next step in the individualistic analysis of society, however, is directed against the rationalistic pseudo-individualism which also leads to practical collectivism. It is the contention that, by tracing the combined effects of individual actions, we discover that many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind; that, as Adam Ferguson expressed it, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the result of human design”;[8] and that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend. This is the great theme of Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, of Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke, the great discovery of classical political economy which has become the basis of our understanding not only of economic life but of most truly social phenomena.”

And Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, ‘Why the Worst Get on Top’

Important slices:

“There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization…

“…That socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learnt 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 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 agreeing on a particular plan for the organisation of the whole of society; others had already learnt the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what a majority of the people agree, but what is the largest single group whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible; or, if no such group large enough to enforce its views exists, how it can be created and who will succeed in creating it…

…it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and “common” instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes it will be those who form the “mass” in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.”

The beginning is the end: ‘Metalhead’, AI, and the specter of weaponized algorithms

Posted on January 7, 2018January 7, 2018 by S. Smith

The Intercept has a new article up, ‘Black Mirror’ reveals our fears of robots and algorithms we can’t control’, and expands on an earlier point I’d made about the nightmarish episode ‘Metalhead’. Before I go on, I’d like to mention that the director of the episode purposely designed his murderbot to look very similar to the very real SpotMini robot dog, designed by Boston Dynamics:

Related image

And here’s a short clip of it in action:

Disturbing, right? It’s nauseatingly easy to imagine this thing armored, equipped with weapons, and also armed with a Google Deep Mind-level AI that has the ability to adapt and learn. And not to give away too much, the bot in the episode is seen searching a kitchen for a weapon, having been previously disarmed by our crafty female hero, and settling on a kitchen knife.

For me, the episode seemed to hint that these things were equipped with AI and just carrying out outmoded, programmed orders from some conflict decades earlier. Basically, “kill everything that moves”. One can imagine they were dropped from the skies by an enemy, and, being solar-powered, continue to kill indefinitely, much like the Vietnam-era cluster bombs that have killed 45,000 Vietnamese farmers since the end of that war in 1975.

The author of the Intercept piece ties in the murderbot with the idea that we aren’t really getting to choose what future we are marching towards. In a sense, Silicon Valley is building our future today, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says. That technology will most certainly strip us of our privacy, and much of our autonomy, as the world around us begins to rely more and more on its latest gadgets. But those companies are doing much, much more. Reason magazine ran an article in November of last year entitled, ‘Is Silicon Valley building the infrastructure for a Police State?’, asks author Zach Weissmueller somewhat rhetorically. Weissmueller’s main point is that the marketing technology that Silicon Valley uses to understand us as comprehensively as possible in order to maximize profit could also be used by government, the perfect tech used to create the perfect Surveillance State. But some companies, such as Palantir, are creating technologies that will help the intelligence community sift through the massive amount of information it rakes in every day. Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, is the primary backer of this project, and justifies it on the grounds that, “”if we could help [agents] make sense of data, they could end indiscriminate surveillance.”

This is completely wrong, though. I much prefer the government to be so flooded with indiscriminate data that it cannot act on it, to technology that can easily sift, sort, profile, and target individual people easily and quickly. Thiel, strangely enough, was a Ron Paul supporter.

A complete elimination of privacy is antithetical to liberty, yes, but also decency. A voyeuristic presumption that we must share our entire lives on social media or some other public forum is being fueled by Silicon Valley, but it’s also the fuel for the privacy-eliminating surveillance boom. Government really doesn’t have to do much to find out about someone’s life. They give it away voluntarily.

And as Facebook Co-founder Sean Parker put it, with the social media platform itself, they created a, “…a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

So someone likes your picture on social media, you get an instant dopamine hit, creating addiction and dependency on these platforms. It is a literal addiction. Completely ingenious.

As a writer, I felt this effect first-hand. When an article gets upwards of 500 Facebook shares, you begin to feel pretty good about yourself. You then find yourself mid-way through the next article wondering if you’re writing solely for that next hit of dopamine. You really have to sit back and question your motives.

So, Parker’s point is probably far deeper than even he knows. This “vulnerability is human psychology” is has been perfectly manipulated to fuel the rapid creation of a complete loss of privacy, driving the momentum of a total surveillance state. It is a mind-boggling phenomenon.

To bring it back around, autonomous murderdogs will probably be dropped on some battlefield in the near future. The tech inside will have been developed by Silicon Valley, DARPA, et cetera. Our insatiable desire for new gadgets, even more unfiltered social media, and internet access for our kitchen appliances will have propelled us there at the speed of light. Maybe we deserve what we will most certainly get.

Also, what kind of life will people really be living in the next twenty years? Would it be possible to escape, or would anyone even want to? Does this level of technology really enhance our lives, or diminish it? Much of the joy of living comes from completing tasks ourselves, doing work, engaging with people face-to-face. What will romantic relationships look like half a century on? The number of people, devoid of immediate access to the instant gratification of internet-connected tech, will plummet to almost zero. Which means the number of people, sitting and doing the hard thing of thinking through things on their own, coming up with their own ideas, developing their own personality, feeling pain, both emotional and physical, and experiencing also all the growth that those experiences bring. “People” will cease to exist. What will exist in its place will be the laboratory rat pushing the orgasm button until he starves to death.

Or the scenario in Farenheit 451. “Flowers feeding on flowers.” No one reading. The books don’t even need to be burned, no one reads them anyway.

No one cares that their digital lives are being uploaded to databases, that a digital prison is being built around them. Hell, they lock themselves in and toss away the key. The Matrix is less a parable about what AI will do to us, but what some people will do to other people. Is there a more savage species in the universe than humankind? Learning of what governments did to people once they had the capacity to, like the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Germany, the Eastern European ‘Bloodlands’ of the interwar years, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s Ukraine famine, it is clear that the limits of human cruelty have not yet been reached.

And to think, that after all that, some random robot dog could also barge in and deliver an algorithmically optimized death, would be the weirdest irony. Maybe, if we were ever to be visited by aliens, they would find the ruins of a technologically-advanced civilization, and then have to fend off the robot army the laid waste to the world. Damn.

I’ll end with this quote from Ayn Rand:

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

The fragile authoritarianism of Sheriff David Clarke

Posted on January 7, 2018 by S. Smith

David Clarke is finally going to trial for siccing a pack of deputies on a fellow airline traveler who shook his head disapprovingly at Clarke during the flight. Apparently, Clarke’s fragile ego couldn’t take such a sleight, so he called in a group of cops to intercept the traveler at the airport, who attempted to intimidate the passenger for silently expressing his disapproval of the badged buffoon. Clarke’s police department later wrote in a Facebook post that the next person to act as the airline passenger did would “get knocked out”. Apparently Clarke can’t even stomach the slightest criticism, proving he’s the most fragile of snowflakes.

Clarke, incidentally, decorates his police uniform with what an Army vet dubbed “toy medals”, or, a collection of pins that give Clarke the appearance that he’s been decorated. He hasn’t.

Authoritarians are notorious for having fragile egos, Clarke being just the latest in a long line of sensitive tyrants who can’t take criticism. Clarke’s is so extreme it seems almost a parody. His behavior in front of a crowd suggests he truly thinks he’s some military commander. It’s military cosplay taken way too far.

The late Will Grigg wrote about the whole affair far better than I ever could in his article, “Take pity on Sheriff Snowflake, or he might have you killed.”