So Who Hacked Atkisson’s Computer?

Thoughts from Ace:

This is obviously a politically-motivated crime, not a personally- or economically-motivated one. That doesn’t mean the government had anything to do with it, but it certainly seems that someone favorably inclined towards the government did.

Perhaps one of those legions encouraged to “get in their faces,” like the staff of the IRS.

Hacking is a federal crime, is it not? Can we expect Robert Mueller to get his Top Men (whoever they are, he doesn’t know) on this like he did with the IRS scandal?

As he says — means, motive, opportunity. I’d bet on someone at DOJ.

I think that when we find out about everything, it’s going to make Watergate look like a parking ticket.

More thoughts from Peter Kirsanow:

The burden of proof remains with government officials to explain why, on any proposition, large or small, they deserve our trust. But recent events show they should be required to convince us even beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s unlikely they’ll be able to do so any time in the foreseeable future.

I hope that the Republic is saved by this overreach, if it’s not too late.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Looking at her Twitter feed. This was done by a professional.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Did they spy on Romney’s campaign computers, too?

At this point, what reason do we have to think not?

The Bozo Leviathan

blunders on:

If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.

We have a government that’s doing all sorts of things that it shouldn’t be doing, and is utterly incompetent at both them, and the things it should be doing.

The Sheep

look up:

What is this but the nightmare of political modernism? The constant watchers with cold, unsympathetic eyes. The men in trench coats falling in step as you leave your home. The knock on the door at three in the morning. The monster state crushing the individual, the “boot stamping on a human face forever.”

You cannot answer this with legalisms or minutiae. By pointing out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts have been on the case since 1978, carefully overseeing all government surveillance programs, that the 1986 Electric Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), the Patriot Act, and its supplementary legislation provided for further and even more rigorous safeguards. Or that the “concept of privacy” is “evolving” under the pressure of new technology, being “redefined” into something vaguer and more metaphysical that it was.

You can’t make those arguments because, obviously enough, the safeguards didn’t work. If they had worked, nothing like this NSA program would have ever seen the light of day. If FISA courts had any real power, if government attorneys had any serious intention of serving the interests of the public, the NSA effort would have been limited to a paper proposal, like thousands of other crazy ideas. (For their own part, the conservative elite have waltzed their way into the dunce corner all by themselves with the argument that national security trumps everything. Memo to NRO, Commentary et al — it doesn’t. It never has.)

Americans know full well what “privacy” is. They know it simply involves being left alone, particularly by those in power. They know that it does not “evolve” without turning into something else completely. Privacy is an aspect of human nature and, like marriage, parenthood, ownership of property, or self-defense, cannot be destroyed or modified by legislation or government activity. Those who attempt to do so are challenging the fountains of the vasty deep, and will be washed away in the attempt.

Involving as it does the NSA, it’s unlikely we will ever learn exactly who was behind this, who gave the orders, and what the precise purpose was. But in a way, that doesn’t matter. We know what the source is, and the rest we can guess.

I think we’re going to find out a lot more before this is over, though. We won’t have to guess.

[Update a while later]

The new Panopticon — the all-seeing eye:

The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers. I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused: after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family. I left the tape on.

This is what it has come to. The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government. The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.

I keep my webcam on my desktop unplugged unless I’m using it, but maybe I should tape my laptop camera. And no, I’ve never trusted Google with my data. But so many people I email with are gmail users, it probably doesn’t matter.

And then there’s this:

No doubt once again there will be a mad scramble in the Capitol to do something – new regulations, new oversight, new attempts to protect civil liberties. But, thanks to Moore’s Law, the technology will have already moved on. Is it too much to ask, just once, that Congress get ahead of this mess before all of those newly-purchased copies of 1984 turn into tour guides? The leaders of many top Silicon Valley companies have besmirched the reputations of their companies (“Do no evil” indeed) and lost the hard-earned trust of their international customers in the last few days – for what? Haul them in before a Senate committee and find out what threats the NSA and other agencies made to make these powerful billionaires give up so much.

Meanwhile, Congress, get ahead of the technology curve for once. You can start by asking about where the data goes from cellphone cameras. Then talk to the GPS folks about the ability to track the location of private phones and use their phone and tablet cameras. Query Google about the future plans for those autonomous camera cars. Get Bill Gates and ask him about what he had to give up to quiet that Microsoft anti-trust case of a decade ago. All may prove dead-ends, but who can now be sure?

Who indeed?

High Blood Pressure

So I’m looking at the reviews of this book over at Amazon, and while it gets lots of praise, there’s a very big omission — no one says that it actually worked for them. If it does, I’ll pick up a copy, but that’s my primary criteriaon — does it work? Not what her credentials are.

In my case, I don’t eat bananas because I think they’re too starchy. There are other ways of getting potassium (one thing I’ve done is to not only cut way back on salt, but to only use sea salt, which also provides other salts than just sodium chloride).

[Update a while later]

Also, I’m not sure there’s any evidence that exercise helps.

Health-Care Propaganda

Of the “non-profit” type (though I think plenty of people are profiting):

How do they get away with it? The Obama picture looks like something from a totalitarian cult of personality, but now that he is safely re-elected, he is not a candidate for office. Neither, it turns out, is Speaker Perez, who is currently serving his third term in the Assembly, is prohibited by California law from seeking another term, and has not launched a campaign for another office in 2014. Further, the brochure makes no reference to any specific legislation, only to the general goal of providing “everyone” with “access” to “affordable health care.”

This column does not think the Internal Revenue Service should take a punitive approach to the endowment’s propagandizing for semi-socialized medicine. (Similarly, our colleagues on The Wall Street Journal editorial page were critical of the IRS’s 2004 investigation of the NAACP.)

But it does underscore why the IRS’s abuse of grassroots conservative groups is so galling. ObamaCare was enacted in 2010 against overwhelming public opposition. This energized the Tea Party, which helped turn the 2010 elections into a referendum in which ObamaCare was resoundingly defeated.

Obama’s re-election was another referendum on ObamaCare. That one he narrowly won–but as it turns out, the IRS was cheating on his behalf. The California Endowment’s pro-ObamaCare propaganda may be unobjectionable in itself, but the government’s systematic suppression of dissent lends another layer of illegitimacy to this monstrous law.

I’m starting to take the view that this entire administration is illegitimate.

My Computer Problems Are Mounting

Literally.

I just bought a new drive to upgrade from Fedora 14 to 18. So I load the new OS onto the new drive, which is drive 1, and keep my old installation as drive 2, figuring I can then just move the old data off it onto the new one. The problem is, it won’t let me. I can see the drive in the Gnome file browser, but my home directory has an “X” on it, and when I click on it, it tells me I don’t have permission to view it. I tried mounting it as root in the shell, and I’m not seeing anything on it that way. I know it’s all fine, because I can still boot from it and go back to the old system, but I can’t figure out how to access it from the new one.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Health Insurance

Why doctors are bailing out:

As the open enrollment period for 2014 approaches, premiums on individual plans in the Obamacare exchanges for California will double, and will increase 80 percent or more in Ohio. At the end of its first decade in force, the ACA will leave more than 30 million Americans without insurance – the driving issue behind health-care reform for at least the last twenty years.

The problem with all of the health-care industry reforms has been that precise goal: expanding insurance. The widespread use of comprehensive insurance policies insulates end users in the system from price signals, especially on routine care. That eliminates competition on price as insurers use their economic weight to pre-negotiate pricing on every kind of service and product under their coverage, from blood tests to setting broken bones. Providers locked into a specific schedule of reimbursements have no reason to innovate to either lower costs or increase value, and end up having to spend money and time dealing with insurance companies for delayed payments rather than focusing on the patients seeking treatment in their clinics.

Ironically, the multiplication of mandates and other regulations in the ACA on both private insurers and government-run programs like Medicare and Medicaid have more doctors opting out of the third-party-payer system altogether. Earlier this week, CNN Money reported on the migration to cash-only services among health-care providers, driven by poor reimbursements, increasing regulation, and high overhead.

ObamaCare has taken a terrible system and made it much worse.

Lois Lerner

Should be doing a long stint in Club Fed:

Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan; she also is a national security problem, because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

This is the danger of a too-powerful government.

Space Safety Regulation

Too much or too little? Clark Lindsey has a post linking to the two extremes. I’d say that Carolynne Campbell-Knight’s piece isn’t just overwraught, but hysterical:

Make no mistake, if a few very wealthy people get killed, the waivers they signed won’t mean a thing if they didn’t know the risks. It may make no difference whether they knew the risks or not. There will be a massive outcry, huge negative publicity and a demand for regulation and accountability. That would be the end of passenger space travel for decades and the damage to the industry would be immense. A wise industry would regulate itself, set published standards, and be open about the risks involved. It would do this before the disaster happens.

When the West was wild, it was a different era. A Wild West in space won’t be acceptable in the day of 24 hour news and the litigious society.

Right now, the risks are not being properly declared. The impression is being given that riding rockets can be as safe as a ride in a light aircraft. That simply isn’t true. Rockets are dangerous and even the most careful engineering can only make them ‘as safe as possible’. They can’t make them ‘safe’.

I’m unaware of anyone “giving the impression” that these vehicles will be as safe as light aircraft. I think that she’s just unjustifiably inferring that. Here’s what I wrote in the book:

Some will argue that part of promoting the industry is to ensure that it doesn’t kill its customers, but the industry already has ample incentive to not do that, and the FAA isn’t any smarter on that subject than the individual companies within it — everyone is still learning.

There is a popular view in the space community that the first time someone dies in private spaceflight it will somehow doom the industry. Bluntly, I believe that is nonsense, because it is based on absolutely no evidence. In fact, there is an abundance of counterevidence with examples being the early aviation industry, various extreme sports including free diving and mountaineering, and even the recent cruise-ship disaster of the Costa Concordia, in which at least thirty passengers died.

In fact, it may take just such a death, a sanguineous christening, to normalize this business, and end the mystical thinking about it.

She herself isn’t consistent on the issue:

While there are some treaties covering satellites and debris, there are no laws. There is no regulator. It’s the wild west in space. Who is going to license and oversee the new commercial ventures? Those involved in this commerce think regulation is a bad thing and that it will preclude innovation. That’s what the early railroads thought. But then the bodies started piling up. When is an aircraft a spaceship? What’s the difference? Regulators such as the FAA have no experience in spacecraft. Once you’re above the atmosphere there are no rules, certainly no laws. If the history of transportation teaches us anything, it teaches us that there will be a dangerous mess until a regulatory regime is established.

If FAA has no experience in spacecraft (actually, they do have some), then how can they, or anyone else, be expected to establish a regulatory regime, until we get some experience actually flying? Not to mention that we do in fact have definitions for aircraft and spaceships, in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.

And as Clark notes:

The same regulations that help keep a vehicle from crashing onto third parties also help protect the second parties in the vehicle. The companies are highly motivated to provide safe space travel. While the industry will go on from an accident, it will be very difficult for the company involved to do so. There will be a long grounding and many customers will no doubt demand refunds. Some states have now limited liability exposure for space tourism operators and manufacturers, but there is no limit when gross negligence is found. An accident will also mean the end of the “learning period” in which the FAA is restricted from applying new regulations on personal spaceflight.

I’ve really got to get the book out.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!