Category: privacy

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general freedom media and media people privacy

CDC’s Covert Data Crime

CDC, Covid, surveillance

The Centers for Disease Control has been criticized so often over the past couple of years — justly, only about 90 percent of the time — that one almost hesitates to add to the pile.

But hey. If the CDC stops saying and doing awful things, we can stop slamming it for saying and doing them.

The latest is the agency’s apparent use of Big Data to surveil cellphone users in ways the users never suspected or authorized.

Vice reports that the CDC paid for location data “harvested from tens of millions of phones” in the U.S. to track patterns of compliance with curfews, visits to churches and schools, and “monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation.”

CDC documents obtained by Vice suggest that although the pandemic was the rationale for getting the data, the CDC has planned to use it for other purposes too.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, is calling for an investigation. “Just because data exists, doesn’t mean that the government should be using it to track Americans.”

He adds that “the government is becoming way too big, and way too powerful.”

Sounds like a new development. But, depending on how you’re measuring it, the metastasizing of the federal government goes back to the Civil War era — or at least the New Deal. So may I suggest a revision, Senator, starting with verb tense?

“Has become.” 

Has become way too big and powerful. 

And is getting even more so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability privacy tax policy

Stay On Call 

facial recognition, taxes, privacy, freedom

Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.

We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.

Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.

It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)

The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.

But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.

Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-than-trustworthy IRS. A third-party vendor would have been involved.

So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?

Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights privacy tax policy too much government

A Closer IRS

IRS, privacy, banking, audit

Congressman Jared Golden, a Democrat in a Trump district, may be feeling heat.

“First, Nancy Pelosi said she’d raise taxes. Now, she’s coming for what’s left,” warns an American Action Network television advertisement airing in Golden’s Maine district. 

“To help pay for trillions in new spending, Pelosi wants the government to spy on nearly every American bank account, looking for new money to spend,” the spot continues. “Your deposits, payments, bank balance . . . under Pelosi’s plan, the government monitors them. 

“Call Jared Golden and tell him to . . . keep the government out of your bank account.”

Fact-checking the spot, News Center Maine determined that, “yes, as part of that plan, banks would be required to give two additional pieces of information to the IRS: how much money went into certain bank accounts over the course of the year and how much came out.”

Those “certain” accounts started out being those with $600 going in or out. After the public uproar, the plan hiked the amount to $10,000. 

Same principle, though.

“The only way to ensure that upper-income taxpayers pay what they owe,” explained a U.S. Treasury press release, “is by giving the IRS the resources and information required to close the tax gap.”

But does our system work that way? Not according to the Fourth Amendment.

We do not keep “a closer eye” on people making a certain amount; it is un-American to require all such “suspects” be put through the wringer the better to find a few guilty of something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs privacy too much government

Privacy with Chinese Characteristics

China, internet

Governments must appear, at least some of the time, to be riding a silver stallion to rescue The People. All government rests on a kind of consent: not legal; not democratic; instead, the accommodation of the many to the few — to accept being ruled. This has been known since David Hume.

So when governments pretend to be more democratic, more contractual, than they actually are, it’s to maintain and increase power.

Take China.

In a fascinating report by Liz Wolfe, we learn that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is establishing new rules regulating corporations’ use of their customers’ data: “the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), necessarily weakens big tech companies, forcing onerous regulations that they will now have to comply with.”

This may sound all very consumer- and citizen-oriented. But Ms. Wolfe not only notes that the regulations are burdensome, she observes that while China’s corporations will soon be prevented from doing things big tech companies routinely do in the West, the Chinese will pointedly not be protected from data collection by the government. 

Which is vast. 

Intrusive.

Often malign.

“Protection of consumer data, while fine and good, means nothing,” she writes, “if there’s no true rule of law binding governments to privacy-protecting standards as well.”

Almost certainly China is trying to prevent in China what happened in America: the creation of powerful countervailing organizations competing with the government in one of the oldest activities of government: suppression of opinion to leverage power and revolutionize the State, changing policy from outside formal power centers.

Our social media — and other major tech corporations — have plied their incredible access to information to mold popular opinion for political and ideological purposes.

The CCP will not put up with that. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard privacy

Google Goes Bad

Google, don't be evil, China, censorship, free speech

Good Google’s evil twin, Bad Google, is at it again.

In addition to doing bad things to advance its political agenda, Google is willing to work with bad governments do bad things. 

For example, the authoritarian Chinese government.

Google is working on a mobile version of its search engine, code-named Dragonfly, which would censor search results the way the Chinese government wants. The company is doing so even though it shut down its Chinese-mainland search engine back in 2010 because it “could no longer continue censoring our results” in China. At the time, I praised Google for moving in the right direction.

Now it’s regressing.

And more than regressing. The Intercept reports that Dragonfly goes beyond censorship. How? By linking a user’s search results to his phone number. Critics note that this would abet human rights violations, since users could easily be detained and even jailed for searching for the “wrong” terms.

At least five Google employees have resigned in protest. One, Jack Poulson, a research scientist, says that he regards “our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe.”

Google no longer promotes what used to be its motto and guide: “Don’t be evil.” 

To be sure, that motto did not put a very positive spin on the company’s moral stance. “Always be good” might be better. But I agree with both. 

Be good, not evil.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism political challengers privacy Regulating Protest too much government

Don’t Enable Tyrants

Tor, anonymity, privacy, Venezuela, socialism, dictator, censorship, criticism, Maduro

If I deliberately help somebody to do evil things — and nobody is holding a gun to my head — I am thereby doing evil myself.

A person should not let himself be in that position. Not even if he’s “just doing my job” and looking for a non-evil job would be demonstrably inconvenient. To have a motive for doing a bad thing is not by itself exculpatory.

What provokes this observation is a newly amplified assault by the Venezuelan government on the rights of its citizens. The government is seeking to violate the right to peacefully read stuff on the Web by blocking Tor software, which allows users to elude government surveillance and reach banned websites.

Venezuelan dictators Chavez, now dead, and Maduro, still there, have never hesitated to stomp freedom in the name of a spurious greater good. Somebody like Maduro is certainly unscrupulous enough to go after Tor for thwarting censorship. So he fulfills that requirement. I doubt that he possesses very extensive programming ability.

Tor may not be perfect, but it’s pretty robust. You need substantial resources, such as those at the disposal of a government, to stop it. You also need to know what you’re doing. The coders on Venezuela’s stop-Tor team are probably smart enough to grasp the purpose of their work.

They and all other such collaborators should defect to the other side: that of programmers working to protect innocent people from government-sponsored cyber-assault.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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