BWare

Much like in Gulf War I, when we were looking for WMDs that we sold to Iraq during their war with Iran; in Gulf War III, we’re destroying weapons we gave to Iraq after Mission Accomplished in Gulf War II.

It’s just the circle of life — if you’re a defense contractor. After all, someone is going to have to sell the new Syrian/Iraq ISIS caliphate the replacements for the weapons being destroyed now. Those F-35s don’t move themselves. Actually they don’t move at all and I’m sure we’ll be looking for suckers^Wclients to offload them on.

The real reason behind the increasing pressure for laws mandating cell phone kill switches? It's not stemming a wave of crime. The real thing it's killing is burners. If you have to have the ability to shut down a phone remotely, then you have to be able to identify who can shut it down. So no more anonymity will be possible on cell phones.

That's why prosecutors and LEOs are behind it. Not because they give a shit about your stolen phone. Try turning in a police report about that, and you'll get laughed out of the station. I've been rear-ended, witnessed hit-and-runs, been the victim of a bike/car hit-and-run, and reported break-ins, with zero police response – they couldn't even be bothered to show up. You think they care about your iPhone? They do care that you might be able to communicate anonymously. These laws will be the end of that.

Someone is developing an algorithm that finds not the shortest, or quickest, or cheapest route, but the most scenic. But what I want, having been burned twice in the last month by LA traffic construction, is one that lets you rule out routes. “Siri. The 5 North is closed. Find a way to get me back on it north of the 22. That doesn’t involve driving on the 5.”

Yes, the maps algorithms let you choose alternate routes, but the alternates are very limited, and there are lots of places where there is one freeway, and Google or Apple or Waze or Mapquest or whoever is going to route you on that, no matter what you do. And if it’s closed, well, too bad for you. As you drive around, pulling out your two-decade old copy of the Thomas Guide, Siri will just be telling you to make a series of u-turns to get onto entrances that are blocked.

Corporations are people, as are unborn fetii – women, not so much. Sorry about that.

This then is totally predictable:

“We’re not opposed to the practice of protecting and celebrating life set forth by your quaint, human Biblical standards,” said Ullman last week on Lou Dobbs Tonight. “But JCPenney is not that sort of company, for in his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. We see through the insignificance of your primitive ape society to the coming storm of insanity that is His rise.”

Once again, the failure of the MSM in general, and NPR in particular, in the simplest sense of not asking the next question. The obvious question.

NPR is running a series on what one might find out about someone if they eavesdropped on them. Like, say, the NSA has been doing to the whole world. So one of their reporters has let someone else monitor his communications with similar tools – except he gets to unplug them if he's doing something embarrassing – I don't remember getting that option from the NSA.

At the end, there's this:

[Carrie Cordero] says because I am a U.S. citizen, the only way the intelligence community could collect my data is with an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as FISA. From the beginning of the Snowden affair, the NSA has insisted that all of this collection has been done from within a pre-existing legal framework. Roughly, it works this way:

If you're living abroad and you're not a citizen of the United States, the NSA has a great deal of freedom to try to collect and analyze your data. If you're doing business with a U.S. company or using a U.S.-based service, any kind of bulk collection program has to be approved by the U.S. attorney general. If you're in the U.S. or are a U.S. citizen, no matter where you are in the world, this kind of collection is supposed to be subject to a FISA court order.

But it stops there. It doesn't mention that basically the FISA court basically never turns down a request from the NSA. And doesn't mention that even the toothless FISA court has threatened to sanction the NSA for ignoring the toothless procedures that are in place. And that basically the Obama and Bush administration have set up programs that completely circumvent the FISA court. And that there is no adversarial process, so it's not really a legal proceeding in the Perry Mason sense (Law and Order? Perry Mason is getting a bit stale – I don't think even I ever saw the first run of one of those, just reruns).

NPR just leaves it there, as though the FISA court was some protection of your rights. When your only protection is that probably the NSA is not interested in you. But that's a sad way to live your life, hoping that you never become interesting enough to be interested in. And it seems like you've already lost if that's how you're moving through life.

But the NSA isn't really designed to prevent anything. It's a Cardinal Richelieu machine, designed to find the six lines it can use to hang you.