Month: December 2013

DIAF Bitcoin

by David Atkins

Bitcoin lost half its value today in a glorious self-immolation certain to have impoverished a lot of cyberlibertarians out there. Charlie Stross has one of the best takes out there on the Bitcoin nonsense:

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created (‘mined’, in the jargon: new bitcoins are created by carrying out mathematical operations which become progressively harder as the bitcoin space is explored—like calculating ever-larger prime numbers, they get further apart). This means the the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, so that the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market…

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars). This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.

Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else’s computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

Bitcoin violates Gresham’s law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

Bitcoin’s utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

It’s also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren’t paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the “if this goes on” linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

That bit about libertarianism and Leninism is a point I’ve been making for quite some time now (and earning me some angry feedback from Marx aficionados.) Both libertarianism and Leninism assume a sort of human perfection that simply doesn’t exist in the real world. Leninists believe that with just enough training, everyone can be brought to a total selfless regard for species being, or at least for motherland and local community in such a way that everyone will be content to hard work with each receiving according to his “need” (however we define that) and toiling away according to his “ability” (however we define that.) We already know that doesn’t work. Increasingly totalitarian structures of management are required to try to force it to work and then, human nature being what it is, those managers inevitably become their own corrupt elite.

Libertarianism has a similar problem. Libertarianism assumes a rational marketplace where everyone spends their time figuring out exactly how to maximize their benefit, and where labor and capital meet their perfect equilibrium at their perfect price. In this magical land there is presumed to be some sort of police force protecting everyone’s basic property rights and persons against harm and theft. But, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. In the real world, there are valuable and essential commodities that only large organizations can purchase (healthcare, sewage, street lights, roads, food inspections, etc.). Without a government to purchase them, large numbers of people simply must do without those commodities. But since people need those commodities, they are immediately and ruthlessly exploited by nongovernmental entities. Moreover, most people lack the time or inclination to thoroughly research all their supposed choices in the marketplace, leading to an enormous power gap between corporations with armies of researchers and deceivers, and consumers without the capacity to make sense of it all. Also, in the real world people aren’t automatons able to simply travel and conform themselves to whatever and wherever the jobs are. In the real world people have interests, skills, communities and families that tie them to more than simply wherever the labor market can use them most efficiently. A perfectly efficient labor market would be a hell of human misery.

And finally, of course, human life and dignity are incredibly cheap on the open market. Left all to itself, the free market becomes like a game of Monopoly: a few people have all the money, and the rest beg for their crumbs. That is, in fact, exactly what happens when comparatively more equal civil societies with broad middle classes (such as the Roman Empire) collapse into feudal societies. The middle class disappears, and all that is left is barons and serfs. And once all the power and money are in a very few hands, that tiny government small enough to drown in a bathtub immediately becomes subject to corruption and either disappears or becomes a wholly owned arm of the barons, leading to totalitarian kleptocracy simply by another route.

A monetary system designed by and for libertarians in order to weaken central governments predictably begins to display all the prominent characteristics of libertarian social failure. It can’t fail fast enough.

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QOTD: Dave Eggars

by digby

In the Guardian:

“What if the government, in its defence, said: “First of all, we’re searching everyone’s home, so you’re not being singled out. Second, we don’t connect your address to your name, so don’t worry about it. All we’re doing is searching every home in the United States, every day, without exception, and if we find something noteworthy, we’ll let you know.”

That’s pretty much it.

The president reiterated his call to tweak the NSA programs so that people can have more “confidence” in them and “trust” them more. I’ll just paraphrase some famous old guy and say that if spies and governments were angels we wouldn’t need a constitution or a judicial system. But we do. We simply do not rely on “confidence and trust” because humans are, by their very nature, untrustworthy and if there’s one thing in which we can have confidence, it’s that there are people who will abuse power, we just don’t know which ones.

This whole line makes you wonder:

If lack of public confidence is the main problem with NSA surveillance, doesn’t that mean the reforms should be largely cosmetic?
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) December 20, 2013

It could. And probably will.

The president is either naive or blowing smoke with this comment:

The — the fact of the matter is that the United States, for all our warts, is a country that abides by rule of law, that cares deeply about privacy, that cares about civil liberties, that cares about our Constitution. And as a consequence of these disclosures, we’ve got countries who actually do the things that Mr. Snowden says he’s worried about, very explicitly — engaging in surveillance of their own citizens, targeting political dissidents, targeting and suppressing the press, who somehow are able to sit on the sidelines and act as if it’s the United States that has problems when it comes to surveillance and intelligence operations. And that’s a pretty distorted view of what’s going on out there.

I’m going to assume that he’s comparing the US to China (or some other repressive regime) but that’s a pretty embarrassingly low bar for the leader of the free world. We have a very long history of doing all those things to one degree or another and some of it is recent history. Very recent. It’s hard to believe that he would say this in light of the report from his own independent panel’s findings, but he did.

What will give people more confidence is ending surveillance and data collection without probable cause and strict adherence to the constitution and the rule of law, period. It’s not complicated.

It’s annual holiday fundraiser time…

The fearless New Journalist nobody ever talks about

by digby

I was chatting about the new journalism with Rick Perlstein the other day and he brought up the fact that one of the unsung heroes of that movement was Gloria Steinem, with her radical muckraking piece in 1963 called “A Bunny’s Tale.” (It came out the same year as the Feminine Mystique.) I hadn’t thought of it quite like that but when I went back and read it I realized it was truly a remarkable example of the kind of brave journalism that changes the world.

I found this piece written about it on the 50th Anniversary that puts Steinem in the pantheon of the New Journalism as she deserves:

“A Bunny’s Tale” takes the form of a diary and moves from Steinem’s initial decision to adopt the alias of Marie Catherine Ochs to her last day on the job when she overhears another Bunny say of a customer, “He’s a real gentleman. He treats you just the same whether you’ve slept with him or not.” In between, Steinem learns the requirements of being a Bunny. On the club’s orders, she is tested for venereal disease, and after being hired, she is told which club members she can date (Number One keyholders) and which she cannot (all the rest).

Her new status leaves no room for doubting how she is viewed. A guard greets her by calling out, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny!” The club wardrobe mistress stuffs a plastic dry cleaning bag down the front of her Bunny costume to increase her cleavage. Finally, the job doesn’t come close to paying the $200 to $300 weekly salary the Playboy Club advertizes that Bunnies earn. At every turn, Steinem and the other Bunnies are nickeled and dimed. They must, she notes, pay for the upkeep and cleaning of their costumes as well as the false eyelashes they are expected to wear. The club also takes 50% of the $30 in tips they make on food and liquor bills that are charged. It’s a no-win trap for the Bunnies, whose vulnerability Steinem captured by sharing their ordeal.

In taking this approach to her article, Steinem was doing what many new journalists did in the 1960s when they made their personal experiences central to the events they reported on. Tom Wolfe took this path in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, and Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels. In Steinem’s case the great challenge was resisting the temptation to lash out against those who were alternately patronizing and exploiting her. She had to know that when “A Bunny’s Tale” appeared in print, she was going to be accused of exploiting her good looks. A homely woman, as the Playboy Club made clear in its ads, could not be a Playboy Bunny. Since “A Bunny’s Tale” first appeared, it has taken on a life of its own. In 1985 “A Bunny’s Tale” was made into an ABC television movie starring Kirstie Alley, and today Steinem’s story, which she retitled “I Was a Playboy Bunny” when she included it in a collection of her own writing, retains its freshness.

You can read the original piece here. It’s well worth it. We’ve come a long way baby, but we’ve got a long way to go.

It’s holiday fundraiser time … 

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The opposite of what they do in America

by David Atkins

An image for you on a Friday morning courtesy hackery21 on Reddit:

One of the frustrations of arguing with many conservatives and neoliberals is that they act as though all American policy questions are theoretical, and that there’s no objective standard of proof based on the experience of other countries. If you try to point to the results of other countries, they exclaim that America is an exceptional snowflake, or that we’re the only country with a significant immigrant population. Neither are true, of course.

We can and should learn from the experience of others.

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*This post will stay at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer material.

Fear and loathing in the blogosphere featuring Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi

by digby

“I think I was more offended by Humphrey’s treachery than by Nixon’s pure evil…”

The first real narrative I ever read about the American political process was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in Rolling Stone. That probably explains a lot about how I see politics. But then I’m a product of a weird time in American history when politics was simultaneously inspiring and disillusioning — sort of like now. In fact, in going back to look at Fear and Loathing in preparation for this post, I was struck by just how much the atmosphere of that time reminds me of today. (Kids, some of us 70s throwbacks can relate to you better than you might think.)

And, like then, such times require a certain kind of journalist to help us through it.  Sure, we need thoughtful, careful, detailed analysts. That goes without saying. But we also need writers who, as George McGovern says in that clip, go beyond that to express a truth that can only be seen if you see through the niceties of establishment manners and mores to see it. Then it was the new journalism personified by Hunter S. Thompson. Today, it’s the new journalism being practiced by Matt Taibbi — or Glenn Greenwald, Michael Hastings, Jeremy Scahill and documentary producers like Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald.

Taibbi is a particular heir to Thompson, although I have no idea if sees himself that way.  It’s more than just the total unwillingness to put up with standard conventional bullshit, although they do share that characteristic. It’s a felicitous writing style that captures our surreal times with perfect accuracy. For instance:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money

It just doesn’t get any better than that.

I have no illusion that I’m that kind of writer. But I do care about good writing and it’s something I take seriously, beyond just documenting the atrocities. At the very least, there’s nothing I enjoy more than finding a beautiful phrase like that from another writer and pulling out and linking to it here. It makes me happy just to see it on the page.

And I also try to see a little bit ahead, as all of those writers I mentioned above try to do, and which McGovern explicitly compliments Thompson for having done in the 72 campaign. I think of it as preparing the soil for people to believe what’s happening once it makes its way into the broader culture. It’s important to have train spotters in the culture and I believe that this is one of the most important contributions of the independent bloggers like those of us here at Hullabaloo or Emptywheel or Atrios or the bloggers at Americablog or Daily Kos. We are the progressive look-outs, the ones who see what’s coming and give fair warning.

One of the best quotes anyone’s ever given about me came from the great James Wolcott who said “Digby’s blog is a Paul Revere gallop through the pitched night of the Bush years.” (You can’t blame me for sharing that …) And with that comes a certain amount of angst from readers who see me as a Cassandra who is always forecasting doom. But the truth is that I’m actually a pretty positive person who has been watching this era of Vampire Squids and Village elites and martial fetishism with sincere alarm and hoping that my small, shrill voice within the din will help steer the ship away from the iceberg. My hope is that at the very least I can help amplify the voices of the brave journalists and commentators who are telling the truths that need to be told.

And I need your help to keep doing that. If you think the independent blogosphere is worth keeping around, that our function here is something you value, I’d be very grateful for your support.

Sparky’s prescience

by digby

From 1994:

Maybe it’s time we thought this through, whaddaya think?

h/t to Bruce Schneier

It’s annual fundraiser time …

Exposing the scrooges

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that the fight to extend Unemployment Insurance may not be quite done yet:

Democrats and liberal groups are still not giving up. They are planning a concerted, multi-faceted push over the break designed to pressure Republicans — not Congress; Republicans — to agree to renew the benefits. This comes after Harry Reid announced that a vote on extending UI — which Republicans continue to resist — will take place when the Senate reconvenes in January. 

Here, courtesy of multiple sources involved in the planning, are the main events planned for this pressure campaign: 

1) Liberal groups will launch a national TV ad campaign that hits Republicans for letting benefits expire for over one million Americans, to be launched the day after Christmas and run on national cable through at least December 28th, the day benefits are set to expire. The ads will also highlight GOP priorities by spotlighting GOP opposition to nixing loopholes enjoyed by the top one percent even as a lifeline expires for over one million far less fortunate Americans. 

There may also be a second round of ads launched when Congress returns in early January. The ads — backed by a “significant” buy, a source says — will be run by Americans United for Change. Other groups involved in the broader campaign include the National Employment Law project, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and UAW. 

2) House Democrats are planning a big push in local media, with the goal of using local coverage to dramatize how constituents in Republican districts will be impacted by the expiration of benefits. This is hyper-granular stuff: I’m told Ways and Means Committee Dems are collecting county-by-county data on the number of people who will be kicked off benefits, and pushing local press outlets to reflect these numbers in their coverage. 

The idea is to make it harder for individual lawmakers to escape the direct consequences, in their districts, of failing to renew benefits, bringing it home. The goal is to inspire more press coverage like this, this, and this. 

3) Liberal groups are drawing up lists of House Republicans who are both vulnerable and reside in states where unemployment is high. The targeting of them will take various forms, such as conference calls — directed at local media in their states and districts — that feature people who are losing benefits. 

Meanwhile, labor unions are planning events in states, and liberal groups are planning polls on unemployment benefits in both marginal districts and nationally. Results should be released next week.

There is evidence that even the misanthropic Republicans can be moved to deal with this, especially a Christmas time. It’s very smart for these groups to do national advertising on this over the holiday and focus on local media. As much as these people want to cut of the unemployed, they are subject to the pressure from normal people not to be cruel and ungenerous.

Normally this would have been put into the budget deal as a price for some horrible concession from Democrats.  But this time it didn’t make it and from the sound of it the leaders of both parties pretty much figure it’s a dead duck. The recession is over, long live the recession.

But it’s always possible that they could relent if enough public pressure is brought to bear.  And there’s no better time to call attention to these horrible Scrooges than now. So good for the liberals. Maybe they’ll pull this one out.

It’s annual fundraiser time …

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QOTD: James Woolsey

by digby

Via Arstechnica, re: Snowden

I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” said [James] Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993 to 1995. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”

Spoken like a true Royalist.

You all remember James Woolsey, right?

In the address to a group of college students, Woolsey described the Cold War as the third world war and said “This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War.”

Woolsey has been named in news reports as a possible candidate for a key position in the reconstruction of a postwar Iraq.

He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the “fascists” of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.

Woolsey told the audience of about 300, most of whom are students at the University of California at Los Angeles, that all three enemies have waged war against the United States for several years but the United States has just “finally noticed.”

“As we move toward a new Middle East,” Woolsey said, “over the years and, I think, over the decades to come … we will make a lot of people very nervous.”

What do you suppose Mr Woolsey is up to today? He’s running a private equity group called Palladin Capital. What does Palladin Capital do?

Founded in 2001, Washington DC based Paladin Capital Group is a multi-stage private equity fund that focuses on investments that toughen the country’s critical infrastructure. Current deal values range from US$5 to US$25 million and the firm has more than US$980 million under management across multiple funds including the Paladin Capital Partners fund (launched in 2001 with US$208 million), the Paladin Homeland Security Fund (launched in 2004 with the US$235 million), and the Paladin III fund launched in 2007. Sectors of focus for its latest fund cover critical infrastructure and homeland security elements such as mesh networks, IT services, data storage, business process software, network management software, detection, biometrics, search software, electronic/network hardware, alternative energy & clean energy technologies, network security, communications interoperability & reconstruction, biological/chemical/radiological remediation, protective equipment, and asset tracking & container security.

So you have a former CIA chief who’s making god-knows-how-much money from the surveillance state — a man whose worldview is just this side of paranoid psychosis — gleefully using vivid imagery of an execution to describe what he hopes happens to Edward Snowden. And presumably he’s still a member of the Washington establishment.

It’s probably important to also remind folks that Woolsey was ostensibly a Democrat.

It’s annual holiday fundraiser time …

Today’s right wing circus acts

by digby

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

The man who said that actually had the gall to call someone else an insufferable man-child. He was referring to yesterday’s wingnut hissy fit over what they are calling “pajama-boy.”  You can read about the whole stupid brouhaha here. (Making fun of Rich Lowry going all Heston is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I’ll let that go.)

Meanwhile, the entire right wing is having a full blown meltdown over the Duck Dynasty guy being suspended for being a homophobic jerk:

I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. http://t.co/IK2fvrqGPn
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) December 19, 2013

Conservatives normally insist that the private sector can do anything it chooses, even hiring and firing on the basis of an owner’s throwback religious or racist beliefs. But that’s only as long as it doesn’t “infringe” on the right of conservatives to be assholes. That’s a sacred liberty which is derived directly from the Bible, Atlas Shrugged and the Declaration of Independence. (You can look it up!)

This is actually an example of a certain variation of the patented right wing hissy fit. This one is based on the “I know you are but what am I” tactic, which takes themes beloved by liberals and turns it back on them in a thoroughly confusing manner. And all too often liberals get tangled up in their own rhetoric while the right wing smugly eggs them on.

Let’s take a little trip back in time, shall we? You all remember the Dixie Chicks’ little faux pas, right? And you remember what happened?

[A]ll hell broke loose after Maines’ on-stage comment made the media rounds. The Chicks lost most of their airtime on right-leaning country-western radio; CD and concert ticket sales plummeted. Encouraged by reactionary FreeRepublic.com bloggers and DJs, ex-fans destroyed Chicks CDs en masse during the ensuing “Dixie Chicks Destruction” campaign. Concerts were picketed by Red-baiters who called the Chicks “traitors” and “communists,” although the group’s fans were divided, with many remaining loyal. Worst of all, bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors were deployed at Dixie Chicks concerts. Under heavy security, the Texas trio confronted a 2003 death threat at a Dallas performance, after a letter threatened to shoot Maines in the same city where John F. Kennedy had been gunned down 40 years earlier. For his part, President Bush appeared to egg on the Chicks’ persecutors, saying: “They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records.”

You all remember Clear Channel’s reaction to the Dixie Chicks controversy, don’t you?

Country music’s No. 1 act, The Dixie Chicks, have been pulled from radio playlists thanks to a remark singer Natalie Maines made in London last week.

“Just so you know,” Texas native Maines said on stage, “we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Maines added she felt George W. Bush’s foreign policy is alienating the rest of the world. 

Her remark unleashed a nationwide backlash. The group’s records have been pulled by dozens of country-music stations across the country, including two Clear Channel-owned stations in Jacksonville, WQIK 99.1-FM and WROO 107.3-FM.

“Out of respect for our troops, our city and our listeners, [we] have taken the Dixie Chicks off our playlists,” said Gail Austin, Clear Channel’s director of programming for the two Jacksonville stations.

I’m quite sure we’ll hear tales of angry gay mobs from San Francisco threatening to take out the Duck Dynasty guys any minute now. Whenever one of the “I know you are but what am I” flaps comes up, the right wingers turn into damsels in distress and whimper loudly about how they are being threatened with violence. (They apparently see nothing weird about the fact that they are simultaneously supposed to be ones who will protect us from “bad guys” and the government alike with their vast caches of NRA sanctioned weaponry.)

The First Amendment protects both the Dixie Chicks and the Duck Dynasty guys from government censorship. Corporations and other employers can fire you for looking at them sideways much less expressing views they think will offend their customers. I happen to think they have too much freedom to fire at will and frankly, most of the time, it accrues to the right wing’s benefit, what with so many rich owners being liberal-hating Republicans and all.

But every once in a while it goes the other way. That Duck Dynasty guy said something obnoxiously repellent about gays and the owners of the network thought it called for sanction. If the right wing would like to work with liberals to make it harder for employers to fire employees for merely expressing their political ideas I think we might be able to form a nice bipartisan coalition. But as I said, they think the constitution only protects conservatives from liberals, so we’re probably not going to come to any agreement on this.

Update: I forgot that we are also not allowed to accuse Republicans of “drinking the kool-aid” because it hurts their feelings.  They are such delicate flowers.

Update II: John Amato makes an excellent point about Palin:

[W]hy didn’t she defend Martin Bashir over his callous words about her –which caused a conservative outrage and then led him to resign his job at MSNBC? She wallowed in his ridiculous words to her and bathed in the conservative backlash politics that ensued.

Did she say that Bashir was entitled to say anything he wants on MSNBC’s airwaves, even attacking her? After all, it was his personal opinion that he voiced. Nope. Did she then go on and debate Bashir over what prompted him to say those things about her? Nope. So it’s OK for anti-gay and and pro-Jim Crow words to be uttered by Robertson, but not anti-Palin words.

Uh, yeah. Basically.

It’s annual holiday fundraising time …

The list of important items in the NSA report


by digby

Kevin Drum does a nice job of highlighting and distilling the most important recommendations of the NSA report:

1. Phone records should be stored privately, not by the government. If the NSA needs phone records, it should get a warrant for them. Like a subpoena, the warrant should be “reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.”
2. More broadly: “As a general rule and without senior policy review, the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about US persons for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.”
3. The FBI should no longer be allowed to issue National Security Letters on its own. NSLs should be issued only if a warrant is approved. Nondisclosure orders should be more restricted; should last no more than 180 days; and should not prevent the target of the NSL from challenging its legality in court.
4. Generally speaking, companies that are ordered to produce information should be allowed to “disclose on a periodic basis general information about the number of such orders they have received, the number they have complied with, the general categories of information they have produced, and the number of users whose information they have produced in each category.”
5. Surveillance of non-US persons “must be directed exclusively at protecting national security interests….[and] must not be directed at illicit or illegitimate ends, such as the theft of trade secrets or obtaining commercial gain for domestic industries.”
6. If a US person is inadvertently surveilled, that information cannot be used as evidence in any court proceeding.
7. The NSA should be headed by a civilian. Leadership of the NSA should be separated from leadership of the military’s Cyber Command.
8. “Congress should create the position of Public Interest Advocate to represent the interests of privacy and civil liberties before the FISC.” In addition, more FISC decisions should be declassified.
9. The government should commit itself to stop trying to undermine public encryption standards.

All of that sounds pretty good.  I’ve been particularly worried about number 6, which seemed to me to be a huge danger, basically providing the US government with a data base they could use to “find” evidence any time they needed it. (Of course, we also need to ensure they can’t hide the fact that they relied on this evidence by considering the data storage the same thing as a confidential informant.)

But what should gain everyone’s attention about all this is the fact that the hand-picked White House commission pretty much confirmed that the government has been doing all these things, or at the very least has the unfettered capability of doing it if if chooses. Number five should make everybody wake the hell up, because it confirms the fact that the government is working on behalf of commercial interests which, by the way, does not mean the same thing as working on behalf of American workers.

It seems to me that this should mean “game over.” All the sturm und drang about Snowden being a traitor who sold out America and made us all vulnerable to boogeymen who are trying to kill us in our beds was always nonsense or, at the very least, beside the point.  Now it’s obvious that this was information that needed to come out and that there was no other way for it to happen except through an act of whistleblowing and brave journalism. The people on this panel are not dirty hippies or libertarian cranks. They are members in good standing of the establishment with credentials that should make any skeptic feel comfortable with their findings.

Unfortunately, politics plays an important role in how we deal with civil liberties and as Drum points out, congress is likely to water all this down (in concert with the administration.)I’m hearing a lot of new talk about how “expensive” these fixes will be (which is funny considering the insanely expensive new headquarters the NSA has been building in Utah) and the usual stenographers are wringing their hands over how impossible this is going to make the NSA’s job. But it’s important that the people understand that these NSA capabilities are not business as usual.  And this report went a long way toward making that clear to even the most obtuse commentators.

It’s annual holiday fundraiser time …