6 in 10 sheep don't mind being shorn

Once again I find myself in the minority of public opinion.

The first polling on the National Security Agency surveillance leak is out, and despite almost unanimous cries of outrage from the press and civil-liberties advocates, the rest of America seems decidedly "meh" on the matter.

(Pew)

Over half of us—56 percent, to be exact—think that serving phone companies with a secret court order to surrender customer phone records is an "acceptable" way to fight terrorism, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

While 41 percent oppose the NSA surveillance program specifically, a much broader swath of the country is generally willing to sacrifice privacy for security.

Sixty-two percent say they'd rather the government intrude on their privacy if it means making it easier to investigate terrorist threats.

You have to wonder how these lambs feel about being led to the slaughterhouse. They probably are thinking the same thing as, you know, actual mutton.

But the survey also reveals some fascinating demographic information. Out of the age groups surveyed, young people are both the least likely to be following the surveillance news closely and the most likely to say they highly value their privacy. Predictably, Democrats say they're supportive of the policy more often than Republicans do—and Republicans were far more supportive of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping back in 2006 when President Bush was in the White House, compared with today.

On the whole, only 27 percent of Americans are even paying close attention to the revelations. That's roughly the same share of the country that in late May was tuned into the IRS targeting scandal and Congress's investigations into the Benghazi attack.

The key part of this news -- to me, anyway -- is that Democrats favor NSA snooping over Republicans, which is precisely the opposite of what it was during the Bush years. In other words, my party's president before the Constitution.

The pushback against the whistleblower -- which some are refusing to even call that -- is a blizzard of smears and personal attacks.

"If you don't have anything to hide..." you say?

So your bank or credit card company has never made a mistake on a check or a deposit or a debit or a credit? You've never been rooked, gypped, or defrauded, or had your identity stolen and your credit report damaged as a result?

The police have never pulled you over for no reason? Never given you a speeding ticket when you weren't speeding... or worse? I don't suppose the law enforcement officers of this great nation have ever gotten an address wrong on a search warrant for drugs. (Certainly, in the United States of America, we have never, ever arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced and absolutely never executed an innocent man, then.)

Ask a lawyer about what a good idea it is to accept a police invitation to stand in a lineup. You know, since you're innocent.

Has your son or daughter ever been in trouble at school? What about that time when your rebellious son was hanging out with the wrong crowd that night and got picked up for criminal mischief -- or worse yet, had a marijuana cigarette in his pocket?

How about the other side of your family? You know, the n'er-do-wells with your same last name? Don't they have a son who goes to all those protests with OWS?

What about that insane neighbor who heads up the Neighborhood Watch? Didn't you piss him off one day by blocking his driveway for five minutes while moving a piano? Did you know that he was filing reports on "subversive" neighbors late at night on his computer?

All of these things -- and more -- will find their way into your file in the new age of Total Information Awareness. These files are permanent. You don't get to read them and correct mistakes. Once something goes in that file, right or wrong, it will be there forever and you won't ever know about it.

Soo...

Can't figure out why you were denied that business loan?

...or why your daughter was denied admission to that prestigious university?

...or why the city wouldn't grant you that building permit?

Do you feel safer yet?

Still not certain about the real threats against your life?

In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack -- by far the biggest in its history -- roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.

Let's put that in context. That same year in the United States:

• 71,372 died of diabetes.
• 29,573 were killed by guns.
• 13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.

[...]

Measured in lives lost, during an interval that includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history, guns posed a threat to American lives that was more than 100 times greater than the threat of terrorism. Over the same interval, drunk driving threatened our safety 50 times more than terrorism.

Those aren't the only threats many times more deadly than terrorism, either.

The CDC estimates that food poisoning kills roughly 3,000 Americans every year. Every year, food-borne illness takes as many lives in the U.S. as were lost during the high outlier of terrorism deaths. It's a killer more deadly than terrorism. Should we cede a significant amount of liberty to fight it?

I am appalled at the people who think this kind of spying is just no big deal. And when the rationalizations for doing so get carried to partisan extremes...

... well, it's probably over for our republican democratic experiment. And six out of ten Americans don't have a fucking clue about that, either.

Update: Extra thoughts from jobsanger.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks that we should have tried to get redistricting done right the first time -- instead of waiting until now to involve the public -- as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff gave an updated look at the state of the 2013 elections in Houston.

Over at TexasKaos, Libby Shaw explains that Texas ranks 51st in voter turnout. Another dubious achievement for Governor Oops...Check it out.

Which news item was false but with a ring of truth, and which was true but everyone wishes was false? PDiddie at Brains and Eggs reports... you decide.

Stace at Dos Centavos is a proponent of using Mexican American culture as a means of capturing that demographic's vote. He provides a follow-up to a recent KHOU report by Vicente Arenas on the resurgence of Tejano music. It's a good opportunity for non-Tejano fans to learn a little cultural history about the music genre whose live concerts still attract thousands of eligible voters.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson explains why the Lege putting money back into public education is unlikely to end the school finance court case.

Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit has the racist Republican vibe down pat. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why she hasn't been impeached yet.

=========================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Texas Clean Air Matters advocates for stronger ozone standards for a healthier Texas.

Greg Wythe liveblogs the Senate redistricting hearing from Houston.

Texas Redistricting explains what "candidate of choice" means.

The Texas Green Report gives Austin the advantage over San Antonio on green building codes... for now.

Texas Vox has a guest post from the granddaughter of the founder of the oil company that is now ExxonMobil. She asks an uncomfortable question: "How will ExxonMobil adapt to the climate change crisis it helped create?"

Colin Strother points out that campus carry is a conundrum for cops.

BOR cannot believe that a Texas jury acquitted a man for killing an escort that wouldn't have sex with him.

Texpatriate offers its list of Best and Worst legislators.

Texas Leftist makes the connection between the war on drugs and racial profiling.

A hearty "Welcome Back" to blogging to John Coby, who tells us about the trouble (sorry, "twouble") with TWIA.

And finally, Lemon Sweetie asked Sir Patrick Stewart a question about his advocacy against domestic violence when he appeared at Comicpalooza in Houston, and got an amazing answer. Be sure to watch the video as well.

Sunday Funnies

Thoughts on the loss of privacy

I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users.

[...]

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

===============

In a speech earlier this year in New York, the CIA’s chief technical officer, Gus Hunt, said, “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time … Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” In his very public statement, Hunt pointed to what the NSA’s Verizon order evidences; as Drake puts it, “This is a surveillance state.”

[...]

...(R)easserting Fourth Amendment protections in a meaningful way would be an uphill battle, requiring a government committee with the political will and resolve akin to the committee created by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s.

It was, after all, Church who cautioned in 1975, “The [National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Church’s dystopic projections are our reality. As Drake told Salon, total, blanket surveillance is “a cancer on the body politic” that will be very hard to remove indeed.

===============

When I read about the news last night on my various connected devices, I was shocked. But not at the revelation. Rather, I was taken aback that so many people were surprised and enraged by the blanket surveillance.

The reality is that we all live in clouds of deeply personal data, and we carry that information everywhere we go and in nearly everything we do. Stop for a moment, and think about all of the services you use and the conveniences you enjoy. Do you really think that Verizon is the only company divulging your information? Or that the NSA is the only organization doing the monitoring?

[...]

Before you argue that this infringes on our liberty, privacy, and free speech, consider the Boston Marathon bombing. The attackers were found and caught precisely because we submit to constant surveillance. A photo posted to social networks, combined with CCTV, mobile broadcast signals, and hordes of overnight activists allowed us to find two out of 600,000 people. (To be sure, this very same technology was also to blame for misreporting, possible libel, and potentially another death.)

I’m certainly not shilling here for big credit card companies, who turn your data over to advertisers. Or for the NSA for that matter. That said, it's 2013, not 1942. Violence isn't just restricted to remote battlefields. It's arrived at our national monuments and our neighborhood sidewalks. The fact that our data is being transmitted for purposes outside of our personal information clouds isn't good or bad. It's our inevitable and present reality.

===============

We don't know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people -- we believe on millions of people -- and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug -- presumably only with a warrant.

We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime -- deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.

We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running "fusion centers" to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn't die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.

We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels -- inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers.

There's much more we don't know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA's ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS's plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA's Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we're completely in the dark.

And that's wrong.

Holdout

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday he has no plans to leave his job despite a stormy tenure marked most recently by a cascade of criticism about how his Justice Department handles leak probes.

The top U.S. law enforcement official told NBC News in a televised interview that there are still things he wants to accomplish before he eventually steps down.

"There's some things that I want to do, some things I want to get done that I've discussed with the president, and once I have finished that I'll sit down with him and we'll determine when it's time to make a transition to a new attorney general," Holder said.

I doubt one of those things was having to publicly explain this.

The Obama administration is collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S.-based Verizon Communications customers, relying on a secret court order obtained under a Bush administration policy that sparked a national controversy, the Guardian newspaper reported.

The administration is defending the practice this morning. The reason they're defensive is because they have been doing this kind of thing since, you know, they took over from the Bush administration.

And, as a concurrent Guardian report points out, the government has long argued that this kind of data is perfectly legal to collect because it's similar to collecting the information on the outside of an envelope. But even that so-called "transactional" data—phone numbers, phone serial numbers, time and length of calls—can represent a goldmine of information. Collect a ton of data and you can use it later to identify individuals.

Remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about lingering past one's expiration date? Yep; it got worse.

I know Holder doesn't want to hit the door while the VRA hangs in the balance. He suggested as much when he spoke in Houston at the NAACP convention last summer. But he is quickly moving down a track to a point where that is impossible. He is just not going to be around to fight that battle.

The longer he keeps holding out, the worse the stench gets.

You can read more analysis on this NSA business from Booman, Americablog, and emptywheel. But the news for Obama just isn't going to begin to get better until Eric Holder resigns. And after that, somebody is going have the dirty job of cleaning up after him.

Then again... it could just be business as usual. After all, not many of us expected Obama's people to do the same thing as Bush's.

Update -- Holder got off real easy at his first post-Verizon hearing on the Hill this morning:

Toward the end of his testimony, which lasted less than an hour, Holder made one statement that appeared to be the only one to betray his inner feelings. "Whoever the attorney general is a year, two years from now," he said, he would want that person to be able to do his job without encumbrance. It was a very vague, very off-handed reference to someone else doing his job, an idea that he — as recently as last night — has consistently suggested wouldn't happen.

And if he continues to face a level of critique similar to what he saw this morning, there's no reason to think that he's going anywhere any time soon.

Headline, money graf

Why do we throw prostitutes in prison?

Texas, not exactly known for its leniency to offenders, also came close to  eliminating its felony penalty this year. (A bill made it out of committee but wasn’t voted on, and there is still felony prostitution in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri.) ”It’s nuts that we’ve got this many prostitutes in prison, people that we’re not afraid of, but we’re just mad at,” the state’s Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire  told the Austin American Statesman last year. “By locking them up, we’re not fixing the problem — we’re just spending a lot of money incarcerating them, warehousing them, when we could be spending a lot less getting them treatment so they can get out and stay out of this business.”  

Why we don't need the Keystone XL pipeline:

Here are some interesting facts you might not be aware of:

• The United States now exports gasoline: Some 15 million barrels of gasoline a month. That's about 500,000 barrels a day. We're selling so much that exports have quadrupled in just seven years.
  

• Americans are using a lot less gasoline. Demand peaked back in September 2007 at almost 9.3 million barrels a day. Today, we consume about 8.7 million barrels a day — a drop of 600,000 barrels a day.

We're producing way more gasoline than we need. The gap between supply and demand is so great, in fact, that the only market oil refiners can find for their product is overseas, where demand is growing (and prices are often much higher).

And this is happening even before booming U.S. shale oil and natural gas production really kick into high gear over the next few years, which brings me to two more observations:

• The United States is on track, says the International Energy Agency, to become the world's top oil producer in just seven years — bigger than Saudi Arabia by 2020.
  

• The U.S. will become a net exporter of oil around 2030 and nearly self-sufficient in energy by 2035.

That means that we'll have so much oil in just a few years that we'll be able to export it — like the Saudis do now — and won't need a drop from anyone.

So with all of that in mind, tell me: Why do we need the Keystone pipeline?

Zimmerman and Martin: Some facts so simple that even Fox 'News' should be able to understand ...

1) George Zimmerman had been arrested and charged for an act of violence. Trayvon Martin hadn't.

2) George Zimmerman had had a restraining order granted against him for alleged domestic abuse. Trayvon Martin hadn't.

3) George Zimmerman had a history of racial conflict. Trayvon Martin didn't.

George Zimmerman's attorney seems to think the personal history of the shot dead unarmed black teenager is relevant. And he's right. It is. Because the shot dead unarmed black teenager had no history of legal problems arising from acts of violence. George Zimmerman, on the other hand, did.

Frank Lautenberg, the last of the New Deal liberals

One of the few members of Congress who could remember listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio and going to college on the initial GI Bill, Lautenberg served five terms in the US Senate as a champion of great big infrastructure investments—especially for Amtrak and urban public transportation—great big environmental regulations, great big consumer protections and great big investigations of wrongdoing by Wall Street.

Lautenberg was the only remaining US senator who served in WWII.

True or false

Your first news item.

Texas legislator drops marijuana cigarette while speaking on floor

While speaking during the Texas legislative session, representative Tom Alvin (R) Altruria, dropped something unexpected on the House floor. Upon picking up the item, cameras caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette.

He quickly put it back in his pocket as legislators looked on and then continued to speak. Several DPS officers were on hand but did not seem concerned about Rep. Alvin’s possession of an illegal substance.

Ironically, the bill being discussed pertained to decreasing penalties for the possession of small amounts of cannabis. If passed, the bill would change state law and no longer jail those with small amounts and would instead only require a fine.

Rep. Alvin spoke in opposition to the bill stating “marijuana is a deadly and dangerous drug. It ruins people’s lives and is so addictive that people can become hooked on it just by touching it. We have to keep in mind that allowing any steps towards its legalization will ensure that children have access to this drug. Only by keeping it illegal and imposing tough sentences can we continue to ensure that this plant is no longer consumed by people who should not have it.”

Your second news item.

Teenage Pregnancy In Decline, But Texas Still #1 For 'Repeat' Teen Births

Jajuana Thomas, 19, and her toddler son Nathan outside their apartment in Greenspoint. Thomas is five months pregnant with another child.

It's hard enough having one teen pregnancy, but what happens when you have two or more?

Public health researchers say teen birth rates are at a record low in the United States, falling 44 percent since the peak in 1991. But the problem remains, with more than a thousand teenagers giving birth every day.

Now, for the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has examined a troubling sub-group: teens who give birth to a second, third or even fourth child. These are called “repeat teen births.” Of all 50 states, Texas ranks #1 for this phenomenon. (CDC Factsheet.)

Jajuana Thomas, 19, is five months pregnant with her second son.

“I wasn’t expecting to have a second child but now that I am I’m happy about it,” she said during an interview at her apartment in the Greenspoint neighborhood of Houston. “I wanted a girl, but I’m having another boy. So it’s okay.”

Here's a better question than true/false: Which news item is true but ought to be false, and which is false but likely to be true as well?