Thursday, March 12, 2015

Here's the deal with Hillary Clinton's email

A couple of deals.  Okay, a few deals.

Chris Cillizza:

The problem for Clinton (or at least the problem I see) is that we won't ever be able to check whether the judgment used by her lawyers was the right judgment. I'm not suggesting that she should have been required to publicly release every e-mail -- professional or personal -- she sent during her time at State. There's plenty of private things that she has every right to keep private. But the decision to destroy all of those e-mails means that the possibility of having an independent review of them by some trusted figure (or figures) is entirely impossible.

The "just trust me" approach is tough in any part of life but especially when it comes to a person running (or about to be running) for the nation's highest office. That goes double when at issue is primary source documentation of the most recent position Clinton held before the one she plans to seek. I don't think Clinton is lying about the nature of the e-mails that were withheld from the State department and then destroyed. But I do think that the line between personal and professional communications -- especially via e-mail -- is a very fine one. And simply saying that you drew that line yourself and expecting everyone to nod their heads and move on is decidedly far-fetched.

Gadfly.

Talking Points Memo has Hillary Clinton's nine-page press release, which has more lies. One? That she emailed all government employees on ".gov" accounts, when we know that Huma Abedin had an account on the Clinton server.

It also notes she is turning over 55,000 pages of emails, not 55,000 emails. She's actually turning over only half of the emails of the account, claiming a full one-half are private.

As for why Clintonistas cite Colin Powell for using a private email account but don't cite Condoleezza Rice, who followed him? A 2005 State Department policy manual update said private email accounts could be used only if those emails were turned over to the government, and specified narrow exceptions for private use. That's probably why Condi used a government account.

Meanwhile, ignore the fact that your chief female political fixer had an email on the same private domain and that your JP Morgan moneybags for your $25 million of investments runs the domain server.

My step-sister.

Ed Snowden, please undelete Hillary's emails, and send them out for review. She said she never put any classified information in her emails, so no worry about national secrets. Isn't it funny that she feels very secure that her deleted emails are deleted. Is there even such a thing as deleted emails? I think they live forever -- like on the other party's server, at the Google headquarters, in cyberspace somewhere. She used her iPad. Did she use it in foreign countries? Does she not know that the Koreans, Chinese, Russians, and many others tap everything in their countries and in ours if they really want to know, just like we do -- at the NSA?

That's bingo.  I still don't understand why Trey Gowdy or Darrell Issa or whoever's turn it is to drive the House Scandal Bus this week doesn't just ask NSA for whatever they need.  Seems like the easiest way to find out if there is actually something scandalous or not.


This is hopefully -- VERY hopefully -- the last thing I need to blog about this topic.

What the BLEEP Happened to Hip Hop? (Updated, this weekend)

I promise that I don't fix current events around my blog posts.  So let's stop blaming white racism on black rappers, mmkay?  Because when you do that, you expose yourselves as ridiculous fools.

David Cobb, the 2004 US Green Party presidential nominee and now one of the leaders of Move to Amend, makes an appearance with Shamako Noble and everybody else in Houston who isn't going to the rodeo Saturday and Sunday.  You should check it out.


“They mine metals for the phones killing trees for the loose leaf
I write raps on both to tell you what it do, g”

-- Mike Wird, Soul Pros, Regenerative Lifestyles and Hip Hop Congress

Do you know what the 1996 Telecommunications Act and how has it influenced culture in the United States?

Have you ever heard of Lyric Committees, and the story of how record labels try to control artists money?

Why haven't artists truly been successful in organizing as a labor force when so many of them are working in our schools, youth centers, prisons and organizations?

And most importantly, what the (bleep) happened to Hip Hop?

Hip Hop Congress and Move to Amend and are partnering to present “What the Bleep Happened to Hip Hop?”, a public education campaign seeking to raise awareness of the dangerous power corporations currently wield over the hip hop industry specifically, and over our society in general.

We invite you to join us on March 14 and 15, 2015 when this unique collaboration arrives in Houston. On Saturday, we will have educational panels and participatory conversations, with an artists showcase that evening. We will close with a People's Movement Assembly on Sunday afternoon that connects to the United States Social Forum.

The cultural terrain of society is a crucial battlefront in the struggle for social justice. Culture retains its dynamism by reflecting and creating consciousness. Exploitation and oppression have always been synonymous with popular culture, from D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation to the struggle of the media justice movement in the late 90's. The United States of America, long heralded as a melting pot, has also been acknowledged as virtual factory for the commodification of culture and the production of a facsimile of culture that greatly resembles the McDonald's of thought, art, music, and humanity.

Hip Hop Congress is an international grassroots organization dedicated to evolving hip hop culture by inspiring social action and creativity within the community. Move to Amend is a national campaign to amend the US Constitution to abolish the court-created legal doctrines of corporate constitutional rights and the legal premise that money equals speech. Both organizations are explicitly committed to anti-racist and feminist organizing principles, and challenge us to organize, create and assert our humanity.

For more information on the agenda, locations, times, or to RSVP for the Educational Forum or the PMA, go to the Facebook event page and register via e-mail contacts there.

Musical artists include Don Claude, Mic Crenshaw, Shamako Noble, Faithful Five, and others.  Open mic and cypher.

#WhatTheBleep Happened to Hip Hop? is brought to you by Hip Hop Congress, Move to Amend, Global Fam.org, Houston Peace & Justice Center, Healthy Habitz, S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, Multi-Media Center, Harris County Green Party, For Our House at Project Row Houses, Civil Rights Law Society, Thurgood Marshall School of Law and The US Social Forum.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Houston PD tracks your cellphone without a warrant, and that's okay by the DA

I don't know why these things shock me any more, but they do.  Maybe it's because they keep saying, "Don't worry; trust us".

Back in September, HPD officer James Taylor lamented how the Edward Snowden leaks had spooked the public into thinking that even local law enforcement agencies were part of a broad, indiscriminate surveillance dragnet that gathers data on unsuspecting Americans.

"We are not the NSA nor the federal government," the HPD officer told members of a Senate State Affairs Committee. A PowerPoint slide he'd prepared for the occasion flashed up on the screen: "STATE AND LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT DO NOT 'SNOOP!'"

Maybe, maybe not. The problem, privacy advocates say, is we don't know. What we do know -- actually, what we've known for quite some time -- is that HPD has the technology to sweep up cell phone data in real time, deploying a device that essentially mimics a cellphone tower and tricks your phone into communicating with it. And, according to local prosecutors -- who, it should be noted, admit they don't know how local cops are using the technology, either -- HPD doesn't need a warrant to use it.

So Stingray.  Which has been mentioned here and by others a few times in the recent past.

Careful going forward; this gets a little complicated.  Michael Barajas at the Houston Press has done an excellent job breaking it down, though, so I'm going to roll out a heavy excerpt from his piece.

In September, HPD officer Taylor and Bill Exley, an assistant prosecutor with the Harris County DA's office who works with local cops to help solve (in his words) "blood and guts cases," warned state lawmakers that, under their interpretation of state law, local cops do need a warrant to gather sensitive cell phone data from a phone company (not messages or call contents, but data showing where you've been and logs of your incoming and outgoing calls). This is despite virtually everyone else saying a state appeals court ruling from last summer called Ford v. State cemented the fact that cops don't need a warrant to get your metadata from a phone company.

It's unclear why the Harris County District Attorney's Office would take this rather unique stance -- the state prosecutors association, for instance, has said that, in light of the Ford case, metadata held by a phone company is most certainly not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Exley basically told lawmakers that the current law is complex and that no matter how they read it, cops always come away needing a warrant to get metadata from a phone company. Perhaps. The more skeptical among us might think Exley and Taylor were trying to scare legislators away from passing stricter privacy rules this session that would explicitly add a warrant-for-metadata protection to state law. (Taylor, for instance, told the committee that securing warrants for phone data "results in us not being able to investigate cases, which results in people dying.")

But if HPD wants to gather that data directly from the source, i.e. directly from your phone, no warrant is necessary, Exley says.

There's a whole lot more that you should read there, but let's finish here with this part.

As MuckRock first uncovered last year, police departments buying Stingray devices from Harris Corp. (the manufacturer of Stingray technology, no relation except as vendor to Harris County) must first sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI. And as the Houston Chronicle reiterated last week, that nondisclosure agreement means even local prosecutors don't know the specifics of how HPD is using its fake-cell-phone-tower devices.

That doesn't seem to bother Exley much. In emails last week, he told us that police using "historical data" gleaned from cell phone companies is a completely different issue than police tracking someone with "live data" sucked up by a Stingray. Exley says that, according to his understanding (again, this is all relatively speculative since HPD won't talk at all about how they use the devices), HPD only deploys Stingrays in a pretty narrow set of circumstances -- for instance, when police are trying to track down a fugitive with an arrest warrant.

I don't see much point in having a smartphone any longer, unless you just don't mind having NSA and CIA and HPD listen in as you take a dump.  You can probably guess that the nerdy kid down the block has also figured all this out and has mail-ordered the technology from Amazon, had it delivered via their drone, hacked into that and has it hovering outside your bedroom window.

AI ain't got nothin' on any of these.  Yet.

With the news earlier this week that CIA has been working on cracking the security for Apple phones and tablets for years now, you can forget about that alleged security blanket as some protection of your privacy (let's note that this fellow calls bullshit on Jeremy Scahill, Josh Begley, and the Intercept, the first link in this graf).  In reference to the toon above... at the rate we're going, of what serviceable use will drones actually be?  Everybody already knows everything there is to know about you as it is.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Stupid Republicans, Vol. 47

It's only Tuesday but several inmates have escaped the asylum and I need to start getting 'em rounded up.  Let's begin here in H-Town, with a little problem that actually originated in Austin.

The official who oversees more vehicle registrations than anyone else in the state gave the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles a failing grade Monday after another error surfaced in its new inspection and registration system.

"It is having an adverse effect on my ability to do the work of the taxpayers," Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Mike Sullivan said of the state's administration of the new single-sticker system, which took effect March 1.

The latest error, discovered Friday, involved incorrect bills sent to 321,927 motorists with April registrations coming due. Of those, 83,541 were in the eight-county Houston area, including 56,965 in Harris County.

The confusion led to long lines at local tax offices, frustrated motorists and haggard county staffers.

"I've got people demanding to see me and calling my office," Sullivan said. "This is a state issue, but the county tax assessors are the face of this... (Motorists) are angry and frustrated, saying they'll never vote for Mike Sullivan again. I'm a big boy, I can take it, but I feel bad for the people coming in."

This is not the Republican county tax-assessor's fault, but the people complaining about "never voting for Mike Sullivan again" are the same people who think they can solve the problem by voting for another Republican.  In other words, the definition of insanity.

There are some who want to blame Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas) for introducing the legislation that made this happen.  That's well and good, but unless Republicans in the legislature all abstained from voting for the bill, then they stamped it with their bicameral majority approval.  This is called, in Republican phraseology, 'taking personal responsibility', which Republicans instruct others to do but avoid doing themselves.

While the DMV screws everybody up and over, the DPS is warning state senators about glitterbombs.

The first rule about glitter bombs, if you work in the Texas Department of Public Safety, is you do not talk about glitter bombs. "DPS does not discuss security-related matters or investigations," the agency vaguely told us in an email statement. (Subject line:"Inquiry about Glitter Bombs.")

But there appears to have been a minor, glitter-sized leak in the department. On Friday, The Texas Tribune said it obtained an email that a Department of Public Safety official sent to state senators. The email contained an unsigned attachment warning of a glitter-bombing threat among our society's most dangerous groups: the gays and women. "Glitter Bombing: Weapon of Choice for Gay Rights, Pro Choice Advocates," the Tribune said the unsigned attachment was titled. 

Couldn't the legislators just use their newly-installed panic buttons in case they get assaulted with arts and crafts by women and gay people?  And whatever happened to the terrorist threats of jars of poop and pee?

Now I know what you're thinking: the DMV and DPS bureaucrats personnel behind these clusterfucks and conspiracies are not ALL Republicans.  I'm certain that's just as correct as saying that Republicans are not all racists, either.

Let's move on to DC, where 47 Republican senators -- where have we heard that 47% number before? -- have decided that they will not be bound by any nuclear agreement Obama negotiates with Iran, and sent Iran's leaders a letter to that effect.  That's called 'trolling the Logan Act'.

It wasn't enough for a Republican Congress to invite a foreign leader to speak to them -- an appalling violation of diplomatic protocol at best -- over the objections of the executive branch just a week ago.  They had to go a little bit further this week to disrespect and de-legitimize the office of the executive.  They may think they're just dissing Obama, but if a Republican ever manages to get elected president again, there's going to be some payback.  There's going to be payback in some form or fashion no matter what.

When Republicans are saying publicly you have lost, you have probably disgraced yourself.

There has never been an instance in which an organized partisan bloc in the legislative branch disregarded the separation of powers in order to publicly and intentionally undermine US foreign policy. Disagreements over foreign policy have often been bitter, but they have been tempered by an understanding that they can be resolved by elections. I may not like a president, but undermining the office itself will haunt me when my party finally wins.

It seems clear that many Republicans have lost their belief that the party can compete for the Presidency. No other logic explains their willingness to burn down the office itself. The demographic realities are brutal and the Blue Wall looms large. This kind of behavior will only get worse, and more dangerous, in 2017.

The best response, however, came from the Iranian foreign minster, who sees right through the GOP's game.  He was, after all, educated in the United States, and appears to understand US constitutional and international law better than most of these Republican senators.  And just think: Republicans might nominate someone for president in 2016 who does not have a college degree.

Finally, and speaking of Republicans who really don't understand anything at all, why is someone who has never sent an e-mail in his entire life sitting on the Senate technology subcommittee?

You already know the answer: because he's a dumb fucking Republican who got elected by some of the dumbest fucking Republican voters in the nation, that's why.