Talking to myself ...

... well, sometimes I'm the most interesting person in the room.  OK, maybe just the only person in the room!

(Does he realize how crazy that sounds?)

We're all a little odd, it seems.  Each can point at another and detail their abnormal behavior or odd responses, true?  We do that.

A friend tells the story about her teen years with her dad.  He'd ask her about this conflict or that drama she'd been involved in.  She'd begin with, "Well, my friend ...," and he would pointedly clear his throat.  He'd do it again if she mentioned someone other than herself.  She learned.  The key element in any conflict will be our own contribution.  That's the part that we own and that perhaps needs review and adjustment.

It's difficult, of course.  In conflict, we see our part in tiny, forgivable terms, and the faults of others as large and inexcusable.  It's kind of like noticing the speck in someone else's eye and not noticing the mudball in our own.

Years pass.  We learn, we change, or not.  If we choose to, we grow gentler and more understanding, giving others the same grace we give ourselves.  If not, then bitterness rules, and we wind up talking to ourselves.  A lifetime of blaming others is just nuts.

The Changed Ones

At an 1850 anti-slavery convention in Cazenovia, N.Y.,
from the left, Emily Edmonson; Theodosia Gilbert
(the fiance of William Chaplin, organizer of the
Pearl escape); Gerrit Smith, the abolitionist
who financed the Pearl escape; Frederick
Douglass, the anti-slavery orator and
chairman of the Fugitive Slave Law
Convention; and Mary Edmonson.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

It was a difficult time for the nation. Once the subject of equality was in the public forum, the painful truth was there for all to see. Slavery was too wicked to ignore; people were being treated like farm animals. We engaged, head-on against those who would harness the lives of others exclusively for personal gain.

It's been 150 years since emancipation here, and that particular battle still isn't over.  Equality and justice are ancient principles, long contested. Lincoln's words point to the same struggle that ran like flood waters through Israel and Nazareth centuries before.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Radical words.  At the time, the land was held captive by Rome.  The people bore the Roman occupation as they had many others.  More than a thousand years had passed since the Kingdom of Israel was first established; conquerors and wars had come and gone and come again.  The proclamation recorded in Nazareth was made after nearly a century of Roman rule.  The years pass.  The diaspora begins ...

Misrepresentation

PRISM did not target US citizens, or so we're told by the NSA director. He said the program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, targeted only Internet users outside of the U.S. “It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.”  Perhaps.  PRISM is just one of many programs.


Then we're told by the president and others that government surveillance targets only a small number of Americans, but that's not what the court order says.

The actual court order for just the Verizon probe says they are to deliver continually and on a daily basis all details for all calls (i) between the U.S. and abroad; or, (ii) wholly within the U.S.

That's ALL calls; every call.  If you have a Verizon phone or talk to someone who has a Verizon phone, you were part of the surveillance sample ordered by the court.  That's 144.8 millions customers, all day, every day.

That's just the Verizon case.  There will be similar court orders for AT&T and other carriers.

Responses are mixed.  The ALCU has filed a lawsuit.  Some folks are furious while others don't seem to mind being spied on.

This blog will be noticed by other government surveillance programs, I suppose.  But we knew that.

UPDATE JUL 4:  The French do the same thing.  It's illegal there too.  The operation is designed, say experts, to uncover terrorist cells. But the scale of it means that "anyone can be spied on, any time", Le Monde says.  Sound familiar?

Court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama

Curious how it works?
You didn't know that there were secret collection centers installed by the government in the AT&T building and others.  They monitor pretty much everything including content.  Know what a fiber splitter is?
The battle in the courts (unnoticed, perhaps, by the media).

The Day of Fathers

The legacy we leave our children begins early with character, both ours and theirs.

Dad was a polite radical.  We lived in the south among old ideas about culture and race. Dad had been broadened a bit by the war, perhaps. He'd seen the real world before we settled in the south.  

Dad quietly refused the stereotypical role.  He pushed aside the cultural norms and made room emphatically for the marginalized folks.  We learned to love others by his example and instruction.  As a college professor, he had hundreds of students every year including a large a capella choir; he and mom were parents in situ to the lot of them, and groups of them were often in our home.  Young folks from every corner of the world were part of my life, thanks to him and his great heart.  I so hope to be like him.

Muito obrigado, papa.  :)

(He learned from his dad.  Help-bringers and world-changers start young.)

PRISM GOVERNMENT

Snowden's disclosure didn't surprise anyone who was paying attention. Anyone who wanted to know, did; and Snowden just confirmed a few troublesome details.  Emphasis on 'few'.  And Snowden is just the most recent NSA whistleblower.

Big data and data mining are not new.  The technology has been visible for a while, and attentive folks are aware that leading edge players in the world's industry and governments are pursuing the benefits thereof. No surprises there.  Next issue.

Whether you think spying is okay or not depends on if the spy is looking at you or somebody else.

Everyone in industry is aware of cybercrime, system hacking, identity misuse, account cracking.  We're aware that criminal cyber intrusion from outside the country occurs continuously, thousands of attempts per day conducted by individuals and groups.  What are the chances that intelligence agencies not doing their version of the same thing?  What are the chances you're not included in one data sample or another?

We know of NSA employees resigning formally for ethical reasons.  The actual number is classified, of course.  And as far as we know, their concerns are not addressed.  (Note the list in the top photo; look them up.)  That's troubling, of course.

Today, our concerns regarding the NSA are the agency's oversight, appropriate restraints, accountability and compliance.  The news is troubling, but it isn't 'new'.  The same questions have been with us for more than a decade.

We're told that there are sixteen federal agencies that collect data about citizens as part of this or that investigative initiative, by the way.  The NSA is just the one in the news today.  The concerns are perhaps national and law rather than agency centered.  Bloomberg reports, "U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms"

We long ago approved limits to our fourth amendment rights.  We are deliberately trading freedom for security.  We were warned against such creeping change a couple of centuries ago, but it appears that now is the time it gains some momentum.

What we find in NSA's activities are only frightening perhaps because of the scope and automation.  We know police can see our phone records if they have a reason to.  We know the feds can read our email if they run across it in the course of an investigation.  We don't worry that public security cameras can identify and track us.  We're ok with phone companies noting how many calls we make and putting our calling history on our bill.  What's spooked the masses, I suspect, is the 1984ish sense that large-scale, computerized processing brings to the picture.  Now, a robot can point at me.  Or you.

Remember the last time the government didn't overreach in such matters.  Me either.  Industry does the same, of course.  They can, so they do.

As unnerving as it might be that our multi-billion dollar semi-secret is spotlighted, finding that the U.S. citizenry is now broadly targeted for general surveillance is perhaps more so.  But not a surprise; not at all.

As Peter Christian Hall wrote in The Huffington Post in January 2010, a 1975 Senate committee investigating COINTELPRO found that the FBI, "...broke into homes and mailboxes; created bogus documents to frame targets as government informers; tried to break up marriages with anonymous letters, and jobs with secret tips to employers; sent letters encouraging violence between street gangs and the Black Panther Party; sought to stir up tax audits; and dispatched agents provocateurs to discredit antiwar groups with unpopular and unsuitable activities." 

And it was done to keep us safe.

Similar assaults have been perpetrated over the years on NSA whistleblowers.

If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think Again

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

Excerpts from a tongue-in-cheek article on what metadata can reveal.  The suggestion that metadata is of little consequence when spying on citizens is, of course, a deliberate half-truth.  Either it is (1) significantly revealing, as has been emphasised by the government in its pursuit of criminals, or (2) it is not, as has been claimed by the government regarding the analysis of virtually all uninvolved and unsuspected citizens.

“Social Networke Analysis,” 

a small encroachment on freedom, identifies terrorists in the Colonies.

By Kieran Healy|Posted Monday, June 10, 2013, at 4:22 PM

The article originally appeared on Kieran Healy’s blog.

Read more on Slate about the NSA’s secret snooping programs.

London, 1772.

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the newfangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. ... I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.

...

Here is what the data look like.

...  So this Samuel Adams person (whoever he is) belongs to the North Caucus, the Long Room Club, the Boston Committee, and the London Enemies List. 

... I will simply start at the very beginning and follow a technique laid out in a beautiful paper by my brilliant former colleague, Mr Ron Breiger, called “The Duality of Persons and Groups.”...

At this point in the 18^th century, a 254x254 matrix is what we call Bigge Data.... Anyway:

...

Notice ... We did not start with a “social networke” as you might ordinarily think of it, where individuals are connected to other individuals. We started with a list of memberships in various organizations. But now suddenly we do have a social network of individuals, where a tie in the network is defined by co-membership in an organization. This is a powerful trick.

... This time, the result is a 7x7 “Organization by Organization” matrix, where the numbers in the cells represent how many people each organization has in common. ...

Again, interesting! (I beg to venture.) Instead of seeing how (and which) people are linked by their shared membership in organizations, we see which organizations are linked through the people that belong to them both. People are linked through the groups they belong to. Groups are linked through the people they share. ... Here’s what that looks like.

And, of course, we can also do that for the links between the people, using our 254x254 “Person by Person” table. Here is what that looks like.

 ... Look at that person right in the middle there. ... His name is Paul Revere.

Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, .... All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations.  ... Here are the top betweenness scores for our list of suspected terrorists:

Perhaps I should not say terrorists so rashly. But you can see how tempting it is. ...  There is something called eigenvector centrality, ... Here are our top scorers on that measure:

Here our Mr Revere appears to score highly alongside a few other persons of interest. And for one last demonstration, a calculation of Bonacich Power Centrality, ....

And here again, Mr Revere—along with Messrs Urann, Proctor, and Barber—appear towards the top of our list.

The full article originally appeared on Kieran Healy’s blog.

Read more on Slate about the NSA’s secret snooping programs.