Tag Archives: people

In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

by ReginalJobe Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Patrick Leahy says that his USA FREEDOM bill will stop the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data. H.L. Pohlman says it’s not quite that easy:

In Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-28) issued in January 2014, the Obama administration defined “bulk collection” as the acquisition “of large quantities of signals intelligence data which . . . is acquired without the use of discriminants (e.g., specific identifiers, selection terms, etc.).” Thus, as long as the government uses a “discriminant,” a selection term, no matter how broad that term might be, the government is not engaged in a “bulk collection” program.

….The USA FREEDOM Act does not guarantee, then, that the government’s database of telephone metadata will be smaller than it is now. It all depends on the generality of the selection terms that the government will use to obtain metadata from the telephone companies. And we don’t know what those terms will be.

This is a longstanding issue that’s been brought up by lots of people lots of times. It’s not some minor subtlety. If the government decides to look for “all calls from the 213 area code,” that’s not necessarily bulk collection even though it would amass millions of records. It would be up to a judge to decide.

If and when we get close to Congress actually considering bills to rein in the NSA—about which I’m only modestly optimistic in the first place—this is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on. As the ACLU and the EFF and others keep reminding us, reining in the NSA isn’t a simple matter of “ending” their bulk collection program. The devil is truly in the details, and tiny changes in wording can literally mean the difference between something that works and something that’s useless. Or maybe even worse than useless. As Pohlman points out, if you choose the right words, the NSA could end up having a freer hand than they do today. This is something to pay close attention to.

Originally posted here – 

In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

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Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

by RicardoEGAG Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s now seven days until Election Day, and unfortunately things are trending pretty badly for us liberal types. The ABC/Washington Post poll on the right shows that Democrats and Republicans are pretty much all planning to vote for their own party next week, which leaves the election in the hands of independents. That turns out to be grim news. We can argue all day long about whether independents are “really” independent, but at this point it doesn’t matter. They represent about a third of the electorate, and at the moment they favor Republican candidates by nearly 20 percentage points.

There doesn’t seem to be any specific issue driving this. People are just generally unhappy. A huge majority think America is on the wrong track; Obama’s approval rating remains mired only slightly above 40 percent; and far more people blame Democrats than Republicans for the rising dysfunction of the federal government.

That last point is especially galling for Democrats, but it’s a win for Republicans and yet another sign of change in the way Washington is likely to work in the future. Republicans have discovered that a sufficiently united party can obstruct everything and anything but largely escape blame for the resulting gridlock. This lesson has not been lost on Democrats, and it bodes ill for the future regardless of who wins our next few elections. There’s just no reward for getting things done these days, and this probably means that less and less will get done. That’s Political Economy 101 for you.

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Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

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Social Networking Employs More People Than We Think

by NobleTroyysmvr Posted on October 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is a pretty amazing story from Wired reporter Adrian Chen about the army of workers who spend their days monitoring the raw feeds of social networking sites to get rid of “dick pics, thong shots, exotic objects inserted into bodies, hateful taunts, and requests for oral sex” before they show up on America’s morning skim of Facebook and Twitter:

Past the guard, in a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-brown hair….Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video.

….So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

Given that content moderators might very well comprise as much as half the total workforce for social media sites, it’s worth pondering just what the long-term psychological toll of this work can be.

We often hear about how the new app economy is largely a jobless economy, but thanks to the general scumminess of human beings maybe that’s less true than we think. Cleaning up the internet for grandma is a grueling, never-ending job that, for now anyway, can only be done by other, less scummy, human beings. Lots of them.

It’s true that the “basic moderation” jobs are largely overseas and don’t pay much, but second-tier moderators are mostly US-based and are paid fairly well. As you’d expect, though, most don’t last long. Burnout comes pretty quickly when you spend all day exposed to a nonstop stream of torture videos, hate speech, YouTube beheadings, and the entire remaining panoply of general human degradation. That’s what the rest of Chen’s story is about. It’s a pretty interesting read.

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Social Networking Employs More People Than We Think

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

by KimberlHiggs Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Name a major super-PAC or dark-money outfit and there’s a good chance it has helped Republican Scott Brown, the former senator from Massachusetts now trying to oust Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Karl Rove’s American Crossroads? Check. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity? Check. The US Chamber of Commerce, billionaire Joe Ricketts’ Ending Spending, FreedomWorks for America, ex-Bush ambassador John Bolton’s super-PAC—check, check, check, and check.

Despite being a darling of conservative deep-pocketed groups, Brown once was a foe of big-money machers. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he sought to curb the influence of donors by stumping for so-called clean elections, in which candidates receive public funds for their campaigns and eschew round-the-clock fundraising. But during his three years in Washington—from his surprise special-election win in January 2010 to his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Warren in November 2012—Brown transformed into an insider who embraced super-PACs, oligarch-donors such as the Koch brothers, and secret campaign spending. On the issue of money in politics, there is perhaps no Senate candidate this year who has flip-flopped as dramatically as Brown. Here’s how it happened.

In November 1998, Brown won a seat in the Massachusetts House. That same year, voters in the state approved a ballot measure to implement a clean elections system; the proposal passed by a 2-1 margin. By law, however, ballot measures can’t allocate taxpayer funds, and the fight to implement the new system moved to the legislature in Boston.

Brown allied himself with supporters of clean elections. As part of the state House’s tiny Republican caucus, Brown clashed with the old-guard Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Tom Finneran, who viewed clean elections as inimical to incumbents. Brown did quibble with reformers over some details of the proposed clean-elections system, but he voted in 2002 against a plan that would have gutted the program.

David Donnelly, who spearheaded the clean elections effort in Massachusetts, remembers Brown as a reliable supporter of clean elections: “Over those years, Scott Brown was not only a consistent vote, but a consistently outspoken supporter of the clean-elections program.” In a June 2001 letter to the editor in the Boston Globe, an activist with Common Cause, the good government group, hailed Brown’s support for clean elections as “not only courageous, but gutsy and heroic.”

When Brown ran for state Senate in 2004, he billed himself as “the person that bucks the system often.” He frequently mentioned his support for clean elections as evidence of his reformer bona fides. “As a state representative,” he said then, “I fought House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s pay raise bill and supported the voters’ will on Clean Elections.” Brown won the special election and served in the state Senate from 2004 to 2010.

In 2010, Brown ran for the US Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years. Most people remember his ubiquitous pickup truck, the one he drove everywhere and used to burnish his regular-guy image. What’s less remembered is how Brown again bragged about his support of campaign finance reform on his way to becoming a US senator.

Here’s what Brown told NPR the day after his upset win over Democrat Martha Coakley:

Maybe there’s a new breed of Republican coming to Washington. You know, I’ve always been that way. I always—I mean, you remember, I supported clean elections. I’m a self-imposed term limits person. I believe very, very strongly that we are there to serve the people.

That reformer approach vanished as soon as Brown joined the Senate Republican caucus.

In the summer of 2010, Senate Democrats heavily lobbied Brown to be the decisive 60th vote on the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would beef up disclosure of spending on elections by dark-money nonprofit groups, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. But Brown instead joined the Republican filibuster that killed the bill. In an op-ed explaining his vote, Brown said the bill was an election year ploy that exempted labor unions, which traditionally back Democrats, from some disclosure requirements. (In fact, the bill applied the same requirements to corporations and unions, and the AFL-CIO opposed it.) But he praised the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law as “an honest attempt to reform campaign finance” and wrote that genuine reform “would include increased transparency, accountability, and would provide a level playing field to everyone.” This gave some reformers hope that Brown might support a whittled-down version of the bill.

But no. Brown later opposed two newer, slimmer versions of the DISCLOSE Act and refused to cosponsor a national clean-elections bill similar to the measure he had backed in Massachusetts. (A spokeswoman for Brown’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Brown has gone on to accept millions from the interests most opposed to campaign finance reform. In 2011, he was caught on camera practically begging David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, for campaign cash. “Your support during the 2010 election, it meant a ton,” Brown told Koch. “It made a difference, and I can certainly use it again.” In his 2012 race against Warren, he benefited from a super-PAC funded largely by energy magnate Bill Koch, the youngest Koch brother and also a billionaire, and casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company. And though he agreed that year to the “People’s Pledge”—a pact intended to keep outside spending out of the campaign—Brown refused to make the same pledge in his current campaign against Shaheen.

As a state legislator, Brown bragged that he was someone who “bucks the system often.” Today, he is relying on the system—dominated by millionaires and billionaires, overrun with money, and cloaked in secrecy—to get back to the Senate.

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

by ReneCogburn Posted on October 20, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s good to be Elizabeth Warren. The senior senator from Massachusetts spent her weekend campaigning for Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa, and by all accounts, she tore it up, and got more than a few calls to run for president. (Breaking: she still insists she isn’t going to.) These were some of her biggest red-meat lines from the campaign trail:

1. “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it. We can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back, and we’re here to fight back. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against. We’ve got our voices, or votes and our willingness to fight. This is about democracy, about your future, and about the kind of country we want to build.”

2. “Who does this government work for?…Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers or does it work for the people? That’s the question in this race.”

3. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers.”

4. When conservatives came to power in the 1980s, the first thing they did was “fire the cops on Wall Street. They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at ’em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”

5. “They ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says…’I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done…or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Contrast Warren’s rock star treatment with the President’s reception this weekend: he spoke at a campaign event in Maryland, and attendees filed out as soon as he started speaking. Obama is being kept at arms’ length in close races—Warren, on the other hand, will head to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who’s running against Warren’s old nemesis, Scott Brown.

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

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"More Money Than I Could Count": Mitch McConnell’s Very Special Relationship With Lobbyists

by KatheriTonga Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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There may be no Washington lawmaker cozier with K Street than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). DC law firms and lobbying shops are stuffed with ex-McConnell staffers and pals. And he uses them well to preserve his power and position. As the conservative National Review reported, “McConnell has often exercised power in DC by pressuring major donors to withhold donations from a given lawmaker or organization. His allies on K Street are often the people who deliver this message and ‘enforce’ it.” The stats below show just how close McConnell is with the well-heeled lobbyists of Washington, DC—a relationship that no doubt will serve both sides well, should the GOP win the Senate and McConnell become its majority leader.

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"More Money Than I Could Count": Mitch McConnell’s Very Special Relationship With Lobbyists

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Americans Hold Wide Range of Opinions on Various Subjects

by CortezEdmundlaT Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ashley Parker apparently drew the short straw at the New York Times and got assigned to write that hoariest of old chestnuts: a trip through the heartland of America to check the pulse of the public.

So how’s the public feeling these days? Here’s Heather Lopez, a church worker in Terre Haute, Indiana:

“Instead of being a country that’s leading from behind, I would like to see us spearhead an all-out assault on ISIS,” she said, referring to the Islamic State, the Sunni militant group that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria and has claimed responsibility for the beheadings of two American journalists. “I would like to see every one of them dead within 30 days. And after we’ve killed every member of ISIS, kill their pet goat.”

Roger that. You will be unsurprised to learn later that Ms. Lopez “said she got much of her information from Fox News.” Where else would she? We’re in the heartland, folks! And not by coincidence. Parker’s trip was deliberately designed to take her nowhere else. Because, as we all know, real people can be found only in small towns and cities in middle America.

Not that it matters. Also unsurprisingly, Parker ran into people with a wide range of opinions. It turns out that America contains lots of people and they think lots of different stuff. It’s remarkable.

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Americans Hold Wide Range of Opinions on Various Subjects

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This Author’s Juicy YA Novels Would Be Banned in Her Parents’ Homeland

by CamilleN93 Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Sara Farizan presented early drafts of her young-adult novels at writing workshops, her fellow graduate students at Lesley University often responded with a stunned “Huh.” The YA genre tends to be dominated by wizards and trolls, but here was Farizan writing about gay teenage sexual angst. Her 2013 debut novel, If You Could Be Mine, centers on Sahar, an Iranian teenager who considers desperate measures—including sex reassignment surgery—to try to stop her true love’s arranged marriage. Farizan, born in the United States to Iranian parents, figured the book would sell on the fringes. Instead, it quickly landed on several “best YA reading” lists and snagged a Lambda Literary Award.

Her new novel, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, takes place closer to home. Out October 7, it is set in a waspy prep school, not unlike the one Farizan attended as a closeted teen in Massachusetts (“pre-Ellen,” she notes). “I had this outgoing personality, and I was class president, but inside, I was going to my car to cry.”

Farizan’s stories, as full of gossip as any school cafeteria, are nonetheless funny and frank. They deal with uncomfortable issues—and not just for “girls named Emily or Annie.” For that matter, Farizan thinks her fellow YA authors could do better at appealing to kids of all stripes. “Not that Harry isn’t great,” she says. “But if Ron and Hermione had been some other identity—black, Latina, gay—I think that would have made a huge difference.”

Mother Jones: You’ve said: “I write books I wish I had as a teenager.” Can you elaborate?

Sara Farizan: My first crush, as early as age 5, was Gadget the Mouse from Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. It didn’t bother me that she was animated, or a mouse; it bothered me that she was female. I had these inclinations, and was really terrified by them. This was pre-Ellen of course, and given the culture my parents are from—where a husband and wife is very important, and kids, and then those kids grow up to be doctors hopefully—I spent a lot of years in this silent fear and anger. As a teenager, I had this outgoing personality, and I was class president and doing all kinds of things; but inside was going to my car to cry. I had no problems explaining to people what my Iranian heritage meant, and trying to be a good representative. What did worry me was that I was secretly gay.

MJ: What were you reading at the time?

SF: There were LGBT-oriented books for teens by Julie Anne Peters, and Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind. I normally got those from my town library rather than my school. But there wasn’t anything about someone of a different background, you know. They were all girls named Emily and Annie. While those books were really helpful to me, there was a disconnect in that the only LGBT books that I had read about in school were concerning very of-European-descent people.

MJ: You started your books as graduate school projects. Did you think they’d become more than that?

SF: I really didn’t see them ever being published, based on what they’re about. Everyone in the “Writing for Young People” track was writing trolls and wizards, and, um, not LGBT people of color, certainly. I thought perhaps they were too niche. I didn’t anticipate that all of this would have happened—that I’d be speaking to you, for one.

MJ: There are a lot of doctors in your books, and I see that your father was a surgeon. Did you feel pressure to go that route?

SF: No, but I think it was a profession that was understood. It’s one that’s really lofty and prestigious. I think for a lot of Persian parents in the States, being a doctor was the gold standard. There’s this comedian, Amir K, who does an impression of his dad, who’s like, “What do you mean you want to be a comedian? You can be a lawyer, you can be a doctor, you can open up a bank.” And Amir’s like, “Dad, you can’t just go around opening up banks.” See video below. My sister and I have gone very media-related routes. My parents are really wonderful about it, but it’s not something they knew anything about. It’s all very new territory for them.

MJ: Is your book, If You Could Be Mine, banned in Iran?

SF: I don’t know that they know about it. I don’t Google myself. I don’t look myself up. One, because I’m a fragile flower. And two, it’s going to mess up anything I want to write in the future.

MJ: You paint a very believable portrait of life in Iran. Did you live there for a time?

SF: I’ve been there. I have the passport stamps. I worry about being exploitative because I’m a Westerner. But for me it was very important, being a member of the LGBT community and dealing with that kind if frustration and isolation, to imagine what it would be like growing up in the country my parents are from.

MJ: The idea of transexualism plays a big role in the new book—though it seems pretty evident that Sahar is not trans. But I was surprised to learn that transgender Iranians can get subsidies for gender reassignment surgeries, and that they have more government protections than homosexuals.

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This Author’s Juicy YA Novels Would Be Banned in Her Parents’ Homeland

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A Very Special Friday Cat Blogging – 26 September 2014

by TraceyNjvfimt Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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So. Marian and I paid a visit to our local shelter on Monday. We figured on adopting an adult cat. Maybe a calico, if one was available. So naturally we walked out with two kittens, one gray and white and the other black and white. They’re brother and sister, 10 months old. For the moment, their code names are Miss Flopsy (on the left) and Mr. Mopsy (on the right). Soon they’ll get permanent names, but we haven’t decided yet what they’ll be. Vickie and Bertie? Luke and Leia? Frankie and Ellie?

In any case, life is more exciting around here these days. There is much chasing and pouncing. So far they’ve both fallen off just about everything that’s possible to fall off. My bookcases are a shambles. And eight hours of sleep at night is not really on the agenda.

But I know you all want to reward me for this act of catblogging heroism, don’t you? And you can! If you haven’t done it already, how about contributing a few bucks to the MoJo investigative fund? Please think of the kittens, won’t you?

It only takes a minute to make your tax-deductible contribution, and you can give using your smartphone, tablet, or computer.

To donate via credit card, click here.
To donate via PayPal, click here.

Flopsy and Mopsy thank you!

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A Very Special Friday Cat Blogging – 26 September 2014

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Chart of the Day: The Death of Print

by RondaNovotny Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a BLS chart that shows how much we spend on reading-related materials. But what does it mean? It’s true that young folks spend less on reading material than anyone else, but that’s mostly because of their complete non-interest in dead-tree magazines and newspapers. Also, presumably, because young folks spend less on everything than prosperous older folks.

But if you add up the books + e-readers category, young folks are spending nearly as much as anyone else. It’s just not clear what they’re reading. E-books? Longform articles? Blogs? TMZ? Hard to say. Then again, it’s not clear what the older folks are reading either. It may be on paper, but it’s probably not Shakespeare for the most part.

In any case, this shows fairly dramatically that print is dying. As we all know by now, young folks mostly prefer digital. And so do plenty of non-young folks like me. I occasionally have to read a print book, but I’m annoyed whenever it happens.

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Chart of the Day: The Death of Print

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