There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

That used to be the kind of sentiment you'd read in a science fiction novel. This is a newspaper.

E-borders - the new frontier of oppression

Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.

New Zealand PC World Magazine - Google submission hammers section 92A

The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession".

Picture 30 is the best one.

Scenes from the recession - The Big Picture - Boston.com

"Because wireless carriers regularly generate and retain the records at issue, and because these records provide only a very general indication of a user's whereabouts at certain times in the past, the requested cell-site records do not implicate a Fourth Amendment privacy interest," the Obama administration wrote (.pdf) Feb. 13 to the federal appeals court.

The sad thing is that their position on this isn't totally insane. Phone company records have generally been considered a constitution free zone, which was a stupid idea in the first place, but thats where we're at and statues like the stored communications act referenced in this filing are legislative band-aids that have prevented what I think would be broad calls for a constitutional amendment resulting from that silly conclusion. Now - Phone company records have accidentally become records of your physical location and movements - records they keep around for 18 months. Does that bring the Constitution into play? No, probably not.

The theory is that anything you've told the phone company or google or "the cloud" is fair game for the police.

Given that everything that anyone would ever want to know about you is in the cloud - the 4th amendment is basically useless. Stick a fork in it. The sooner people get this, the better off we'll be.

In order to resolve the problem you need one of the following:

1. A radical shift in the way courts interpret the Constitution.
2. A new Constitutional Amendment.
3. More band-aid legislation.

This physical location problem is likely to be resolved behind door number three. The frogs will need to be a great deal warmer before 1 or 2 will happen.

(But they WILL inevitably happen. Probably the first one, but only after a series of very carefully argued Supreme Court victories.)

Obama Administration: Constitution Does Not Protect Cell-Site Records | Threat Level from Wired.com

flynn23 wrote:
You want the best and brightest to be compensated, with really, no limit.

In this case I think what is frustrating is that we're not talking about "best" or "brightest" but "closest to the money." We have examples of performance bonuses being paid out by companies that are, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt. I'm all for profit sharing by successful companies, but paying it out when your company is bankrupt and being propped up by the federal government is nonsensical. There are no profits to share, so what, exactly, are you sharing? The argument that "we have to do this or we'll loose talented guys" is a non-starter in this environment. No one in the banking industry is on a hiring binge right now. The last thing anyone in any industry wants at this moment is to be on the street looking for work. Those words are a code for something else - something which becomes clear when you look at how AIG's bonuses are structured.

In the case of AIG we're not talking about profit sharing. These are retention bonuses that were negotiated last January when it ought to have been clear to those close to this disaster what was about to go down. These people demanded more money or they would simply walk away from the mess they had created. They've squirreled away enough money at this point that they don't have to work again for the rest of their lives. They clearly threatened, when the going got sour and it was clear that there weren't going to be profits for performance bonuses, that they were unwilling to work at their salary level, and a substitute bonus must be created - or they'd leave.

AIG was not afraid of loosing talent. They were afraid of loosing money. They had billions wrapped up in this stuff. It was about to explode. Their traders were the only people who understand all of it. If those traders left, it will be more difficult to unravel, and more money would be lost.

Imagine if you had a software developer working a piece of code that was extremely complicated, required daily maintenance, and cost billions every day if it broke. And the guy wanted to quit. The million you'd pay him not to quit would cost you less than what you'd loose while the next guy came up to speed on how to maintain the thing.

Basically, these people have gotten themselves into a position where they are responsible for billions of dollars, and they are blackmailing the management of AIG and the United States Government. We have to pay them millions or they will walk away, and we know that will cost us even more. Thats why the Treasury hems and haws about clawing back the bonuses but doesn't do anything effective. They know they're fucked. The banksters have a gun to their heads.

This isn't a case of rewarding talent. This is blackmail. And I don't think its illegal - I don't think prosecutions are coming unless evidence of book cooking comes to light. In this case these bonuses are intentionally disconnected from profits so there is no benefit to cooking the books.

It speaks to a more fundamental disconnect between our idealistic notions of talent and merit and the actual economy that we have, in that its not really about talent - its about what you control. Account executives are typically far better compensated than engineers, for example, not because what they are doing is objectively more important, but because they directly control access to revenue...

RE: Looting AIG

Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine to go into our annual Outlook report. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War.

Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2009:

Futurist Top Ten for 2009 and Beyond

Virtually from the first day Obama was inaugurated, right-wing polemicists have been alternatively accusing him of (a) radically reversing Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, thereby ensuring that we're all about to be slaughtered by the Terrorists (see Cheney); and (b) fully embracing the Right's Terrorism approach, thereby vindicating the Bush administration's policies and exposing civil liberties criticisms of Bush as hysterical, disingenuous and wrong (see Lowry).

I've reached the point where I think much of what Greenwald writes is too shrill, but this one is worth looking at - if for no other reason than this clear inconsistency he observes in the right's search for a position on Obama's civil liberties policies. It says a lot about Obama - its still not possible to read where he stands on these issues.

I think the "enemy combatant" announcement WAS largely symbolic, as was the closing of gitmo, but reason these things are symbolic is that the problem has already been solved. At the outset the primary issue (in my mind) was the assertion that the US could seize any citizen at any time and hold them forever without explaining why. That idea finally died in Boumediene v. Bush. Clearly, if Bosnians in Gitmo can file a Habeas petition, Americans can too, and Gitmo is not a legal blackhole. Two birds - one stone - no more problem.

I certainly DO think the US government OUGHT to be able to detain actual terrorists, but there needs to be a process that determines that this is actually what they are doing. That process now exists. What arguments about this are left mostly amount to squabling over details - and while perhaps those details are important they do not represent the kind of basic civil liberties debate that was occuring in this country a few years ago.

Bush's legal theories about detention have been discredited. The left should declare victory and move on. It is better in any case to win these victories in court than to have a President merely declare that he won't bother to do something anymore - as the next administration can reverse that posture again.

Obama's "enemy combatant" policy: following a familiar pattern - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Decius, in a prescient post from 2004:

Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

I still think this is at the heart of what is happening.

A massive stock market bubble blew up in the late 1990's - which were as roaring as the parties felt.
Al Queda stepped in at exactly the right time - at the cusp of a major market collapse which they would have been able to take credit for.
In order to avoid that collapse for both political and war related reasons, the government blew up a credit bubble.
That bubble has burst - but the question is - where will real growth come from?
There is no basis for real growth because, as Obama has been repeating, the American middle class has been thrown under the bus.
A solution to this is coming:
In some respects the credit bubble made this possible - when people's purchasing power is rising they aren't going to be clamoring for a raise.
The rush to offshore was fueled by greed - it doesn't work as well in practice as its proponents claimed and like anything has to be approached thoughtfully.
The political system is rebalancing, much to the horror of the press corps who find themselves among the elite who are facing a higher tax load.
But there are problems:
The symbiotic relationship between the US and China upon which much depends is rooted in America's ability to spend in spite of not producing - which is ultimately unsustainable and must eventually end.
Home prices are only about half way down. There are various policy responses designed to "stop" this. There are two ways to do it, a 20's style crash or a Japan style long, slow crush. I think policy makers are basically hoping for the later - that they can deflate these bubbles the rest of the way slowly - and possibly without much nominal price deflation - while the real economy starts to grow again.

What went down in September was some sort of mistake. "We have lost control." The question is whether or not the situation is back under control again. Regardless, attention must turn to the fundamental problems, which will take a long time to resolve.

We've been sitting on a powder keg since the late 1990's, and although we reduced the size considerably between the last decade and the load that went off last fall, a great deal remains below us. Its possible that it will go off again.

Its also possible that they intentionally set the keg off in September, knowing that an inflection point between administrations would allow us to work off a large amount of the imbalance with minimal political consequences, but they'd never admit to that - it would require acknowledging that a change in the Whitehouse was inevitable.

RE: Old Growth And The Future

In the first quarter of 2008, prior management took significant retention steps at AIG Financial Products. ... Some of these payments are coming due on March 15, and, quite frankly, AIG's hands are tied.

They knew the ship was sinking and the rats decided to leave unless millions more were paid to them - and so these millions were offered and now that the government has bailed out the company the millions must still be paid. Basically, they set up the system in advance so that it would continue to enrich them after it failed.

Outside counsel has advised that these are legal, binding obligations of AIG, and there are serious legal, as well as business, consequences for not paying.

Best argument yet for nationalization. Large government bailouts should, at least, require filing some kind of bankruptcy where a court can come in an make contracts void.

Looting AIG

They are known as the Wolfpak or simply “the boys.” They use fear and their fists to command respect in the surf along the North Shore of Oahu, a seven-mile stretch of some of the world’s most renowned waves. At the celebrated Banzai Pipeline, they determine which waves go to whom, and punish those who breach their code of respect for local residents and the waves.

On North Shore of Oahu, Enforcing Respect for Locals and the Waves - NYTimes.com