Aug 142022
 

Glenn Kirschner – Georgia DA Willis destroys Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to weasel out of testifying about Trump’s crimes

Meidas Touch – Teenager CRIMINALLY CHARGED after Facebook TURNS OVER Private Messages

The Lincoln Project – Getting Sh*t Done

The Ring of Fire – Child Slave Labor Uncovered At Alabama Hyundai Facility

MSNBC – Lawrence: ‘Merrick Garland Has Outsmarted Donald Trump At Every Turn’ – The Last Word

Beau – Let’s talk about a weird story out of Michigan…. (Sounds to me like a textbook recusal)

Share
Jul 262022
 

Glenn Kirschner – With J6 committee revelations, it’s time for DOJ to indict Donald Trump & his co-conspirators

Meidas Touch – BREAKING: Democrats SLAM GOP for voting AGAINST contraception bIll

The Lincoln Project – Josh Hawley Is A B*tch

“Nyet Vladimir” – Ukrainian War Song (The Ukrainian version of the Finnish song “Nyet Molotov.” The Finns wrote the song during the 1939-1940 Winter War they were fighting against the Russians. Sadly, the Ukrainians had to adopt the tune with different lyrics in 2022.)

John Fugelsang – America’s Next President, Ron DeSantis

Beau – Let’s talk about privacy and your cell phone….

Share
Jul 132022
 

Yesterday, I of course watched the hearing. It doesn’t appear there will be another this week, but rather probably next week. The last two witnesses today were, I thought, impressive, although who knows what it takes to impress MAGAts. It’s not exactly the Committee’s mission to address political violence in general (as opposed to political violence in the service of Trump**) in the hearings, but I certainly hope it will be addressed as they draft legislation. Political violence at low levels (i.e., without a dominant leader common to the groups involved) can lead to fascismut as surely as a narcissistic ambitious dictator can. Besides the eharing, I didn’t do much else. I did a load of laundry comprising a few sweaters which are machine wash/dry flat and that’s about it.

Cartoon –  This reminds me of an anecdote about a sweet elderly lady who had had massive surgeries bu never lost hersense of humor. She called one of her scars “Market Street.”

Short Takes –

Letters from an American – July 10, 2022
Quote – Democratic president Joe Biden appears to be centering his presidency around the idea of rebuilding the middle class through government investment in ordinary Americans. This is a major shift—a sea change—from the past 40 years of Republican policy saying that the economy would prosper if only the government slashed taxes and regulation, leaving more money and power in the hands of business leaders, those “makers” who would invest in new industries and provide more jobs. Watching the effect of his policies is a window into what works and what doesn’t.
Click through for more, and why ir matters politically.

The 19th – What will happen if Obergefell is overturned? Queer legal experts are scrambling
Quote – A concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that ultimately overturned Roe indicates he wants to reexamine whether other rights based on substantive due process have been interpreted correctly. “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” Thomas wrote. Other opinions written by conservative justices show division over how the court should handle similar civil rights issues in the future.
Click through for more legal thinking. Don’t forget Pastor Niemoller’s famous poem – no one is safe.

Food For Thought

Share

Everyday Erinyes #324

 Posted by at 12:39 pm  Politics
Jun 262022
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Overtrning Roe isn’t all the Supreme Court did this week which was disastrouus. It also weakened the rights of states to administer their own policies, with its decision to overtuen New York’s concealed carry law, and that opens another wholw can of worms. As well, it made the separation of church and state unconcstitutional. But what I want to address here is the overturning of Roe v Wade.

The basis for the Roe v Wade decision in the first place was the concept that, though it nowhere says so in so many words, the Constitution guarantees every American a right to privacy, including a right to make personal decisions for oneself, without interference from the government. It is that which the Court has stripped away (and pretty explicitly too.) It has been stripped from men as well sa from women, from children as well as adults, from white people as well as from black and brown people, fron straight people as well as from LGBTQIA+ people. Those who are worried about this decision have mentioned Loving and Obergefell and whichever decision it was that guaranteed access to contracepton. All these depend on the right to privacy. And now that’s gone. What now?
==============================================================

Privacy isn’t in the Constitution – but it’s everywhere in constitutional law

Who’s allowed to watch what you do and say?
Shannon Fagan/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Scott Skinner-Thompson, University of Colorado Boulder

Almost all American adults – including parents, medical patients and people who are sexually active – regularly exercise their right to privacy, even if they don’t know it.

Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century, the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty. As I have studied in my research on constitutional privacy rights, this implied right to privacy is the source of many of the nation’s most cherished, contentious and commonly used rights – including the right to have an abortion – until the court’s June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson.

A key component of liberty

The Supreme Court first formally identified what is called “decisional privacy” – the right to independently control the most personal aspects of our lives and our bodies – in 1965, saying it was implied from other explicit constitutional rights.

For instance, the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly allow people to privately decide what they’ll say, and with whom they’ll associate. The Fourth Amendment limits government intrusion into people’s private property, documents and belongings.

Relying on these explicit provisions, the court concluded in Griswold v. Connecticut that people have privacy rights preventing the government from forbidding married couples from using contraception.

In short order, the court clarified its understanding of the constitutional origins of privacy. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to have an abortion, the court held that the right of decisional privacy is based in the Constitution’s assurance that people cannot be “deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” That phrase, called the due process clause, appears twice in the Constitution – in the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

Decisional privacy also provided the basis for other decisions protecting many crucial, and everyday, activities.

The right to privacy protects the ability to have consensual sex without being sent to jail. And privacy buttresses the ability to marry regardless of race or gender.

The right to privacy is also key to a person’s ability to keep their family together without undue government interference. For example, in 1977, the court relied on the right to private family life to rule that a grandmother could move her grandchildren into her home to raise them even though it violated a local zoning ordinance.

Under a combination of privacy and liberty rights, the Supreme Court has also protected a person’s freedom in medical decision-making. For example, in 1990, the court concluded “that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment.”

Limiting government disclosure

The right to decisional privacy is not the only constitutionally protected form of privacy. As then-Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in 1977, the “concept of ‘privacy’ can be a coat of many colors, and quite differing kinds of rights to ‘privacy’ have been recognized in the law.”

This includes what is called a right to “informational privacy” – letting a person limit government disclosure of information about them.

According to some authority, the right extends even to prominent public and political figures. In one key decision, in 1977, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Rehnquist – both conservative justices – suggested in dissenting opinions that former President Richard Nixon had a privacy interest in documents made during his presidency that touched on his personal life. Lower courts have relied on the right of informational privacy to limit the government’s ability to disclose someone’s sexual orientation or HIV status.

All told, though the word isn’t in the Constitution, privacy is the foundation of many constitutional protections for our most important, sensitive and intimate activities. If the right to privacy is eroded – such as in a future Supreme Court decision – many of the rights it’s connected with may also be in danger.

This story was updated on June 24, 2022, to reflect the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.The Conversation

Scott Skinner-Thompson, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==============================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, without the right to privacy, and with this particular Court comprising these particular justices, there may be no limit to the rights which may be stripped away, from all of us. In fact, with this Court, it may not even matter if progressives achieve commanding majorities in Congress and the White House. We may already be living in a fascist country, details to be released as the fascists deem appropriate.

The Furies and I will be back.

Share
Jun 262022
 

Yesterday, the radio opera was “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. It’s been up before, so I won’t go into details. The performance was at the Paris Opera, and the cast included three pretty well-known bass baritones (one American, one Englishman, and one Italian [married to the daughter of another American one]) and pretty much no one else I had ever heard of. But no major company is ever going to put on a bad performance of this opera. It’s kind of ironic that it’s on today – something which was planned long ago – because it high;ights the position of women in a male-dominated society (that was probably unconscious) and also how class status affects everyone, but women especially (and that was definitely conscious and led to censorship.)

Of course I could not ignore SCOTUS. Both here and with the Furies I have chosen to explore “Now What?” One of today’s short takes is hopeful, but hope needs effort to come to fruition. And in one piece of good news, NATO has granted candidate status to Ukraine. President Zelenskyy thanked each nation’s leader by name and the name of the country, and also the President of the EU, on the Zoom call which notified him. Mitch (I had missed it.)

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
Quote – If a fetus is a person, then a legal framework can be invented to require someone who has one living inside her to do everything in her power to protect it, including—as happened to Savita Halappanavar, in Ireland, which operated under a fetal-personhood doctrine until 2018, and to Izabela Sajbor, in Poland, where all abortion is effectively illegal—to die. No other such obligation exists anywhere in our society, which grants cops the freedom to stand by as children are murdered behind an unlocked door.
Click through for full article, including optional audio. The New Yorker is right. There has never been a time in history when women have been quite as discounted as this decision ad its eventuality imposes. And the article does not even go into other rights wich are likely to disappear – and h=not just women’s rights – as subsequent decisions come to reflect the logical consequences of this one.

POGO – Accountability: The Path to Improve Government Effectiveness and the Antidote to Authoritarianism
Quote – There are six primary mechanisms that, if working properly, serve as pillars of accountability in federal government. They are: whistleblowers, who expose wrongdoing; inspectors general, who serve as independent watchdogs at each government agency; congressional oversight, which provides a check on executive power; transparency and civil society participation, which ensure that the government answers to the people; independent journalism, which investigates and exposes wrongdoing; and the equal application of the rule of law to the highest levels of government.
Click through for full analysis.  Progressives’ work is never done.  Of course, that is true of all whose work is or includes cleaning up the messes made by others.

Food For Thought

Share
Jun 042022
 

Yesterday,I slept in again, due to shoulder issues again, although, because I resomved them a couple of hours earlier than the night before, I also got more sleep than the night before.  Hopefyllu I have figures out the frmula and can resolve them earlier still while they last.  I al assuing they are arthritis, and arthritis (and sciatica) hae a habit of coming in flare-ups and gong away again after 2-6 weeks, depending.  That doesn’t mean they won’t ever come back, but – touching wood – after my knee flareup in February 2020 (which was agonizing), that knee has been fine ever since – unlike some other body parts I could mention.  So there can be good long periosof no to minimal pain also.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

Project on Government Oversight – How to Protect Yourself from Surveillance While Seeking Reproductive Health Care
Quote – Living under an abortion ban in 2022 will not be similar to 1972, before Roe v. Wade. Due to the massive surveillance powers the government now possesses, the consequences of the ban could be much more draconian. Law enforcement not only has powerful tools to monitor individuals, but can capture a stream of sensitive data we produce in our daily lives, often without us realizing it’s happening. And investigating individuals for prohibited abortions will likely direct the government’s immense surveillance powers at the most intimate medical, familial, and sexual details of people’s lives.
Click through for other aspects. I know a lot of readers here will never be pregnant – I won’t myself. But, in addition to at least some of us having people in our lives we care about whoo could, I found reading this made me think about other things I tend to take for granted. You may also.

PolitiZoom – Trump Tops Pumpkin Pie, Kardashians as “worst thing to come from US” In British Poll.
Quote – In a poll of 2,000 Brits conducted by Lottoland.co.uk who are pushing their own lousy U.S. exports, Powerball and Megamillions on an unsuspecting British Public, TFG walked away with the title of “worst thing to come out out of America” handily topping gun culture, the Kardashians and American Football.
Click through for details. Yes, this is fluff Bu it’s cool fluff.

Science alert – The Human Heart Can Repair Itself, And We Now Know Which Cells Are Crucial For It
Quote – Key to the study was the discovery of the role played by macrophages, specialist cells that can destroy bacteria or initiate helpful inflammation responses. As the first responders on a scene after a heart attack, these macrophages produce a particular type of protein called VEGFC, the researchers report. “We found that macrophages, or immune cells that rush to the heart after a heart attack to ‘eat’ damaged or dead tissue, also induce vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGFC) that triggers the formation of new lymphatic vessels and promotes healing,” says pathologist Edward Thorp from Northwestern University in Illinois.
Click through for full info. There’s nothing here that makes any recommendations for current patients – but it’s hopeful that such recommendations may come as we understand more.

Food For Thought

Share
May 062022
 

Glenn Kirschner – Draft opinion shows Supreme Court about to revoke women’s constitutional privacy rights

Meidas Touch – Texas Paul REACTS to Supreme Court Justices Lying UNDER OATH!

Rebel HQ – Ojeda v. Gaetz

Really American – GOP Plans To Take Right to Privacy (It’s been suggested that future movemets for abortion [and birth control] should not focus on the 14th Amendment but on the 13th, which prohibits involuntary servitude, and I concur.)

VoteVets – The Moment

Kalush Orchestra – Stefania – Ukraine 🇺🇦 – Official Music Video – Eurovision 2022
This is Ukraine’s entry in the Eurovision Son Contest (May 14). You can read more about it and about the contest here

Beau – Let’s talk about 10 propaganda techniques you’ll see in the midterms….

Share

Everyday Erinyes #305

 Posted by at 10:36 am  Politics
Feb 132022
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

We have through this column looked at facial recognition before, and, while it can certainly have some positive uses, I personally prefer to be identified by what’s inside my head rather than what’s outside it. (Then there’s the little issue that I do not own, nor do I plan to own, a phone which is capable of downloadding an app or anything else. Nor do I own or plan to own a webcam …even assuming the technology could be downloaded to a desktop.) If the IRS wants to identify me by a body part, I’d be amenable to a fingerprint … provided it hadn’t been taken from a hand which was subsequently amputated. But that’s the problem. Body parts are not set in stone. So I was very happy to read that the IRS had backed off on making this mandatory.
==============================================================

Government agencies are tapping a facial recognition company to prove you’re you – here’s why that raises concerns about privacy, accuracy and fairness

Beginning this summer, you might need to upload a selfie and a photo ID to a private company, ID.me, if you want to file your taxes online.
Oscar Wong/Moment via Getty Images

James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is planning to require citizens to create accounts with a private facial recognition company in order to file taxes online. The IRS is joining a growing number of federal and state agencies that have contracted with ID.me to authenticate the identities of people accessing services.

The IRS’s move is aimed at cutting down on identity theft, a crime that affects millions of Americans. The IRS, in particular, has reported a number of tax filings from people claiming to be others, and fraud in many of the programs that were administered as part of the American Relief Plan has been a major concern to the government.

The IRS decision has prompted a backlash, in part over concerns about requiring citizens to use facial recognition technology and in part over difficulties some people have had in using the system, particularly with some state agencies that provide unemployment benefits. The reaction has prompted the IRS to revisit its decision.

a webpage with the IRS logo in the top left corner and buttons for creating or logging into an account
Here’s what greets you when you click the link to sign into your IRS account. If current plans remain in place, the blue button will go away in the summer of 2022.
Screenshot, IRS sign-in webpage

As a computer science researcher and the chair of the Global Technology Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, I have been involved in exploring some of the issues with government use of facial recognition technology, both its use and its potential flaws. There have been a great number of concerns raised over the general use of this technology in policing and other government functions, often focused on whether the accuracy of these algorithms can have discriminatory affects. In the case of ID.me, there are other issues involved as well.

ID dot who?

ID.me is a private company that formed as TroopSwap, a site that offered retail discounts to members of the armed forces. As part of that effort, the company created an ID service so that military staff who qualified for discounts at various companies could prove they were, indeed, service members. In 2013, the company renamed itself ID.me and started to market its ID service more broadly. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs began using the technology in 2016, the company’s first government use.

To use ID.me, a user loads a mobile phone app and takes a selfie – a photo of their own face. ID.me then compares that image to various IDs that it obtains either through open records or through information that applicants provide through the app. If it finds a match, it creates an account and uses image recognition for ID. If it cannot perform a match, users can contact a “trusted referee” and have a video call to fix the problem.

A number of companies and states have been using ID.me for several years. News reports have documented problems people have had with ID.me failing to authenticate them, and with the company’s customer support in resolving those problems. Also, the system’s technology requirements could widen the digital divide, making it harder for many of the people who need government services the most to access them.

But much of the concern about the IRS and other federal agencies using ID.me revolves around its use of facial recognition technology and collection of biometric data.

Accuracy and bias

To start with, there are a number of general concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition technologies and whether there are discriminatory biases in their accuracy. These have led the Association for Computing Machinery, among other organizations, to call for a moratorium on government use of facial recognition technology.

A study of commercial and academic facial recognition algorithms by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that U.S. facial-matching algorithms generally have higher false positive rates for Asian and Black faces than for white faces, although recent results have improved. ID.me claims that there is no racial bias in its face-matching verification process.

There are many other conditions that can also cause inaccuracy – physical changes caused by illness or an accident, hair loss due to chemotherapy, color change due to aging, gender conversions and others. How any company, including ID.me, handles such situations is unclear, and this is one issue that has raised concerns. Imagine having a disfiguring accident and not being able to log into your medical insurance company’s website because of damage to your face.

Facial recognition technology is spreading fast. Is the technology – and society – ready?

Data privacy

There are other issues that go beyond the question of just how well the algorithm works. As part of its process, ID.me collects a very large amount of personal information. It has a very long and difficult-to-read privacy policy, but essentially while ID.me doesn’t share most of the personal information, it does share various information about internet use and website visits with other partners. The nature of these exchanges is not immediately apparent.

So one question that arises is what level of information the company shares with the government, and whether the information can be used in tracking U.S. citizens between regulated boundaries that apply to government agencies. Privacy advocates on both the left and right have long opposed any form of a mandatory uniform government identification card. Does handing off the identification to a private company allow the government to essentially achieve this through subterfuge? It’s not difficult to imagine that some states – and maybe eventually the federal government – could insist on an identification from ID.me or one of its competitors to access government services, get medical coverage and even to vote.

As Joy Buolamwini, an MIT AI researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, argued, beyond accuracy and bias issues is the question of the right not to use biometric technology. “Government pressure on citizens to share their biometric data with the government affects all of us — no matter your race, gender, or political affiliations,” she wrote.

Too many unknowns for comfort

Another issue is who audits ID.me for the security of its applications? While no one is accusing ID.me of bad practices, security researchers are worried about how the company may protect the incredible level of personal information it will end up with. Imagine a security breach that released the IRS information for millions of taxpayers. In the fast-changing world of cybersecurity, with threats ranging from individual hacking to international criminal activities, experts would like assurance that a company provided with so much personal information is using state-of-the-art security and keeping it up to date.

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Much of the questioning of the IRS decision comes because these are early days for government use of private companies to provide biometric security, and some of the details are still not fully explained. Even if you grant that the IRS use of the technology is appropriately limited, this is potentially the start of what could quickly snowball to many government agencies using commercial facial recognition companies to get around regulations that were put in place specifically to rein in government powers.

The U.S. stands at the edge of a slippery slope, and while that doesn’t mean facial recognition technology shouldn’t be used at all, I believe it does mean that the government should put a lot more care and due diligence into exploring the terrain ahead before taking those critical first steps.The Conversation

James Hendler, Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==============================================================
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I think I am even more nervous about the possibilities of false negatives than false positives. I do not take kindly to being told I am not who I am. I realize the government has a legitimate interest in being able to verify people’s identity, and I also realize that people as a whole are pretty stupid about passwords. That’s why there is a trend toward two-step verification (after inputting your password the site gives you an option of getting a one-time code by text or voice phone to a number which is already on record with them, and you input it when you receive it.) I assume we have all done that at one point or another. One of my banks has always had a two-step process where you had to have both a password and a PIN to get in (and now also has the phone/text option.) My credit union has for over a decade has a system where, upon opening an account, you select a picture from a library and then enter a pass phrase to go with it, and each time I log in they show both to me, and if either one is not right, then I don’t even enter my password (not that that has ever happened. In fact, it seems to be working.)

The Furies and I will be back.

 

Share