Yesterday, I actually finished putting together the Video Thread before I finished this one. A couple of the “usual suspects” came through, and popped in an animal one which can only be viewed on You Tube – but was too good not to share About a cat who is a practicing Buddhist. And it’s easy to click through to it (and excellent CC)
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AP News – Judge tosses Zimmerman’s lawsuit against Trayvon’s parents
Quote – Judge John Cooper in Tallahassee dismissed all counts against all defendants in the lawsuit filed by Zimmerman against Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin; attorney Ben Crump, who had represented the family; and others. In his order, the judge wrote that Zimmerman had failed to show “any fraudulent representation” and said any further arguments in the case would be futile. Click through for a few details about the case. In the nineties, I worked in an art gallery, ans my boss has her own way of describing what many of us call “chutzpah.” She’d say, “He has balls the size of church bells.” I think that fits here.
Second Nexus – GOP Senator Slammed for Single-Handedly Holding Up Designation of Internment Camp as Historic Site
Quote – With the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 only a day away, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah is refusing to budge on the commemoration of a former internment camp in rural Colorado as a historical site. Even in today’s bitterly divided Senate, Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet secured support for the Amache National Historic Site Act from 99 out of 100 Senators, but the bill failed to pass by unanimous consent thanks to Lee’s sole “No” vote. Click through – George Takei has many websites, and by the time they get written andhis newsletters go out, they are often a bit late. That doesn’t always change the facts. This time it did. Lee came around thanks to My Senator, and I’m only too happy to brag about it.
Comic Sands – NFL Star Takes Young Fan To Daddy-Daughter Dance After Her Father Died—And We’re Ugly-Crying
Quote – When Audrey’s school announced a daddy-daughter dance, Audrey’s mom, Holly, knew this was going to be a pain point for her little girl. Having just lost the men in her life, Audrey was a Daughter with no Daddy or Grandpa to take her. So Holly threw a proverbial Hail Mary for her daughter. Using social media, she reached out to one of the other long-standing influential men in Audrey’s life—Philadelphia Eagles Player Anthony Harris. The family had been fans of Harris’ for years…. Click through for story – and pictures. Yes, this is another George Takei site. He can be hard on malefactors, but he has an appropriately soft heart for the innocent – and those who help them.
Yesterday, I again didn’t do much. A little knitting was about it.That’s just as well though. At least I got both of today’s posts ready. It was a slow day for videos – and I have so many sources now that I can usually stay a little ahead. Not today. I hopw everyone who normally uploads videos was doing something special with their significant others … and that a bunch of them upload one today.
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The New Yorker – Autocrats, Not Terrorists, Are Increasingly Taking Americans Hostage
Quote – The officers at the airport blindfolded Fenster and trundled him into a van. When the blindfold was removed, Fenster was in what appeared to be a police station. Two men interrogated him. The environment was more menacing—Fenster was shackled to a chair while they fired off repetitive questions about why he had come to Myanmar and what he was doing in the country. Hours later, he was blindfolded again and taken to a new location. When this blindfold was taken off, he found himself in a courtroom inside Yangon’s Insein Prison, a notorious complex known as “the darkest hellhole in Burma.” Click through for story. Of course foreign autocrats are a danger, but frankly, it’s the domestic ones which worry me more.
Mother Jones – Canadian Police Clear Protesters From Key Border Crossing
Quote – And in New Zealand, cops have made at least 120 arrests at the camp near Parliament. Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard, pitched in by blasting annoying music to deter the protesters. Among the selections: Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, “Baby Shark,” and Matt Mullholland’s out-of-tune cover of “My Heart Will Go On.” As of Saturday, it wasn’t working. Click through for details. Not all of Manilow’s hits are annoying – at least not that annoying. Personally, I wish Rocky Mountain Mike would pick up on “Weekend in New England.” The chorus writes itself: “When will we see him in jail?”
History Art and Archives – Robert Smalls
Quote – An escaped slave and a Civil War hero, Robert Smalls served five terms in the U.S. House, representing a South Carolina district described as a “black paradise” because of its abundant political opportunities for freedmen. Overcoming the state Democratic Party’s repeated attempts to remove that “blemish” from its goal of white supremacy, Smalls endured violent elections and a short jail term to achieve internal improvements for coastal South Carolina and to fight for his black constituents in the face of growing disfranchisement. Click hrough. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s documentary “Reconstruction,” in the second hour of Part 1, Prof. Gates interviews his great-grandson. In reality, Smalls was one of many black legislators who infuriated white by being competent. (I recommend the entire documentary, and you don’t have to watch it all at once.)
Glenn Kirschner – Two Standards of Justice: Fed Worker Jailed for Mishandling Classified Docs, While Trump Golfs (Apparently, that was the only crime in the completed case. It does take limger to write a term paper than it does to write a 500-word essay. Just a thought.)
Yesterday, as much time as I spent trying to get organized, all I really accomplished was putting together my pills for the next tao weeks – and was happy to do that.
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Lwtters from an American – February 12, 2022
Quote – Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places…. “It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.” Click through for the complete essay. The way Lincoln put this huge moral and ethical leap inot words strikes me as very similar to Freya’s method of demolishing the individualism myth.
The Hill – A retired Russian general’s criticism may signal a larger problem for Putin
Quote – Retired Russian Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, has gone public with a statement that calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign over the confrontation involving Ukraine. To remove any doubt as to his message, Ivashov, 78, followed the public statement with an interview on a liberal Russian media outlet, Echo Moskvy, insisting that he was speaking in the name of the assembly of retired and reservist Russian officers which he heads. Click through for story. I know what you’re thinking, because it stunned me too – “What? There’s a liberal media outlet in Russia?” But seriously, Putin may just have triggered his country’s equivalent of our Smedley D. Butler. And with that at his back, he may very well reconsider marching forward into Ukraine. We can certainly hope so.
Black History – Wikipedia – Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Quote (from Brooks, not from Wiki. Probably her best known.) –
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon. Click through for full bio. She is better known than most of the people I am featuring, but I’m including her today because I once had the privilege of meeting her. And that is a sweet memory.
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.
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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
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.
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
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.
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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.
============================================================== 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.)
Yesterday, The opera broadcast was not an opera, but the “Requiem” by Giuseppe Verdi. It was a special presenation on last fall’s opening night to recognize and memorialize the losses of the pandemic, and to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Verdi was criticized at the time for making it “too operatic.” As if the Day of Judgment were not a subject worthy of opera. (Not to mention there are some pretty dramatic passagesin Mozart’s Requiem – and even in Brahms’s “German Requiem,: which was intended to be kinder and gentler than the usual requiem.) The soloists were all fine singing actors, but it was Eric Owens singing bass who choked me up with his vocal depiction of shock and awe – and that (along with the FFT) is the Black History tidbit for today. There was other stuff which needed to be said.
Cartoon – 13 Galileo Loaded
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The 19th – More states want to restrict how LGBTQ+ people, issues are discussed in schools
Quote – None have become law, although some — like Florida’s bill on classroom discussion, called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by advocates — are advancing in state legislatures, and more could be introduced as the year continues. These bills focused on schools are at the nexus of two movements: adding restrictions to LGBTQ+ youth and limiting what can be taught in schools. The fights over sex and gender are happening alongside those over teaching about bias and systemic racism. Click through for article. At the rate we are going, the next edition of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is going to look like the Oxford English Dictionary.
Mother Jones – Let This Sweet Man Keep His Damn Pig
Quote – However, the Disney villains on the Canajoharie village board are threatening him with jail time unless he gets rid of her. Flatt currently faces a criminal trial and a potential sentence of up to six months in jail. On top of that, a civil case could fine him $20 for every day he’s had Ellie at his house—about $18,000 in total. Click through – it isn’t long. This is what fascism is like. No common sense. No flexibility Conform or be run over. I am not a pig person, but those who are form bonds with them as strong as anyone;s bond with a dog or a cat – or sometimes even another human. Haven’t they ever heard of a variance, for heaven’s sake?
Letters fron an American – February 11, 2022
Quote – Sullivan told reporters that the administration believes that the world has entered the window of time in which IF Russian president Vladimir Putin is going to attack Ukraine, he will do so. The U.S., he said, is “ready either way.” It will continue its hefty diplomatic push, or it and key allies will respond to an invasion with severe economic sanctions, reinforce the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and continue to support Ukraine and its well-trained and equipped army. (emphasis mine) Click through for the whole thing. All the media are saying “Putin is going to attack.” But that is not the same thing as what President Biden and his staff are saying. Fortunately for us, we have a President who can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time.
