Category Archives: Keeping Them Honest

Just because it’s been said doesn’t mean it’s so. We don’t care how many times it’s been repeated. If it isn’t true, we’ll point it out, or at least question it, here.

Terrorist: Fail Word

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From the series: “Will 2012 be a fail year?”

Languages that are living (compared to, say, Latin) are ever changing and evolving. Let’s get real, folks. The meaning of “terrorist” has changed. By now anyone with a nominally functioning brain knows that the new definition of the word is “someone we don’t like or is a threat to the status quo” when used by governments or forces of the status quo. [The pun of the use of Latin here is both intended, and meant to appeal to those with nominally functioning brains]

When Bashir El Assad calls the Syrian people “terrorists” only a fool doesn’t recognize that the meaning of the word is the same as when it is used in connection with the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act).

Fasten your seat-belts, if 2012 isn’t fail it wil, in the words of chaos monger Newt Gingrich, be “wild and woolly”.

Occupy Boulder Fail?

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Will 2012 be a fail year?

I traveled to the People’s Republic of Boulder, as neighboring Coloradans call it: 10 square miles surrounded by reality. The purpose of my visit was to check in on Occupy Boulder; Boulder City had changed the law to prohibit occupying park space overnight, thus making the Occupy Boulder encampment illegal.

Boulderites, being very politically correct, obeyed the new law immediately, saying (as reported in The Denver Post) that they would focus their efforts during daytime. Only one person was arrested as the encampment picked up and dispersed. However, the Boulder courts are clogged with previous Occupy Boulder arrests, as the crimes involved mandate jury trials under local law. Efforts to change the legal proceedings to alleviate pressure on the local courts have been criticized as being anti-homeless. Which they are. Surprise, surprise.

Streaming live video on Global Revolution, I combed the area looking for evidence of Occupy Boulder. I was threatened by a dealer posing as a Colorado University student, talked with a homeless person denied any knowledge of anything, and obtained a confession from a groundskeeper said the last he’d seen of them was when they moved out the encampment.

The intersection of Broadway and Canyon adjacent the Municipal Building had a beggar with a cardboard sign on each corner. These people are professionals, and I’d given them a wide berth. They don’t take kindly to encroachment of any kind on their territory; when encroachment occurs, violence ensues. The most effective sign these people have wielded is by far the one reading “Need money for beer and prostitutes” (if measured by resultant income). On this occasion, however, one individual was holding a sign that said: “Greed Is Not An Option” with “99%” written in extremely small characters. I asked this one if he had seen any “Occupy Boulder” protesters. He answered “I AM the Occupy Boulder Protestor”.

Please view my interview with him:  http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19868453

Also at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4HFnerfFaI

NH Vote Count Fail

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Will 2012 be a fail year?

In the “they should have left well enough alone department”, the Republicans decided to re-count the Iowa caucuses results. They didn’t let the disappearance of many of the voting records get in the way of trying to change the outcome to their liking.

Watching the Republicans try to come up with a candidate is more fun than watching a barrel of monkeys. Hey, wait a minute! It IS watching a barrel of monkeys.

I suppose I should be more forgiving. After all, ballot box stuffing is an ancient tradition. So is rewriting history.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” must have been apocryphal. Some species must be willing to step up the plate and relieve this planet of its’ infestation by the pathetic humans.

History Repeats Itself – Again

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Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. It’s been one of those years, a fail year. I hope you had a great holiday… I know I did. Time to get back to work here at the LatchfordFactor.com. 2011 was a FAIL YEAR… and I’ll be wrapping (and rapping) that up over the next couple of days.

Meantime, you may enjoy my comment on NY Times coverage of Ron Paul’s campaign:

Could Age Be An Issue For Ron Paul?

– Rex

See Also:  Propellerheads – History Repeating – 1997

Google vs. Customer Service

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This article is about the inhumanity of Google to man. Google is, after all, a bunch of rocket scientists trying to interface with mere human beings. We saw this problem in the space program with the loss of Challenger and its crew due to inhuman organization. Today, Google is larger than even the space program, and has the capacity to wreak great havoc while trying to “do no evil”. Like the three wise monkeys, Google sees no evil, hears no evil, and tries hard to speak no evil. Despite this, we have seen Google do evil. Rather than rant further on the subject, I’d like to provide an example of how the problem can cost the average netepreneur big money. We’ll also see how Google is meeting the enemy and it is… Google (not Apple) — as the Google Gobble is performed on Motorola Mobility. Will Google recognize this as it tries to “Google Everything”? Like many giant corporations beset with difficult-to-manage growth, Google may have forgotten that its core business is to “be Google”; not just another behemoth set upon us, run amok, devouring everything in sight.

 


Three Wise Monkeys – Image via WikiPedia

But where is Shizaru?

An Example in Business

If you’re one of the millions of people with, or managing, a web presence, you probably deal with Google AdSense. You may also deal with AdBrite or nearly a dozen other Internet advertising networks. Both are easy-to-use ad networks that let you embed ads on your website and “reap the rewards” (one thousandth of a penny at a time). Many Internet projects and websites would not be possible without them. As a matter of full disclosure, The Latchford Factor derives most of its revenues from Google AdSense.

You sign up for Google AdSense. And AdBrite. Both are the same in the beginning. You create an online account on their website, and, after all the signup details (including providing name, rank, and serial number to satisfy the government’s need to enumerate you) start placing ads.

With AdBrite, as soon as you hit $50 in revenue, they’ll cut you a check at the start of the month and mail it to you. You get it about 12 days later. Simple, with no other choices for payment. It works. Mostly. As long as you get the proverbial check in the mail.

With AdSense, it’s just as automated, but not quite so simple. More like rocket science, PhD style. You’ll get paid after you hit $50 in revenue, all right, but first… they’ll send you a PIN number in the mail. It’s in a perforated mail form that is easily lost by the Post Office. You have to receive the mailer, and enter the PIN inside to validate your address before you can get paid… even if you’ve already verified a bank account for direct deposit. If the form is lost in the mail (which happens a lot), you have to wait a month or so before another can be sent. Then you can get paid* (terms and restrictions apply). You get the options of direct deposit, fed-X for an exhorbitant fee, etc. Cool. So far. Except…

What separates these two services is what happens when something goes wrong. And something always does go wrong. Sooner or later. Google, apparently, hasn’t learned about Murphy’s Law, and believes that they can automate a task such that every possible error condition can be anticipated and handled. Except, they don’t even come close.

With AdBrite, you can pick up the phone, and during business hours, they’ll answer your call fairly promptly. They’ll do their best to help you, but usually just wind up opening up a support ticket that you could have opened yourself online. Regardless, your issue is addressed in a documented and timely manner. The way you’d expect to be treated by a business partner you’re sharing hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars a month with.

With Google, you can pick up the phone, but it won’t help. There is no number to call. You can’t send an email either. There is no email address you can write to. You can’t even open up a support ticket. They don’t have those either. They do have “customer forums”. If you spend enough time searching (Googling), you’ll probably find that there are dozens, hundreds, or many thousands of people with the same problem. Wow, how cool is that? But then… nothing happens. You just sit there, reading complaint after complaint about the same thing. Your problem does not get solved. Well, maybe it does, but it gets solved in “Google Time”, which in my experience can take two years or more.

After my own experiences with Google, which cost thousands in lost revenue for my employer, the employer took the position that to the extent profitable, it would give its business in preference to any other ad network that would communicate with its partners. The problem is, Google generally does give the best revenue. What’s a mother to do? Stand in line?






Apples-to-Googles

Everyone is agog (not aGoog) at Apple’s iStores. The opposite of iSores, these temples of whiteness and monuments to computerphobia compensated for by industrial design are more than pretty facia. Customers pay (handsomely) for, and get Customer Service. It’s sort-of hands-on Customer Service. I’d frankly feel better if they wore white gloves, but that’s another post… The point is there’s nothing to separate you from the dispenser of Customer Service. No counter. No intimidating cash register or credit verifier. Just a sometimes friendly geek with a card swiper hooked to his iPhone so he can take your iCash in an instant.

But Google doesn’t like people. They like to keep the human interaction at a distance, buffered by the web browser and HTML with CSS.

And so it was that when I turned on my car radio, I felt like there was an echo in there. Ira Flatow was on NPR’s Science Friday (SciFri) and chatting it up with Glenn Fleishman of The Economist about Google vs. Apple in the context of the Google-ization of Motorola Mobility, the cell phone manufacturing arm of Motorola. You can listen in, or read the transcript.

At nine minutes and twenty-two seconds into the segment, Glenn Fleishman says:

“Google doesn’t like people very much has always been my impression. They want to keep people arms-length away and let the algorithms, the automatic things, the user support forums handle everything.”

I felt vindicated. And less alone. Even though I knew I was a member of a fairly large crowd. It’s just that Google Gloss tends to cover us over. Caveat Googlor of the Google Gobble.

Milking the Spooks Who Milk US

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I came across this twist while researching invasion-of-privacy by the government.

Communications Companies Milk the Spooks

It’s fairly widely known that the government routinely asks for, and gets, telecommunications information on individuals from communications companies like Internet and telephone service providers. Sometimes these requests are legal (with an accompanying court order), sometimes not. They are almost always complied with. Or, were.

There are two trends in this landscape of communications providers ratting out our activities to the government:

First, communications companies have discovered the are huge profits to be made snooping on citizens for the government. For example, Comcast documents show that after an initial charge exceeding a thousand dollars, the cost per month to snoop on one individual is more than seven hundred dollars.

Second, perhaps to mitigate the increasing costs cited above, the need for law enforcement or government snoops to ask for this information is diminishing as the amount of information amassed by the Total Information Awareness “non-program” increases. The only stumbling point there is gaining access to the NSA‘s mother lode.



Spooks Milk US so They Don’t Have to Go Outside

Meantime, despite the recession, and perhaps to stem the needs to purchase information and instead just keep recording everything and store it forever, the NSA continues to expand it’s capacious data trove:

From: US spooks to build 60 megawatt data center by Timothy Prickett Morgan

According to declassified documents made available by the comptroller’s office for the Department of Defense, the US government’s fiscal 2012 budget includes $860.6m to build a high performance computing center at the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters facility. That is the cost for the facility alone, not the cost of the servers, storage, and networking gear that will inhabit the data center.

From:  NSA to Modernize With Cloud and Crypto Centers by Darlene Storm, Computerworld

NSA’s chief information officer (CIO) Lonny Anderson talked with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller about the NSA’s mission, the three new state-of-the-art NSA cryptological centers in Hawaii, Georgia and Texas, as well as how efficiencies in IT with the cloud will help modernize the secretive intelligence agency.

NSA’s massive 65 megawatt data center is on 240-acres at the National Guard facility in Camp Williams, Utah. The self sustaining complex will have 1 million square feet of enclosed space with 100,000 square feet of working computer space. It will have its own “water and waste-water treatment plants, power, gas supply, battery backup, visitor-control facilities, vehicle inspection station and perimeter security.” It is supposed to be capable of storing staggering amounts of surveillance data, yottabytes of data . In case your mind does not automatically compute just how mega huge that is, CrunchGear described it as, “There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?”

Anderson said the Utah data center will support the Obama administration’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) as well as support the Intelligence Community (IC). It will have new tech and very efficient tech, designed with NSA’s future needs in mind. It will be used to assist Homeland Security, but Anderson said the NSA only helps DHS when asked. The massive data center will help focus on cyber threats to make certain national security networks are protected. All intelligence will “feed” from the data center, meaning the data will be stored in that single data center which will help discover threats in a “near real-time environment.”

 

Why We Can’t Trust the Government With Our Secrets

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Logo of the Information Awareness Office, an a...

Image via Wikipedia

The title of this blog is the problem with the government’s widespread snooping on citizens. The government says it hasn’t implemented the Total Information Awareness Program… but there is plenty of evidence that it has. And that means that everything on the Internet, and all phone calls, are being recorded and archived by the government for data mining. That means anything said during a voice call or done on the Internet could come back to haunt you at any time in the future. And let’s be serious – we’re not just talking crime here. You have to know it will be used for political purposes (e.g. to control citizens).

I want to keep this post focused. So we’ll keep it simple:

Can we trust the U.S. government to keep all the information it amasses about us secret?

According to the government, we can’t.

This sad, but hardly astonishing fact was underscored yesterday in the publication of a memo from Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 while he was Secretary of Defense under President Bush:

 

Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld Image via Wikipedia

 

FOUO
November 02, 2005
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: U.S. Government Incapable of Keeping a Secret

The United States Government is incapable of keeping a secret.

If one accepts that, and I do, that means that the U.S. Government will have to craft
policies that reflect that reality.

DHR.ss
110205-11

 

The actual memo is here.

… that’s short, sweet, and to the point. But if we accept Rumsfeld’s view, then we are in grave danger, and we must consider that any shred of privacy we may have once had, say, a decade ago… is now long gone.

Please see:

U.S. is “Incapable of Keeping a Secret,” Rumsfeld Concluded in 2005
July 15th, 2011 by Steven Aftergood

The Devil in your Cookies
July 15th, 2011 by Rex Latchford

Getting a Chokehold on the Internet

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Internet Kill Switch

Leaders everywhere fervently pray for a “kill switch” for the Internet. Many of them undoubtedly have projects underway, or perhaps have completed such projects, within the bounds of their reach. Governments and like entities that would exercise control over information have good reason to be concerned about control of the Internet, in the wake of Wikileaks and the Arab Spring. As a result, we, the people who would be controlled in such a manner, should become more aware of Internet control issues.

The Internet was designed, perhaps diabolically in the minds of the military industrial complex that funded its development, to resist being cut off or broken. Internet protocols will try endlessly to find any route possible that will get around road blocks and interruptions that are thrown in the way of the flow of information. The Internet (capital I) is not one network, but a network of thousands of smaller internets (lowercase i) that are autonomously operated. These smaller networks include cable companies, phone companies, Internet transit companies such as Level(3), and “ISP”s, all of which are potentially dispensable and not critical to the operation if the Internet. Even users have choice in how they connect. If you home connection is shut off, there is the Internet cafe, etc. This decentralized design was intentional, and does have the effect of resisting centralized control. And who would want centralized control anyway? Only those who would control the flow of information. Just what we don’t want. Right? One would hope.

This was all very obvious to users of the early Internet. But many users have come on board since the commercialization of the Internet who have no clue what the Internet really is, how it works, or why it was designed the way it is. This lack of awareness is, as is often the case, a threat to our freedom. Some education is in order. The need, and a partial solution, is manifested in the recently formed “Chokepoint Project“.

Introducing the Chokepoint Project

On February 27th, 2011, the order was given to “turn off” the Internet in Egypt, limiting communications and voiding commerce conducted online. Egyptian Internet services resumed on February 2nd. Fastforward just a few weeks later, this time Libya commences its disconnect February 18th, with a blackout occurring March 4th.

Shutting down the Internet in two countries sent shock-waves across the world. We also  heard people like American Senator Liberman asking for access to a similar kill switch. These actions force us all to ask ‘Who owns The Internet?” and what are the implications of the said controls over connectivity and scenarios for their use?

If you believe the Internet is not something that can or should be soley controlled by politicians or people inside the higher echelons of nation states, resulting in situations like Egypt and Libya, we’d love to tell you about what we are building.

The Choke Point Project addresses the events of recent months with the clear aim of mapping nodes of Internet connectivity and who maintains their control and what this may mean. We believe there is the need for a more decentralized Internet beyond the complete control of nation states and corporate influence.

A quick look at the Chokepoint Website leaves the impression that it is produced by individuals who never knew a world without the Internet, and do not fully grasp what it is or how it fits (and does not fit) with the world in which we live. Nor are the issues of privacy and control apparently fully grasped. But it’s an important start. It’s important work, and there are many who need to be educated to the threat that controlling power poses. One is immediately concerned that a road map is being produced that will greatly assist those who would exercise control over the Internet. But knowledge is power, more so when placed in the hands of the public than when placed in the hands of insulated power-mad bureaucrats and their minions.

Choke Point Project Introductory Video

Still Here, No Rapture

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It’s now 45 minutes after the time scheduled for the start of “the rapture” by Family Radio.

I’m still here, in the New York City area, and there’s no sign of the rapture.

Perhaps it’s just arriving late.

Not that I think “the rapture” would be a bad thing. It’s just that it’s not happening right now.

Keeping ’em honest.

– Rex

Medical Marijuana a States Rights Issue

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Just after completing the “How “Medical Marijuana” Scams Pot Users” blog, I scanned the Denver Post and found an article about the clash between states with medical marijuana laws and federal law, which criminalizes marijuana. As mentioned in the previous blog, this puts registered users at considerable risk. Perhaps greater risk than if they continued to use black market pot, instead of coming in from the cold.

It’s not to difficult to find articles about “medical marijuana” or just “marijuana” in The Denver Post. Search for it, and you’ll come up with an average of two articles a day. That’s nearly twice the number of articles found in the New York Times, with its national scope. The more local New York Post ran only one story in the past week where marijuana was the main topic. But, The Star Ledger in New Jersey, where marijuana possession is even more rigorously prosecuted than in New York, averaged over two stories daily in which marijuana played a prominent role over the past week.

Meanwhile, the states rights issue is the elephant in the room when it comes to medical marijuana and the conflict between state and federal law.

Ever since the 16th Amendment to the constitution was floated, allowing for the establishment of the IRS, discontent has festered in some corners of the Union. Wikipedia lists Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Utah as states that rejected that amendment and never ratified it. Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia never even considered the amendment. By accounts other than Wikipedia, there were other states that did not ratify the amendment either.

The issue has not gone away, and continues to be at the top of states rights issues. In 2009, Texas Gov. Rick Perry told and anti-tax rally crowd at Austin City Hall that “…the federal government is strangling Americans with taxation, spending, and debit”. He was met with shouts of “Secede!” Texans have other beefs with the feds that have elevated the prospect of secession, as well.

Similar rumblings have been heard in many corners of the United States, and some say that there is a quiet agreement among a dozen or more states that formal moves to secession will be made should states rights face further erosion at the hands of the feds. Meanwhile, it is generally felt by many that the federal government has destroyed the 10th Amendment, which says that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

All of this seems to underlay the uneasy truce between the feds and the states when it comes to prosecution of marijuana users in states with medical marijuana, or liberal marijuana laws. The Denver Post article concluded with a statement from Robert Mikos, a Vanderbilt University law professor who studies the intersection of medical-marijuana and federal power:  “To some extent, the Department of Justice is simply trying to draw a line in the sand.” — they’re not trying too hard though, probably because no one wants to force the states rights issue to the point where desires for secession in many states come to the surface. It’s something that wouldn’t benefit either states or feds… at this particular moment. And that could change at any time.