Business & Finance

Credit Cards Threaten Privacy! (Says 1969 LAFree Press Article)

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More than 40 years ago(!) the LA Free Press printed this article.  Then, many readers might have thought this was ‘far out’.  And, now??

Credit Cards Threaten Privacy! Los Angeles Free Press, 1969

Credit Cards Threaten Privacy! Los Angeles Free Press, 1969

Encrypt Your Phone Conversations! Make Them Secure From Big Brother!

http://zfoneproject.com/   This is the url where you can obtain information and a free download of Phil Zimmerman’s new program, zphone, allowing anyone to have phone conversations that can not be overheard by hackers, criminal or political.

Phil Zimmerman is the developer of the program Pretty Good Privacy. PGP is widely used on the internet by companies and individuals to maintain privacy. Big Brother does not like this program because PGP can prevent the government from viewing exchanges between individuals on the internet i.e. internet-tapping.  As a result, Zimmerman has a long history of involvement in litigation with the government over legislation and rules preventing the export of PGP to other countries. The L.A. Free Press will provide you with more information about zphone as this story develops.

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today… it’s
Wednesday, September 1, 2010

More Here @ 3 pm (PST)

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Public Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

(This article refers directly to today’s issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. If you have not yet seen it, please, before reading further, click HERE.)

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s…

all about who’s looking into our life and why, and how we, individually and collectively, have come to say no way, no more.

by Steven M. Finger

Thought it was important to let you know, via our first Item, that the invasion of privacy (in this case, pronounced as the British do…priv’acy) is not just an act of our government, but spreading throughout Europe like the latest fashion.

With that point made, we needed to return back to the US to make another one that may surely affect the future of our country.   Most of us know of the Patriot Act, and we know it circumvents many civil rights we hold dear.  But few of us have considered – may not even have known – of the impact it has on the rights of students.  (Click here to review that posted article.)

In our earlier Series on the growing distrust of our government and the consequent rise of movements and third parties, students – educated, motivated and not willing to have their needs lowly prioritized – will be striving to be a larger component of the political process.  The Patriot Act may put a brake on that.

On the other hand, an act of outright defiance – by what many consider one of the most meek and mild-mannered professional groups (librarians!!) – virtually ground one of those Patriot Act provisions to halt.  While the article here speaks about the Chapters of the American Library Association putting forth resolutions, the word is that many a librarian simply put the regulation aside by refusing to record what books a patron choose to read.

They are lessons well-learned:  divided we stand…, and personal courage shapes nations.

Our final Item ties more closely to those to lessons than you might suspect:  it enables you to take a personal stand and it leads to a tale of personal fortitude and intrigue – another act of defiance that said, loud and clear that our personal business is our own business, here’s a wall for your peeking eyes.

Here are the keywords to our thinking today: Big Brother in Britain, Fair Trials International, James Slack, Surveillance Society, ACLU, Personal Privacy, Patriot Act, Section 203, Section 215, Section 901, Student Activist Groups, Students, Terrorists, American Library Association, Lauren Barack, Librarians, Patriot Act, Section 206, Section 215, Section 505, Cell Phone Encryption, PGP, Phil Zimmerman, Pretty Good Privacy, zphone, Art Kunkin,  L.A. Free Press, Los Angeles Free Press, Changing Society, Self-Improvement, Social Change, Society & Culture

Here are links to today’s items:

[1] European police to spy on Britons: Now ministers hand over Big Brother powers to foreign officers

[2] Patriot Act Stands Over Students

[3] Librarians Push Against Patriot Act

[4] Encrypt Your Phone Conversations! Make Them Secure From Big Brother!

Every Click You Make, Big Brother Is Watching You

— Illustration: 1984 movie prop.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific series of stories called “What They Know.” The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the digital world, and the first article in the series explained how websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per site:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

….Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200 tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and wikipedia.org.

What to do about this? Read more…

And Here Is The Documentation Assembled By The Critics Of Cato of The Cato Institute.

Part of the “Critiques of Libertarianism” site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 08/27/10.

The Cato Institute is a “libertarian” quasi-academic think-tank that acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. There is no significant participation in Cato by its tiny libertarian minority. These libertarians do not fund Cato or affect its goals. Cato is a creature of corporations and foundations.

The major purpose of the Cato Institute is to provide propaganda and soundbites for conservative and libertarian politicians and journalists conveniently free of reference to funders such as tobacco, fossil fuel, investment, media, medical, and other regulated industries.

Cato is one of the most blatant examples of “simulated rationality”, as described in Phil Agre’s The Crisis of Public Reason. Arguments need only be plausibly rational to an uninformed listener. Only a tiny percentage will notice that they are being mislead. That’s all that’s needed to manage public opinion.

Links

A Critical Assessment of “Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths”.

The Cato Institute, heavily funded by tobacco companies, hired Levy and Marimont to denounce statistics about smoking related deaths. This article refutes their key arguments, finding them unscientific and inflammatory.

Media Moguls on Board: Murdoch, Malone and the Cato Institute

An Extra! (the magazine of FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting ) article that describes how media giants use Cato to lobby Congress for corporate welfare and legal monopolization.

Why Privatizing Social Security Would Hurt Women

An Institute For Women’s Policy Research rebuttal to Cato Institute proposals and claims about Social Security privatization.

An Analysis Of The Cato Institute’s “The Case Against a Tennessee Income Tax”
Senate finance panel examines Cato report, recognizes propaganda

Citizens For Tax Justice lay open the shoddy errors behind this typical example of the claims Cato makes. The Tennessee Senate finance panel also identified a large number of other errors.

Who knew? The Swedish model is working.

Paul Krugman points out that CATO and other conservatives were dead wrong in their predictions for Sweden, and that big welfare states do sometimes work well. From The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive.

Libertarian Think Tanks

Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World” gives credit where it is due.

Do Windmills Eat Birds?

David Case, executive editor of TomPaine.com, exposes a quotation out of context by CATO in a case of pretend environmental concern.

Millionaires One and All

(PDF) Details the fallacies underlying the CATO Social Security Calculator. Under realistic assumptions, you’d accumulate 1/10th to 1/30th of what CATO estimates. Part of The Social Security Network.

Rethinking the Think Tanks

Sierra Magazine’s article detailing the corporate financing of anti-environmental propaganda from thinktanks like Cato.

Internet Bunk: The Junk Science Page

The CATO Institute is a corporate front that employs Steven Milloy to tarbrush opponents scientific arguments as “Junk Science”. Robert Todd Carroll’s excellent The Skeptic’s Dictionary details Milloy’s unscientific part in this PR campaign.

Read more…

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s
********* Tuesday, August 31, 2010 *******
**********More Here @ 3 pm (PST)*****

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Public Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

(This article refers directly to today’s issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. If you have not yet seen it, please, before reading further, click HERE.)

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s…

all about who’s looking into our life and why, and how we, individually and collectively, have come to say no way, no more.

by Steven M. Finger

Will see you all back here at 6 so we can look the Items over together, and draw some wider conclusions.

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Here are the keywords to our thinking today: ACLU, Surveillance Society, Big Brother, Kevin Drum, personal privacy, ATT, Verizon, Art Kunkin, CATO Institute, L.A. Free Press, Los Angeles Free Press, Critiques of Libertarianism, Changing Society, Self-Improvement, Social Change, Society & Culture

Here are links to today’s items:

[1] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/aclu-highlights-u-s-surveillance-society/

[2] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/every-click-you-make-big-brother-is-watching-you/

[3] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/what-if-verizon-could-censor-your-telephone-conversations-why-net-neutrality-matters/

[4] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/the-the-l-a-free-press-presents-the-two-sides-of-the-%E2%80%9Clibertarian%E2%80%9D-cato-institute/

[5] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/how-big-brother-began/

[6] x http://losangelesfreepress.com/and-here-is-the-documentation-assembled-by-the-critics-of-cato-of-the-cato-institute/