Twenty years of jail time! This is what one Black man endured for stealing two (yes, 2) shirts!
My comment: Epicurus is known, among other things, for advocating moderation. He would be speechless with disbelief if told of such a sentence in his own day.
In the US the legal system is broken and is a disgrace. Can you imagine a White man being jailed for that amount of time for such petty theft?
Probably not.
A Russian academic has said that humans will one day be able to live forever and bring the dead back to life. “Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility,” said “transhumanist” Alexey Turchin. He added that there are four different paths to indefinite life so that we can “choose our own adventure”. One such path is to replace your organs with bioengineered ones, he claimed. (The Week Feb 26, 2021)
My comment: Help! Don’t go there! The idea is pointless if you are to continue living while all the people dear to you have long ago passed away. And keeping all of them alive indefinitely is a logistical and engineering challenge too huge to contemplate.
No, no. We have a finite life. Let’s make the best of what we’ve got.
Meanwhile, any takers for the concept of continued, bioengineered life? Just interested!
John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s former intelligence director, recently said: “There are a lot more sightings of UFOs than have been made public.” He continued that in some of the cases “we don’t have good explanations” about what the UFOs might have been, adding: “I actually wanted to get this information out and declassify it before I left office.”. (The Week,26 Mar 2021).
My comment: Mr. Radcliffe and his brilliant scientific friends, admired around the world, also forgot to present the finding that the moon is composed solely of cream cheese. You can tell by the color. Once the full moon has changed into a crescent you can be assured that a lot of it has been eaten by aliens.
More than 12,000 Americans have been killed by guns this year alone.
As a long-ago foreigner I have never understood how so many people interpret the Constitution so strangely. Arming citizens (it is clear to me anyway) was in the context of membership of citizen militias, defending against foreign interference. Yes, the wording is careless, and the founders should have clarified that section, but they were smart people and I doubt they truly advocated that every Tom, Dick and Harry, every teenager and mentally deranged person should freely carry around guns, taking out their hate and frustration on the innocent, and doing more harm to fellow citizens than to any invader.
As the survivor of a gunshot from three yards away from a careless soldier (which almost literally parted my hair; guns give me nightmares ) I can only think that all this gun crime arises from a lack of imagination in the politicians who have refused to address it. Nowhere in the world should private gun ownership, especially automatic gun ownership be a right. Epicurus advocated moderation – lock up the guns and use them on firing ranges or for hunting, if you insist.
You may have a roommate you have never met. And even worse, they are nosy. They track what you watch on TV, they track when you leave the lights on in the living room, and they even track whenever you use a key fob to enter the house. This is the reality of living in a “smart home”: the house is always watching, always tracking, and sometimes it offers that data up to the highest bidder – or even to police.
This problem stems from the US government buying data from private companies, a practice still quite shrouded in secrecy, but relatively simple in a country like the US that has weak privacy laws: approach a third-party firm that sells databases of information on citizens, pay them for it and then use the data however deemed fit. The Washington Post recently reported – citing documents uncovered by researchers at the Georgetown school of law – that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using this very playbook to buy up “hundreds of millions of phone, water, electricity and other utility records while pursuing immigration violations”.
“Modern surveillance” might evoke images of drones overhead, smartphones constantly pinging cell towers, and facial recognition deployed at political protests. All of these are indeed unchecked forms of 21st-century monitoring, often in uniquely concerning ways. Facial recognition, for instance, can be run continuously, from a distance, with minimal human involvement in the search and surveillance process. But the reporting on Ice’s use of utility records is a powerful reminder that it’s not just flashy gadgets that increasingly watch our every move; there’s also a large and ever-growing economy of data brokerage, in which companies and government agencies, law enforcement included, can buy up apparently fairly innocuous data on millions of Americans.
When it comes to police purchases of private data, privacy protection is completely absent. This is one of the oddities of trying to update 18th-century rights to address 21st-century threats. At the time of the country’s founding, the framers wrote about protecting things like our homes, our papers and other physical objects. Forward to today and these categories fail to capture most of our intimate data, including the ins and outs of our daily routine captured by, say, a nosy electronic roommate or a data broker.
Courts have been slow to update these legal categories to include computers and other electronic records. But while we now have the same protections for our laptops as our paper records, the matter gets much less clear in the cloud. The documents and data we access remotely every day can end up in a gray zone outside the clear protections afforded in our homes and offices.
When it comes to police purchases of private data, the protections are completely absent. Our financial, phone and countless other records held about us by third parties are generally open to police even without a warrant. This so-called “third-party doctrine” has come under more scrutiny in recent years, and there is some hope the courts will catch up with the changes in technology. Until they do, however, nearly all the data held about us by private companies remains completely exposed. Utility records might end up in the hands of law enforcement via a private company, or smart-home devices like thermostats and fridges could very well be sending off your data to be sold away.
While the recent Washington Post story focused on data brokerage and utility records, the smart-home phenomenon makes this problem of data sale and unchecked surveillance even worse. These gadgets are sold as flashy, affordable and convenient. But despite all that has been written about the speculative benefits of the so-called Internet of Things, these technologies are often insecure and may provide few to no details to consumers on how they’re protecting our data. Ring, Amazon’s home security system, has documented surveillance ties with law enforcement; that is but one example. The more smart devices are marketed in the absence of strong federal privacy protections, the more likely it’s not just about hackers half a world away controlling your home’s temperature – it’ll also be about arrests and deportations with the help of smart-home data.
All of which means American citizens and lawmakers must remember that protecting modern privacy is not just a question of facial recognition bans and legal restrictions on smartphone data collection. It’s also a matter of regulating the appliances and smart devices that watch people in their homes – and reforming the giant industry that profits off buying and selling those systems’ data. (Albert Fox Cahn and Justin Sherman)
