Arlington County Fair, 2008
Category: Society Page 43 of 69
I expected that the Russia-Georgia confrontation would bring out some warmongering pronouncements from old men eager to spill young blood, but I didn’t realize that so many would lose all sense of perspective and reality over it.
So try to ignore these fools who seem to so desperately want us back in military confrontation with Russia, and learn a bit about the moving parts yourself. There is no clear and easy answer, and the facts on the ground keep changing. But reading up through the linked articles here and here would be a good start to your understanding of it.
So many times in the course of conversations about privacy and politics, people are otherwise share my same general socio-political moorings express great doubt that the US government would ever spy on people for any reason other than crime prevention.  While I’m never at a loss for counter examples, I’ll have to say that the best documented examples are often a generation or two old, and probably carry a little less currency, as a result. Well, governments – state and federal – have been obliging me lately. First we had Maryland police closely tracking the activities of dangerous people like anti-death penalty activists, and now we’ve got a straight admission from the FBI that it spied on reporters from the Washington Post and New York Times.
It not only can happen here, it *does* happen here.
That’s a title I have to say that I didn’t expect to be writing about with any seriousness. Yet here we are, with Russia and Georgia facing off over South Ossetia:
The president of the separatist region, nestled in the Caucasus mountains, said 1,400 people had been killed. Moscow said its troops were responding to a Georgian assault to take back the region.
This is a big deal, and the US is rather involved with things there. US-Georgia relations are generally pretty good, and Georgia has been seeking NATO membership for a while (something that – were it in place now – conceivably require a US military response to the Russian movements, today). Not sure where the best news source for this is yet, but if I find one, I’ll post it here.
Update: Understandably, Georgia’s taking 1,000 of its troops out of Iraq and bringing them home. The discomfitting bit? The US is the one doing the transportation. Wired’s (excellent) Danger Room blog gives us some general background on the Georgia-US military relationship:
Since 2002, the U.S. military has been providing Georgia with a serious amount of military assistance, beginning with the Georgia Train and Equip Program in 2002. I first visited Georgia’s Krtsanisi training range in fall of 2002, when the Georgian military was still little more of a militia, with some of the troops wearing sneakers and surplus Soviet uniforms.
[ . . . ]
Officially, SSOP was supposed to prepare Georgians for service in Iraq. But Georgian trainees I spoke to in 2006 at the Krtsanisi training range saw things a bit differently. A female sergeant told me: “This training is incredibly important for us, because we want to take back Georgia’s lost territories.â€
There are no innocent actors here, and the US public should keep its eye on this (even if its President is busy playing games in China).
Objectively, the Olympics are a scam. It’s a conspiracy between global corporations interested in advertising, local governments looking for an excuse to shovel public money to favored private contractors, and the Skekis (also known as the International Olympic Committee) who suck the lifeblood out of young men and women. If this were the last Olympics ever, it would probably be a net good for the world.
But it won’t be. So make of it what you will. Living in the center of the ’96 Olympics was among the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. The people, the energy, the – forgive me, Francis – post-history feeling to all of it (it was 1996, after all). Not even some wingnut with a bomb could ruin it for us. After the experience of those couple of weeks, I will always be up for hanging out in an Olympic city.
It’s more than a party, though. It’s – despite NBC’s best efforts to ensure I never care about someone’s triumphantly-overcoming-tragedy again – the story of thousands of people who have busted their ass for most of their lives to be there. It’s the amazing people it produces, like Otto Peltzer (follow and read that). It’s people.
And finally, it’s among the very few events where we can truly say that “the world is watching.” And that, my friends, leads to profound and important actions like this:
The Olympics can still be shaped by individuals. All of the people in these (amazing) Opening Ceremonies pictures? They are individuals, like you and me, who worked incredibly hard to be there. Don’t cede the good of the Olympics to spite the bad.
~
If you want to watch the Olympics online, and live in the United States, NBCOlympics.com is probably the place for you. I say “probably”, because 1) while it will show most events live, it will delay online access for any event it plans to broadcast until *after* its been broadcast, and 2) there’s some ridiculous deal by which access is only available to those US viewers living in areas served by NBC’s “partners”. They check this by asking for a zipcode (I have a friend who lives in 22203, and it works perfectly).
If you’re getting screwed by the inability of the IOC and world broadcasters to find a way to make the Olympics accesible to you, you might be interested in this article on the “alternative” means of watching the events.
Nothing much else to say about this, I guess.
Update: from Elizabeth Edwards.
The Olympics are already on my nerves, so we’re going to take a brief detour from the weekly makeover. What happened? Well, some silly cyclists wore some silly masks when they got off the plane in Beijing, which made everyone act silly (I’m trying to be nice here). The national coverage and local conversations that followed were not . . . encouraging. And while all us chickens are pecking at our own little circles, without ever looking up, I’m reminded:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Her2M_zZDEI[/youtube]
Yes, that’s Jarvis Cocker’s Running the World. Listen to it. Understand it. Remember it. Probably not kid safe, but they’ll learn it soon enough.
You might have noticed a company called Clear, when you last passed through an airport. They’re a private operation that will sell you a fast pass through the security lines, provided that you give them lots of personal information in advance so they can perform a background check on you (if that sounds like a cheap way for terrorists to sort out whether they’re on any lists, well . . . we’ll get to that another time). This, then, is a “security” company that someone at TSA is apparently thinks competent enough to delegates security decisions to, as well as collect and store lots of personal information.
You know the punch line already, don’t you?
Clear lost a laptop with the personal information of 33,000 members on it. None of it encrypted. Oh, but don’t worry, they found it! Where? In the same office from which it was reported lost.
So many of these “security” programs strike me as much like the bridge trolls we used to find in children’s stories. Bridge trolls are, of course, just extortionists. The put themselves between where you are and where you need to go, and demand a price to let you pass. Many people paid, because the bridge trolls were dangerous enough to do damage to you. But all of them ultimately turn out to be not that bright and are eventually shown for the dumb brutes that they are, usually by some enterprising kid who just doesn’t buy into the fear. Clear is just another bridge troll.
Disquieting Rasmussen numbers this morning–McCain’s crying racism worked. 53% of Americans, including the same % of whites and half of all Democrats, thing that Obama’s “dollar bill” remark was “racist.” Only 22% think the Paris Hilton ad was racist–most of those being black people, of course (only 18% of white people took this view).
This NYTimes is carrying an interesting essay about a new site called CriminalSearches.com (you’re welcome to cut and paste it to see it – I’m just not giving it the benefit of a link).  The author explains:
Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.
Go ahead, you can search me. You’ll find both an incomplete (I must admit that I have received more than two speeding tickets in my lifetime) and an incorrect result. As much as I do regret getting those two tickets, I’m not particularly embarrassed by them. But I am bothered by the incorrect component – one lists me as “guilty in absentia” (for a ticket I got in Front Royal, doing 44 in a 30, I believe). Now *this* bothers me greatly. I may be morally corrupt enough to drive 44 in a 30, but I certainly do understand and meet my obligations to answer any resulting traffic summons. And yet we’ve now got a publicly accessible resource which certainly makes it look as if I didn’t. The NYT essay notes this problem of accuracy (and context):
A quick check of the database confirms that it is indeed imperfect. Some records are incomplete, and there is often no way to distinguish between people with the same names if you don’t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).
To further test the site, I vetted some of my colleagues at The New York Times. One, who shall remain nameless, had a recent tangle with the law that the site labeled a “criminal offense,†while adding no other information. Curious, I called my colleague with the date and city of the now very public ignominy. The person was stunned to know that the infraction — a speeding ticket — was easily accessible and described as criminal.
“I went to traffic school so this wouldn’t appear on my record. I’m in shock. This blows me away,†my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. “I don’t necessarily want you all knowing that I’m a fast driver.â€
The site’s owners remain unfazed:
PeopleFinders’ response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.
So maybe the source of my particular problem is with the Virginia records themselves, and not CriminalSearches. But it’s CriminalSearches that made it matter, because *anyone* can now pop my (rather uncommon) name in and see what comes up, without any contact with me.  The implications – legal, political, social – are worth considering.  Some of these concerns *were* considered, fairly recently:
In the past, Congress carefully considered how the public should use criminal records. Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1997 required that employers who hire investigators to obtain criminal records from consumer reporting agencies advise prospective employees of the search in advance, and disregard some types of convictions that are older than seven years.
“I don’t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,†says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “Understanding Privacy.†“Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn’t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.â€
So, legally, some of the information you can find on individuals via CriminalSearches.com is off the table for certain uses. But with such easy access, observance of these restrictions is doubtful:
Jurors can and almost certainly will be tempted to look up criminal pasts of defendants in their cases. And employers can conduct searches themselves without hiring investigators. Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders says that employers cannot legally use the database in making hiring decisions — but there is nothing to stop them.
And speaking of hiring decisions, let’s remember that even the Department of Justice – which we should expect to be as scrupulous an observer of the law as ever there was – used information it wasn’t legally entitled to use:
A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.
The traditional walls that have kept information like political contributions, traffic offensive, and long-past criminal convictions from the casually curious have all but crumbled. Maybe we should talk about privacy while we still remember it.