Spokeo

"Look on spokeo.com" he said. "They know everything about you and you can find out anything about anybody" And so you can. just don't expect it to be correct. Of course you have to join to see just what they know about you and the "free" trial membership somehow costs $14 a month, but OK, I just had to see for myself.

At least they spelled my name right and my age is accurate, but my favorite hobby is sports? I'm a Protestant? I must protest. My house doesn't have only 4 rooms or only three baths, I've lived there longer than they say I have and neither of my parents live there or ever did. Spokeo claims that they do and seems unaware that one parent has been dead for years and that I have two children not one and that neither lives with me.

The market value of my house is off by at least $200K, my estimated income is way off the mark and sorry, Spokeo, I do own the place. But hey, I hope the tax assesor reads Spokeo too. Otherwise the guy who spent $14 to look me up wasted his money. They do have a nice satellite photo of my house though, complete with my boat parked at my neighbor's dock. They don't mention boating as a concern of mine.

The info about my kids was even worse. My daughter would be very surprised to know that she had a six year old girl for instance or that she didn't finish college. My son would be surprised to know that he lives in the house I sold ten years ago where he hasn't lived in 18 years and simultaneously at two other addresses in New York and has a graduate degree. He apparently is "upper middle class" and I'm only "middle class." I do like to read however. At least they got that one right.

We live in a world of constant surveillance and the idea that our government cares or would support our right to privacy is ludicrous, but perhaps worse that the fact that so much information is available about us to anyone with a computer and $14 bucks is that it's bad information. Of course when I began to search the web site for some means of angry protest ( they said I was a protestant, after all) I found a disclaimer averring that the information was for entertainment purposes only and was not intended to be a means to evaluate a person's credit or credibility. *

I'm not amused.


*† All data offered is derived from public sources. Spokeo does not verify or evaluate each piece of data, and makes no warranties or guarantees about any of the information offered. Spokeo does not possess or have access to secure or private financial information. Spokeo is not a credit reporting agency and does not offer consumer reports. None of the information offered by Spokeo is to be considered for purposes of determining any entity or person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or for any other purposes covered under the FCRA.

Spy in the sky

You expect the smaller government gospel in Texas and Texans will tell you that the damned government should stay out of private matters like dragging gay men to death behind pickup trucks, instituting safety standards for drilling rigs and demanding proper accounting practices from Bush beloved companies like Enron, but there's an alternate logic in Texas; one that has no problem with the government spying on us with unmanned drones. Following us down the road recording our movements and our speed and our destinations, peeking into our back yards. The largest of these things are as big as airliners and the smallest, I'm told, can fly right into your window. Some are remotely operated, some are almost autonomous. They can see in the dark, they know when you're sleeping; they know when you're awake -- well, maybe not, but they know if you've been good or bad.

Of course there's support for patrolling the borders with these machines, which are much cheaper to operate and aren't dangerous to the operators, but they pose a collision hazard to civil aviation and the FAA, pushed by manufacturers, fear-mongering politicians and the government, has been trying to balance the need for aviation safety with the lust for more government surveillance. Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, are so hot to employ drones on the border and who knows where else that they're trying to twist the President's arm. Cornyn, for instance is blocking a Senate confirmation vote on Michael Huerta, Obama's nominee for the No. 2 FAA job, until he gets his way.

Of course there are legitimate uses for drones, but there are legitimate dangers, not all of which concern collisions and the urge to deploy more eyes in the sky; the insistence that we can and must trust the government with another spy tool seems to make liars out of the people making careers out of telling us we can't trust anyone but them.

Bigger, more intrusive government

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone."

-Justice Louis Brandeis-

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

"offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,"

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

"A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

"That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too."

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

The walls still have ears

“It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people” said Barak Obama yesterday.

Obviously he is less of a polemicist than I am. I would have hoped for his utter objection and opposition to the FISA bill that passed the House of Representatives yesterday, but in his calm fashion, he seems to be far less dogmatic and more practical and dare I say more conservative than I am by saying in essence that this is an improvement because it restores oversight and so he will support it with the pledge that further improvements are to be expected.

A good compromise fully satisfies no one and perhaps, although I loathe the actions of the Bush administration and it's swashbuckling lawlessness, it may be necessary to allow domestic surveillance but subject to legal guidelines: perhaps it may be a good compromise.

Perhaps what Obama shows here is leadership. It takes a stronger man to recognize the objections of people he does not agree with and to accept what practically can be acieived at any given moment rather than to play up to hard core supporters by chest pounding and foot stomping obstinacy that divides and does not achieve much. Sometimes a grudging admiration leads to more respect than unrestrained approbation.

To be a conservative

I don't want to speculate about how many of our publicly educated young people know who John Wilkes Booth was, but I'll bet that far fewer recognize the Englishman, John Wilkes and know about the part he played, by proxy, in shaping the fourth amendment to our Constitution. Because Wilkes ran afoul of the Crown by openly criticizing a treaty signed by George III, a general warrant for his arrest led to his apprehension along with the publishers of the paper that printed his argument. Wilkes had popular support in England and in the colonies and the notion that the King could authorize upon his own authority and without challenge from Parliament or the independent judiciary, a general search or fishing expedition to seek anything they could use to squelch protest, made him a bit of a hero and martyr.

We are no longer a group of colonies. We are no longer the nation that grew out of those colonies and we have another George who insists on the right to unrestricted, unsupervised and secret investigations without court oversight or any scrutiny at all. We are no longer a nation that objects. We are no longer a nation that values individual liberty to the point where we can accept the slight risk of crime rather than the security of a police state.

We've had so many examples of warrantless wiretapping and other acts of indignity without probable cause that anyone who doesn't know, isn't someone who cares, but documents appearing in the Washington Post show how the FBI can and has been indulging in espionage of "suspects" without having to explain who they are or why they are or what they are suspected of by what evidence to any court. Only the Federal government knows for sure; a Federal government that loves secrets and fights to keep them.

That they can use whatever they find for whatever purpose they wish seems to be evident in the case of Eliot Spitzer and the use of his ATM records to show that he cheated on his wife. I'm sure nobody believes that information was obtained for such purposes and we're just too delighted by the circus to care. If we don't send to know for whom the wires are tapped, the e-mails read, the bank records examined, the mail box inspected, the credit card receipts tallied, it none the less tolls for us.

If we're good subjects, the King will be good to us and protect us. He may or may not tell us what he's protecting us from or how or why, but we can trust George or pay the cost of being adjudged, like John Wilkes, a Liberal, a traitor, an enemy of the state.

Which side are you on, Mr. conservative?

Gonzo in the sky with diamonds

Look! Up in the sky - it's a bird - it's a plane - it's Alberto Gonzales! That's right, it's not enough to tap your phones and faxes and to read your e-mail and make lists of what you take out of the library or record video of you as you walk down the street; the Bush Administration wants to use super sophisticated, classified spy satellite technology to monitor what you're doing on your own property in your own home. Warrant? Probable cause? Don't make me laugh.

And meanwhile, back at the Surge. . . you know the surge Big Brother's media says is working so well because there was a momentary slowdown in suicide bombings? As many as 250 were killed today when 5 trucks blew up in a Kurdish area of Northern Iraq. Out of one side of his mouth, Major General Mixon tells us it's a typical al Qaeda trick to get us to turn against the war (has he noticed that we already have?) and out of the other side he calls it ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. Which is it? Do the Qaeda boys really give a damn about kurds as much as the Shiah or Sunni militias? Do insurgents and non-insurgents having nothing to do with Osama want us the hell out of the middle east? Does the continued slaughter of innocents mean we're winning or losing? Not hard questions to answer, General and none of the answers seem to lead to any of your twisted conclusions.

And now the death toll is at least 500

And CNN is still telling us it's ethnic cleansing but still has the fingerprints of al Qaeda. What it is is a continuing civil war with the fingerprints of George W. Bush. How's your surge progressing today George?

But wait, there's more.

And Bush wants it. He still doesn't think he has enough power to do what he will about looking and listening and snooping and spying on anyone, anywhere, anytime. He wants more. He wants those who broke the law before he emasculated the Constitution protected from prosecution and of course as of July 23rd he's made new laws all by himself allowing him to seize the assets of anyone getting in the way - not that he will let anyone see the details. On May 9th he gave himself dictatorial powers and he wants more.

And the witch hunt begins. Since nothing he did in violation of the 4th amendment can now be considered illegal, it seems the administration now feels able to punish whoever exposed his massive and still mostly secret intelligence gathering, spying and data mining directed against US citizens without court approval. According to the August 13th edition of Newsweek, a secret warrant has been used to seize the computers and files of Thomas M. Tamm, who previously worked in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets.

Stalin would applaud and now Bush has nearly Stalinesque powers to punish someone who tried to expose the criminal administration in its criminal activities. Such things are not unprecedented, but they are unprecedented in America - and Bush wants more. The man who said he didn't trust government but trusted the people now wants more secrecy, more power and more ability to punish those untrustworthy advocates of a government constrained by law and responsible to the elected representatives of the American people and to an independent judiciary.

It's hard to believe that a lame-duck president would press for such power and such protection from any checks and balances the law provides if he did not intent to stay in power beyond the November 2008 elections. I'm no longer embarrassed to say that I think he doesn't intend to leave and that I think his ambitions are dictatorial. I would however, be embarrassed to say that I'm a citizen of a country that allowed this to happen; a country that snickered about Liberals, obsessed about celebrities, numbed their brains with pop culture, sucked up lies and propaganda like Flavor-Aid in the hot Guyana jungle and allowed it to happen.

Die Gedanken sind frei

There's an old German song I learned long ago in school. Written in the 16th century, it became popular again as the Nazis began to take over during the 1930's. It's called Die Gedanken sind frei: Thoughts are free. For most of history, one's inner thoughts were the only kind of freedom most people had.

Freedom of thought has always been a precious commodity and back when the United States meant something; back when people used to call it a free country, there weren't any government databases listing what each of us thought about politics and religion; about our sexual thoughts or about the things we have bought.

That was then. That was before the Commander Guy. Our department of Homeland Security is building a database of all airline passengers entering the United States whether they are American Citizens or not and it will include Race, Sexual orientation, political opinions, religious beliefs, credit card records and of course fingerprints.

"We're going to be able to connect the dots more quickly," says DHS's Russell Knocke adding that"it's a powerful tool that really can help to save lives." It can ruin them too. The information will be kept for 15 years although presumably if you fly within that time, it will be kept another 15.

Isn't it time we connected the dots? Bush is doing the same thing they did in Germany to terrify us into submission and to keep such good records that any enemies of the state can be identified and dealt with. Our stubborn belief that "we're the greatest country in the world" may be the deciding factor in our becoming another fascist police state with imperial ambitions and if we don't start looking at where the dotted line is pointing we surely will lose most of our freedom.

The Constitution - best if sold by Bush - no preservatives

I've had it with these people. I'm packing, I'm pissed and I'm going to pistol whip the next nattering nitwit who says "Liberal Media" within my range of hearing - and that's only if I'm in a good mood.

The Associate Press issued this gem yesterday, just in time to spoil my breakfast. Appearing in the "Notoriously Liberal" Palm Beach Post and many other print and broadcast media, the headline reads "Bush Pushes Bill to adapt Surveillance Law to Tech Age." Apparently "Tech Age" means an age without protection from being spied upon at the unfettered whim of the President.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which at present provides the legal basis for Bush's enormous wiretapping program, says the article ". . .allows information about terrorists' communications to be collected without violating civil liberties." "This law is badly out of date."

Democrats, says the AP in passing, want to insure that any changes do not give the executive branch unfettered surveillance powers. Democrats; they mention Democrats as though two thirds of the nation didn't think Bush was stomping all over law and order and liberty with those shiny new two thousand dollar Lucchesi boots. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to marginalize the majority, to pretend the rarely equaled public distaste for a president gone wild is some insignificant product of a fringe minority's bias. It takes a Republican dominated, war mongering, freedom hating press.

Larded with the administration's rationalizations about why Bush needs unrestricted and extra-constitutional powers, along with repeated digs at the Democrats for being behind this unpatriotic obfuscation, the article concludes with a quote from John Boehner saying

"Rather than learning the lessons of September 11 - that we need to break down the bureaucratic impediments to intelligence collection and analysis - Democrats have stonewalled Republican attempts to modernize FISA and close the terrorist loophole."

Apparently that loophole consists of the already slim protection you have against the random curiosity of the Government; against the abuse by a government who really has no reason to believe you're a "terrorist" but just wants to know and doesn't want to be bothered explaining to anyone as annoyingly unpatriotic as the courts why it's reading your e-mail.