US Official Admits That Following Terrorist Attacks, It Starts Arresting People Based On Ideology To 'Get Them Off The Streets'

from the police-state dept

CNN has one of those useless filler stories concerning the Paris attacks where it notes that the FBI will be ramping up wiretapping of suspected ISIS "sympathizers" in the wake of the attacks. That's sort of a dog bites man story if you think about it. What else are they going to do? However, as Adam Johnson notes, the article has a bizarre statement by an "anonymous" law enforcement official at the end. The story mostly talks about how the FBI similarly ramped up its wiretapping following the shootings in Garland, Texas, and then admits that law enforcement will then use that information to arrest people based on non-terrorism charges just to "get them off the street."

The Garland attack ushered in several months of stepped-up use of 24/7 monitoring on suspected ISIS supporters. FBI Director James Comey has described the period between May and July as one that stretched the FBI's resources, and that isn't sustainable. Dozens of arrests were made, in many cases not for terrorism-related charges if the FBI couldn't gather enough evidence of a plot.

"In some cases we just needed to get people off the streets," one senior law enforcement official said.

In other words, the wiretapping becomes a pretense to find anything to lock up people based on their ideological views, even if they're doing nothing related to terrorism. That seems like the very definition of a police state.

Filed Under: arrests, doj, fbi, ideology, isis, paris attacks, wiretapping

Rooting For The Laundry: The Absolute Insanity Of Decisions About The NSA Being Made Based On 'Liberal' Or 'Conservative' Ideology

from the up-is-down,-left-is-right dept

Geoffrey Stone, one of the members of the White House task force which suggested that the President needed to end the Section 215 bulk collection of phone records, has said that he was told that the White House rejected that plan because they viewed the report as "liberal."

“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.

God forbid a supposedly "liberal" President actually do something he considers "liberal." And, indeed, it seemed that his non-proposal in which he pretends to reform NSA surveillance was predicated on not pissing off the hawkish conservatives who tend to support the surveillance state.

So... what happens now that the supposedly conservative, hawkish, surveillance state-loving Republican Party has agreed that the program is unconstitutional and should be shut down?

To some extent, it really does seem to go back to the corruption of power. Those in power always seem to trust themselves not to abuse that power -- and unthinking automaton partisan hacks seem to flip their position based on whether their guy or the other guy is power.

There's been an insanely stupid debate over the past few weeks as to whether or not folks like Ed Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange were somehow "ideologically pure" enough to be supported by liberals -- which highlights the monumentally asinine level of political discourse in the country these days, further highlighted by President Obama rejecting the task force's opinions as being "too liberal."

As can be seen by the flip-flopping of "liberals" and "conservatives" over the surveillance state, the entire concept of those labels is really no different than if you're rooting for the orange team or the yellow team. It's like the old joke about how if you root for a sports team, you're really rooting for the laundry. People focused on whether something is "liberal enough" or "conservative enough" are wasting everyone's time. These issues are not about being "liberal" or "conservative." They're about doing what's right. It's not about partisan politics or which team you play for or root for. It should be about what is best for the country and the wider world in which we live.

It's incredibly disheartening that we seem to live in a world where that aspect is barely considered but what color your team is matters the most.

Filed Under: conservatives, democrats, ideology, liberals, nsa, politics, republicans, surveillance

A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

from the drop-the-crap dept

A few weeks ago, we posted a bit about Dalton Caldwell's argument that a fee-based Twitter made more sense for users, because the company wouldn't put advertisers first. Caldwell, of course, has now put his development skills where his mouth was and recently launched App.net, which kicked off with a Kickstarter-style funding campaign in which it sought $500,000, mainly from users who would pay $50/year for the service. Developers could pay $100 and there was a "pro" tier for $1,000. Over the weekend, the fundraising effort hit the target mark and it has since shot well past the amount.

First of all, I think it's great that we're seeing alternatives and someone like Caldwell trying to do something different. More competition is something I always think is a good thing, and I'm happy to see more players in the market trying different ways to do something. If anything, hopefully it will drive Twitter to stay more focused on providing a great service.

But I do have a complaint: Caldwell and others seem to be acting as if this fee-based effort is somehow more ideologically "pure" than a free-based system that makes money on ads. You can see it all over the website and especially in the video announcing the launch: In that video, Caldwell insists that by setting up a "paid" service, he's aligning the economic incentives of the company with its users, and suggests that's not true with ad-based services, who focus on pleasing their advertisers first.

That's hogwash.

Two points:

1. First off, App.net's interests are not economically aligned with its users. It wants money from those users, and all things being equal, those users want to keep their money. So their goals are actually diametrically opposed. Who's to say that App.net will always cost $50 per year? What if, a year from now, it needs a lot more to keep the service going. App.net has incentives to figure out ways to raise the price to bring in more money. Now, that's fine. That's how businesses work. But to suggest that the economic interests are aligned is simply not true. Coldwell argues that the interests are aligned because it now has to make the service as good as can be so that users will want to pay. But the same thing applies to free-based services, as we explain in the next point...
2. A free-based service, supported by advertisers, has tons of incentive to keep its users just as happy as a fee-based service. Why? Because if it doesn't, people go elsewhere and the advertisers go with them. If the advertisements are too annoying and/or intrusive, people will go away and the value of that advertising drops. Any smart media property knows this, and actually works quite hard on keeping the user experience as good as possible, which quite frequently means pushing back against the desires of advertisers. Caldwell acts as if all such companies immediately give in to any ad company desire, which is either spoken from ignorance or out of a desire to misrepresent reality to benefit his own effort.

Again, none of this is to suggest that either model is "the right" model. But it's flat out ridiculous to suggest that either one is somehow economically pure or has interests more aligned with users. What amazes me, however, is so many people are repeating Caldwell's assertions as if it's absolutely true, when it's clearly not. App.net may turn out to be a success or it may be a complete flop. I hope it succeeds because I like to see new companies innovate and do new things. But if it succeeds it won't be because it's more pure or more aligned with users. It'll be because it just executes better.

So, please drop the moralizing about App.net being more pure. It's not. It's economically interested in taking its users' money. That's not that much different than a site that's economically interested in taking advertisers' money.

Filed Under: advertising, business models, dalton caldwell, fee, free, ideology
Companies: twitter