There has been a lot of righteous indignation expressed in the US Congress and White House about how terrible it is when Russia interferes in the affairs of other nations and how it must be punished for its actions in Ukraine and Crimea, including the imposition of sanctions.
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It is clear that there are rumblings of great discontent around the world about how the internet is being hijacked by government spying agencies and I suggested that it may lead to some kind of organized revolt. As usual, I am behind the times because reader John Horstman informs me that there is already a project in the works known as Reset the Net that calls upon everyone to do their bit to reclaim the promise of the internet as a free and open space
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In the US there have been two inexorable trends that have long threatened to doom even the pretense of being a democracy. One is the fact that election days are cemented into the calendar, which means that politicians can plan and execute their campaigns well in advance, though a thin façade of decorum requires them to demur from having such ambitions until somewhat closer to the date. This long gestation period necessarily results in campaigns becoming more expensive. This is true for all elections but most pronounced in contests for the presidency. In the 2012 election, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent on the order of one billion dollars each, an obscene amount.
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I have been railing at the way that the US has used the war on terror to undermine basic civil liberties. In its efforts to hide its misdeeds, the war it has waged on whistleblowers and the reporters who convey their revelations has been nothing short of disgraceful.
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Laura Poitras has a new story out in Der Spiegel today about how the NSA and GCHQ targeted 122 world leaders for spying, in addition to leading German telecommunications companies and particularly their engineers, using a hitherto secret court order to do so.
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Today is the day that NSA director Keith Alexander leaves his post. I would be very happy about this except that it is very likely that his replacement will be cut from the same cloth of being a smooth liar.
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Stephen Colbert is willing to endorse Joni Ernst’s candidacy for US Senate in Iowa as long as she keeps far away from him. In this clip, he explains why. (Since Comedy Central revamped their website, embedded clips are glitchy. If the one below does not work properly, follow this link.)
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As close followers of US politics know, the US does not elect its president by direct popular vote. Instead it has an institution called the Electoral College whose members vote for the president. The electoral college consist of 538 votes apportioned among the states corresponding exactly to the total of their members of the House of Representatives (that varies with the population) and comes to 435 total plus two each for the Senate, that gives 100 more. The extra three votes consist of two for Puerto Rico and one are for Washington DC. This means that the winner has to get 270 electoral college votes.
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Jacob Appelbaum, a US computer security researcher who works with WikiLeaks and about whom I wrote back in 2012 because of the harassment he receives every single time he returns to the US after traveling abroad, gave a presentation at the 30C3 Conference held in Germany in December 2013.
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In a speech given to the SXSW meeting, Julian Assange makes the point of how information is used to accrue wealth.
Assange also described what he sees as an “unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to those people who already have a lot of power … doing that in part by stealing information from all of us. Knowledge is power, and as a result they’re getting more power.”
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