Civil Liberties Are Not Something You Trade

Civil Liberties Are Not Something You Trade: There's one trope zipping around out there at the moment in connection with the current storm over phone records that makes me a little bit crazy -- and that is the discussion of whether the American people will "trade off" civil liberties for what is rea

The NSA: Never Not Watching

The NSA: Never Not Watching: Trailrunner7 writes "For many observers of the privacy and surveillance landscape, the revelation by The Guardian that the FBI received a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to require Verizon to turn over to the National Security Agency piles of call metadata on all calls on its network probably felt like someone telling them that water is wet. There have been any number of signals in the last few years that this kind of surveillance and data collection was going on, little indications that the United States government was not just spying on its own citizens, but doing so on a scale that would dwarf anything that all but the most paranoid would imagine." And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phone snooping is creepy

Phone snooping is creepy: Douglas Rushkoff says we already give up tons of information about ourselves digitally; what the government is collecting is "big data" to predict who's likely to commit terrorism

White House defends NSA phone records collection as 'critical tool' | World news | guardian.co.uk

White House defends NSA phone records collection as 'critical tool' | World news | guardian.co.uk:

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Jim McDermott to Megyn Kelly: How can we be sure these IRS tea-party victims are telling the truth?

Jim McDermott to Megyn Kelly: How can we be sure these IRS tea-party victims are telling the truth?:

“Miss Kelly, you are putting words in my mouth. You are putting words in my mouth. Stop it.”

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A follow-up to yesterday’s victim-blaming. Kelly, who was as angry as anyone at his “you don’t need to apply for tax exemption” shpiel, brought him on today to clarify. His clarification: He said repeatedly during the hearing that some of the IRS’s questions to tea-party groups were inappropriate, which is super but doesn’t really answer [...]
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Government Org Photoshops Little Girl, Makes Her Fat to Fight Obesity

Government Org Photoshops Little Girl, Makes Her Fat to Fight Obesity:

This unsettling ad campaign for First 5, a government-run "healthy kids" program, depicts a heavily (literally) photoshopped little girl drinking from a paper bag (?) of sugar. Ugh, so many problems here.
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IRS Audited Over Inappropriate Spending, Claims It Can't Find Its Receipts

IRS Audited Over Inappropriate Spending, Claims It Can't Find Its Receipts:
Just a guess, but it probably sucks to be the IRS right now. Between reports about them snooping on people's emails and their targeting of conservative groups, it's quite easy to paint them as a big, evil bureaucracy. Actually, it was pretty easy to do so before all that. You can generally rely on the hatred of the people for a group that requires meticulous spending records and then collects taxes. Big, bad, evil. What could be worse?



Well, how about hypocritical? That sure seems like an apt word in light of reports on how flighty the IRS was with tax-payer money for their own comforts.

The conference spending included $4 million for an August 2010 gathering in Anaheim, Calif., for which the agency did not negotiate lower room rates, even though that is standard government practice, according to a statement by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Instead, some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including baseball tickets and stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night. In addition, 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about "leadership through art," the House committee said.

Infuriating, right? The bald-faced audacity of the organization that collects our taxes using some of that tax money to go to baseball games has the air of outright thievery. Fortunately, thanks to the investigation by the Treasury Department, we now have a full and accurate account of the awful IRS spending, right?



No, we damn well don't, because the IRS -- and I stress this, the IRS -- is claiming it can't find its own receipts, so the spending may well have been even worse.





Hypocrisy, thy name is now an acronym, and that acronym is IRS. This is the type of thing that keeps pitchfork and torch manufacturers in business. In fact, were it not for the undeniably smooth face and impossibly perfect coiffure of Anderson Cooper getting me through this, I might just be leading the mob.


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