Monthly Archives: April 2013

IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant

open quoteThe Internal Revenue Service doesn’t believe it needs a search warrant to read your e-mail.

Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy “generally no privacy” in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications — meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.

That places the IRS at odds with a growing sentiment among many judges and legislators who believe that Americans’ e-mail messages should be protected from warrantless search and seizure. They say e-mail should be protected by the same Fourth Amendment privacy standards that require search warrants for hard drives in someone’s home, or a physical letter in a filing cabinet. close quote (Read more)

Why Is Obama’s Growing Dept. Homeland Security Army, Buying Armored Vehicles?

open quoteIn addition to stockpiling over a billion bullets and thousands of semiautomatic weapons the feds would deny U.S. citizens, the vehicle of choice for fighting the counterinsurgency war in Iraq is appearing on U.S. streets.

The sequestration question du jour is why the Department of Homeland Security, busy releasing hundreds, if not thousands, of deportable and detained illegal aliens due to budget constraints, is buying several thousand Mine Resistant Armored Protection (MRAP) vehicles?

And just who are they intended to be used against?

This acquisition comes on top of the recent news of the stockpiling by DHS of more than 1.6 billion (with a ‘b’) bullets of various calibers, enough by one calculation to fight the equivalent of a 24-year Iraq War, and the ordering of some 7,000 5.56x45mm NATO “personal defense weapons” (PDW) — also known as “assault weapons” when owned by civilians.

Additionally, DHS is asking for 30 round magazines that “have a capacity to hold thirty (30) 5.56x45mm NATO rounds.”

The Department of Homeland Security (through the U.S. Army Forces Command) recently retrofitted 2,717 of these MRAP vehicles for service on the streets of the U.S. They were formerly used for counterinsurgency in Iraq.

These vehicles are specifically designed to resist mines and ambush attacks. They use bulletproof windows and are designed to withstand small-arms fire, including smaller-caliber rifles such as a .223 Remington. Does DHS expect a counterinsurgency here?close quote (Read more)

U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans’ finances

open quoteThe Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates.

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of “suspicious customer activity,” such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).close quote (Read more)

Swedish Feminists Are So Bored They’re Telling Men How to Sit on the Bus

open quote Sweden has a reputation as having the most equal relations between the sexes in the world—it’s a place where male politicians are voted “woman of the year” by feminists, where young dads on paternity leave take toddlers for play dates while their wives work, where a preschool can casually ban gendered pronouns. A recent World Economic Forum report claimed Sweden is the most gender equal country in the world.

Yet some Swedish women apparently think that the image of the Nordic country as a feminist’s paradise is just a veneer hiding deep-seated misogyny. Their evidence? Men slouching and taking up more than one seat on buses, trains, and subways.

To counter this “normalized expression of power” (that’s what they call slouching), a group of firebrand feminists have set up a blog called “Macho i Kollektivtrafiken” (“Macho in Public Transport”), encouraging readers to send in sneaky snaps of men in relaxed poses. The aim is to spread awareness of a “symbolic and active recreation not just of power, but of a stereotypical form of masculinity.”close quote (Read more)

Hmmm. Foreign workers expelled from Hong Kong.

open quoteIn a landmark decision Hong Kong’s highest court on Monday ruled against granting residency to two Filipino maids, dashing the hopes of several hundred thousand other domestic helpers from ever gaining permanent residency in the city.

Five judges on the Court of Final Appeal ruled unanimously that Evangeline Banao Vallejos and Daniel Domingo would not be allowed to settle permanently in Hong Kong after residing here for over seven years, a period that would ordinarily qualify foreigners to become permanent residents under the constitution.

The court ruled that maids should not be treated as “ordinarily resident” in the financial hub given contracts that tied them to finite stints of temporary employment.close quote (Read more)

workshop at Brown Univ. set to help queer minorities overcome attraction to queer whites

open quoteA group of Brown University students appear to be preparing an on-campus workshop in which “queer” participants will separate by race to work past their sexual attraction to Caucasians.

We “find ourselves falling always for the white queers… wishing we could have more agency in the process, be more intentional about who we desire and how,” reads the official Facebook description of the event.

“We are invested in generating a politics of sexuality that compels us to interrogate beauty as privilege and constructed by systems of white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and heteronormativity,” it continues.close quote (Read more) (Read more)

Twitter sued £32m for refusing to reveal anti-semites

open quoteIn January, a French court ruled that Twitter must hand over the details of people who had tweeted racist and anti-semitic remarks, and set up a system that would alert the police to any further such posts as they happen. Twitter has ignored that ruling, and now the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) is suing it for €38.5m (£32.8m) for its failure.

The case revolves around a hashtag — #unbonjuif (“a good Jew”) — which became the third-most popular on the site in October 2012. The UEJF took Twitter to court, demanding that those who had tweeted anti-semitic remarks using the hashtag be named by Twitter so the police could prosecute them for hate speech.close quote (Read more)

Ten Years on, New Estimates of the Economic Cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

open quoteLast week the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University released a new set of estimates. The numbers are summarized on the web site of the institute’s Cost of War project and detailed in a paper by Professor Neta C. Crawford. The institute’s estimate of the total cost of the two wars now comes to just under $4 trillion.

It wasn’t supposed to cost so much

The wars were not supposed to cost so much. As the administration of President George W. Bush was building a case for the Iraq war in 2002, with some 5,000 American troops already deployed in Afghanistan, the question of cost naturally came up. In September of that year, Lawrence B. Lindsey, then Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a new Iraq war would cost $100 billion, maybe $200 billion at a maximumclose quote (Read more)

At CPAC, The Future Looks Libertarian

open quoteThe libertarian domination of CPAC follows years of growing support at the annual conference starting from the final years of the George W. Bush administration, forming a schism in the Republican Party the GOP has yet to repair. And after the defeat of Mitt Romney, who won the nomination on the support of establishment conservatives, the insurgent and fiercely independent groups have claimed this CPAC as their time to shine.close quote (Read more)