2013 – Page 130

A Wikileaks For The Mob

It’s called MafiaLeaks, naturally:

Despite the inevitable comparisons to WikiLeaks, the framework of the site is based on the open source project GlobaLeaks, and bears similarity to the New Yorker’s Strongbox project, as well as the late Aaron Swartz’s SecureDrop. All three emphasize the anonymity of the whistleblower: not even the recipients of the information know their identity, nor can they ever find it out. Once submitted to MafiaLeaks, the data remains on their server for 20 days, encrypted with a key which is only visible to the whistleblower and their chosen confidant. … The time, more than two weeks and less than a month, was chosen because repeat visits to an internet café could become suspicious.

Meghan Neal asks:

What if a hacker manages to exploit some security hole and trace your message back to your real identity? You’re probably getting murdered. This risk isn’t lost on the project’s founders – who obviously wish remain anonymous themselves. They write on the website’s FAQ: “We are not asking you to trust MafiaLeaks. Indeed, please do not trust MafiaLeaks! Send your information anonymously, do not leave your name, do not leave anything in the data that can be traced back to your person.”

Joe Kloc sizes up the site:

In many ways, [MafiaLeaks] presents a less controversial application of the WikiLeaks model than revealing state secrets.

Using the anonymity provided by encryption may prove an effective way to combat crime while protecting the identities of those fearing reprisal. However, the comparison between WikiLeaks and MafiaLeaks isn’t perfect. In the former’s case, there is relatively little incentive for governments to leak falsely incriminating evidence. With MafiaLeaks, there’s a considerably higher risk that the platform’s anonymity will allow it to be manipulated and exploited by organized crime family members. Further, WikiLeaks accepts primary government documents that can be verified. It isn’t entirely clear how the leaked information on MafiaLeaks will be authenticated, or whether it will be admissible in court

But documents aren’t everything:

Lirio Abbate, an Italian journalist who has reported on Mafia for years, warns that it will be hard to obtain documents since Mafia organizations don’t issue meeting minutes or receipts for murder hits. But the site could find success if it can gather video or audio evidence. “That would be devastating, that would create an enormous anti-Mafia revolution,” Abbate told Mashable.

The Best Of The Dish This Long Weekend

These videos of returning vets and their dogs never get old:

Never.

After Orwell, Camus is, for me, the most baldly honest writer of the last mid-century. We took a moment to celebrate his 100th birthday yesterday. We also published two ravishingly honest poems by Vijay Seshadri, insisted that spirituality is about what’s real, like the best writing, and that science must always end in mystery. One theme unites Flannery O’Connor with the vibrant, fearless women of early Christianity: a giving over to God.

Two dances: one military and hilarious, one fluid, joyful, and alone.

One “formidably difficult negotiation” in the words of William Hague; and one short essay on Israel and Iran.

The most popular post of the weekend was my story of how I found and bonded with my new puppy: Falling In Love Again. Second was The Reality Of Serious Weight Loss, with a follow-up today.

See you in the morning.

Face Of The Day

A dog snuggles up to a woman with a prosthetic leg while waiting to march in the Veteran’s Day Parade in New York City on November 11, 2013. The parade included members of all four branches of the military, as well as members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), New York Police Department (NYPD) and veterans from all major conflicts that the United States has been involved with since World War II. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

Sanctioning Our Way To War

Beinart likes “hearing Iran hawks argue for war because I know they’re being honest.” When they argue for more and more crippling sanctions, despite concessions from Iran, not so much:

Hawks argue that because sanctions are hurting Iran’s economy, and Iran has showed increased flexibility under newly elected President Hassan Rouhani, even more sanctions will make Tehran capitulate completely. Since “international sanctions have forced Iran to the negotiating table,” argued House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce recently, “we should build upon this success with additional measures to compel Iran to make meaningful and lasting concessions.”

But it’s hard to reconcile that view with any of the information coming out of Iran. While the pain of sanctions may be prompting Iranian leaders to make concessions they would not have previously made, there’s little evidence that the sanctions threaten what Iran’s leaders cherish most: their hold on power. To the contrary, prominent Green Revolution figures have argued that sanctions strengthen the regime at home. Were Royce’s logic correct, Rouhani would be feeling the heat from Iranian doves outraged that he is not capitulating more fully to Western demands. Instead he’s under attack from hawks outraged that he’s conceding too much and getting little in return.

It’s hard to believe that hawks such as Netanyahu and [House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed] Royce really believe that ratcheting up sanctions in pursuit of a zero enrichment demand that most foreign governments, and most Iranians, oppose, will bring a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff. Then again, given what they’ve written in the past it’s hard to believe that many hawks really want a diplomatic solution at all.

They don’t, it seems to me. Such a solution would require imagination and a strategic sense of the long view. Netanyahu has powerfully demonstrated that he – along with his extremist allies in the US Congress – has neither. They remain wedded to a past that cannot hold and a future which cannot happen, unless it means catastrophic religious warfare.

My longer take on Israel and Iran is here.

Chart Of The Day

Fewer and fewer politicians serve in the military before taking office:

Erik Voeten flags the work of Peter Feaver and Chris Gelpi to explain why this is important:

Feaver and Gelpi establish the following regularities (see especially this book and this chapter-length update):

— On issues that concern the use of force and the acceptance of casualties, the opinions of veterans track more closely with those of active military officers than with civilians.

— The U.S. initiates fewer military disputes when there are more veterans in the U.S. political elite (the cabinet and the Congress).

— The U.S. uses more force in the disputes it initiates when there are more veterans in the U.S. political elite.

— Veterans are less likely to accept U.S. casualties for interventionist uses of force than for “realpolitik” uses of force.

Spending Singles

In China, 11/11 is “Singles’ Day,” the four 1s “symbolizing ‘bare branches,’ Chinese slang for bachelors.” Although “the true meaning of this holiday [is] hating singlehood,” it’s also a boon for business:

Thought to have originated about 20 years ago as a joke on college campuses, Singles’ Day was once an occasion for confessing one’s feelings to that special someone. But since 2010, online retailers have transformed the holiday, also known as “Double 11,” into an epic online shopping extravaganza akin to America’s Cyber Monday.

China has 271 million online consumers, meaning that almost half of China’s 591 million Internet users buy products online. E-commerce sites Taobao and Tmall, which saw a combined $1 trillion in sales in 2012, will both be running promotional campaigns during China’s Singles’ Day. Among the offers: 50 percent discounts on products like boyfriend body pillows and hoodies that read “I am single because I am fat.” Amazon.cn declared that the site would sell “20,000 products discounted by as much as 90 percent.” That includes a wedding ring, which singles can presumably buy, just in case. Jack Ma, founder of Internet giant Alibaba, told Chinese Premier Li Keqiang late last month that Alibaba’s sales on Singles’ Day 2012 were “nearly $3.3 billion” — more than double the roughly $1.5 billion purchased on Cyber Monday in 2012. For Singles’ Day 2013, Ma expects sales to exceed $4.9 billion.

Update from a reader:

Just thought I’d let you know that this was a really interesting post you put up about China, but the stat you quote that “E-commerce sites Taobao and Tmall, which saw a combined $1 trillion in sales in 2012…” is not actually correct. If you go to the source, it’s a combined 1 trillion Yuan, which would be $160 billion.

Capturing America’s Conflicts

In honor of Veterans Day, the Washington Post has created Portraits of War, a portfolio of some of the greatest war photography of the last 150 years. Among the ten featured photographers is Mathew Brady:

Brady remains the single most famous photographer of the Civil War. His name came to overshadow those of other photographers, causing some mistakenly to believe that Brady had almost single-handedly created the immense photographic archive. Brady deserves credit for envisioning the possibility of using photography systematically to document the war. He would send teams of photographers – and occasionally go himself – to create images of battlefields and important leaders. His public display of “The Dead of Antietam” was the first time the American public viewed images of dead soldiers on the battlefield.

Brady’s efforts to document the Civil War pushed him into a series of bankruptcies. In the years after the war, he campaigned to get Congress to buy his collection of negatives and prints. In 1875, Congress finally bought the rights to his work for $25,000.

See the full tribute here.

(Photo of Union soldier by gun at US Arsenal, Washington DC, 1862, by Mathew Brady via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s So Scary About Relaxing Sanctions?

Dennis Ross claims that “Israelis and others in the Middle East … fear that the limited relaxation of sanctions will quickly erode the sanctions regime”:

Notwithstanding our claims that the sanctions architecture will remain in place, there is a widespread belief in the Israeli security establishment that many governments and their private sectors will see an opening and will be convinced that they can and will be able to start doing business again. As they start approaching the Iranians, the Iranians will see that the sanctions are going to fray and they simply need to hang tough and concede no more. From the Israeli standpoint, the first step will thus be the last one and the Iranian program even if capped, will be at such a high threshold that Iran will have a break-out capability. They see no reason to give up our leverage now and let the Iranians off the hook.

Mental Health Break

Go white pants, go white pants, go white pants …

Blockbusted, Ctd

A reader reflects:

I worked at a Blockbuster for about three years, starting in high school and continuing when I was in college. As a budding filmmaker and rabid cinephile, it was pretty much the perfect job for me. Sure, the pay sucked, but the bottom line was I was being paid to indulge in my number one passion.

Blockbuster had an inventory management system whereby if a particular video had not been checked out within the past year, it would get flagged by the system for resale. We’d actually take the video off the shelf, price it, and put it in the used video sale bin. As a movielover, this greatly upset me. So I made it my mission to look up movies that I cared about and check them out under my employee account if they were in danger of being weeded. David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders owe me big time. (Here’s a post I wrote about one of my encounters as a Blockbuster employee.)

Another was there at the beginning:

The recent announcement of the closure of Blockbuster brought back some fond memories for me. I worked at the original Blockbuster in Dallas – the Medallion Store, as we called it (it was located in a strip mall that was then known as the Medallion Center).

I’m sure Jason Bailey’s descriptions of know-nothing employees is accurate, but not in the beginning, certainly not at Medallion. We knew our stuff. I suppose the difference between my 1985 Blockbuster experience and Jason Bailey’s was that, in 1985, we still were a mom-and-pop enterprise. I think by the time I left the store for the real world, there were still only seven stores. And we had employees who loved movies.

We had SMU film majors like Todd, who would occasionally answer the phone in character (Jack Nicholson: “Blockbuster Video, what the hell do you want?”). We had working local actors and actresses like Laurel, keeping a day job in a field she loved that had hours flexible enough for her to ply her craft on the weekends. We had writers like Betsy who was a staple in Dallas-area TV and radio. And we knew our movies; we knew the shit out of them. I had customers who would come directly to me for all of their movie recommendations; I remember pointing a man to a little-known new movie by a couple of then-unknown brothers and winning his loyalty for life (Blood Simple). I remember impressing a girl so much with my foreign film knowledge by pointing her to the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix that we ended up watching Betty Blue together on the couch in her one-bedroom apartment and doing it on that same couch before Betty had even poked her eye out. And we even got the occasional celebrity: I met Chris Evert, NBC sportscaster Bill Macatee (dating Evert at the time, allegedly), and the writer Calvin Trillin (whom I surprised simply by knowing who he was).

Blockbuster had obviously grown too big for its own good; it couldn’t keep pace with modern technology and its passing was inevitable. But I for one will mourn that passing.

Another reader:

I clerked at Blockbuster off and on for four years. It was a part-time college job, and every time I’d leave and come back they’d have a new store manager and would want me to go through training again because they’d changed some insignificant procedural detail of the job like a new step in the nine-step checkout process. Yes, they wanted you to go through all nine steps of a carefully scripted upselling routine, and even though most of us didn’t follow it, every clerk had little printouts of the process taped to our computer monitors.

I tended to only observe steps 1, 8, and 9 because I’m a big fan of not slowing down the line, although we’d often add in the all-important “negotiation over and removal of late fees” steps. Those weren’t in the official process for some reason, but the district manager once told us “it’s not worth losing a customer over a late fee under $10.” I didn’t ask for any clarity beyond that, as it seemed like cart blanche permission to remove all my friends’ fines, and if they racked up larger ones I could just take them off in installments.

The point of sale system that I used in my last year there (2004) was DOS-based and probably hadn’t changed since the early-’90s. It had severe limitations on memory, meaning that transaction-level data would drop off after six months. The system would retain records of old late fees, but we wouldn’t have a way of referencing the original transactions. This meant that one easy way to avoid paying a fee was to just wait a few months and then ask a clerk what movie the fee was for.

Unlike most libraries, the systems were not networked, so I had no way of checking inventory at other stores without calling them. This often played out on busy Friday night shifts with a long line and a popular new release that everyone wanted and no one had in stock. And naturally we’d often get tied up with an insistent customer who wanted us to call every Blockbuster within a 30-minute drive.

Blockbuster settled a class-action lawsuit over late fees in 2001, and for several months we were printing out information about it onto everyone’s receipt. The receipts stretched beyond 3-feet (yes, we measured), and there was a phone number that people could call to get a couple of coupons for free rentals and $1 off candy. Another consequence was that clerks were no longer allowed to refer to these controversial charges as “late fees.” They were now “extended viewing fees,” but the policy didn’t change.

The perks of the job included the free rentals and the exposure to the eclectic mix of customers in the Delmar Loop neighborhood of St. Louis. The Loop is a stretch of bars and restaurants near a university, so you could count on a steady stream of the inebriated from mid-evening to midnight on most nights. I’m also a firm believer working at least one retail or restaurant gig during a holiday season builds character. We found ways to have fun with it all. For my part, I always made sure that Die Hard made its way to the special display of holiday movie rentals.

In hindsight, the only things working against Blockbuster were the ridiculous pricing model, widespread hatred from the customer base over late fee policies, auto-charging of credit cards for said fees, traditional competition from Hollywood Video and indy stores (which could carry porn), new competition from Netflix, Redbox, BitTorrent, YouTube, Amazon, premium cable channels, OnDemand, Dish, and Hulu, and massive cultural shifts in media consumption patterns caused by widespread adoption of the internet and the move away from removable media formats in general. But other than those things, Blockbuster’s business model was completely sound.