Year: 2013

Barton Gellman reports that the NSA breaks its privacy rules thousands of times annually. The headline had me aghast – but the actual details? Not so much. The privacy rules seem to have been violated because of technical, not human, reasons. Mistaking the phone code “20” for “202” (Egypt vs DC) is not a sign of anyone’s deliberate abuse of the law. But it does emphatically reveal the risks and potential abuse involved in this massive collection of data. And it does show that this behemoth has slipped past any meaningful oversight. The lesson Marc Tracy draws from this latest, damning detail of the NSA program’s inherent threat to privacy:

There is a valuable, vital debate to be had over how much the federal government, in its intelligence programs, ought to be permitted to violate Americans’ privacy in an effort to protect Americans from a dangerous world that includes people who want to kill Americans. There are many different places where the important red lines can be drawn in this debate. It is a debate strewn with well-intentioned, conscientious people who would draw those lines at very different places. Let’s even be generous and stipulate that the question of whether the statutorily provided oversight of these programs belongs, as well, to that debate.

The terrifying thing is that we are not having that debate.

As these documents are the latest things to demonstrate, the various overseers as well as the public do not have access to the information that even the current rules assert they should have. That is how I can state with certainty that we are not having that vital debate: We do not have the means to have that debate with any kind of authority; therefore, no matter how much we discuss these issues, we are not having that debate.

Ezra Klein adds:

In a companion story today, the chief judge of the U.S. surveillance courts made clear how much he doesn’t know, telling the Washington Post that “The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court. The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

This is the reality of the NSA spying programs: Aside from Snowden’s leaks, we only know what the government is telling us. Of course, that’s always the case with intelligence operations. What’s scarier is that the oversight bodies only know what the government is telling them, too.

Friedersdorf calls for a new Church Committee:

Note that the 2,776 incidents of illegal surveillance don’t mean that just 2,766 people had their rights violated — rather, in just a single one of those 2,776 incidents, 3,000 people had their rights violated. As the story notes, “There is no reliable way to calculate from the number of recorded compliance issues how many Americans have had their communications improperly collected, stored or distributed by the NSA.” And that is another reason that an intrusive Congressional investigation into these practices is urgently needed.

In an excerpt from his new book The End of Victory Culture, Tom Engelhardt delves into the history of G.I. Joe:

Joe was the brainstorm of a toy developer named Stanley Weston, who was convinced that boys secretly played with Barbie and deserved their own doll. Having loved toy soldiers as a child, he chose a military theme as the most acceptable for a boy’s doll and took his idea to Hassenfeld Brothers (later renamed Hasbro), a toy company then best known for producing Mr. Potato Head. … Merrill Hassenfeld, one of the two brothers running the company, called on an old friend, Major General Leonard Holland, head of the Rhode Island National Guard, who offered access to weaponry, uniforms, and gear in order to design a thoroughly accurate military figure. Joe was also given a special “grip,” an opposable thumb and forefinger, all the better to grasp those realistic machine guns and bazookas, and he was built with 21 movable parts so that boys could finally put war into motion.

Hassenfeld Brothers confounded the givens of the toy business by selling $16.9 million worth of Joes and equipment in Joe’s first year on the market, and after that things only got better. In this way was a warrior Adam created from Eve’s plastic rib, a tough guy with his own outfits and accessories, whom you could dress, undress, and take to bed – or tent down with, anyway.

But none of this could be said. It was taboo at Hasbro to call Joe a doll. Instead, the company dubbed him a “poseable action figure for boys,” and the name “action figure” stuck to every war-fighting toy to follow. So Barbie and Joe, hard breasts and soft bullets, the exaggerated bombshell and the touchy-feely scar-faced warrior, came to represent the shaky gender stories of America at decade’s end, where a secret history of events was slowly sinking to the level of childhood.

Meg Sense captions the above photo:

GI Joe Fuzzy head Land Adventurer w/ Kung Fu Grip.

My ex-step-father used to have this doll (yeah yeah action figure), the original version w/ talking. My brother and I really loved that thing. I found out they re-produced it in 2006 and have been trying to find one for the last year or so, that doesn’t cost me a ton. It’s a repro after all.

In the wake of several high-profile suicides, mostly notably Aaron Swartz, the hacker community has become much more attuned to depression within its ranks. But are they any more vulnerable than the average American?

The typical hacker lifestyle doesn’t exactly sound like a breeding ground for good mental health. Erratic sleep patterns and prolonged isolation in front of a computer monitor are common. Prosecution by law enforcement is a constant threat, if not a reality. (Swartz spent the two years before his death under prosecution for downloading more than a million journal articles en masse from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His family believes that the threat of imprisonment contributed to his death.) It’s tempting to infer that the hacker world attracts introverted outcasts, subjects them to pressure from law enforcement or the soul-sucking technology industry, and finally sequesters them behind a screen until they give up hope.

That scenario is pretty far from the truth, however, based on the few studies that have been done on the elusive cohort. …

“I kept looking for everything that would support these myths,” [Bernadette Schell, vice-provost at Laurentian University, who studied hackers for more than a decade] said. “What I found was that the hacker community was a very well-adjusted group of individuals.”

At the time, the perception was that hackers were computer addicted, high-strung type A personalities. But the hackers in Schell’s study turned out to be emotionally balanced, “self-healing” type B personalities. They were a bit more introverted than the average population, but still socially connected. Most were employed and made more than the median income level. Incidence of depression was not higher than in the general population. (In fact, some studies have shown that engineers, a group that has a lot of overlap with hackers, have one of the lowest depression rates compared to other occupations.) The hackers were so resilient that even being sent to jail or charged for hacking crimes did not affect their reported stress levels long term.

Sarah Carr worries that the college-for-all movement, while egalitarian in theory, is “often quite paternalistic” in practice:

In their efforts to set poor children of color on the path to college, the idealistic young educators attempt to inculcate middle-class aspirations in their students through a form of body and mind control: instructing them in everything from how to take notes to how to sit, talk, walk, and move; embracing the goals of “re-acculturating” and “re-calibrating” them; and calling them “scholars,” in honor of the new pursuit. One veteran principal refers to it as “lockstepping.” In a not atypical scene inside a New Orleans charter school, a kindergarten teacher told her young charges, “We have a lot to do this year—a lot if we want to go to the first grade. The first graders already have read this book and moved on to other books. I know all of you want to go to first grade because all of you want to go to college. But you need to show discipline over your bodies to do that.”

Many parents (and even some “scholars”) welcome this structure and the intense focus on college. But some would like to see the new charters incorporate more trade and technical training in addition to their heavy college-prep emphasis. And others see a disconnect between the reformers’ goals and their methods. New Orleans grandfather Ronald McCoy shook his head during a 2010 interview with NPR when he thought about some college-prep charter schools that force their students to walk a straight line—marked out with tape—in the hallway between classes. “This walking the line?” he said. “I have been incarcerated, and that’s where I learned about walking behind those lines and staying on the right-hand side of the wall.” Applying the college-for-all ethos in a top-down fashion in low-income communities of color creates the risk of being more imperialistic than egalitarian.

John McWhorter wants to free “black America from the myth that the only way to have a decent existence and raise a family is to get a B.A.”:

The op-ed pages tell us this week after week. But did your cable technician, ultrasound technician, mechanic, building inspector or bail bondsman go to college? And do you get the feeling those jobs are in any danger of disappearing anytime soon? Community colleges and vocational schools are Black Power too.

Jen Doll learns how dictionaries cull obsolete words from their pages:

Frequent targets for deletion include abbreviations, biographical entries, and geographical names, as well as scientific and medical terms, which are regularly rendered obsolete by new phraseologies. Goodbye, Vitamin K. Hello, riboflavin. “The kinds of entries we’ve removed include ’70s slang—like Panama Red, a type of marijuana—and obsolescent technology terms like cassette memory,” says Steve Kleinedler, the executive editor of The American Heritage Dictionary. Complicating matters, usage can be fickle. In the late 1990s, lexicographers considered chad a serious candidate for deletion—but then came the 2000 presidential election. Which words now hang, chad-like, in the balance? Eath (“easy”) has not been widely used since the 19th century, says Stamper. Poor old landlubberliness (“the state of being like a landlubber”) doesn’t get much love, either.

While defending non-literal uses of the word “literally,” Dick Wisdom looks at how language evolves:

Words change their meanings all the time. Even Buzzfeed readers know that. Angels used to be messengers, awful used to mean “inspiring wonder,” brave used to mean “showy or gaudy,” and so on. Literally ad infinitum. And have you read Shakespeare? That idiot thought calling somebody a “ho” was a way to greet them. Even God can’t get it right: many words in the Bible could be confusing to the contemporary reader.

Pick a word. Any word. Now look up its etymological history. Chances are, it used to mean something quite different. Language changes, at times quite fast.

Alex Seitz-Wald discovers that upper-class Americans are prone to not vaccinating their children:

Public health officials see large clusters of unvaccinated children in latte-drinking enclaves everywhere, like Ashland, Ore., and Boulder, Colo., where close to 30 percent of children are exempted from one vaccine or another. In some schools in Ashland two-thirds of the students have exemptions, according to Mark Largent, a James Madison College professor who wrote a book about the vaccine debate last year.

And new data out this month from the Centers for Disease Control shows what Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, calls a disturbing uptick in the number of children forgoing vaccinations. “For the first time ever, there are a handful of states which now have people who are choosing not to get vaccines at the greater than 5 percent level, which is a problem. That’s where you’re going to start to see some of these diseases coming back. And you’re already seeing it with whooping cough and other diseases,” he told Salon. Indeed, the anti-vaccination movement was blamed for helping cause the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years.

Marcotte wonders why the rich are becoming more anti-vaccine:

Seitz-Wald interviews some experts like Nina Shapiro, a professor at UCLA, who notes that anti-vaxx sentiment is “a little bit of a trend.” She describes it as “I’m going to be pure and I want to keep my child pure.” But that doesn’t quite get at why there’s such class differences here, since presumably people of all stripes object to the notion of poisoning their children and therefore are vulnerable to propaganda that paints vaccinations as poisonous. I’d posit that refusing vaccination has become something of a status symbol, a way to distinguish your special snowflake from the herd. It’s in line with other trends of varied inherent value, such as putting your kid in a private school, not allowing him to ever eat trashy “kid” food like hot dogs or macaroni and cheese, or forbidding her from engaging with pop culture.