Silly Bits V

Since the Administration has had a couple of problems with spying on the US press (the Associated Press and Fox News to be specific).  It therefore seemed only fitting that the latest leak of information (ill-timed for the Administration) that the NSA is collecting data on many of the rest of us came from "The Guardian", an English paper.  Good show old boys and welcome to the party! Tea anyone?

Congratulations on not only scooping your American counterparts on yet another potential PR nightmare for the current Administration, but for creating a new level of national paranoia that we can only be hoped will be covered under the Affordable Care Act.  According to responses from the President and other Administration spokespeople, all of this has been done according to law and under the auspices of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court.  (Evidently FISA is like VISA, 'everywhere you want to be'.) 

*  According to information being touted on the Sunday talks shows, over 99.9% of FISA warrant requests have been approved by its judges.  Can you say 'rubber stamp'?

Now I'm a Verizon customer and a Google user, so I probably don't have anything left in the way of secrets where the government is concerned.  No wait, I forget that I was told that they weren't listening in on my calls or reading my emails by the same government who lied about a reporter being a 'co-conspirator' and went to three judges before they could get a warrant issued and also lied when they told me that they weren't having the IRS target conservative groups.  So naturally I believe them when they tell me that they aren't going to intrude on my privacy or keep any private data from my phone or Internet use at the same time that they're building a massive new data storage facility in Utah.

Jesse Jackson Jr may be getting four years in prison after pleading guilty to engaging in a scheme to misuse $750,000 of his campaign contributions on personal items.  Not only is the government looking for that same $750,000 in the way of restitution, but they're also looking for $168,000 in re-imbursement from his wife Sandra; who was receiving a $5,000 per month consulting fee on top of her six-figure salary as a Chicago alderman.  On the bright side, Jesse and his wife may not have to serve their prison sentences at the same time, which would keep their two children from being parent-less, even temporarily.  

With the example of 3 of the last 4 Illinois governors serving or having served time (including Rod Blagojevich,  in a case in which Rep Jackson was at least incidentally involved, though no charges were filed), Jesse Jr was apparently incapable of finding someone in this capital of malfeasance to create a workable paper trail to hide behind.  (What is Chicago coming to these  days?)  His dramatic attempt to drop off the radar and hint at a breakdown was a fair enough strategy, but it came far too late in the game and was poorly played.   

One can only imagine how disappointed that his father is.  After all, Jesse Jr was not only raised in one of the greatest schools of political corruption anywhere in the world ... Chicago, but apparently either didn't apply himself to his lessons or was simply incapable retaining successful strategies while being mentored by an expert on living with dubious expenses.  Jesse Sr has lived, after all, rather well for longer than Jr has been alive, in spite of a holding politically commendable, but financially questionable jobs which earned him a lavish lifestyle that would be the envy of many CEO's.  

Pakistan summoned US Ambassador Richard Hoagland to its Foreign Office today.  Evidently the new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wasn't happy over the fact that the US decided to pop off a couple of missiles launched off a drone into his country, killing seven people, without letting bothering to let his government know about it. But what the heck can concepts like national sovereignty mean when you're fighting a war on terror that actually hasn't existed for some time according the same Administration pulling the trigger? 

Now normally I would be concerned over the contradiction of terms involved with such an act and terrified over the long term implications of any government's use of such technology.  Fortunately, MY government has told me that while it's the same government which has come to heavily rely on the concept of remote control 'rub-outs'; it's now going to review the use of such technology.  (Though perhaps the review has more to do with a NBC story revealing that of a review of CIA records concludes that our government couldn't confirm the identity of 25% of the people they killed in drone strikes.)  I know that I, the 25% we can't identify, and the 'incidental casualties' will certainly be comforted by the idea that someone in our government is gong to get to the bottom of this.

Hey!  Maybe they could get the same people in the Administration who are going recommend legislation to Congress to protect the press from the DOJ that has recently targeted them from the DOJ itself to help on this other project before somebody escalates the war on AP and Fox News into drone attacks.

Someone To Watch Over Me

(My recommendation is to enjoy the video while reading the post.  Trust me when I say that eventually it will all make sense.)

With  a unanimous vote of its City Council, Toledo becomes yet the latest in a growing number of cities to grow the number of cameras within its confines.  These were not the 11 red light cameras that I've written about before, to be added to 32 of their brethren in an effort once touted to promote traffic safety and not for the purpose of generating revenue. That ship sailed long ago after statistics showed that such cameras usually increase the number of rear end collisions in the intersections they're placed in and Toledo admitted that there was money to be made. But in cities like Toledo across the country that are starved for new sources of revenue in a tough economy, threatened by countless programs that they can't afford and buried under bloated union contracts for their safety workers, little more could be expected of elected officials who seldom consider the law of unintended consequences where their actions are concerned.

No, the vote this week was to purchase a different kind of cameras entirely; or more accurately, 150 of such cameras at a cost of $1.6 million.  In addition to the cameras, the city intends to use 4 members of a police department that many already claim is under-staffed to monitor them.  This program will be instituted (perhaps as a first step) in a technological effort for crime prevention and enforcement in the downtown and/or high crime areas of the Glass City.

Toledo is far from being alone in the installation of such cameras, and in fact might seem to have some way to go in order to compete with its 'Big Brothers' (George Orwell pun intended).  A  Wall Street Journal article from over two years ago points to an estimated 15,000 such cameras, in both public and private ownership, that are linked in Chicago to what the city calls "Operation Virtual Shield".  

New York City has a similar set up, though the last estimate on the number of cameras that I could find is probably woefully out-of date in a NYCLU report from 2006.  The maps contained in this report showing the locations of these cameras blanketing the city in various areas however, should be enough to frighten anyone (perhaps even more than the crime that they are supposed to monitor).  

London however has far and away taken the technological lead in city surveillance however, with estimates according to a British Channel 4 report from back in 2008 that there are 350-500,000 cameras under public or private ownership that are available to the local constabulary to monitor its citizens.

(Cities are notoriously recalcitrant in releasing the actual numbers of such cameras in use.  Go figure.  It seems rather strange not to do so however, if their intent is to, as they often tout, prevent crimes from occurring.) 

No ... make no mistake.  Regardless of the breast beating and dire warnings, this is not about crime prevention.  A camera can no more prevent a crime from happening than it can capture the perpetrator of that crime.  It can only take a picture (often rather poorly lighted and blurry) of the perpetrator in the act of committing it.  While these electronic sentinels may potentially contribute to reduced response times by police to such crimes, no statistics that I was able to uncover were able to document such an advantage.  And while they may make it somewhat easier to eventually track down the suspect and inevitably easier to convict them if they do, it will do nothing to protect citizens from either the crimes themselves or from the potential that the same crimes will be committed in the future.

What it will do however is remind everyone in the Glass City, and others around world that no matter where they are, someone is probably watching.  We're told that if we're not doing anything wrong, we have nothing to worry about, but we were told the same thing when TSA told us that making us safer would only prove a minor inconvenience.  We were told the same when the Patriot Act was passed to aid the good guys in catching the bad ones.

No, the answer here is as simple as it is subtle.  We have nothing to worry about as long as we aren't concerned about a level of government's ability to monitor its citizens without the protection of a legally issued warrant.  We have nothing to worry about as long as we are willing to give up our liberty and rights of privacy to achieve a purported level of safety on a public street. (Can anyone else remember what Benjamin Franklin said about liberty and safety?)  We have nothing to worry about as long as we blindly believe in the altruism of government officials and law enforcement agencies, that such surveillance will not become over time a not-so-subtle form of behavior modification.  We have nothing to worry about unless we're afraid to live with a bunker mentality where everyone is watching over their own shoulders to see who else is watching.

While I chose to entertain you with a rather eclectic Sting rendition of a classic George and Ira Gershwin tune from 1926, it doesn't require me to slip on my tin foil hat to tell you that I'm anything but comforted in knowing that no matter where I am, soon there will undoubtedly be "Someone to Watch Over Me".

 

Daily Newspapers - Last Call

Less than a week ago the Chicago Sun-Times announced that it would close the Ashland Avenue production facility that it built just twelve years ago, having reached an agreement with its bitter rival the Chicago Tribune to begin printing both it and the Chicago suburban newspapers that it owns. To put this announcement in perspective (and as someone who grew up in the middle of this competition and worked with both papers in Chicago), let me say that this would be comparable to Democrats announcing that Republicans would now be issuing all public policy statements on behalf of their party. They might as well have announced that they had cancer, that it was untreatable, and that it was terminal. We of us who have been around the daily newspaper business (though I am no longer) have known for some time that the business model that most have used was no longer a valid one. 


Unfortunately, like so many other businesses (and people) they spent more time wishing for a return of the "Good Old Days" than seeking a path forward. When advertising chose to leave ROP and went to stand alone inserts instead (for those who haven't heard this term before, it stands for 'Ripped on Page' and means advertising actually printed in the newspaper), newspapers resisted such change and placed obstacles in the path of those who were trying to find a way to give them revenue. When the Internet began to encroach on their turf, they wrote it off as a fad. When blogs and news pages became an alternative for younger readers (and older ones as well), they denigrated them as unprofessional and unworthy. 


When they finally woke up and began to embrace this new technology, they couldn't find a way to produce a user-friendly product or generate revenue from it. When they finally realized their past mistakes and began to put 'paywalls' up on their websites to rectify past errors, they found that like their television counterparts they had become largely irrelevant and little more than a supporting cast member. 


Oh some are still surviving like USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, but the far greater number are suffering under staggering revenue losses, staffing cuts, and a loss of credibility. For this last (and perhaps most telling) situation they once again have no one to blame but themselves. Daily newspapers have so far confused objective reporting with editorializing that they can no longer tell the difference themselves. Seldom, if you read carefully, can you find a story in one that does not inject the reporter's point of view into what is ostensibly a straight news story. And while it's bad enough that reporters are so busy trying to become columnists that they are already playing the part, the fact that their editors are no longer 'editing' these stories to correct the errors in perspective is an even more egregious offense. 


Now perhaps this has always been the case, and it's only now in the explosion of news sources available to the public that the bias is being revealed. Perhaps those of us who are still 'news junkies' have become more sensitized to the situation, and more critical. Perhaps 'The Fourth Estate' is returning to its 'Yellow Journalism' roots. Certainly newspapers here in colonial days were often little more than mouthpieces for political ideology. Newspapers in Europe in the same period was certainly no stranger to telling stories from the point of view of the ruling government. 


This time however, the chickens have finally coming home to roost. Daily newspapers may no longer be looking at a the beginning of the end, but at the middle of it. Some of these organizations may survive in some form, in the same way that land-line telephones are disappearing while cell phone use is growing, but their days of preeminence are now past. 


In truth, the best hope for such products are the weekly newspapers, since they focus on the local stories, the personal perspectives, and the contributions of local talent. Though their model will too change eventually, they are neither burdened by an inflated sense of their own worth, nor do these 'free' newspapers fail to understand that they survive only by the grace of advertising dollars and only as long as they serve their audience and advertisers. With what's now going on in Chicago, we may at last be seeing the "Last Call" for the daily newspaper as we know it today. The lights have been turned on and the patrons are moving to the door. As those of us who have unfortunately experienced this time in the wee hours of the morning have heard the barman say,

"You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here any more".

TFP Column: Influence Peddling

It's been a while since I've had an effort in the Toledo Free Press (in fact not at all in 2011). This lack, like that of warmer weather in the Midwest, is about to come to an end however. 


This week sees my return to publication with a column posted on the website, "Influence Peddling". It has to do with my slightly different take on the situation going on in Egypt, and some comparisons to events in this country that I have heard from no other source. 


With this early posting, you have only more to look forward to in this week's edition of the TFP. I cannot help but believe with all of what has been going on with the sale of the Docks and potential sale of the Marina District, there will be plenty of interest to everyone. This is of little surprise however, with Toledo's largest Sunday circulation newspaper, the Toledo Free Press.

New Year's Eve Dialogue

While thinking about the questions that will face the youth of the nation (and the rest of us for that matter) in the year ahead, a thought occurred to me about some that I remembered from my own youth. After doing a bit of research, I found a copy of the video I from that time to illustrate my point. It is one from a live performance at Chicago's Arie Crown Theater in 1972 of a song from the "Chicago V" album, at a time when the band's original line up was still in place. Since this song was originally released that year, as the Vietnam War was ending, it might seem rather dated. Upon listening to the lyrics however, you may (as I did) find it less so. 


I will not print out the lyrics, though if for some reason you cannot understand them or are simply interested in reading them through, you can find them here. I cannot help but wonder as a new year is about to begin, if we have even now adequately answered these questions; and if these queries posed some 38 years ago (almost 39) aren't as relevant today as they were then. 


I am likewise struck by the combination of compassion and naivete as young people of my generation assumed (as all generations do) that they would be the ones to change the world. I hope that in enjoying this trip through the "Way-back Machine" and the music provided, you too are struck by the timeless message provided.

Happy New Year