bugfox blog

In his post on net neutrality, Otaku-kun includes an image that is so hilarious (an unfortunately so plausible) that I couldn’t resist copying it:

The new FTC blogging guidelines are supposedly intended to go after the big commercial astroturfing campaigns, where publicity agencies pay large number of bloggers and tweeters to push commercial products. However anyone who blogs or posts to social networks needs to be aware of the rules, since it would be pretty easy to run afoul of them.

This raises significant free-speech concerns. Jack Shafer in Slate has a pretty good run-down of the issues: The FTC’s Mad Power Grab.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has just returned from China and posts this disturbing comment:

Reflecting back on my recent trip to Beijing…one of the most striking things was the contrast between personal, day-to-day freedom in Beijing and the United States (especially NYC/Los Angeles/Orange County). I’m not talking about political representation or freedom to read whatever I felt like, but just the simple ability to go whereever I felt like going without being hassled. To my surprise, by that measure Beijing came off way better than the United States does these days, and that doesn’t speak well for the U.S.
…
Somehow I thought a one-party, authoritarian state would be more oppressive than this. At least in the capital, Beijing compares favorably to major U.S. cities. To be honest, that doesn’t speak well for the U.S. If we can’t be less of a police state than a one-party, nominally Communist nation like China, then something has gone seriously wrong.

(Read the whole thing)

Back during the Cold War, right-wing types used to make a big distinction between “totalitarian states” (bad) and “authoritarian states” (not so bad.)

A totalitarian state (Russia, China or Nazi Germany) would try to monitor everything its citizens did and demanded constant declarations of effusive loyalty. An authoritarian state (Franco’s Spain) would generally leave people alone if they kept quiet and stayed out of politics.

By this definition China has clearly become an authoritarian state. But if America is becoming more of a police state than China (in terms of surveillance, etc.) then what does that make us?
(more…)

Declan McCullagh has a detailed analysis of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s recent Congressional testimony in which he asked for greatly expanded surveillance powers. Currently the FBI has the technical ability to monitor just about everything that goes over the Internet, but they need to get a warrant (or a secret National Security Letter) in order to do so.

Mueller wants to convince the Internet Service Providers to change they Terms of Service to force their customers to “consent” to having the FBI monitor everything they do without a warrant. If the ISPs refuse (as they probably would for fear of lawsuits) then he wants Congress to pass legislation requiring it.

He justifies this by invoking the usual suspects (terrorism and cyberattacks) but of course the surveillance would be quickly extended to cover lesser crimes like copyright violation. It is amusing to imagine the FBI locking up millions of file sharers, but probably they would just prosecute a small number of people to serve as examples.

Like most people I have been following the unfolding problems of New York governer Eliot Spitzer with a mixture of amusement and disdain. However one detail seems particularly striking:

[Spitzer] arranged to meet with “Kristen,” a prostitute who charged $1,000 an hour, on February 13 in a Washington hotel and paid her $4,300, the court document said.

That would seem to imply that high-priced prostitutes, like high-priced lawyers, bill in six-minute increments.