chicagotribune | The federal government is projected to spend $4.091 trillion
next year, with roughly two-thirds of that going mostly toward Social
Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, poverty assistance and interest payments on the government
debt. This spending is expected to be left untouched in the budget
proposal next week.
What Trump will propose changing is
the rest of the budget, known as discretionary spending, which is
authorized each year by Congress. Slightly more than half of this
remaining money goes to the military, and the rest is spread across
agencies that operate things like education, diplomacy, housing,
transportation and law enforcement.
Among Trump's
expected proposals are an increase in military spending of $54 billion,
more money to start building a wall along the border between the United
States and Mexico, and the creation of new initiatives that expand
access to charter schools and other educational programs.
To
offset that new money, Trump will propose steep cuts across numerous
other agencies. Although final numbers remain in flux, his advisers have
considered cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development's
budget by $6 billion, or 14 percent, according to a preliminary budget
document obtained by The Washington Post. That is a change that Trulia
chief economist Ralph McLaughlin said could "put nearly 8 million
Americans in both inner-city and suburban communities at risk of losing
their public housing and nearly 4 million at risk of losing their rental
subsidy."
Preliminary budget documents have also shown
that Trump advisers have also looked at cutting the Environmental
Protect Agency's staff by about 20 percent and tightening the Commerce
Department's budget by about 18 percent, which would impact climate
change research and weather satellite programs, among other things.
Trump
and his advisers have said that they believe the federal workforce is
too big, and that the federal government spends - and wastes - too much
money. They have said that Washington - the federal workers and
contractors, among others - has benefited from government largesse while
many other Americans have suffered. Federal spending, they have argued,
crowds the private sector and piles regulations and bureaucracy onto
companies.
When “the left” endlessly debates which core issues or
constituencies must be sacrificed for political gain, as if economic
justice for the poor and the working class could be separated from
social justice for women and people of color and the LGBT community and
immigrants and people with disabilities, it is no longer functioning as
the left.
When LGBT claptrap, gluten free food, political correctness and other
such niceties beat out programs to serve the basic needs of the common
people nothing "left" is left. The priority on the left must always be
the well-being of the working people. All the other nice-to-have issues
follow from and after that.
Many nominally social-democratic parties in Europe are on the same
downward trajectory as the Democrats in the U.S. for the very same
reason. Their real policies are center right. Their marketing policies
hiding the real ones are to care for this or that minority interest or
problem the majority of the people has no reason to care about. Real
wages sink but they continue to import cheep labor (real policy) under
the disguise of helping "refugees" (marketing policy) which are simply
economic migrants. (Even parts of the German "Die Linke" party are
infected with such nonsense.)
The people with real economic problems, those who have reason to fear
the future, have no one in the traditional political spectrum that even
pretends to care about them. Those are the voters now streaming to the
far right. (They will again get screwed. The far right has an economic
agenda that is totally hostile to them. But it at least promises to do
something about their fears.) Where else should they go?
bibliotecapleyades |
The years 1982-1986 marked the period Pat Robertson and radio and
televangelists urgently broadcast appeals that rallied christian followers
to accept a new political religion that would turn millions of christians
into an army of political operatives. It was the period when the militant
church raised itself from centuries of sleep and once again eyed power.
At the time, most Americans were completely unaware of the militant
agenda
being preached on a daily basis across the breadth and width of
America.
Although it was called "christianity" it can barely be recognized as
christian. It in fact was and is a wolf parading in sheep’s clothing: It
was
and is a political scheme to take over the government of the United
States
and then turn that government into an aggressor nation that will
forcibly
establish the United States as the ruling empire of the twenty-first
century. It is subversive, seditious, secretive, and dangerous.[9]
Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is
frequently called "christian Reconstructionism." Its doctrines are shocking
to ordinary christian believers and to most Americans.
Journalist Frederick
Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism,
"seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite
that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’"
He described the
ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate "…labor unions, civil rights
laws, and public schools." Clarkson then describes the creation of new
classes of citizens:
"Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently christian
men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this
theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy,
heresy, adultery, and homosexuality." [10]
Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one
investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify
themselves as religious conservatives said,
"They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’"
[11]
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy
Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy
at Cornell University wrote,
"In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in
Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had
distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, "How to
Participate in a Political Party."
It read:
"Rule the world for God.
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push
an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don’t flaunt your christianity.
"christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control
political parties and so it is very important that mature christians
have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God
willing."
[12]
Dominionists have gained extensive control of
the Republican Party and the apparatus of government throughout the United
States; they continue to operate secretly.
Their agenda to undermine all government social
programs that assist the poor, the sick, and the elderly is ingeniously
disguised under false labels that confuse voters. Nevertheless, as we shall
see, Dominionism maintains the necessity of laissez-faire economics,
requiring that people "look to God and not to government for help."
[13]
It is estimated that thirty-five million Americans who call themselves
christian, adhere to Dominionism in the United States, but most of these
people appear to be ignorant of the heretical nature of their beliefs and
the seditious nature of their political goals. So successfully have the
televangelists and churches inculcated the idea of the existence of an
outside "enemy," which is attacking christianity, that millions of people
have perceived themselves rightfully overthrowing an imaginary evil
anti-christian conspiratorial secular society.
When one examines the progress of its agenda, one sees that Dominionism has
met its time table: the complete takeover of the American government was
predicted to occur by 2004.[14]
Unless the American people reject the GOP’s
control of the government, Americans may find themselves living in a
theocracy that has already spelled out its intentions to change every aspect
of American life including its cultural life, its Constitution and its laws.
Born in christian Reconstructionism, which was founded by the late
R. J. Rushdoony, the framers of the new cult included,
Rushdoony
his son-in-law Gary North
Pat Robertson
Herb Titus, the former Dean of
Robertson’s Regent University School of Public Policy (formerly CBN
University)
Charles Colson, Robertson’s political
strategist
Tim LaHaye
Gary Bauer
the late Francis Schaeffer
Paul Crouch, the founder of TBN, the
world’s largest television network,
...plus a virtual army of likeminded television
and radio evangelists and news talk show hosts.
Dominionism started with the Gospels and turned the concept of the invisible
and spiritual "Kingdom of God" into a literal political empire that could be
taken by force, starting with the United States of America.
Discarding the original message of Jesus
and forgetting that Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world," the
framers of Dominionism boldly presented a Gospel whose purpose was to
inspire christians to enter politics and execute world domination so that Jesus could return to an earth prepared for his earthly rule by his
faithful "regents."
religionandpolitics | Much has been made of the fact that Pence at one time described himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” However, Pence has become reticent about the shift in his faith identity, according to Craig Fehrman, who wrote a 2013 profile of him for Indianapolis Monthly.
Instead, he prefers to call himself an “ordinary Christian.” Pence “was
torn between his family’s faith and background and a new more exciting
faith,” Ferhman explained.
Pence continued to call himself a Catholic until the mid-1990s, when
he began attending an evangelical megachurch in Indianapolis. In her story about Pence’s evolving faith, Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post
noted that it was during this period when “white evangelicals and
conservative Catholics in the United States started to realize they had a
lot more in common than their more denominationally tribal parents
realized.” Together, Catholics and evangelical Christians worked to
protect “traditional marriage” and enforce greater abortion
restrictions.
Pence earned a law degree from Indiana University in 1986 and entered
private practice. After running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988 and
1990, he became the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation,
part of a Koch brothers-backed network, which bills itself as promoting
“the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues” by
“exalt[ing] the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially as
they apply to the interrelated freedoms of religion, property, and
speech.” It was during his four-year tenure there, which coincided with
this fuller embrace of evangelical Christianity, that Pence first began
promoting “traditional family” ideologies and policies in earnest.
Pence then became the host of a talk radio show—“Rush Limbaugh on decaf,”
is how he described his radio persona—as well as a local Sunday TV
show. Pence maintained ties, however, with his former organization. In
1996, he published in the foundation’s journal an essay
in which he lambasted the Republican Party’s move away from
“traditional Pro-Family conservatives.” His evidence was the 1996 RNC
speakers’ line-up, which included “pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and
proponents of Affirmative Action.” He lamented that the GOP had
abandoned the combative posture epitomized by Pat Buchanan’s “culture war”
speech at the 1992 convention. Pence even included a bit of unintended
foreshadowing of the rise of Trump. He wrote that not only did the 1996
RNC’s retreat from conservatism make for bad politics, it made for bad
TV; “ratings were dismal,” he noted.
In 2000, Pence was elected to the House of Representatives. There he
became a leader among movement conservatives committed to rolling back
federal intervention in education and healthcare, business and
environmental regulations. Until just last week, he called climate change “a myth”
based on faulty science. In the House, he voted to block policies that
would curb greenhouse gases. In 2002, he took to the House floor to call for science textbooks
to “be changed” to reflect that evolution “taught for 77 years in the
classrooms of America as fact” is just a “theory,” and that “other
theories of the origin of species,” notably “intelligent design,” should
also be included alongside evolution.
nybooks | As for the underlying mechanisms, we now have a general idea of how
they might work because of another strange inversion of reasoning, due
to Alan Turing, the creator of the computer, who saw how a mindless
machine could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing what it was doing.
This can be applied to all kinds of calculation and procedural control,
in natural as well as in artificial systems, so that their competence
does not depend on comprehension. Dennett’s claim is that when we put
these two insights together, we see that
all
the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of
uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more
competent—and hence comprehending—systems. This is indeed a
strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of
Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last.
And he adds:
Turing
himself is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts,
concrete and abstract, are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian
processes in the same way spider webs and beaver dams are….
An
essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution,
much of which, Dennett believes, is as uncomprehending as biological
evolution. He quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith’s definition, from which it is
clear that the concept of evolution can apply more widely:
Evolution
by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in
the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes
different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.
In the biological case, variation is caused by mutations in DNA,
and it is heritable through reproduction, sexual or otherwise. But the
same pattern applies to variation in behavior that is not genetically
caused, and that is heritable only in the sense that other members of
the population can copy it, whether it be a game, a word, a
superstition, or a mode of dress.
This is the
territory of what Richard Dawkins memorably christened “memes,” and
Dennett shows that the concept is genuinely useful in describing the
formation and evolution of culture. He defines “memes” thus:
They are a kind of way of behaving
(roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned,
denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
They
include such things as the meme for wearing your baseball cap backward
or for building an arch of a certain shape; but the best examples of
memes are words. A word, like a virus, needs a host to reproduce, and it
will survive only if it is eventually transmitted to other hosts,
people who learn it by imitation:
Like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication, and every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.
pnas | Emotional
states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional
feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately
programmed in subcortical areas of the
brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of
consciousness, such
as those related to the perception of
external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of
their content,
arise from one system in the brain. In
this view, what differs in emotional and nonemotional states are the
kinds of inputs
that are processed by a general cortical
network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences.
Although subcortical
circuits are not directly responsible for
conscious feelings, they provide nonconscious inputs that coalesce with
other kinds
of neural signals in the cognitive
assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for
this proposal, we
defend a modified version of what is known
as the higher-order theory of consciousness.
Much progress has
been made in conceptualizing consciousness in recent years. This work
has focused on the question of how
we come to be aware of our sensory world, and
has suggested that perceptual consciousness emerges via cognitive
processing
in cortical circuits that assemble conscious
experiences in real-time. Emotional states of consciousness, on the
other hand,
have traditionally been viewed as involving
innately programmed experiences that arise from subcortical circuits.
Our thesis is that the brain
mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not
fundamentally different from
those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences. Both, we propose, involve higher-order representations
(HORs) of
lower-order information by cortically based
general networks of cognition (GNC). Thus, subcortical circuits are not
responsible
for feelings, but instead provide
lower-order, nonconscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of
neural signals in the
cognitive assembly of conscious emotional
experiences by cortical circuits (the distinction between cortical and
subcortical
circuits is defined in SI Appendix, Box 1). Our theory goes beyond traditional higher-order theory (HOT), arguing that self-centered higher-order states are essential
for emotional experiences.
physorg | Geneticists
from the Universities of Manchester and Bath are celebrating the
discovery of the elusive 'greenbeard gene' that helps explain why
organisms are more likely to cooperate with some individuals than other.
The renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "greenbeard gene" in his 1976 best seller The Selfish Gene.
The greenbeard is a special type of gene that, said Dawkins, could
solve the conundrum of how organisms identify and direct selfless
behaviour to towards other selfless individuals.
The existence of greenbeard genes once seemed improbable, but work published in Nature Communications by the team of geneticists has identified a gene that causes a whole range of 'beard colours' in a social microbe.
The microbes - 'slime moulds' - live as single celled organisms,
but clump together to form a slug like creature when they run out of
food. The newly formed slug can move to help them find new sources of
food, but this depends on successful cooperation.
With funding from the Wellcome Trust, NERC and the BBSRC the research
team found that slime mould cells are able to decide who they
collaborate with. By sequencing their genomes, they discovered that
partnership choices are based on a greenbeard gene.
The gene encodes a molecule that sits on the surface of a slime mould
cell, and is able to bind to the same molecule in another slime mould
cell.
Greenbeard genes stand out because they harbour enormous diversity,
with most slime mould strains having a unique version of the gene.
The team discovered that individuals prefer to partner with those
that have similar versions of the gene, and the slugs formed with
preferred partners do better than those with non-preferred partners.
This demonstrates, according to the team, that there is a whole range
'beard colours' that function to identify compatible partners for
cooperation.
BI | In early 2017, the day came: Horton made her final loan payment.
In just over three years, she had put a grand total of
$220,561.21 toward becoming debt-free. Though it took longer than
her original goal of just one year, Horton's dedication to
repayment is nothing to scoff at.
"You have to stick with it," she said. "You have to be willing to
make some very drastic sacrifices, and you have to be creative in
the ways that you produce extra income."
Now that her loans are a thing of the past, Horton wants to
continue buying and renting out properties; she has her sights
set on finding real estate in downtown Chicago. Horton is also
writing a book, and she hopes to one day speak to high school and
college students about how to take on loans and responsibly pay
them back.
While everyone's situation is different — not everybody can move
back home, and not everybody will have a small rental property
gifted to them — Horton's willingness to ditch an expensive city
like DC to move back to the Midwest, cut down living costs, and
increase her earning power by purchasing more real estate helped
her pay off a mountain of debt in just three years, when it may
otherwise have taken a decade or more
To anyone who feels overwhelmed by the prospect of taking on
student loans — or paying back any debt they've incurred — Horton
has a simple message: "I just want them to feel empowered that
they can pay if off. If I can do it, anybody can."
statnews | A little-noticed bill moving through Congress
would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or
risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let
employers see that genetic and other health information.
Giving employers such power is now prohibited by
legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law
known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating
explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic
tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.
The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House
committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17
Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the
House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act,
but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second
ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not
affect federal spending, as the main bill does.
“What this bill would do is completely take away
the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of
policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a
civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for
genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with
Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.
Employers say they need the changes because those
two landmark laws are “not aligned in a consistent manner” with laws
about workplace wellness programs, as an employer group said in
congressional testimony last week.
We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."
The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.
Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.
Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?
If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.
The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.
Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.
The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.
WaPo | We learn, for example, from Tuesday’s spectacular WikiLeaks dump that
among the CIA’s various and nefarious cybertools is the capacity to
simulate intrusion by a foreign power, the equivalent of planting phony
fingerprints on a smoking gun.
Who are you going to believe now?
I can assure you that some enterprising Trumpite will use this
revelation to claim that the whole storyline pointing to Russian
interference in the U.S. election was a fabrication. And who was behind that ? There is no end to this hall of mirrors. My rule, therefore, is: Stay away.
Hard
to do with Washington caught up in one of its periodic conspiracy
frenzies. Actually, two. One, anti-Trump, is that he and his campaign
colluded with Russian intelligence. The other, anti-Obama-CIA-“deep
state,” is that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower to ensnare candidate Trump.
The
odd thing is that, as of today, there is no evidence for either charge.
That won’t, of course, stop the launch of multiple all-consuming
investigations.
(1) Collusion:
James Clapper,
Obama’s director of national intelligence, who has been deeply and
publicly at odds with Trump, unequivocally states that he has seen zero evidence of any Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Nor has anyone else.
(2) Wiretap:
The other storyline is simply fantastical. Congressional Republicans have uniformly run away from Trump’s Obama-wiretap accusation. Clapper denies it. FBI Director James Comey denies it. Not a single member of Trump’s own administration is willing to say it’s true.
Loopier still is to demand that Congress find the truth
when the president could just pick up the phone and instruct the FBI,
CIA and DNI to declare on the record whether this ever occurred. And if
there really was an October 2016 FISA court order to wiretap Trump, the president could unilaterally declassify the information yesterday.
The
bugging story is less plausible than a zombie invasion. Nevertheless,
one could spin a milder — and more plausible — scenario of executive
abuse. It goes like this:
She starts by saying that "Trump’s assertions, however overinflated, nonetheless echo certain aspects of The New York Times’s reporting from recent weeks. That, in turn, has allowed his administration to assert that the basis for his claims rests, in part, on reporting by The Times."
On the surface, there are similarities. Both The Times and
Trump have referred to wiretaps. Both have referenced White House
knowledge of the investigations. And both have described efforts by
officials from the Obama administration to involve itself in the
continuing investigations of Trump and Russia.
Maybe Trump is not a completely raving lunatic after all. So where are the differences:
For one, as The Times (and others) has made clear, these
investigations have been conducted by the F.B.I., intelligence agencies
and Congress, not by Obama himself. The Times has also
said Obama administration officials sought to spread intelligence about a
possible link between Trump and Russia to ensure a trail of evidence
for investigators, but it said Obama himself was not involved. And no Times reporter has claimed that any warrants have been issued to spy on Trump or his associates.
And there it is again: several months after we thought we would never
again hear the old "Obama had no idea what was going on excuse", it
strikes yet again, only this time we find it very difficult to believe
that Obama, who expanded the distributions of confidential NSA data to
multiple offices just weeks before his final day in office, had no clue
that Trump was being wiretapped.
There's more, and this is where things get delightfully Orwellian,
because as Spayd "explains", the confusion is really just a function of
readers being confused because, well, it's complicated:
libertyblitzkrieg | By now, most of you have heard about the largest ever release of
confidential CIA documents published by Wikileaks, known as Vault7. Many
of you have also read various summaries of what was released, but
reading the take of others is not the same as analyzing it yourself. As
such, I strongly suggest you check out the original Wikileaks summary. It’s mostly written for the layperson without much technical expertise (like myself), and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
In this post, I’m going to republish the entire press release, as
well as provide key excerpts from the larger summary along with some
personal observations. Let’s get started…
Press Release Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of
leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7” by
WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents
on the agency. The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761
documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated
inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election. Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its
hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero
day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated
documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than
several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire
hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated
among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized
manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the
archive.
Lovely. Just lovely.
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the
CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of
“zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European
company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and
Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones. Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence
over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself
building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different
type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of
hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose
its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic
rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.
This leak might very well be from a competing government agency
concerned about the unaccountable power and sloppiness of the CIA, or it
could simply be a turf war.
NYTimes | In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents in history, WikiLeaksreleased
on Tuesday thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools
and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers
and even Internet-connected televisions.
The
documents amount to a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools. They
include instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer
tools for use in spying: the online calling service Skype; Wi-Fi
networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus
programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their
computers.
A
program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted computer,
and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete
function on Internet Explorer. Other programs were called
CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget.
The document dump was the latest coup for the antisecrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which uses its hacking abilities to carry out espionage against foreign targets.
The
initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first installment in
a larger collection of secret C.I.A. material, included 7,818 web pages
with 943 attachments, many of them partly redacted by WikiLeaks editors
to avoid disclosing the actual code for cyberweapons. The entire
archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of
computer code, the group claimed.
In
one revelation that may especially trouble the tech world if confirmed,
WikiLeaks said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services have
managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their
officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal,
WhatsApp and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks, government hackers can
penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and message traffic before
encryption is applied.”
Unlike the National Security Agency documents Edward J. Snowden gave to journalists in 2013,
they do not include examples of how the tools have been used against
actual foreign targets. That could limit the damage of the leak to
national security. But the breach was highly embarrassing for an agency
that depends on secrecy.
Robert
M. Chesney, a specialist in national security law at the University of
Texas at Austin, likened the C.I.A. trove to National Security Agency
hacking tools disclosed last year by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.
“If
this is true, it says that N.S.A. isn’t the only one with an advanced,
persistent problem with operational security for these tools,” Mr.
Chesney said. “We’re getting bit time and again.”
guardian | It may sound strange, but a number of prominent people have been
asking this question lately. As fears about the impact of automation
grow, calls for a “robot tax” are gaining momentum. Earlier this month,
the European parliament considered one for the EU. Benoît Hamon, the French Socialist party presidential candidate who is often described as his country’s Bernie Sanders, has put a robot tax in his platform. Even Bill Gates recently endorsed the idea.
The proposals vary, but they share a common premise. As machines and
algorithms get smarter, they’ll replace a widening share of the
workforce. A robot tax could raise revenue to retrain those displaced
workers, or supply them with a basic income.
The good news is that the robot apocalypse hasn’t arrived just yet. Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn’t happening
on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a
level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an
egalitarian utopia by comparison.
The real threat posed by robots isn’t that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps
Elon Musk up at night – it’s that they will amplify economic
disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally,
unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful
policy tool for averting this scenario. But it’s a good starting point
for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious
political problem – one that demands a serious political solution.
theatlantic | In science fiction, the promise or
threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to
conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like
the “Star Trek” computer or the Star Wars droids, machines
warrant the name AI when they become sentient—or at least self-aware
enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise.
What
to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and
technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even
if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don’t quite
measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of
sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving.
But in most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence
aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re
just software.
* * *
Deflationary examples of AI are everywhere. Google funds a system to identify toxic comments online, a machine learning algorithm called Perspective. But it turns out that simple typos can fool it. Artificial intelligence is cited as a barrier to strengthen
an American border wall, but the “barrier” turns out to be little more
than sensor networks and automated kiosks with potentially-dubious
built-in profiling. Similarly, a “Tennis Club AI” turns out to be just a better line sensor using off-the-shelf computer vision. Facebook announces an AI to detect suicidal thoughts
posted to its platform, but closer inspection reveals that the “AI
detection” in question is little more than a pattern-matching filter
that flags posts for human community managers.
AI’s
miracles are celebrated outside the tech sector, too. Coca-Cola
reportedly wants to use “AI bots” to “crank out ads” instead of humans.
What that means remains mysterious. Similar efforts to generate AI music or to compose AI news stories seem promising on first blush—but then, AI editors trawling Wikipedia to correct typos and links end up stuck in infinite loops with one another. And according to human-bot interaction consultancy Botanalytics (no, really), 40 percent of interlocutors give up on conversational bots after one interaction. Maybe that’s because bots are mostly glorified phone trees, or else clever, automated Mad Libs.
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