Month: March 2017

Sweet Irony

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Breitbart News just came out against Trumpcare:

Donald Trump has been very good for the news business — and the news business has been very good for Donald Trump.

But no publication has had a more mutually beneficial relationship with our new president than Breitbart. Trump’s campaign brought the site’s brand of reactionary populism into the mainstream — and its former mastermind into the West Wing. By the time the ballots were cast, no other news outlet had grown its audience more over the 2016 cycle.

And Breitbart, of course, supplied Trump with a megaphone, a strategist, and relentlessly positive coverage — even when the mogul’s campaign manager low-key battered one of the site’s reporters.

So, Breitbart’s latest headline on the Trump-Ryan health-care plan is probably causing some consternation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Any heartburn being experienced by Steve Bannon, former editor-in-chief of Breitbart, is the source of much pleasure for me personally.

Quote of the Day

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But I do think one thing that has happened is that during the Cold War, for good or ill, Americans believed that they were the force of good. That belief is a lot harder to sustain in this day and age, for a range of reasons (not least the warrantless wiretapping and torture that Hayden facilitated). So just maybe the values remain the same, but America has changed?

—Marcy Wheeler, noting that Hayden’s blame of millennials for leaks is not based in reality.

Nathan Myhrvold Needs to Be Fired ……… Out of a Cannon ……… and into the Sun

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Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO at Microflaccid, now owns and runs Intellectual Ventures, the most egregious patent troll in the world.

Myhrvold has always maintained that his company fosters advancement, citing a lab, which has never actually made anything, and asserting that its patents actually have merit.

An appeals court has disagreed observing that simply adding, “Do it on a computer,” to an existing process does not make it a unique and patentable invention:

Intellectual Ventures boasts of having more than 30,000 patents—but you’d have to look for a long time to find one that can hold up under real scrutiny.

After staying quiescent for years, IV opened up a barrage of lawsuits to enforce its patents in 2010. But the companies that decided to stand up to IV rather than buckle under have been faring well, as judges have found the patents that IV has chosen to enforce in court less than impressive. It’s a telling sign about the giant patent-holder’s collection. Given the opportunity to pull just about any patent out of its huge collection, one would assume the company would choose the best of the lot. But much of it appears to be exactly the kind of easy handouts from the dot-com boom era that have been called out by critics of “patent trolls.”

Earlier this week, Intellectual Ventures lost two more major patent cases at the nation’s top patent court. It lost a case against Erie Indemnity Company and several other insurers, which had stood accused of infringing US Patent Nos. 6,510,434, 6,519,581, and 6,546,002. The same judges also tossed patents asserted against banking company Capital One. All were found invalid under the Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. precedent, which barred many patents that describe basic business processes and add computer jargon.

While we are at it, we should also fire the US Patent Court (technically the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) into the sun, which has expanded IP well beyond what is necessary to foster creativity.

This sh%$ is out of control, and while some rent seeking is acceptable to encourage creativity, this is just parasitic.

This is What Happens After Elections

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After refusing to resign, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara has been fired.

There will be a lot of hand wringing about this, and I am disappointed that this will likely slow the progress of the investigations of Andrew Cuomo and Roger Ailes, but this what happens when there are elections.

It’s something that has been drilled into my head by my dad, who worked for in the cabinet of Bill Egan, Governor of Alaska, and when Wally Hickel took over he was offered the opportunity to stay on, he politely declined.

His judgement was reaffirmed when the Hickel administration fired one of his coworkers for getting a hunting license at the in-state rate a few months early.

This is what happens when someone new takes over, particularly when they are of the opposing party:

The call to Preet Bharara’s office from President Trump’s assistant came on Thursday. Would Mr. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, please call back?

The following day, Mr. Bharara was one of 46 United States attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama asked to resign — and to immediately clean out their offices. The request took many in his office by surprise because, in a meeting in November, Mr. Bharara was asked by the then-president-elect to stay on.

Mr. Bharara refused to resign. On Saturday, he announced on Twitter that he had been fired.

………

Mr. Bharara was a highly public prosecutor who relished the spotlight throughout more than seven years in office. He pursued several high-profile cases involving Wall Street, and he was in the midst of investigating fund-raising by Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, and preparing to try former top aides to the governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, who are both Democrats. It was not immediately clear how his departure would affect those cases and others that were pending.

Mr. Bharara stayed quiet until Saturday afternoon. Then, on his personal Twitter account, which he set up eight days ago, he wrote: “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired.” Referring to the Southern District of New York, he continued, “Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life.”
 

………
 
Mr. Bharara’s job had appeared to be secure. In November, he met at Trump Tower with the president-elect and several of his advisers, including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to two people briefed on that discussion who requested anonymity.

At the meeting, according to those briefed, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Bharara to remain in the job, which Mr. Bharara relayed to reporters and television cameras in the Trump Tower lobby.

Then came the order to resign on Friday, creating what was described as a feeling of whiplash in the prosecutor’s Manhattan office. One person familiar with the views of current prosecutors described an oddly subdued reaction mixed with anxiety as the events unfolded. “You have a sense of how it’s going to end, and it’s not going to end well,” the person said.

But Mr. Bharara, unlike his fellow United States attorneys, publicly refused to leave. He gave no statement citing a policy or legal issue affecting his decision to refuse the resignation order.
 
………

Mr. Bharara’s office is overseeing the case against the former aides to Mr. Cuomo and the inquiry into fund-raising by Mr. de Blasio, who has been a target of Mr. Trump’s ire as he has positioned himself as a vocal opponent of the president’s on the left.

His office is also overseeing an investigation into whether Fox News, which is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, failed to properly alert shareholders of settlements with female employees who had accused the channel’s former chief, Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment.

It’s not how I would have liked this to turn out, but this is very much business as usual.

Once Again, Their Evil Outstrips My Fertile Imagination

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The Republicans are proposing a bill that would allow employers to coerce genetic testing from their employers and share the data with whomever they please:

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 got virtually everything they wanted for their workplace wellness programs during the Obama administration. The ACA allowed them to charge employees 30 percent, and possibly 50 percent, more for health insurance if they declined to participate in the “voluntary” programs, which typically include cholesterol and other screenings; health questionnaires that ask about personal habits, including plans to get pregnant; and sometimes weight loss and smoking cessation classes. And in rules that Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued last year, a workplace wellness program counts as “voluntary” even if workers have to pay thousands of dollars more in premiums and deductibles if they don’t participate.

Actually, this explains a lot about Obamacare.

It appears that it was drawn up under the assumption that the average American was a fat ignorant slob with no agency, and so they needed to be coerced.

And people wonder why, even as people support almost all the parts of the ACA, they hate the whole package.

Because it was delivered to the American public dripping with contempt.  (“Deplorables”)

Welcome to Operation Unbelievable Clusterf%$#

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It looks like we are sending ground troops into Syria, specifically Marines artillery and armored vehicles, which is a significant escalation from the special forces previously in Syria:

The United States, feeling confident enough about its war on the totalitarian Islamic State, has upped the stakes by deploying a detachment of Marine artillery into Syria.

To be sure, U.S. troops are certainly in combat in Syria, although the deployment of artillery is a step further than Special Operations Forces working with local U.S. allies in the country. Commandos often travel in smaller numbers, can move faster and do not need as much security as artillery units.

………

Pentagon officials stated that the deployment of the troops and their 155-millimeter M-777 howitzers, summoned from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has “been in the works for sometime,” according to The Washington Post.

………

Meanwhile, in a highly visible — and deliberately visible — move, U.S. soldiers riding in Stryker armored vehicles flying American flags drove into the Syrian city of Manbij to prevent a clash between the SDF and the Turkish-backed FSA brigades.

This will not end well.

Human Sacrifice, Dogs and Cats Living Together… Mass Hysteria!

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It appears that we are now having Pennsylvania Mennonites protesting Donald Trump policies:

Mary Beth Martin and Lindsey Martin Corbo each held one side of the large cardboard poster, the mother and her adult daughter eager to deliver a personal if unconventional message to their congressman, Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker.

“Hey Smucker,” said the sign, written in red, green, and blue marker. “300 years ago our Mennonite family took sanctuary in PA, just like yours did.

“Lancaster values immigrants.”

The anger might have been directed at Smucker, but Martin and Corbo were really there – like 100 others – because of President Donald Trump.

The two women were among a hundred newly engaged activists assembled in Republican-heavy Lancaster County – an area that went to Trump in November by 57 percent – braving toe-freezing temperatures to protest Trump and the lawmaker, who was 200 yards away at a chamber of commerce breakfast.

That Martin and Corbo were protesters was – by their own admission – a remarkable development. Both are members of the Mennonite Church, a religion that encourages its members to stay away from politics just as it asks them to shun the wider culture.

This is like a half step away from the Amish engaging in civil disobedience, and I ain’t talking about Rumspringa here.

H/t Charlie Pierce.

Tweet of the Day

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Heritage Foundation: It sucks.
FreedomWorks: It sucks.
Club for Growth: It sucks.
Democrats: Needs some tweaking! https://t.co/ezpXEskarD

— Bodega Fats (@GarbageApe) March 8, 2017

This is, of course the comments on Paul Ryan’s Obamacare repeal plan.

I’m beginning to think that if you took every member of the DNC and examined them, you would not find enough testicles to match those of the eunuchs corps at Topkapı Palace.

This is truly pathetic.

H/t Ny Mag

Linkage

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Have some classic George Carlin:

Why Running Helathcare Like a Business Does Not Work, Part LVXXI

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The Department of Health and Human Services decided to tie reimbursement rates to hospitals to patient satisfaction.

The result was happier but sicker and deader patients:

When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals’ Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials wrote, rather reasonably, “Delivery of high-quality, patient-centered care requires us to carefully consider the patient’s experience in the hospital inpatient setting.” They probably had no idea that their methods could end up indirectly harming patients.

Beginning in October 2012, the Affordable Care Act implemented a policy withholding 1 percent of total Medicare reimbursements—approximately $850 million—from hospitals (that percentage will double in 2017). Each year, only hospitals with high patient-satisfaction scores and a measure of certain basic care standards will earn that money back, and the top performers will receive bonus money from the pool.

………

In fact, a national study revealed that patients who reported being most satisfied with their doctors actually had higher healthcare and prescription costs and were more likely to be hospitalized than patients who were not as satisfied. Worse, the most satisfied patients were significantly more likely to die in the next four years.

………

As a Missouri clinical instructor told me, “Patients can be very satisfied and dead an hour later. Sometimes hearing bad news is not going to result in a satisfied patient, yet the patient could be a well-informed, prepared patient.”

We don’t need to market incentivize healthcare, we need to take the market out of healthcare.

Not Enough Bullets

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California is seeing the rise of for fee luxury jails:

………

Instead, Wurtzel, who also had been convicted of sexual battery in a previous case, found a better option: For $100 a night, he was permitted by the court to avoid county jail entirely. He did his time in the small jail in the nearby city of Seal Beach, with amenities that included flat-screen TVs, a computer room and new beds. He served six months, at a cost of $18,250, according to jail records.

Markin learned about Wurtzel’s upgraded jail stay only recently, from a reporter. “I feel like, ‘Why did I go through this?’” she said.

In what is commonly called “pay-to-stay” or “private jail,” a constellation of small city jails — at least 26 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties — open their doors to defendants who can afford the option. But what started out as an antidote to overcrowding has evolved into a two-tiered justice system that allows people convicted of serious crimes to buy their way into safer and more comfortable jail stays.

Madam la guillotine needs to come back.

Quote of the Day

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To be fair, and to be scientific about it, we should choose another subpopulation for equal focus, so we can measure the effects of our added attention. I suggest starting with politicians.

—Cathy O’Neil

She is noting that the Trump administration is engaging in an effort to find more crime committee by immigrants, and she notes that when you look for this, you will generally find it.

It’s what I call a self-licking ice cream cone, and her suggestion to focus on politicians as a statistical control is both methodologically reasonable and delicious snark.

I am Surprised and Impressed

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It appears that Wikileaks is exercising a bit more due diligence in its releases, as it is making the CIA hacks leaked to it available to the tech firms that were targeted before making them available to the general public:

Technology firms will get “exclusive access” to details of the CIA’s cyber-warfare programme, Wikileaks has said.

 The anti-secrecy website has published thousands of the US spy agency’s secret documents, including what it says are the CIA’s hacking tools.

 Founder Julian Assange said that, after some thought, he had decided to give the tech community further leaks first.

 “Once the material is effectively disarmed, we will publish additional details,” Mr Assange said.

 ………

 Mr Assange said that his organisation had “a lot more information on the cyber-weapons programme”.

 He added that while Wikileaks maintained a neutral position on most of its leaks, in this case it did take a strong stance.

 “We want to secure communications technology because, without it, journalists aren’t able to hold the state to account,” he said.

 Mr Assange also claimed that the intelligence service had known for weeks that Wikileaks had access to the material and done nothing about it.

 He also spoke more about the Umbrage programme, revealed in the first leaked documents.

 He said that a whole section of the CIA is working on Umbrage, a system that attempts to trick people into thinking that they had been hacked by other groups or countries by collecting malware from other nation states, such as Russia.

 “The technology is designed to be unaccountable,” he said.

 He claimed that an anti-virus expert, who was not named, had come forward to say that he believed sophisticated malware that he had previously attributed to Iran, Russia and China, now looked like something that the CIA had developed.

This is why cyber security needs to be completely separate from any intelligence agency.

Otherwise, there is too much pressure to cover up the bugs so that the folks on the other side of the office spy on the rest of us.

Any hole which the CIA, NSA, DIA, or other TLA* can exploit can also be exploited by criminals, the Chinese, the Russians, terrorists, or the New England Patriots.

*Three letter acronym.

Linkage

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I would argue that this was the best video of the 1980s:

Wikileaks Explains Why the Internet of Things Sucks

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Another document dump from Wikileaks, this revealing how the CIA hacks into PCs, phones, and smart televisions:

In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents in history, WikiLeaks released 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.”

If you are wondering why you are constantly hearing of some large organization being hacked, one reason is that our state security apparatus refuses to patch holes, because they use them to spy on the rest of us:

………

 Some of the attacks are what are known as “zero days” — exploitation paths hackers can use that vendors are completely unaware of, giving the vendors no time — zero days — to fix their products. WikiLeaks said the documents indicate the CIA has violated commitments made by the Obama administration to disclose serious software vulnerabilities to vendors to improve the security of their products. The administration developed a system called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process to allow various government entities to help determine when it’s better for national security to disclose unpatched vulnerabilities and when it’s better to take advantage of them to hunt targets.

At least some civil liberties advocates agree with the WikiLeaks assessment. “Access Now condemns the stockpiling of vulnerabilities, calls for limits on government hacking and protections for human rights, and urges immediate reforms to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager for digital rights group Access Now, wrote in response to the new leak in a press release.

Iterestingly enough, it appears that the hacking tools were not actually classified:

………

But Wikileaks also suggests that, because the CIA doesn’t classify its attack tools, it leaves them more vulnerable to theft.

In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of “Vault 7” — the CIA’s weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse.

The CIA made these systems unclassified.

Why the CIA chose to make its cyberarsenal unclassified reveals how concepts developed for military use do not easily crossover to the ‘battlefield’ of cyber ‘war’.

To attack its targets, the CIA usually requires that its implants communicate with their control programs over the internet. If CIA implants, Command & Control and Listening Post software were classified, then CIA officers could be prosecuted or dismissed for violating rules that prohibit placing classified information onto the Internet. Consequently the CIA has secretly made most of its cyber spying/war code unclassified. The U.S. government is not able to assert copyright either, due to restrictions in the U.S. Constitution. This means that cyber ‘arms’ manufactures and computer hackers can freely “pirate” these ‘weapons’ if they are obtained. The CIA has primarily had to rely on obfuscation to protect its malware secrets.

This is why offensive cyber war is something to be avoided, because any weapon you devise becomes immediately available to the enemy to be deployed against you.

If you find a bug, it should get fixed, because if you can use, so can anyone else.

The Pentagon Acquisition System in a Nut Shell

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The GAO wrote a report detailing the massive cost overrun for its over priced and under performing Littoral Combat Ship.

This information was promptly classified to prevent public disclosure:

The Pentagon office that reviews information to determine whether it’s classified has blocked publication of potentially embarrassing data on cost overruns for the first two vessels bought under the Navy’s primary Littoral Combat Ship contracts, according to a new congressional audit.

In a report examining Navy shipbuilding contracts, the U.S. Government Accountability Office deleted overrun information on two of the Littoral Combat Ships launched in late 2014 — the USS Milwaukee built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the USS Jackson built by Austal Ltd. — at the request of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review.

The GAO said the Defense Department “deemed the cost growth” on both vessels “to be sensitive but unclassified information, which is excluded from this public report. However, the percent difference” in cost for each ship “was above target cost.” Other types of ships were listed with specific data on cost increases that ranged from 4 percent to 45 percent.

“This seems to be an overly broad reading of competition-sensitive information,” said Mandy Smithberger, a director for the Project On Government Oversight’s military reform initiative. “Taxpayers are footing the bill for these overruns. They deserve to know the costs.”

We desperately need to get the military out of the business of defense acquisition, as the Swedes have with FMV.

Uh-Oh

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The Latest Fed Data

The latest financial data is out, and it appears that banks are pulling back, which would indicate that a recession may be on the horizon:

Starting to look seriously ominous:

When delinquencies start going up, banks tend to start tightening up lending standards a bit to keep them in check, which tends to slow down lending, which causes the economy to soften, resulting in a downward spiral that doesn’t end until public sector deficit spending increases sufficiently:

It looks like banks might be retrenching and delinquencies are rising.

You can click the images for larger popups.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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It appears that everyone’s second least favorite bureaucracy (Comcast is worse) is warning local police that its new pat down procedures may produce allegations of sexual assault:

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has declined to say exactly where—and how—employees will be touching air travelers as part of the more invasive physical pat-down procedure it recently ordered.

But the agency does expect some passengers to consider the examination unusual. In fact, the TSA decided to inform local police in case anyone calls to report an “abnormal” federal frisking, according to a memo from an airport trade association obtained by Bloomberg News. The physical search, for those selected to have one, is what the agency described as a more “comprehensive” screening, replacing five separate kinds of pat-downs it previously used.

The decision to alert local and airport police raises a question of just how intimate the agency’s employees may get. On its website, the TSA says employees “use the back of the hands for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body. In limited cases, additional screening involving a sensitive area pat-down with the front of the hand may be needed to determine that a threat does not exist.”

Now security screeners will use the front of their hands on a passenger in a private screening area if one of the prior screening methods indicates the presence of explosives, according to a “security notice” that the Airports Council International-North America (ACI-NA) sent its U.S. members following a March 1 conference call with TSA officials. “Due to this change, TSA asked FSDs [field security directors] to contact airport law enforcement and brief them on the procedures in case they are notified that a passenger believes a [TSA employee] has subjected them to an abnormal screening practice,” ACI wrote.

So basically, the TSA is asking local law enforcement for pre-approval to sexually assault you.

If I want to see the Mona Lisa, I am swimming to Europe.