Once the stuff of science fiction and high-tech crime fighting, facial recognition technology has become one of the newest tools in marketing, even though privacy concerns abound.
[...]
The Venetian resort, hotel and casino in Las Vegas has started using it on digital displays to tailor suggestions for restaurants, clubs and entertainment to passersby.
– Source: LA Times

It seems to be widely used in Japan already, Kraft Foods Inc. and Adidas announced their plan to start using the system this year to “push their products”.

Welcome to the future. Isn’t it amazing?
………. not.

Do you remember what the idea of the “USA Patriot Act” (2001) was?
To remind you, it is an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”.

Terrorism. Right.
About 1.700 delayed-notice search warrants were issued under the expanded powers of the Patriot Act from 2006–2009. Whatfor? The New York Magazine has a lovely graphic:

Please keep that in mind when they want to restrict the rights of people in your country. It is most likely that politicians aren’t quite honest with you.

(There are dozens of other examples, but I’m too tired and too upset for an extensive list. Feel free to google. A good example is the data we have for internet censorship in Australia: they established it to fight child pornography, but only less than one percent of the websites blacklisted actually contain child pornography – the list is published on wikileaks)

The riots in England continue. What is the reaction of the police, the state, the democracy?

Cameron considers to ban people from social media websites to “stop them communicating” (see also here).
China (!) applauds (see also: here).

“You know your internet censorship plans are too strict when China praises you for it.”
– zeropaid.com

Two young males (20 and 22) without criminal record are going to prison for four years. What did they do?

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, set up an “event” called Smash Down in Northwich Town for the night of 8 August on the social networking site but no one apart from the police, who were monitoring the page, turned up at the pre-arranged meeting point outside a McDonalds restaurant.
[...]
Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan [...] used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page entitled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the following morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result.
– The Guardian

Four years? Really?

There are considerations to introduce a curfew; in Birmingham pictures of rioters are being displayed on vans and driven around by police (“Dou you know this person?”).

Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaaim, Libya, stated:

“Cameron and his government must leave after the popular uprising against them and the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police [...]. Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy. These demonstrations show that the British people reject this government which is trying to impose itself through force.”

Mugabe and several politicians in Iran made similar statements:

“A member of Iran’s parliament, Hossein Ebrahimi, told the semi-official Fars news agency that Britain should allow a delegation of human rights monitors to examine the situation.”

Rioting and stealing and looting is wrong. But there are reasons why you have thousands of people in the streets in England. Acting like China or Libya now will not solve problems, only create more.

EDIT: added the tag “dystopia” to this blog.

The foundation “Bureau of Investigative Journalism” in London has evaluated over 2.000 sources (newspaper stories, leaked embassy documents, statements by lawyers, eye-witnesses and members of NGOs) regarding the usage of unmanned drones by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2004 and 2011.

They come to the conclusion that within this period of time, at least 291 attacks took place, and at least 2.500 people were killed by these drones (and I don’t have to educate you about the concept of assassination in a modern, democratic state). To make things worse, at least 385 of the victims are proven to be civilians, at least 168 of them children. Furthermore. at least 1.100 people have been injured.

Most of these attacks actually took place under the presidency of Barack Obama – 236 out of 291. That is, on average, one each four days.
Welcome to the future.

CIA officials obviously criticised the study. Unspecifically (you are a bad, bad study!), and more importantly, before it was finished/published.

People elect other people and entrust them with the power to manage state affairs for them. Trust is the key.

Rasmussenreports conducts political polls on a regular basis. These are the results of the latest study:

[...] 46% of Likely U.S. Voters now view most members of Congress as corrupt. Just 29% think most members are not corrupt, and another 25% are not sure.

Similarly, [...] 85% of voters think most members of Congress are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping other people. [...] Only seven percent (7%) believe most of the legislators are more interested in helping others.

[...] Just six percent (6%) of voters now rate Congress’ performance as good or excellent. Sixty-one percent (61%) think the national legislators are doing a poor job.

52% of voters said most members of Congress get reelected not because they do a good job representing the folks at home but because election rules are rigged to their benefit. Only 17% felt incumbents get reelected because they do a good job representing their constituents, while 31% were undecided.

I’m not a person for revolutions. But do people actually realize what this means?

(N = 1.000, the margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence)

“My booby prize for sheer spinelessness goes to the 60 percent of American high school biology teachers who, according to a survey published earlier this year, take a neutral stance on evolution in their classrooms.”

What is this all about? Susan Jacoby writes in the Washington Post National about a study published in the January 28 issue of Science, authored by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State.

This study is concerned with a National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. The results:

“Only 28 percent of public high school biology instructors consistently use lesson plans, recommended by scientific organizations, that present evolution as the unifying theme linking different areas of biology. About 13 percent of teachers explicitly teach creationism or intelligent design in defiance of federal court decisions. The other 60 percent—the spineless majority—try to avoid controversy, often by substituting a phrase like ‘changes over time’ for the taboo E-word.”

The New York Times also offers an opinion about the Survey.

Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota:

“With 15 to 20 percent of biology teachers teaching creationism [...] this is the biggest failure in science education. There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology. [...] If they weren’t going to teach real biology, they shouldn’t have become biology teachers.”

To understand the significance of this, keep in mind that teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts over the last ten years.

Why the debate came up (once again) in Louisiana is explained on the website of the National Center for Science Education:

Despite the overwhelming support for SB 70 from scientific and educational organizations around the state and across the country, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee voted 5-1 to shelve the bill on May 26, 2011, according to a blogger for the Baton Rouge Advocate (May 26, 2011). If enacted, SB 70 would have repealed Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008. As Barbara Forrest recently explained in a column for Louisiana Progress (May 18, 2011), the LSEA “was promoted only by creationists. Neither parents, nor science teachers, nor scientists requested it. No one wanted it except the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a religious organization that lobbies aggressively for its regressive agenda, and the Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think tank in Seattle, Washington, that couldn’t care less about Louisiana children.”

At least once a week we have news from the US that are not very encouraging. Just recent disappointments have been the assassination of an unarmed terrorist who had valuable information in a a foreign country that was not asked for permission to carry out this operation, another one Guantanamo Bay.

Obama did promise to shut it down, about 3 years ago. Nothing has happened.

Now the next big disappointment is about to happen: the Patriot Act is going to be extended. The New York Times sums it up nicely:

“Congress overwhelmingly passed the original Patriot Act in October 2001. Over time, for those who believed that government power had expanded too far, the act became a symbol of eroding civil liberties and privacy rights.”

UPDATE:
I’m not sure how adequate this is, but it seems to be a summary of Obamas promises and statements, checked for truth (PolitiFact: Obameter).

Daniel Suarez, an American information technology consultant, followed up his first book “Daemon” (selfpublished 2006, published 2009 by Dutton; I wrote about it two weeks ago) with “FreedomTM”.

The first book is brilliant fiction in the sense that Suarez takes several things that exist in our world and puts them together in a way nobody else seems to have thought about before.
The second book “FreedomTM” continues with his ideas, but gains a new quality because Suarez’ ideas for a modern and truely democratic civilization are stated much more explicitly now.

Content
The Daemon, a computer program Matthew Sobol released when he died to take over the corporate world, has infested many companies. Whereas the fight between the Daemon and our world and the way the Daemon functions were portrayed in “Daemon”, now the US secret services decide to abuse the daemon for their own good, try to hack their way into it and manipulate it. One of the protagonists on this side is The Major:

“Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly …”

On the other side, we have farmers, hackers, our old friend Pete Sebeck and many others – members of the so-called “darknet”, a community that is hosted by the daemon. What was written between the lines in the first book is now written very explicitly in statements of characters. Suarez’ critique of the modern, globalised world starts before the book starts, with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt (1906):

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befout the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statemanship of the day.”

The critique continues.
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