Month: May 2014

In January, the Obama
administration put together a “working group” to analyze how huge
swaths of Americans’ data are being gathered and stored and what
sort of privacy issues need to be addressed. The group’s report was
just released this week

Before you ask: No, it’s not about the National Security Agency
(NSA) sweeping up huge amounts of metadata from phone and online
communications by Americans, even though that’s the big data
conversation many Americans want to have right now. Such data
gathering is vaguely mentioned in the full report, but primarily
the
85-page study (pdf) is about consumer privacy in the private
tech sector and citizen privacy in other aspects of government data
collection. So, pretty much everything except NSA.

Here’s the list of
final policy recommendations. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but
take note of how many appear to expand the power and reach of
government authority:

• Advance the Consumer Privacy Bill of
  Rights because consumers deserve clear, understandable,
  reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in
  the big data era.
• Pass National Data Breach Legislation that
  provides for a single national data breach standard, along the
  lines of the Administration’s 2011 Cybersecurity legislative
  proposal.
• Extend Privacy Protections to non-U.S. Persons
  because privacy is a worldwide value that should be reflected in
  how the federal government handles personally identifiable
  information from non-U.S. citizens.
• Ensure Data Collected on Students in School is used for
  Educational Purposes to drive better learning outcomes
  while protecting students against their data being shared or used
  inappropriately.
• Expand Technical Expertise to Stop
  Discrimination because the federal government should build
  the technical expertise to be able to identify practices and
  outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a
  discriminatory impact on protected classes.
• Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy
  Act to ensure the standard of protection for online,
  digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical
  world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left
  unread or over a certain age.

The “Consumer
Privacy Bill of Rights” mentioned (pdf) calls for more
transparency about online company privacy policies for users but
wants to do so by expanding the power of the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) to monitor consumer website behavior, including
creating a bureaucratic federal process for submitting site codes
of conduct for federal review. But, hey, the summary proposes a
“reasonable” 180-day turnaround on these reviews. No doubt it won’t
be a burden for anybody. The federal government has a good
reputation for meeting deadlines, right?

As for the White House’s desire to find ways to prevent big data
from being used for discriminatory purposes, the problem is that
currently at least one federal agency, the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC), has been making fools of itself and
the administration (and wasting taxpayer dollars) going after
misguided, flimsy cases. They’ve been all but laughed out of the
courtroom for accusing companies of discrimination for using
background and credit checks as part of their hiring process.
Walter Olson, of the Cato Institute and Overlawyered, has a roundup
of some of the EEOC’s lows here.

On the plus side, it’s good that they’re calling for reform of
the archaic e-mail search policy. Current law allows authorities to
get access to stored e-mails older than 180 days with just a
subpoena, not a warrant.

But still, on the whole, the proposal looks like federal
agencies looking for more opportunities to regulate and pass more
rules controlling private commerce, and to use their authority to
come down like a ton of bricks on anybody who can’t keep up with
the many demands. And thus government
compliance costs will gobble up another piece of the budget
pie.

I would also point out that on the same day these
recommendations were released, The Washington Post
reported that several major tech companies such as Google,
Facebook, and Apple were going to start informing their customers

when the government subpoenas their data rather than keeping
quiet about it. The Department of Justice objected strenuously to
this new move toward transparency. The government is a terrible
guardian of our privacy.

The California Agricultural Labor Relations
Board, whose objective enshrined in the labor code is to ensure
“the right of agricultural employees to full freedom of
association, self-organization, and designation of representatives
of their own choosing,” is doing no such thing, according to Steven
Greenhut. The board gave short-shrift to about 50 workers who
filled the board’s auditorium last Tuesday during its public
meeting. The assembled farmworkers were treated politely but their
long-standing concerns—that they are being denied the right to
select their own labor representatives—have been ignored. Neither
the governor nor any legislative leaders have been there to help
them.

View this article.

Residents of most states
take for granted the ability to buy beer and wine at the grocery
store. That has been possible in every state where I’ve lived, with
the exception of the one where I was born: Pennsylvania, where
packaged wine and distilled spirits can be purchased only from a
state monopoly and beer can be purchased only from distributors (if
you are willing to buy a whole case) or in bars and restaurants (a
loophole that some grocery stores, with clearance from the
Pennsylvania Supreme Court, have used
to sell their customers beer). An anti-privatization ad sponsored by the
UFCW, which represents employees of the state liquor monopoly,
portrays this bizarre situation as perfectly natural, faulting
“Harrisburg politicians” who “want to give big companies the
right to sell beer and wine in supermarkets, big box
stores, even gas stations.” The union puts its anti-privatization
propaganda into the mouths of two mothers sitting on a park bench
at a playground. The best moment may be when a little girl scampers
over to her mother and climbs onto her lap, whereupon the woman
observes that “it only takes a little bit of greed to kill a
child,” then shakes her head sorrowfully. If you watch only one
accidentally comical political commercial this week, it should be

this one.

How does Mom No. 1 know that “the same kind of law in North
Carolina is killing one child every week”? According to
the story cited in
the ad, that is the average number of minors killed by “underage
drinking-related accidents” in North Carolina each week.
Clearly, privatization is to blame—if you assume that no one under
21 drinks in states with liquor monopolies. Given the motivation
for the ad, which is aimed at preserving phony-baloney jobs, Mom
No. 2 is on firmer ground when she remarks that “it’s about greed,
pure and simple.”

Another UFCW ad (below)
is more despicable than comical, showing a little girl laying a
flower on her father’s coffin as she reflects on how “a drunk
driver took your life and changed mine forever.” The narrator urges
viewers to “tell your state senator to say no to liquor
privatization,” because “we don’t want other children to lose their
parents.”

You can tell South Dakota Rep.
Steve Hickey (R-Sioux Falls) is quite proud of the analogy he made
in a recent anti–anal sex screed, titled “A One Way Alley for the
Garbage Truck.” Edgy! After submitting the letter to the Argus
Leader, South Dakota’s largest newspaper,
Hickey also posted it to Facebook. “We’ll see if they reprint
it,” he wrote. “Kristen hates the title. You probably will too.
Doubt they use it…”

And yet, clearly, he found the garbage truck comparison just too
good to pass up. He’s also sure that more doctors would speak out
against homosexuality if they didn’t feel “silenced and
intimidated.” 

“Certainly there are board-certified doctors in our state who
will attest to what seems self-evident to so many: gay sex is not
good for the body or mind. Pardon a crude comparison but regarding
men with men, we are talking about a one-way alley meant only for
the garbage truck to go down. Frankly, I’d question the judgment of
doctor who says it’s all fine.”

Frankly, I’d question the judgment of a lawmaker who refers to
his anus as an alley and his poop as a garbage truck. But different
strokes… 

Hickey goes on to tell South Dakota doctors that it’s time “to
come out of the closet and give your professional opinion on this
matter like you capably and responsibly do on all the others.” This
belies perhaps the most amazing thing about Hickey’s letter—he is
utterly convinced that doctors must agree with him, and the only
reason we hear that “eating at McDonald’s will kill us but the gay
lifestyle” won’t is because no one’s properly encouraged them in a
strongly worded letter-to-the-editor yet.

“Truth be told it seems self-evident the list of side effects
would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis
commercial,” writes Hickey. Translation: Come on, guys, butt
sex has to be more dangerous than my boner meds! 

After a few paragraphs lamenting the existence of transgender
teens, Hickey concludes by “issu(ing) a call to the medical and
psychological communities and associations to weigh in publicly and
timely on the matter of homosexuality and the human body, psyche
and family, particular kids.” Here,

Rep. Hickey, LMGTFY…

Six years ago, I wrote a
story about a satire that had been suppressed in the Soviet
Union and rediscovered many decades later. Here’s how the article
opened:

At some point in our lives, we’ve all waited in a
line for so long that time seemed to stand still. In My
Grandmother, a strange and wonderful silent comedy made in
Soviet Georgia in 1929, this happens literally: As a “notorious
idler and bureaucrat” cools his heels, everything around him slows
to a crawl and finally freezes altogether.

But all is not lost. From atop a mountain, a member of “the Youth
Communist League, our junior cavalry” hurls an enormous pen down
the slope and, miraculously, into the office, where it pierces the
bureaucrat’s chest, removes him from his job, and restarts the
clock. For the rest of the movie, our now-unemployed protagonist
will search for an older apparatchik willing to be his patron and
to find him a new post. Along the way, there will be no shortage of
surreal sequences, including a statue that comes to life and a
cartoon that crawls out of the newspaper; there’s also slapstick
aplenty—the central character is modeled on the American comedian
Harold Lloyd—and sets inspired by expressionist and constructivist
art.

But what’s especially striking is that Youth Communist cavalry. At
a time when Stalin was imposing harsh new constraints on Soviet
cinema, the boy’s intervention was clearly parody, not propaganda.
If you doubt that, consider a scene later in the movie, when our
antihero, applying for another job, is unable to speak to the
bureaucrat behind the desk because the latter keeps disappearing
and being replaced by someone new. “Directors are changed,” the
narration informs us. “The job remains.”

Now that we’re in an age when it feels like every scrap of
footage can be found on the Internet somewhere, I thought I’d check
to see if anyone had posted My Grandmother online. And
sure enough, the movie is out there, though YouTube unfortunately
won’t let me embed it; to see it, you can follow this link.

In that old article, I mentioned that My Grandmother‘s
mix of slapstick, surrealism, and anti-bureaucratic satire brings
two other movies to mind: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Death of a
Bureaucrat and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. And since the
great Bob Hoskins died this week, I thought I’d top off this post
with a scene from Brazil—one where Hoskins plays a plumber
employed by a totalitarian bureaucracy:

While I’m at it: I can’t say Hoskins’ final scene in The
Long Good Friday has anything to do with My
Grandmother, but damn he’s good in it. If you haven’t seen
that movie, rent or stream it this weekend; it’s one of the best
gangster films I’ve ever watched. If you have seen it,
take a moment to absorb this part again:

Requiescat in pace.