Soda_Jerk Re- Copyright

Soda_Jerk's site is here.

From a tweet

(Sorry I've misplaced the source; pls let me know it, if you do.)

Google: Censorship Requests "Alarming"

Per HuffPo:

Google has received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011, the company said on Monday, denouncing what it said was an alarming trend.

* * * * *
Many of those requests targeted political speech, keeping up a trend Google said it has noticed since it started releasing its Transparency Report in 2010.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Chou.

In the second half of last year, Google complied with around 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of informal requests to remove content, it said.

(Emphasis supplied; more at the link.) It's even more alarming that it's reached the point that even Google finds it alarming.

Wisconson: 2004 Redux?

The excerpt below is from Wisconsin Wave; I hope you'll read the whole article, 'cuz it's a great summary of what happened in 2004.

But since I like to include visuals, I dug up the map at right. It was created in April, 2005 based on the exit poll data available at that time (click on the image for a larger version) and shows a "red shift" from the percentages reported by voters in the exit polls, which strongly favored Kerry by nearly five full points, to the percentages of the official, tabulated vote.

Per Richard Charnin, "[t]he unadjusted 2004 exit polls (state and national) were not released until about a year ago" (i.e., ca. June, 2011). According to the exit polls, out of the total respondents, 51.7% reported voting for Kerry and 47.0% reported voting for Bush (with the remainder voting for "Other"). Per the actual vote as tabulated, the final percentages were 50.7% for Bush vs. 48.3% for Kerry. This means the results shifted from Kerry being ahead by 4.7 points in the exit polls, to Bush being ahead by 2.4 points in the votes as tabulated, for a net, actual red-shift from the exit polls to the reported vote totals of 7.1 points. Can't believe you didn't hear more about it? Neither can I.

ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: The 2004 Presidential election was stolen via institutional fraud

* * * * *
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark – they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

(Emphasis supplied.) Footnotes and much more at the link. The issue of election integrity is, i.m.h.o., among the most under- and mis-reported of our time.

UPDATE: Bob Fitrakis has another great article on vote rigging, at The Free Press.

The Knowns and "Known Unknowns" in Wisconsin

What we know (see image right, from Labor's Pains):

What we don't know:

From BradBlog:

The early Exit Poll results had reportedly predicted the race between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett a virtual tie, leading media to plan for a long night tonight. A second round of Exit Polls results, however, were said to have given Walker a broader lead over Barrett. Even so, we were told, the race based on the Exit Poll data alone was still "too close to call." . . .

Of course, the raw, unadjusted Exit Polling data itself is no longer entrusted to us mere mortals. It can only be seen by members of the mainstream media, and we are simply left to trust them to report it all accurately to us or not. And when, after all, have we not been able to rely on the mainstream media to report everything accurately to us? But never mind the Exit Polls. We've got real polls, real votes, actual ballots now to tell us who won or lost. If only we'd bother to actually count them...

Instead, those ballots --- Wisconsin votes on mostly paper ballots --- are tabulated by computer optical-scan systems like the ones in Palm Beach County, FL which, in March of this year, had named several losing candidates to be the "winners". And like the ones in New York City which, in 2010, managed to toss out thousands of valid votes, including as many as 70% in one South Bronx precinct. And like the ones in Oakland County, Michigan where officials found the same machines failed to count the same ballots the same way twice in 2008. And like the ones in Leon County, FL which, in 2005, were hacked to entirely flip the results of a mock election.

In Palm Beach County, FL the failure was discovered during a state mandated post-election spot-check of 2% of the paper ballots. In New York City, it took nearly two years before the failures were discovered after the New York Daily News was able to examine the paper ballots via a public records request. In Oakland County, MI, election officials were lucky enough to discover the failure during pre-election testing. And in Leon County, FL, the hacker --- a computer security expert --- revealed the op-scan system flaw he exploited to flip the results of the election in an Emmy-nominated HBO documentary.

(Links to more info in quoted portions are omitted but can be found at BradBlog.)

And more of what we do know: Item 7 in my previous post here; see also here (and if you live in Wisconsin and don't know who Kathy Nickolaus is, see here); and see also the media-related labels below this post.

Corporate Media's Campaign Coverage ATM

From an interview of Bob Mcchesney, Prof. of Communications at U. of Illinois, at the Real News Network, by Paul Jay:

JAY: So your piece to a large extent is about political advertising, partly as it has been affected by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allows practically unlimited corporate spending on television advertising, and . . . . you got this crazy system whereby the entities that benefit most from this money in politics are the . . . mass major news organizations that get all this and billions of dollars of paid advertising, and then they report in what their – supposed to be their journalism on – mostly on poll results, poll results affected by TV buys which they're benefiting from. . . .

MCCHESNEY: . . . . You know, most democracies in the world have nothing like the United States in terms of this huge amount of money that gets spent by television ads, most of which are attacking the other candidates, not promoting your own candidate. And the reason for that is that it's driven in the United States by commercial broadcasters, the commercial television stations. And really we're talking about less than a dozen companies that own the vast majority of the stations that participate in selling TV ads. They are making a killing from this cash-drenched system. Literally between 18 and 25 percent of all the revenues of a commercial TV station this year will come from selling TV political candidate ads. And, you know, this is a profit center for them that's beyond belief. . . .

So you have – the commercial broadcasters are to campaign finance reform what the National Rifle Association is to bans on assault weapons. They are the number-one lobby to promote massive amounts of money in politics, because our electoral system in America has basically converted into a system where billionaires and corporations give tons of money to politicians, who then give most of that to commercial media to buy inane ads. And that's really what we have for our system. And the beneficiaries immediately of this are the commercial broadcasters [crosstalk]

* * * * *
It is – you know, and I think the point that's got to be understood by your viewers is that the companies that get these monopoly broadcast licenses – you have television stations or radio stations, cable systems – they get these monopoly privileges at no charge from the government in exchange for doing something in the public interest. In every major definition that's ever been given of what the public interest requirements ought to be of commercial broadcasters, number one on the list is always that they should do outstanding campaign coverage above and beyond what they would do if they were just out to make money, that basically that's where they put all their emphasis, to draw people into public life as voters, as citizens, to understand the candidates and the issues. And what we've seen is just the opposite. In the last 20 years, as the percentage of revenues going to commercial broadcast stations has gone from around 2 percent 20 years ago on average to 20 percent on average today, if not more. We've seen the amount of journalism covering campaigns on commercial television plummet. Lots of races get no coverage anymore. It's not any better, really, in newspapers. And what coverage that does remain is appalling. . . . It's like going over polls. It's sort of like reviewing whether an advertising attack ad is successful at manipulating people, not, you know, discussing how inane it is in the first place.

(Emphasis supplied.) More at the link above. (Infographic from the U. of Minnesota via The Angry Bureaucrat; click on the image for a larger version.)

That's a lot of cash going into a "hopelessly unproductive works."

How to Keep a Frog Occupied

Clay Shirky on PIPA and SOPA

Excellent overview of where these bills are coming from and what we should expect going forward, at TED.

Update on Media Ownership

Thanks to Frugal Dad for this updated chart. (For an even bigger version, click on the image to see it in a separate page, then click on it again.)

The bright spot has, of course, been the internet; but the 1% is fast closing in on controlling that as well (click on the "media consolidation" label for a bit more info on that, and assume that things have gotten worse since those posts).

UPDATE: Some additional charts re- media ownership at freepress.net, also, I believe, fairly recent.

A few headlines via DU today

("DU" meaning democraticunderground.com.)

Report: Obama top recipient of [Murdoch's] News Corp. donations

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation. (More at The Hill.)

Cenk Uygur was removed due to "political pressure"; Phil Griffin: MSNBC is "part of the establishment"

After a nearly six-month tryout for the Internet talk show host Cenk Uygur, the cable news MSNBC is preparing to instead hand its 6 p.m. time slot to the Rev. Al Sharpton. . . . Mr. Uygur, who by most accounts was well liked within MSNBC, said in an interview that he turned down the new contract because he felt Mr. Griffin had been the recipient of political pressure. In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and that “you need to act like it.” (More at The NYT.)

The "Gang of Six" deficit-cutting plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders warned, "The plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country. Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations." (More at Common Dreams.)

How to save $2 trillion

There are 23 million Americans who can't find full-time work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are 50 million Americans who can't see a doctor when they are sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

There are more than 15 million American families who owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth, according to Zillow. That's almost a third of all the families who own homes.

* * * * *
I'll be honest – the federal deficit for the year 2021 is not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, these days. But let's assume – arguendo, as they used to say back in Ancient Rome – that for some reason, there were some compelling, emergency need to work out how to cut $2 trillion from projected federal budget deficits over the next ten years.

I have an idea about how to do that. It's a very simple idea. In fact, I can sum it up in one word, with five letters: PEACE. (More from Alan Grayson at DU.)

New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included is a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Prior to the filing, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not." (More at freepress.org.)

(Originally b&w image above by Ansel Adams, Internees Reading Newspapers, Manzanar Relocation Center, from the Library of Congress.)

Wikileaks-esque Sites

As of today, LeakDirect lists 23 of them (with links).

Somebody had to be first.

Recent Assange on Facebook et Al., the Media, War, Etc.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.

* * * * *

Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is . . . we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment.

(Emphasis supplied.) More at RT.

About Anonymous

I'm still seeing a lot of confusion about what Anonymous is.

During the last several months, Anon constituencies have been most active in organizing peaceful online protests against services like MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America (which are attempting to strangle Wikileaks financially) and in supporting the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, when Mubarek shut down most Egyptians' access to the internet, Anons provided critical help to the Egyptian people by creating and publicizing alternative means of access and other communications.

Part of the problem is that there have been both overt and covert disinformation campaigns going on about the Anons (as well as about Julian Assange and Wikileaks). E.g., during the Anons' DDoS "sit-in" against MasterCard, a rumor was spread that they'd actually hacked the site and had published a bunch of individuals' MasterCard account information. This was a fabrication; in fact, someone had published a list of account numbers that bore no relation to any actual accounts, in a deliberate effort to smear the Anons.

More recently, per The Guardian: "US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda." And there's no reason to believe that the disinfo efforts uncovered so far are the only ones.

The Anons are at least as diverse as any other large group of people and certainly include pranksters. But the majority seem almost poignantly altruistic; and I believe the results of their major operations have been helpful. Before you accept as true anything about or purporting to be from Anonymous, please check it against a trusted Anonymous news source. For info about the known, "legit" operations, see AnonNews or AnonOps Communications. Other sites have existed but have been taken down; new ones continually arise; again, please use caution re- the source.

Here are a couple of legit Anonymous videos. In the first, they describe themselves and their general purposes. In the second, they describe one of their more recently-launched operations.

"Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar"

Or, Are We in Post-Reality Yet?

The full essay with links to sources and more is here. (To comment on it, please return to this post and click here or on "comments," below.)

Here's the précis:

1. A balance of power requires a balance of information. In the US and elsewhere, we've developed a serious imbalance, in that governments and big businesses know everything about us, and we know less and less about them.

2. What's new about Wikileaks is that it may be the first instance of an institutional system that confers the power that comes from the revelation of secrets on the people rather than their rulers. The potential to help restore the balance of knowledge and thus the balance of power between the oligarchs and the rest of us constitutes what I've called as the most important effect of Wikileaks' revelations.

3. The infowar strategy of exposing the secrets of corrupt regimes (which I call, the "Exposure Strategy"), as described by Julian Assange, is three-pronged:
(a) It gives us the opportunity to redress previously hidden injustices;
(b) It tends to deter injustices in the first place by heightening the likelihood and
thus the fear of exposure;
(c) It tends to weaken corrupt organizations by prompting them to tighten security, thus lowering their
own computational I.Q.

4. The counter to the Exposure Strategy is "public relations," which uses our most primitive emotions and drives in order to induce us to disregard truth and to act against our own best interests, at least up to an as-yet-not-fully-understood point. When p.r. is deployed successfully, the truth simply no longer matters; it's as if we've been immunized against it. And note that, to the extent "public relations" is effective, it neutralizes all three prongs of the Exposure Strategy; i.e.,
(a) Injustices exposed need not be investigated, prosecuted, or corrected;
(b) Future injustices are therefore not particularly deterred;
(c) Corrupt organizations need not tighten their security, and thus can avoid having to lower their own
computational I.Q.

5. How far p.r. prevails over the Exposure Strategy will provide an important indication of the extent to which we now live in Post-Reality.

6. Computers are the new guns; but an infowar is not just a war using information as ammunition; it is a struggle between old and new power structures over who will control access to information.

7. The infowar is in essence a class war over knowledge as a form of wealth. As a corollary, information is a commodity for which there are markets that are (absent effective regulation) manipulable.

8. Greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, but individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are.

9. So long as a system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's a more-than-zero-sum game; but where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, the competition among "players" devolves into a race to see who can loot the most the fastest, even if valuable resources are wasted in the process.

10. By virtue of the internet, humanity is (again) on the verge of a potential transition from a system in which powerful elites exploit the governed in a less-than-zero sum game, to a more transparent, collaborative, more-than-zero-sum game system. If the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, the growth in mankind's collective intelligence and well-being may be about to explode. But this beneficial effect could be retarded, perhaps even partially prevented, if we fail to protect the internet and facilities like Wikileaks from those who seek to control them.

More here.

The Great Dictator

Charlie Chapman was Anonymous:



The Great Dictator (1940) is a comedy film written, directed, produced by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. It was his first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film.

Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar

I'm working on an essay to put flesh on these bones, but wanted to get this out there without further delay. The essay will have lots of links to sources, plus images.

UPDATE: The guts of this post has been moved here.

WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't?

This video has been around for a few months and is long, but it's very good – I'm not aware of a better summation of many of the issues involved (I just went back to it as a source for an essay I'm working on). If you can't make it through the whole thing, my faves were the moderator, Paul Jay; Neville Roy Singham; and every bit of Daniel Ellsberg (including his comments near the end).



UPDATE 2011-03-07: Greg Mitchell celebrates his 100th day of blogging the WL story today with an article on his top Cablegate revelation picks; see also Kevin Gosztola's top 100 leaks in 100 tweets.

Colbert's True Colors

Last night, Colbert provided a hilarious recap of the HBGary v. Anonymous fiasco:

He went on to interview Glenn Greenwald, the journalist targeted by HBGary:

In case you missed it, here's a screen grab of the single frame (at 3:22 in the foregoing clip) in which Colbert is masked/unmasked (art as true lie) (@MikeRiggs, thanks for the screen grab!) Note, the frame appears shortly after he asks Glenn earnestly, "Are you Anonymous??" – which suggests the possibility that the insert was planned before the taping.

We are all Anonymous.

Baptists Claim to Discover Internet’s Purpose, to the Amusement of Anonymous

From Rawstory:

Members of Pastor Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church claim to have discovered the underlying purpose of the Internet: using it "to tell this nation & this world that your [i.e., the Anons'] destruction draws nigh."

* * * * *
"GOD HATES FAGS & LOUSY 'HACKERS!'" they declared, apparently responding to a missive from protest group "Anonymous," which was well known for becoming a persistent antagonist to another group of religious fanatics: the Church of Scientology.

(Yes, it's the same church that threatened to burn Qur'ans.) Thanks for the lulz; but while the Anons could certainly take over the Baptists' computers, the more important question – as the Baptists suggest – is, can the Anons win the p.r. battle for Americans' "hearts and minds"? (Although having Westboro on the other side should help.)

More at Rawstory; and more re- the fictitious "threat" against the Baptists at PCWorld (fundies are just so ends-justify-the-means, but w/o taking responsibility for the consequences other than the one they're fixated on).

Anonymous Hacks the Hackers

One little-mentioned aspect of the Wikileaks saga is that it appears that from the beginning, t.p.t.b. have led the hacking offensive against WL and Anonymous – i.e., the US government and its contractors started trying to hack WL and Anonymous before Anonymous began any DDoS or other efforts in support of WL.

Here's the latest volley, from the category of don't start what you can't finish, apparently written by a recently outed Anon:

On the Saturday before last, an article appeared in Financial Times in which a certain Aaron Barr, head of US federal contractor HBGary Federal, claimed to have identified by name what he termed Anonymous's "leadership." [Anonymous] responded with a press release conceding defeat. The next day, our hackers infiltrated Barr's personal data as well as that of HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary, thereafter releasing tens of thousands of company emails, as well as the very document that Barr had planned to sell to the FBI – a document that turned out to be both hilariously inaccurate and not-so-hilariously destined to get some undetermined number of innocents raided by government agents, despite them not having any connection to Anonymous whatsoever. We then released all of these materials ourselves, and in doing so revealed documents that included plans to collect information on the family members of political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as a proposal to attack WikiLeaks and key supporter Glenn Greenwald by means of a range of unethical and possibly illegal tactics now being reported by media outlets world wide.

Much more at The Guardian. (Image by Espen Moe.)