Can somebody please explain what Google did wrong?

They drove around with a car, taking photos of the public surroundings of their car (that’s how they make StreetView).  While so doing, they picked up and recorded whatever wireless signals were coming in to their car.

Now people are whining that they are being spied upon.

Does anybody really think that preventing this kind of conduct has anything to do with making our communities secure against unwanted surveillance?  Is this line of defense the best we’ve got?

If you stand at your doorway, yelling at the top of your lungs about many intimate, private details of your life, is it fair to accuse a passerby of illegal (or unethical) surveillance because they happen to be recording their surroundings with an audio recorder?

Do you think that members of congress will rally to your defense, accusing those same pedestrians of spying on you?

There are plenty of very secure options for wireless communication.  If you aren’t using any of them, that’s your prerogative.  If you abstain from secure practices while at the same time communicating about sensitive issues which you bizarrely regard as private, that’s your problem.

On the bigger issue of Google being a scary monster of information collection… Sure, I see your point.  While on one hand, the information they collect is, in every practice I know of, voluntary (search phrases, email contents on Gmail, advertising clicks, cookies, the Google Toolbar, and many other methods), it’s not any less scary that they know more than anybody else about the modern polity.

I’m not usually a defender of google or any other giant corporation – I’ve expressed my fair share of google skepticism.  In this case, I think they’ve actually done wrong by repeatedly apologizing, but I guess that’s a PR move.

Nevertheless, their amazing (and thankless!) gift two weeks ago of releasing the VP8 codec to the public domain under an open source license was perhaps the single most significant act of bolstering independent radical journalism in the (still short) history of website-based video delivery.  Still not as profound as the movement that Miro represents, I’ll grant, but big (and a LOT more expensive).

To my mind, Google gave us as $124.6 million dollar gift, and I think we have a responsibility to accept it in full if we want to take advantage of it. That means in turn taking full responsibility for our network presence.  If your upload stream includes poignant, radical, inspirational content encoded in a free codec for the world to cherish, good.  If your upload stream (and wireless connection) includes unencrypted content that you irrationally regard as private, bad.

David Keene, the President of the “American Conservative Union,” got his ass handed to him by John Ziegler on video.

Keene is a BS conservative who sold himself out to Arlen Specter and then tried to solicit Fedex to give him millions to write a positive op-ed.

Ziegler was supposed to be on a panel at the conference where this encounter occured, but got booted after putting the tough questions to Keene.

I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a Ziegler lover, but this video is absolutely sick.

Check it out:

Stacia Cosner, rockstar SSDP activist and DRCnet correspondent, brings you:

This will come as no shock to those that have been following the abhorrent practices of AstraZeneca, one of the world’s most destructive pseudoscience corporations in this blogger’s humble opinion.

The Washington Post (not my usual first news source) has produced a surprisingly decent and balanced report about a study from 1997 showing that AstraZeneca’s flagship poison which they call Seroquel, was no more effective than older ‘antipsychotics’ (industry term) and had far worse side effects.

Psychonauts the world over will lament, “Well, duh!”  This Serotonin Antagonist is designed to disable the tryptamine system in the human brain – one of the most important and study-worthy neurochemical systems.  It’s a sledgehammer of a drug, and really has no business as a therapy for people who have any possibility of recovery and leading a normal life.

As students of the psychedelic mind, it’s important that we question this toxin and all others that seek to disable the neurochemical system that we know to be connected to spirituality, insight, love, and our sense of the profound.  It is alarming that this drug is available for a medical professional to administer, but not LSD, Psilocybin, or MDMA.