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.

I have emailed Mercy for Animals, the publisher of the video, asking for the names of people involved.

UPDATE:One of those featured in the video is Billy Joe Gregg Jr., who has been charged with 12 counts of animal cruelty. Each carries a measly maximum sentence of 90 days in jail. I can’t find a phone number for this scumbag, but if somebody does, please post it so we can be sure to let him know how we feel.

Several of “the usual suspects,” including myself, spoke. There’s no doubt, though, that Eric Sterling stole the show. I have seen him speak 10+ times, and he is one of the best and most engaging public speakers I have ever been exposed to. Fortunately my camera was rolling:

….now before you jump on me about the “order of magnitude” comment with encryption – I fully realize that with increasing strength that decryption becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult, but as this was not a technology conference, I didn’t want to belabor the point.

This is one of the best sit-in videos this year.

That said, I understood how and why many of my intelligent friends were inspired by this man’s powerful words.

Finally, now, a year after the election, people are really realizing that Obama is, at least in the worst ways, as bad or worse than Dubya Bush was.

But why? Obama’s support for warrantless wiretapping, torture, wars of aggression, bank bailouts, and all the rest of this dreadful administration’s crimes are scarcely printed in the New York Times or the Washington Post. When a tiny flashlight is shone on one corner or another of these facts, the context is always “The Obama Administration, continuing the Bush Administration’s policy of….” as if their hands are tied or as if they are somehow less culpable for the murder and torture that they commit each day.

One source, however, has consistently, without fail, continued to break the news and place it in a wide, intelligent context each and every time Obama tightens the vice-grip of totalitarianism that people more readily associated with Dick Cheney. That source is Salon.com and particularly Glenn Greenwald’s column on Salon.

Today, Greenwald writes an awesome expose on Obama’s use of the “State Secrets” privilege to cover up the shadowy wings of the White House, one of the many skills he has learned and improved upon from his predecessor.

Of course the (captial-R) Republican Party has been a miserable failure in representing (small-r) republican views in my lifetime, so I’m not sure why in this instance I expect anything more.

The problem is that in this instance, the statist / socialist perspective is fundamentally correct about one thing: The health care system of the United States is poorly designed for efficiency and efficacy as a system.

Imagine, if the current system were invented as a full system, the kind of conversation leading to its invention: “Let’s base health coverage around employment status – most of the people who are employed can have a product we’ll call “insurance” but that will really be a buffet-style hodgepodge of health services. We’ll have a whole slew of different plans and practices so as to avoid large-scale negotiation for the benefit of the consumer. People who are self-employed or not-employed will be kinda screwed, as will those who happen to be sick the day before they get a job – pre-existing conditions are a liability, you know. People who are young and destitute or people who are over a particular arbitrary age will be covered by a mix of their home state government and the federal government. All the while, no solid block of informed consumers will exist to challenge the status quo as a market force.”

Now I realize that’s an oversimplification, but my point is that, while pretty much everybody sees the need for a massive change to the health care system, only the statist / socialist perspective has risen up with a really great sounding alternative:

“Every single person will be required to pay into a collective hold, for which on their behalf a single entity will negotiate the best prices and practices. Each person then will be entitled to coverage with a fraction of a percent of the system’s resources leaving as overhead or profit.”

It’s not hard to understand how a person can find this alternative compelling!

Making it even more difficult to resist, proponents are able to point to many nation-states around the world where such systems are deployed effectively and to the delight of the citizenry.

Now, on the other hand, look at the narrative of reform offered by the anarchist / republican perspective. I don’t know of one. I can’t think of one! Instead, we merely point out the many (and scary) inevitable pitfalls of asking the most powerful military hegemon in history to take care of our health. We sound terribly academic and disconnected, and we offer no systemic perspective on what our ideal system will look like.

This is the problem.

Thus, henceforth, I’m suggesting that we stop or at least curtail all criticism of the current “reform” proposals. We take Obama (and the curious word “Obamacare”) out of our lexicon and out of our cross-hairs. Instead we relentlessly espouse our vision for taking care of people – all people – without the heavy hand of government.

I don’t know all the details, but just to get us started, it goes something like this:

We start by ending all criminal liability for the act of putting anything into one’s own body. We restore and strengthen the notion that, across the system, each person is the sole owner and operator of their own biological organism.

We restore and re-examine the role of plant-based medicines, making coca, poppy, hemp, and all other plants legal to cultivate.

We repeal those laws which create the artificial concept of “intellectual property,” at least as far as psychoactive compounds are concerned. We thus end government protection of pharmaceutical companies who inflate their prices by thousands of percent. Medicines of all kinds become affordable again, and lo and behold! More, rather than fewer, enterprising young scientists become interested in open source medicine.

We create a rich, comfortable, and easy-to-use wiki-like environment, in which people can list the symptoms of any malady from which they may be suffering. They can also list the remedies which have helped them in the past, and together, as a community, we can create a massive database of trends for all sorts of diseases.

In this online environment, people in similar biological conditions can talk to one another in a live environment and have occasional support meetings and form consumer support-and-wellness groups.

Practitioners of medicine, both conventional and alternative, can advertise their services and be hired as advisors by these support groups, being paid directly instead of through a convoluted coverage system. If, for example, they want to make $50 / hour, they can charge a 10-person group $10 each for a two-hour session, and answer all of their questions.

The concept of “insurance” can be re-introduced and distinguished from buffet-style comprehensive coverage. Most people will likely opt-out of insurance, realizing that the act of purchasing insurance is actually a bet that they will become sick or die sooner rather than later. On the other hand, some will purchase policies to cover unlikely catastrophic events. Such insurance will be very cheap.

People can once again choose for themselves which tests and procedures are important, and the incentive structure will be one of conservation, as they’ll have to pay for each one.

As overhead and systemic costs are reduced, people who currently find themselves spending outrageous amounts on “coverage” for themselves, their families, and their employees can instead invest in medical centers or charities in their communities which can care for people who truly need complicated and expensive procedures but can’t pay for them.

Support groups can also use their presence to help doctors help the poor. In the example above, if each participant pays $11 for the session, the doctor will have an extra $10. Assuming the doctor is willing to work for half price for charity, she needs to administer only five such sessions a week in order to administer a free one for people who cannot afford the $10 fee. Surgeons can work the same way, albeit on a larger scale, just as they did before government regulation got us into the mess we are in today.

Some doctors and other medical professionals will make long-lasting relationships and be able to charge a bit more money as they get older and more trusted. Some of them will make very good money practicing their art, and that’s OK. In fact, that’s great. Young people will again have a reason to follow their passion for caring about people instead of studying pharmaceutical patent law or insurance adjustment expediting.

Of course none of us has all the answers, but I think that most people have never stopped to think about what kind of alternative the republican / anarchist perspective has to offer in the health care debate. It’s time to change that.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, the open-source movement and the progress of technology make all of these ideas (and lots of even more innovate ideas!) not only possible, but inevitable. So it’s time for us to become optimistic and take some pride in our ability to help each other and keep each other well.

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:

Now, without any legislative backing or public hearings, the New York State Health Commissioner has made an “emergency executive order” demanding that Jessica, her mother, and every other medical service professional to be vaccinated with both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccines.  If they decline to allow this, they’ll lose their jobs.

Remember, these are not government employees.  They are private citizens who have worked hard to build a career around helping people be healthy.  They know better than anyone the risks of being, or declining to be, injected with swine flu vaccine.

A recent small protest on the steps of the New York State Capitol in Albany got a bit of news attention, with local TV coverage,

Later, a lawsuit filed got more coverage, and the decision of a New York State judge got even more coverage when he issued a restraining order against the State, preventing it from vaccinating people until a hearing is held.  The hearing is scheduled to begin October 30.

Many health care professionals have said they’ll be fired rather than allow themselves to be injected with the vaccine.  As with all flu vaccines, it’s quite risky.  In addition to the typical risks, though, the plaintiffs say that this vaccine was rushed to market hastily and has already caused more sickness than usual.

Does anybody have the relevant documents?  I’m looking for, but cannot find:

• The text of the mandate
• The brief filed by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the response, if any, from the state
• The restraining order
• Any kind of press release from the State defending the mandate

I have started a facebook group.  Please invite!