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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Still Trust Them? Now the Government Is Tracking You So It Can Steal Your Car

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Ted Rall

According to federal government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, federal and local law enforcement agencies are using incredibly sneaky technology to track you as you drive the nation’s streets and highways. Their goal? Stealing your car.

This latest scandal — a mash-up of privacy violations on a wide NSA-like scale, corrupt asset forfeiture programs that make a mockery of the U.S. as a nation that respects private property rights, and brazen targeting of lawful gun owners — is a perfect political storm, an outrage that ought to bring liberals, libertarians and conservatives together in an alliance of freedom-loving people against an out-of-control government.

Given the collective shrug elicited by the Edward Snowden revelations, however, expecting a big reaction may be unrealistic.

In the shell of a nut: the ACLU has learned that the DEA and local police departments are scanning every motorist’s license plate as they drive down American streets. The NYPD and LAPD have each already collected hundreds of millions of time- and place-tagged license plate scans. One private security corporation sells its composite list of 2 billion scans to any police department or government agency that wants it. The Department of Homeland Security is teaming up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build and maintain a national database of license plate data to be shared with other parts of the U.S. security state apparatus.

Aggregated and analyzed, license plate tracking data forms a sophisticated model of your, and my, and everyone else’s habits, associations, shopping habits, friendships, and other activities. If you visit a porn store, they know — and their algorithms can predict when you’ll go again. But blackmail is not what’s on the cops’ minds…not for now, anyway.

They want your cash.

“Asset forfeiture” programs have become big business for law enforcement. Relying on dubious interpretations of the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, American police agencies are taking in billions of dollars a year from people they arrest. “Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing,” according to The Washington Post.

Total take: $5.3 billion.

If you think they’re confiscating the mounds of coke and machine guns they find in a drug kingpin’s trunk, think again. Pulled over for DUI? They take your car, sell it at auction and pocket the proceeds, or keep it for the cops’ own use. That’s on top of whatever jail time and fine the judge hands you if you get convicted.

Even if you’re found not guilty, they keep your car. And/or your cash. And/or jewelry. Anything valuable. Anything they want.

“No criminal charges are necessary for such seizures, and under federal and state laws, authorities may keep most or all seized assets even in the absence of formal charges. Countless innocent Americans have been victimized by what critics call legalized government theft,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “Police have made cash seizures worth almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others without search warrants or indictments since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,” says the Post. “Police spent the seizure proceeds with little oversight, in some cases buying luxury cars, high-powered weapons and military-grade gear such as armored cars.”

            Talk about un-American: these renegade robber-cops are traitors.

Police have been so pleased with the money and other goodies they nab through asset forfeiture programs that they send officers to seminars that teach them how to maximize their take. Some victims have complained, and successfully proven in court, that they were targeted and entrapped by police whose motivation to detain and arrest them was solely to steal their possessions — but it’s expensive and time-consuming.

Among the money-making schemes cooked up by greedy cops was a 2009 plan by the DEA to “work closely” with officials of the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) “in attacking the guns going to [redacted by government censors] and the gun shows, to include programs/operation with LPRs [license plate readers] at the gun shows.”

But the DEA and ATF didn’t care about gun violence. “One internal email acknowledged that the tracking program’s primary purpose is civil asset forfeiture,” the Journal reports. They planned to set-up checkpoints around gun shows, search attendees’ cars using the pretext of a traffic stop, and arrest drivers on whatever charge they can come up with — some legit, others ginned up, in some cases no indictment at all — as an excuse to take their money and their cars. Which, even if they beat the rap, the cops get to keep.

Note to self: carry $5 in cash, use a debit card.

The UK Guardian reports: “According to DEA documents, the primary goal of the program was to seize cars, cash and other assets belonging to criminals. However, the [license plate reader] database’s expansion ‘throughout the United States,’ as one email put it, also widened law enforcers’ capacity for asset forfeiture.”

“It’s deeply concerning and creepy,” lawyer Clark Neily of the libertarian Institute for Justice told the newspaper. “We’re Americans. We drive a lot.”

It is also disgusting, cause for the immediate firing of every “law enforcement” official who has overseen an asset forfeiture program, and a perfect illustration of why only an idiot would trust the government.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

Pre Ripping Apart the State of the Union Address

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Ted Rall

Originally published at ANewDomain.net:

If you’re in a hurry, I’ll skip straight to the biggest reason not to watch President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address: these things are always hyped, yet they are never good. Think about it. Year after year, pundits tell you to expect big things from the SOTU, but we’re always disappointed.

This is the political version of Lucy offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown so he can kick it. Okay, you can go wash the car or whatever.

Still here? Okay, here’s another reason to skip the so-called big speech: Obama is the lamest of all lame ducks, so nothing he says really matters anyway. He’s got two years to go, but really he’s got less than one year left because the presidential election campaign season begins this September. And there’s no way he’s going to get much traction with a Republican Senate and a Republican House, both of which hate him to various degrees.

If you’re still reading, you’re like me — the kind of political junkie who will watch tomorrow night’s SOTU out of pure multiple-car-pile-up voyeurism.

Like the Grammys.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Senior Obama political advisor Dan Pfeiffer says the theme of the speech will be jobs: “How we make paychecks go farther right now; how we create more good-paying jobs right now; and how do we give people the skills they need to get those high-paying jobs.”

Well, ain’t that sweet.

Correctly if I’m wrong, but as I recall, Pfeiffer’s boss came into office in the middle of the great economic meltdown of 2009, when America was shedding 800,000 jobs a month. Back then, people like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (and, ahem, moi) suggested that the government ought to step in with a WPA-style jobs program that would have directly employed millions of Americans to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure and build things like national high-speed rail. Rather than bail out Main Street, however, the White House chose to bail out their buddies on Wall Street. As a result, millions of people lost their homes, millions more lost their jobs, and workforce participation has plummeted, putting a serious crimp on the mini recovery that appears to have begun late last year.

In short, better late than never. Or maybe it’s the same exact thing, since whatever chance there was of cooperation with Congress evaporated with the results of the 2014 midterms.

Faced with low expectations of progress, Obama’s speechwriters faced a choice between aiming high – setting the bar for what Democrats favor and will be fighting for in 2016 – and low, asking for legislation so modest in scope yet popular that Republicans would look bad for refusing. Instead, they opted for a third choice: proposals so ridiculously unambitious that Republicans can ignore them because no one will care whether they pass or not.

For example, Obama will ask Congress – though probably not loudly – to require employers to provide workers with seven paid sick days a year. Given the fact that the United States and Papua New Guinea are the only two countries in the world that don’t guarantee paid sick days – that’s right, Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea do — you’d think that this would be the sort of thing that even pro-business Republicans could get behind, and they could if the winds were in their faces rather than at their backs.

The same thing is true about his so-called plan – I say so-called because if it was really a plan, it should have been announced years ago – to provide free community college tuition to students who attended at least half-time and kept their grades up. Sure would’ve been a good idea if he’d been willing to spend some political capital on it to make it happen.

This is what has been so frustrating about this president. Time was the one thing he didn’t have to waste, yet he has been casually golfing his way through both his terms as the income and wealth gaps continue to widen.  Imagine what he could have accomplished had he acted immediately upon taking office in 2009, when he enjoyed control of both houses of Congress, sky-high opinion polls, and the adoration of the media.

Now it’s way past way too late. At this point, it’s annoying to watch him pretend to try to wake up.

The Government’s Drive to Criminalize Driving While Talking

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Ted Rall

Welcome to the dawning of the age of DWT — the criminalization of “driving while talking.”

For the first time, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued a formal recommendation calling for states to prohibit the use of cellular phones while driving.

Yes, that’s right. The board even wants to ban mobile phone use while using hands-free devices like earbuds and those fancy cars that let you pick up the phone through the dash using Bluetooth, which are currently viewed as less likely to distract drivers.

Texting while driving

The NTSB doesn’t have legal authority to enforce its proposed phone-use ban, but its recommendations are taken seriously by state regulators and legislators.

“There is a large body of evidence showing that talking on a phone, whether hand-held or hands-free, impairs driving and increases your risk of having a crash,” Anne McCartt, SVP for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, told The Huffington Post.

Automobile safety experts agree that distracted driving is behind a growing portion of the accident rate, which in general is falling.

Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, co-authored a test of “the performance of drivers not engaged in conversation and drivers who could hear someone talking to them through headphones. Drivers took the simulator tests inside an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine that recorded images of changes in their brains while driving, including which areas of the brain were used for driving. The amount of the brain devoted to driving was 37 percent less in drivers who could hear someone talking to them than for drivers not using cellphones.”

“The human mind can multitask, but each task is performed with less brain power and lower proficiency,” Just explained.

The NTSB says 18 percent of automobile fatalities are caused by distracted driving (including causes other than phones).

Other distractions, such as children and other passengers in the vehicle, are viewed to be relatively neutral from a traffic safety standpoint. You might be distracted by your screaming kids, but one of them might also point out the potential danger that you might otherwise have missed.

Forty percent of Americans told the National Highway Administration they don’t think that hands-free driving is dangerous. But if you’re like me, and you’re honest with yourself, you have to know that you have more close calls when you text or talk on the phone as you drive.

Still, it’s hard to know where to come down on this question of freedom versus safety. Horror novelist Stephen King was nearly killed by a guy distracted by his dog, but it sure would be sad to mandate that dogs be locked in their cages throughout a drive.

What’s certain is that, if a ban on driving while talking becomes law, it will have significant cultural and economic implications.

A Return to Disconnection

In their early days, cellular phones were more of a way for you to call someone else than for you to be reachable. There were many places where they simply didn’t work: inside buildings, out in the sticks, even in the middle of some cities.

Starting in the 1990s for most Americans, the digital revolution has seen connectivity increased to the point that it is easy to foresee a time when everyone would become available to everyone all the time. Cellular signals have spread into remote rural areas, including national parks, and even into subways. The FAA is currently considering a proposal to allow the use of cellular phones on airplanes.

One place where cellular phones have been popular has been behind the wheel of an automobile. Getting stuck in traffic isn’t as bad if you know you can make a few important calls while you’re sitting there sucking up the exhaust fumes. (Since everyone else is doing the same thing, of course, their reaction times aren’t as great, which means that traffic jams are bigger and longer, but whatever.)

There’s just no denying the appeal of using time that used to be close to a total waste — transportation from point A to point B — to make a call. Not to mention the ability to check Google Maps for a quicker route around that jam, and to text your friend to tell him that you’re running late.

If the NTSB gets its way, all that will be over. Cops will have devices that allow them to track the use of cell phones from moving cars, and though some people will break the law, for most the only interaction you’ll have is with your radio or fellow passengers — if, of course, it’s enforced.

It’s obviously impossible to quantify the cost to business, but I have to think it would be high.

On the other hand, the glory days of unavailability would return. Don’t feel like picking up a call? You can always tell your boss you were stuck in traffic. It would have been illegal for you to talk to them.

Mothers Against Talk Driving?

Talkers won’t be demonized as badly as drinkers, but the media and politicians will declare those who break laws against using cell phones while driving to be irresponsible buttholes, who don’t care if they kill your kid so they can pick up a pizza without waiting for it to be made. There will be ad campaigns, sad-eyed dead children and of course high fines, prison sentences and asset forfeiture.

Trains and Planes Instead?

Some people may decide to switch to alternative forms of transportation where they are still allowed to use their phones in transit. For many people, especially those conducting business during daytime hours, the desire for conductivity will trump all other considerations.

Which might be good — that means less traffic on the roads.

Reverse Darwinism

Experts say that we should expect fewer accidents as a result of a cell ban, which would obviously be great, but what about culling the herd? What if we end up with more, stupider people?

Just kidding.

On Charlie Hebdo and the Real Free Speech Weenies

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Ted Rall

Originally published at ANewDomain.net:

Not everyone believes in free speech.

I’m not talking about those on the authoritarian right. No one expects them to stand up for the right to dissent. They are ideologically consistent; for them, the rights of the individual always, a distant second to the prerogatives of the state and its incessant campaign to maintain the status quo that keeps them in power.

Today I’m pointing to those – liberals, progressives, left libertarians – who purport to support freedom of expression, and must be seen to do so in order to continue to identify as members of the antiauthoritarian left, but only state their defense of press and personal freedom with reservations.

As in: “Andres Serrano has the right to soak a crucifix in urine, but I would never do anything like that cuz I’m, like, awesomely sensitive.”

Secretary of State John Kerry condemned last week’s mass shooting at Charlie Hebdo‘s offices in Paris — yet found it necessary to introduce the qualifier “whatever you think of this magazine…”

What he or you or I think about the editorial cartoon content of Charlie Hebdo pre- or post-shooting ought to be irrelevant. Either you support freedom of expression, or you don’t.

Even when it is offensive.

Even when it is racist.

Even when it is gross.

Especially when it makes us uncomfortable. (For a recent example of something that triggers my censorship impulse, check out this reactionary response by an Australian cartoonist to the Paris massacre. Really gross. Australian police thought Islamists might think so too, because they turned up at the artist’s house to offer protection.)

Having been at the center of cartoon controversies, I am well familiar with the standard issue liberal “well, I wouldn’t draw anything that disgusting about our soldiers, firefighters, 9/11 widows, president, but Rall clearly has the legal right to do it – if he can get someone to print it” talking point. What these weak sisters conveniently forget is that, even while they’re kind of sort of defending free  expression, death threats and dismissal letters are pouring in… and they are not kind of sort of.

Arthur Hsu’s essay in The Daily Beast is a classic entry in this oh-so-reasonable rhetorical tradition.

First comes the required condemnation of mass murder: “Shooting people is wrong. I want to get this out of the way. When twelve people are killed by violence, whoever they are, for whatever reason, that is a tragedy and a waste. To murder someone by violence is the greatest crime imaginable…”

Yeah yeah yeah, we get it.

Though it’s too late for Hsu to cut to the chase, he finally gets to the point: “Charlie Hebdo is also a crap publication and people need to stop celebrating it and making martyrs out of its staff.”

Why does Hsu think it’s a crap publication?

“Paging through translated cartoons from Charlie Hebdo’s past, the comparisons that kept coming to mind were to Mad magazine or pre-David Wong Cracked, but while the sophomoric level of humor fits—we’re talking single entendres on the level of this crappy joke about the Pope raping choirboys—none of those publications ever descended to quite the same depths as, say, making fun of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram by portraying them as pregnant welfare queens.

The best comparison here for an American audience is, well, Internet stuff. The stuff that ends up in censored form on Tosh.0—the kind of videos, images, and text memes you see linked from 4chan or Something Awful.”

As someone who speaks and reads French fluently, and has read more than my share of French cartoons and graphic novels, Hsu’s reliance on “translated cartoons” jumps out at me. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons are stripped of cultural and historical and political context when they are translated minus the extravagant puns, leftist orientation of the editor and artists, and literary and cultural references of the original. I’m about as French as you can be without living in France, and I don’t get half of this stuff.

I doubt Hsu gets 5%.

But never mind that.

Referencing the magazine’s cartoons about Muslims, who are a persecuted minority in France, Hsu writes: “The whole reason the concept of responsible satire has been summed up as ‘punch up, don’t punch down’ is to acknowledge that not all your targets of satire start out on an equal footing.”

Well, fine. I agree with him. But that’s because I’m American. Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted is the American way, especially for left-of-center American satirists. But the slaughtered cartoonists weren’t American. They come from a very different cultural tradition. It’s not possible for foreigners to judge these cartoons intelligently.

Cartoons like those in Charlie Hebdo make people like Hsu — and me — uncomfortable. They set off all sorts of triggers rooted in political correctness and identity politics, some, no doubt well-intentioned.

But that’s exactly the point.

If those cartoons hadn’t been outrageous, the cartoonists who drew them probably wouldn’t have gotten shot to death. (Similarly, my cartoons about 9/11 icons were over-the-top. That’s why they stirred a fuss.)

To believe in freedom of expression, to truly defend satire, we must stand up for it unequivocally, without reservation — not despite our distaste for the cartoons or standup routines or humorous essays or films drawing fire from critics and potential murderers, but because they make us uncomfortable.

If you can’t compartmentalize, if you can’t refrain from playing the critic even when the cartoons or whatever have gotten their creators blown away by automatic weapons, then you are not with us. You are with them.

[Corrected 1/23/15. “Piss Christ” was the work of Andres Serrano, not Robert Maplethorpe.

Virtual War is Virtual Hell

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Ted Rall

Originally published at Breaking Modern:

ISIS hackers successfully penetrated Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts. Virtual war is virtual hell, isn’t it? Next they’re going to try to take Pinterest. But we’re ready.

ted-rall-virtual-war-virtual-hell

SYNDICATED COLUMN: “Selma” and Hollywood’s Sleazy Perversion of History

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Ted Rall

Movies are the historical record.

Americans experience the Vietnam War by watching “Apocalypse Now,” slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” and D-Day through “Saving Private Ryan.” A lot more Americans watch historical movies than read history books. Which, when done well, is not a bad thing. I’ve read countless books about the collapse of Nazi Germany, but the brilliantly-acted and directed reenactment of Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker depicted in the masterful 2004 German film “Downfall” can’t be beat.

When a film purports to depict a historical event, it becomes the only version of what most people believe really happened. So, as we move further into a post-literate society, misleading historical filmmaking isn’t just a waste of 2-1/2 hours.

It’s a crime against the truth.

The Ava DuVernay-directed film “Selma” is at the center of controversy, both due to its semi-snubbing by the Oscars – viewed as backtracking from last year’s relatively racially diverse choice of nominees – and accusations that it plays loose with history.

Former LBJ aide and Democratic Party stalwart Joe Califano fired the first shot with a Washington Post op-ed. “Selma,” wrote Califano, “falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the Selma march itself.”

He’s right.

Robert Caro’s magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson portrays him as a deeply flawed man, but one whose passion to push for desegregation and an end to discrimination against blacks informed his political career throughout his life, though it wasn’t always obvious to his detractors.

It was only after JFK’s assassination brought him to power – actually, a movie portraying Kennedy as reluctant to support civil rights would have been accurate – that he had the chance to push through both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he did aggressively and quickly, despite what he famously predicted would be the loss of the South to the Democratic Party for a generation or more.

Johnson gave J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI too much latitude, which Hoover used to harass King, but there’s no evidence that, as the movie depicts, it was LBJ who ordered Hoover to send audiotapes of King having sex with other women to his wife. And let’s be clear: every important conversation in the Oval Office was being taped. We have the transcripts. We would know if that had happened.

Califano takes his defense of his former boss too far when he says “[the march on] Selma was LBJ’s idea.” Otherwise, the facts are on his side: the LBJ in “Selma” is not the LBJ King knew.

Fans of the film argue that it doesn’t matter.

“Did ‘Selma’ cut some corners and perhaps tilt characters to suit the needs of the story? Why yes — just like almost every other Hollywood biopic and historical film that has been made,” the media writer David Carr writes in The New York Times.

Yes, in a movie the story is the thing. It’s hard to imagine “The Queen” — about the inner workings of the British monarchy and its relationship to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana — working without a lot of made-up dialogue between the principals. However, the great detail of these obviously private conversations signals to the audience that they don’t come out of a transcript, and that we must be witnessing a fictionalized account.

There comes a point, on the other hand, where so many corners get cut and so many characters get tilted that a film ceases to resemble history and enters the territory of complete fabulism and, in the case of “Selma” and LBJ, retroactive character assassination.

The clash between MLK and LBJ – King pushing, Johnson resisting – isn’t merely some extraneous detail of the script in “Selma.” It’s the main plot of the film.

It didn’t go down like that, yet thanks to this BS film, a generation of Americans will grow up thinking that it did.

Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post repeatedly calls “Selma” “fiction.” As in: “film and other fiction.” To her, apparently, film is always fiction. But it’s not.

Like books, film is a medium.

Film can be nonfiction.

Film can be fiction.

“Califano’s approach,” she writes, “besides setting a [sic] odd standard for how fiction ought to work…suggests that we should check fiction for inaccuracies.”

As usual, the crux of the debate boils down to an inability to agree on definitions of terms. For those like Rosenberg who believe that everyone knows movies are just for fun, it doesn’t matter that “Schindler’s List” depicts showers at Auschwitz spraying water rather than Zyklon B — even though that never happened, and thus serves to understate one of the horrors of the Holocaust. To the all-movies-are-fiction crowd, “Zero Dark Forty” is cool despite its completely false claim that torture led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

“This is art; this is a movie; this is a film,” director DuVernay told PBS. “I’m not a historian. I’m not a documentarian.”

That’s sleazy. Truth is, her film is being marketed as fact, as she knew it would be. And it’s doing better because of it.

Audiences need a ratings system to separate films that purport to recount actual historical events from those like “Selma,” which are fictional tales using historical figures as hand puppets.

I suggest that the MPAA institute the following ratings:

Rated H for Historical: a film that makes a good faith effort to recount history accurately.

Rated S-H for Semi-Historical: a film that relies on devices like made-up dialogue and encounters, but whose basic plot line reflects history to the best of our knowledge.

Rated H-F for Historical Fiction: a film in which anything, including the basic plot line, can be made up out of whole cloth.

If the movies are going to lie to me, I deserve to know before shelling out my $12.50.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

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