Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

A judge in Iran wants ‘Zionist director‘ of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg to appear in court to answer privacy complaints related to Facebook-owned companies WhatsApp and Instagram, according to the news agency ISNA.

As the Jerusalem Post helpfully explained…

Zuckerberg, whose company owns WhatsApp and Instagram, is unlikely to heed the summons. Iran is still under international sanctions over its disputed nuclear activities and it is difficult for US citizens to secure travel visas, even if they want to visit.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

YouTube has deleted the videos from an account believed to have belonged to Elliott Rodger, the disturbed 22-year-old man suspected of killing six people and wounding 13 in Isla Vista, California.

Flushed down the Memory Hole include selfie-vid rants with titles like “My reaction to seeing a young couple at the beach, Envy” and “Life is so unfair because girls don’t want me.”

A YouTube spokesperson told Mashable: “Our hearts go out to the families affected by this terrible news. Videos threatening violence are against YouTube’s guidelines and we remove them when they are flagged.” Fair enough.

Not so much the next part.

“We encourage anyone who sees material that they think crosses the line to flag it for us,” YouTube’s PR flack continued. “As YouTube is a place where people come for information, where content is posted in a news context it will be allowed to stay on the site.”

But that’s the thing: Elliott Rodger’s rants weren’t merely newsworthy. Though evidently the product of a foggy brain, his videos were/are a rare first-person account of a now-dead mass murderer’s self-proclaimed motivations. They were/are as close as we — as well as the victims and their survivors — will ever get to understanding why six people are dead.

Those videos were/are news. But now they’re gone.

As is, now, Rodger’s freshly-cleansed YouTube account itself.

Media types seem oddly sanguine about this reflexive deletion of history.

I understand the arguments in favor of — there is no other word — censorship. The trouble is, no one is speaking out against what has become the automatic knee-jerk reaction following national tragedies: erase, delete, wipe away. Anything that causes us to feel uncomfortable, that brings back traumatizing memories, is effaced from existence.

Censorship is so obviously the right thing to do that we don’t talk about it.

Post-tragedy, politicians and other public figures follow a standard script. The vacuous statement: “Our hearts go out to the victims and their families, our thanks to the first responders, blah blah blah.” Studiously missing the point: Too many guns! Too much misogyny! Culture of violence! (Hint: sometimes crazy people snap. Always have, always will.)

Finally, Full Orwell.

After mass school shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, radical renovation and demolition of the buildings. Because, you see, moving walls and drop-off addresses helps the healing process.

After Sandy Hook, one victim — Nancy Lanza, the shooter’s mom ­— was disappeared from the total count of victims. Talk about misogyny! She didn’t deserve to be mourned because (a) she gave birth to a monster and/or (b) could have been a mom.

Had 9/11 occurred in a different country, there is a strong chance that the pile of debris would have been left in place. What could have served as a more powerful memorial? In Bush-era America, there was no debate. What remained of the World Trade Center was hauled off, body parts and all, and unceremoniously vanished into the city dump.

News media sanitized their web archives, deleting footage of office workers falling to their deaths.

Censorship is almost always baseless. What is the rationale of banning the sale of Nazi ephemera on eBay? It isn’t as though Americans are about to be seduced by 75-year-old pins into forming a neo-Nazi party. You can still find the anti-tax screed of a man who flew his small plane into the Austin IRS office in 2010; four years later, there’s no sign of copycats.

Americans deserve a discussion over whether historically significant, newsworthy bits of information should be cavalierly deleted from the Internet. Whether it is the Isla Vista shooter’s so-called manifesto, or his YouTube videos, or footage of 9/11 jumpers, these are important and historically relevant artifacts that not only the historians of the future but ordinary Americans today have an inherent right to see should they so desire.

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

On Friday, Courthouse News Service reported:

Fifteen Connecticut cab companies sued the ridesharing app-providers Uber and Lyft in Federal Court, seeking an injunction against the unlicensed services they say flout public transportation laws and are equivalent to ‘a fleet of gypsy cabs.’

‘Over 90 years of regulation in Connecticut have produced a set of rules designed to meet the needs and protect the rights of individuals who need a car and driver on short notice – i.e., a taxi,’ the complaint states. ‘Technological advances have made taxi dispatching more efficient over the years, but the defendants’ approach ignores virtually all taxi regulations designed to protect customers who suffer from disabilities, who live in less secure neighborhoods, or who simply cannot afford a limousine.’

Lead plaintiff Greenwich Taxi claims that the ridesharing companies ‘carefully crafted [a] plan to insert itself, at no cost and without legal authority, into the taxi and livery infrastructure that has existed in Connecticut since the 1920′s. The defendants then profit by simultaneously flouting and taking parasitic advantage of a transportation system in which all other players must comply with safety rules and consumer protections established by state and city laws.’

Cabbies in Houston and San Antonio filed a similar lawsuit against Uber and Lyft in April.

Taxi regulators in New York, Vancouver, Seattle, and elsewhere have also challenged Uber. Last year California became the first state to legally accommodate the ride-sharing business model.

On the other hand, European taxi drivers aren’t driving off so quietly into that good night. In January, Paris cabbies went on a violent Uber car-bashing spree. In London, traditional taxi drivers are threatening gridlock next month unless Uber gets banned.

The taxi industry, responds Uber founder Travis Kalanick, is a “protectionist scheme.” He claims that the industry doesn’t care about the drivers, and the cab cartel “would prefer not to compete at all and like things the way they are.”

Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t they?

Kalanick is a smart guy, but I think his glib response to the growing avalanche of cease-and-desist notices is missing a unique aspect of the taxi biz: It’s one of the few sectors in which the interests of labor and management are not diametrically opposed. And that makes for an unusually powerful alliance of enemies.

As in other lines of work, taxi profits are a zero-sum game. But taxi owners and drivers share a desire for higher fares and restricted supply. This common interest is so pronounced that, in many places, taxi “drivers” unions represent and are managed by bosses.

In most cities, cabbies work under one of three basic payment schemes. The oldest is a commission system under which the owner of the cab pays its driver a percentage of the total on the meter at the end of the day. This has pretty much vanished because too many drivers cheat by driving off-meter. The norm for drivers who don’t own their own taxis is the lease system. You rent the cab for a fixed rate, say $150 for 12 hours, return it with a full tank of gas, and keep whatever you make over the lease fee plus gas. Finally there is the elite class of owner-drivers – drivers who own their own taxi.

With the exception of the relatively low number of existing drivers who join Uber, every class of driver and owner is threatened by competitors, especially since Uber attracts the well-heeled fares who travel longer distances.

Taxi drivers aren’t paranoid. They know there isn’t room on city streets for both them and Uber.

During the mid-1980s, when I was working my way through college working my way through massive student loan debt as a yellow taxi driver in New York, my average earnings for a 12-hour shift fell from $240 to $85. The economy hadn’t changed. The number of taxis had gotten too big.

A fixed number of yellow cabs — 13,595 “medallions,” as set by a law signed by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1937 — is licensed by the city to pick up street hails in the five boroughs. New Yorkers perennially complain that they can’t find taxis at rush hour or during a rainstorm. (Most cabbies would reply, what about the rest/most of the time, when they’re riding around empty?) Beginning in 1982, in order to address the relentless editorial page screeds declaiming the supposed shortage of yellow cabs, the Taxi and Limousine Commission created a new category.

Each medallion owner received two licenses for so-called “black cars,” so named because the black Lincoln Town Car became the standard package. They couldn’t accept street hails; they were dispatched by radio.

Wall Street banks, law firms and other Manhattan companies soon signed contracts with the black cars to spirit their executives home to Westchester and Connecticut. Black cars secured a monopoly on long, lucrative $200 fares; yellows were relegated to the $5.60 hops across Central Park (here, keep the 40¢). Adding to the effect of the bifurcated fare structure was simple supply-and-demand: with three times as many taxis chasing the same number of customers, per-driver revenue plummeted as accidents caused by desperate drivers cutting each other off rose. As wages fell, experienced drivers quit. I was one of them.

San Franciscans are witnessing the same phenomenon.

“They’ve flooded the streets with too much supply,” Trevor Johnson, a driver and director of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association said. “It’s already the Wild West out there. Go down Polk Street on Saturday at 10 PM. and every car out there is for hire. It’s gridlock.”

Uber and Lyft may not be on the ropes — in dollar and cents terms, in places like San Francisco, they’re destroying the yellow cabs — but they ought to be worried. The old-school taxi industry enjoys extraordinary high political clout derived from well-placed donations to entrenched figures in city government, that unique solidarity between worker and boss, and a perception — undeserved, in my experience — that “official” yellow cabs are safer and more professionally driven than these snotty young punks in their Benz S550s.

Riffing off the death-by-Uber-driver of a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco, Trevor Johnson, one of the directors of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association, asks Business Week: “Would you feel comfortable if you had a 21-year-old daughter living alone in the city, using a smartphone app to get in a vehicle for hire, and that vehicle ends up being a 2001 Chevy Astro van with 300,000 miles on it?”

Of course, you can die in a regular cab too. As I witnessed firsthand, safety inspectors looked at your $100 bribe, not your car, which was more often than not a hot mess of duct-taped pipes, fenced spare parts, threadbare tires, and secondhand brake pads moments from disintegrating. One time I drove a car that stalled when you tried to turn right. I took every customer around the block left after left after left until one guy insisted I go right. We struck a parked car. When I threw in the towel as a driver (after being held up at knifepoint for $12), my owner-boss mourned: “But you’re my safest driver! Only 24 accidents!” (Of which only one, a fender-bender, was my fault. But still.)

Because passengers remain ignorant of the ugly truth beneath the hood, the safety issue remains a potent weapon in their war against Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing outfits.

“Taxi drivers and cab company owners have a long history of not getting along, but they’re united in their opposition to the newcomers,” reports SFGate. “They say the [Public Utilities Commission] regulations are minimal, essentially allowing anyone to haul passengers for money in their personal cars with a minimum of rules and red tape. That makes it easier for ride services to hire drivers, they say.”

One owner’s quote sums it up:

“Who wants to go through the process of getting a license and going through training when you can just get a couple of apps and start picking up people in your 1999 Mazda?”

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

Getting into the United States has long been a pain in the ass for foreigners. It’s getting worse, especially for citizens of nations targeted for political retribution.

As “part of a broad effort to curb Chinese cyber espionage,” an anonymous “senior [Obama] Administration official” told Reuters that the United States may deny visas to Chinese citizens who want to attend the DefCon and Black Hat hacker conventions in Las Vegas this August.

The relationship between the hacking community and the U.S. government, frostier post-Edward Snowden, has suffered further since the filing of federal hacking charges against five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398.

Ars Technica reports:

Jeff Moss, founder of both the DefCon and Black Hat conferences, and Chris Wysopal, a member of the Black Hat board that reviews presentations, were both skeptical of the move. Wysopal noted that Black Hat talks are taped and sold after the conference, and preventing Chinese hackers from being physically there would not appreciably affect China’s hacking abilities. “It seems symbolic to me,” Wysopal told Reuters of the move. Several Chinese nationals are booked to speak at the Black Hat conference, although none are booked to speak at DefCon.

The takeaway: The U.S., pissed off at authoritarian China, is increasingly resorting to the authoritarian — and puerile — tactic of visa denial in order to retaliate. “Ten to 12 Chinese citizens were unexpectedly denied visas last week to attend a space and cyber conference hosted by the Space Foundation in Colorado this week, the organizers said,” according to Reuters.

This follows an unusual decision in April by the State Department to deny a visa to Iran’s new Ambassador to the United Nations, Hamid Aboutalebi, because he served as an interpreter to the students who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic revolution.

So much for diplomacy, cross-cultural exchanges, the importance of dialogue, blah blah blah.

As Wysopal notes, blackballing Chinese nationals from travel to the U.S. won’t slow down Unit 61398′s commercial espionage activities. But it does make the U.S. look bad.

[Photo by Eliot Phillips]

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

Chinese state media is slagging the U.S. as a “mincing rascal” and “high-level hooligan” in response to federal hacking charges filed against five members of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398.

As is the usually the case when you interpolate between the Sino-Tibetan and the Indo-European language families, something has obviously been lost in translation. But, as with North Korea’s bellicose tirades — they recently called South Korea’s president a “crafty prostitute” and President Obama her “powerful pimp” — weird interpretations are 99% of the fun.

Despite the trans-Pacific linguistic hiccups, however, the Chinese government’s gist — that Americans are playing cute with their hypocrisy, deploying lawyerly distinctions without a difference in a lamely transparent attempt to validate its own NSA’s electronic eavesdropping against China — is clear. Not to mention hard to deny.

There was once a time when Americans were like John Wayne: Straight shooters, who did what they had to do. We weren’t stylish like the French or smart like the Brits or terrifyingly accurate with firearms like the Afghans. But you could always count on Americans to keep their word. I say “word” because, being people of few words, we preferred singular to plural.

When General MacArthur said “I shall return,” everyone knew exactly what it meant (never mind that he actually returned somewhere else.)

That era is dead.

Now we, or at least our government, is known around the world as a culture of “mincing rascals,” of weasely lawyers who parse what the meaning of “is” is.

Follow, if you can, the U.S. government’s official “why we are not hypocrites” line on hacking. If you agree, congrats! You are a rare bird. For, as The New York Times notes in a piece bearing the headline “With Spy Charges, U.S. Draws a Line That Few Others Recognize, “while American officials are loath to admit it, Washington’s view has relatively few advocates around the world.”

As usual.

As The Times explains, the NSA spies on people in other countries, including China. It spies on foreign government, including China. But it does not spy on foreign companies for the direct benefit of specific American companies. However, it does spy on foreign economic sectors:

Even before Mr. Snowden walked out of the Hawaii facilities of the N.S.A. with a trove of documents, it was clear that the United States was not above economic espionage, as long as it was not for the direct benefit of specific companies.

For example, the United States spies regularly for economic advantage when the goal is to support trade talks; when the Clinton administration was locked in a high-stakes negotiation in the 1990s to reach an accord with Japan, it bugged the Japanese negotiator’s limousine. At the time, the chief beneficiaries would have been the Big Three auto companies and a smattering of parts suppliers. It is also widely believed to be using intelligence in support of trade negotiations underway with European and Asian trading partners. But in the view of a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations, that is fair game.

Of course, China’s nominally communist, authoritarian political system maintains close government ties to “private” companies, closely integrating Communist Party officials into boards of directors. So, in many business sectors, there’s one dominant “private” corporation or family of companies. As far as we know, the NSA doesn’t share what it learns about Chinese companies with, say, Cisco or Apple. But it’s an apple-to-oranges comparison that neither China, nor just about anyone else, is buying.

Anyway, the NSA does spy on specific companies abroad:

Companies can also be targets. Documents released by Mr. Snowden showed that the American government pried deep into the servers of Huawei, one of China’s most successful Internet and communications companies. The documents made clear that the N.S.A. was seeking to learn whether the company was a front for the People’s Liberation Army and whether it was interested in spying on American firms. But there was a second purpose: to get inside Huawei’s systems and use them to spy on countries that buy the company’s equipment.

Huawei officials said they failed to understand how that differed meaningfully from what the United States has accused the Chinese of doing.

Pretty mincey.

[image via simpsons.wikia.com]

Cross-posted from Pando Daily:

If a blog is, in the words of my friend the film critic Cole Smithey, “a column without the responsibility,” a tweet must be something yet more trifling. Off the cuff. Unvarnished. Unfiltered. A revolution is not a dinner party and a tweet is not a political platform.

The kerfuffle (<- word that must be used in pieces about this sort of thing) over game-show host Pat Sajak’s climate-denialist tweet proves that enough is enough. It is time for a Tweet Manifesto, a definitive, universally agreed-upon declaration that restores the tweet’s rightful, inherent status as a free-fire zone for stupid thoughts for which no one may be held responsible, much less, say, fired over.

On May 19, 2014 at 10:38 pm, well into the hours during which most alcoholic beverages are consumed in the United States, the master of “Wheel of Fortune” master of ceremonies issued the following bit of brilliance: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.”

Global warming alarmists (i.e., reasonably intelligent and/or attentive people, including 97% of climate scientists) took issue with being accused of racial bigotry and treasonous loyalty to America’s numerous enemies. Salon accused Sajak of “unhinged denialism — throwing wild allegations of racism against the overwhelming majority of scientists.”

A day and a half into SajakTweetGate, Sajak backpedaled:

 “As most of you know, original Tweet was intended to parody the name-calling directed at climate skeptics. Hyperbole.”

He doubled down.

“Of course I was joking. Just mocking the name-calling that is directed at global warming skeptics within and without the scientific community.”

But then — have you no mercy, Viceroys? — the cruel journo-detectives at Vice scrolled down investigated Sajak’s Twitter feed. There they discovered a series of (a) straightforward tweets doubting that climate change is real, including the inevitable shot at Al Gore, (b) anti-environmentalism generally and (c) strong evidence of Republicanism.

E.g., May 7^th: “My interest in Al Gore’s pronouncements could fit into a gnat’s navel & still leave room for a Liberal’s sense of humor.”

J’accuse!

So now, a question and a plea.

Question first: Why do we/would we/should anyone give a shit what Pat Sajak thinks about climate change?

Now the plea: From now on, can we let Twitter be what it was always meant to be: a forum where nothing you say can be used against you?

Do we really want to live in a world where a comic actor can be chastised for making fun of reality show contestants who die in tragic extreme-sports accidents? Where a football player — working in a game known for its progressive politics — is suspended for tweeted gay-bashing? Where a governor is forced to beg for forgiveness because a state bureaucrat failed to think through a tweet urging rape prevention?

People need a place where they can be their own, stupid selves online. Where they can express their dumbest prejudices, their unsourced political opinions and their peculiar unjustified bigotries free, not of the ridicule they richly deserve and cannot be blocked, but of the real-world fear that they’ll get suspended or fired for something their brains coughed out during a random moment of whateverness.

On Twitter, if nowhere else, let 1,000 moronic flowers bloom.