My office neighbor Caroline Bradley and I are having a mild disagreement over her incredulity that greek doctors are “foreign government officials” for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act purposes.
My take is that if they are state employees, and if they have authority to buy stuff, and if the bribes are to get them to buy the stuff in particular ways, then why not?
Please direct any comments to the original post.
Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely describes the human cost of political gay-bashing: nine student suicides in two years in Michelle Bachmann’s home district. The article attributes this to the local School Board’s embrace of a fervent anti-gay agenda. This in turn fed a climate of severe anti-gay bullying in the schools, making targeted students’ life hell — while administrators did nothing, maybe under the Board’s policies could do nothing, to protect them.
Eben Moglen has the bon mot (or is mot juste the better term?) — Moglen: Facebook Is a Man-In-The-Middle Attack
I have a minor cameo in a Palm Beach Post article today, Ethical debates intensify as Guantanamo Bay detention center turns 10 by John Lantigua.
[Update: Corrected in the cold grey light of morning: As commentators more awake after the game than I noted, Charlton Heston has been dead for years. I knew he was Clint Eastwood, we even talked about it during the game; no I idea why I then substituted Heston in the post. One of my blogging rules is that when I screw up, I correct, but don’t hide the fact of the error. This is a beauty.]
By far the most notable Super Bowl commercial was Charlton Heston Clint Eastwood reassuring America that it’s only half time and there’s still everything to play for. As his gravelly voice touted the resurgence of Detroit, I thought at first it would be an Obama commercial, and then it was Clint Eastwood/the Man with No Name/Dirty Harry/Walt Kowalski and Chrysler, and it wasn’t, overtly, pro-Obama after all.
But maybe it in a way it was Chrysler’s way of saying thank-you on the QT for the bail-out; if so, getting long-time Republican Charlton Heston to do the spot was a stroke of genius insurance against charges of partisanship. [Update: I still think it felt like a way to say thank you without having to admit it was a campaign expenditure; and I thought of Eastwood as a Republican — see below.]
And a new catch phrase is launched.
[Update: I thought Eastwood was a Republican because he was elected as Mayor of a town in California on the Republican ticket. At least according to a Wikipedia article on the Political life of Clint Eastwood, however, his politics are more complicated than that.]
Canada is building a total traffic surveillance system based on Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR):
With ALPR, for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read licence plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. These plate numbers are automatically compared for “hits” against ICBC and Canadian Police Information Centre “hot lists” of stolen vehicles; prohibited, unlicensed and uninsured drivers; and missing children. When such “hits” occur, plate photos are automatically stamped with time, date, and GPS coordinates, and stored. The officer will investigate details in the above-mentioned databases directly, and may pull over suspect vehicles.
At least, that’s how the popular story goes ….
… the Privacy Commissioner described the ALPR program to parliament as “general and ubiquitous surveillance, without adequate safeguards,” …
… the categories of people that generate alerts or “hits” in the ALPR system, alongside car thieves and child kidnappers, are much broader than has ever been disclosed publicly. And information on these people’s movements is being retained in a database for two or more years. For example, though you may not be stopped, your car is a “hit” and its movements are tracked and recorded if you’re on parole or probation or, in some cases, you’ve simply been accused of breaking a criminal law, federal or provincial statute, or municipal bylaw. You’re also a hit if you ever attended court to establish legal custody of your child, if you’ve ever had an incident due to a mental health problem which police attended, or if you’ve been linked to someone under investigation. The list of hit categories continues through three more pages, and a fourth page that the RCMP completely redacted.
Meanwhile, according to the Privacy Impact Assessment, the RCMP is also keeping records for three months on the whereabouts of everybody else’s cars, too—this is called “non-hit” data.
I predicted something like this over a decade ago in The Death of Privacy?, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I wanted to write that undoubtedly we’ll be doing this here very soon. But in fact it seems we’re already using Automatic License Plate Reader/Recognitiontechnology in many parts of the US.
(Canadian article spotted via Slashdot.)
Jotwell Blenderlaw