Warning: Extreme elitist misanthropic opinion follows.

I watched the latest “Real Time with Bill Maher” the other day, and he decried the intelligence of the American people as unable to do the right thing when voting, citing as one of his examples the fact that most people (according to USA Today) believe in angels, particularly interceding “guardian angels.” This news was immediately below the article on the economic collapse. He may also at one point mentioned the fact that Bush got 49 and 50% of the popular vote the last two elections as an example of the lack of intelligence in the U.S.

That stayed in the back of my mind for a while. Then the other day I had to sit in the emergency waiting room and had the privilege of sitting near an 18-year-old mother of what looked like a 1 year old, with her husband/boyfriend/whatever and his friend. She didn’t in general seem very bright, the boyfriend seemed a bit dim, and the friend was a dead ringer for “Larry the Cable Guy”. Including the god-awful voice. Next to them was another teen mom who was only slightly more with it. When we moved to the next waiting room, there was a, what I would peg as a 16-year-old, who wasn’t too shy about expressing her “embarrassment” (yeah) at being a “what’s it called, when someone has sex and, like, isn’t married or something? Oh, yeah, a for-ni-ca-tor. Now I bet they’re all thinking I’m a for-ni-ca-tor” she said as she patted her flat bare tummy. It was very surreal.

Now, let me stop for a second and correct what I’m sure is an understandable misreading of where I’m going with this. My story isn’t done, but it would look like I’m about to equate teen pregnancy with lack of intelligence. I’m not. Anyone old enough to be capable of sex with an IQ of 50 to 150 can get pregnant as a teen. Teens have sex, it’s what our bodies evolved to do regardless of intelligence. We may not like it (I’d prefer if my own daughter abstained until, say, 32…) but it’s a fact of life. Where intelligence would have any role in this is in how the adults in society approach the subject: Either pretend it won’t happen and teach abstinence only despite the facts, or accept it may happen and teach the realistic dangers of sex and appropriate birth control. But, this isn’t what this post is about, although it’s slightly related. I just wanted to clear up that my thoughts on American intelligence only coincidentally was sparked by being around pregnant or child-n-tow teens who happened to be dim bulbs irrespective of their state of parenthood.

So, this later girl and her mother are talking to another waiting room patient who I pegged as what this girl would likely be like in 40 years: not a very sharp tack but experienced, yet without having learned from it. And somehow they get to talking about the girl’s boyfriend sleeping in the same bed…but they don’t have sex. Of course the other woman commented, “Riiiight!” with the girl responding “It’s true! But, it wasn’t an “It’s true!” with the subtext of “You must believe my claim of chastity!” but rather “…and it sucks!” My read of her subtext was confirmed by the mom saying, “Oh, it’s true, they don’t…and she’s very frustrated about it.”

Buhwah?! Yep, you read right and I heard right. The mom was sympathetic to the 15, 16-year-old daughter’s pain at not having sex because of her boyfriend’s “respect issues.” This is obviously a woman who has no idea what a parent is supposed to do and evidently believes the best way to parent is to be your child’s “best friend.” Well, my droogs, I’m certainly not the first person to express “bullshit” at that idea and present as Exhibit A the f–ed up state of American culture as proof that we have way too many parents out there who are doing a piss-poor job of parenting. Why is it we’re one of the most modern, richest, advanced countries, and we have a higher drug addiction rate, higher crime, teen pregnancy, belief in Creationism and literal Biblical interpretation, lowest math and science scores than any other modern Western nation? We have a culture of intellectually retarded people raised by idiots who are now raising their own idiots in a tradition of pride in idiocy.

At risk of sounding like a curmudgeony stand-up comic, the “perfect America” never existed and “Leave it to Beaver” never existed, but there WAS a time when a kid got in trouble at school they got in equal or more trouble at home. A premium was placed on getting education. On learning. Today if a kid gets in trouble at school, the parent will be “all up in da principal’s face” defending their kid’s right to be a slacker delinquent.

We have a media culture that panders to mindless entertainment and shies away from anything challenging. “News” that believes all sides must get equal time, even if that means giving flat-earthers as much validity as legitimate scientists. “News” programs that encourage belief that a frakkin’ bug on a camera lens is a ghost or angel without a whisper of skepticism or encouraging people to actually think.

We have a society in which any sign of intelligence is derided as “elitism” and we make fun of it like the school bully who deals with his latent insecurity about being dumb by beating on the smart kids. We have a bully culture that thrives on war and violence, responds only to fear, and mistrusts intellectuals or education.

Well I for one am sick of it. I’m tired of “who would you rather have a beer with/watch football with?” as a poll question when discussing who to vote for. No one asks “Who would you rather have defining the scientific agenda for the country?” or “Who do you think has the ability to use statesmanship in the complex and delicate balances of world relations?” We seem to be a country of “American Idol” addicted weeble-wobbles with a media culture that has no interest in doing anything other than feed the demand for more idiots playing to the idiots and an education system that has no teeth or ability to make any significant difference. We live in a country in a world that demands intelligent, thoughtful, reasoned leadership and representation. Our very existence as a country depends on it.

I think it’s time we suspend the idea of “everyone has the right to vote” in favor of “you must be this intelligent to vote” criteria. It’s a somewhat fascist idea, but if we don’t stop voting on “values” and “beer buddy” benchmarks and start voting into offices people who are capable and bright, we’re doomed. The school bully tends to grow up and become an insurance or car salesman or real estate agent; the picked-on nerd runs the internet and controls the systems we all depend on. Well, it’s graduation time and America is becoming a car salesman and the smarter countries will before long own and control us. I don’t know, maybe we derve it. We get the President we deserve, they say. Maybe we’re getting the status in the world we deserve as well.

The last few weeks there have been a slew of postings and releases (to feature only a couple) regarding the rise of deadly measles and other once fully contained contagious diseases in the U.K. and the U.S. due to people not vaccinating. Enough people in some places have stopped vaccinating as to weaken the “herd immunity” allowing disease to spread through a community. Fortunately in the U.S. and U.K. people have been getting treatment in time before anyone has died–but people in less modern anti-vaccine propaganda soaked regions aren’t so lucky: “What is the Harm?” Doesn’t it scare anyone that in 2008, because of anti-vaccine scaremongers, polio could make a comeback?

And is it likely that yet another high-quality, indipendent study on the supposed link between Autism and vaccines has come back with a resounding result of “no connection” will make any difference to these people? I seriously doubt it.

Here’s the point of why I’m finally commenting on the subject: Phil Plait just posted his thoughts on the dangers of uncritical thinking in general, and why we cannot with any human conscience sit idly by while superstition and unreason and uncritical thinking can have real, tangible, harmful effects:

• Uncritical thinking kills

… I’m a parent. I sometimes think the most important thing I can do for my daughter is love her, keep her healthy, protect her. But in all of those, there is an overarching responsibility for me to teach her how to live in the real world. And that means showing her how to think. Not what to think, but how. …

His post is sparked by a death as the result of fear around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which came online this week. Yes, the absurd fear surrounding the LHC, not the LHC itself, resulted in a death. A couple of days ago two classmates walked into class talking about the LHC and in only half-joking tones were asking each other what they thought of the possible results of the LHC–including Earth destroying black holes and reality destroying chain reactions. Two supposedly educated people who have allowed themselves to be duped by a sensationalism spewing mass media which cares only for gaining readership/viewers and nothing for actual facts and truth and real news, who are comfortable with accepting what they’re told and not checking things out for themselves. It would… should, only take a couple of minutes for a person to think:

“Hmmm, the LHC sounds like a massive endeavor involving a lot of scientists, researchers, and technicians to come up with and build it. Something on that kind of scale would surely have been so thoroughly studied that any possible negative effects (especially the destruction of the universe which presumably would include the death of all the scientists, researchers, and technicians and everyone they love and care about) must either be negligible or non-existent.
Although, people have been on large scales wrong before or have been willing to take huge deadly risks–but usually on subjects involving religion, politics, and/or war–not cold and calculating science.
I doubt there’s anything potentially seriously dangerous about this, but I could be wrong. I should check this out by using critical sources that don’t have as their primary agenda to spread entertainment, fear, sensationalism, yellow journalism as “news”….”

Uncritical thinking has nothing to do with intelligence or education, but everything to do with, as Phil emphasizes, how to think. The human brain has evolved awesomely (in the true sense of the word) to be capable of such incredible ability and reason. We’re amazing pattern recognizers. We can deduce and we predict outcomes. But we’re also still incredibly primitive in the amazing capacity we have for logical fallacy and cognitive bias. Because each and every one of us have our own darlings, our own one or ten superstitions we believe in, or mystical/mythical beliefs, we really want to be able to say out of rationalization for our own peccadilloes “Oh, what’s the harm of letting people believe what they want, live and let live.”

The problem is that people die, people harm other people, over uncritical beliefs and thinking. Uncritical thinking has more at risk than a “harmless” $2 /minute call to an astrologer: uncritical thinking can kill. The most important thing we can do is not go around telling people “what you believe is wrong,” but telling people “this is how you examine and test what you believe” and then have the courage to apply that critical reasoning to your own beliefs as you desire to have other people do unto their own.

This is too brilliantly funny!

(hat tip to Humanist Mama)

Yesterday I posted a super-bloated overlong post: The failure of conservatism. (That’s what happens when I allow myself to write unedited in stream-of-consciousness–which is every time, really.) I railed against the ideas of free market capitalism and libertarian, objectivist anarchy in the modern world. I briefly mentioned public education as part of “the commons,” a service that everyone in a society benefits from either directly or indirectly, and it gets privatized at the risk of harming society.

Well, today, “carr2d2″ on the SkepChick blog posted an article that addresses that very topic:

• Whose freedom?

She reasonably questions the libertarian belief that parents should totally determine the way, why, how, and when a child is educated. carr2d2 asks:

We were looking at the children’s education as a function of the parents’ freedom.  At what point does a parent’s right to raise their child as they see fit (or, as some argue, their freedom to not pay taxes) infringe upon that child’s right to live a healthy life, relatively untainted by abuse?  Don’t we owe it to all our kids to give them as equal a shot as is possible at success?

This topic spawned a great comment thread with wonderful observation like this snippet from AgnosticOracle:

If we look at periods and places where there was no public education the vast majority of working class people didn’t get educated. It isn’t merely a question of fairness to the child. There are externalities of education that benefit society as a whole. Carl Sagan’s father was a garment worker. Without public education there is a good chance the world would have lost out on his genius.
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It is a benefit not only to the child but to society at large to educate children well. This is especially true if you want a functioning democracy. While we may wish to give the parents the right to teach the child what they want, we shouldn’t give them the right to deny them education. For instance, a parent shouldn’t be able to choose not to teach their daughters math and science.

He, and most commentors, have it exactly right. A parent isn’t imbued with special wisdom simply because they can procreate. They certainly have a wide range of rights along with their responsibilities, but the minimal education of the people who are going to be participating in society is everyone’s concern–not just the parents. The libertarian mindset, like I implied in yesterday’s post, was perfectly reasonable when people can and did live in a such a way as to not have to interact or participate in society at large. but we, as Americans and a human race, have developed far beyond any reasonable concept of isolationism and selfish individualism.

The education of my children directly affects your and your childrens’ lives–you want to be assured that my kids have a certain basic level of education, no? In a libertarian paradise, there’s no guarantee that anyone you interact with doesn’t have a skewed and flawed education, if any. Would you want to live in that kind of wild west in an age in which our health and lives and lifestyle is so delicately balanced on a web of dynamic social interactivity?

Animal Farm revisited:

There’s a chain email that’s being passed around conservative emailers that tells a story of a foreign freedom fighter describing to his American college professor how to capture wild pigs by feeding them free corn and slowly penning them in. The email ends with a quote: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.” attributed to Thomas Jefferson. One problem is that according to Jeffersonian researchers, Jefferson never said that. Republican President Gerald Ford did. Although, as a big fan of Jefferson, I wouldn’t have put it past him to have said it! Jefferson was no fan of big government, absolutely believed that the right to bear arms was so the people could change government by force should politics fail, and even believed all debts and laws and Constitutions should be eliminated every fourteen years and recreated based on the norms and needs of the new generation. The other problem with that quote…I half agree with it despite the fact I also think it’s absurd.

The root of the entire problem is that we live in an extremely complex and complicated world, but we’re creatures that abhor complexity and demand simple answers. I’m no different. For the last four years I’ve been investigating ways I could define myself in the simplest terms: libertarian, anarchist, socialist, collectivist, some combinations thereof. And the conclusion I constantly confront is there are no simple answers.

This also shows the flaw in that very simple, easy to understand metaphor of the pigs. The reason the pigs can be easily penned in and trapped is not because of the free food, but because they’re pigs and the story’s antagonists are humans. If the humans in the story didn’t use free food and gates, they’d use snares. Or guns or tranq’ or traps or any of a hundred methods because the story is comparing simple hungry pigs to clever and technological humans. The story as an analogy is completely absurd and illustrates nothing analogous to our situation or conditions.

The irony of small, powerful government:

So, let’s take a closer look at that quote since that’s the part that really applies to anything realistic: Read the rest of this entry »

Let me ask you a question:

How would you react if one day came home to discover that every room in your house had two or three CCTV cameras installed in it? You don’t know who’s watching them or when or why? Would you be OK with this?

Let’s say someone came to your door, introduced themselves as being a private contractor working for Homeland Security, and demanded a copy of your house key so that they (and presumably the DHS and any one else they contract out to) could come in whenever they wanted to have a look around now and then. Would you be OK with this?

Then I have to ask, why are you OK with what actually IS happening right now with your electronic information and possibly your phone calls? The NSA has their own sealed room at an AT&T switching center with a system that intercepts all electronic data that runs through their backbone. Are they looking at your e-mails or listening to your voicemail? Who knows. Probably not. But they can if they want, and the House just gave them permission to do it with the Senate about to do likewise (years after they installed the room without congressional or judicial oversight.)

• Is the NSA Spying on US Internet Traffic?
• Hepting vs AT&T
• NSA Spying
• A Story of Surveillance

Project Carnivore was once thought to be an urban (geek) legend, possibly intentional disinformation. However, over the last few years, network administrators for various ISP’s around the country have confirmed putting packet sniffers on their servers providing the FBI and NSA the ability to intercept and read all data passed through their network. Supposedly used only on court orders and targeting specific individuals–but with the governments track record lately of monitoring first and forgetting to ask permission later (see recent FISA Court cases) can we really be sure they’re keeping themselves to high and ethical standards?

The administration also got in trouble recently (although nothing’s been done about it) for data mining through the call records of all domestic telephone calls, not just the international ones they admit to eavesdropping on.

• FAQ: NSA’s data mining explained

Q: When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was testifying a few months ago, he seemed careful to specify that he was talking only about the “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Does that mean he knew about the phone data mining effort and refused to reveal it earlier?
It seems likely, but we don’t know. During his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and in a subsequent letter to senators, Gonzales’ careful wording seemed to imply that there may be additional domestic surveillance programs beyond the one revealed by The New York Times. (Testifying before senators, Gonzales referred to that program as “the program that the president has confirmed.”)

• Report: NSA continues controversial data-mining program
• NSA’s domestic data-mining ops gathered vast troves of info

Data mining is more serious than it seems on the surface:

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

It only takes a few questions about you for someone to know exactly who you are without your providing any identity information. Anyone who visits this Web page is leaving information about what site you were at before this one and where you go to when you leave this one, what browser and operating system you’re using as well as what town you’re in. That alone is enough to create a profile on you. But you also leave your IP address which is the most vital piece of electronic data possible which allows someone to track your activities all over the ‘net. Let’s say someone knows what town you live in, that you did a search for “repairing 2005 Scion,” bought a size 10 dress online, and looked at the Web site for a particular church or health club in your town–how much more information do you think they’d need to find out who you are and what kind of person you seem to be? That’s the kind of information available to advertisers, ISP’s, corporations, and their employees and anyone an employee wants to provide that information to. We’re not even talking about what the government has collected on actual specific information on who you called and when and for how long.

These are just a few of the programs we know about. There may be other programs even more invasive that we don’t know about–but that’s conspiracy theory territory and what has been admitted to Congress and the Supreme Court is bad enough already.

Now, when I talk about this topic to people, there are those whose first response will often be, “So? If you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry about it?”

If you’re asking this, let me remind you of my earlier question of whether you’d have any problems with someone wandering through your house without your permission, looking at you and your family, rifling through your stuff, listening to your conversations, whenever they wanted. Even if you’re not doing anything “wrong,” would you not have a problem with this?

I’ll address the abstract principle of privacy and liberty in a moment, but first the practical application of the destruction of privacy and collection of data….

Do you know how big the TSA’a No Fly List is? Nearly a million names. A million. Is there that many terrorists and enemies of the US in the country?! Mmm, doubtful. Names that are on the list include Senator Kennedy,children, soldiers fighting in Iraq, war heroes, and constitutional scholars.

• ACLU calls out US over ‘absurd bloating’ of terror watch list
• Another five-year-old on the no-fly list: meet Sam Adams
• Korean War hero branded a terrorist by draft-dodging Shrub

One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said. “

Not caring about being watched and recorded and surveilled assumes that those doing the surveillance and collecting are perfect and without error in judgment and practice and have the cleanest of ethics and intent. If that were true, I probably wouldn’t mind myself! And every night I’d eat a salad of fairy wings sprinkled with unicorn horn croutons. The problem with the government collecting data, wantonly eavesdropping, making lists, is that it’s being done by humans who are quite prone to mistakes, humans that are capable of malicious and unscrupulous actions, for reasons that may be (and most likely are) political in nature and have nothing to do with security and everything to do with power and control.

• Theater of the Absurd at the T.S.A.

Everything about the No Fly List and the security regulations are completely useless for real security: any high school chemistry student can tell you it’s neigh impossible to make an effective explosive out of carry-on liquid containers. Each of the 9/11 hijackers had valid and legal identification. As the above link describes, people can easily make fake IDs and boarding passes–and when the TSA is alerted of such real threats to security, they threaten the whistle blowers with arrest. The No Fly List and TSA security is useless at best, and a tool for the government to harass and monitor political enemies at worst.

The same government which we are shrugging our shoulders about collecting our data and watching our communications is the same government that:

• Signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive #20 which states that should the President declare a “state of emergency” for any reason the office sees fit, all powers of the federal government are turned over to the Executive Branch (the President).
• Swapped the original Patriot Act bill which Congress got to see, with a rewritten one literally in the middle of the night before Congress voted it in.
• Rescinded habeas corpus which prevents the government from arresting anyone they want, declaring them an “enemy combatant,” and disappearing them indefinitely.
• Literally kidnapped a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil and flew them in a CIA plane to be tortured for a year in Syria…before deciding the person was innocent.
• Advocates using torture methods we’ve convicted other countries of war crimes for, even though overwhelming evidence shows torture is ineffective for gathering viable intelligence (as if the human rights violation isn’t enough).
• Puts covert CIA agents and their assets at risk (as well as destroying years worth of trust and asset building) for political revenge.
• Rescinds Posse Comitatus which prevents federally controlled military forces from acting in domestic capacity.
• Uses privately contracted para-military organizations for foreign and domestic missions without Congressional permission or oversight.
• Keeps CIA run prisons in countries which use torture methods even worse than what the White House admits to using–and privately contracted security forces to oversee their operations.
• Infiltrates and harasses organizations that protest the administration’s politics…like Quaker churches.

…to name a few ways in which the government does not act in a responsible, perfect, error-free, ethical manner.

Take a moment to watch this film (even if you’ve seen it before; I’ve posted it on my blog a couple of times…)
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This illustrates my point perfectly. From a practical standpoint, you don’t have to be doing anything wrong to be a victim of error, incompetence, unethical use of power.

Cory Doctorow describes the dangers of being a victim of mass surveillance:

Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here’s how that works: imagine that you’ve got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that’s 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that’s what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there’s only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your “99% accurate” test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated “tests” for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we’re just making much bigger haystacks.

Even ignoring the possibility of unethical or political behavior, mere statistics bear out that innocent people who shrug and say “Doesn’t matter so long as you aren’t doing something wrong” may find themselves arrested by DHS, detained, interrogated, threatened and tortured, have their lives turned upside down–because of a mistake. I’ve blogged a dozen times enumerating many cases of innocent people being the victim of erroneous police drug raids resulting in property damage and even innocent deaths. Shrugging it off and saying it doesn’t matter because you’re not doing anything wrong is the worst of rose-colored, Pollyanna, primrose path thinking.

The principle of privacy is an abstract concept but entirely as vital and important as any concept of practical application. As humans in general and citizens of the United States in particular we have an unalienable right to personal privacy as part of our freedom and liberty. It’s a simple matter of principle that we don’t tolerate unknown people or agents of the government walking into our house unannounced and uninvited for no other reason than some vague pantomime of protecting us from the boogeyman. If the goal of the terrorist is to get a government, an entire people, to fundamentally change out of fear and terror–they’ve won. We are willingly handing away our essential freedoms and liberties that we associate with being American for the price of an illusion of security. Allowing them to listen to our calls, collect all our communications data, scan our e-mail and Web browsing, plant RFID chips in our passports and luggage, create federalized identification, all of these are actions that have nothing to do with protecting us from real threats, as all of these steps would have had no effect stopping 9/11, and everything to do with creating a fascist police state.

I’m about to Godwin the post by bringing it up, but bear with me. In the evolution of all fascist regimes and dictatorships, from Hitler and Mussolini to Stalin and Pinochet, there was a time when things were heading toward Bad but not yet there. Fascism and dictatorships don’t spring up fully formed from out of nowhere–they slowly, step by step, on the backs of a mixture of trusting and lazy citizens, rise from nowhere. Before there was Chancellor Hitler, the Fuhrer, there was a small man leading a rabble party preaching conservatism and fear of the outsider. Before there was an occupation of Czechoslovakia and in invasion of Poland in 1939 by the German army, there was a period from 1921 to 1933, when the Nazi Party was formed to when the burning of the Reichstag building convinced the German legislature to give Hitler full governmental and military power. The Nazi Party didn’t take Germany over by force, they inched their way into power using the law, politics, twisted to their ends and allowed by a populace and Parliament afraid of domestic terrorism and economic frustrations and a desire for a strong leader with a strong, conservative vision who will crush the enemies of the homeland.

Sound familiar?

We do a greater disservice to history by elevating Hitler and the Nazis to some fictionally epic evil that couldn’t possibly happen in real life. It did and it can again when people are too uncaring and lazy to take thrats to their freedom and civil liberties seriously, and by allowing folksy plain-speakin’ conservative war-mongers to have positions of great power thanks to jingoist appeals to false patriotism and invoking the spectral fear of the shadowy anarchist communist terrorist bad guy around every corner.

What can we do? Well, various things, but this post is a focus on protecting privacy which can be done by a greater public use of encryption and Internet anonymity. Here’s the irony that ends up working to protect privacy:

It’s a bad thing that the government is making huge haystacks of data and surveillance, erroneously claiming some straw as needles they’re looking for. But, the greater the haystacks, the more ineffectual the mining and surveillance, until it reaches a point where watching everyone and collecting everyone’s data is no longer even desired by those in power. This happens the more “chaff” there is in the system.

• Surveillance: You can know too much

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

The more people use secure methods to chat with their friends about the weather, use encryption to share chicken pot pie recipes, use anonymizers in their search for parts for their 2005 Scion, the more frustrating it is for those watching and looking and listening to watch and listen to everyone. At least that’s one theory of circumventing the police state in a grand scale. On the small scale, you have the right to be able to share your chicken pot pie recipe without being eavesdropped on–more so if you’re sharing private personal information or sensitive business or financial information. The more ordinary, non-techie people are using security methods to communicate the easier it is for you to do the same. What good is it if you want to use encryption to discuss anything from plot points of a television show to potentially embarrassing medical information or yearly budget information if the people you’re communicating with doesn’t use encryption or take security precautions.

Here’s something you probably didn’t know but really should: every time you check your e-mail with a program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you are sending your username and password in human readable clear text across the internet. If someone has installed a trojan on your PC, they can read it. If you’re using unsecured wi-fi, anyone in the area could access your info. Anyone who may be snooping between your computer and your mail server can read it.

What if you send sensitive info to Bob, and Bob’s checking his e-mail with Outlook on an unsecured wireless connection? You may have taken precautions logging into your mail securely, but because of Bob’s innocent ignorance your information is open to easy interception.

Here’s another nice thought: man-in-the-middle attacks in this situation is pretty easy for a mid-level cracker to perform. They gain your e-mail access info, intercept a message, make changes to it before letting it continue ion its way with no one the wiser.

OK, now we learn to take some basic precautions:

E-mail. By default most email programs send traffic over unsecured connections (ports 110 for incoming and 25 for outgoing). Find out if your e-mail provider offers secured “SSL” servers (usually ports 995 and 465 respectively). If they do, they should be able to help you change your program settings (Outlook: account properties, Advanced tab).

If you use a Web mail service like Yahoo or Gmail, or even a general ISP but through a Web application like Horde, you’re in better shape. Chances are you’re already using an SSL connection (”https://”). When you log into your mail Web page, make sure the URL has that “s” (https://) and the little lock icon wherever your browser shows you secured connection info (bottom middle status bar for Firefox 3).

Web searching. You know Google stores your searching habits tied to your IP and browser info, right? Here’s a way around that: Scroogle Scraper. (Secure page: https://ssl.scroogle.org/). Read their main page for more info.

Email encryption. OK, things get a little trickier here, but it keeps getting easier than it used to be. Most people who use email encryption use what’s called GnuPG. (You don’t need to go to that site unless you want more info about the tech). You will need to generate a key-pair to do the encrypting and an email program plugin to apply the key-pair to. If you’re lucky enough to be using Linux and Thunderbird, KGpg is probably already installed to help you make your keys and you just need to add the Enigmail add-on (actually, I believe all you need is the Enigmail add-on for Thunderbird as it has a built-in key manager. Which means, if you’re using Thunderbird in Windows, that’s all you need as well! Use your Thunderbird add-on search, or this link.)

If you’re using Outlook, you’ll need to install something like WinPT or better yet, GPG4Win which has everything you need to generate the keys and make Outlook send and decrypt encrypted email. It may be a bit tricky to get used to at first, and you may question its worth-whileness… but it is. (And like Thunderbird and Enigmail, it’s free.)

Security packages. If you really want to get into security, I recommend a package like Steganos. It costs money, but it’s extremely easy to use and a whole lot of options. Email encryption, file (or even entire drive and partition) hiding, encrypted Internet connections (if you can afford that, it’s the best way to go!!) Steganos even offers a free encryption tool on their Web site: LockNote to encrypt data you want to keep on your PC, like passwords and the like, and FreeCrypt which allows you en- and decrypt text that you can cut-n-paste into messages. (The recipient just has to use the same Web page to decrypt so long as they have the password you decide on).

Another is a package endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Anonymizer Anonymous Surfing. They have variety of packages like VPN connections, spam foiling disposable e-mail addresses, file and history “shredding.”

Internet anonymity. Steganos and Anonymizer VPN, mentioned above, provides a secure, encrypted connection which makes all of your traffic anonymous so companies can’t track your browsing habits and visits and tie it back to you. A free option that’s not near as complete and secure, but is a pretty good option…for free, is EFF’s daughter project, Tor. It doesn’t involve any encryption. What it does is send your traffic through a large and wide network of participating relays (of which you can choose to be one) so that you look like you’re one of the many random end servers with virtually no way to track the traffic back to your original IP. It can be slow using it, and it’s not foolproof–that is, if you’re doing something illegal you WILL get caught (I highly discourage doing anything illegal anyway. In fact, not sure I’ve mentioned it yet but I’ve certainly implied it: privacy and security is the right of ALL people and one does not have to be doing something illegal to have use of it.) But if you want to avoid general tracking and recording of your surfing by corporations and marketers, etc, this could work for you.

Drive encryption. Getting a bit more tricky is the concept of drive encryption (whether PC drive or USB thumb drive). If you keep passwords or credit card info or any personal info on your thumb drive which would be a major hassle or even financially ruinous of someone got their hand on it, I highly recommend encrypting it. Steganos Safe is very user friendly, but costs. A powerful, free option is TrueCrypt. But I’ll tell you, unless you know some tech, you might not want to touch it. The Fedora 9 Linux distro has a built-in drive encryption feature. Come to think of it, I think Windows XP Pro (and maybe Vista) also has drive encryption if you’ve formatted the drive in NTFS…except, Windows login security is VERY easy to circumvent. Don’t rely on it.

Well, I guess that it. Final thoughts: Security and privacy is everyone’s right, protecting it is everyone’s responsibility. Don’t be lazy, take time investigate how you are at risk and take steps to protect yourself and your civil liberties. It benefits all of us!

Update (28 Jun 1:30pm): Here’s a new example of how trustworthy and ethical those with power and control use it:

• Local councils in the UK use CCTVs to spy on dog owners, cute butts

And a sign of the times: Sweden, a former protector of civil liberties and privacy, last week passed a bill which allowed the government to monitor ALL domestic electronic and telephone communications.

When discussing and criticizing New Age, New Thought, pseudoscience beliefs (like The Secret, crystals, homeopathy, chiropractic, ESP, psychics, Tarot, astrology, chi, feng shui, ghosts, reflexology, etc. ad nauseum) people often say “Oh, what’s the big deal? It’s harmless; let people believe what they want,” it’s often because they themselves have some belief or three that they know fall into the category of superstition and credulity. Subconsciously they think, “Hmm, I better not be too harsh on people who believe in The Secret because I know some know-it-all busybody would have problems with my belief in alien visitation.”

But there is a harm to non-critical thinking and it can be as “small” as spending good money on bunk to as significant as death:

• Teen’s death blamed on faith healing

(_Another Child Dies from Faith Healing_.) A cousin of his also recently died due to lack of medical care thanks to religious beliefs. There’s a woman I work with who also believes in faith healing, and has ignored ever-increasing symptoms until she passed out at a chiropractor and was sent to the hospital. Seems she has a brain tumor. (No word yet if it’s malignant or benign.)

There’s no reason for this. I want to try hard not to disparage faith or spirituality, but let’s be realistic here: medical science over the last 200 years has literally turned the worldview of illness in the west completely upside down. What was once thought to be caused by demons and curses we know to be viruses, bacteria, and chemical disorders. No amount of praying has ever repaired anything visibly irreparable and known to be medically incurable or able to go into remission such as amputations or visible horrific burn damage. A recent massive double-blind study showed that of the three groups of heart surgery patients, (one prayed for by large amounts of cross denominational Christians and not told about it, one prayed for and told about it, and one not prayed for) the group not prayed for and the one prayed for and not told had no difference in post-surgery recovery or complications. In fact, the one prayed for and who knew about it fared statistically worse. (Hypothesis is that some of the patients felt increased stress and concern which lead to complications.)

Recently a girl with serious Autism had a teaching assistant who visited a psychic. The psychic told her a student of hers was being molested. She went to the school with her “evidence” and they turned it to the Canadian version of Family Services:

• The Mother, The Child, The School Board And The Psychic

(_Psychics and gullible people do REAL harm_.) Long story short, it was proven without a doubt that the girl was not being molested–the psychic was full of crap (surprise!) The result of her “for entertainment purposes only” seering was to throw a family into upheaval and cost them a great deal of money and emotional distress.

Neurologist Steven Novella has an excellent commentary on this story: _Psychic Alleges Sexual Abuse_:

Any reasonable assessment of the evidence, in my opinion, clearly shows that alleged psychics are frauds - yes, all of them. Some may be self-deluded, while others (by the techniques they use) must be con artists. But they are all frauds - they pretend to do something they cannot do. Spreading false beliefs about reality is harmful in and of itself. But this harm is greatly magnified by great mischief ensues when alleged psychics make serious allegations based upon their intuitions. This elevates fraud to negligence, and perhaps even depraved indifference.

My wife is often a voice of reason to me. When I go off on something, criticizing what I think is irrational thought, she usually has a point of view that pulls me back down to civility. On this issue she suggested that people should be allowed to believe whatever bogus ideas they want, but should be held accountable should negative results arise. Well, of course that makes sense–I don’t think we should outlaw gullibility or non-critical beliefs, that’s fascist and would actually be counter-productive. But there’s a problem: people AREN’T being held accountable because people are scared to death to publicly criticize religion, pseudoscience, superstitions, or other credulous beliefs. From that CNN article on the boy’s death:

After earlier deaths involving children of Followers of Christ believers, a 1999 Oregon law struck down religious shields for parents who treat their children solely with prayer. No one had been prosecuted under it until the Worthingtons’ case [last March].

We have reached a point in our culture where criticizing, examining, demanding evidence for people’s beliefs is verboten. That kind of Christian fundamentalism which eschews modern medicine and science and puts their children in harm damn well deserves to be criticized at its very foundation. All psychics are frauds, period, and should be treated as such by the legal system and society at large. Beliefs which can and often do lead to harm should not be tip-toed around and given a pass because of some misguided desire to give all beliefs respect and tolerance. Some don’t deserve it.

There’s a CNN article yesterday:

• Should I Vaccinate My baby?

It floored me. Because of vaccinations we’ve eradicated polio, a disease which used to kill or paralyze or cripple literally hundreds of thousands of people a year. Measles? Silly measles, we can risk it–why vaccinate. Because measles is a highly contagious disease with a 10-30% fatality rate and killed half a million unvaccinated people in 2003. There’s a reason we vaccinate children–it saves countless lives from many easily preventable diseases. And because of completely non-critical thinking, this process is thrown into question. Because of three converging conditions, this life-saving science is questioned and debated and needlessly avoided by many:

• Symptoms of Autism reveal themselves at the same age range in which we vaccinate kids–regardless of vaccination. We’ve known this for decades, we see this in places where vaccinations aren’t done. It is coincidence which confuses correlation with causation.
• We’re diagnosing more cases of Autism because of changes in methodology. It used to be that only the most severe cases of Autism were recognized as such–non-functional, “Rainman” style Autism. Now an extremely expansive continuum of symptom severity is being diagnosed. People with Ausperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning Autism was virtually undiagnosed a couple of decades ago…now doctors are more readily recognizing and diagnosing cases. It’s always existed–we’re just diagnosing it more and it has nothing to do with vaccines.
• Parents understandably want to blame something. No one, parents, anyone, likes hearing “sometimes things just happen.” People want reasons, they want answers, they want something to blame. It’s completely understandable, perfectly human. It’s why people turn to ideas of “luck” and fortune, ESP, ghosts, aliens, what have you, for explanations to coincidence, accident, unexplained (in their mind) occurrences.

But the bottom line, is test after test, study after study, research after research, prove that there is no link between Autism and vaccines. In fact, one of the most vocal proponents of the connection was invited to help design what was one of the largest and most comprehensive studies examining the possible link. When the data was analyzed and it was becoming obvious that once again there was no link, she took her name off the study and started a propaganda campaign to distance her involvement and try to discredit the study.

Sometimes people want to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary. That’s delusion.

We should hold people accountable for the effects of their beliefs, absolutely. But what happens when those responsible for holding people accountable themselves rely on magical-thinking, superstition, and other woo? People get a pass. Children are being killed by medieval religious beliefs? Well, we have to be tolerant of religion (especially in this country if it in any way involves the words “Christian” or “…of Christ”.) “Psychics” like _Sylvia Browne_ crassly lie to grieving families, feeding on their pain and grief for their own fame and money? Well, it’s for “entertainment purposes” so they’re covered. (Or, hey, in Sylvia’s case it’s a “religious belief”! Two passes in one!) Besides, cultural leaders and gurus like Oprah advocate mysticism, New Age and New Thought, psychic beliefs, and pseudoscience–so, there must be something to it.

And so we continue to support and encourage un-critical thinking and credulous belief in woo as a culture in general, and that affects our legal system, politics, media.

The other day I heard a commercial for some “all natural” prostate health herbal supplement. “And it’s all natural, so you don’t have to worry about those annoying side effects that come with pharmaceutical products.” Got a message for you: poison ivy is “all natural.” Hemlock, toadstools, heroin, arsenic, Ebola, hepatitis, cancer, cyanide, anthrax…all natural, my friends! And here’s another clue: if something, like an herb, is capable of any kind of “positive” biochemical effect on your body, it’s capable of producing unwanted and negative side effects. The only difference, FDA regulated pharmaceuticals go through rigorous testing to find all or most of those side effects, their severity, cross medication reactions. Herbal remedies get none of that testing. St. John’s Wort? All natural, and promotes liver disease. Ginko biloba? All natural, and contributes to heart disease and strokes. (True