Reminder: You Have No Expectation Of Privacy In Public Places

The EFF has a post in which they raise an alarm about license plate readers being used by a private company in private malls.

Automated license plate recognition is a form of mass surveillance in which cameras capture images of license plates, convert the plate into plaintext characters, and append a time, date, and GPS location. This data is usually fed into a database, allowing the operator to search for a particular vehicle’s travel patterns or identify visitors to a particular location. By adding certain vehicles to a “hot list,” an ALPR operator can receive near-real time alerts on a person’s whereabouts.

OK. I may not "like" this, but I have no expectation of privacy when I am in public. Your license plate is in clear view of anyone who has line of sight. Not only that, but most if not all mall parking lots have cameras that record your comings and goings. You may think that because the mall parking lot is "private property" that somehow YOU have an expectation of privacy. No. The owner of said private property has an expectation of privacy. You, the guest do not.

You know where else does this kind of thing? Casinos. Many advantaged players who are known to a Casino are spotted in the parking lot and 'security" can be waiting for them at the entrance. Is the EFF interested in this? Of course not. Why? I.C.E.

In December 2017, ICE signed a contract with Vigilant Solutions to access its license-plate reader database. Data from Irvine Company’s malls directly feeds into Vigilant Solutions’ database system, according to the policy. This could mean that ICE can spy on mall visitors without their knowledge and receive near-real-time alerts when a targeted vehicle is spotted in a shopping center’s parking lot.

EFF has joined other lefty organizations in being against the US enforcing it's immigration laws. This is why this is "news". Of course the actual problem is that there are people who are in the US illegally who have been given a driver's license and other forms of "ID", often fraudulently obtained (fake SS numbers, etc.). That's the real problem. But EFF isn't really worried about all that.

Troubling First Amendment View By Kavanaugh

Read the following yesterday:

Under Supreme Court precedents, "the First Amendment bars the Government from restricting the editorial discretion of Internet service providers, absent a showing that an Internet service provider possesses market power in a relevant geographic market," Kavanaugh wrote. "Here, however, the FCC has not even tried to make a market power showing. Therefore, under the Supreme Court's precedents applying the First Amendment, the net neutrality rule violates the First Amendment."

Now I have my strong issues with proponents of net neutrality but this "editorial discretion" point was new to me. What exactly is "editorial" about data traveling over/through the data connection between a website and it's viewer?

"Internet service providers may not necessarily generate much content of their own, but they may decide what content they will transmit, just as cable operators decide what content they will transmit," Kavanaugh wrote. "Deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN and deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN.com are not meaningfully different for First Amendment purposes."

Um. No.

When you click on a link or enter a location in your browser (for example) the ISP is not generating any content whatsoever. Transmission of content is not the generation of content. When an ISP intercepts traffic and injects advertising then they are creating content. I doubt that Kavanaugh was discussing that. But things such as advertising injection is the only time the ISP is "generating content". The content of a website is not an ISP's editorial content. It doesn't belong to the ISP. The ISP doesn't get ownership rights over that material simply because it travelled over their fibre or copper.

Now the next item, that they may decide what content they will transmit, is the actual crux of the argument. As recent events have shown, many companies are flexing their muscle to censor websites and organizations they do not like from using internet services. I suppose Kavanaugh has no problem with that. I do.

I'll skip over the "decide what content they will transmit" because the article discusses that, but to think that there is no "meaningful" difference between transmitting ESPN the channel which (ESPN app aside) cannot be viewed by those without a TV and cable subscription, and ESPN.com which is accessible by anyone, anywhere without a subscription to any "reception provider" is certainly a "meaningful difference". I'm troubled that Kavanaugh would not recognize that.

Kavanaugh's argument did not address the business differences between cable TV and Internet service. Cable TV providers generally have to pay programmers for the right to carry their channels, and cable TV providers have to fit all the channels they carry into a limited amount of bandwidth. At least for now, major Internet providers don't offer a set package of websites—they just route users to whichever sites the users are requesting. ISPs also don't have to pay those websites for the right to "transmit" them, but ISPs have argued that they should be able to demand fees from websites.

I would hold that this argument by Ars authors holds water even if cable providers did not have limited bandwidth.

Srinivasan and Tatel also provided the two votes supporting the FCC's right to impose net neutrality rules in the 2016 version of the case. "Because a broadband provider does not—and is not understood by users to—'speak' when providing neutral access to Internet content as common carriage, the First Amendment poses no bar to the open Internet rules," they wrote at the time.

The net neutrality rules forbid ISPs from blocking lawful websites and did not apply when ISPs cooperated with emergency communications and law enforcement officials, public safety agencies, and national security authorities.

And this is where I depart with most net neutrality people. If we are to agree that ISPs do not speak when providing "access" to information or services, then the same should apply to any other website offering "access". That PayPal can cut off financial services (though claimed not to be financial services) to websites it objects to is "speech" by PayPal and it suppresses the "speech" of those seeking to do legal financial transactions. Similarly when Twitter bans a user for "hate speech" (whatever that is, since SCOTUS says there is no such legal thing) but offers an endorsement (via blue check mark) of others who engage in the same speech, then it is no longer neutral, it is engaging in "speech" and suppressing the speech rights of others. These are not neutral actions. You cannot say that an ISP must grant access to any and everything and then exempt owners of public forums from the same.

The bar needs to be that so long as the speech is legal, those providing public services must allow it or ban it equally or be subject to civil liability. To do otherwise would be to make a [continued] mockery of things such as DMCA's safe harbor rules that ONLY apply if the actor is neutral.

Jimmy Carter: You Are Dead Wrong

Jimmy Carter said on Huffpost live:

Former U.S. President Carter said on Sunday he believes “Jesus would approve of gay marriage.”

“I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else,” Carter, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, told HuffPost Live.

It is so sad to see so called Christians who are either so unfamiliar with their foundational texts or who are purposely deceitful about said text in order to curry favor with certain groups. Let me clue Jimmy Carter in.

First:

Genesis:2:24:

24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh. 25And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Second:

Matthew 19:

3The Pharisees also came unto Him, testing {tempting} Him, and saying unto Him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? 4And He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that He Who made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they two {twain} shall be one flesh? 6Wherefore they are no more two {twain}, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Both KJV.

So let's be real here: Jimmy Carter knows not what he speaks. His so called Christian friends and associates should publicly correct him and then he should publicly apologize for misrepresenting "his" faith.

#WalkingAlong

[Updated 1:27 PM]

So there's this thing going on where people are discussing why they "walked away" from the Democratic party. This would be my addition to this discussion. First, I cannot say I "walked away" from Democrats because I never was one. I was also not a Republican. Still not either. As the header of this blog indicates, I'm a Pan-Africanist so I have no affiliation with the major US political parties. That said, for much of my life I have been sympathetic and supportive of Democratic politicians because generally speaking they reflected the things I believed in. What were these things?

1) Civil Rights: All American citizens have rights as outlined by the constitution. No govt. entity should be abridging those rights.

2) Economic fairness: Monopoly capitalism is bad. Govt should prevent the excesses of capitalism. Workers should be treated and paid fairly.

3) Freedom of Speech/Expression: A mighty tool that allowed Black people to get out from under Jim Crow. No free speech means no means to change public opinion and government policy.

4) General apathy to warfare: I say general because Dems have never really been anti-war. But generally speaking were against imperial war making.

5) Generally against African exploitation: I say, generally.

I hadn't really even though of immigration even though I lived in an immigrant community. Nor did I really consider finer points of things like minimum wage other than when I was making it I would have gladly accepted more. I did however believe that if you wanted more than minimum wage you should do work that was more valuable.

If you have followed this blog since it's inception you'll notice there has been a distinct change in tone which started somewhere around the time Obama was running for office. The reason for this is that I noticed that when Obama was running for office, that people in my circle suddenly changed their tune in regards to a lot of things. For example, there was an interview in which Obama was commenting on Iranians and said something to the effect that they didn't understand the ramifications of having an atomic bomb. Now, had such a thing popped out the mouth of a white male, he would have been called racist on the spot. However, the people I associated with were quick to brush this off. See, all this time I thought a racist statement was a racist statement was a racist statement. This is when I discovered that certain things only applies to non-blacks.

Really though, I shouldn't have been surprised since I had engaged in this kind of double think. I had actually internalized and propagated silly shit like "blacks can't be racist because we have no [systemic] power" and "racism is [literally] white supremacy." These are two points I have written on (refuting) at length so I won't go into it here.

Indeed what had happened was that I re-evaluated and studied up on the things I believed. I put them to the test and a lot of them came up wanting. Going back to the changes my peers were going through for their "black president", we had the bombing of Libya. Folks were like, Oh well, I'm sure Obama knows what he's doing. Aside from the current fact that Libya now has open slave trading going on as a result of "Obama knowing what he was doing", how did these former "US should stop imperial wars in Africa" come to "US should start an imperial war in Africa"?

On some other matter, I had folks tell me how Obama couldn't do x,y or z because "Republicans in congress would fillibuster". Previously these folks were "any means necessary". Besides at the time Democrats controlled the executive and both houses.

But that was just the beginning. Ferguson was what really opened my eyes to what was really going on. I've written extensively on that situation. The amounts of outright lies told by Democrats (including the media) was staggering. Never mind that the actual grand jury testimony, by black witnesses no less, confirmed that Mike Brown not only assaulted the store owner, but had assaulted the police officer. Every left wing talking head was against the facts. On top of that you had black people actually carrying signs calling for lynchings.

Black. People. Calling. For. Lynchings.

It was at this point that I realized that Democrats and the left had gone into orbit. Facts and truth did not matter. BLM (sic) rose up and made all kinds of easily disprovable claims yet no one on the left would call them on it. BLM would say shit like "Black on Black Crime isn't really a thing" which is not only demonstrably wrong but a massive FUCK YOU to the families of thousands of dead black people killed by other black people. BLM literally got people killed with their bullshit and yet to this day they have not been cast out by Democrats.

Then we had Obama use the power of the state to bully North Carolina into "accepting" gender dysphoria over the objections of the voters of that state. So I saw that the Democrats had no respect for the voters. It was about power. Raw power. They had an agenda and you will go along with it whether you like it or not.

Not satisfied with that abuse of power, Democrats went along with persecuting Christians. I'm a former Christian. Seventh Day Adventist to be specific. When the whole homosexual marriage thing came about, I knew it was a direct attack on freedom of religion. The reason being that if one rejected homosexual marriage and such a rejection became codified in law as a [fill in the blank] crime, then Christians were at risk (among others). Not only was SCOTUS wrong in it's decision since there is no right in the Constitution to same sex marriage, or marriage of any kind, but also that English common law, which US law is based upon (often stated right in state constitutions) recognized marriage as only between a husband and wife. Man and woman...distantly related at worst. When Christian bakers were prosecuted by state agencies on behalf of homosexuals who had no numerated right to demand any Christian (or anyone else for that matter) attend to their wedding in any capacity caught to abridge the numerated right of a Christian (or any other religion) to freely practice his faith, the left had abandoned any pretense of adherence to the rule of law. This was about power (and revenge). Nothing more. Then came the treason. While we can understand regular internal disputes that citizens of a country can have, there should never be a case where citizens prefer or organize on behalf of foreigners. Period. The government of a country acts for the benefit of it's citizens above everyone else. Not only do leftists spend an inordinate amount of time and money on people who have no legal right to be in the country but they have used the government to do so. Not a few "representatives" have outright claimed that they will use their [elected] office to the benefit of foreigners. This is treason.

This doesn't even include the negative effects of both legal and illegal immigration (trespassing) on the source countries who are brain drained. No person who cares about the "third world" can justify brain draining poor countries so America can be "more diverse". No person who claims that they care about the working poor in America can also be for importing low wage workers to compete with citizens for jobs. If nothing else has shown how far out the Democrats and the left has gone (Past orbit, we're in interstellar territory here) it is the immigration issue. When a political party cannot bring itself to publicly state that it is working for it's citizens and that trespassing will simply not be tolerated, it is no longer a political party but a foreign occupying power.

Just the other day, some lefty publication declared that Bernie Sanders was not really a Socialist because he doesn't want to abolish ICE. Seriously. They've turned on a declared Socialist because he still has a bit of sense.

In the end the Democrats have painted themselves out of serious consideration. If we can't talk about immigration without being called a Nazi, then we can't talk. If we can't talk about the real threats to black lives without being called Nazis, then we can't talk. If we cannot have free speech, without being called a Nazi, then we cannot talk. If we cannot state that men and women and state the fact that tranny's are mentally ill, then we cannot talk. If everything you don't like is "phobic" then we don't have anything to talk about. We can do what the song says, You see me on the street, walk on by.