BMBS

Reuters and the New York Times have reported that a secret court secretly asked Yahoo to secretly screen all users’ e-mail for digital “signatures” that reportedly could appear in the messages between potential terrorists.  Yahoo secretly complied and secretly sent all such e-mails (the quantity of which remains secret) to a secret office at the FBI.  (The NYT’s sources claim the collection has stopped.)  The judge who issued the secret order, claiming to have secret information, reportedly was convinced that the signatures were unique to one particular terrorist organization, the identity of which remains secret.  Reuters said that Yahoo “secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming e-mails for specific information [the alleged signatures] provided by U.S. intelligence officials.”  Yahoo claimed that it “narrowly interpret[s] every government request for user data to minimize disclosure.”  The story came to light two weeks after Yahoo revealed — after keeping it secret for months — that hackers stole the secret credentials of the service’s 500 million users.

Assuming that the intelligence community’s claim is accurate that the hostile group’s e-mails carry a unique digital signature — which would reflect pretty amateurish tradecraft by the terrorists — the broad nature of the request to Yahoo seems unfair.  A case can be made for searching the e-mails of particular people, with a court order, but it’s quite different to be forced to run a filter on ALL e-mails in order to find the infinitesimally miniscule number of bad guys.  Yahoo’s expedient compliance — its failure to reject such a broad request — hurt its credibility and Americans’ privacy.

Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gassett wrote a lot about “mass man.”  In Rebelión de las Masas, he said:

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone.”

But his most compelling and most important message is that when political, economic and social elites shirk the responsibilities they have as elites — that is, when elites behave like masses — that’s when society unravels.  When elites put themselves above all others, above law, above the values (including religious values) they want everyone else to live by, the damage is progressive and extremely difficult to reverse.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the federal government has the right to refuse to explain to rejected visa applicants why they’ve been refused visas.  The specific case involved a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan and her Afghan husband, whom she wanted to bring to the United States to immigrate.  He was denied because of unspecified concerns related to terrorism, but the government refused to explain those concerns or allow an appeal or anything.  Five justices said the government has no responsibility to provide any information or explanation.  Four said the wife deserved an explanation.  In other words, the five have such confidence in U.S. information that they reject the thought of it ever being challenged by applicants.

The thought that government bureaucrats, without having to explain themselves and without being subject to challenge, can make such momentous decisions about people’s lives is quite amazing.

Hardly a week goes by that we don’t see reports on American companies’ efforts to take advantage of cheap foreign labor — usually abroad but also in the United States.  The U.S. government’s H-1B visa program provides 85,000 visas a year to foreigners with skills that American workers supposedly don’t have (but who work for a small fraction of the pay).  Disney World just laid off a couple hundred American workers to make way for cheaper replacements from India.  South California Edison, a power utility, did the same thing to 450 workers.  Neither company even bothered to try to argue that the American workers lacked the necessary skills.  The U.S. government has done nothing to investigate and stop such practices, while it spends billions to keep out and kick out low-wage workers.  It just keeps issuing the visas.

No surprise that legislation to require companies importing this labor to demonstrate a good-faith effort to hire Americans first can’t pass.

A retired Army lieutenant colonel receiving millions in U.S. federal contracts has engaged in bizarre, abusive acts — and the money just keeps on coming.  The government has given the company of the officer, John Hagmann, more than $10 million since he retired in 2000 to train soldiers and medical personnel how to treat battlefield wounds.  He hasn’t just used live, wounded pigs to simulate combat injuries — bad enough.  He gave his trainees drugs and liquor and then instructed them to perform medical procedures on one another, according to an investigation by the Virginia Board of Medicine.  Among the exercises students did while under the influence was inserting catheters into the genitals of their classmates.  Two students were subjected to “penile nerve block procedures,” and other were put through “shock labs,” during which Hagmann withdrew their blood, monitored them for shock, and then put the blood back in them. The officer claimed he was doing nothing out of the ordinary and that “absolutely no ‘sexual gratification’ was involved.”

Is there no adult supervision?

An article in Slate about an FDA advisory board’s vote in favor of “viagra for women” probed whether the drug would be for women’s bodies or for their minds.  The piece points out that the pill’s purpose is to create desire, not just act upon it, and it underscores the trickiness of the task because of the skyrocketing use of anti-depressants.  According to the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, one in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four.

The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania has found that many Americans do not think trading their personal information in return for personalized services, giveaways or discounts is a good idea, but they are resigned to having little say over what companies do with their info.  According to a survey conducted by the school, 55 percent of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed that “it’s O.K. if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”  Ninety-one percent of respondents disagreed that it was fair for companies to collect information about them without their knowledge in exchange for a discount.

Profiling by either government or the “private sector” has serious implications for our rights.

Transportation Security Administration screeners failed to detect weapons and other prohibited items 95 percent of the time when their agency’s inspectors put them to the test.  Inspectors routinely got through security with all kinds of dangerous stuff in their bags and on their bodies.  According to ABC News, one undercover agent was stopped when he set off an alarm, but the TSA screener failed during a pat-down to detect a fake explosive device taped to his back.  The Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, said he took the findings “very seriously” and ordered TSA to retrain airport security officers, retest screening equipment and increase the use of covert testing in airports.

The companies that have made billions selling machines to TSA should be examined as well.

Atlantic Monthly reports that, despite laws banning the practice, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found that roughly half of American employees are not allowed — overtly or tacitly — to discuss their pay with coworkers.  In the private sector, some 61 percent of employees say their bosses impose pay secrecy rules.

The oldest trick in the book for bad, manipulative managers: keep it all secret.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that more than two-thirds of America’s youth would fail to qualify for military service because of physical, behavioral or educational shortcomings.  The military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and “ear gauges” that create large holes in earlobes.

No great crisis for the Army, which the report says each year still successfully recruits about 180,000 volunteers.  But where do the rejects go next?