BMBS

As the media run story after story about how the U.S. Government is building systems that give it access to any and all of their electronic activity (e-mail, purchases, voip, etc.), the Pew Internet Center released a study today indicating that a whopping 86 percent have used various tools on the internet to conceal their identity.  According to the study, people have something to hide – at least from complete strangers trying to profit from knowing what they do online. They are trying to clean up their digital footprints by clearing browsing histories, deleting social media posts, using virtual networks to conceal their Internet Protocol addresses, and even, for a few, using encryption tools. Sara Kiesler, an author of the report and a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said “It’s not just a small coterie of hackers. Almost everyone has taken some action to avoid surveillance.”

Ireland’s Central Statistics Office yesterday released figures showing an extraordinary rate of emigration — driven by the financial crisis.  Almost 400,000 people have left Ireland since 2008.  In the 12-month period from April 2012 to April 2013, one person was leaving the country to live abroad every six minutes.  Most are going to the UK, Australia and Canada in search of work.  A lot of Irish have returned home during the past five years as well — about 277,000 of them.  That translates into a net out-migration of about 120,000.

For a country of about 4.5 million people, this means a net loss of 2.5 percent of the population, no?  If I’ve got the math right, in the U.S. that rate would mean 7.8million people.

A paper entitled “Cleaning House: The Impact of Information Technology Monitoring on Employee Theft and Productivity” — by three academics — studied how staff at 392 restaurants in 39 states stole from their employers.  Other studies estimated that employees stole 1 percent of revenue, which is a lot in a business that typically works on a 2 to 5 percent profit margin.  “Theft alert” software was installed in the restaurants, and the scope of the pilfering became clearer:  after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.

From an op-ed in today’s New York Times:  Our capacity to tune out noises — a relatively recent adaptation — may itself pose a danger, since it allows us to neglect the physical damage that noise invariably wreaks. A Hyena (Hypertension and Exposure to Noise Near Airports) study published in 2009 examined the effects of aircraft noise on sleeping subjects. The idea was to see what effect noise had, not only on those awakened by virtual fingernails raking the blackboard of the night sky, but on the hardy souls who actually slept through the thunder of overhead jets.

The findings were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.

A former physician in India was troubled that sorcerers, gurus, babas, astrologers, godmen and other mystical entrepreneurs — usually with a religious bent — were cheating and manipulating people who went to them with problems.  He was an advocate for banning animal sacrifice, magical treatments for snake bites, and the sale of magic stones, according to the New York Times.  It all ended last week, when assassins shot him at point-blank range.

Two former Census Bureau officials have completed a study that shows that, despite some improvement in median household income in the last two years, we’re still not close to the purchasing power we had before the 2008 financial crisis.  Median annual household income rose to $52,100 in June, but that’s $2,400 lower — a 4.4 percent decline — than in June 2009. Combined with the 1.8 percent decline that occurred during the recession, leaves median household income 6.1 percent — or $3,400 — below its level in December 2007, when the economic slump began.

The top 1 percent of Americans don’t have anything to complain about, though.

The wire services are reporting that British police are examining new information relating to the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.  Officers are assessing the “relevance and credibility” of the information.  Scotland Yard stressed that it was not reopening the investigation into the 1997 deaths of Diana and Fayed, who were killed in a car crash in Paris.

Gimme a break.

The New York Times today has an insightful article entitled “Not All Industrial Food Is Evil.”  One of many fascinating facts from it:  “if you’re wondering what percentage of the price of the canned tomato you buy goes to the farmer, I’m figuring it’s around 2.”

Two percent.

Reuters reports today that China in November will start phasing out its practice of using the organs of executed prisoners for transplant operations.  At the end of 2012, about 64 percent of transplanted organs in China came from executed prisoners.  Government officials claim the ratio has dipped to under 54 percent so far this year.

President Obama’s nomination of Valerie Caproni, who left the FBI in 2011, to be a judge in the Southern District of New York has reopened the issue of FBI abuses of intelligence-gathering tools during the Bush Administration — raised anew the fact that no one has ever been penalized for it.

While she was general counsel, Caproni had legal oversight over the use of national security letters, or NSLs, and exigent letters, were used to obtain phone and e-mail records of U.S. citizens and residents without a court sign-off.  According to the New York Times,  a series of reports from 2007 to 2010 revaled that DOJ’s Inspector General pointed out that FBI agents over a three-year period ending in 2005 served more than 140,000 national security letters on companies without retaining evidence that the data collection was legal, without ensuring that the data were relevant to government needs and without correctly reporting efforts to Congress.  Exigent letters are supposed to be used only in emergencies and followed up by documentation of an underlying investigation, which was never done.

Publicly available information does not indicate anyone was ever punished, or that any victim was ever made whole after their privacy was violated.