In the New York Times, Emily Keegin offered Welcome to My Museum of America. She put together “a collection of 25 objects that reveal something special about us.” Along with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, and Personal Injury Lawyer Advertisements (for sure), she offered up the Ring Doorbell Camera.
“Have we always been so scared of strangers? And when did we, as a country supposedly built on individual liberties, become so enthusiastic about Big Brother-style surveillance? Maybe we are still haunted by the ghost of Michael Wigglesworth and the Massachusetts Puritans who looked out from their chapels and saw only ‘a waste of howling wilderness.’ Maybe we still believe that safety can be found only beneath the eye of a benevolent and omniscient lord. The Puritans had God. We have Jeff Bezos. In a nation plagued by loneliness, perhaps it’s time to start answering the door.”
My wife and I had a couple of passing conversations about them. She thought that if we had had one, we would have captured the late Nick, the absentee landlord of the property next door, when he damaged my wife’s car more than once. But my discomfort was great.
Mass surveillance
And it got worse when I saw Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s segment on Police Surveillance Technology. “In recent years, the prevalence of local mass surveillance systems has exploded thanks to cheaper technology and increased funding from the federal government. And this all tends to get presented as a boon to public safety. Local news loves to cover cities’ real-time crime centers…
“Here’s one in Cooper City, Florida. And in that story, the town’s then mayor offered this upbeat assessment. ‘Everyone is being watched. And if you’re doing nothing wrong, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, but when you’re doing something wrong, we’re going to find out. We’re going to have the wherewithal to come and get you. We’ve got essentially Big Brother on steroids.'”
Oliver got into how the technology is used as a “digital form of stop and frisk, ” often hooked into surveillance cameras. “Increasingly, they’re able to use those owned by private businesses or homeowners. There are an estimated 85 million in this country, and police now routinely request access to them.”
Oliver has also noted the technological shortcomings. “The way Shot Spotter works is it basically sets up microphones all over a city, which alert police if they sense a loud noise that could be a gunshot… Unfortunately, the technology seems nowhere near as good as you’d want it to be for that kind of response. An AP investigation found the systems can miss live gunfire right under their microphones or misclassify the sounds of fireworks as gunshots. While other reports found Spotter being activated by cars backfiring or even people using a nail gun.”
ALPRs
“And there is a similar issue with… automated license plate readers or ALPRs. And cops will claim that they’re a way to find stolen cars or those engaged in suspicious activity.
“The most popular are made by a company called Flock. And here is how they work. Flock license plate readers don’t just scan tags looking for stolen cars or vehicles on a hot list. The cameras take a photo of every car that passes, stamped with the precise time and location. The more cameras you pass, the clearer the picture of your movements. All of that data is saved in a database for 30 days, shared with connected police departments, allowing the government to go back in time to see where your car was and when. No warrant required, whether you’re suspected of a crime or not.
“A randomized trial in Vallejo, California, found that 37% of all ALPR hits from fixed readers like those attached to a street light, and 35% from mobile ALPRs, like those on cop cars, were misreads, which is an astonishingly high error rate. And that has had real consequences.”
CBS News has had several stories like this one in several jurisdictions: Privacy groups raise red flags over police misuse of Flock cameras, usually for personal use. The Oliver story touches on that as well. Common Cause is advocating to tell Congress: Defund Flock’s surveillance cameras nationwide.
From the NYT: Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don’t. “In Texas, there’s one thing liberals and conservatives agree on: They don’t want cameras trained on their cars.”
Atlas of Surveillance
Oliver pointed to the Atlas of Surveillance, Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities with Open Source Research. It shows Albany County, NY using Flock, and the state using other technologies.
Oliver: “It is worth remembering, even when these systems work perfectly, they can still be wildly invasive. Cameras and license plate readers can track your movements wherever you go, which means they could find out if you, say, attended a protest or visited an abortion clinic.”
“And some departments can then use all the data fed into them to engage in our final and maybe dumbest use of this tech. It’s called predictive policing. Basically using all that data to figure out which areas or individuals might be likely sources of crime.
“Shot Spotter and license plate readers are disproportionately used in communities of color. And cameras are often associated with
facial recognition software tends to misidentify suspects far more often based on race.”
You should watch the whole thing. It may have you think differently about your Ring Camera. I’ll pass, thank you.
I’ve been experiencing what they used to call manic depression. My highs can be really high and often unexpected. But my lows might be rage-fueled tantrums.
In music, which I’ve listened to dozens of times before, I’m often struck by how emotional I will get. Familiar pieces can bring me extraordinary joy – or great contemplation. An example of the former: The Concerto in F by George Gershwin is a recently heard example.
This tale of a memorial service brought me familiar recognition.
Here’s a wonderful bio piece about first niece Rebecca Jade for a concert she performed last week.
I loved the clue on a recent JEOPARDY so much that I stopped the recording – I watch almost nothing in real time – to point it out to my wife. 3 CONSONANTS IN A ROW, $800. “The comical coinage aibohphobia describes the fear of this type of word.” What is palindromes? I should have gotten it because it was used before, in 1999. PALINDROMES, $1000. “The whimsical coinage ‘aibohphobia’ means this.” What is fear of palindromes? It was a triple stumper both times.
I am bemused and more than slightly amused by how much the Jeffrey Epstein issue is the hill that MAGA people are willing to die on. Besides knowing that Epstein was dreadful, I’ve thought of nothing about him. Given all the other things happening in the country, he took no space in my brain.
Won’t get fooled again
I got an e-mail from what purported to be the company that hosts my blog saying that the payment didn’t go through. Given my technological difficulties a few weeks ago, this was a reasonably possible situation. So I went to the login page, but it wasn’t my provider’s URL, though it looked like their page. I contacted my provider, and they asked me to resend them visuals, as I must not have properly understood. So it was with GREAT JOY when they indicated they’d gotten enough complaints on this topic from others that I didn’t need to send them anything else—something off my plate.
Our backyard has a shed that holds our bicycles, lawn chairs, grill, etc. We could no longer lock it because some gophers or other rodents had undermined the shed’s base. This was a great concern because there’s a neighbor boy about 12 who would wander into our backyard; our next-door neighbor came to our house to express concern about the kid. We started putting cinder blocks in front of our yard gate, but that’s suboptimal. So I was pleased when one day we came home and suddenly the shed door locked; it must have been our contractor, whom we had contacted several days earlier. It gave me a sense of real joy.
Conversely
The news in the country made me not just disappointed but furious, enraged. No recent story ticked me off more than ICE being able to access information from CMS about 79 million Medicaid users, including home addresses and ethnicities, information being passed along so that they could “root out fraud.” It infuriated me so much that – and my wife can verify – I was spewing invectives to no one in particular. “Don’t those F***ing SOBs know about HIPAA privacy laws? Their ethnic bigotry knows no end!”
Then I read about the US Secretary of State’s plan to burn 500 metric tons of emergency food aid that had “expired” because the State Department failed to distribute it when it took over USAID.
The EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm and “begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.”
And this, on top of the other crappy things, such as Congress codifying the cuts of previously allocated funds to PBS and NPR, and authorizing health cuts that would have prevented people from dying, really broiled me. Oh, former criminals need more access to guns!
You may have seen David Brooks share Alistair McIntyre’s explanation of FOTUS in The Atlantic magazine: He “doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. [He] speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. [FOTUS] doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and [FOTUS] is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.”
And it makes me think of less than charitable thoughts… So, some joy, some rage. The rage turns into the melancholy of One More Damn Thing.
John Green, one of the Vlogbrothers, and probably no relation to me, created a post called Getting Personal about Getting Personal. He talks about the transactional nature of media. John is promoting the movie Turtles All The Way Down, based on his novel, even though he has no great financial incentive to do so. He just likes, no, loves the movie.
He was asked an innocuous question by a PEOPLE magazine reporter about what keeps his 18-year marriage strong. The answer doesn’t just reflect on him but delves into his wife Satah’s life. Ultimately, he shares a story he had told before, but he mused on it first.
Likewise, last year, his brother Hank shared his cancer diagnosis, in part because he’s part of a Nerdfighter community but also because he had to cut on his responsibilities for a time.
A friend of mine is going through a very serious family tragedy. Though they have alluded to it, they haven’t said it outright, probably because writing it makes it too real.
Formerly known as
I saw Chanel Miller on CBS Mornings recently. She was sexually assaulted by Stanford frat boy Brock Turner in 2015, though he got an outrageously light sentence. She was described as Emily Doe then.
In 2016, her victim impact statement at his sentencing hearing went viral. She outed herself in 2019 when she released Know My Name: A Memoir, which I thought was gutsy.
But she was on the program promoting her new children’s book, Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All. She was happy to be there because she didn’t want to be just known as a crime victim. And she looked joyful, which made me quite happy.
So there may be value in sharing, but that’s not going to be everyone’s choice. And frankly, I see a lot of TMI, especially online.
Where’s the line?
Almost every week, I struggle to figure out the line between sharing and oversharing. I figure if I get to be 105, I’m going to publish my no-holds-barred book, the consequences be damned. Until then, I straddle the line when it comes to other people’s privacy and my own. You just have to wait another 34 years for my tell-all.
https://wronghands1.com/2020/07/07/rock-classification-table/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported License The NRA and the Long Con.
I’ll have to read Isabel Wilkerson’s important new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. She makes unsettling comparisons between India’s stigmatizing treatment of its untouchables, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews, and America’s treatment of African-Americans, the social systems that “keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom.”
https://wronghands1.com/2020/05/26/regency-novel-or-pandemic-life/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported License
Stevie Wonder music featuring Rebecca Jade and Leonard Patton on vocals, Tripp Sprague on sax and flute, Mack Leighton on bass, Duncan Moore on drums, and Peter Sprague on guitar. The Prayer featuring Rebecca Jade and Chris Walker.
The Puritanical “outrage” over nude pictures in the Cloud left me shaking my head.
It’s 4:40 a.m., and if I were an independently wealthy/retired, there are any number of recent topics I might write about. But I’m not. So some scattershot thoughts before they go totally cold.
Reclining seats on planes
I’ve long hated airline travel; it’s a flying bus. The recent spate of fights over someone trying to recline his/her seat, and was inhibited by the person behind, have gotten so bad that three flights were diverted in ten days. This is inevitable, given the fact that the space between seats is getting smaller as the passengers, collectively, are getting larger. Of course, this totally screws up not only the lives of the passengers on those flights but those on connecting flights as well.
Part of the reason I’m strapped for time, actually, is that I switched around three pieces of furniture that hold my CDs. One extremely heavy piece moved, two others replaced, which meant reorganizing almost every disc I own. I am reminded that Jaquandor recently noted that he hadn’t purchased a physical CD in four years, and Alan David Doane said the other day that he listened to an album all the way through for the first time in a long time. Whereas I, obviously an old person, listen to albums, all the way through, all the time, and purchased, or was given, maybe two dozen CDs in the past four years. Yes, I know they may deteriorate over time. Did I mention my vinyl collection?
The moving of these CDs actually made me nostalgic. When I was a new blogger eight or so years ago, Lefty Brown and some of his online cohorts (Greg Burgas and Mike Sterling and Eddie Mitchell and Gordon Dymowski, among others) put together a mixed CD exchange; those discs now have their own section in the new furniture.
There’s some comedy routine that ends with “no one understands the Cloud.” And while technically untrue, I sometimes feel that way. I’ve never been all that comfortable having my music there, and good thing; the stuff I used to have on Amazon seems to have disappeared.
Nude photos in The Cloud
And speaking of the Cloud, intellectual property lawyer/drummer Paul Rapp explains the misrepresentations about pix of Jennifer Lawrence, et al being accessed. I discovered amazingly heated conversations about this topic.
My feeling is that the hackers were – I already used schmucks this post – twerps. Others criticized the (mostly) actresses who stored the pictures and fall into a couple of subcategories: those who thought it was not safe to rely on the Cloud to keep nude photos, and those who wanted to slut-shame those who HAD nude photos of themselves. I sort of understand the former – though this should have known better talk irritated me. But the Puritanical “outrage” left me shaking my head.
As usual, Dustbury has an interesting take on the issue.
CVS bans tobacco
A month earlier than previously announced, the pharmacy CVS decided to ban the sales of cigarettes. The reaction by some baffled me “I don’t smoke, but I think it’s ridiculous. We can’t legislate everything.” Well, no, it’s not being legislated, it’s a business decision, which, in the short term will cost the company millions of dollars in sales.
The major complaint is that they aren’t banning cookies and chips and candy, which can also be bad for you. Sure, but in moderation, it won’t give one diabetes and heart disease, while cigarettes can kill even second-hand smokers. Much of the thread seem to scream about a loss of “freedom”, as though Walgreens and the corner store and thousands of other venues have begun banning them as well.
Gillibrand redux
I’ve mentioned the less-than-tasteful comments made by members of the US Congress toward Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). There are shrill calls saying she should be naming names. I don’t. 1) She’s made her point and 2) she still has to work with these guys, and even if they weren’t always using Senate decorum doesn’t mean that she should abandon same. *** Evanier pretty much nailed my feelings about Joan Rivers. Before she got nasty and spent too much time doing whatever schtick she did with her daughter, she was quite funny. The term pioneer is applicable.
In the New York Times, Emily Keegin offered Welcome to My Museum of America. She put together “a collection of 25 objects that reveal something special about us.” Along with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, and Personal Injury Lawyer Advertisements (for sure), she offered up the Ring Doorbell Camera.
John Green, one of the Vlogbrothers, and probably no relation to me, created a 
