[...] USA is increasing its commitment to drone warfare without regard for the risks these weapons pose to our security and moral standing in the world. Drone technology is spreading rapidly, with dozens of countries and even nonstate actors such as Hezbollah now developing or purchasing these systems. Military planners are developing autonomous drones that could make their own decisions on when to unleash lethal force. If other nations follow our example as they often do, we will soon face the prospect of a world in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning. There is no long-term benefit to the United States in the unchecked proliferation of drone weapons or in the absence of agreed standards for limiting their use. [...]

The United States should work through the United Nations to convene an international conference for developing legal standards on the use of unmanned weapons. The goal should be to ensure that any military use of these systems complies fully with the laws of war, including international humanitarian law and human rights law. This would enhance our moral standing and strengthen U.S. and international security.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/01/09/david-cortright/license-to-kill

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/world/europe/rare-opposition-protests-in-hungary.html

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“tribal communities are the default system of human social nature. Humanity evolved that way for millennia after exiting the hunter-gatherer band stage of social life. Many of the planet’s diverse societies have since moved on toward becoming modern states, but not all of them have. And even for those that have, the shadowy emotional residues of the distant past remain; we never lose anything in evolution, but instead add new developments to older ones. That is Fox’s central idea and the theme running through The Tribal Imagination.

It is also a truth, Fox believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in far-away strange places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. The pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights with respect to the state, whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan.

This truth, he says, sheds a harsh light on instances when “our leaders make claims about human nature and the natural state of human society as justifications for political action, armed intervention included.” These leaders, more often than not, suggests Fox, simply refuse to understand the essentially tribal nature of the lands they hope to remake. They are reluctant to grasp that

there is no ‘Iraqi People’. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical. . . . What is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe and sect command major allegiance. The idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our own systems, is relatively foreign.

Numerous unforeseen events during the Iraq occupation have illustrated the priority of tribal authority. When men came out and stole copper wire connecting hospitals to the electricity grid, indignant U.S. soldiers tried to make the thieves see that their actions would hurt “the Iraqi people.” True to form, the thieves responded just as Aouda had a hundred years before: Who were these “Iraqi people”, they wanted to know, whose claims outranked those of their own needy relatives? The thieving clansmen felt no responsibility for some mythical collectivity called “the people” that, as far as they knew, did not include them and that, in any case, foreigners had invented without their approval. In contrast, they were absolutely bound by customary law to help their kin” http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=990

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How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: “[...] the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. [...]” http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spurred-on-p2p-file-sharing.aspx

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Cartelizing Taxes: Understanding OECD’s Campaign Against ‘Harmful Tax Competition’:

Formed in 1961 to promote global economic and social well-being, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has become the collective voice of rich countries on international tax issues. After an initial focus on improving commerce through addressing double taxation issues, the organization shifted to a focus on restricting tax competition and increasing automatic exchanges of tax information. In this paper we analyze the reasons for this shift in policy focus. After describing the history of the OECD’s work on taxation, we examine the OECD’s project against “harmful tax competition” as it has played out since its launch in the 1990s. We analyze the mechanisms behind the project from a public choice perspective. While typical economic models portray tax competition as a prisoner’s dilemma between governments, a more powerful perspective is of the incentives of politicians and bureaucrats. We conclude that the project against tax competition is an example of the interplay between the interests of politicians and international bureaucrats, which illustrates the role international organizations play in competition among interest groups. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1950627

Cf. Joining the Chorus for Tax Cooperation:

[...] But international organizations aren’t the only ones that are destroying jobs and economic opportunity in the name of tax fairness. The U.S. Treasury and Internal Revenue Service are considering regulations that could cost Americans millions of jobs. One of the regulations being developed stems from the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was passed by Congress in 2010. FATCA would impose a 30 percent tax on the investment in the United States of any foreign financial institution, including a bank, if it had any unreported U.S. citizen or green card holder contributing to the pool of money invested. Furthermore, the foreign financial institution’s officers could be subject to civil and criminal charges for making such an investment. In an era of common dual citizenships, it is impossible for a foreign financial institution to know for certain whether any of its clients is a U.S. taxpayer (i.e., citizen, green card holder, etc.). Thus, foreign financial institutions in Switzerland, Taiwan and elsewhere are pulling their investments out of the United States right at the time when the U.S. needs all of the job-creating foreign investment it can get.

Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, and the other economic-know-nothings who proposed these measures claim — without any basis in fact — that the United States is losing $100 billion annually because of foreign account tax avoidance or evasion. Private foreign investment in the U.S. is about $14 trillion. So $100 billion is less than 1 percent of the private foreign investment, yet the mental midgets in Congress and the administration are willing to risk trillions of dollars in job-creating foreign investment in exchange for a phony $100 billion. Well over 10 million American jobs are at risk because of this foolishness.

It gets worse. The Treasury and IRS have yet to do a cost-benefit study of FATCA, but final regulations are being developed. In the private sector, executives who so failed at their fiduciary responsibilities would be fired, perhaps fined or even sent to jail. But members of Congress and the executive branch are most unlikely to pay any penalty for risking perhaps 20 to 40 jobs for each job they might, theoretically, save. By the way, many of the senators and congressmen who brought you FATCA are the same ones who want to continue to fund the OECD. Mr. President, if you really care about jobs in the way you say you do, why are you not calling for the repeal of FATCA and reining in Mr. Levin, his colleagues and your own Treasury secretary, who are in the process of endangering far more existing jobs than any of your questionable jobs proposals could possibly create? http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13832

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National Strategy for Counterterrorism http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/counterterrorism_strategy.pdf

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“[...] the US government’s dollar position is short, not long — its dollar-denominated debts are greater than its dollar-denominated assets. In financial terms, a short position is a way to bet against the value of the underlying commodity. The US government is currently about $7 million million dollars “short”.

An illustration may help to clarify. Suppose you are a private in the Zimbabwean military in September 2007. Suppose your monthly pay is about US$180, but you are paid in Zimbabwean dollars, so your pay packet is actually Z$5.4 million for the month. The Zimbabwean dollar has been hyperinflating, and you expect it to continue to lose value. You don’t currently need to pay any expenses. Consider the following options:

A. Keep the Z$5.4 million in cash.

B. Immediately buy other commodities with it; for example, buy 300 kilograms of rice and store it in Tupperware in the pantry.

C. Immediately buy other commodities with it, and also borrow an additional Z$10 million some poor sucker is willing to lend you at an extortionate 20% APR, and use that to buy rice too.

Option “A” is maintaining a “long” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. This amounts to a bet that the Z$ will retain its value. If you had taken this option, you would have lost 90% of your salary within a few weeks.

Option “B” is maintaining no position in the Zimbabwean dollar. It doesn’t matter what the Zimbabwean dollar does thereafter; you still have the same amount of rice. (Practically speaking, in situations like this, there tend to be price controls on most things you can buy with the collapsing currency.)

Option “C” is maintaining a “short” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. If you had somehow found such a sucker, then within a few weeks, you could have paid them back by selling off a tiny percentage of the rice you bought, as the Zimbabwean dollar continued to inflate.

This is the position the US government has taken relative to the US dollar.”

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So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158

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Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator

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4strategies that American companies use 2reduce their taxes (Video 3:35) http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/06/19/business/100000000870844/inside-the-accountants-playbook.html

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Yes, It Is a Police State – A line has been crossed http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/yes-this-is-a-police-state/

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“Internet in a Suitcase”: A Detour Around Censors http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

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SCOTUS Affirms High Standard of Proving Patents Invalid “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s rule that, in litigation, a patent may only be proved invalid by clear and convincing evidence. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case – Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership – supporting Microsoft’s request that the standard for proving invalidity merely be by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) rather than clear and convincing evidence (a high probability). [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/supreme-court-affirms-high-standard-proving

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Forget piracy, US government is going after Bitcoin http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/08/government-crackdown-on-bitcoin/ Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2636078

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LulzSec versus FBI: “It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and [...] Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took complete control over the site and defaced it [...]” http://pastebin.com/MQG0a130 Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618562

Update: http://www.unveillance.com/latest-news/unveillance-official-statement/

Update2: “####[CRIMINALS OF LULZSEC]####
After being invited to the lulzsec private channel after social engineering parr0t
I was able to learn a few interesting things about their group! Alot them have
previous cyber crime and are involved in some heavy shit!” http://pastebin.com/RBjzDQbS
But cf. “Uh, yeah. Adrian Lamo is the guy who ratted out Bradley Manning to the feds.” http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619898 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#WikiLeaks_and_Bradley_Manning

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