Month: July 2013

McDonald’s Can’t Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage – The Atlantic

In a financial planning guide for its workers, the company accidentally illustrates precisely how impossible it is to scrape by on a fast food paycheck.

Of course, minimum wage workers aren’t really entirely on their own, especially if they have children. There are programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit to help them along. But that’s sort of the point. When large companies make profits by paying their workers unlivable wages, we end up subsidizing their bottom lines.

Source: McDonald’s Can’t Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage – The Atlantic

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance | WIRED

Many don’t understand why they should be concerned about surveillance if they have nothing to hide. It’s even less clear in the world of ‘oblique’ surveillance, given that apologists will always frame our use of information-gathering services like a mobile phone plan or Gmail as a choice. If everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective.

WE WON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHEN WE HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations.

Source: Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance | WIRED

Thurgood Marshall’s Prescient Warning: Don’t Gut the 4th Amendment – The Atlantic

His dissent in a 1989 case stated that “today’s decision will reduce the privacy all citizens may enjoy.” And so it has.

You’d think that avowedly originalist conservatives would embrace this dissent and contest the wisdom of a secret court that has gone even farther than the wrongheaded precedent set by a 1989 majority opinion. Instead, conservatives by and large argue that the FISA court’s decisions properly render legal the sweeping, warrantless surveillance being conducted on American citizens, without any hint of individualized suspicion. In doing so, conservatives are signing onto the notion that there are special, judicially created exceptions to the Bill of Rights. So are many Obama Administration supporters.

Source: Thurgood Marshall’s Prescient Warning: Don’t Gut the 4th Amendment – The Atlantic

 

But ultimately, today’s decision will reduce the privacy all citizens may enjoy, for, as Justice Holmes understood, principles of law, once bent, do not snap back easily. I dissent.

— Justice Thurgood Marshall

Tools For Treason | TechCrunch

Our rights are extended and limited by the tools we use. The Internet has magnified our capability for free speech, but has pared down the reasonable expectation of privacy.

if we are to start over again, the founding principle of our tools for communication cannot be the establishment of trust, but the impossibility of trust.

The trick is to treat every communication as a potential act of terrorism. After all, isn’t that how the NSA does it? For them, it’s an excuse; For us, it should be a method. Start there, and you can build a system that works. Start there, and you will be told that you are building tools for treason. You are. … But your tools are neither necessary nor sufficient for such atrocities. Every kitchen knife is sharp enough to cut your fellow man; every hammer is hard enough to split skulls; every car is fast enough to mow down pedestrians. They have to be to fulfill their purposes, and it’s the same here.

because freedom is the freedom to do wrong as well as right

Source: Tools For Treason | TechCrunch