NSA whistleblower comes forward

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 3 Comments
Whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, helpfully superimposed on Hong Kong by the internet

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, helpfully superimposed on Hong Kong by the internet

At his request, The Guardian has reported the identity of Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who revealed last week that, among other surveillance activities, the US government keeps phone logs of millions of Verizon customers. It also logs customers of AT&T, Sprint and Nextel, and collects “metadata” from Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and YouTube. As soon as a MetroPCS user successfully completes a call, the NSA will write that down, too. It’s kind of disturbing, but what is perhaps most disturbing is that, now that its secret domestic surveillance program has been revealed, the executive branch has no intention of shutting it down. In the context, Snowden’s decision to out himself is very interesting.

Continue reading

Friday links! Total information awareness edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

fsm

Who wouldn’t want to know everything? If we could make sure we knew absolutely everything, nothing unfair would ever happen to us again. We would know, for example, whether the federal government’s secret reason why it’s authorized to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer is an airtight legal argument or a drawing of Mayor McCheese having his way with the Hamburglar. If we knew who all the terrorists were and whom they called, and who all those people called, we would have a sort of terrorist social network. I call it Friendsterrorist. It’s a list of everyone who is bad, and once we have it we need only shut those people down and live forever, like Myspace. Today is Friday, and what you don’t know could fill a book you aren’t allowed to read. Won’t you speculate on the contents with me?

Continue reading

Galled by homeless in Missoula

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments
Eric

Eric

Missoula residents will recognize Eric, who has been panhandling/sleeping on the streets/hanging out in the Ox for the last 13 years. For a small town, Missoula has a serious homeless problem. It is more serious in part because you get to recognize them, making it harder to regard the homeless as a problem and easier to regard them as people. That’s when the guilt kicks in. You can read about it in my most recent column for the Independent, which is what y’all get today instead of a real blog. But do Indy readers get a free picture of Eric stolen from the Wall Street Journal? They do not.

Kilroy is here

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
A saguaro cactus spray-painted by Robert Baratheon

A saguaro cactus spray-painted by Robert Baratheon

When I read this article about vandals tagging saguaro cacti in national parks, I immediately considered capital punishment. That would not be appropriate, I thought, almost entirely convinced. Vandalism makes me angry in a way that more serious crimes do not. I can totally understand why people steal things, and murder makes sense to me whenever someone, say, puts “Hotel California” on the jukebox or spray-paints over a petroglyph. But vandalism is one of the few crimes that confers almost no benefit on the person who commits it. At best, the mastermind who wrote “Nevada has cronic” over 1,000 year-old cave drawings got the memory of a fun caper. Oh yeah—and he wrote his name on something other people think is important.

Continue reading

The hands-free Whopper is not real, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2YLgZqf3A

Brad alerted me last weekend to the existence of the hands-free Whoppper, ostensibly a product released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Burger King in Puerto Rico. Sadly, the HFW is not real. When you know that it is not real, the commercial above looks like exactly what it is: a gentle exercise in absurdity that also provides occasion to say that word “Whopper” 78 times. It seems impossible to believe that such a product could exist. Yet the hands-free Whopper was the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning, and I was all set to write some funny (read: lazy) screed about it. Apparently, I was not alone. At all.

Continue reading