Thursday 10-06-16

 Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.
According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.
The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.
"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.
"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.
                      
 Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
"We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'," a spokesman for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." The company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.

CHALLENGING THE NSA
 Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.
Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year's demand on at least two grounds: the breadth of the directive and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.
"It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court," Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Some FISA experts defended Yahoo's decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a specific account. So-called "upstream" bulk collection from phone carriers based on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to Web companies' mail.
As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more such requests from spy agencies.

 Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies."

SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAM
 Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said the people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.
They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.
The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
Stamos's announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention any problems with Yahoo. (bit.ly/2dL003k)
In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought new scrutiny to Yahoo's security practices as the company tries to complete a deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSKCN1241YT

Australia Becomes First Country To Begin Microchipping Its Public

Australia may become the first country in the world to microchip its public. NBC news predicted that all Americans would be microchipped by 2017, but it seems Australia may have already beaten them to it.

Back in 2010, CBS news reported that the Australian government had a potential RFID microchipping plan in the works related to the health care system. 

 

 

Now, it seems that this plan is beginning to unfold but the push is not a result of mandated health care reforms, but rather a clever propaganda campaign that equates RFID microchipping with becoming superhuman, and people are begging for it.

Under the headline 'Australians embracing super-human microchip technology', Australia's premier media outlet news.com.au (News Corp Australia) reports:

It may sound like sci-fi, but hundreds of Australians are turning themselves into super-humans who can unlock doors, turn on lights and log into computers with a wave of the hand.

 

Shanti Korporaal, from Sydney, is at the centre of the phenomenon after having two implants inserted under her skin.

 

Now she can get into work and her car without carrying a card or keys, and says her ultimate goal is to completely do away with her wallet and cards.

She told news.com.au:

 

You could set up your life so you never have to worry about any password or PINs it’s the same technology as Paypass, so I’m hoping you’ll be able to pay for things with it.

With Opal you get a unique identification number that could be programmed into the chip. Any door with a swipe card ... it could open your computer, photocopier. Loyalty cards for shops are just another thing for your wallet.

The microchips, which are the size of a grain of rice, can act like a business card and transfer contact details to smartphones, and hold complex medical data.

 

In her interview with the Australian news outlet, Shanti claims that her friends and family are envious of her microchip lifestyle;

 

My nana wants one. I’ve had more opposition to my tattoos than I’ve ever had to the chip. My friends are jealous.

In fact, the 27-year-old has noticed a business opportunity and set up a distribution service called Chip My Life with her husband, Skeeve Stevens where for just $80 to $140, people can become so called "super humans."

On the same day this news story broke, Shanti appeared at Austarlia's launch of the much anticipated cyborg themed video game Deus Ex Mankind Divided, alongside American implantable technology pioneer Amal Graafstra.

As you can see, the push for RFID microchipping and assimilating the human population with robots and technology, is something that will most likely be sold to the public as helping them to become "super human," but clearly if you become part machine/computer, that means there will be someone who can control that technology. If you think the elites wouldn't capitalize on such an exceptional opportunity to control the population you obviously don't know  history very well.

Amal Graafstra, who became one of the world first RFID implantees back in 2005, just made headlines recently in the US with a prototype of the world’s first implant-activated smart gun and is a huge proponent for this new technology.

He’s written a book, spoken at TEDx and also appeared in a number of documentaries.

In an interview with the Australian media outlet, Amal explained that the technology he has implanted into his body has “given me the ability to communicate with machines. It’s literally integrated into who I am.”

Shanti has bought into the culture that dominates society today, which is one dominated by the fantasy of super heroes that mesmerizes the population at theaters all across the globe.

“Ever since watching movies like the Terminator, Matrix and Minority Report I wondered if we could actually live like that. I always wondered why we all weren’t living as ‘super-humans’

http://www.organicandhealthy.org/2016/10/australia-becomes-first-country-to.html?m=1

Wednesday 10-04-16

Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue

SAN FRANCISCO — It has been six months since the Justice Department backed off on demands that Apple help the F.B.I. break the security of a locked iPhone.

But the government has not given up the fight with the tech industry. Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of the year for subscriber information and other details associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.

The subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year.

Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations.

Justice officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets. The officials say that they are simply following leads where they take them.

The information request made of Open Whisper Systems is particularly sensitive, since its encryption app is used around the world, and it is often recommended to journalists and human rights activists.

Microsoft sued the Justice Department over the gag order practice in April, arguing that law enforcement was relying on these orders too often. Specifically, the software giant said the gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property and also the company’s First Amendment right to speak to its customers.

Microsoft also complained that the orders often came without time limits, unlike the Open Whisper Systems order. Dozens of other technology, media and civil liberties groups filed briefs supporting Microsoft last month, and the case is pending.

Part of the gag order on Open Whisper Systems was lifted after a court challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, and redacted versions of documents related to the information request were made public last week. But the small San Francisco company was still not allowed to tell specific account holders about the investigation.

The documents made public show that the government asked Open Whisper Systems to turn over data associated with two telephone numbers, including web browsing histories and data stored in the tracking “cookies” of the web browsers attached to those accounts. But one of Signal’s biggest draws is that it does not collect most of that information.

“The Signal service was designed to minimize the data we retain,” said Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems. Mr. Marlinspike said Signal uses a technology called end-to-end encryption that kept the service from gaining access to the contents of its users’ messages. The company also does not store information on those with whom its users are communicating.

  

Civil liberties lawyers argue the Justice Department request fell well outside the bounds of what is typically covered by a subpoena, including basic subscriber information. Additional information, such as computer logs or content, would require a search warrant under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

“The Justice Department is pushing the envelope,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Big companies like Apple and Microsoft have the wherewithal to push back, she said. But smaller companies may cave, rather than risk an expensive fight.

The Justice Department came to Open Whisper Systems with a menu of information needs, including subscriber details, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and method of payment. The request went on to demand information on internet addresses, browsers and internet providers that the account holders could have used, according to court records.

One of the phone numbers the government was investigating was not a Signal user after all. For the other phone number, Open Whisper Systems turned over the only pieces of data it could: the time the user’s account had been created and the last time it had connected to the service — far less than the government sought.

 

In other circumstances, the government has tried to force companies via court order to re-engineer their services to collect missing pieces of information, as it did with Apple earlier this year and in a similar case in 2013 against Lavabit, a small encrypted messaging service used by the former defense contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The government did not make that request of Open Whisper Systems. “They need to pick those cases carefully,” Ms. Granick said. “They are only picking cases where they think they’re going to have the people on their side.”

The Justice Department and F.B.I. tried to force Apple to break its own software security in the case of an iPhone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino terrorist attacks, she said.

Companies are having some success in getting courts to lift gag orders. Last year, Nicholas Merrill, the owner of a now-defunct internet service provider, got a gag order lifted, though it took more than a decade. After the court decision in Mr. Merrill’s case, a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York denied gag orders in more than a dozen cases related to Facebook subpoenas last May. And in June, Yahoo was successful in getting a court to lift gag orders on a number of law enforcement information requests.

“Gag orders should be used in exceptional cases,” said Brett M. Kaufman, the staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. who represented Open Whisper Systems. “This one demonstrates that the exception has become the rule in routine proceedings.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/technology/subpoenas-and-gag-orders-show-government-overreach-tech-companies-argue.html?_r=0

 

 

SAF CALLS GUN SHOW LICENSE PLATE SCANS A ‘CIVIL RIGHTS OUTRAGE,’ WANTS PROBE

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today is calling for a probe by the House Oversight Committee on an effort by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to record license plate information on all cars belonging to gun show customers in Southern California, calling the project a “civil rights outrage.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that federal agents apparently persuaded local police officers in 2010 to scan those license plates, ostensibly to detect possible gun smuggling. But SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said the effort appears to have been “one more gun control affront launched during the Obama administration.”
“Attending a gun show is not a criminal activity,” Gottlieb observed. “American citizens engaged in a perfectly legal activity should not have to worry about the government monitoring their exercise of various civil rights, including freedom of association and the right to keep and bear arms.
“Instead of worrying about people attending gun shows,” he continued, “maybe the same attention could have been paid to criminals walking guns across the border under the Fast and Furious fiasco. Oh, wait, that was a debacle created by government agents, also during the Obama administration.
“Unless there is clear evidence of criminal activity,” Gottlieb stated, “it is none of the government’s business who comes and goes at a lawfully-operated gun show. This kind of snooping should require a court order, and unless some illegal activity was detected, all license plate information gathered during this effort should be destroyed, and Congress should determine how it may have been used, or misused.
“We think this revelation by the Wall Street Journal raises enough questions that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform should launch an inquiry,” he said. “If this kind of monitoring dealt with any activity other than a gun show, you can bet the liberal media would be screaming. The Obama administration and its media cheerleaders should understand that gun owners have privacy rights, too.”

 

https://www.saf.org/saf-calls-gun-show-license-plate-scans-a-civil-rights-outrage-wants-probe/

 

 

Wednesday 07-06-16

I love it when they use the argument that they are saving money to do it this way, they are not saving you money, it is your money they are spending.

 

US Government Approved 100% Of Wiretap Applications In 2015

A 10-year study shows the U.S. wiretaps increasingly often and effectively

A ten-year study of how state and federal law enforcement wiretaps suspects shows that the government is extremely efficient at the practice, and is only getting better.
The new report, conducted by the Federal Judiciary, looked at the prevalence of the FBI and state and local police petitioning for a warrant to surveil someone. Methods range from tracking their computer activity to bugging a home telephone or a room, though it overwhelmingly—96 percent of the time 2015—meant tracking or listening to their cell phone calls. It has become a common enough practice that in a ten-year span, a wiretap request has been denied only eight times, and never more than twice in a year. According to the report, “No wiretap applications were reported as denied in 2015.”

And while the number of wiretaps that courts approve has steadily risen over the past decade, to the point where they’ve more than doubled from 1,774 in 2005 to 4,148 in 2015, wiretapping has become a more cost-effective process.

Of note is that despite FBI director James Comey’s repeated insistence of an endemic of terrorists and other criminals “going dark”—using chat programs that use end-to-end encryption, like iMessage or WhatsApp, making it impossible to easily understand a wiretapped message—only six federal wiretaps were reported encrypted in 2015, and two of those were successfully decrypted. It’s rare at the state level, too: 22 instances of intercepted information being encrypted were reported in 2014, but only seven in 2015.
http://www.vocativ.com/336409/united-states-wiretaps/

 

Ottawa shuts down kids' lemonade stand over permit, sparking criticism

It wasn’t long after two young sisters set up shop on a grassy roadside in Ottawa that a federal officer told them to ‘pack up and leave’

 

To the young entrepreneurs – ages 7 and 5 – it seemed like a win-win situation: Hawk ice-cold lemonade to pedestrians and cyclists on a hot day and rake in money to help pay for summer camp.  But their business plan was swiftly derailed by officials in Ottawa, who cited the girls’ lack of a permit to shut down the C$1-a-glass lemonade stand.  Eliza Andrews, 7, and her sister Adela, 5, had been running the stand on their front lawn for several weeks. As the date of their summer camp neared, the pair eyed their profit margins and considered a crucial question: location.  On Sunday they relocated, setting up shop on a grassy median that flanked a stretch of road open only to cyclists and foot traffic on Sunday mornings.  Business was just beginning to pick up – the two had earned C$52 in about an hour – when a passerby stopped to ask them if they had a permit for their lemonade stand. It wasn’t long after that a uniformed official with the National Capital Commission, a federal agency, arrived on the scene.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eliza and Adela at their lemonade stand. Photograph: Courtesy of Kurtis Andrews

“They were polite, but said we had to pack up and leave,” Kurtis Andrews, the father of the two girls, told the Toronto Star. His offer to pay for a permit on the spot yielded no compromise. “For a couple of kids, it’s kind of intimidating, with the flashing lights and guy in black uniform.” First reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the story made headlines across Canada. Many on social media took aim at Ottawa – playfully rehashing the capital’s reputation as the “city that fun forgot” – while several Conservative politicians seized on the story as an example of how government overreach can strangle entrepreneurship.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/05/ottawa-canada-lemonade-stand-shut-down-permit-backlash

 

Monday 03-21-16

I found this at Survival Blog, it was sent in by a person named B.B. very interesting.  Also tied into this is the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Including the Ocean Floor, the Feds Own Much More Land than You Think

• 

March 17, 2016Mark Brandly

Tags U.S. HistoryPricesValue and Exchange

The Importance of Economic Calculation

In “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” Ludwig von Mises challenged the socialists to explain how economic calculation could be performed in a socialist economy absent prices. Mises concluded that economic calculation in a socialist economy is impossible, therefore socialism is impossible.
Mises wasn’t saying that you couldn’t have a socialist society, he was saying that it’s not an economy, in the sense that decision makers are economizing regarding their decisions about the allocation of resources.
Socialism, at the time, was defined as a system where the state owns the means of production. The state owns the natural resources and the capital, such as the factories necessary for use in the production process. Given this state ownership, the resources are not being traded in any market and since there are no markets for the resources there are also no market prices for the resources.
In an economy where resources are privately owned, the exchange of those resources would provide us with market prices. And those prices provide us with a sound basis for assigning resources to their most productive uses.
This rational calculation is impossible in a socialist economy.
Mises concluded, “Thus in the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.” (p. 23)

Land Socialism in the United States

My interest in this topic was inspired by Yuri Maltsev. A few years ago, Dr. Maltsev gave a talk at Ferris State University focusing on the evils of Soviet socialism (a portion of the presentation can be seen here). Nobody disagreed with Yuri’s point that the Soviet economy was socialized, however, some took heavy issue with Yuri’s claim that the US economy was also socialized to a large degree.
This led me to consider the degree of land socialism in this country. This is a critical issue. Starting with the available land and labor, the structure of production is determined by the available technology and the capital that we derive from the available land and labor. Government control of the natural resources gives the government tremendous control of the whole economy, distorts prices, and diminishes the efficacy of our economic calculation.
Is US land ownership heavily socialized? Let’s begin answering this question by considering the states with the largest percentages of government-owned lands.

Nevada has the largest percentage, 84.9 percent, of federally owned lands, but 30 percent of Alaska is state owned, so Alaska has the largest percentage of government-owned lands. As you can see, due to the Louisiana Purchase and other factors, much of the federal land ownership is in the Western states. I included New York on the list because New York has the highest percentage of state-owned land.
Admittedly there is some false precision in these numbers as the states and the federal government have some difficulty in accurately providing statistics on their land ownership.
Next, consider the largest federal agencies ranked by land ownership.

Texas, with 171 million acres, is the second largest state. We see here that the BLM and the Forest Service are both larger than Texas. And the fourth largest agency, the National Park Service, is larger than all but four states, Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana, slightly larger than New Mexico’s 77.6 million acres.
Note that these numbers do not include the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The federal government claims that the 55 million acres of BIA lands are Indian lands not federal lands. I don’t know if the Indian tribes agree with this assessment. The Indian lands, if they were a state would be the 11th largest state, almost equal in size to Utah’s 54.3 million acres.
The Department of Defense administers 14.4 million acres of land, according to a 2014 Congressional report. (By the way, a 2012 Congressional report with the same title as this report claimed that the Department of Defense administers 19 million acres of land. There is no explanation for the missing 4.6 million acres in the 2014 report.)
The federal government, according to this report, “owns and manages roughly 640 million acres of land” and there is an estimated 200 million acres owned by the various state governments. Therefore, 37.1 percent of US dry land is owned by some government.

A map of the government land ownership will help us put things in perspective.

Note that this map shows only the federal holdings and the Indian lands and omits the 200 million acres of state lands. Still, it provides us with an illustration of the degree of land socialism in this country. The federal government owns most of the land roughly from the Continental Divide west to the Pacific Ocean.

Government-owned Lands in the Oceans

What about the submerged lands? The federal government also claims ownership over what they call the submerged lands of the US. These claims began with 1799 legislation regarding the “customs waters,” allowing the boarding of foreign flag vessels within 12 nautical miles of the coast. Over time, these claims have expanded and in 1945, Harry Truman declared US government jurisdiction and control over the continental shelf. During the next decades, governments of the world claimed increasingly larger amounts of the ocean beds. Problems occurred, however, if two governments disagreed over these claims. This became a United Nations issue in the 1970s, and in 1982, at the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, the countries of the world came to an agreement regarding their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), whereby each country owned the sea and the sea beds out to 200 nautical miles offshore.
Due to Congressional resistance of United Nations treaties, Congress did not ratify this agreement. But Ronald Reagan, in 1983 simply proclaimed sovereign rights over the US Exclusive Economic Zone. He ratified the agreement by presidential mandate.
According to a Department of the Interior report, there are 3.9 billion acres in the US EEZ. Reagan’s proclamation was the biggest land grab in US government history.
Consider this map of the US that includes the US EEZ. The various colors highlight the regions of the EEZ.

The federal government owns the sea beds out to 200 nautical miles off of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and much of the Gulf of Mexico. Due to the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, there is a tremendous amount of EEZ lands off of the Alaskan coast. And the US government claims ownership over immense amounts of the Pacific Ocean, much of which is due to the military use of small islands during World War II.
For instance, the Johnston Atoll in the Pacific was used as an airstrip of about one square mile during WWII. Since this tiny island is now a federal holding it allows the government to claim ownership over 166,000 square miles of ocean sea bed, which is approximately the size of California.

We can now consider the total amount of US government lands.

One point to make here is that there is over 70 percent more submerged lands in the US than the total amount of dry land in this country. That is, the federal government owns more submerged land than the total amount of land in the 50 states.
Thus, 76.9 percent of total land in the United States is government owned. There is no doubt that regarding this essential resource, land, our economy is heavily socialized.

Back to the Calculation Problem

The government ownership of lands leads to several economic problems. Government officials can use their control of the natural resources to reward politically favored industries and punish their political enemies. Second, government restrictions on the use of resources on government lands limits economic growth. Third, and this is Mises’s point regarding socialism, land socialism will create economic calculation problems.
The first calculation issue here is the government’s decisions regarding the use of this land and the resources on and under the land. Since the government owns the land, we see no prices for these resources. The government has no way to economize on these resources in the sense that government officials, even if they wanted to, could not efficiently allocate these resources. They make these allocation decisions based on political considerations, so they end up allowing the private sector to access the wrong resources, wrong in the sense that if we were allowed to have private ownership of these resources, we would choose to use the resources much differently, and more efficiently.
The second issue is that the economic calculation of private businesses is distorted by government control of the resources, because government ownership distorts the prices of the resources. If the prices were based on the private ownership of land and resources, for instance, we would see a different array of energy prices. The prices we see for resources do not accurately reflect the underlying realities of resource availability. Even though we are engaged in calculation when we allocate these resources, we are not economizing on the resources in the sense that Mises described.
Due to the high degree of government land ownership, the US government distorts economic calculation in the exact manner that Mises explained and predicted in 1920.

https://mises.org/library/including-ocean-floor-feds-own-much-more-land-you-think

Your Data Footprint Is Affecting Your Life In Ways You Can't Even Imagine

Job decisions, college admissions, health care decisions: All are now being fundamentally altered by your big data, and you might not even know.

Illustration: Eric Palma for Fast Company

                           

Imagine you’re moving apartments and shopping for new furniture at a couple of stores. You see a couch you like, but you’re not sure, so you leave thinking maybe you’ll return another day. But that couch doesn’t take well to rejection. It gets up, leaves the store, and starts following you around as you shop elsewhere and even after you go home having purchased a different couch. Then you start getting offers in the mail for new mattresses.

 

This is basically people’s experience on the Internet today—where innocently clicking on a link results in ad targeting that’s hard to shake and our purchases quickly reveal more information than we intend, such as the infamous example of Target knowing a woman is pregnant before she’s told her family—and before she's purchased any baby products.
From the credit card offers we receive to recommendations we see on Netflix and posts we see on Facebook, ads and marketing are the obvious example of our personal data being aggregated and analyzed to make predictions about us. National security—facilitated by massive and sometimes illegal data collection by the government—is clearly another. And if you work at a large information-based business, you’ve no doubt heard the terms "big data" and "bottom line" in the same sentence before.

Predictions about you are deeply shaping your life in ways of which you are probably blissfully unaware.

But these (mostly) benign examples that we encounter every day hide the truth about what large-scale government and corporate data collection means and where it's being used. Predictions about you (and millions of other strangers) are starting to deeply shape your life. Your career, your love life, major decisions about your health and well-being, and even if you end up in jail, are now being governed in no small part by the digital bread crumbs you've left behind—many of which you don't even know you've dropped in the first place.

Predictive analytics could save your life—or ruin it

Cities have long seen the potential in big data to improve the government and the lives of citizens, and this is now being put into action in ways where governments touch citizens' lives in very sensitive areas. New York City’s Department of Homelessness Services is mining apartment eviction filings, to see if they can understand who is at risk of becoming homeless and intervene early. And police departments all over the country have adopted predictive policing software that guides where officers should deploy, and at what time, leading to reduced crime in some cities.

Predictions based on this biased data could create a feedback loop.

In one study in Los Angeles, police officers deployed to certain neighborhoods by predictive policing software prevented 4.3 crimes per week, compared to 2 crimes per week when assigned to patrol a specific area by human crime analysts. Surely, a reduction in crime is a good thing. But community activists in places such as Bellingham, Washington, have grave doubts. They worry that outsiders can’t examine how the algorithms work, since the software is usually proprietary, and so citizens have no way of knowing what data the government is using to target them. They also worry that predictive policing is just exacerbating existing patterns of racial profiling. If the underlying crime data being used is the result of years of over-policing minority communities for minor offenses, then the predictions based on this biased data could create a feedback loop and lead to yet more over-policing.
At a smaller and more limited scale is the even more sensitive area of child protection services. Though the data isn’t really as "big" as in other examples, a few agencies are carefully exploring using statistical models to make decisions in several areas, such as which children in the system are most in danger of violence, which children are most in need of a trauma screening, and which are at risk of entering the criminal justice system.

 

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In Hillsborough County, Florida, where a series of child homicides occurred, a private provider selected to manage the county’s child welfare system in 2012 came in and analyzed the data. Cases with the highest probability of serious injury or death had a few factors in common, they found: a child under the age of three, a "paramour" in the home, a substance abuse or domestic violence history, and a parent previously in the foster care system. They identified nine practices to use in these cases and hired a software provider to create a dashboard that allowed real-time feedback and dashboards. Their success has led to the program being implemented statewide.

Recommendations get personal

Dating apps get popular when they are actually connecting people, so it's obvious that their systems usually try to show you matches based on some formula that accounts for the person you say you prefer, what your swipes and clicks reveal, and how others behave. Apps surely increase the number of strangers you can meet, but in the quest for love, research shows that all the work of their matching algorithms are mostly meaningless. You still need to work hard to find the right person, because a formula can’t account for all the uncertainty and individuality about what finding a lasting relationship requires.
But while they don't have the magic formula for creating love, dating sites are still shaping the romantic lives of the growing portion of the population that use them. Consider that Tinder has an internal rating of how desirable you are. If you're getting a lot of swipes, you won't be shown as frequently to give other people a chance. Another app, Coffee Meets Bagel, guides users to people of their own race or ethnicity, even if they say "no preference" on their profile. Partly, they do this because of what their data reveal: even when users say they have no preference, in private, people gravitate to others like them. That may be true in general, but for any given user, it may nudge them to live more segregated lives than they would otherwise want to, without them knowing at all.

Money, Health, And School

The emerging and heavily funded field of precision medicine revolves around the fact that doctors can start to personalize diagnosis and treatment based on how others—whether similar to you in their DNA, demographics, disease pattern, or life habits—respond to care. In the future, the goal is that health care will be highly personalized, and improved outcomes and lower costs will result. This is at an early stage, but already, responding to financial incentives in Obamacare, hospitals are using data mining to predict which patients are more likely to be readmitted within 90 days. People at a high risk to return are likely to receive more attentive follow-up care. At one hospital, for example, they are assigned a post discharge coordinator, where someone at a lower risk might not get the same treatment.

"It’s not that much of a stretch, where [a computer] actually says, here’s what I suggest with your portfolio."

Personal finance is another new area for algorithmic, data-driven predictions, with a number of new "robo-advsior" apps. "We’re getting used to computers actually being pretty credible in terms of the recommendations they make," says Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and its Center for Data Science. "It’s not that much of a stretch, where [a computer] actually says, here’s what I suggest with your portfolio."
Even major life decisions like college admissions and hiring are being affected. You might think that a college is considering you on your merits, and while that's mostly true, it's not entirely. Pressured to improve their rankings, colleges are very interested in increasing their graduation rates and the percentage of admitted students who enroll. They have now have developed statistical programs to pick students who will do well on these measures. These programs may take into account obvious factors like grades, but also surprising factors like their sex, race, and behavior on social media accounts. If your demographic factors or social media presence happen to doom you, you may find it harder to get into school—and not know why.
And what about getting a job? Consider a startup called Gild, which has built a database of tens of millions of professionals that contains data purchased from third-party providers plus "anything and everything that’s publicly available," according to CEO Sheeroy Desai. Its system identifies candidates who fit a job opening and analyzes factors that might predict their success. The company says it currently has about 10,000 recruiting and hiring managers using the platform, from employers such as Facebook, HBO, and TD Bank.

 

Desai says Gild’s speciality is "unifying information across very different sources." Its big data-based recommendations consider factors including job history, language, and behavior on social media sites, and public work samples such as a programmer's open-source code contributions. By analyzing the job movements of millions of people, it rates candidates not only based on their expertise but also how in-demand they might be based on the current job market. It also tries to answer questions like when a given person is most susceptible to a new job offer, how a person’s career track predicts where they’ll be in 10 years, and the likelihood a person will be a good fit at a company.

The reason the job market is so inefficient is that we have humans making decisions.

"The reason the job market is so inefficient is that we have humans making decisions," says Desai. Humans, he says, often have more nuanced judgment than a computer, but that judgment is clouded by lots of little biases that people are blind to. "At the end of the day, companies are still going to make decisions based on humans. We want to make more unbiased recommendations on who you should be interviewing."
On the plus side, recruiters have lauded it for helping them find candidates they might not otherwise have considered, like someone who didn’t go to college. A downside? Candidates trying to negotiate a higher salary against this kind of smart system might find a harder time of it. In either case, job candidates, Desai says, are sometimes shocked at how much interviewers know about them ahead of time.

A Dystopian Future?

"I think the opportunity is a rich one. At the same time, the ethical considerations need to be guiding us," says Jesse Russell, chief program officer at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, who has followed the use of predictive analytics in child protective services. Officials, he says, are treading carefully before using data to make decisions about individuals, especially when the consequences of being wrong—such as taking a child out of his or her home unnecessarily—are huge. And while caseworker decision-making can be flawed or biased, so can the programs that humans design. When you rely too much on data—if the data is flawed or incomplete, as could be the case in predictive policing—you risk further validating bad decisions or existing biases.

There’s this danger we lose our identity as people and we become categories.

Russell’s concerns are applicable to many areas where big data touches our lives. What happens when a computer says you’re likely to commit a crime before you do it, and, worse, what if the data underlying that prediction is wrong and you can’t do anything about it? What happens when a dating program is slowly pushing us to a more segregated society because it shows us the people it thinks we want to see? Or when personalized medicine can save lives, but because it is based mainly around genomes sequenced from white people of European descent, it's only saving some lives?
And while it’s true that analytics can already make smarter guesses than humans in many situations, people are more than their data. A world where people struggle to rise above what is expected of them—say a college won’t admit them because they don’t seem like someone with a good chance of graduating—is a sad world. "There’s this danger we lose our identity as people and we become categories," says Dhar.

Big data could solve really fundamental questions of human existence

On the other hand, big data does have the potential to vastly expand our understanding of who we are and why we do what we do. A decade ago, serious scientists would have laughed someone out of the room who proposed a study of "the human condition." It is a topic so broad and lacking in measurability. But perhaps the most important manifestation of big data in people’s lives could come from the ability for scientists to study huge, unwieldy questions they couldn't before.

 

A massive scientific undertaking to study the human condition is set to launch in January of 2017. The Kavli Human Project, funded by the Kavli Foundation, plans to recruit 10,000 New Yorkers from all walks of life to be measured for 10 years. And by measured, they mean everything: all financial transactions, tax returns, GPS coordinates, genomes, chemical exposure, IQ, bluetooth sensors around the house, who subjects text and call—and that’s just the beginning. In all, the large team of academics expect to collect about a billion data points per person per year at an unprecedented low cost for each data point compared to other large research surveys.

"There’s so many pressing problems that we struggle with in this society, and we are so bad at data-driven policy."

The hope is with so much continuous data, researchers can for the first time start to disentangle the complex, seemingly unanswerable questions that have plagued our society, from what is causing the obesity epidemic to how to disrupt the poverty to prison cycle. "There’s so many pressing problems that we struggle with in this society, and we are so bad at data-driven policy," says Paul Glimcher, director of the project and a professor of neural science, economics, and psychology at NYU.
For example, how do people decide what to eat? In these decisions, there’s complex interactions between biology, behavior, and environment that have always made this question hard to study comprehensively. But if the Kavli Human Project combines geo-located food shopping and consumption data with health biomarkers with financial details and other data, obesity experts say this will be a "first-of-its-kind bio-behavioral, economic, and cultural atlas of diet quality and health for New York City" that can help them make breakthroughs.
Part of its potential is that it could bring the benefits of big data to those who are currently left out. "I think it’s really not been the case that [big data] has broadly impacted everyone. I think it’s impacted the people who write for The New York Times and Fast Company, and people who read The New York Times and Fast Company," Glimcher says.
Glimcher says he’s disappointed at the ways that big data tools have been used so far. "It’s just terrible," he says. "Sometimes big data is treated as if it’s an organism. And the question is how will this organism interact with us. And we really honestly hate that. We like the idea as scientists, as activists—we are big data. We are designing big data. And the challenge is to design big data that has those positive impacts, not to wait and see."

 

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3057514/your-data-footprint-is-affecting-your-life-in-ways-you-cant-even-imagine