[Plura-list] White House street renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza"; Little Green Men; Kim Stanley Robinson on the Jobs Guarantee; There's a bright side

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* White House street renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza": But when will
Mayor Bowser rein in the violent white supremacists in Metro PD?

* Little Green Men: Who are the secretive, armed men patrolling DC?

* Kim Stanley Robinson on the Jobs Guarantee: Forced labor or dignified
labor?

* There's a bright side: Massive waves of voter registration, support
for defunding the police.

* Toxic familial surveillance: Tech supercharges intimate surveillance.

* Consumer Reports joins the revolution: Which side are you on?

* This day in history: 2005, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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👩🏿‍🏭 White House street renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza"

Murial Bowser, the Mayor of DC, has renamed the stretch of 16th St NW in
front of the White House "Black Lives Matter Plaza" (which abbreviates
to "Black Lives Matter Plz") (!).

https://twitter.com/guycecil/status/1268927143091765249

Mayor Bowser also ordered a giant BLACK LIVES MATTER mural painted down
the center of 16th St on the approach to the White House.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/d-c-mayor-bowser-has-black-lives-matter-painted-street-n1225746

However, @DMVBlackLives, a DC chapter of Black Lives Matter, has decried
Bowser's actions as window-dressing, sharing a video enumerating ways in
which Bowser's administration has failed Black people in DC.

https://twitter.com/DMVBlackLives/status/1268951468041789440

The video lays out the case for DC's Metro PD being riddled with violent
white supremacists who operate with impunity, harassing, hurting, and
murdering Black people, while the Mayor looks on.

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👩🏿‍🏭 Little Green Men

The Russian soldiers who invaded Crimea wore no insignia and posed as
local citizens who'd taken up arms for regional independence from the
central government.  Ukrainians called them "little green men" -
invaders from outer space.

The streets of DC have their own little green men, armed riot cops in
military gear who refuse to identify themselves or which branch of the
US government they represent.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/05/protests-washington-dc-federal-agents-law-enforcement-302551

They are members of the myriad, ramified network of fed cops whose ranks
have swollen by about 2,500 cops/year - creating a federal police force
that now outnumbers the entire headcount for the ATF. The Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center trains inductees into 80 forces.

These agencies are only cursorily overseen and are generally
unaccountable. They're a shitshow.

Take the CBP, who serve as a kind of praetorian guard for Trump.
Remember, during the Muslim Ban, the CBP supervisor who hung up on
Members of Congress who oversee the agency?

The Reps asked the CBP chief who he reported to, and he said "Donald J
Trump" and hung up the phone?

The CBP is a shitshow's shitshow. On average, a CBP officer is arrested
for corruption *every single day*.

*For a decade*.

The FBI once declared CBP corruption to be the greatest threat to US
border security.

It's not just CBP - Federal policing agencies from the Bureau of Prisons
to the US Marshals are routinely rocked by ghastly scandals.

Trump's cabinet doesn't care. They don't want the rule of law, they want
armed stooges. That's why Scott Pruitt used his 20-person security
detail to buy him moisturizer; why Mike Pompeo uses Diplomatic Security
Service to pick up Chinese food.

Few of these agencies even have permanent chiefs; they're filled by a
now-you-see-em-now-you-don't rogues' gallery of cronies appointed as
interim heads, a job they inevitably lose when they fuck up in some
predictable way.

All this is from an outstanding Politoc piece by Garrett M Graff, who
goes on to note that the ATF hasn't had a constant oversight by a
Senate-approved chief since 2002, because the NRA rejects EVERY SINGLE
qualified person as too soft on gun control.

Most recently, Chuck Canterbury's application for the job was withdrawn
after NRA-enthralled Senators made it clear they wouldn't approve him.
Who is this gun-grabber, Chuck Canterbury?

He's the former head of the Fraternal Order of Police.

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👩🏿‍🏭 Kim Stanley Robinson on the Jobs Guarantee

There's a terrible paradox at work in the mass unemployment created by
the pandemic. We know that there is more than enough work for every
human alive today and for the next 2-300 years, addressing the climate
emergency.

That was true before the pandemic. What's changed is that tens of
millions of workers in the USA and hundreds of millions worldwide have
lost their jobs, and there is no demand from the private sector for
their labor.

Our system relies on markets to create jobs, on the grounds that this is
the most efficient way to employ people.

Today, millions of people face long-term unemployment (with the physical
and mental-health tolls that come with it).

And we *desperately* need their work to save our planet and our species.

How is it "efficient" to leave them idle while the planet burns?

It's a subject I've been contemplating in fiction for a long time. It's
at the center of the novel I'm writing.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#byebye-falc

But don't listen to an sf writer - listen to an economist, like Pavlina
Tcherneva, whose forthcoming book "The Case for a Jobs Guarantee," lays
out a clear and plausible case for giving a job to every person who
wants one, doing the care and rehabilitation we so desperately need.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the-hard-stuff/#jobs-guarantee

I'm not the only sf writer who's been inspired by Tcherneva's vision. My
colleague Kim Stanley Robinson's latest Bloomberg column lays out the
case for a jobs guarantee with the poesy for which he is justly famed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-05/the-climate-case-for-a-jobs-guarantee-kim-stanley-robinson

Robinson rightly sees the threat of automation-driven unemployment as
hacky science fiction masquerading as economic analysis: "Most jobs
require a flexibility and creativity that only humans can bring to the
task."

"And even if some of the jobs offered by government were make-work, such
as the Works Progress Administration when it was building hiking trails
and post offices in the 1930s, so what?"

Robinson connects the Jobs Guarantee to Modern Monetary Theory and the
premise that deficit spending doesn't create inflation - what creates
inflation is too much money chasing the same goods and services.

"If [economists] think the [economy's] goal is other than prosperous
people living in balance with a healthy biosphere, they need to make
that case—or think again."

Governments presiding over 25-40% unemployment don't last. They are so
unstable that they collapse, sometimes taking the nation with them. When
the pandemic is over, we're going to do *something*, or we're going to
dissolve into chaos.

The right wing version of this is workfare, AKA forced labor.

The progressive version is the Jobs Guarantee: care and remediation jobs
created in consultation with local communities, paying a living wage and
good benefits.

The Fight For 15 is important, but the idea that this would set the
minimum wage at $15/h is wrong. In the absence of a Jobs Guarantee, the
true minimum wage is $0/hour. That's how much you earn if no one wants
to buy your labor.

A living minimum wage puts some pressure on the worst employers to
improve their workers' lives, but at the end of the day, those employers
have a counteroffer for their workers: how about $0/hour?

A Jobs Guarantee - like the other guarantees the federal government
offers, backing loans, guaranteeing profits to contractors, buying
surplus agricultural product - would put a real floor on the living
conditions of workers.

If we're willing to guarantee a minimum price for cheese, why not human
labor?

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👩🏿‍🏭 There's a bright side

I don't think every cloud has a silver lining, but I DO think that when
life gives you SARS, you need to make sarsaparilla (h/t Joey DeVilla).

Is it possible that there's SOME bright side to ::gestures vaguely:: all
this?

How's this: the uprisings and the brutal police retaliation has sent
unprecedented floods of people to register to vote, with record funds
and volunteer turnout for Democrat-linked causes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/george-floyd-protests-created-surge-in-voter-registrations-groups-say.html

There've been surges of young, racialized voters - the kinds of voters
who back real progressives in downticket races, which is where all the
action is (the White House is important, but so is the Mayor, the county
commissioners, and your state reps).

In case you doubt that voter registration can make a difference when the
Democrats are so committed to business as usual, consider Janeese Lewis
George, a Democratic Socialist who clobbered her establishment incumbent
opponent in a local race in DC's Ward 4.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/dc-city-council-janeese-lewis-george-election/

George ran on a unapologetic progressive platform whose centerpiece was
defunding the police. Her opponent smeared her on this, calling her a
radical. But she kicked his ass.

#DefundPolice is gaining steam across America. If you want to sign onto
a letter in your city, check this master list:

https://defund12.org/

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👩🏿‍🏭 Toxic familial surveillance

Stalkerware is a grotesque dumpster-fire,  a perfect example of how
shortsighted product designers' mistakes can be leveraged by
unscrupulous profiteers to destroy peoples' lives.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aeyea8/i-tracked-myself-with-dollar170-smartphone-spyware-that-anyone-can-buy

It's through these tools that we see teens with abusive parents, women
with abusive partners, and people with abusive "friends" subjected to
the kinds of surveillance that powerful, repressive governments use on
their opposition movement leaders

Unsurprisingly, these tools are marketed by absolute sociopaths.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aemeae/meet-flexispy-the-company-getting-rich-selling-stalkerware-to-jealous-lovers

And equally unsurprisingly, they're not very good at their jobs - the
company that lets you spy on your teen is apt to be dumping all that
surveillance data online where anyone can get it.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j573k3/spyware-data-leak-pictures-audio-recordings

Even worse: these companies are a bargain-basement alternative to the
equally creepy world of police spyware, so cops often use stalkerware
instead, and expose their suspects' data to the same leaks.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmwnm3/metropolitan-police-flexispy-legal-complaint

All of this is abetted by a tame "security" industry that, until
recently, refused to even class stalkerware as malware, so their tools
wouldn't warn you if it was on your device.

(Thank EFF's Eva Galperin for making them change course)

https://www.wired.com/story/eva-galperin-stalkerware-kaspersky-antivirus/

"Privacy threats in intimate relationships," a new Journal of
Cybersecurity paper by Karen Levy and Bruce Schnieier, is the best
resource I've yet seen on understanding the risks presented by these
tools and what to do about them.

https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/Privacy_Threats_in_Intimate_Relationships.pdf

Starting with the observation that we often hear about the design
weaknesses that enable stalkerware in a positive light, such when the
Governor of Alabama was outed for having an affair because his cheating
SMSes were synced to his wife's Ipad.

"From a privacy-protective perspective, we ought to be agnostic as to
the nature of the behavior or content detected, and be fundamentally
concerned with how technology may facilitate involuntary
information-sharing."

And they introduce contexts in which people might have a legitimate
reason to surveil their loved ones, and likewise contexts in which
society might expect them to (or even punish them for not spying on them).

Think of mothers who face legal and social sanctions for leaving their
kids alone while they shop or look for jobs, and who receive messages of
inadequate parenting for failing to supervise their kids 24/7.

Or parents who are told they have to put ankle-bracelets on their
"high-risk" teens by counsellors or authority figures.

Or the (ugh) "granny-cams" that adult children of older people use to
monitor their home conditions, compliance with complex medication
requirements, and the conduct of caregivers, both in and out of
long-term care facilities.

But note how easily these can shade over into abuse, especially when
firms pick up on the (real and imaginary) anxieties that fuel
consumption of these tools. That's how you get companies like Bark,
which sells stalkerware for parents to force on their kids.

Bark advertises that it will alert you if your teen's texting or social
media use contains "profanity, sexting, or indicators of depression."

For parents of younger kids, there's Hello Barbie, which secretly
records children's interactions with their toys and relays them to parents.

One of the cardinal rules of security is that there is no such thing as
abstract "security" - there is only security *from* some threat. The
assumptions in many tools' security design assume that threats are
external - a distant hacker, griefer, state or thief.

But when the call is coming from inside of the house, all bets are off.
For example, what if the attacker is legally allowed to give consent on
behalf of their victim (parents, some spouses, adult children of older
adults)? "Consent" for data-gathering is meaningless here.

What happens when 2FA challenges send an SMS to a phone that the
attacker can access and read incoming messages from, right on the
lock-screen?

Or when the attacker can look at an array of photos and reliably pick
out the people who are known to their victims and describe their relations?

These emotionally motivated attacks also disrupt the "security
economics" that underpins security models - a bank vault that protects
$1m doesn't need to be impregnable - it just has to cost more than $1m
to break into, so "rational actors" won't bother.

But jealousy, paranoia, misogyny, revenge, and the other emotional
factors behind this kind of factors are hard to set a price on -
Schneier describes how, as a kid, he spent days cracking a 10,000-code
padlock by trying combos in succession.

("Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and
cash-poor" -Little Brother, to which Schneier contributed an excellent
afterword)

And, crucially, "While many of the threats we have described here are
technically unsophisticated, we should not misread this as an indication
that they are easy to solve."

Though the authors take a stab at it, recommending Eva Galperin's work,
and this superb Citizen Lab report:

https://citizenlab.ca/2019/06/the-predator-in-your-pocket-a-multidisciplinary-assessment-of-the-stalkerware-application-industry/

To which I would add the power of mockery to de-normalize surveillance,
as when a grassroots movement of teens to dunk on the parental spyware
app Life360 went viral on Tiktok.

https://www.wired.com/story/life360-location-tracking-families/

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👩🏿‍🏭 Consumer Reports joins the revolution

You might think that Consumer Reports' mission - objectively reviewing
products and services - is a politically neutral activity, but reality
has a left-wing bias, so anyone who tells the truth is intrinsically
political.

That's why Consumers Union - publishers of Consumer Reports - was on the
House Un-American Activities Committee's list of subversive organizations.

Objectively reporting on the activities of corporations IS a subversive
activity.

In recent years, CU/CR have become more explicitly political, doing deep
and groundbreaking work on privacy and other issues of moment in the
digital era:

https://www.consumerreports.org/mobile-security-software/glow-pregnancy-app-exposed-women-to-privacy-threats/

But the magazine grows more radical by the day. This week, they
published an excellent guide to staying safe at protests:

https://www.consumerreports.org/coronavirus/how-to-stay-safe-while-protesting-during-a-pandemic/

While there's nothing in here that you wouldn't find many places
elsewhere, the fact that it comes with CR's imprimatur of objective
technical excellence, and that its inclusion in CR automatically makes
protesting police violence into a consumer issue, is amazing.

Beyond that, CR also wants to explain to you have to safely record video
at protests:

https://www.consumerreports.org/audio-video/how-to-record-video-during-a-protest/

CR's audience skews older and more conservative - both because of its
origins as a print magazine and because thriftiness and fixed incomes go
together. I don't claim to know the editorial calculus behind this move,
but the outcome is incredibly heartening.

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👩🏿‍🏭 This day in history

#15yrsago Wal-Mart won't print digital photos that look "professional"
https://web.archive.org/web/20050610004003/http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/personaltech/20050530-9999-mz1b30snap.html

#1yrago People who document evidence of violent extremism are being shut
down in Youtube's crackdown on violent extremism
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/06/dolphins-in-tuna-nets.html

#1yrago A mysterious nonprofit made millions suing companies to put
California cancer warnings on coffee
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/the-secretive-nonprofit-that-made-millions-suing-companies-over-cancer-warnings/

#1yrago Australia's raids on journalists signal an authoritarian turning
point
https://theconversation.com/why-the-raids-on-australian-media-present-a-clear-threat-to-democracy-118334

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👩🏿‍🏭 Colophon

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://superpunch.net/), Christian
Reilly (https://twitter.com/mmtpodcast), Geoffrey MacDougall
(https://twitter.com/taliesan), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 514 words (22079 total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances:

* Cogx, Jun 8, "Freedom and Civic Duties: How to beat surveillance
capitalism and reclaim your privacy" 9AM Pacific. Free registration via
https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/en/discount/SPCXSFP100

* Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

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That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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👩🏿‍🏭 How to get Pluralistic:

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla


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