Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

DS Exclusive: Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers Reflects on his Journey from Belfast to Chicago; and the role of Political Punk in the Era of Trump

Stiff Little Fingers, out of Belfast, Northern Ireland was amongst the first wave punk bands, and among those with a lasting impact. Their debut album, the seminal Inflammable Material celebrated its 40th Anniversary earlier this year.  The album features a trilogy of angry, political songs. S.L.F. founder and lead singer Jake Burns still has a […]

The post DS Exclusive: Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers Reflects on his Journey from Belfast to Chicago; and the role of Political Punk in the Era of Trump appeared first on Dying Scene.

Isiah James Wants to Take Brooklyn’s Fight for Affordable Housing to Congress

The 32-year-old veteran is challenging seven-term incumbent Yvette Clarke. He’ll have to convince voters he's the true progressive.

The post Isiah James Wants to Take Brooklyn’s Fight for Affordable Housing to Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History | History | Smithsonian https://prismo.xyz/posts/a8b3300f-044a-498c-a3c0-15f8dfd5cad8

Apple Can Feel Its Reputation for Bulletproof Security Slipping Through Its Fingers
https://gizmodo.com/apple-can-feel-its-reputation-for-bulletproof-security-1837941493 #privacy #security #librem5

Microsoft's modus operandi seems to be "Embrace open source (not #FOSS) and convince naive developers to use weak (not Copyleft) open source licenses so we can Extend their work as free R&D, to which we add tiny proprietary "enhancements", and sell it back to them". It's entirely consistent with their current approach.

Facebook's Dating Service is Full of Red Flags

If you open Facebook’s mobile app today, it will likely suggest that you try the company’s new Dating service, which just launched in the U.S. after a rollout in 19 other countries last year. But with the company’s track record of mishandling user data, and its business model of monetizing our sensitive information to power third-party targeted advertising, potential users should view Facebook’s desire to peek into our bedrooms as a huge red flag.

Bad at Data Privacy But Good at Dating Privacy? Doubtful

Just this week, Facebook’s lax data privacy practices resulted in a huge database of phone numbers linked to accounts surfacing on a third party’s unprotected server. Generally, this is how the story goes: sensitive user data is leaked or found to be available in a way that Facebook users didn’t expect. But don’t worry, the company says—we’ve updated those practices. While improvements are appreciated, this cycle gets repeated so regularly that you could almost set your watch by it. 

This has created a problem for Facebook. Once upon a time, the company’s main value proposition was to make it easier for friends, or acquaintances, to connect and share info about themselves with one another (and thus with Facebook). And over the years, the company has expanded the amount of data it collects—even as it has become clearer and clearer that it can’t be trusted with all of that sensitive info. 

Butafterthesenumerousscandals, many users have spent the last year or two trying to minimize the information they intentionally give to the company (though its ubiquitycan make that difficult). Facebook Dating offers a new twist on what the company once promised—connection—in exchange for what the company values most—your data. But at this point, one would have to be pretty desperate to give a company with Facebook’s history any insight into their romantic life. Your friend list alone can reveal all sorts of information about you. With a new service like Dating that gives Facebook access to particularly sensitive information about our love lives—like which of our friends we have a crush on, what we are looking for in a partner, where we met them, etc—users should be very wary that the company will continue to mishandle this especially private info the way it has already mishandled user info for years.  

Third Wheels and Third Parties 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook says it isn’t currently monetizing its dating service. But the company is powered by advertising dollars, paid for by advertisers who want access to the data that Facebook collects. Facebook gathers this information inlots of ways—when you click the “like” button, when you click ads, when you visit other sites that have Facebook’s pixel on them, even when you visit specific stores in person. In all likelihood, dating profile data will prove too valuable an addition to that collection for the company to keep hidden from advertisers, who would love to be the third wheel in your relationship with Facebook’s dating service. Some of that info will almost certainly be available for those third parties to use in their search for ever more detailed data about potential targets.  

To do that, Facebook could combine your dating profile information with the rest of your account data—it’s hard to imagine the company giving up the ability to add its years of data on users with the new data it collects about their dating. If it required informed opt-in consent from users before advertisers could use that data, that might be less worrisome. But we don’t know if there will be any controls at all for those who don’t want their dating life to mingle with the rest of their online profile, or to be shared with advertisers—and that’s a recipe for heartbreak. 

This is not to mention that earlier this year, in a world-class blunder, Facebook was caught (and chastised by the FTC for)using phone numbers for targeted advertising purposes that users had provided only for two-factor authentication. If you can’t trust Facebook with your phone number, can you really trust them to safeguard your dating history? These numerous past mistakes should serve as a warning: if you wouldn’t tell Facebook—and all of its advertisers—the nitty gritty details about what you’re looking for in a partner, you should think twice about asking the company to play matchmaker.

Kamala Harris Pledged To Halt Fracking. Her Foreign Policy Advisor Wants The Opposite.

At the September 4 CNN climate town hall, Kamala Harris sounded like a candidate serious about climate change. She came out for bans on fracking and off-shore drilling, pledged to stop drilling on public land, and vowed to get rid of the Senate filibuster in order to pass a Green New Deal. She spoke derisively about Congress debating whether science should be the basis of public policy, and called climate change “an existential threat to who we are as human beings.”

Any president will face many challenges to the bold climate agendas outlined at the town hall. For Harris, those challenges could include her own foreign policy advisor.

Harris is being advised by Michèle Flournoy, a career Pentagon official who has repeatedly urged increasing domestic fossil fuel extraction as a key part of U.S. foreign policy, and supported several policies that have helped turn the U.S. into one of the world’s worst carbon polluters, such as Obama’s repeal of the ban on domestic oil exports.

Foreign policy will be critical to any successful effort to prevent climate catastrophe—and not only because of ongoing global climate negotiations and the responsibility of the U.S. to assist other nations’ energy transitions. Current U.S. foreign policy is also a major driver of climate change, whether through the massive and carbon-intensive global military footprint, or the use of oil and gas exports as a lever of power.

Flournoy was considered Hillary Clinton’s secretary of defense-in-waiting in 2016 and is rumored to be a top candidate to run the Pentagon under almost any future Democratic administration, which, based on her public positions, could portend a more fossil fuel-friendly foreign policy than many climate-conscious voters may be comfortable with.

Flournoy co-wrote a 2015 Washington Post op-ed outlining a “bipartisan national security agenda for America’s divided government.” Besides cancelling the planned 2016 withdrawal from Afghanistan and signing the controversial, corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific Partnership, her recommendations included a remit to “permit crude oil exports, expand liquefied-natural-gas export permits and fully leverage America's newfound energy position.” U.S. energy production “has emerged as a new source of strength,” she wrote, and “Washington should take maximum advantage of these developments,” including by lifting the decades-old ban on exporting crude oil from the United States.

In a similar op-ed in the Wall Street Journal four months later, Flournoy again called for unleashing U.S. fossil fuel production as part of a “bold and bipartisan international economic agenda” dedicated to maintaining the United States’ superpower status. She called the 1975 oil export ban “outdated and counterproductive” and urged Obama to “speed the issuance of permits for the export of liquefied natural gas” to U.S. allies in Europe and Asia.

Flournoy again urged this course of action in 2016, when she endorsed a report produced by the Center for a New American Security, a centrist foreign policy think-tank she co-founded in 2007, titled “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand US Engagement in a Competitive World Order.” Among other things, the report praised the U.S. “energy revolution” wrought by fracking and horizontal drilling, which was an “area of strategic advantage” that could “help extend American power.” Owing partly to Flournoy’s involvement, the report was perceivedat the timeas a preview of what a President Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy might look like.

Flournoy saw energy exports as critical to maintaining the United States’ superpower status. On the one hand, Washington could leverage fossil fuel exports to box out adversaries like Russia and Iran from regional influence. At the same time, with the U.S. economy “the foundation of its military and political power,” and since “the demand for U.S. power is higher than it has been in decades,” the United States could use the consequent economic gains to continue to intervene and have its influence felt across the world from Asia, to the Middle East to Europe.

This vision runs up against not just Harris’ commitment to tackling climate change, but the views of environmental groups.

“Exporting drilling, fracking, mining for some supposed geopolitical gain is in fact going to undermine global geopolitical stability,” said Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director at Food & Water Watch, explaining that, as the Pentagon itself has acknowledged for years, the devastating effects of climate change will fuel national security threats around the globe. “You cannot have a secretary of defense, president, or secretary of state who is going to be promoting the export of fossil fuels from the US.”

“We're way past the time of ‘all of the above’ and ‘Drill, baby, drill,’” says Greenpeace USA Climate Campaigner Charlie Jiang.

Asked about the disconnect between Flournoy and Harris’s statements, Jiang says: "It's absolutely true that personnel is policy.”

 The Harris campaign did not respond by deadline to a request for comment.

For Incarcerated Workers, Summer Heat Can Be a Death Sentence

A Google News App Is Pushing Climate Denier Blogs. Google Won’t Say Why. https://prismo.xyz/posts/17e22a22-31c7-4992-9733-f4d1e24888a0

Why Warren Can’t Count On A ‘Women’s Vote’ | FiveThirtyEight https://prismo.xyz/posts/35eb1b79-3ef6-4855-9296-1e08d683a5f9

Livestream: The Right to a Future — With Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg

Watch The Intercept’s Naomi Klein, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and other youth leaders discuss the emerging climate movement for a sustainable future.

The post Livestream: The Right to a Future — With Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg appeared first on The Intercept.

Ah yes, this is good. Facebook needs to be held responsible.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20852566/facebook-antitrust-investigation-states-attorneys-general-letitia-james-big-tech

House Democrats Announce Investigation of Pence’s Ireland Trip

The House Oversight and Judiciary committees have launched inquiries into efforts by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and others to spend taxpayer funds at properties that Trump owns—a move the lawmakers say is part of their broader investigation into corruption by the administration. The Oversight Committee sent letters Thursday to the White House, […]

Exxon Mobil Is Funding Centrist Democratic Think Tank, Disclosures Reveal

Oil companies and centrist Democrats have started to sound a lot alike on climate policy.

The post Exxon Mobil Is Funding Centrist Democratic Think Tank, Disclosures Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

Elizabeth Warren Is Doing to the Pentagon What She Did to Wall Street

The confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was a snoozer. A few Senate Armed Services Committee members spent nearly three hours heaping praise on Esper, a decorated Gulf War veteran, for his decades of service in the military and as a staffer on Capitol Hill. The comity was interrupted only once, when one of the panel’s […]

DS Exclusive: The Restarts debut “Black Dog” from upcoming album, “Uprising”

Happy Friday, gang! Dying Scene are stoked to bring you some brand new music from English hardcore vets The Restarts! The East London-based trio has got a brand new EP, Uprising, due out on Pirates Press Records on October 25th. BUT because they love you, the Pirates are bringing you the debut single, “Black Dog,” […]

The post DS Exclusive: The Restarts debut “Black Dog” from upcoming album, “Uprising” appeared first on Dying Scene.

Secret Terrorism Watchlist Found Unconstitutional in Historic Decision

The U.S. government's Terrorist Screening Database included roughly 1.2 million people as of 2017, among them about 4,600 U.S. citizens or green card holders.

The post Secret Terrorism Watchlist Found Unconstitutional in Historic Decision appeared first on The Intercept.

We Won’t Be Silent

“Nobody wants to think about the women risking their lives for abortion access. But they did. And they will.”

The Pen Isn’t Mightier

Trump does some more light editing.