Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Part Time Killer streaming new song “System is Using You”

Finnish skate-punks Part Time Killer are streaming their new song “System is Using You”. The song comes off the band’s upcoming yet to be named album. Mastered by Jason Livermore at The Blasting Room, the new album promises to be a gem. Check out the new song below. Part Time Killers released “Notes To Myself” […]

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Nerf Herder returns to Chicago to play inaugural “Merry Punking Christmas”

Punk vets Nerf Herder will return to Chicago for the first time in seventeen long years to play the inaugural “Merry Punking Christmas” at Reggies. Joining Nerf Herder for this, the most joyous of occasions will be: The Copyrights, Dan Vapid & The Cheats, and Capgun Heroes. The show will go down December 7th as […]

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Cleopatra Records streaming Punk Rock Halloween 2 compilation

Cleopatra Records is streaming their latest installment in the Punk Rock Halloween compilation department Punk Rock Halloween 2. Featuring the likes of The Vandals, Pulley, Down By Law, Tsunami Bomb, and a whole host of other amazing bands covering some of your favorite Halloween classics. Check it out below. Cleopatra Records released Punk Rock Halloween back in 2017. Featuring […]

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Who’s Speaking at the U.N. Climate Summit? Several Champions of Coal. https://nyti.ms/34XHbo1 #climatechange #climatecrisis

GOP Leadership Huddles With Fossil Fuel Industry During Climate Week

“Please join us for a Gas and Oil Industry Dinner with Republican Whip Steve Scalise,” read one invitation.

The post GOP Leadership Huddles With Fossil Fuel Industry During Climate Week appeared first on The Intercept.

Bernie Sanders Introduces Plan to Cancel $81 Billion in Medical Debt

Bernie Sanders not only wants to eliminate future medical debt with his plan for Medicare-for-All, he also wants to wipe the slate clean for Americans who already have debt from unpaid medical bills. On Saturday, the Democratic candidate announced an ambitious plan to eliminate $81 billion medical debt for Americans, reform bankruptcy laws, and even […]

Black Flag Concert Turn Into Ticket Mayhem

Last night Black Flag performed at the Wiltern Theater in LA and there was a problem: fans who bought tickets from third-party vendors like StubHub were turned away. There was massive pointing of fingers over this, with TicketMaster saying everyone knew the tickets were nontransferable while the third-party guys said TicketMaster changed the rules 40 […]

New ruling gives legal boost to a key data journalism tool

A recent federal appeals court ruling may be a big win for data journalists and researchers who depend on scraping — the automated collection of data from websites — to collect information on which they report.

The case, involving the professional social networking giant LinkedIn and the data startup hiQ Labs, has been widely discussed in legal circles and the security community, but may be just as significant for journalists.

The legal controversy centers on a database of information that hiQ had scraped from the portion of LinkedIn profiles that were set to be publicly accessible on the web. LinkedIn sought to stop hiQ from accessing that data, sending a letter threatening to sue under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a handful of other grounds. hiQ then challenged that letter in court. In response, the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled last week that the CFAA likely does not prohibit the scraping of public web pages.

“Permission is not required”

Strictly speaking, the court has not yet definitively ruled on the issues at the heart of hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn. Rather, it said hiQ is likely enough to win on the merits of its argument — including the CFAA question — that LinkedIn must allow the startup to continue scraping while the case continues. It's a bit of a confusing procedural posture, but some takeaways are clear and important.

While CFAA rulings — in this circuit and elsewhere — have become a bit of a contradictory thicket, here the Ninth digs in specifically to the statutory language on authorization, or who can access what. Namely, the CFAA prohibits "exceed[ing] authorized access" to a computer.

The ruling lays out a neat taxonomy of computer information, dividing it into three parts: information for which access is open to the general public and permission is not required; information for which authorization is required and has been given; and information for which authorization is required but has not been given.

Last week’s ruling specifically covers LinkedIn’s publicly available data, which it correctly describes as falling into the first category — one that also includes the vast swath of information available on the public web. LinkedIn had argued that, by sending a cease-and-desist letter, it revoked hiQ’s “authorization” to use the site. The court dispensed with that idea: information that is presumptively available to all requires no special authorization to access, and so there’s no authorization to revoke.

Many journalistic endeavors that involve scraping fall precisely into that first category, which is why the ruling is significant.

Journalists may automate visits to an Inspector General’s web page, to be alerted when there are newly published reports. They may write a script to download all the previous meeting agendas of a community board committee at once, to analyze how often a topic has been discussed. They may back up the online marketing materials for a business they’re reporting on, to monitor whether it quietly makes changes after an expose is published.

Research scraping and the CFAA

For journalists and researchers, web scraping — and other mechanisms of automating computer usage — can be an invaluable source of raw data, but has occasionally hit legal friction, especially around the CFAA.

First Look Media and a collection of academics described bodies of research they were creating, using techniques that include scraping, in a constitutional challenge to the CFAA. First Look’s portion of the complaint was dismissed in 2018, but the ACLU continues to represent plaintiffs who investigate whether sites are systematically discriminating against certain classes of users.
A broad coalition of journalists and researchers, represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute, challenged Facebook to establish a "safe harbor" from CFAA prosecution for activities that include scraping the site or creating temporary accounts. Some courts have allowed plaintiffs to argue that terms-of-service violations also constitute CFAA violations, so the group asked specifically for Facebook to clarify its terms to explicitly allow that behavior.
A team of ProPublica reporters scraped some 80,000 criminal records to compare with data collected through public records requests in order to analyze patterns of discrimination in one component of the prison parole process. Julia Angwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on that research team, later said of their research, “The CFAA criminalizes practically everything I do in my reporting.”

While these examples don’t deal exclusively with the sort of entirely public web content addressed in the hiQ ruling, they demonstrate both the power of scraping as a tool, and the peril of the CFAA as a threat.

By taking the common-sense position that these activities are “not analogous to ‘breaking-and-entering,’” last week’s ruling provides legal cover for the myriad journalistic uses of public web scraping against the dark cloud of the CFAA.

Why I Decided Not To Delete My Old Internet Posts

In this excerpt from his memoir, the NSA whistleblower describes his realization that no one should have to "pretend to be perfect."

The post Why I Decided Not To Delete My Old Internet Posts appeared first on The Intercept.

Climate change study finds that maple syrup season may come earlier

Once winter nights dip below freezing and the days warm up above freezing sap begins to flow in sugar maples marking the start of the syrup season. With climate change, daily temperatures are on the rise, which affects sap flow and sugar content. By 2100, the maple syrup season in eastern North America may be one month earlier than it was during 1950 and 2017, according to a new study.

The Shocking Lack of Diversity on State Supreme Courts

The American judiciary is facing a crisis of legitimacy. Just one in three Americans express confidence in the legal system, and there is a widespread belief that the rule of law is unfairly applied. “The Supreme Court is not well,” five Democratic senators wrote in a much-discussed amicus brief filed last month. “And the people know it.”

What fewer people may know is that the nation’s highest court is hardly unique in its dysfunction. Perhaps matters pertaining to lower-level courts have gone unnoticed because President Trump has appointed two controversial justices to the Supreme Court and named nearly 150 other judges to lifetime federal positions. But this oversight is at the public’s peril: State courts hear 95 percent of all legal cases, and set precedents that bind more than 23,000 lower court judges, who, as legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill explained in the Washington and Lee Law Review, have “a more direct and irrevocable impact in the lives of many Americans than local or even national legislators.”

One of the most significant developments in recent years is the outsized role of big money in the 38 states that elect judges. The National Institute on Money in Politics estimates that, in 2018, more than $35 million was spent on state court races—an all-time record.

Partisanship continues to be an issue, too. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey recently added two additional seats to the state’s top court and removed Democrats from its nominating commission, which, Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern claims, “rig[s] the judicial process in favor of ultraconservatives.” Last year, a would-be judge in North Carolina was targeted by the GOP for “siding with gangs before police.” And when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled to legalize same-sex marriage in 2009, conservatives responded with a vigorous—and ultimately successful—campaign to remove three of the justices from the bench.

These trends compound another problem plaguing top courts: an astonishing lack of diversity. Seventeen states have just one woman on their supreme court, and nearly half of all state top courts are all-white, according to a recent report published by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy think tank at New York University’s Law School. This includes states with considerable minority populations like Nevada, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Indeed, by many measures, state benches are less representative than they were a generation ago, even as legislative bodies like the U.S. Congress continue to become more racially and ethnically diverse.

“This is a problem that goes much deeper than the current president or the federal courts,” says Alicia Bannon, the managing director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and a co-author of the report. “It goes to the integrity of our system of justice… If your courts aren’t reflecting the communities they’re supposed to serve, you have a real crisis on your hands.”

A homogenous judiciary isn’t well positioned to understand the challenges that face Americans of varying sexual orientations, ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses. And when the legal system fails to include alternative perspectives, it’s deprived of the opportunity to render truly fair and equal justice. As Harry T. Edwards, a senior circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, noted in 2002, diversity ensures “constant input from judges who have seen different kinds of problems in their pre-judicial careers, and have sometimes seen the same problems from different angles.”  

Edwards’ point was not that personal identity should determine a justice’s decisions, and he actively rejected the notion that he was obligated “to enforce some mythical black perspective” as part of his rulings. Rather, he was arguing that diversity on the bench was about ensuring differences in awareness and that a more variegated court was ultimately better able to rule impartially.

“Just as most of my Jewish colleagues have more than a fleeting understanding of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and issues surrounding Israel and Palestine, most blacks have more than a fleeting understanding of the effects of racial discrimination,” he wrote. And “If I sometimes bring unique perspectives to judicial problems—perspectives that are mine in whole or in part because I am black—that is a good thing. It is good because it is inevitable that judges' different professional and life experiences have some bearing on how they confront various problems that come before them.”

A large body of social scientific research backs up these assertions. When John Kastellec, a political scientist at Princeton, analyzed results from the U.S. Court of Appeals, he found that the presence of a Black judge nearly guaranteed that the court would rule in favor of affirmative action. This happened even when the rest of the court was white. “Race goes above and beyond the effect of ideological diversity,” he says. His results align with other findings, including by Dr. Kate Bratton at Louisiana State University and Dr. Nancy Arrington at Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, that illustrate how diverse viewpoints on the bench influence decision-making on issues related to voting rights, death penalty litigation and gender discrimination.

Yet recent efforts to address this diversity gap have been mixed. In 2016, a coalition of citizens in Texas filed a federal lawsuit challenging that the state’s system of at-large elections, arguing that its voting system diluted the power of Hispanic voters (in at-large elections, candidates are elected from across the entire state, rather than on a district-by-district basis). While the federal judge hearing the case did not challenge the claims of vote dilution, she concluded that because there was no proof that “race rather than partisanship” determined electoral outcomes, Texas was not obliged to reform its system. More recently, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) have filed suits alleging that statewide elections in Arkansas and Alabama, respectively, violate the Voting Rights Act. In both states, a Black justice has never first reached the state supreme court through an election.

“If you go into the courtroom and nobody looks like you, there are concerns about whether communities are being treated fairly before certain judges or justices,” says Natasha Merle, a senior counsel at the LDF who is representing the plaintiffs in Alabama. “Less diversity on the court brings into question its impartiality.”

Merle says that no Black candidate has ever been elected to a statewide position in Arkansas, and says that a shift toward voting districts, like those used in Congressional races, could help improve the strength and agency of Black voters. But unlike the Brennan Center, which has long advocated for replacing judicial elections with an appointment system, Merle believes that having elections is not a bad thing for judges or the communities that they serve.

“Saying that if you elect judges in districts they will only worry about their constituents and maybe ignore the law is disingenuous,” Merle says. “The issue here is ‘are voters being heard?’ And if black voters aren’t able to equally participate in the process and elect candidates in the process—whoever those candidates might be—then that’s the problem that we should focus on.”

The LDF’s case in Arkansas is not expected to go to trial until next summer, but there’s plenty to be done in the meantime. As Bannon points out, most voters don’t focus on judicial elections, even though they’re well-positioned to affect change, whether by voting for judges who support their values, putting pressure on governors and other elected officials to appoint more representative judiciaries or supporting programs like public financing that would reduce the influence of special interests.

There are reasons for optimism, too. Last year, Melody Stewart became the first black women elected to Ohio’s supreme court and was one of four justices of color elected nationwide. It was just the third time in American history that more than one person of color has been first elected to the bench in a single election cycle. Next month, Delaware, a state with a population that’s nearly 40 percent non-white, will fill a vacancy on its Supreme Court. While the state has never seated a justice of color, Bannon says advocacy from local communities could help to change things.

“This isn’t a problem that can be diagnosed in one point and solved away in another,” she says. “But the positive side is that there are many points where improvements can be made, which means there are lots of opportunities for citizens and activists to make a difference.”

I stand with the climate striking students – it's time to create a new economy https://prismo.xyz/posts/10c214e2-47e3-4a2b-91a8-981dfbd5ae60

Tsunami Bomb announce new album “The Spine That Binds”, stream single “The Hathors”

Aside from a few festival appearances and comps or re-releases, California’s Tsunami Bomb have been relatively quiet since they officially broke up in 2005. Their last album, The Definitive Act, came out in 2004 right before the last founding member left the band, but today they’ve announced a brand new LP out November 8th on […]

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Documents Shed New Light on Critical Moment in Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend Political Career

An investigation by the Young Turks sheds new light on a moment Buttigieg has highlighted as defining his relationship with South Bend’s black community.

The post Documents Shed New Light on Critical Moment in Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend Political Career appeared first on The Intercept.

Two Years After the Hurricane, Puerto Rico’s “Generation Maria” Leads a Climate Strike

The most powerful youth-led climate strike movement of the moment may actually be in Puerto Rico.

The post Two Years After the Hurricane, Puerto Rico’s “Generation Maria” Leads a Climate Strike appeared first on The Intercept.

'No Planet B': Hundreds of thousands join global climate strike | News | Al Jazeera https://prismo.xyz/posts/a41cee9c-d1c1-47d7-9321-4fa4ff32e231

Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas Scoop Up Personal Data From Scores of Companies https://nyti.ms/2AuBlfM #privacy #security #libremone #librem5

Say It Loud, Unvaxxed and I’m Proud

Anti-vaccine protesters are likening themselves to civil rights activists.

Saudi Drone Attacks: What We Know

5.7 million barrels of daily crude oil production were knocked out in Saudi Arabia.

We’d Like a Second Opinion

Sympathy CTE? Mitchnesia? It’s all here.