![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
Urgent action items
US citizens: call on Secretary Mnuchin to suspend sanctions on Iran for 120 days.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the House to pass the Ban Fracking Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Stephen Schwartz as a federal judge.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to refuse the demand to suspend habeas corpus. Doing so would allow thugs to arrest people and jail them for any length of time.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to stop interfering with who will have the job of investigating the alleged corruption of Elaine Chao, Saboteur of Transportation, who is (as it happens) his wife.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for an investigation of each congresscritter or senator who is suspected of profiting from Covid-19 by selling stock based on inside information.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to pass the Ban Fracking Act.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the FCC to use its authority to put a stop to dangerous Covid-19 disinformation on broadcast TV.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on US governments to release old prisoners and sick prisoners.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for many steps to keep people safe from catching Covid-19 in prison.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the US to remove all military forces from Iraq.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Boston Globe and the L.A. Times to stop charging for access to coronavirus coverage.
Paying to access an article these days generally requires running nonfree Javascript code, and tracks who reads the article. I consider each of those an injustice, and I won't stand for either of them. Therefore, if an article is thoroughly paywalled, I do without seeing it.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: 51 Republican senators voted against offering paid sick leave to additional American workers. If any of them is your senator, phone per office now and rebuke per.
(Please respect gender neutrality and number agreement together, by referring to a single person of unspecified gender as "perse" and "per".)
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject the political appointment of John Ratcliffe as DNI.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Facebook to fact-check political ads.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass legislation to provide national paid sick leave. For everyone, that is.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Louisiana Governor Edwards to implement a rent freeze and a moratorium on layoffs, evictions and water shut-offs in the state of Louisiana.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on New York Governor Cuomo to end the prison injustices that make prisoners vulnerable to Covid-19.
If you call, please spread the word!
Residents of Massachusetts: call on Massachusetts legislators to pass the moratorium on government use of face recognition.
I gave this personal message:
I urge you to pass the proposed moratorium on use of face recognition in Massachusetts government activities.
This is only a first step. Systematic use of face recognition technology, and the systems that can do so, should be very strictly regulated. The operations of Clearview AI should be illegal regardless of what sort of entity carries them out, whether it be public or private.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: stop Wall Street from using the coronavirus to weaken bank regulations.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call your congresscritter at (202) 224-3121 and call for strong action to protect Americans from the effects of the epidemic. Please support these proposed actions:
- Guaranteed paid sick leave for ALL employees
- Extended Medicaid
- Immediate one-time payments of $1,500 to every adult and $500 to every child
- Suspension of the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule that enables federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants who use social safety net programs
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call your congresscritter and say to reject the bully's plan to cut Social Security funds in order to fund response to Covid-19.
If you call, please spread the word!
"Quarantine soirees" and digital freedom: does any of the live streams described here respect freedom?
The usual forms of digital oppression are
- Requiring nonfree software, often with DRM. Warning: this may be Javascript code; to check for it, use LibreJS.
- Identifying people.
- Imposing an antisocial contract ("terms of service").
Experience suggests that all of those streams are oppressive, but I'd like to know if any of them is not.
If you try one and find it to be oppressive, I hope you will not go ahead with installing that nonfree software, entering your personal data, or agreeing to the terms. Get a copy of some music which does not oppress those who listen to it, and listen to that instead.
It would be useful to inform the organization's personnel of your objections to its computing practices. Keep in mind that they have probably never thought about these issues, never even heard the idea that there might be something wrong with the usual practices that they imitated or were taught by some "expert". So be prepared to explain, and not in an angry tone.
For streaming, the program they should be using is called IceCast.
US citizens: call your senators at (202) 930-8115 and urge them to let PAT RIOT Act surveillance systems expire. Say that if the government wants to get information about people from data bases, it should get warrant to investigate specific people and then get data only about them.
Here is more information about the situation.
If you call, please spread the word!
Phone your congresscritter and senators to push for a bill that wuld help non-rich Americans cope with Covid-19. The bill would do these things:
- Federally mandated paid sick leave for caretakers and ill people, to stop the spread of this virus by allowing sick people to stay home and avoid infecting others;
- Free coronavirus testing that will allow people to know if they've been infected and health agencies to track the spread of the virus;
- Emergency food aid for low-income pregnant women, young children, senior citizens, and food banks that may become overwhelmed as more people are temporarily out of work and
- Unemployment funding for workers laid off or furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens and residents: thank abortion providers.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: Tell world leaders: don’t exploit Coronavirus to take away our basic rights.
If you sign, please spread the word!
The House of Representatives voted to extend the massive surveillance power originally granted in the USA PAT RIOT Act. Around 60 representatives voted no.
I suggests phoning your congresscritter's office and asking, "Did Rep XYZ vote to extend the government's power to track massive numbers of phone calls?" If the answer is yes, you could express your opinion of that vote.
The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.
If you call, please spread the word!
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the recording of Guantanamero, a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player, see the FSF's Ogg Players page.There Ought to Be a Law
-
The staff of a Chicago medical organization are suing because it identified them with fingerprints for each shift.
I think it is bad that the employer has their fingerprints at all. Is it possible to authenticate people with a biometric that is normally hidden?
-
10% of the workers in Britain have been captured by the piecework sweatshop dis-services.
We must extend all the rights and benefits of employees to cover these forms of work.
-
Thousands of Americans — perhaps hundreds of thousands — have been killed because judges sealed evidence of deadly defects in products and kept the defects secret for years as more people died. The dangerous flaws of OxyContin, which spread opioid addiction, were concealed for 12 years.
Trade secrecy is always bad for the public. Occasionally it is deadly, but usually merely harmful. We should change the law so that no significant problem can be concealed in this way.
Busineses should not be allowed to enforce an NDA to conceal mistreatment of workers, customers, or the public.
Agreeing to nondisclosure of generally useful technical information, such as software, is betrayal of society as a whole. I refuse on principle to do this.
-
A woman in Alabama has been charged with manslaughter for getting shot while pregnant. The state treats the fetus as a person.
This is the natural conclusion of the twisted premises of those who treat fetuses as sacred.
But the problem may be broader than that. Suppose she had been shot while carrying a three-year-old child in her arms? Suppose someone else had shot at her and killed the child.
I don't think people should be prosecuted for the effects of being shot at.
-
Facebook treats the video moderators like shit. And that's in addition to the depression they feel from watching the videos.
The article gives no evidence that Utley's death was caused by his job, but the way the managers treated it is despicable even if they did not cause it.
Naturally, these workers are subcontracted, so that Facebook can deny responsibility for how they are treated. But Facebook is in fact responsible: it demands contractors offer a low price, which they achieve by treating the workers like shit. We need laws to hold companies like Facebook responsible for the treatment of indirect workers, and give them employee rights such as sick leave.
It should be a felony for employees of a company to ask a worker to sign a nondisclosure agreement covering any aspect of the working conditions, benefits, or pay.
-
Senate Democrats have introduced a data privacy bill which begins, though just barely, to limit collection of some data.
But it has obvious loopholes. It won't require companies to reveal the conclusions they have deduced from the personal data they have access to — because they argue that those are not "the client's data." It won't, as far as I can see, limit the targeted ads that are the basis for surveillance capitalism.
And it won't even try to make it possible to buy something over the internet anonymously. We have the technology for this.
The most sensitive personal data about you are where you go during the day, what you do there, who you talk with, and what what you and they say. It should be illegal to set up or operate a system which systematically collects any of those data, except when authorized by a court order targeted at specific people.
I propose a law requiring stores to offer the service of bringing an item to the store for you to buy later, in exchange for an ordering fee paid in advance.
-
Tenants in Atlantic Plaza Towers campaigned against installing face recognition cameras and got the landlord to back down.
It should be illegal to install face recognition cameras in a residential building, except for cameras installed inside an apartment by the residents of that apartment.
-
*Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.* Precisely how Amazon achieves this is a secret.
How about requiring all corporations operating in the US (or whichever counry it may be) to publish their full international accounts?
-
*Calls grow for laws requiring firms to reveal links to deforestation.*
I am generally skeptical about systems which expect company A to make sure supplier B doesn't engage in practice C. The problem is, A has every incentive not to try very hard to stop B from doing C and covering it up.
I wonder if it might be more effective to impose on all possibly deforestation-related products an import tariff whose rate is based the fraction of deforestation in the country of production since a given base year. The tariff function could be 1/R - 1, where R is the fraction of the forest in the year 2000 which still survives. After 90% deforestation, the tariff would be 8 times the exporter's selling price.
Quotes
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
