“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Trevor Timm: The government wants tech companies to give them a backdoor to your electronic life
The FBI chief’s call for ‘clarity and transparency’ on surveillance wouldn’t be so laughable if the government wasn’t so aggressively secretive
FBI director James Comey wants a US government-mandated backdoor into your iPhone and your Google account. But Comey doesn’t want to call his proposed privacy invasion a backdoor. He doesn’t understand how it would work. And he expects everyone who has been horrified by the NSA’s mass surveillance to just sit back, weaken their personal security and trust that the government will never abuse it. [..]
We know there’s no real need to worry about Apple and Android’s move: law enforcement has a half-dozen other ways to get at all the data out of your phone if it needs to solve actual crimes. This is just a basic security protection that, if implemented by Facebook, Gmail, text messaging apps and others, could go a long way to solving America’s cybersecurity problem. And it would leave everyone living in countries with authoritarian governments like those in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China or Russia from having to worry about being spied on.
But Jim Comey, like the NSA, sees encryption for the masses as the enemy – not the type of tool that keeps your medical and bank records safe. He was on 60 Minutes this week calling Apple and Google’s decision a threat to national security, and, on Thursday, he gave first major speech as FBI director, which focused entirely on the dangers of people controlling their own security.
Naomi Klein: Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay
By dropping Shell, Lego shows new ways to target the astronomical profits of the fossil fuel industries
When the call came in that the University of Glasgow had voted to divest its £128m endowment from fossil fuel companies, I happened to be in a room filled with climate activists in Oxford. They immediately broke into cheers. There were lots of hugs and a few tears. This was big – the first university in Europe to make such a move.
The next day there were more celebrations in climate circles: Lego announced it would not be renewing a relationship with Shell Oil, a longtime co-branding deal that saw toddlers filling up their plastic vehicles at toy Shell petrol stations. “Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations,” a Greenpeace video that went viral declared, attracting more than 6m views. Pressure is building, meanwhile, on the Tate to sever the museum’s longtime relationship with BP. [..]
Internationally, there are hundreds of active fossil fuel divestment campaigns on university and college campuses, as well as ones targeting local city governments, non-profit foundations and religious organisations. And the victories keep getting bigger.
In the Middle Ages, the call for a crusade to conquer the Holy Land was met with cries of “Deus vult!” – God wills it. But did the crusaders really know what God wanted? Given how the venture turned out, apparently not.
Now, that was a long time ago, and, in the areas I write about, invocations of God’s presumed will are rare. You do, however, see a lot of policy crusades, and these are often justified with implicit cries of “Mercatus vult!” – the market wills it. But do those invoking the will of the market really know what markets want? Again, apparently not.
And the financial turmoil of the past few days has widened the gap between what we’re told must be done to appease the market and what markets actually seem to be asking for.
Hannah Giorgis: The problem with the west’s Ebola response is still fear of a black patient
Ebola is now a stand-in for any combination of ‘African-ness’, ‘blackness’, ‘foreign-ness’ and ‘infestation’ – poised to ruin the perceived purity of western borders and bodies
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to die of Ebola in the United States, was not the right kind of victim for the west: he wasn’t a pretty young woman smiling in sunglasses as a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Bentley licks her cheek; he didn’t have a young, benevolent doctor’s face that looks “appropriate” plastered on newspapers; he wasn’t a kindly older nurse who told reporters how God had spared her. He wasn’t the kind of person to whom primetime news specials would dedicate 20 minutes and glorify with quotes from loved ones about his kind spirit or ceaseless determination to overcome an unfair affliction.
Thomas Eric Duncan was black, he was poor, and he was African.
A Dallas hospital turned away the uninsured Liberian immigrant after an initial exam concluded he suffered only from a “low-grade viral disease“, and the media turned him into the unsympathetic, undeserving face of a contagion with which the west is frantically grappling.
Peter van Buren: Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State
You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster-a friend crossing Death Valley with next to no gas in his car-and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?”
Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.
Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?
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