“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 just admitted it will use smart home devices for spying
If you want evidence that US intelligence agencies aren’t losing surveillance abilities because of the rising use of encryption by tech companies, look no further than the testimony on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.
As the Guardian reported, Clapper made clear that the internet of things – the many devices like thermostats, cameras and other appliances that are increasingly connected to the internet – are providing ample opportunity for intelligence agencies to spy on targets, and possibly the masses. And it’s a danger that many consumers who buy these products may be wholly unaware of.
“In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper told a Senate panel as part of his annual “assessment of threats” against the US.
Clapper is actually saying something very similar to a major study done at Harvard’s Berkman Center released last week. It concluded that the FBI’s recent claim that they are “going dark” – losing the ability to spy on suspects because of encryption – is largely overblown, mainly because federal agencies have so many more avenues for spying. This echoes comments by many surveillance experts, who have made clear that, rather than “going dark”, we are actually in the “golden age of surveillance”.
David Cay Johnston: How cheap oil may ruin your life
With the price of oil sliding, you might expect demand for oil would be rising. Not so much. Demand is rising, but at a rapidly decelerating pace, roughly two-thirds lower than last year. That’s not good news, especially for jobs, which have grown in the U.S. for a record 71 straight months.
That the growth rate for oil consumption is down sharply tells us a lot about the global economy and the likelihood of continued market volatility. Companies and countries with the financial muscle to buy oil cheap and store it until prices rise have been taking the excess supply, but that must end soon because we are running out of places to store oil. [..]
The world, particularly the United States, has become much more efficient in the use of fossil fuels generally and oil specifically since the price shocks of 1973, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries showed it could drive up the price of oil by restricting supply. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries with fuel economy standards for automobiles, for example. That, too, contributes to the slowing growth of demand for oil.
Because oil remains central to human economic activity, weak demand in a period of gushing supply (even before Iran resumes shipping into the world oil markets) spells pervasive disruption of global economic activity. Even if your job is as far from an oilfield or an oil company’s headquarters as snowfalls are from Florida, pay close attention to the price of oil. As oil jobs go away, so may yours.
Steven W. Thrasher: Suing families of slain black youths is racial capitalism at its most grotesque
Apparently, it wasn’t enough for a Cleveland police officer to shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice less than two seconds after arriving on-scene in 2014 and handcuff his sister when she tried to help him, nor for his mother to be left homeless in 2015 as she waited months for an investigation. It wasn’t enough for Cleveland to actually blame the little boy for his own death, or to present multiple reports which found his killing to be “reasonable”.
On Wednesday, in a letter submitted by the city’s Director of Law Barbara Langhenry, the City of Cleveland actually sued Tamir’s family for $500, which it claims is “past due – owing for emergency medical services rendered as the decedent’s last dying expense”, according to Cleveland Scene.
In the creditor’s claim, the line item expenses coldly break down to $450 for “Advance Ambulance Life Support” – dispatched after Cleveland officers “waited minutes to give first aid” to the boy one of them had shot – and another $50 for “mileage”.
In the coming days, we will likely hear that the city had no choice but to sue the Rice estate, that Cleveland is justified by the very economic and faux moral argument which scoundrels unleash in such scenarios (and which David Graeber tears apart in Debt: The First 5,000 Years): that “one has to pay one’s debts”.
But make no mistake: viewing Tamir as a debtor to a society which killed him is racial capitalism at its worst, which Nancy Leong calls “the process of deriving social or economic value from the racial identity of another person”.
Jeb Lund: Bullying was Chris Christie’s trump card, before Trump got in the race
It isn’t hard to say goodbye to Chris Christie. It’s just that, with so many members of the Republican field vanishing like teens partying overnight in an abandoned asylum on the anniversary of several unsolved murders, it’s becoming difficult to say goodbye uniquely. There isn’t time, and anyway there are only so many ways you can point out how they themselves were the monsters in the crazy house while you wait for the dawn.
That Chris Christie was not much different from every other horror lurking in the dark of the Republican party ultimately says everything about his campaign that a bridge outage can’t tell you. With a roster of Republican candidates that started out large enough to nearly hold a full baseball scrimmage against itself, there was nothing he sold that you couldn’t buy somewhere else. [..]
Christie’s signature bullying might have taken him far in another year: he understands in a visceral way the suck-up, kick-down, validation-by-humiliation relationship that conservative voters have with their leaders. They not only enjoy seeing their enemies – that anxiety closet of commies and Muslims and minorities and women who are sexually active with someone who is Not You – attacked, but they enjoy seeing the punishment of failure. Chris Christie could stomp on the lowly with the best of them.
Scott Lemieux: The high court halted Obama’s climate change plan. This doesn’t bode well
Hours before New Hampshire’s primary voters made Donald Trump the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday night – I can’t really believe this even as I type it – the US supreme court reminded us of why the upcoming presidential election is so important. On a party-line vote, the court temporarily stopped Barack Obama’s clean power plan from going into effect. This decision could well portend a future one that will have devastating consequences – not only for the climate but for the state of our lawmaking process.
The decision also underscores the urgency of the November elections in two ways: it will be a choice between a candidate who supports taking action against climate change and one who believes it should be ignored, and it will present a choice between a president who believes that the federal government has the authority to effectively regulate and one who believes that the supreme court should arbitrarily throw monkey wrenches into the political process.
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