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Summer is almost upon us… After a small unscheduled break get ready for a new “season” of TIM. New format, new topics, new people! Thanks to all our listeners over our first run at this, it has been a learning experience and we hope to come back bigger and better that ever!
We get down right Freudian and come out swinging!
Back again after a week off! We roll past half a year of Podcasts with a big old fashioned one in which we talk about: dissatisfaction or lack there of in the modern condition, self actualization and flanking people with kindness.
I’ll borrow the name of a song that I fancy for this short article.
The misery of our modern condition. Consider some problems you have with your life right now. How many are self made problems?
When we have all our needs taken care of, we start comparing. Comparing wealth, social position, relationships and profession to name a few. It is when these comparisons are made that inequalities and deficiencies start emerging. It may be natural to make these comparisons, but for me at least, these comparisons also form the basis of most my problems. But wait… is it natural to make comparisons? In a liberal democracy the freedom of the individual is thought to be the solution to everything. With freedom comes success! The freedom to think, to act and to live. How is my individual freedom so defined (and perhaps controlled) by what I take about my life and compare to others? This contradicts both the word individual and freedom.
With this in mind I will ask again, how many of your problems are self made?
Now this is not a new idea, but it is an important one. Somewhere along the way, under the guise furthering the individual, our wants and needs have been hijacked. One could blame Capitalism, greed or western culture in general, however I believe that the one common trait these things are founded upon is comparison. Hold the phone… comparison/competition? Those are healthy! They help us strive to be our best… right? Perhaps they are, and perhaps when pair with empathy they are just that. Individual freedoms based on competition and comparison, especially in an economic sense tend to kill all forms of empathy I would argue. How can a company (or individual), who by duty and definition must be self perpetual, and ever expanding be empathetic.
Closing thought for the day: Feeling unfulfilled? Try your best to not compare your situation with anyone’s for a day. Impossible? Maybe. Interesting exercise? Definitely. Try being an individual in the most true sense, it may be the only way to then be something more.
We talk about of all things… the end of the world! We also try some some thought experiments.
We get heavy into the metaphysical with: what is real and what is the real, and the subjectivity of time.
We get all pissed off about Bill C-11, which spawns some internet freedom discussion, and some law discussion, and a conclusion: we can not be trusted.
A short one this week! We talk about free will, until we have no free will.
We get together to talk about the inconvenience of not enough globalization, reaching heaven through drugs, and death.
We ramble about predicting doomsday predictions, being sad about working too much, and the cruise ship captain who could.
I was going to “save this for the podcast”, but its a bit more complex then I think I could spell out articulately in a conversational format. Its been a long time since I’ve written anything of any length, but here goes. Maybe we’ll talk about it later this week.
This morning I discovered the death of a first cousin via Facebook. I knew last night that he had been seriously injured, and given the nature of that injury I didn’t expect him to survive. Confirmation of his death came via his brothers (another cousin’s) Facebook “wall”. I am now sharing this story with you, the anonymous internet. How long ago would something like this have been inconceivable? I’ve since used the same Facebook to discuss sending something, food or whatever to his house, located hundreds of kilometers from where I am now. It all seems so weird, and yet somehow it also seems so very right.
With this weird feeling in my mind, and on my morning bounce around the internet I found this article from Ares Technica. “Supreme Court holds warrantless GPS tracking unconstitutional”
If you want to read a summary of the decision it, you can click here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf
It didn’t seem like that big a deal, until I actually started reading the decision on a whim.
A little bit of background on this case is that the FBI suspected this guy “Jones” was a Cocaine distributor. They got a warrant to place a GPS tracker on his car to track his movements. The warrant said that the tracker had to be installed in Washington D.C. within the next 10 days, and could only be used for 28 days. The FBI attached the device to the guy’s wife’s car (he was the only driver of the car) on the 11th day, in a different state (Maryland). So, right there the FBI done goofed. They had rules to follow, and they didn’t bother. Hey, at least they got the warrant in the first place, right?
Not so fast, the court said that “Jones had no reasonable expectation of privacy while the car was on public streets” and allowed the GPS data to be admissible in court. At least in part based on this evidence Jones was found guilty. Jones’ lawyers appealed the case saying that under the Fourth Amendment this counted as a “search”, and the Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to besecure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Because the car counts as an “effect” and they trespassed by installing the GPS device, the search is considered unreasonable. The supreme court decided to take a look at the case.
Here is where privacy comes into it, on about page 17 of the supreme court document linked above, Justice Sotomayor talks about the other information that could be gathered by GPS info in addition to evidence of criminal wrong doing: “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail abouther familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”
Whoa, wait what?!? How do you get that much information from just a log of where someone has gone.
“Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic,the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on”). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future.”
Scary stuff. I’d never thought of it that way before. Going further she says:
“More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a greatdeal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.”
I added the bold there, to the word warrantless. That’s the key, isn’t it. I think, if the police have a reason to suspect someone is a terrorist, and can convince a Judge of that fact, they should probably be able to get a warrant to ask their Internet Service Provider for a log of their online activities. And, if that log shows they visit Al Qaeda websites, and bomb-making websites then they’ve probably just saved a lot of lives. On the other hand what the hell is the ISP doing maintaining such a log of actives. Is that something they actually do? Just logging that kind of thing freaks me out – do you remember every website you visited in the last 5 minutes, let alone the last year? Privacy is serious business, and while I thought I had been careful in the past, maybe I should be even more careful in the future. But why should I have to worry about this kind of stuff, I am not a criminal right? Right?
Honestly I am not a lawyer, and its very possible that I could have done something, at some point that is against some law that I don’t even know about. I am sure if a police officer decided to look into anyone of us, with the tools now available to them, they could probably find something.
To bring this into a Canadian context, the language of the Charter of rights and freedoms section 7, and 8 contains similar language when compared to the Fourth Admendment to the United States constitution. See here, quote:
7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”
The world is changing very quickly, the laws that govern us were written in a time when modern technology was inconceivable. Laws written now, (For example SOPA / PIPA / ACTA) will have far reaching consequences in the future. I am happy that SOPA is dead, no law written by people that by their own admission they don’t understand, should be allowed to pass without expert review.
Its kind of scary that the only thing that protects us, the law, is also the thing that can be used against us to lock us in cages for the rest of our lives. As always, knowledge is power so know as much as you can about as much as you can.
- Blaine
In this special 3 seat episode: Science news with Blaine! We mourn the death of Megaupload.com, beat the dead carcass of SOPA with sticks, and go back to Sex Ed.
Have something for us to talk about? Send us an email at today@todayinmediocrity.com
Rad’s back and he brings with him Jarrett from Clever Antidote Podcast, check em out! We talk about Nukes! Suicide as a union bargaining tool and self defence fruit cutting utilities.
It’s 2012!! 347 more days till Quetzalcoatl day, oh and episode 17 is here! We talk about regrowing our livers with coffee, harnessing human energy in a gym, all while wishing our time away.
Join along with us for a 2011 retrospective and a 2012 apocalyptic guessing game!
After a missing a week we are all ready to rap some dialog tonight! Predictions, and a look back at the year that was… Going to be deep, real, and full of anti SOPA sentiments! Line up is going to be Adam, Blaine, Will, and Patrick.
Guest Eric joins us as we talk about: buying Christmas, comparing menial jobs to bootcamp, and the evils of SOPA.
