Washington (AFP) ‐ Of the hundreds of questions thrown at Mark Zuckerberg by US lawmakers Tuesday, none appeared to flummox the Facebook founder more than Senator Dick Durbin’s pointed query about where he slept the previous evening.
"Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?" Durbin asked during an intense and closely-watched hearing about online digital privacy, and Facebook’s role in what happens to personal information once users join the platform.
Zuckerberg paused for a full eight seconds, chuckled, grimaced, and ultimately demurred.
#3
1. Zuckerberg's own testimony says that Facebook is a publisher responsible for content on the site
2. Russian bots posted false news all over the site during the election
3. Zuckerberg by his own definition is a traitor who helped the Russians attempts to influence the election. Arrest him, confiscate his money, and make Facebook a public utility.
4. Not really, but one can dream.
#4
If I were the Feds and concerned about FB, I believe I would have come at it from a 'Pineland' model. Pineland being a shadowy, English or French speaking foreign entity desiring to purchase data on potentially non-US personnel.
The FB model might, I say again might, be more easily uncloaked.
#5
Call me old fashioned or just plain old but I cannot understand how FB is compared to a public utility. It has no resemblance whatsoever to water, electricity or gas. It is not a sewer or a freeway or a bus company. Nobody really needs it. We all got along just fine before it was invented and if it went away tomorrow we'd all continue to get along just fine. Nobody is twisting your arm to make you use it so if you don't like it, don't use it. I sure don't. I don't care what Zuckerberg has done or what has been done to him. It's totally irrelevant.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/11/2018 10:59 Comments ||
Top||
#6
FB is simply too lucrative a collection platform not to be exploited by intelligence services and police state entities the world over.
#7
Call me old fashioned or just plain old but I cannot understand how FB is compared to a public utility.
Not that I agree with the idea I'm about to present, but perhaps it might be interesting.
At one time there was no sewer. Then it was invented. Same for water. Electricity. Phone. Gas. Cable. Internet.
Now we have the function that FB serves. If it and everything like it were ripped away, it would create problems. Not on the scale that ripping away the other more fundamental utilities mentioned, however.
[American Thinker] Even at age 90, Helga Lustig vividly remembers when she first heard the news that her father had been taken away by the Nazis.
It was 1938, and she was safely ensconced in a boarding school in Holland just across the border from Germany. Her parents had never planned to send her and her sister to any school so far away, but they did it as a precautionary measure. Just in case. Just in case the local Nazis in her hometown of Wesel, Germany expelled the girls from school or made their lives so unbearable that they couldn't attend.
Her parents knew they couldn't shield them from the Nazi encroachment, so they sent them out of Germany. They were totally defenseless against the Nazis, and when they finally came, they came first for Helga's father.
Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, spread like a wave across Germany. It was the first major salvo in state-sponsored terror by the German government against Germans, specifically German Jews. In one night, Nazi paramilitary hordes destroyed over 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses, murdered around 100 Jews, and carted off 30,000 or more Jewish men to concentration camps. Helga's father was among them.
By the time the Nazi Party launched a concerted nationwide attack upon the Jews, there was nothing the Jews could do. The time for defending themselves had long since passed.
Helga's father certainly couldn't fight back. A year before, they had come for his guns. Since he had been a German officer in the Kaiser's army in the Great War, the Nazis assumed, erroneously, it turned out, that he had at least kept his sidearm. They relented on his traditional officer's sword, reasoning that it was no match for bullets anyway.
The Nazis had in their possession a national registry of gun-owners. When they came to power in 1933, they knew exactly who had what kind of gun and how many. And they didn't even have to compile the registry themselves. A few years earlier, the Interior Minister of the German Weimar government had started the gun ownership registry as a way of keeping tabs on extremist groups in Germany, such as the communists...and the Nazis. The national registry was thorough, precise, and extensive. But not public. The Weimar interior minister was wary of it falling into the wrong hands, like those of the Nazi extremists he warned of.
Shortly afterward, with the Nazis finally coming to power, he and his staff either neglected to destroy the list or ran out of time. So in one of their first acts after Hitler was elected to govern Germany ‐ yes, he really was elected by the German people ‐ the Nazis quickly went about confiscating the guns through the German gun-owner registry.
The gun confiscation was highly selective. The Nazis allowed their loyal minions to keep their guns and even encouraged them to get more. Those Germans deemed suspect, or declared enemies of the state, had their guns confiscated. After the Nazis disarmed the rival communists, they targeted the Jews. Within a year they had visited the homes and shops of every Jewish gun owner in Germany and taken away their guns.
The Nazis were nervous about any of their real or imagined domestic enemies shooting back at them. They were especially nervous about the Jews, paranoid to the point where even after they confiscated the guns of all the registered Jewish gun-owners, they still went after the Jewish war veterans. This is why they ended up at Helga's home in Wesel in 1937.
Thus, when the Kristallnacht rampage happened a year later, the Jews didn't shoot a single bullet in self-defense because they didn't have any guns to shoot with. The Nazis had made sure of it.
#1
When the two SS men came to arrest my grandfather in his law office, seeing the hunting rifles in the gun cabinet that he did not touch and the growling hunting dog that required Grandfather to maintain a two-handed grip on her collar persuaded the SS men they wanted to return the next day with reinforcements. Even though, one assumes, the SS men had revolvers or some such weaponry as part of their uniform. My grandparents fled across the border into the Netherlands that night.
As a condition of receiving asylum, my grandparents had to agree that the only relative they could bring in was their minor child — my mother was eleven at the time. The grandmother that lived with them had to stay behind, with the result that can be imagined.
Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.
What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.
The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.
Continued on Page 49
[PJ] Harvard Law professor and high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz spent time at the White House on Tuesday in the wake of the FBI raid on the home and office of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
"It was a pre-arranged, pre-scheduled meeting with White house staffers regarding the ongoing peace process in the Middle East," Dershowitz told Fox News' Sean Hannity Tuesday night. "I have advised every president since Bill Clinton on Israel," Dershowitz explained, saying that Israel has long been a passion of his.
"It was very nice that I was invited to have dinner with the president and a few other people," he added. "We discussed the Middle East and a range of subjects."
Dershowitz told Hannity that he believes the FBI raid on Cohen was a violation of his constitutional rights.
"You can't just go and sweep up all lawyer-client privileged information and then give it over to some FBI agent or a low-ranking U.S. attorney and say, 'well, go through it.'" he said. "The 4th and 6th Amendments don't just protect against use of evidence in a criminal trial. They protect privacy. Imagine if instead of going into lawyer-client privilege, they tape recorded a person's confession to his priest or rabbi, or went into somebody's home and recorded conversations with his wife, or conversations between a doctor and a patient? The lawyer-client privilege is as sacrosanct as that. There has to be a very, very good reason before any prosecutor should have a right to look at any such material," the professor explained.
Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has reportedly recused himself from the investigation. Berman was appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January after meeting with Trump in late 2017.
According to the Washington Examiner, the FBI raid was signed off on by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Hannity argued that he thinks Mueller and Co. are trying to goad Trump into firing him, but Dershowitz said that he doesn't believe Trump will fire anyone connected to the probe.
"What we're seeing is a bifurcation of the investigation," Dershowitz said, explaining that because Mueller knows he doesn't have the authority to look into all of Trump's pre-presidential activities, he gave that authority to the Southern District of New York. "Because apparently they couldn't find anything substantial when it comes to the president's exercise of his Article 2 authority," Dersh said.
"That seems like a subterfuge by which Mueller doesn't have the authority so he gives it to somebody else," he added. "It's like laundering information to another prosecutorial authority."
Dershowitz said Mueller is "trying to have it both ways" in that the special prosecutor can not formally investigate Cohen's relationship with Trump, but the Southern District of New York can. Of course, the Southern District of New York would not have received any information had it not been for Mueller.
#4
You just know a lot of that Client-Lawyer privledged information will be leaked by the Mueller team. After all they hold daily press leakings briefings.
#6
Dershowitz, perhaps the last honest man on the left.
Yes. Except that when it came to Election Day, he voted for the Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton the third time, no matter how much he had castigated them beforehand. So the honesty is limited even in this sterling case.
[Townhall] At the White House press briefing Tuesday, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if President Trump has "thought about stepping down."
"With all of this turmoil, particularly last week, has the president at any time thought about stepping down before or now?" Ryan asked, as the press asked repeatedly about President Trump’s anger at the FBI raiding his personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office.
#5
"Have you every thought quitting your job as a second-rate hack? Maybe a more honest job as a street panhandler?"
Well, by the way she performs in the press, she wouldn't make a very good street corner -er- lady...
This question was designed to suggest that Trump should step down. Good luck with that - I think he's having the time of his life pulling the Press'es tail with his tweets...
[Townhall] President Trump is sending national guard troops to protect America’s southern border. Not only is this a great policy decision, but it’s a strategic one that puts America first.
The troops will help secure the border from illegal immigration, a decision that will protect the American people from foreign and domestic threats. Trump has approached the very solemn duty of protecting the American people by doing what most politicians won’t: actually defending our borders.
America is a sovereign nation, one that is discernible by its identifiable borders that must be secured and defended. Countries have gone to war over border disputes including airspace. We read news stories all the time about air space being violated. That’s how serious countries take their sovereignty. Apparently, that isn’t the case here in the United States.
There are three major reasons America needs to protect and secure its borders: security, health, and American jobs.
The most important aspect of immigration reform is keeping America safe. Illegal drugs, weapons, terrorists, and criminal gangs are pouring into the United States through our unsecured border. The growth of the dangerous criminal gang MS-13 was in part the result of a defective Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and other illegal southern border crossings.
The second aspect is preventing the potential spread of infectious diseases being brought to the United States. For example, the spread of the Zika virus from South America and the H1N1 or swine flu outbreak from several years ago were in part spread by immigration. In order to prevent such diseases from turning into a pandemic, we started monitoring people for symptoms coming into the country ‐ that’s border enforcement. If people enter the country illegally, we cannot effectively control any disease they may carry.
[Townhall] This week, the FBI raided the office, hotel room and home of President Trump's personal attorney and self-described "fixer," Michael Cohen. According to various media reports, the Department of Justice signed off on a warrant for the search; presumably, the law enforcement agency is searching for evidence regarding Cohen's $130,000 payment to pornography actress Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had a one-night stand with Trump in 2006. Cohen has openly stated that he paid Daniels to shut up about her peccadillo with Trump -- and he has said that Trump had no knowledge of the payment.
That presents a problem. If Cohen paid off Daniels without Trump's knowledge, that raises the question as to whether their agreement was binding. If not, then Trump may have been party to a violation of campaign finance law, since a $130,000 in-kind donation is well above any legal limit. And if Cohen and Trump coordinated that arrangement, none of their communications on the matter are subject to attorney-client privilege.
So, it's quite possible that the FBI and DOJ may have just ensnared Cohen and, by extension, Trump, in a serious scandal.
But this raises another question: Where the hell were the FBI and DOJ when it came to Hillary Clinton? Trump himself has been enraged by the disparity between law enforcement's treatment of Clinton and its treatment of him. He rightly points out that the FBI and DOJ worked to exonerate Clinton, with former FBI Director James Comey going so far as to change the definition of existing law to avoid recommending her indictment for mishandling classified material. And not only did then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch meet with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in the middle of the election cycle and the investigation of his wife; Lynch's Department of Justice allowed Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's top aide, to claim attorney-client privilege. As Andrew McCarthy of National Review pointed out at the time, Mills was involved in the scrubbing of over 30,000 emails, yet the DOJ "indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI's ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation." Furthermore, Mills was allowed to sit in on Clinton's interview with the FBI as Clinton's lawyer.
[Townhall] With his Sunday tweet that Bashar Assad, "Animal Assad," ordered a gas attack on Syrian civilians, and Vladimir Putin was morally complicit in the atrocity, President Donald Trump just painted himself and us into a corner.
"Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria," tweeted Trump, "President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price... to pay."
"Big price... to pay," said the president.
Now, either Trump launches an attack that could drag us deeper into a seven-year civil war from which he promised to extricate us last week, or Trump is mocked as being a man of bluster and bluff.
For Trump Sunday accused Barack Obama of being a weakling for failing to strike Syria after an earlier chemical attack.
"If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand," Trump tweeted, "the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!"
Trump's credibility is now on the line and he is being goaded by the war hawks to man up. Sunday, John McCain implied that Trump's comments about leaving Syria "very soon" actually "emboldened" Assad:
#2
Stay out of it! Let them devour one another. How many amazing Gazanian, Cuban, or Venezuelan success stories do we need to reflect on before we realize the correct course of action requires a quiet sit-back, and a bucket of delicious popcorn.
#3
Deals require a position of strength. Movements to ensure a visible position of strength are often misunderstood by friend and foe (that is by design). There is little point second guessing the moves along the way with this President or you'll get nauseous when you realize you've been following a fake move, again.
Moved to Page 4: Opinion because the writer is arguing for his point of view.
[NationalInterest] How many American citizens even realize the U.S. military now occupies most of the eastern third of Syria? There's been no new congressional authorization of force and scant debate on Capitol Hill. Contrary to effective strategy and sound policy, expansive war and military occupation is the default solution championed by the Washington establishment.
The problem with holding territory in Syria is quite simple: people live there. Real, live folks the U.S. military -- like it or not -- is now beholden to. These Syrians' hopes, dreams, sustenance, quality of life, gripes and complaints -- at the expense of domestic concerns -- become the responsibility of the U.S. government according to local perception. I've seen this movie before, experienced it, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It doesn't end well.
Furthermore, Washington is being sucked ever further into the Syrian abyss for no strategic benefit to the United States.
Rhetoric aside, many of Trump's campaign statements were eminently reasonable. But contrary to his clear-eyed observations, his administration is doubling down and staying put in Eastern Syria.
A plea for clear-eyed policy to
cut our losses and sensibly redeployed our troops based on sober strategy and U.S. interests rather than reacting to a crisis merely because we can. Thoughts?
#2
The tradeoff: Trade the Euphrates River region in return for the Hasakah province of easternmost Syria presently under control of the indigenous Kurds. How to set up a Kurdistan that would include parts of Iraq and Syria. A polity that could survive political and military attacks by Iraq and Syria and thus offer the US a safe base of operation to go along with Israel.
#6
Iskenderun? Wonderful weather.
We're slipping the Turk a French letter!
A century of cleansing
And diplomats fencing:
The Sandjak of West Kurdistan Alexandretta.
[AccordingToHoyt] Or worse, in this case, they get actions.
Look, guys, this is not new, and it wouldn’t surprise many people in the past. It’s more that what we’re engaged in is a very weird revolutionary activity.
It is a revolutionary activity, don’t make a mistake on that, just because I haven’t bared my boobs like the chick above, and I’m not charging forth with standard.
Think back, those of you who are my age or close to it, to all the times when you were ‐ seemingly ‐ the only one who saw that "what everybody knew" was wrong, all the times when if you had said what you believed people wouldn’t necessarily oppose you: they’d just think you were crazy. It’s not that you didn’t think them: of course you thought them. And in the company of very trusted friends or family, you might even say something, but you had no way of reaching the public.
Having blogs, commenting on blogs, working on internet diffusion of ideas that are contrary to the establishment ‐ and the establishment is wholly liberal now ‐ is a revolutionary activity.
The founding fathers and their precursors did in fact engage in much the same activity, given their technology: handbills, political discussions, all of them were part of the revolution, or perhaps the ramping up to it.
Thing is, the founding fathers, (and the few saneish French revolutionaries) EXPECTED the other side to have a say. Hanging was not off the table for all the revolutionaries. When they pledged their life, their liberty, their sacred honor, they expected to lose all three. The chances of success were infinitesimal.
So, why are we shocked by the people who think we need to be put down and controlled? Why are we shocked by attacks on the amendments the founding fathers gave us?
The other side gets a say.
Look, for almost a hundred years now they’ve been at least as privileged as the French aristocracy. There are tangible benefits to lefty privilege. Why do you think people virtue-signal? Because virtue signaling translates into jobs, book deals, media appearances and applause.
They had it all. Make the right noises, support the right causes, and you’ll be on top.
Thing is most people aren’t even political. They are clever apes who identify what is best in their tribe and what will bring them rewards. We’re the weird ones. And the rewards have been on the left for almost a century.
Yes, they managed the neat trick of pretending to be revolutionaries even as they controlled all of the establishment. The extent to which they controlled it is becoming very apparent in the civil war going on in our institutions.
But they are still the establishment. Third generation now. And it has its privileges. No one on the right with Obama’s type of mind and experience could make it to president. (And no, Trump isn’t the same. He’s run businesses. Obama couldn’t run a lemonade stand. And oh, yeah, for the lurkers, this is not racial, it’s political. Red diaper kids rarely manage to comprehend economics. Their religion makes them believe a set of precepts that is at odds with the world.) No one on the right who was no smarter than most main stream pundits would have got anywhere.
We’ve had to be faster, stronger, and insanely hard working to be heard, and evne then we were torpedoed at every turn.
Then there was the net. And computers. And ways to communicate.
You have to understand how deep 2016 cut. They spent all their money, they pushed all their celebrities, they controlled all the press. Everything said they were going to win. And then they lost.
Is it any wonder they’ve gone nuts? This is like Marie Antoinette finding her palace full of not-at-all-respectful peasant women, demanding bread. (True.) And the guards being unable to clear them away. (Also true.)
So yeah, unsavory rats like Zuckerberg are going to try to preemptively ban our opinions. Banks are going to try to refuse money to companies who make guns. Idiots like the Twitter Twit are going to call for us to be crushed.
Did you expect to have a revolution, and the establishment didn’t fight back?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/11/2018 12:52 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Like the way the White House Press corps hates, hates President Trump's Twitter account. The Press is being ignored! Sacrilege! Lèse-majesté!, and off with their heads!
[Electronic Frontier Foundation] It’s past time for Facebook to come clean about how it is handling user data. After the latest Cambridge Analytica news broke the dam on over a decade of Facebook privacy concerns, Mark Zuckerberg is heading to to Washington, D.C. this week for two days of Congressional testimony. On Tuesday, he’ll appear before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, and on Wednesday the House Energy & Commerce Committee.
The last thing we need from Zuckerberg at these hearings is more apologies. What we want is information and accountability, and not just in connection with discrete scandals like Cambridge Analytica. Congress should be asking Facebook for a detailed account of what data Facebook has shared with third parties, what it has done to prevent misuse of that data, what it told users about how it would handle their information, and what steps it will take in the future to respect users' privacy rights.
And because this is about more than just Facebook, Congress should also be asking whether Facebook will serve as an industry leader by publicly embracing key privacy-protective principles.
Beyond nailing down down the details of specific cases like the Cambridge Analytica mess and the revelation of paid Russian propaganda on the social media giant's platform, we hope lawmakers will also keep in mind the larger tension at the core of each one of Facebook's privacy missteps and scandals: A company ethos of connection and growth at all costs cannot co-exist with users' privacy rights. Facebook operates by collecting, storing, and making it easy for third parties to use unprecedented amounts of user data. Until that changes, the privacy and integrity concerns that spurred these hearings are here to stay.
Getting to the Bottom of Facebook’s Word Games
There is no shortage of questions and angles that Congress members can grill Zuckerberg on—from the Cambridge Analytica fiasco that exposed the data of approximately 1 in 5 Americans, to paid propaganda’s effect on the 2016 election, to private censorship, to the role of AI technologies in detecting and mitigating all of the above.
And Zuckerberg will no doubt weave word games and roundabout language into his answers to distract from the real problem.
Here is some language to watch out for—and for lawmakers to drill down on when they hear it:
“Bad actors”
Selling or not selling user data
What Facebook knows about you
“Idealistic and optimistic”
Back to the Big Question
We can expect Zuckerberg to apologize for past mistakes, explain the challenges his platform faces, and outline the fixes Facebook is ready to roll out. But the big question is: Will he be able to convince users and members of Congress that any of those fixes is substantial enough to amount to real change?
The CEO’s testimonies are an opportunity for Congress to shed light not only on Facebook’s “black box” algorithms but also on its data operation as a whole. That means confronting the hard, fundamental questions about how an advertising-powered, surveillance-based platform can provide adequate user privacy protections.
In particular, Congress should beware of offers from Zuckerberg to better control the misuse of user data and expression by granting his company and other tech giants an even greater, more exclusive role as the opaque guardians of that data. Facebook has had a long history of saying, “Trust us. We know what we’re doing," without offering much transparency or accountability to their users. Congress should take this opportunity to trust Zuckerberg a little less, and Facebooks’ users—who are also, coincidentally, their voters—a little more.
#1
All a waste of time and productivity. The snarkly little twit and his followers make me ill. Neither the congress nor anyone else need not be concerned. Those who participates in such self promotion deserve the fate that befalls them. A completely preventable disease.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Washington (AFP) ‐ Of the hundreds of questions thrown at Mark Zuckerberg by US lawmakers Tuesday, none appeared to flummox the Facebook founder more than Senator Dick Durbin’s pointed query about where he slept the previous evening.
[Electronic Frontier Foundation] It’s past time for Facebook to come clean about how it is handling user data. After the latest 
