the Intercept

After Congress’s 1976 Church Committee investigated the excesses of Hoover’s FBI, in particular the infamous COINTELPRO program — in which agents targeted and subverted any political groups the government deemed threatening, including anti-war protesters, black nationalists, and civil rights activists — a series of reforms were enacted to rein in the FBI’s domestic powers. As The Intercept and other news outlets have amply documented, in the guise of the war on terror the FBI has engaged in a variety of tactics that are redolent of the COINTELPRO abuses — including, for example, repeatedly enticing innocent Muslims into fake terror schemes concocted by the bureau’s own informants. What The Intercept’s reporting on this new trove of documents shows is how the FBI has quietly transformed the system of rules and restraints put in place after the scandals of the ’70s, opening the door for a new wave of civil liberties violations....

For example, the bureau’s agents can decide that a campus organization is not “legitimate” and therefore not entitled to robust protections for free speech; dig for derogatory information on potential informants without any basis for believing they are implicated in unlawful activity; use a person’s immigration status to pressure them to collaborate and then help deport them when they are no longer useful; conduct invasive “assessments” without any reason for suspecting the targets of wrongdoing; demand that companies provide the bureau with personal data about their users in broadly worded national security letters without actual legal authority to do so; fan out across the internet along with a vast army of informants, infiltrating countless online chat rooms; peer through the walls of private homes; and more. The FBI offered various justifications of these tactics to our reporters. But the documents and our reporting on them ultimately reveal a bureaucracy in dire need of greater transparency and accountability.

One of the documents contains an alarming observation about the nation’s police forces, even as perceived by the FBI. Officials of the bureau were so concerned that many of these police forces are linked to, at times even populated by, overt white nationalists and white supremacists, that they have deemed it necessary to take that into account in crafting policies for sharing information with them. This news arrives in an ominous context, as the nation’s law enforcement agencies are among the few institutional factions in the U.S. that supported Trump, and they did so with virtual unanimity. 

deportation agents pleased

Two unions, representing more than 21,000 immigration officers, praised Trump’s action on Saturday night, shortly after federal judges had ordered a halt to the deportation of refugees, tourists and legal permanent residents detained at airports nationwide.
“As representatives of the nation’s frontline immigration officers and agents responsible for enforcing our laws and protecting our borders, we fully support and appreciate President Trump’s swift and decisive action to keep the American people safe and allow law enforcement to do its job,” the National Border Patrol Council and the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council said in a joint statement.
“We applaud the three executive orders he has issued to date,” the unions added, in reference to Trump’s travel ban as well as his orders to construct a wall along the Mexican border and hire 5,000 additional border patrol agents and 10,000 additional immigration officers. “Morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially since the signing of the orders,” the unions reported.

Philippine criminal underworld wear badges

Police prosecuting the war on drugs in the Philippines have behaved like the criminal underworld they are supposed to be suppressing, taking payments for killings and delivering bodies to funeral homes, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Amnesty International's report said the wave of drugs-related killings since President Rodrigo Duterte came to power in mid-2016 appeared to be "systematic, planned and organised" by authorities and could constitute crimes against humanity...
In a series of reports last year, Reuters showed that the police had a 97-percent kill rate in their drug operations, the strongest proof yet that police were summarily shooting drug suspects. (reut.rs/2jPSgSn)
The Reuters reports also found that low-level officials in poor neighbourhoods helped police assemble "watch lists" of alleged drug users and pushers that were effectively hit lists, with many of the people named ending up dead.

Hurray for debt

Artificially low interest rates have not only helped the government, they’ve also produced a generation of families who’ve become addicted to serial mortgage refinancing and fallen back in love with credit cards, all the better with which to aspire to appear to live the American Dream.

frustrated expectations

In percentage terms, black people have fared worse since the housing crash (and the pattern is similar for Hispanics). But black and Hispanic households never had that much wealth to begin with -- they’ve gone from a small amount in the bank to a very small amount. And there was never a long sustained trend of black wealth-building; in fact, black wealth started declining years before the financial crisis.
White households, on the other hand, accumulated a good deal of wealth during the '80s, '90s and early 2000s, and the trend was smooth and steady. The average white person, extrapolating the trends of the past few decades, would have expected a comfortable retirement. If people have extrapolative expectations, then a white American in 2007 counted on house prices and stock prices carrying him or her ever upward through the ranks of the middle class.
The financial crisis and the housing bust put an end to that. Extrapolative expectations were dashed, and what people thought were unbreakable trends turned out to have been bubbles and blips. Suddenly, instead of a comfortable retirement or a properous middle age, many white people faced a future of uncertainty, where they would have to scrimp and save like their parents and grandparents.

encryption tipping point

That's it - I'm calling it - HTTPS adoption has now reached the moment of critical mass where it's gathering enough momentum that it will very shortly become "the norm" rather than the exception it so frequently was in the past. In just the last few months, there's been some really significant things happen that have caused me to make this call, here's why I think we're now at that tipping point.
We've already passed the halfway mark for requests served over HTTPS.
This is really significant - Mozilla is now seeing more secure traffic than it is non-secure traffic. Now that doesn't mean that most sites are now HTTPS because that figure above has a huge portion of traffic served from a small number of big sites. Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc. all do all their things over HTTPS and that keeps that number quite high.
But let's look at individual site numbers too because the story there is also very good.
The sites implementing HTTPS doubled in a year