January, 05 2020, 11:00pm EDT
Amazon Ring Isn't Even Good at Pretending to Care About your Privacy and Safety
In response to widespread criticism, lawsuits, and Congressional scrutiny, the company has launched a new “privacy dashboard” that utterly fails to address concerns.
WASHINGTON
Amazon's controversial surveillance camera company, Ring, is making a feeble attempt to regain trust. So feeble, it's pathetic. In the wake of a string of harrowing reports of Amazon cameras being hacked and used to spy on families and children--as well as widespread concerns about the ways that Ring's partnerships with police undermine civil liberties and encourage racial profiling--the company has unveiled a new "privacy dashboard," which amounts to little more than a cosmetic redesign accompanied by a press release.
Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer issued the following thoughts in response to Ring's announcement:
"I honestly expected Ring to do a better job pretending to care about user privacy, but this is a total joke.
Amazon is still putting the responsibility on users to protect these devices, knowing full well that they won't. You can't sell a car without seat belts or airbags and then say the driver should have installed them when they get in a crash. Amazon is selling cheap, insecure, Internet- connected surveillance cameras and convincing people to put them inside their homes, knowing that they put those people in danger. Their rushed PR cover up doesn't even begin to fix that.
Despite a string of terrifying stories about Ring cameras being accessed in the most grotesque ways, the company doesn't appear to be making any meaningful changes to their product. Instead, they've basically given their app a re-design and called it a new feature. They're still not requiring users to have two-factor authentication, something that should be a default on a product as sensitive as a surveillance camera that might be placed inside a child's bedroom. There's no indication that Ring has addressed the gaping security holes that Motherboard identified, like the fact that they're not rate limiting login attempts, leaving their devices vulnerable to brute force attacks and credential stuffing, or doing basic IP detection to tell a user that someone is attempting to log in to their account from multiple different countries at the same time. There's also no indication that they plan to require users to use strong passwords or will prevent them from using passwords that are known to be exposed from previous data breaches.
The fact is that even if Ring fixed all of its security flaws, these devices would still be dangerous. Ring's entire business model is based on thinly veiled racism -- spreading fear and convincing people that they need Amazon's surveillance devices to keep their families safe from a dangerous outside world. But the evidence suggests that Ring devices actually put families at greater risk.
And there's a bigger story here. Ring's announcement is solely focused on the privacy of its users. The company doesn't even pretend to care about the privacy, safety, or civil liberties of Ring owners' neighbors, community members, delivery workers operating in their area. Their announcement does nothing to address the serious concerns raised by racial justice, immigration, and civil liberties groups about the dangers inherent in a world full of privately owned surveillance devices. Allowing users to opt-out of receiving requests from police for footage won't stop police from vacuuming up enormous amounts of sensitive data on our communities. And Amazon has openly admitted that there are no limits on what police can do with that footage, or how long they can store it once they've collected it.
Crime has been steadily falling for decades. But Amazon wants you to be afraid. They want you to distrust and spy on your neighbors. Their surveillance-based business model is fundamentally at odds with community safety and basic rights. These devices are corrosive for our society. They encourage racial profiling and over-policing of vulnerable communities.
Before you buy one of these devices, ask yourself: is it worth ushering in a dystopian surveillance state to watch someone steal a package that the police will do nothing about and Amazon will just replace with the click of a button? Is there a better way to address issues like petty crime and income inequality that doesn't put our most basic rights at risk?"
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
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'This Is Political,' Journalist Who Published Vance Dossier Says of Permanent X Ban
"It's not about a violation of X's policies," wrote Ken Klippenstein. "What else would you call this but politically motivated?"
Sep 27, 2024
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein said Friday that he was privately informed by the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X that his account has been permanently banned, a decision that Klippenstein argued was "politically motivated."
X, formerly Twitter, suspended Klippenstein on Thursday after he posted to the platform a link to his Substack article containing a download link for a 271-page dossier that Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign prepared to vet Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was ultimately chosen as the former president's running mate.
The dossier, Klippenstein noted, "reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign," and major news outlets such as Politicodeclined opportunities to publish it. The U.S. Justice Department on Friday charged three men with allegedly carrying out a hack against the Trump campaign.
In a statement issued late Thursday afternoon as it faced backlash, X said that "Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance's physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
On Friday, Klippenstein—who has previously worked for The Intercept and The Nation—shared a private message from X informing him that his account is "permanently in read-only mode, which means you can't post, Repost, or Like content" or "create new accounts."
"The two-step dance X is doing here—avoiding further backlash by pretending like my suspension is just a temporary thing, no big deal, while privately suspending me permanently—only makes sense when you consider the political dimensions," Klippenstein wrote on his Substack. "Elon Musk is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and JD Vance's political campaign. The Wall Street Journalreported that he promised $45 million a month for a pro-Trump Super PAC (Musk subsequently disputed this). So X clearly doesn't want to give the appearance that my ban was politically motivated. But a careful look at the pretext X cites for my suspension makes it obvious that this is political."
"The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn't worth losing their social media accounts over."
Observers have noted the obvious parallels between the social media platform's handling of the Vance dossier and a 2020 New York Post story on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. At the time, Twitter—not yet under Musk's ownership—placed restrictions on sharing of the Post story, limits that were reversed months later.
Klippenstein noted Friday that Musk—a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist"—was "so incensed by Twitter's previous owners' decision to block the story on its platform that he took the extraordinary step of releasing Twitter's internal correspondence to independent journalist Matt Taibbi so he could report on how the decision came about. (I support his transparency, by the way.)"
"Now, anyone posting a link to my article finds their account locked, which is exactly how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post," Klippenstein wrote.
Journalist Lee Fang pointed out shortly after Klippenstein's ban that "the Hunter Biden laptop—which had newsworthy info that was fair game—also had personal dox info, far more than this Vance doc."
"The Biden laptop had bank/credit cards, personal addresses, nudity, etc," Fang added. "You can still link to those Biden docs on X, but Vance doc link banned?"
Klippenstein argued that "the biggest tell that this is political" is that X did not offer him a chance to restore his account by removing the post that resulted in his ban, as the platform typically does with users accused of violating its policies.
"As an experiment, last night my editor and I decided to redact all 'private' information from the Vance dossier in my story here at Substack," Klippenstein wrote Friday. "Despite filing an appeal in which I mention this, I remain banned. So it's not about a violation of X's policies. What else would you call this but politically motivated?"
"Boo hoo, poor me, I lost my account. That's not the point here," he continued. "If you were frustrated with the media's refusal to publish the Vance dossier, prepare for a future that's worse. The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn't worth losing their social media accounts over. Why take the risk when you can just blather on about the horse race? As always, it's the public that loses out the most."
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Dems Name and Shame Companies Paying Executives More Than They Pay in Federal Taxes
"In the first five years following the 2017 giveaway, 35 companies raked in $277 billion in domestic profits and paid their executives $9.5 billion."
Sep 27, 2024
A group of congressional Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday highlighted dozens of profitable U.S. corporations that have paid their executives more than they've paid in federal income taxes in recent years, a problem that the lawmakers attributed in large part to former President Donald Trump's massive tax-cut package that Republicans are working to extend.
"In the first five years following the 2017 giveaway, 35 companies raked in $277 billion in domestic profits and paid their executives $9.5 billion—more than they paid in federal income taxes," the lawmakers noted in letters to each of the companies, pointing to recent research by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness.
"Next year, Congress will decide what to do with these corporate giveaways. Republicans have promised to go even further if elected and cut the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 15%," the lawmakers continued. "This additional tax giveaway would provide Fortune 100 corporations as a whole with another $50 billion each year, more than all current K-12 federal education spending."
"The windfall from TCJA to big businesses, executives, and wealthy shareholders is unmistakable."
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in the Senate and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in the House led the letters to the 35 companies, a list that includes high-profile names such as Netflix, Ford, and Tesla, whose CEO is the richest man in the world.
"Tesla is among the most dramatic examples of this phenomenon—big, profitable corporations that have actually been paying their top executives more than they pay the government in federal income taxes," the lawmakers wrote. "According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, in the period between 2018 and 2022, Tesla raked in $4.4 billion in profits and did not pay a single dollar in federal income tax."
During that same period, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk received "the largest pay package ever recorded for a company's CEO," the lawmakers observed.
The other companies that have paid their top executives more than they've paid in federal taxes in recent years are T-Mobile, AIG, NextEra, Darden, MetLife, Duke Energy, First Energy, DISH, Principal Financial, American Electrical Power, Kinder Morgan, Dominion, Oneok, Williams, Xcel Energy, NRG Energy, Salesforce, DTE Energy, Ameren, Sempra Energy, U.S. Steel, Entergy, AmerisourceBergen, PPL, CMS Energy, Evergy, Voya Financial, Atmos Energy, Alliant Energy, Match Group, UGI, and Agilent Tech.
The lawmakers demanded that the companies' CEOs answer several questions, including how much the corporations would have paid in federal taxes had the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) not been enacted and how much they've spent on lobbying to keep the Republican law intact.
"The windfall from TCJA to big businesses, executives, and wealthy shareholders is unmistakable," the letters read. "A recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 342 companies paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1% during the five years after TCJA passed, almost a third less than the 21% statutory rate. The gains do not 'trickle down'—90% of workers saw no earnings increase, while executives making $989,000 per year or more got an average raise of $50,000."
The letters were released days after the Economic Policy Institutereleased an analysis showing that CEO pay has soared by 1,085% since 1978 while the pay of typical U.S. workers has grown by just 24%.
The 2017 Trump-GOP tax law led major companies to splurge on stock buybacks, a major gift to corporate executives whose annual compensation packages consist largely of stock.
"President [Joe] Biden and Democrats in Congress are committed to making corporations pay their fair share," the lawmakers wrote in their letters. "In the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, we passed the first corporate tax increase in 30 years with the 15% corporate minimum tax. Though significant, raising $222 billion from billion-dollar corporations, it is not enough on its own to undo the corporate tax giveaways signed into law by President Trump and ensure that corporations pay their fair share."
"Next year," they added, "Congress has an opportunity to take bigger strides in reforming our tax code—to raise the corporate rate, close loopholes, and hold big businesses to the same standards as everyday working Americans who pay their fair share."
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Mass Walkout as 'Global Pariah' Netanyahu Addresses UN General Assembly
The public rebuke of the Israeli prime minister, said one observer, "demonstrates the international community's rejection of genocide."
Sep 27, 2024
A large number of diplomats and other officials walked out of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Friday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to defend his nation's slaughter of more than 41,000 people in the Gaza Strip during the past year and over 700 in Lebanon this week.
Journalists and critics of the "global pariah" shared photos and videos of people filing out of the hall before Netanyahu's address—which came just a day after 25 anti-genocide protesters were arrested for blocking his motorcade in Manhattan.
While there was some audience applause from the sparsely populated room on Friday, Al Jazeera Arabic's Rami Ayari explained that "the people you hear cheering the PM during the speech are in the gallery who he brought for that purpose."
Council on American-Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement that "as the far-right, openly racist Israeli government continues its genocide in Gaza and expands its campaign of state terrorism to civilians in Lebanon, this mass walkout during war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu's U.N. speech demonstrates the international community's rejection of genocide."
Awad added that U.S. President Joe Biden "should take note of our government's growing isolation on the international stage, change his policy, and support human rights and international law, without an exception for the Palestinian people."
Since Israeli forces launched their assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack, the United States government has stood by Israel, sending billions of dollars in weapons and opposing U.N. resolutions, while claiming to be pushing for a cease-fire. Addressing the General Assembly earlier this week, Biden called for "security for Israel, and Gaza free of Hamas' grip."
In response to diplomats' Friday walkout, Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that "the impunity Biden has offered Israel has been used by Netanyahu to make Israel an international pariah. Neither good for the U.S. nor for Israel."
Parsi also highlighted a clip of Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob's speech to the U.N., in which he urged Netanyahu to "stop this war now!"
Netanyahu began his Friday address by taking aim at the world leaders who throughtout the week have condemned the recent escalation against Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the past year of Israeli forces bombing and starving Palestinians in Gaza.
"I didn't intend to come here this year. My country is at war fighting for its life," Netanyahu said. "But, after I heard the lies and slanders leveled at my country by many of the speakers standing at this podium, I decided to come here and set the record straight."
Armed with more of his infamous maps of the Middle East, the right-wing leader went on to claim that "Israel seeks peace," while also pledging to wage war on Hamas-governed Gaza until "total victory" and telling "the tyrants of Tehran" that "if you strike us, we will strike you."
Noting that Netanyahu also spoke of "savage enemies who seek to destroy our common civilization," James Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said: "Words spoken by the man who has been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. This is a disgrace. Abusing the General Assembly platform to lie and incite."
Israel faces a South Africa-led genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor has sought arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders—one of whom Israel recently assassinated in Iran. Israel also claims to have killed a second Hamas leader, which the group has denied.
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