Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams writes—This Story on Cellphone Tracking 'Is the Most Important Article You Should Read Today. Period.':
The New York Times' on Thursday sparked calls for congressional action by publishing the first article in its "One Nation, Tracked" series, an investigation into smartphone tracking based on a data set with over 50 billion location pings from the devices of more than 12 million people in the United States.
The data, from 2016 and 2017, "was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so," explained reporters Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel. "The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers."
Readers and fellow journalists quickly turned to social media to draw attention to the reporting. Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, tweeted: "This is the most important article you should read today. Period."
Aaron Zitner of the Wall Street Journal concurred, writing on Twitter: "This is surely the most consequential piece of journalism published today, and its presentation is the highest form of storytelling. Think of what an authoritarian state is already doing with this technology."
The new report—the first of seven pieces set to be published this week by the Times Opinion Section's "Privacy Project"—features visualizations of the data from Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, and the New York Stock Exchange in New York City; Beverly Hills; downtown San Francisco; Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's resort in Florida; the White House; and the Pentagon. [...]
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QUOTATION
“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
~~ Albert Camus, Reflection on the Guillotine (1959)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Due process at Guantánamo:
There was an important development on Tuesday at Guantánamo. A ruling by the judge in Salim Hamdan’s military commission appears to require entirely new hearings for any prisoners who claim to be POWs. Hamdan had appealed for a POW status hearing under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. The ruling by Navy Captain Keith Allred went strongly in his favor.
Allred rejects the Congressional view that Combatant Status Review Tribunals had been adequate to determine POW status. That view was asserted forcefully by Sen. Lindsay Graham in 2006 during hearings for the Military Commissions Act. Allred, however, concludes that CSRTs concerned themselves with whether the prisoners were "enemy combatants" and therefore weren’t competent to determine whether the men were prisoners of war.
The military commissions are defective by design and should not be permitted to stand in for civil trials, but at least one prisoner has been assigned a judge who is willing to face up to the plain flaws in the legal "system" that the Bush administration slapped together
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: They did it! The Big “I”! And Trump began his meltdown on-stage at a rally. Greg Dworkin confirms: there’s still no data for a "glide path" to reelection. We explore the mechanics of holding back impeachment articles, and grounds for even more new ones.
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