CNET

All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon

by on August 12, 2010 @ 5:30 am · 6 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, Business, Corporatism, Democracy, Nanny Statism, Technology, Vulgar Politics

Googlizon with Chrome eye beam What you say!!!

There has been a lot wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over a joint announcement by Google and Verizon of a legislative-framework proposal they’ve been working on.

Now, I’ve seen this variously referred to as a backroom deal or pact, a secret treaty, or a set of regulations Google and Verizon are imposing on the internet. The FCC is shamefully abdicating its responsibility to regulate the internet! Nevermind that the D.C. Circuit court determined recently in the Comcast case that the FCC has no such regulatory authority over broadband internet; hence, the calls to disastrously reclassify broadband internet access in order to place it under the same regulatory rules as regular telephone service. Some are even intimating that Google and Verizon are trying to “own” the internet. Net neutrality activists are up in arms about this proposal, viciously attacking Google for selling out and reversing its longstanding defense of net neutrality, and calling for people to stage a silly boycott of Google products and services. If you don’t join the herd, you get labeled a Google-Verizon apologist or it is insinuated that you are on their payroll (see comments on the CNET articles linked below, for example).

So what should libertarians make of all this?

[Keep reading…]

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Who’da Thunk It?

by on August 4, 2010 @ 3:52 pm · 2 comments

in Police Statism, Technology

From CNET via Boing Boing, we find out something which should be shocking to no libertarian: the federal government lied about not keeping images from the body scanners installed in airports.

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

And to think that some people actually trust the government enough to despise Wikileaks and even support the death penalty for people who reveal state secrets. When you are dealing with a known liar, trusting the word of a complete stranger is probably preferable. And the state has the same relationship to truth that a prostitute does to chastity. Both will tell you whatever you want to hear, but only an idiot would take them at face value.

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