Face recognition bans, and an ad-based Internet. Is there no end to foolishness?

There is no more important news, and they hope we won't notice: 'In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals - based in Missouri... has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public.' This is of course a blatant attempt to reverse the most important year for civil liberties in this century, when courts and the Obama administration declared a universal right of citizens to record (and hold accountable) encounters with authority-force on the streets. Make no mistake, this is part of the Roberts Plan to reshape America according to the blackmailers' will. See below for what we must do about this.
== On Surveillance and Facial Recognition ==
Come by for a lively debate among friends on Warren Olney's "To The Point" NPR radio show -- "Surveillance cameras are capturing what we do on the streets, at airports, in stores, and in much of our public space. Facial recognition software is touted as making us safer. But mass surveillance has downsides of major proportions. Kade Crawford of the Massachusetts ACLU is concerned about violation of privacy."
... and she's perfectly correct! So I say in my on-air response, while asserting that the ACLU's emphasis on trying to blind elites is tactically all-wrong, as there's no sign of it ever having worked for long, across human history. Far better to strip elites naked. It is what the bad ones fear most.

It is fast coming on us. China is expected to have 626 million surveillance cameras – or one camera for every two people – in use by 2020. “The country, which has a 1.386 billion-strong population, has also reportedly invested in facial recognition technology to track people’s movements and even predict crime. According to an earlier report, the system is touted has being “fast enough to scan China’s population in just one second”, and can scan the world’s population in just two seconds.”

One can see how this leads to Orwellian Hell. But is there a way out, as non-Chinese cities like Singapore and London hurry to keep pace? 

Now comes: Bernie Sanders announced this weekend that he would bar law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition systems if he’s elected president in 2020.  Not only is Bernie a near clone of my dad. He's clearly technologically clueless.  One thing is certain, attempts to “ban” facial-recognition systems in San Francisco etc. may flow from legitimate Orwellian fears, but the prescription is a sure sign of lunacy and truly cosmic level ignorance. That isn’t the solution.

The cameras and their analytic systems are coming, soon to be like pollen in the wind. But they can as likely be freedom’s friend as its enemy, depending on whether access is limited to controlling elites or spread among a population of confident citizens, who use the flood of light to sousveil the mighty, holding them accountable.

And… The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk. "Hate may be less like a cancer and more like bubbles, says Neil Johnson, who applies physics theory to human behavior.”

== Alternatives to advertising in social media? ==

"Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly rolled out a new social network that is intended to get right what Facebook and Twitter have so far been getting wrong.  The new social network, WT:Social, which Wales announced had 25,000 members on November 6, now has about 78,000 members who are at least intrigued by the idea of a social network that combats fake news."

The site goes against the ad-funded models normalized by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, instead asking users to pay a subscription fee to access information and communicate on the site.  It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe. It's £10 and £80 in the UK. In other words, about the same as a Netflix or Spotify subscription.

It seems a stiff price and a mistake not to do a ramp up, letting folks know in advance that the price will rise from pennies at first.

Meanwhile, Facebook debuts vaccine pop-up windows to stop the spread of misinformation. 

I have a better approach...

== The time has come ==

Keynes said you’ll run out of money (betting against market idiots) long before the markets run out of idiocy. And yes, it applies to me. Way back in the last century, I foretold that it would be loony to imagine that the whole internet would be financed by advertising for much longer. But well, it has, with  countless negative outcomes including the near destruction of many old-line investigative journalism outlets and local newspapers, the convergence of ad dollar flows into a half-dozen trillion-dollar companies, and the massive collection of personal data from almost every person who ever goes online. 

Can it go on? In his most recent Strategic News Service newsletter, Mark Anderson cites dozens of reasons to figure that it can’t, though not the biggest one.  

- 1 in 5 ad-serving websites are visited exclusively by fraud bots (The Verge, 2017)

- For every $3 spent on digital ads, fraud takes $1 

- Click fraud is currently growing at 50% per year

- The click fraud operation Methbot generates $3 to $5 million in fraudulent revenue every day 

Fake news sites have been major perpetrators that clone the look and feel and almost the same URL as reputable sources like ABCNews. Among the myriad are those used to spread financial rumore that manipulate stock markets. Another published a false story claiming actor Denzel Washington endorsed Donald Trump for president. The fictional headline led to thousands of people sharing it on Facebook, a prominent example of fake news spreading on the social network prior to the 2016 presidential election. Then there are real-but-unhinged sites like InfoWars, soon to be wholly owned by the parents of Sandyhook victims. Anderson’s long list of examples is daunting and depressing and just a scintilla sampling…

… and all the more reason we need a savvy counter-attack against lie-spreading methodologies. I offer a dozen or more potentially effective approaches in Polemical Judo… and no, not one of the proposals involves anything remotely resembling a “Ministry of Truth.”

  "I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the Internet than ad tech. It interferes with everything we try to do on the Web. It has cheapened and debased advertising and spawned criminal empires.... Nobody knows the exact number, but probably about 50 percent of what you're spending online is being stolen from you." - Bob Hoffman, veteran ad executive, industry critic, and author of the blog the Ad Contrarian; quoted on Bloomberg.com

And now the key point. I know why all past efforts to do micropayments have failed. Would you pay a nickel to read a New York Times article, knowing you could get the nickel back, if you thought it inferior? And if it was one-click and saved you having to type passwords to get into a subscription silo?

Then see the "secret sauce" that could offer this alternative to insidiously awful advert-based internet commerce in your information. And part II showing how micropayments could be the alternative that frees us all.

== Defend our right to see! ==

Oh, what to do about the right's effort to re-criminalize recording the police?

The transparency-accountability prionciple still hols outside the 8th Circuit. - "A transparency auditor was photographing a local police station from a public sidewalk. As a result, the transparency auditor was illegally detained for 2 hours. The Colorado Springs Police Department agreed to pay the transparency auditor $41,000 and to update police policy and provide local police with training on transparency and citizen rights." But for how long, if this truly opens a wedge for John Roberts to use against us? (Or to rule favorably, for "balance" while cutting us off at other ankles?)

We need to wage a full frontal assault on every libertarian we know. Propagandized by $3billion spent by Kochs and Mercers/Fox etc, the supposed "freedom lovers" reflexively and automatically deem Republicans less-bad than democrats, and hence represent an important part of the "hold-my-nose" factions staying loyal to the GOP at the ballot box. Despite liberals sharing descent from Adam Smith, being far better on deficits and flat-fair enterprise, blue states leading us out of the Drug War and taking the law out of the bedroom, and EVERY major deregulation that ever made sense.

They will move goal posts again and again, and it is time to corner them and dare them to actually, actually justify joining the putin-putsch to re-establish 6000 years of feudal-inheritance-brat-rule.