New move not about privacy. It's about domination…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Facebook’s new move isn’t about privacy. It’s about domination | Siva Vaidhyanathan

If you have visited China in recent years you might have discovered how difficult it is to make your way through without WeChat, an all-purpose mobile phone application. People in China use WeChat for everything from sending messages to family to reading news and opinion to ordering food to paying at vending machines to paying for a taxi. WeChat lets you deposit money in your bank, search for a library book, make a medical appointment, conduct business conference calls, and interact with the government. In China, WeChat is the operating system of your life, as it is for almost 1.1 billion people.

For Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, WeChat is both his greatest challenge and the model for the future of his company. Zuckerberg has long wanted Facebook to be the operating system of our lives – at least for those who live outside of China. WeChat is what Facebook has yet to become. WeChat, should it move beyond China and its diaspora, is also the greatest threat to Facebook’s global domination.

This, better than any empty and distracting pledge of “pivoting to privacy”, explains Zuckerberg’s announcement on Wednesday. He pledged to federate the messaging services of his three non-Facebook platforms, Instagram (1 billion users), WhatsApp (1.5 billion users), and Messenger (1.3 billion users). He would extend the strong encryption that distinguishes WhatsApp from many other messaging services (although not, significantly, from growing and encrypted potential competitors like Telegram and Signal) to the other two platforms and allow content to move easily among them.

Facebook hopes to draw those who use competing services like Telegram, Signal, Skype, Google’s Hangouts (formerly known as GChat), Apple’s IMessage, or classic SMS to Facebook’s various and soon-to-be-united messaging services. Crushing all those apps, along with email and old-fashioned phone calls, would be a major step toward becoming the operating system of our lives.

Basically, this announcement means the WhatsApp won’t change as many feared – abandoning encryption and becoming more like Messenger. Instead, Messenger will become more like WhatsApp. This would be the first step toward unifying these services to work and look a lot more like – and thus prepared to compete against – WeChat.

Despite all the hype, Zuckerberg said nothing about changing Facebook itself. Facebook, with 2.3 billion users and growing, will still watch everything you do, will dictate what you read and see in your Newsfeed, and will feature advertisements targeted at you based on the massive surveillance system Facebook has built over the past decade. It will still distribute pictures of puppies and babies along with hate speech, conspiracy theories, and calls to genocide. It will still chip away at democracy and starve journalism.

This recent announcement, with all its unjustified hype about a “pivot” or a “move” serves more of Zuckerberg’s interests. It distracts journalists and critics from several revelations that show how brazenly Facebook exploits and abuses its users.

For years we have been instructed to use “two-factor authentication” to secure the login process for services and platforms. Facebook itself encourages us to have it send a message to our mobile phones to confirm that we are who we say we are before logging in. But Facebook does not protect your number from prying eyes or advertisers. Using a phone number anyone can look up a Facebook profile, and there is no way for users to opt out. This puts people at risk for the sake of Facebook’s ability to track them. Given that identity on WhatsApp is mobile-number specific, it’s likely that our numbers will be the source of more vulnerability in the future.

And last week we learned that at least 11 popular health applications were sharing extremely sensitive personal data with Facebook through mobile phones. At least one service, Flo Period and Ovulation Tracker, decided to cease that practice once it came to light. This was the latest in a series of revelations about how Facebook tracks people – even those who are not Facebook users – through mobile devices and applications. Nothing in Zuckerberg’s latest announcement changes this.

Beyond abuses, Facebook has another plan to make itself essential to the daily lives of people around the world. It plans to create a new crypto currency for its users. WhatsApp users could soon use the currency to order food deliveries or purchase train tickets. Imagine if the 1.5 billion WhatsApp users start sending money to relatives in other countries using a currency Facebook controls and payments Facebook authorizes. That could push away many unsavory services that charge high fees. It could also consolidate even more unaccountable global power in Facebook.

The ultimate unification of these platforms under the mothership, Facebook, could effectively block any governmental attempts to sever Instagram and WhatsApp from the company. It might take years for the European Union or the United States government to muster the legal foundation and political will to break up Facebook. By that time Zuckerberg could plead that this new, unified service has shared its back-end data and core functions for too long. There would be nothing distinct to sever. Plus, Zuckerberg could argue that encrypted private messages protect users better than the only other major rival in the world, WeChat.

In the coming battle against WeChat, Facebook can use its pledge to protect private messages from snooping states to his advantage. TenCent, the company that offers WeChat, is very close to the government of the People’s Republic of China and WeChat users assume their communication is subject to state surveillance. Facebook might collaborate with brutal authoritarians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, but it’s still not yet as dangerous as WeChat. That’s something, I guess. And it might be enough to ensure domination for many years to come.

For too long, we have taken Mark Zuckerberg at his word. Too many times he has betrayed us. Let’s not fall for it again. This move is not about protecting you. It’s about defeating other companies and consolidating global power.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

The Problem With Trump’s Foreign Policy Is It’s Too Much Like Cheney’s

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Fresh off his likeness’s appearance on the big screen, former vice president Dick Cheney is back in his element dispensing foreign policy advice to Republican administrations.

Politico’s Eliana Johnson reports that Cheney politely but firmly pressed Vice President Mike Pence about President Donald Trump’s deviations from his handiwork during the George W. Bush years. The encounter took place at an American Enterprise Institute confab in Georgia in front of Republicans with deep pockets.

Some of Cheney’s complaints could easily command bipartisan assent: too much policymaking via Twitter, for example, and inartful rhetoric that hasn’t exactly smoothed the path to diplomacy. But that was not the crux of the Bush veep’s argument against Trump and Pence.

“It seems, at times, as though your administration’s approach has more in common with [Barack] Obama’s foreign policy than traditional Republican foreign policy,” Cheney reportedly told Pence. It was an assertion, the kind neoconservatives often make, of total continuity between presidents dating back to at least Ronald Reagan—if not all the way to Dwight Eisenhower—and the architects of the Iraq war. It’s as if history, or at least Republican Party traditions, began circa 2002.

Trump, of course, won the Republican presidential nomination after calling the Iraq invasion a mistake and suggesting that future wars for regime change in the Middle East would be destabilizing. In the process, he defeated Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and other largely unreconstructed defenders of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy.

Pence, no reflexive dove in his own right, made note of this in response to Cheney. “When the American people elected this president, they elected a president who expressed concern about American deployments around the world,” the vice president said, according to the Washington Post. “And they knew this was going to be a president that came and asked the fundamental questions about—you know, where are we deployed and do we really need to be asking men and women in uniform to be deployed in that part of the world?”

And while Pence reportedly argued that Trump was governing squarely within the Republican mainstream, he concluded per the Post, “[I]t should come as no surprise to anyone: This president is skeptical of foreign deployments, and only wants American forces where they need to be.”

“Isn’t it fitting that Cheney is the one mad that Trump is ending his reckless and endless wars?” Donald Trump Jr. asked on Twitter. “I never knew peace would be so unpopular!”

Where Trump and Obama do have something in common is that they both understood on some level that forever war weakens rather than strengthens the United States, spending treasure and political capital. They also both wanted a smaller U.S. military footprint in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Trump and Obama also have a third thing in common: they both broke with the Bush-Cheney foreign policy more in rhetoric than in practice (at least so far, in Trump’s case), allowing themselves to be talked out of retrenchment and into more bombings. Their interventions were narrower in scope than Iraq and committed fewer boots to the ground, but also proceeded without the constitutionally mandated congressional authorization.

So while it is rich to read that one of the men most responsible for mainstreaming dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction and ties between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks chastised Trump for “frequently” not listening to the intelligence community, it is Cheney’s main contention that deserves the most skepticism.

Trump’s foreign policy—a hard line against Iran, continually delayed yet supposedly precipitous withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, interventions in Yemen and Somalia, dragging Elliot Abrams out of retirement to saber-rattle against the admittedly awful Maduro regime in Venezuela, all conducted under the watchful eye of John Bolton—is too much like Cheney’s.

Some of this is due to a new Republican administration being overly dependent on the previous one’s retreads for staffing important national security positions. “Trump has rejected the interventionism and democracy-promotion espoused by George W. Bush, who talked during his second term of ‘ending tyranny in our time’” is how Politico summarizes the dispute.

Trump has not rejected the neoconservative foreign policy in the same systematic way that Bush embraced it, however. Nor did he come into office with the same elaborate plan for ending wars that Cheney had for starting them. Like Obama before him, Trump likely realizes he will be blamed for any bad thing that happens that is perceived to be the result of inaction, while the political consequences of ill-advised intervention will either be nonexistent or spread around the Beltway establishment.

Why, then, go after Trump over something like NATO burden-sharing when he has thus far simply been a less enthusiastic and ideologically consistent hawk? One could easily imagine Cheney or other AEI regulars defending in another context the idea of the Europeans spending more money for their own defense and less on their generous welfare states.

The reason is that the debates Trump has started by just talking the way he has constitute a loosening of the Cheneyites’ once ironclad grip on Republican foreign policy. “Guests seemed divided about new ways versus old ways being best,” a meeting attendee told Politico in an email. “I think most felt that while new ways are fine, some old ways—like thoughtful strategy and communicating/seeking advice from experienced players—is a time-tested and valuable piece as well.”

Conspicuously missing was any reference to regime change, the Bush-era “freedom agenda,” or large-scale, indefinite foreign military occupations as the best way of preventing terrorist attacks against Americans. Even among conservative hawks, including some in Cheney’s orbit, there has been a dampening of enthusiasm for democracy promotion. This group was split, for example, over the Arab spring.

Instead of following Cheney’s advice, as first-term W. did, Trump should learn that his failure to follow through on his “America First” campaign promises has won him little credit from the most important GOP hawks. This is similar to how his reticence on immigration has cost him the support of the Ann Coulters without gaining him any new defenders.

Disastrous results aside, Cheney was always a more articulate and consistent defender of Bush’s foreign policy than the 43rd president himself. Perhaps he just made the best case for Trump’s, too.

W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative.

Illegal immigration on pace to triple 2017 levels…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Three Times the Illegal Immigration of 2017 Levels at Current Rate

In the month of February, there were more than 76,000 illegal border crossings and inadmissible foreign nationals, the most in this month in 12 years — a record for President Trump’s administration.

Princeton Policy Advisor Steven Kopits now projects that illegal border crossings for this calendar year will be more than three times what they were in 2017 and nearly double last year’s total crossings. The projection predicts there will be more than 840,000 illegal border crossings this year, though Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen predicts about 900,000 crossings.

Should illegal immigration reach this level, as Kopits projects, it would mean that border crossings in Trump’s third year in office outpace every single year of illegal immigration under former President Obama.

“Crossings are now clearly at crisis levels, and the pressure will be on Democrats in Congress to tighten asylum laws if they intend to hold the House in 2020,” Kopits notes. “I would note that migrants are also certainly aware of this, and therefore apprehension numbers could rise substantially heading into the summer months as migrants rush to cross the border before new legislation can be prepared.”

While Nielsen receives praise from her close allies in the Washington, D.C. beltway and political establishment, her tenure has been marked with overseeing the largest illegal immigration surge not seen since former President George W. Bush.

During Obama, border apprehensions at the southern border floated between more than 700,000 in Fiscal Year 2008 and dipped as low as about 327,000 apprehensions in Fiscal Year 2011. Since Fiscal Year 2017, when illegal immigration dropped to about 303,000 apprehensions, border crossings have continuously increased.

The vast majority of voters say a border wall would be effective in stopping illegal immigration, though that has not equated to progress on constructing new barriers at the border.

Only about 40 miles of replacement fencing have been built since Trump’s election, although about 124 miles of new wall and replacement fencing has been approved by Congress. This month, about 14 miles of new wall is expected to be constructed in southern California and some new portions of a wall have been constructed in the El Paso, Texas region.

Today, the majority of the U.S.-Mexico border remains open. At the same time, the U.S. has continued funding border walls and border security programs in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Lebanon.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

ImmigrationPolitics2020 electionasylum lawsborder crossingsdepartment of homeland securityDHSIllegal Aliensillegal immigrationKirstjen Nielsenmass immigrationObamaSouthern BorderU.S.-Mexico border