The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016

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The Patriot Post Digest 10-7-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Yahoo and the Eyes on Your Email21

By Michael Swartz

This week we learned that people with Yahoo email accounts had their messages subject to scrutiny at the behest of the federal government22 — all in the name of national security. The story, as told by “people familiar with the matter,” is that Yahoo complied with a classified government directive to search for specific information, termed in the Reuters story as a “set of characters” in any emails.

This eavesdropping began in April 2015 and was facilitated once Yahoo engineers created a software program intended to flag emails with these strings of characters. The program was kept so secret within Yahoo that weeks after it went online, Yahoo security engineers, who had been excluded from the process, believed their servers had been hacked. Eventually, Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer, Alex Stamos, resigned over being left out of the loop on the decision by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell.

Given these allegations, Yahoo has been roundly criticized by privacy advocates23 who believe the company could have fought the directive — in fact, Yahoo called the original Reuters story “misleading” and denied the existence of the government-requested software program on its systems.

However, Yahoo may have cooperated because they recalled the prospect of $250,000 per day fines24 threatened by the federal government back in 2008 when the PRISM program to spy on online communications was introduced. While Microsoft, Google, and other online providers refused to comply with this more recent government directive — with many of these companies now exhibiting a holier-than-thou attitude — it’s worth remembering that they all knuckled under to the PRISM program, so we know they can be bought, too.

Some, though, may agree there’s a legitimate point25 to be made about the trifling and infrequent loss of privacy an average law-abiding citizen could reasonably expect from a program looking for specific indicators and character strings when compared to its usefulness to national security. We may want and still expect26 our conversations to be private, but we also have to ponder just how much privacy can be expected with email at all given the ease and frequency at which servers are hacked these days — including Yahoo’s27. And it may not just be email. Consider the fact that Yahoo’s Internet operations are being bought out by Verizon28, which adds millions of consumers to the mix.

Yet there is the overarching civil liberty question to consider as well: When does the spying transcend national security and become a tool for harassment of certain groups? Recall that this administration has used the IRS to target certain political entities29, but looked the other way when a former secretary of state subjected herself to multiple security breaches30 by using her own email server.

In short, we have a situation full of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed “known unknowns”: We’re certain that the federal government is keeping tabs on our electronic communications, but we’re generally clueless to the extent of that intrusion. We may or may not be affected directly, but indirectly we’re either benefiting from the additional security we receive against the risk of terrorism and/or we’re suffering from the loss of the expectation of privacy, a phenomenon that is doubly severe when the current climate of political intolerance is factored in.

Perhaps the best way to proceed in these times is with the common sense to know that once something is on the Internet or in an email, it’s going to be there forever — so think before you write. You never know who might be reading it.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

How to Address Iran31 — After Obama gave the store away, what now?
Generosity Is Not Political32 — A new study finds that rich Democrats aren’t all that altruistic.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Mona Charen: “One out of 6 prime-working-age adult males in the United States is not temporarily unemployed, or ‘between jobs,’ or ‘looking for work.’ No, a huge cohort of men in America is now neither employed nor looking for work. They are just skating by on a combination of girlfriends, wives, mothers and government benefits. … Who are these new non-workers? Most are low-skilled, never married and native-born, and many are African-American. High school dropouts are the most likely group to be out of the labor force, but 40 percent of non-workers have some college under their belts, and one-sixth are college graduates. A significant number have felony convictions and/or prison time in their pasts. … The factors contributing to non-work are clearly complex, but the role of social mores is highly significant. When a man feels the traditional role of father and husband is no longer valued, he has less incentive to become the sort of person who can hold down a job. Our family roles give life meaning and purpose. Marriage is a far better predictor than race or ethnicity of whether a man will be employed, contributing to his community and caring for others. … Non-marriage and non-work are locked in a downward spiral.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.” —Charles Krauthammer

Confessions: “I strongly supported [ObamaCare]. … But there are problems with it. And everybody knows it.” —Bill Clinton

For the record: “Well, sometimes with the Clintons, even the truth happens. … Bill Clinton said what millions of Americans have known for years, and that is we need to repeal ObamaCare lock, stock, and barrel.” —Mike Pence

Corruption exposed: “The FBI’s cover-up [of Clinton’s email], far from being a trifling favor paid to a political patron, turns out to be part of a much bigger cover-up of the numerous corrupt linkages between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. If so, this is criminality on a massive scale, dwarfing even Watergate.” —Investor’s Business Daily

Non Compos Mentis: “It’s very interesting that this [Paris Climate Agreement news] is happening a day when there’s a hurricane bearing down on the United States and in the Caribbean because these severe storms, beach erosions, intense weather episodes that we’ve had is perhaps the most practical sample of what the president was talking about as the threat that the planet faces and this is what this whole climate agreement signed by 190 nations and now ratified by 60 or so is designed to stop.” —NBC’s Ron Allen

Braying Jackass: “There’s already some interesting work — not definitive, but powerful — showing that droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war.” —Barack Obama

And last… “Are you late for work? Did you forget someone’s birthday? Blame global warming! Everyone else is. Severe acne, bad beer, crumbling gingerbread houses — you name it! These are just some of the things scientists are pinning on what they claim is a man-made climate crisis. Only now, it isn’t just scientists. It’s the president too.” —Tony Perkins

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.