Cyber Criminals Caught and a Young Boy Gets His Mother out of Jail

Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the human race has much to recommend it. From a certain perspective, it's a dirty, anarchistic world. Countries are trillions in debt but they manage to borrow more money. Politicians lie and cheat the people they're supposed to be representing. Bankers destroy economies and get rewarded for it. Individuals' lives are ruined when they can't make a couple of payments on their mortgage or credit cards. 

A pregnant woman in India gets wrongfully convicted of murder and stuck in jail for 19 years because she couldn't put together the $180 bail money. Hundreds of thousands of people languish in prison for years - some for most of their lives - without being charged. 

Another woman commits a federal crime, is prosecuted and found guilty but escapes prison, gets a new identity, lives a decent life for dozens of years until she's caught but she gets off with a good lawyer. Yet another woman commits a lesser crime but can't afford a clever lawyer and her life is over. It's possible that race has something to do with it, because although on the surface it's coincidence that the one who gets to live the rest of her life as a free woman is white and the other one is black, it's no coincidence that most of the wealth, resources and opportunity have historically been available to whites and not to blacks in that country.

People are tried, condemned and executed on insufficient grounds unless you count the grounds of some DA or police department needing to bump up stats. Corporations that produce arms control politicians who create wars out of nothing and get away with it. 

Upstanding members of a community and various business men who wear suits and who everybody respects get to screw around with a woman's fledgling business, sexually harass her, contribute to the destruction of that business and get away scot free while she picks herself out of the gutter, stumbles and falls, stumbles and falls. This time it's not about race because they're all white. Might be about gender, though. Partly it's about people who don't give a damn but mostly it's just about what they know they can do and what she doesn't know she's allowed to do.

It's not hard to get totally bitter and twisted about the way things are. Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the human race has nothing recommend it, some of us - maybe even most of us - still believe that good conquers evil; that everybody has something within them that nobody can touch or assail. That the darkest hours actually contain the light.

That it's possible to climb out of the gutter even when you don't know how and things look hopeless for you. It's possible to retrieve your life no matter how much anybody's screwed you around, no matter how much the odds seem - and are - stacked against you. 

We believe it's possible to turn your life around when it seems too late, that help is always at hand in reality; that we just have to learn how to see it. Because no matter how bad things look and are in the world people are fighting back. And conquering. Bankers are investigated eventually as are banks for illegal home repossessions. In a world that’s tailor made for the worst kind of criminals, when profits from child pornography and crime to the tune of $6 billion are laundered through shadowy cyber organizations they actually get caught. 

Corrupt systems and rulers fall apart. When you have lousy entitlement and self esteem you can get help and rebuild until you're very clear about what people can and can't do in your presence and to you. 

And in a country with so much poverty it's blinding to the soul, a young boy, Vijai Kumari, who was born in prison and spent his life being shunted around juvenile homes because his mother is unjustly and unnecessarily in prison, grows up straight somehow. Somehow learns a skill and gets a job. Miraculously saves and saves until he has the money to pay for a lawyer to get his mother released. And he succeeds.

FBI Push to Tap Internet Communications Triggers Big Brother Paranoia

The Washington Post and the New York Times have both reported that the Obama administration is considering a bill that will enable the FBI to tap internet users in much the same way as it has permission to wiretap. The matter has been debated for years, as far back as 2010, when the FBI asked Congress to pass a bill that would force internet companies to update their technical capacity to comply with a court order to intercept and unscramble internet communication in specific cases. 

This would include social networking sites and encrypted email transmitters. All companies would be required to put adequate technology in place so they could comply if asked, or face a $25,000 a day fine.

 FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III

The FBI didn’t succeed then and they’re pushing again for the same law to be put in place. Their rationale then and now is that methods of communication have evolved but their ability to pursue criminals hasn’t kept pace. Everybody knows about wiretapping and how to avoid it now so the FBI has lost its edge.

This is not Hollywood; the FBI will still need a court order just as they do for wiretapping, but it’s creating a firestorm of protest among IT companies and internet users. Both are bringing in the big paranoia guns, arguing that this is a big brother move which will make privacy even more of a joke and facilitate hackers. They’re also warning it will impact negatively on Silicon Valley and the US IT industry as a whole; that established IT companies and startups will gravitate to other countries without any controls. Which argument isn’t much different from the 1% protesting that if they have to pay taxes they’ll leave and the economy will collapse without them.

It's difficult to distinguish the difference between the real work that the FBI does in protecting society and the Hollywood version of a corrupt, inept, megalomaniac organization. It's also hard to know where sanity kicks in, in the war on terror, given that nobody really knows what happened on 9/11 and that the Iraq war was initiated on fabricated ‘evidence’. And that conservatives with an agenda and their media have played a huge role in cultivating paranoia.

It’s also impossible to know whether the FBI will abuse this capability or whether it will really help them pursue criminals. Probably both will happen. The firestorm is understandable but it isn’t logical. Everybody lived with wiretapping and if this bill passes everybody will get used to it too. In any case it’s ludicrous that companies like Google and Facebook would protest about people’s right to privacy. Personally I’d rather be guarded by the FBI than intruded upon by either of those two thugs. 

And right now the internet is the wild west; there aren’t any controls at all, so maybe it would be good to introduce some. What can anybody do if you’re the victim of internet crime? Absolutely nothing. So maybe this will actually facilitate not just catching terrorists but hackers, pedophiles and internet bank robbers.

Iceland’s Minister Jonassen Acts to Stop Internet Porn

It’s a world where everybody is constantly clamoring for freedom to act out your own destiny without anybody placing unnatural limits on your right to speak and work and live, where the words regulation and censorship are like red rags to everybody’s bull. But now Iceland’s Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson has spoken out against internet porn and introduced the idea that it should be banned because of the effect it has on children, who can access it too easily.

He has appointed committees to study ways to prevent children from seeing these images on games consoles, smartphones and computers. One of the options would be to block the IP addresses of known porn sites and make it illegal to pay for online porn with an Iceland-based credit card. 

If Iceland goes through with this it will be the first Western democracy to block online pornography. Right now it is already illegal to print and distribute porn, and strip clubs were banned two years ago because of how they violate the rights of women who work in them.

Of course, Jonasson has drawn fire, from advocates of freedom of the Web, in particular, a member of Iceland’s parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir. In an editorial in The Guardian (UK) she called the proposed bill “bizarre”, saying it is impossible to erect walls around the internet unless you create an entirely independent internet as Iran is attempting to do. The Iran-fear factor; there’s nothing like it for striking terror into the hearts of people.

Jonsdottir also wrote about the danger of companies not wanting to host their businesses in Iceland as they fear this bill will presage the kind of blanket censorship that China and Saudi Arabia practice. Ah, the China-fear factor. Jonsdottir didn’t address how such a simple, well-defined and isolated instance of censorship could ever snowball into the kind of manic destruction of rights that she suggests we will all have to guard against.

Personally, I think the loss of some paranoid businesses – if they even exist, Jonsdottir didn’t elaborate; fear mongers never do – is a small price to pay for a move that the world should have taken a long time ago, and that would place Iceland amongst the heroes. The internet’s porn trade is the Wild West; unfettered freedom, a breeding ground for criminals and rank exploiters. And children use this medium the most. I think every single thing that can be done should be done.

Jonsdottir has suggested the development of free anti-porn software and educating parents. There’s nothing wrong with her ideas, and she should move on them. The more solutions in the pot the better. But ‘education’ is always the panacea that’s offered when people want to avoid the hard solution because money is involved. The NRA and Republicans in the US tout education instead of gun control. 

On its own, education won’t fix a problem, because you can’t force parents who don’t really give a damn to participate. You can’t force people to read pamphlets or attend lectures either – it’s their basic human right to choose. And in any case one lecture or a series doesn’t always inspire people to act in a sustainable way. This isn't just about people not understanding the dangers, it's about a culture of adult apathy.

It’s kind of like having advanced cancer; you can decide to learn about what has caused it and how you need to change your life, but you’d better also do something about those rampant cancer cells right now. Internet porn is a cancer and it’s rampant, and the way it affects children is as serious a problem in the world as global warming. Lawmakers need to take it seriously. I think Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson is heading for a Nobel Prize.